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In the wake of genocide, this special issue gathers critical theorizations of the Israeli occupation of Palestine with the aim of providing a basis for understanding formations of imperialism and possibilities of solidarity in the contemporary global conjuncture.

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Against colonial unchilding—the stripping of Palestinian children from futurity—this article theorizes re-childing as ontological resistance in Palestinian literature. Through Kanafani, Daqqa, and al-Araj, the author argues that these writers reclaim the child as insurgent epistemology: a mode preserving wonder and prophetic imagination within catastrophe. Drawing on Benjamin’s messianic temporality, the article shows how Palestinian resistance operates through vulnerability as political faculty. The child and prophet converge as figures keeping the world open to revelation. Re-childing reorients resistance theory: to resist is to remain capable of astonishment, protecting tenderness within militancy while insisting the future breathes through language.

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Edward Said, working through the Western interwar and postwar theoretical traditions, articulates existential homelessness/exility as a countering ideal to the rigid homogeneity of the nation-state. This essay emphasizes the need to reconfigure Said’s framework for theorizing Palestinian subjectivity within discourses privileging exility, because the theoretical space of exility itself is bound up with a Western theoretical preoccupation with anti-Semitism, Nazism, and Jewish redemption. It tangles constructions of the Palestinian as a partial, fragmented figure (archaeological, biblical, ahistorical, acultural), who lacks aesthetic capacity to travel, materially and symbolically, and thus to join the human march of culture and civilization. Beyond even these theoretical foreclosures, the current Gaza genocide exposes a need to move beyond the currently imagined basis for reconciliation, coming as it does from a specifically post-Holocaust Jewish rhetoric that universalizes the Jewish figure of the exile as a way of securing a path of assimilation and human transcendence.

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This essay draws on Roberto Esposito’s immunitary paradigm to analyze how the state of Israel deploys the conceptual paradigm of immunity, biologically, politically, and legally, to maintain and legitimize its settler colonial project while shielding itself from critique and accountability for its genocide in Gaza. As a historically racialized and gendered construct in the West, immunopolitics relies on a colonial epistemology of separation and othering that maintains an impenetrable border between self and other. In epitomizing what this essay theorizes as an “immunocolonial state,” the case of Israel yields insight into the sacrificial logic of contemporary settler colonial projects and underscores the urgency of seeking out decolonial ethical alternatives to the ideologies that hold them in place.

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This article examines Israel’s ongoing military operations in southern Lebanon as a deliberate and planned effort to obliterate life and reconfigure territory. It argues that ecological violence—understood as the disruption of human and nonhuman interrelations—is both a tactic of war and a strategy of territorial domination. The analysis explores how Israel has weaponized nature and the built environment, employing a scorched-earth policy that serves broader settler colonial goals. It also explores psychological warfare tactics aimed at demoralizing local populations and inducing displacement, alongside broader, slower, and less visible forms of violence that increase the risk of dispossession and permanent uprooting. In this vein, the article focuses on the historical and symbolic significance of the Hula Valley—originally part of Greater Lebanon—and the growing force of invisible violence embedded in nature protection narratives. In conclusion, it reflects on “eco-normalization” as a mechanism that obscures or legitimizes asymmetric power and raises broader concerns about how the politics of postwar recovery and reconstruction may entrench territorial control and displacement in southern Lebanese towns.

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No one following the critical academic study of Palestine and Israel over the past decade and a half could fail to observe the dramatic proliferation of the category of settler colonialism. This article examines the intellectual historical conceit of one prominent strand, those studies taking after Patrick Wolfe’s influential theorization. Where many scholars observe a renewal or return to an earlier tradition of studying Zionism, the author argues that recent developments represent a paradigmatic turn. This is, moreover, often a highly “motivated” interpretation that aims for the history to adhere to the preferred theoretical schema (specifically, the superfluity of native labor to the settler economy), rather than striving to incorporate the unfolding of a dynamic struggle and its contemporary analysis. To demonstrate this shortcoming, the article then samples a selection of English- and Arabic-language sources from the apparent interim in the theorization of Zionist settler colonialism. These works, responsive to their conjuncture between the June War and the First Intifada, not only deploy many concepts and theories that are illegible in the Wolfean paradigm but also demonstrate a concerted recovery of the history and struggles of the Palestinian working class and their relevance to the struggle for national liberation.

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Darryl Li is an anthropologist, attorney, and legal scholar at the University of Chicago. He has written and spoken extensively about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, beginning with his time working for the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights from 2001 to 2002. After several years at human rights NGOs, Li shifted to academia in part to better understand the transregional Muslim social worlds targeted by the “war on terror.” His book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (2019), is a study of Muslims who traveled from Western Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia to fight in the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. His research across geographies informs his attentiveness to mobility and transmutability—of people, technology, weapons, and ideas.

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Our reflection commences with a workshop we had planned for the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in April 2025 centered around one question: What should teaching “Palestinian film and media” include? The original idea was to convene those with expertise/experience in the area and nonexperts who see teaching Palestine as a historical necessity in order to reflect collectively on their curriculum and pedagogies amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We were galvanized by an intensifying information war that complemented and buttressed the massive loss of Palestinian lives, forced displacement, and the use of famine as a weapon of war.1 We were also alarmed by the intimidation of scholars teaching Palestine in institutions across the world, with Palestinian academics in particular under constant scrutiny. At a minimum, two imperatives face media scholars in what is unequivocally an information war geared toward erasing Palestinian politics,...

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