Discourses and Differences: Situating Pro-Palestine Activism in Discursive Context (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
This rhetorical frame analysis uses a combination of rhetorical theory and frame analysis to examine the rhetorical framing strategies of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. This project investigates how both official and vernacular BDS activist-rhetors frame the movement and their goals, how they frame their responses to evolving rhetorical situations and challenges, how they tailor these frames for different audiences, and how resonant these frames are likely to be for targeted audiences. The results of this study suggest that BDS activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, and settler colonialism against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, joint struggle, and individual and collective agency—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice activist discourses that focus on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. Thus, these framing strategies likely resonate most strongly with audiences comprised of networks of social and racial justice activists, especially black American activists and other activists of color in the US, and to a significant degree with younger liberal and leftist Americans, including many young Jewish American racial justice activists. In response to the shifting rhetorical situations and challenges they face, including sensitivity to antisemitism, BDS activists regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other familiar struggles for justice and liberation. BDS activists emphasize certain frames for particular audiences while maintaining a strong consistency in overall framing strategies between Palestinian official BDS discourse and the more vernacular student-generated discourse of US college activists. To address common critiques of the movement and expand support for BDS, BDS activist-rhetors could express more empathy with Jewish fears of antisemitism and clarify some BDS goals and demands, both of which could help wider audiences transcend the affective rhetorical obstacles and predictable uptakes to promote more productive discussions about Palestinian rights and help achieve a more just and sustainable resolution to this intractable conflict.
Mainstreaming Anti-colonial Discourse on Palestine: Mohammed El-Kurd’s Discursive Interventions
2022
Palestinian activists have long maintained that the hegemonic discourse used to describe their predicament is unhelpful for understanding the nature of the so-called "conflict" in their country. They maintain that a discursive hegemony suppresses their voices and denies their lived experience. A high-profile case of a settler organization's attempt to evict Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem brought visibility to a counter-hegemonic Palestinian discourse that challenges the dominant framing of the situation in Palestine/Israel. Through steadfast on-the-ground resistance that was powerfully documented online, attention was brought to an otherwise routine act of home dispos-session. This study examines the counter-hegemonic discourse advanced by one of the victims of the case as an example of a growing Palestinian tendency to frame Israeli actions through the prism of settler-colonialism. The article outlines the fundamentals of this discourse and traces synergies between Palestinian narratives of injustice and those of system-critical social movements concerned with issues of racism, militarism, and capitalism to examine how power-resistance discourses challenge extant modes of knowledge production.
Intersecting Alliances: Non-Palestinian Activists in Support of Palestine
Influenced by social identity theory, psychologists have focused primarily on the role of shared identity in leading people to engage in collective action. In this study, we are concerned with the factors that lead individuals who do not share a collective identity to act in solidarity with an outgroup. We explored this question by looking at the narratives and motives that brought non-Palestinian university students to participate in collective action for Palestine. In-depth interviews with campus activists and a yearlong observation of campus debates over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggested a number of motives for solidarity activism. First, activists drew parallels between their in-group collective narrative and the collective narrative of the Palestinians. Second, an intersectional narrative of identity increased activist self-efficacy by highlighting the ways that activists were both marginalized and privileged. Third, activists explained their affinity to these narratives as rooted in personal experiences with marginalization and discrimination. A final motive arose through the practice of coalition building that further empowered students of different minority groups. Findings from this study contribute to an understanding of the current surge in Palestinian solidarity activism on college campuses in the United States.
Review - Israel-Palestinian Activism: Shifting Paradigms
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online, 2015
Israeli-Palestinian Activism: Shifting Paradigms is a brave, ambitious and insightful ethnographic investigation focused on the various types of contemporary activism occurring throughout the Negev/Naqab desert. Written by Alexander Koensler, a faculty member at Queen's University Belfast, the book predominantly focuses on the plight of the Negev Bedouin and their ongoing struggles for civic equality, land rights, and the provision of basic services to unauthorised Bedouin villages. Describing the Negev as a periphery or borderland area, Koensler investigates the blurred boundaries within the region. As such, the author urges us to problematize binary oppositions, such as Palestinian/Israeli, Oriental/Occidental, and other " common-sense " categories, that promote monolithic conceptions of identity. To this end, Koensler delves deep into the interstitial areas between such dichotomies, not only to interrogate the divide between putative collective identities, but also the divisions within such entities. It is within these " zones of friction " (p.30) that experimental forms of activisms emerge, eluding categorisation and eschewing zero-sum games, but rather focusing on building cross-cutting relationships and promoting new ways of thinking. It is these forms of activism which constitute Koensler's shifting paradigms.
Webs of oppression: An intersectional analysis of inequalities facing women activists in Palestine
Human Relations
How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? With a long tradition of counter-hegemonic organizing, the Palestinian context presents opportunities and challenges for women pursuing activist causes in the public domain. Adopting an intersectionality framework, we uncover how gender, class and settler-colonized domination interact, engendering dynamics of oppression differentiated by activists’ social positions. Activists’ stories captured at interview reveal they were not victims across all categories of difference, experiencing forms of relative privilege, characterized as safeguarded, secured and sheltered. We connect relative privilege to the patchwork nature of Palestinian institutions, whereby women’s agency intermingles with a patchwork of historically constituted structures and conditions. Our fine-grained study contributes to literature on feminist and activist organizing and to theoriz...
2015
Advocates for Palestinian rights who operate outside the Fatah-Hamas binary have emerged as a third political tendency in recent years. Palestinian and international activists have advanced an alternative framework through which to act on the Palestine question. Their campaigns, consisting of education, advocacy and direct action, have managed to advance a rights-based understanding of the Palestinian plight. One area that global Palestine activism has not delved into is that of offering a critique of Palestinian armed resistance, as practiced primarily by groups in Gaza. Drawing on the public positions of prominent Palestinian commentators and on media statements made by organizations within the movement, as well as my own participation in Palestine advocacy, I propose that activists have largely evaded a critique of the armed strategy. This paper explores possible reasons for this and argues that activists should engage on this issue. I explicate why this is a legitimate, necessar...
International Sociology
Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies contemporary critiques of human rights to the case of Palestine, where this discourse has arguably been used to undermine Palestinians’ political subjectivity and collective struggle, and legitimise outside intervention. Nevertheless, transnational groups critical of Israel, particularly diaspora Jewish organisations, rely on a human rights frame. There are several reasons for this: it offers activists a means to achieve ‘cognitive liberation’, to speak about the issue and to frame their activities so as to attract recruits. The article investigates this paradoxical role of human rights, and recommends understanding it as a language which both constrains and enables the practice of transnational solidarity.
Creating a counterhegemonic praxis: Jewish-Israeli activists and the challenge to Zionism
Conflict, Security & Development, 2015
Despite over 20 years of peace process, Israel's occupation, colonisation and repression continue, and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace. In this context, re-conceptualisations of the conflict and alternative visions of the future will take on increased urgency-both in Israel and Palestine. This article therefore focuses on two activist groups in Israel-Zochrot and Boycott from Within -engaged in provoking a confrontation with the hegemonic narrative of Zionism through a praxis of 're-framing', 'counterbranding', solidarity and direct action. Theoretically, the research is placed within debates regarding hegemony and counterhegemony, and how activists develop praxis. Empirically, it is based on in-depth interviews with activists from these groups, analyses of their writings, observations of their social media activities and attendance at their events over a two-year period. In recent days I was arrested by authorities and questioned about my research regarding the use of illegal weapons in Gaza, my mail and facebook accounts were blocked, and I received strong hints that my life is at risk and I need to be silent and keep low. Mandy Turner is the director of the Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant) in East Jerusalem, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics' Middle East Centre. Her research focuses on the political economy of war-torn societies with a country focus on the occupied Palestinian territory, and she has published widely on this topic. Her most recent book is The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace, co-edited with Florian Kühn (Routledge, 2016).
This study explores how Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN) Theory relates to the Palestinian Network, the TAN operating around Palestine, focusing on the three most powerful actors within it: the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (UN CEIRPP), and the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). In the specific, this paper examines the structural and strategical differences between these three actors through a combination of quantitative content and linguistic analysis. A website content analysis was conducted to explore the three actors’ organisational characteristics, their areas of activity, campaigns and issues. Their dialogic practices on Twitter were assessed next against Kent’s recommendations (2013), while their framing techniques were examined against Snow et al. (1986) framing tasks using an innovative textual analysis method proposed by Vicari (2010). The website analysis indicated that three actors present significant structural differences, especially between the BDS, which presents a decentralised and flexible structure and the UN CEIRPP and JVP, which are bureaucratically organised. After the analysis on Twitter, the study found that none of the three actors used Twitter to foster dialogue and engagement with their stakeholders. Rather, the BDS, UN CEIRPP and JVP appear to be using Twitter as a tool for one-way communication and action coordination.