Index: Concepts

• Academic boycott — PACBI’s institutional boycott of Israeli academic institutions for their complicity, not a boycott of individuals, in Barghouti’s account.
• Academic freedom — The principle ideas are evaluated on their merits in the university; the test Stern applies to anti-antisemitism measures, and a principle Barghouti also invokes for the opposite conclusion on boycott.
• Administrative Detention — Imprisonment without disclosed charges or trial, renewable six months at a time on secret evidence, against which Falk’s hunger strikers protest.
• Antisemitism — Hatred of Jews; in Stern’s testimony, defined for data collection by selection of Jews as victims, real on some campuses but not, in his account, an epidemic.
• Apartheid — Sayegh’s comparison term for the discrimination practised against the Arabs who remained in the settler-state after 1948.
• Arab Question — The single matrix of authoritarianism, colonialism’s legacy, social justice and the conflict with Israel facing the Arab people.
• Arabisation — The Palestine Communist Party’s unachieved programme of becoming a party of the Palestinian Arab masses.
• Bantustans — Henry Siegman’s term, quoted by Makdisi, for the enclosed Palestinian territories Israel’s settlement enterprise is producing, Gaza the first in the series.
• BDS movement — The global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign modelled on South Africa’s, presented by Makdisi as citizens’ answer to occupation and as an emerging alternative Palestinian leadership.
• Bitachon — Security, the meta-term Ben-Gurion made an obsession overshadowing all other issues, used in Pappe’s account to cover and justify core policies including the policy against the Palestinian population.
• Black–Palestinian solidarity — The solidarity between the Black US struggle and Palestinian freedom, from the Black Power era to Ferguson and 2020.
• Brand Israel — Israel’s government image campaign, launched in 2005, using culture as a hasbara tool of the first rank, in Barghouti’s account.
• Center of life — The mid-1990s regulation, in Makdisi’s account, stripping Jerusalem Palestinians of residency if Jerusalem has not always continuously been their “center of life”; 8,269 stripped between 1967 and 2006.
• Closure system — The checkpoints, roadblocks and closures that broke the West Bank into three sections and ten enclaves, in Makdisi’s account.
• Cultural boycott — PACBI’s institutional cultural boycott of Israel, modelled on South Africa’s and directed against complicity and Brand Israel, in Barghouti’s account.
• Dahiyeh Doctrine — The Israeli army’s proclaimed strategy of disproportionate firepower against villages, named for Beirut’s razed southern suburb, in Makdisi’s Epilogue account.
• Delegitimization — The Israeli charge that BDS delegitimizes Israel, traced by Barghouti to a Tel Aviv think tank’s strategic-threat warning and answered by delegitimizing oppression, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, not a people’s existence.
• Demographic problem — The Israeli planners’ term, in Makdisi’s account, for wanting the land of the occupied territories without its non-Jewish people.
• Eretz Israel — The name Zionists give, in Sayegh’s account, to all of Palestine emptied of its Arabs, whose minimum 1919 definition covers about double the settler-state’s area.
• Ethnic Cleansing — The concept at the centre of Pappe’s book: rendering a mixed country homogeneous by expelling a group, turning them into refugees and demolishing their homes, then erasing them from history — a crime against humanity of which Palestine in 1948 is, he argues, a clear-cut case.
• Feudal-Clerical Leadership — Kanafani’s first enemy: the semi-feudal, semi-religious leadership heading the national movement until 1948.
• Fortress Israel — Pappe’s term for the Zionist project as a ‘white’ fortress in a ‘black’ world, defended by majority-at-all-costs, walls and refusal of return.
• Genocide — As Barghouti uses the term for Gaza: acts of genocide, albeit slow, measured against Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, with slow genocide the first reason comprehensive boycott is urgent.
• Global Solidarity — The worldwide civil society support for the Palestinian struggle — BDS, divestment, flotillas and tribunals — whose proper posture in Falk’s account is humility about tactics and solutions.
• Hunger Strikes — The 2011-2012 Palestinian prison hunger strikes, from Adnan’s individual strike to the April 17, 2012 mass strike, as an extreme form of nonviolence in Falk’s account.
• Imperialism — British imperialism in Palestine, and imperialism as a worldwide colonising body in Kanafani’s thought.
• Infiltrators — The Israeli label for Palestinian refugees who crossed back to their homes after 1948, fought through arrest, military courts and renewed expulsion, in Manna’s Chapter 4 account.
• Intersectionality — The interweaving of oppressions, learned by BDS from Black feminists, requiring intersectional resistance.
• Jewish Labour Only — The slogan and policy excluding Arab labour (and goods) from the settler economy.
• Judaization — The policy of converting Arab land and areas into Jewish ones, Judaizing territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it, in Said’s account.
• Lawfare — The Israeli hardline label for Palestinian and civil-society reliance on international law, which Falk treats as a backlash acknowledging the legitimacy struggle’s strength.
• Legitimacy struggle — Falk’s name (replacing “legitimacy war”) for the Palestinian grand strategy of nonviolent soft power, international law and morality, and global solidarity.
• Liberation of Palestine — The telos of Sayegh’s five-stage Palestinian response, seized as an initiative with the creation of the PLO in 1964.
• Memoricide — Pappe’s term for the erasure of the Nakba’s memory: Hebraized renaming and the JNF’s forests and parks over the destroyed villages, whose signs deny Palestinians ever lived there.
• Mission civilisatrice — The ethos of a European civilising mission to which, for Said, both Balfour’s imperial vision and the Zionist vision belong.
• Nakba — The Palestinian term for the catastrophe of 1948, which in Pappe’s account leaves out the actor and may thereby have contributed to the denial of the ethnic cleansing.
• Non-expulsion — Manna’s term for the cases in which Palestinians were allowed to remain in northern Palestine, which he argues were the result of high-level Israeli orders and policy, not chance.
• Normalization — Joint Palestinian-Israeli relations or projects that give a false impression of normalcy despite colonial oppression, and the two PACBI conditions against it, in Barghouti’s account.
• Occupation by bureaucracy — Makdisi’s occupation worked through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and permits.
• One-state solution — The single secular democratic state Makdisi advocates, announced in his front matter.
• Orientalism — The West’s tradition of representing the Orient, Islam and the Arabs, on which Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians, in Said’s account.
• Peasant Revolt — Kanafani’s characterisation of the 1936-39 revolt in substance and leadership.
• Permanent revolution — Trotsky’s theory, drawn on by Jabra Nicola, that liberation struggles must challenge local capitalist classes.
• Pinkwashing — Israel’s foregrounding of supposed gender liberalism to distract from its human rights record and accuse Palestinian society.
• Politics of deflection — Falk’s name for Israel’s repertoire of techniques — anti-Semitism charges, auspices attacks, the “terrorist” label, diplomatic and geopolitical diversion — for shifting the gaze away from the merits of the dispute.
• Politics of fragmentation — Falk’s name for Israel’s inward moves — minority/diaspora/PA–Hamas divisions and West Bank cantonization — designed to weaken Palestinian resistance and induce despair.
• Politics of language — Falk’s argument that neutral diplomatic vocabulary obscures the occupation’s annexationist character, and that the time has come to “call a spade a spade”.
• Population registry and family unification — Israel’s retained control of the registry, identity cards and family unification that decides Palestinian residence, in Makdisi’s account.
• Present Absentees — The label for Palestinians expelled from their villages in 1948 who remained inside Israel as internal refugees, barred from returning to their houses and lands, in Manna’s account.
• Racial Self-Segregation — The first corollary of Zionist racial identification in Sayegh: separation from non-Jewish societies and regrouping alone in Palestine.
• Racism — In Sayegh, a congenial, essential and permanent trait of the settler-state, aiming in Palestine at racial elimination rather than hierarchical coexistence.
• Remainers — Manna’s subject: the Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 or who returned, 156,000 by the summer 1949 consensus figure, whose struggle to remain ran to 1956 and beyond.
• Representation — Said’s name for Zionism’s speaking for Palestine and the Palestinians, blocking Palestinian self-representation, and the liberal West’s acceptance of mediated Arabs.
• Resistance Poetry — The poetry and popular poetry that mobilised the villages and attacked the land-selling leadership.
• Responsibility to Protect — The R2P norm, invoked for Libya in 2011 and, in Falk’s account, geopolitically withheld from Gaza.
• Right of Return — The refugees’ right acknowledged in Resolution 194, centred in Palestinian nationalism and excluded by Israel’s peace axioms as a ‘non-starter’, in Pappe’s account.
• Seam zone — The closed military area between the wall and the 1949 Armistice Line, almost 10 percent of the West Bank, in Makdisi’s account.
• Secular Democratic State — The PLO’s idea of a secular, democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, which Said calls the true novelty and revolutionary force of the Palestinian movement.
• Self-determination — The fundamental right at the centre of Said’s Chapter Three, made difficult by exile and dispersion because it requires a clearly seen self to determine.
• Separation wall — The West Bank wall as Makdisi, following the ICJ, calls it: built mostly inside the occupied territory and fragmenting Palestinian space.
• Settler Colonialism — The transformation of the Mandate into Zionist settler colonialism, climaxing in the mid-1930s.
• Socialism — As defined by the editors of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: workers’ collective democratic control of their labour and its value, realized from below against “socialism from above” and Stalinist stagism.
• State Terrorism — Falk’s name for Israel’s doctrine of disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure and for the occupation itself, maintained by daily violations of international humanitarian law.
• Sumoud — Steadfastness: Palestinian resistance as perseverance against erasure; “our mere existence is resistance”.
• Surrounding Arab Regimes — Kanafani’s second enemy: the regimes of the surrounding Arab states, which curbed and ended the revolt.
• Territorial Expansion — The settler-state’s third characteristic and Zionism’s unfinished business in Sayegh: expansion towards all of Eretz Israel.
• Transfer — The Zionist concept of removing Palestine’s Arab population from the country, deeply rooted in Zionist thought from Herzl through Motzkin, Ben-Gurion, Weitz and Sharett, in Pappe’s account following Masalha.
• Two-state solution — The formula Falk shows covers two radically different solutions: the American conception and the Barghouti–Avnery conception of genuine sovereignty and equality.
• Universal jurisdiction — National courts’ authority over grave crimes regardless of place or nationality, from piracy through Nuremberg to the ICC, as Falk sets it out.
• Unrecognized villages — The dozens of Palestinian villages inside Israel the state does not officially recognise, home to about 10 percent of Palestinian Israelis, with no grid, water, schools or building permits, in Makdisi’s account.
• Watchdog state — Israel’s role for US imperialism in the Middle East, in Chapter 2 of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, from the Haaretz watchdog proposal to the post-Cold War partnership.
• Zionism — The settler movement allied with British imperialism, as Kanafani presents it.