Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
Donate Sign Up
  • العربية
  • English
  • Policy Analysis
    • Civil Society
    • Economics
    • Politics
    • Refugees
    • Scenario Matrix
  • Policy Insights
    • Policy Focus
    • Policy Labs
    • Podcasts
  • Policy Network
    • Members
    • Contributors
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Who We Are
    • Internship Program
    • Contact
    • Donate
    • Privacy & Terms of Use
  • Media & Outreach
    • Op-Eds & Articles
    • In the Media
    • Events
    • Press Releases
    • Press Contacts
Al-Shabaka Logo
Al-Shabaka Logo
FocusPolitics

Focus On: Visions for Political Futures

by Amal Ahmad, Yara Asi, Sam Bahour, Nadim Bawalsa, Leila Farsakh, Layth Hanbali, Yara Hawari, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, Rania Muhareb on September 12, 2023

  • Download
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Email
  • Print

A sovereign Palestinian state is today perhaps further from reality than ever before. Indeed, with the demise of the so-called two-state solution and the entrenchment of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid across Palestine, the possibility of a Palestinian nation-state is arguably defunct. What does a Palestinian political future beyond partition look like? What would this entail for Palestinians within colonized Palestine and across the diaspora? Given their forced fragmentation, how might Palestinians forge collective visions for their political future?

In this Focus On, Al-Shabaka’s policy analysts imagine Palestinian political futures within the context of historical and ongoing realities. Among other topics, they revisit the history of popular committees and consensus-building efforts during the First Intifada to show how local Palestinian governance might be strengthened, and how we might rethink the meaning of self-determination from the grassroots. They consider how various aspects of Palestinian society, including health, education, and policing, could be transformed to help sustain a new political vision for liberation, and revive popular engagement in colonized Palestine and beyond. And they examine the different means through which Palestinians can utilize international legal avenues to strategize an effective anti-apartheid movement. 

One State, Two States, and Beyond

Palestine Beyond Partition and the Nation-State

Leila Farsakh

How might we rethink the idea of Palestinian self-determination outside of the frameworks of nation-statehood and territorial sovereignty? In this interview, policy analyst Leila Farsakh argues that Palestinians should relinquish the partition paradigm and advocate for a one-state future on the basis of equal citizenship. Read more...

Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future

Yara Hawari 

Given the failure of the two-state solution, how have Palestinians crafted new collective strategies to achieve liberation? Senior Analyst Yara Hawari examines past efforts by Palestinians to push beyond the boundaries of partition, and points to consensus-building as the first step in the path towards a just political future. Read more...

Radical Futures: When Palestinians Imagine 

Yara Hawari

To imagine a future beyond Israeli settler colonialism – which works to create “facts on the ground” and normalize Palestinian dispossession – is an inherently radical act. Senior Analyst Yara Hawari shows how Palestinians have begun this difficult but necessary work. Read more...

Palestine Post-Oslo: Moving to a Just Future

Amal Ahmad, Sam Bahour

On the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, policy analysts Amal Ahmad and Sam Bahour join Al-Shabaka honorary president Nadia Hijab to discuss how the agreement has affected the Palestinian national project, and to offer their visions for new political futures. Read more...

Palestinian Succession: Crisis or Opportunity?

Leila Farsakh, Ahmad Khalidi

With the two-state solution increasingly obsolete, policy analysts Leila Farsakh and Ahmad Khalidi discuss the realities of succession in Palestinian leadership in the context of the fast-changing Palestinian street. What opportunities do Palestinians have in forging a political future outside of their corrupt leadership? Read more...

Beyond the Binary: Two States, One State, Failed State, No State 

Amal Ahmad

While many have abandoned the quest for a sovereign Palestinian state, policy analyst Amal Ahmad contends that other political configurations are much more likely than a single, democratic state across colonized Palestine, particularly in the near future. Read more...

Alternative Forms of Political and Social Organizing 

The Case for Palestinian Nationality

Nadim Bawalsa

In this policy brief, Nadim Bawalsa examines the historical and legal foundations of Palestinian nationality. He argues that Palestinians and their representatives across the diaspora must come together and stake claims to their rights to Palestinian nationality as a way to safeguard their legal connections to Palestine. Read more...

Defying Fragmentation and the Significance of Unity: A New Palestinian Uprising

Yara Hawari 

The 2021 Unity Intifada reaffirmed that Palestinians everywhere share a common struggle. Despite the failures of the Palestinian leadership, as Senior Analyst Yara Hawari shows, Palestinians still possess an enormous potential for widespread grassroots political mobilization. Read more...

Reimagining Liberation through the Popular Committees

Layth Hanbali 

In this policy brief, policy analyst Layth Hanbali investigates the history of popular committees in the West Bank and Gaza during the 1970s and 1980s. He shows how they can offer a model to reinvigorate local governance and build a new, popular political movement from the grassroots. Read more...

Community Accountability in Palestine: An Alternative to Policing

Yara Hawari

Any vision for Palestinian political liberation must address the reality of violent policing and mass incarceration that Palestinians face across colonized Palestine. Senior Analyst Yara Hawari explores the concept of community accountability as a way to promote reconciliation and counter social fragmentation within Palestinian society. Read more...

A Vision for Liberation: Palestinian-led Development in Health and Education

Yara Asi

How can the Palestinian health and education sectors be transformed to align with and advance political visions for Palestinian liberation? Policy analyst Yara Asi offers her recommendations, based on interviews with a diverse group of Palestinians across colonized Palestine and the diaspora. Read more...

International Law and the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Movement

Rania Muhareb

How can Palestinians employ international law to lay the foundations of an effective anti-apartheid movement outside of their leadership? Policy analyst Rania Muhareb offers recommendations for how Palestinians and their allies should harness international laws to strategize a political anti-apartheid movement. Read more...

Photo of Amal Ahmad
Amal Ahmad

Amal Ahmad is a Palestinian economic researcher. Amal interned at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah before completing a Master’s degree in development economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work focuses on fiscal and monetary relations between Israel and Palestine; she is also interested in the political economy of development in the broader Middle East.

Yara Asi

Dr. Yara M. Asi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics. Her research agenda focuses on global health, human rights, and development in fragile populations. She is a Non-resident Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Scholar to the West Bank, the Fall 2021 US Fellow at Al Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network, and the co-chair of the Palestine Health Justice Working Group in the American Public Health Association. Along with working at one of the first accountable care organizations in the United States, she has also worked with Amnesty International USA and the Palestinian American Research Center on policy and outreach issues. She has presented at multiple national and international conferences on topics related to global health, food security, health informatics, and women in healthcare, and has published extensively on health and well-being in fragile and conflict-affected populations in journal articles and book chapters. Her work has also been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, +972 Magazine, The Conversation, Al Jazeera, The World, and other outlets. Her forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press will examine war as a public health crisis.

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour resides in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine. He does business consulting as Applied Information Management (AIM), specializing in business development with a niche focus on the information technology sector and start-ups. Bahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers (APSC). He is Co-founder & Emeritus Member of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy (A4VPE). He currently is an independent Director at the Arab Islamic Bank PLC and a board member at Just Vision. He writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published in leading outlets. He is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians (Olive Branch Press, 1993), tweets at @SamBahour, and blogs at epalestine.ps.

Nadim Bawalsa

Nadim Bawalsa is Associate Editor with the Journal of Palestine Studies. From 2020-2023, Nadim served as Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor. He is a historian of modern Palestine, and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022). His other work has appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, NACLA Report on the Americas, and as well as in edited volumes. He earned a joint doctorate in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017, and a Master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in 2010. In 2019-2020, he was awarded a PARC-NEH fellowship in Palestine.  

Leila Farsakh

Al-Shabaka policy analyst, Leila Farsakh, is Associate Professor and Chair of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (Routledge, 2012), and of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-determination beyond Partition (California University Press, 2022). She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and MAS in Ramallah, and she has been a senior research fellow at Birzeit University since 2008. In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission.

 

Layth Hanbali

Layth Hanbali is a freelance consultant focusing on health policy. He has also worked as a researcher, public health practitioner, and doctor, volunteered as a civil society organiser, and taught on several Global Health programmes. He earned a Master’s degree in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a medical degree and a bachelor’s degree in Global Health from University College London.

Yara Hawari

Yara Hawari is the Senior Analyst of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught various undergraduate courses and continues to be an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.

Ahmad Samih Khalidi

Ahmad Samih Khalidi is Associate Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Geneva, and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut. A Palestinian from Jerusalem educated at Oxford and London Universities, Khalidi has been a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and co-editor of the Arabic edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He served as advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid/Washington peace talks between 1991 and 1993, as senior advisor on security in the 1993 Cairo-Taba PLO-Israeli talks, and as advisor to Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Khalidi has written widely in both English and Arabic in outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Cairo Review, Prospect, and OpenDemocracy, among others. He is author of three books: Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation, (Chatham House, 1995), Track-2 Diplomacy; Lessons from the Middle East (MIT Press, 2003), and A Palestinian National Security Framework (Chatham House, 2006).

Rania Muhareb

Rania Muhareb is an Irish Research Council and Hardiman PhD Scholar at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her PhD research examines the relevance of the apartheid framework to the Palestinian struggle for decolonization. Between 2017 and 2020, she worked as a legal researcher and advocacy officer with the Palestinian human right organization Al-Haq. Rania holds an LLM in international human rights and humanitarian law from the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and an undergraduate degree from Sciences Po Paris.

  • Policy Analysis
    • Civil Society
    • Economics
    • Politics
    • Refugees
    • Scenario Matrix
  • Policy Insights
    • Policy Focus
    • Policy Labs
    • Podcasts
  • Policy Network
    • Members
    • Contributors
  • About Us
    • Who We Are
    • Internship Program
    • Contact
    • Donate
    • Privacy & Terms of Use
  • Media & Outreach
    • Op-Eds & Articles
    • In the Media
    • Events
    • Press Releases
    • Press Contacts
  • Contact
    • Contact al-Shabaka by email at:
      [email protected]
    • Or by mail:
      Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network
      1178 Broadway, 3rd Floor #3625
      New York, NY 10001

© 2010-2023 Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. All rights reserved.

Stay Informed

Join Al-Shabaka’s mailing list and find the latest Palestinian policy analysis in your inbox:

I agree to Al-Shabaka's Privacy Policy

×