On Sunday, 26 January 2025, the second day of the Annual Palestine Forum continued with a full schedule of presentations in addition to an evening symposium. Dozens of researchers shared their work on wide-ranging topics such as Palestinian citizenship within Israel, Palestinian women’s experiences under genocide, aesthetics in Palestinian resistance, Jerusalem, emerging settlement trends in the West Bank, and the critical ramifications of ongoing attacks on refugee camps.
The first session included presentations in four parallel tracks on framework for liberation in Palestine, scholasticide in Gaza, symbolic representations of Palestinians resistance, and policies of erasure and resistance in Jerusalem. In the first track Leila Farsakh presented her paper “Palestinian Political Liberation after the War on Gaza: Self-determination beyond Partition” reassessing the relationship between statehood and self-determination; Yara Hawari discussed examples of Palestinian feminist organizing in her paper “Palestinian Women in the Struggle: Carving a New Framework for Liberation; and Muhannad Ayyash presented his research “Sovereignty, Non-Partition, and the Struggle for the Decolonial Liberation of Palestine” about centring the Palestinian struggle to our understanding of decolonial resistance.
In the second track, Refaat Sabbah compared local actors’ and international organizations’ responses to Gaza’s education sector suffering a state of emergency in his paper “the Education Response in Gaza under Genocide: Between local and international policies and services in light of current challenges”; Riam Kafri-Abu Laban’s research “the Role of Civil Society Organization in Responding to Scholasticide in Gaza” examined the extent to which innovative approaches to saving education in Gaza can become applicable beyond emergency situations; Ahmad Ashour presented “The Concept of Liberation and the Search for a New Robe in the Context of Gaza”, highlighting how community work in Gaza transformed education into a tool for resistance; and Asmaa Mustafa addressed changing mechanisms of educating during genocide in her paper “Gaza’s Innovative Teachers: Candles in the Dark.”
The third track critically evaluated the role of aesthetics in Palestinian resistance from different angles in their papers: Ahmed Dardir explored the effects of the image of the masked insurgent in his paper, “The Ideal Image of Resistance: (Mis) Recognition and the Ideology of al-Qassam”; Majd Darwish analysed the transformation of the traditional Palestinian headdress in his paper, “When the Kufiyyah Hides, What the Kufiyyah Reveals: A Social History of the Mask and the Men behind It”; Karim Elhaies explored how Palestinian cinematic practices forge new aesthetics in his research, “Hijacking Aesthetics as Cinematic Decolonization: Palestinian guerilla filmmaking and its afterlives”; and Sanabel Abdel Rahman argued that revolutionary aesthetics potentialize material liberation and exert a liberated Palestinian future in her paper, “Potentializing Aesthetics: Visualizing the Palestinian revolutionary.”
In the fourth track, Mansour Nasasra highlighted the Qalandiya airport as an example of the agentic empowerment of the inhabitants of Jerusalem in his paper “Materializing an Arab Jerusalem: Narrating the Jerusalem Airport/Qalandiya 1948-1967”; Daoud Al-Ghoul presented his paper “Restructuring Geographies of Political leadership in al-Quds/ Jerusalem” about Israel’s attempts at dismantling Palestinian political structure in Jerusalem. Sonia Espinosa Najjar centred the voices of interviewees from Wadi Hilweh to understand the impacts of living under settler colonialism in “Palestinian Civil Society, Emotions, and Sumud under Settler Colonialism – the case of Wadi Hilweh”.
In the second session, one track focused on Palestinians in Israel, where speakers addressed how Israeli policies reduce Palestinian citizenship to a lower status and place them under a “dialectic of control and containment.” In his paper, “Subjects in an Ethnocratic Regime and a Settler Colonial Context as a Concept and Practice Counter to Citizenship and National Identity: The Case of Palestinians within the Green Line,” Ibrahim Khatib argued that Israel’s insistence on Jewish statehood subordinates Palestinians and nullifies much of their formal citizenship. Khaled Anabtawi, in “Between Homeland and the Trap of Citizenship: Palestinians within the Green Line and the Dialectic of Control and Co-Optation,” examined how political co-optation and heavy-handed state authority leave Palestinians of 1948 in a state of uneasy compromise, while Durgham Saif, presenting “Rethinking the Palestinians’ Status in Israel,” warned that a civil rights strategy under Israeli law has failed, calling for an alternative grounded in Palestinian sovereignty.
A second track, Palestinian Women in the Time of Genocide, featured research on the targeting of women and their homes as sites of colonial aggression. Kholoud Al-Ajarma explored this phenomenon in “Beyond the Genocide: The Tactical Degradation of Palestinian Women’s Privacy in Gaza,” revealing how Israeli soldiers exploit women’s intimate belongings for psychological warfare. Meanwhile, Ferdoos Abed Rabo Alissa, in “Gaza Women as Narrators of the Present: Daily Suffering and the Daily Pursuit of Survival,” documented how women’s social media testimonies preserve memory and illustrate survival strategies under siege.
A third track, The Settler Presence in the West Bank, began with Hussein Ayaseh’s study, “Pastoral Settlement in the West Bank as a New Means of Seizing Land,” which detailed how agricultural or “pastoral” outposts undermine Palestinian land rights. Amro Wawi, with “Data and Water Governance: Governance Assessment Approach to Understand Their Interactions and Impact in Palestine,” then showed how Israel’s data monopoly hinders Palestinian water infrastructure.
A fourth track, Genocide Methods in Gaza, analysed how the Israeli military systematically imposes lethal conditions on the population. Ali Aljasem, in “Starvation as a Weapon of Warfare: The Case of Gaza, Palestine,” revealed the deliberate withholding of resources to break Palestinian resilience, while Orouba Othman, in “In Critique of Trauma Studies: Social Pain as a Site for Social Action and Hope in the Time of Genocide,” challenged conventional trauma frameworks, showing how communal pain can transform into strength and agency.
Following a short break, the Forum proceeded to another set of four tracks. A panel on Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return: Memory and Space included papers by Dana Al-Azzeh, “Growing up Uprooted: Experiences of Marginalization in Shaping the National Identity of Palestinian Youth in Lebanon,” which explored how displacement shapes youth identity in camps; Hala Abou Zaki, “Tel al-Zaatar: A Forgotten History? Violence and Memory in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon,” which recalled the traumatic siege and destruction of Tel al-Zaatar; and Areej Ja’fari, “Palestinian Refugees’ Preferences for Return,” detailing new evidence on how and where refugees envision returning.
In the second track on The Symbolic Representation of Palestinian Resistance: Literature, Education, and Popular Culture, Ghada Alatrash spoke about “Palestinian and Native American Literature as Resistance and ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’,” drawing parallels in how both literatures counter colonial erasure; Jan Busse, with “Global Palestine against the Wall: Street Art as a Counter-Hegemonic Everyday Practice of Space Appropriation and Resistance,” showed how graffiti and murals contest settler narratives; and Asma Al-Sharabati, in “The Representation of Prisoners and Martyrs in Palestinian Textbooks: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Palestinian Authority Discourse,” questioned how institutional material portrays or elides the suffering of prisoners and martyrs.
Meanwhile, a panel on Palestinian Youth and Digital Activism featured Omar Abu Arqoub, “The Role of TikTok in Mobilizing the Global Solidarity Movement with Palestine during the Genocidal War on Gaza,” who examined grassroots video content that has boosted Palestinian visibility worldwide; Naveen Shariff, “The Impact of Ongoing Coverage of the Genocide in Gaza on the Collective Identity of Global Youth Communities on Social Media,” highlighting the youth’s intensifying political and religious identification; and Jala Rizeq, “A Psychological Investigation of Palestinian Youth’s Future Thinking: Lessons in Steadfastness,” examining hope and aspiration as a form of resilience.
A final track, Colonial Control and the War on the West Bank, included Ibrahim Rabaia and Lourdes Habash, whose work, “Weaponizing Infrastructure: The Israeli Colonial Approach in Jenin,” revealed how destruction of roads, utilities, and institutions undermines daily life and resistance; Ayat Hamdan, “Israel’s War on Refugee Camps in the West Bank: Settler Colonialism and the Revenge Doctrine,” which linked aggressive airstrikes and raids to a colonial mindset of retaliation; and Walid Habbas, “Indigenous Management: Israel’s Colonial Governance Strategy in the Occupied Territories,” explaining how Israel’s latest policies are shifting toward an openly genocidal framework rather than the older strategy of controlling the population.
An evening symposium entitled Trump II and the Palestine Question: Prospects for Change featured speakers Osama Abu Irshaid, Tamara Kharroub, Yousef Munayyer, and Tariq Dana. The discussion examined the possible implications of another Trump administration for Palestine, from intensified settlement expansion to the weakening of international law and the accelerated normalization of ties between Israel and Arab states.
