“We’re all going to end up in Jordan,” remarked a young man from Al-Jiftlik, a Palestinian village in the Jordan Valley. His comment reflects growing despair in the West Bank countryside, where Israeli settler-colonial expansion has intensified to unprecedented levels. This is particularly true in the Jordan Valley, the agricultural heartland along the West Bank’s eastern frontier with Jordan. Once known among Palestinians as the “bride of the Jordan Valley,” Al-Jiftlik now illustrates the gravity of Israeli state-sponsored settler expansion on Palestinian land, having transformed from a prosperous agricultural community into one under siege and facing sustained displacement pressure.
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, land seizure in the West Bank has shifted from creeping settler encroachment to a vicious military-backed campaign of territorial theft. This commentary shows how the Israeli regime’s land appropriation policy in the West Bank, once justified through bureaucratic-legal land seizure orders, has now increasingly shifted toward direct settler takeovers. This shift does not indicate a change in objectives but rather an escalation of existing settlement expansion mechanisms, signaling the growing power and influence of the settler movement over Israeli policy.
The announcement of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a 15-member technocratic body chaired by Ali Shaath, signals a shift toward depoliticized governance in Gaza amid ongoing genocide. Shaath, a Palestinian civil engineer and former deputy minister of planning and international cooperation, will lead an interim governing structure tasked with managing reconstruction and service provision under external oversight. While presented as a neutral technocratic governing structure, the NCAG is more likely to function as a managerial apparatus that stabilizes conditions that enable genocide rather than challenging them.
This policy memo argues that technocratic governance in Gaza—particularly under US oversight, given its role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide—should be understood not as a pathway to recovery or sovereignty, but as part of a broader strategy of genocide management.
This policy brief introduces de-healthification as a framework for understanding Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian healthcare infrastructure, particularly in Gaza. Rather than viewing the collapse of Gaza’s health system as a secondary outcome of the genocide, the brief argues that it is the product of long-standing policies of blockade, occupation, and structural neglect intended to render Palestinian life unhealable and perishable.
By tracing the historical evolution of de-healthification, this brief argues that naming the process is essential for accountability. Because intent is revealed through patterns of destruction rather than explicit declarations, the framework of de-healthification equips policymakers, legal bodies, and advocates to identify healthcare destruction and denial as a core mechanism of settler-colonial control.
Parkland Institute's 29th Annual Fall Conference: Democracy Under Siege
Muhannad Ayyash: The Persistence of the Palestine Exception in Canadian Policy and Academic Discourse: What Does It Tell Us About Canadian Institutions?
After 19 months of genocide in Gaza, massive demonstrations, student encampments, and a shift in public opinion towards support for Palestinian rights, Canadian institutions continue to render the Palestinian aspiration for decolonial liberation as unintelligible – as something that cannot enter valid and legitimate policy discourse. Ironically, the more Canadian institutions seek to conceal the settler colonization of Palestine, the more the colonial nature of reality is revealed— not just in Palestine, but in Canada as well. In that sense, the “Palestine Exception” reveals that Canadian institutions are not simply refusing to apply to Palestine what they apply to other cases of injustice (prioritizing human rights, anti-racism, decolonization, etc.), but rather that these institutions are structured in a way that is antithetical to the ideals of substantive anti-racism and decolonization.
Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel (Columbia University Press, 2025) and A Hermeneutics of Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2019). He has published over twenty journal articles and book chapters on topics such as political violence, Zionism and colonial modernity, settler colonial sovereignty, anti-Palestinian racism, BDS and Palestinian decolonial movements in journals such as the European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Sociology, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Middle East Critique. He has co-edited two books, the most recent with Jeremy Wildeman is titled, Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (University of Alberta Press, 2023). He has written over fifty commentaries, policy analyses, and opinion pieces for Al-Jazeera, The Baffler, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, Arab Center, and Al-Shabaka, among others.
Corey Snelgrove: Alienated Labour and the Question of Palestine
The Palestinian solidarity movement has made implication and complicity keywords of our time. While these efforts draw attention to what we might call the bounds of freedom, they also illustrate how “Palestine has the potential to set us free” (Erakat 2024). In this talk, I offer some reflections on the connections between implication and alienated labor and what this might mean for the academic sector. More specifically, I argue that implication requires a move beyond the limitations of non-interference vis-à-vis the discourse of ‘academic freedom’ to a more expansive concept of democratic control. To end our implication in the colonization of Palestine would then necessitate the expansion of democratic control. This is just one instance of what I take Erakat to mean when she states “Palestine has the potential to set us free”.
Corey Snelgrove is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He teaches and writes on questions of settler colonialism and decolonization in Canada. His writing is published or forthcoming in journals such as Theory & Event, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Legal Form, Polity, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, where he addresses questions such as: How might non-Indigenous political theorists inherit treaty today? What explains the emergence of reconciliation? What political lessons does this history offer for the critique of reconciliation? How do Indigenous treaty visions challenge the premise of capitalist social relations? What might communism mean on stolen land? His book manuscript aspires to change the framing question of Indigenous-state/settler relations in Canada away from the “political form” of co-existence to the “social form” of co-existence.
M. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada, where he is now Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University....
