Description:

Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression

Palestinian activists who are citizens of Israel and those living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Through ethnography, Bishara enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism. Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest. She also reflects on experiences sharing this work with Palestinian audiences and on how changes in both Palestinian political terrain and decolonizing work in anthropology frame and reframe this work.

Amahl Bishara is Associate Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford 2022), about different conditions of expression for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. She also writes about popular refugee politics in the West Bank. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013), is an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian Intifada. She is the president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association.