Palestine and Self-determination beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims

“We fought for dignity and freedom, not for territory or a national identity” were the words of Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising in his recollection of the events around the revolt. This was the first and most prominent action of armed urban resistance to the Germans during the second world war. Edelman was a member of the Bunds, a secular Jewish labour socialist movement, and an anti-Zionist who also later fought in the general Warsaw uprising of 1944 to liberate the city from the Nazis. His memoir, The Ghetto Fights: Warsaw 1941-43 (1990), published first in 1945, was banned for decades in Israel where Edelman was considered persona non-grata. Not only did Edelman disrupt official Zionist historiography which claimed that the Warsaw ghetto resistance was led by Zionists - and the linear trajectory that pose these events as the natural prelude to the Zionist national movement in Palestine - Edelman also opposed Zionism as a conquering project that would have left unchallenged the plight of Jews in their homes in Europe. Edelman's reflections open a breach in the Israeli orthodox narrative by claiming that the protection of Jews and Judaism in their homes in Europe was at stake and this represented a divergent, and more radical and universalising, vision for Jews than an aggressive nationalism and occupation of another land. Edelman’s disrupting narratives offer inspiring material for an opening to this special issue on “Palestine beyond national frames”. Mainstream representations of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians tend to portray it as a struggle between two opposing national aspirations on the same land. Yet, Zionism is not only an ethno-religious form of nationalism, but also an expansionist settler colonial project based on the ethnic cleansing of the native population. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination, on the other hand, is inscribed in an anti-colonial type of nationalism and liberation, closer to the ‘the fight for dignity and freedom’ that Edelman recalls as the core call of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance. Unsurprisingly, colonisation, dispossession and statelessness meant that the ‘national’ has featured as the prime lexicon for speaking of Palestine. The ‘national’ has functioned as the affective and symbolic frame for the political project of liberation for Palestinians, and has been also the underlying grid of most of the scholarly work on Palestine. However, in this issue we explore the view that going beyond national frames can disclose a different dimension of the Palestinian politics of liberation. We shed light on an indigenous population engaged in ongoing and everyday collective resistance to protect their “home” and defend their “land” - as they are constantly reconfigured and imagined across place and time - rather than a memorialised homeland or national territory. Furthermore, over time, Palestine, as a ‘site’ -or laboratory- of encroached forms of control, surveillance, dispossession, and separation, has become a paradigm for universal claims to justice across the world, shifting its scope from a national to an international public (see, among others, Collins 2012 and Salih, Welchman and Zambelli 2017).