The last day of the 2023 Annual Palestine Forum consisted of 15 presentations and two workshops. The last workshop also served to wrap up the forum’s discussions by directing participants’ and attendants’ attention toward reflecting on the future of the Palestinian project. Today was also the last day for the Ostour Symposium, whose sessions were conducted in parallel to the forum.

The first session of the forum’s third day covered three main themes: the legal and linguistic dimensions of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, gender perspectives on Palestine, and Palestine from a historical perspective. Nine papers focusing on these themes were presented.

Three papers looked at the Israeli settler colonial regime from a legal and linguistic lens. In his paper “Ethnic Cleansing as a Tool for Consolidating Settler Colonialism and Apartheid in Jerusalem”, Nizar Ayoub studied the policy of systematic ethnic cleansing as a tool of the Israeli settler colonial regime to maintain a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Lena Obermaier, in a paper titled “Disablement and Debilitation during Gaza’s Great March of Return”, examined Israel’s policies of deliberate disablement of Palestinians in the Great March of Return as part of a settler-colonial “logic of elimination”. In his paper “Linguistic Rights of ‘48 Palestinians”, Saul J. Takahashi focused on the right of access to judicial proceedings in the struggle for Palestinian’s linguistic rights, drawing on the case of road signs as an example.

Three papers focused on the theme of gender and Palestine. Hà Bao Ngan Dong’s paper, “Not Allowed to Play Under Zionist Colonization: The ‘Speed Sisters’”, presented an analysis of the “speed sisters” car racing team, based on the documentary by filmmaker Amber Fares. Camelia Ibrahim-Dwairy’s paper, titled “The Case of Single Palestinian Men in Israel: Between Patriarchal and Israeli Oppression”, examined the discourse of single Palestinian men living within the Green Line amid a patriarchal society. Suhad Daher-Nashif and Areen Hawari focused on the daily lives of Palestinian women, particularly those from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are married and live inside the Israeli state in their paper “The Lived Experience of Married Palestinian Women from the Palestinian Territories Occupied in 1967 Residing within the ‘Green Line’”.

Three papers discussed Palestine from a historical perspective. Presenting his paper, titled “Towards Liberation from the Narrative of Biblical Archaeology in Writing the Ancient History of Palestine”, Mohammed Maraqten analysed several case studies of inscriptions that reveal the misinterpretation and misuse of linguistic data in the interpretation of historical and cultural events in ancient Palestine. In a paper titled “‘Mā kānsh fīh!’: Oral Narratives as a Missing Source for the Military Historiography of the Palestine War 1947-1949”, Bilal Shalash reviewed the outputs of two projects, a Birzeit University project on depopulated villages and the Nakba Testimony Program, which reflect the military history of the 1948 war. Mehmet Osmanli demonstrated the extent to which the Ottoman authorities began dealing with a Palestinian cause in the late nineteenth century in his paper “Aspiring to the Sympathy of His ‘Hümâyunic Shadow’: The Limits of the Ottoman Bureaucracy’s Perception of Jewish Immigration to the Land of Palestine”.

The second session of the Palestine Forum was centred on two other themes: the impact of settler colonialism on the environment and agriculture in Palestine, and Palestine in literary discourse.

Three papers presented studied the impact of settler colonialism on the environment and agriculture in Palestine. Kholoud Al-Ajarma presented her paper “Tobacco Cultivation in Palestine: Farmers’ Struggles over Land Ownership in the Context of Settler-Colonialism”, which provided examples of the daily struggles of Palestinian farmers and their active participation in land protection in the face of settler-colonialism. Rawan Samamreh presented her paper “Nature Reserves and National Parks: An Approach to Settlement Expansion and Control of Space” which investigated Israel’s settler-colonial exploitation of nature reserves and national parks as tools to manage and control the local Palestinian population and land. Yasmin Qaadan’s paper “Environment Meanings from the Language of Local Knowledge for the Movement of Palestinian Peasants” offered a political ecology perspective of settler colonialism through its ethnographic research of Palestinian peasants.

Three papers were presented on Palestine in literary discourse. Asaad Alsaleh’s paper “A Palestinian Women Looking for Place: Fadwa Tuqan’s A Mountainous Journey” which provided a new reading of Fadwa Tuqan’s text within the displaced autobiography subfield. Abdelrahman S. Abuaber presented his paper “The Stranger’s Mirrors: Place, Time, and Questions of the Self in Biographical Writing”, which aimed to give organic theoretical attention to biographical writing by Palestinians. Hosni Mlitat’s paper “Representing the Palestinian Cause in Contemporary Spanish Orientalist Discourse” explored the representation of the Palestinian cause from the perspective of contemporary Spanish orientalists Juan Goytisolo, Emilio Ferrín, and Isaías Barreñada.

In the afternoon, the Forum hosted two workshops. In the first workshop, four speakers – Khaled Hroub, Alain Gresh, Ben White, and Yousef Munayyer – discussed changes in the representation and news coverage of Palestine in Western and Arab media discourse. For the second workshop and closing session of the forum Tarek Mitri, Institute for Palestine Studies Board of Trustees Chairman, and Azmi Bishara, General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies opened the floor for a discussion for participants to reflect on the question of what is to be done and the future of the Palestinian national project. Bishara stressed the success of this forum in bringing together Palestinians from across the world to share knowledge from the field of Palestinian studies in an academic environment.

Bishara then introduced Marwan Barghouti, political figure and political prisoner for the last twenty-one years, who delivered a word through his partner, lawyer, and politician Fadwa Barghouti who read what he had written from his cell. Barghouti discussed the challenges facing the Palestinian national project including: the struggle to return the unity of the Palestinian people through one national project, the unity of the Palestinian cause, Zionist settler colonialism, the emphasis on Arab identity, the humanitarian struggle, reinforcing the importance of resistance in all its forms, the crisis of the Palestinian national movement, and the struggle for womens’ right to equality and dignity, and a leading Palestinian force with a political culture that views the Palestinians as worthy of dignity, equality, and justice. Barghouti concluded by reflecting on the importance of this forum as a step that reinforces the unity of Palestinians and the unified aim of all those working for the Palestinian cause.