Book Review: Occupation and Resistance in Palestine: A Decolonial Perspective

Reviewed Book: Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality, and Settler Colonialism. I.B. Tauris & Bloomsbury Publishing (2024) - Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana

Book review by A. S.

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Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality, and Settler Colonialism is a thought-provoking volume, edited by Senior researcher at Geneva Graduate Institute and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Alaa Tartir, Associate Professor at Eastern Mennonite University Timothy Seidel, and Associate Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies Tariq Dana – all renowned for their contributions to Conflict and Peace Studies relative to Palestine. This comprehensive and well-articulated first edition combines contributions from leading scholars on both the power of domination and resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories (hereinafter oPts, which includes East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), so as to outline academic research on Palestine from an intersectional standpoint: it depicts the everyday life of the Palestinians in the oPts through the prisms of settler colonialism studies, decolonisation, and critiques of neoliberalism, in order to projects light on long-standing asymmetries between the Palestinians and the Israeli State’s policies prior to the 7th of October attacks.

Resisting Domination in Palestine challenges the analytical framework, situated in westernisation and modernisation theories, through which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been viewed. The book offers a decolonial analysis of the Palestinian struggle, aligning with Edward Said’s well-known book Orientalism (1978), which challenged the Western misrepresentation of the East and emphasised the importance of context. Like Said, the contributors to the book oppose the stereotyping and dehumanisation of Palestinians, and generally of Arab subjects, that have legitimised imperialist interventionism in the region. Therefore, each chapter brings together testimonies, empirical data, and infographics to demonstrate the systemic and systematic forms of subjugation and oppression endured by the Palestinians living in the oPts and the manifestations of their resistance.

The book is structured to first demonstrate, through the lens of coloniality and settler colonialism, the problems Palestinians face, at various societal levels, because of systemic practices of domination and oppression. Second, it explains how the Palestinians struggle and resist in this specific context while also highlighting the failure of the Oslo Accords and how it has contributed to the current status quo. It is made up of four sections, respectively addressing political (governmentality, institutions, and mechanisms of control); economic (exploitation, dispossession, and de-development); environmental (land, indigeneity, and settler colonialism); and epistemic (local knowledge and global norms) “sites” of control (p. 5). Each contribution to the book examines the tension between “increasingly sophisticated forms of domination”, that are forcefully imposed, via direct or indirect means, on Palestinians, and the resulting “actions of counterpower” through “novel forms of resistance” (p. 2-3). The contributions of Yara M. Asi (Chapter 3), Colin Powers (Chapter 7), and Timothy Seidel and Federica Stagni (Chapter 10), in particular, provide insights into understanding how legal voids and new technologies enable structural violence and their repetitive patterns against Palestinians from the oPts. Altogether, these three chapters reveal the multiple layers of domination from healthcare control through economic coercion to spatial control and fragmentation. Additionally, the book successfully explains the reality that the Palestinians are not a homogeneous society, but rather a people intentionally separated by geography and legal status, with differing levels of conditional autonomy and freedom of movement.

The first part, comprising four chapters, is devoted to political “sites” of domination and resistance. The authors provide crucial insights into the flawed structure of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the ambiguous autonomous nature of the Palestinian Authority (PA), as well as the securitisation of the Palestinian people.

Part II illustrates how the economy plays an active role in the exploitation, dispossession, and de-development of the oPts. Colin Powers further develops further this argument in Chapter 7, where they underscore the role of financial and monetary systems in structural violence experienced daily by Palestinians. First, a process of “monetary colonialisation” (p. 110) unfolded in the oPts. Since 1967, previous currencies in the oPts have been replaced by the use of the New Israeli Shekel (NIS). Second, Powers points out the “weaponised interdependence” (Farrell and Newman, as cited in Powers, p. 109) of the oPts toward Israel: at times of escalations, Israel employs its “foreign sovereign” (p.110) position to instrumentalise the monetary system, that is to say, to exert a level of pressure over Palestinian’s opposition by delaying, suspending or blocking money influx in the oPts.

Part III of the book explores environmental “sites” of domination.  Chapter 10, in particular, powerfully demonstrates how settler violence is used as a tool of colonialism, as well as the entrenchment of occupation and annexation in the oPts (apart from the Gaza Strip). As observed in the case of Masser Yatta, settler violence’s goal lies in the displacement and the removal of local Palestinian communities to rebuild new human ecosystems (p.161). 

The fourth part critically examines the epistemic dimension around the Palestinian struggle. Somdeep Sen, Jeremy Wildeman, and Melanie Meinzer criticise the disregard for Palestinian voices and the framing of their experience into liberal norms.  They prompt readers to re-examine and reflect holistically on how top-down liberal peacebuilding frameworks, like the Oslo Peace Accords, reproduce neocolonial dynamics by putting forward a one-template model at the expense of local narratives and aspirations.

Overall, the authors’ use of interdisciplinary and decolonial frameworks produced a multilayered book, setting out complex domination dynamics in an intelligible manner. The illustration of structural violence, through day-to-day political, economic, environmental, and epistemic “sites” of control, allows readers to unpack subtle and unseen mechanisms of domination. In this regard, the book successfully fills the gap within the extensive Israeli-Palestinian academic literature by pointing out the importance of everyday struggles.

The book’s critique of the Oslo Peace Accords is a strength of this political intellectual work.  Each part of the book highlights the flaws and asymmetric dynamics underlying the Oslo paradigm, and its impact as of today on Palestinian’s quest for self-determination. Resisting Domination in Palestine prompts broader reflection on the use of liberal top-down peacebuilding frameworks for conflict resolution. A key shared observation lies in the fact that the Oslo Accords were a framework more inclined to conflict management than to addressing the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which overall contributed to the increased securitisation of Palestinians, and by extension, reinforced domination mechanisms enforced against them. The approach adopted in the book, which focuses on the everyday-life struggles of Palestinians in oPts, demonstrates the subtle mechanisms of control and domination made possible by the flaws of the Oslo Accords’ state-centric approach, and how under the guise of securitisation, the resilience of Palestinians is being tested with the long-term aims of inducing compliance and encouraging emigration.

At the same time, the concept of resistance is not fully and explicitly developed in the different “sites” of control addressed by the book.  The clear unpacking of structural violence and domination tools somehow obscures the way in which everyday resistance is practised in the oPts. In this regard, Resisting Domination in Palestine paves the way for further contributions focusing on the everyday struggle of Palestinians in oPts.