Jonathan Adler

During the last week of July, my internship with Al-Shabaka came to a close: I wrapped up my remaining editorial projects, attended my final staff meeting, and logged off our Slack and Google accounts. One week later, on August 5th, the Israeli state launched its latest assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the tiny coastal enclave home to over 2 million Palestinians that has faced an Israeli blockade for the past fifteen years. The three-day military operation killed 47 Palestinians, 16 of whom were children, and injured at least 350 Palestinian civilians – not to mention the damage to physical infrastructure that will prevent a complete recovery from Israel’s prolonged assault last May. Yet as one of my Al-Shabaka colleagues pointed out, the “truce” that ended the assault on Sunday is a misnomer, since the Israeli state shows no sign of ending its violent siege of Gaza, and has resumed its assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere.

This brutal reality for Palestinians – and the likelihood of its continuation – makes it difficult not to despair. And for progressive policy organizations like Al-Shabaka, it is frustrating to see US politicians respond to every assault on the occupied Palestinian population in Gaza by “reiterating support for Israel’s right to self-defense and celebrating Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which the US helps fund and which blocked most of the rockets from Gaza.” But I think these facts also reaffirm a core part of Al-Shabaka’s modus operandi, which I discussed with my colleagues during the internship. We might assume that the broad goals of a policy-focused organization are obvious: to influence government policy in order to enact social change. But just as important, especially in the Palestinian context, is the work to shift the narrative on what is all-too-often termed the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. In the case of Gaza, this means that the critical work is to push back against the idea that this is a conflict between Israel and Hamas or Palestinian Jihad, and to emphasize that Israel’s assaults on Gaza amount to a war on children. Or, as my colleague notes in Al-Jazeera, it is to point out the double standards whereby Ukrainian resistance against Russian occupation and military aggression is widely praised in Western media, and Palestinian resistance is condemned and delegitimized as terrorism. And it is to reiterate the importance of historical context in any discussion of Palestine – the fact that over half of Gaza’s population, for example, are refugees from 1948 – and that any narrative that ignores the centrality of the Palestinian Nakba is inherently incomplete.

Over the course of my internship with Al-Shabaka this summer, I’ve tried to continue to remind myself about the importance of positionality and its effect on my own work. In particular, I’ve had to think about how to edit pieces and write about Palestinian society in an ethical, responsible manner – particularly as a non-Palestinian, working from New York. I’ve seen that this question of representation is also at the forefront of my colleagues’ minds: as an organization whose staff and members are located not only within Palestine, but also in Jordan, Egypt, Europe, and the United States, Al-Shabaka’s own institutional and political positions are guided by an awareness of how taking such positions may impact people differently depending on where they live. 

These issues came up during a recent assignment, where I was tasked with ghost-writing a draft of an op-ed for one of Al-Shabaka’s policy analysts. Building on the analyst’s previous scholarship, the op-ed discussed the recent anniversary of the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law as evidence of the failure of the partition paradigm – the idea that historic Palestine should ultimately be divided into separate Jewish and Palestinian states. It argued that Palestinians should move away from advocating for a two-state solution, and towards the idea of a single civic, democratic state in Israel/Palestine that guarantees the equality of all its citizens. And it suggested that the Unity Intifada of 2021 illustrated the potential for a new, grassroots Palestinian political movement that could coalesce around a one-state platform. 

While I was working on this op-ed, the editorial board of Metras – an online Palestinian media outlet known to be fairly progressive – published an openly homophobic letter. This followed a spate of attacks on members of the LGBTQ community in Palestine, in addition to other publicized homophobia. It was not only disturbing to witness these brazen acts occur out in the open, but also a disheartening reminder of the social and religious fractures within Palestinian society, fractures that may very well undermine the call for a unified political movement. From abroad, it can seem easy or self-evident to argue that the Palestinian people are united in their struggle against Israeli apartheid – and it may be necessary to do so, in order to articulate certain political demands – but such a claim may also distort the reality that many Palestinians (and those, in particular, within the LGBTQ community) face.

Jonathan Adler / Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network / New York, NY

As I’ve begun my work as an editorial intern at Al-Shabaka, I’ve continued to grapple with the readings from this past semester’s seminar and independent study. In particular, I’ve thought about how I can make use of academic scholarship to inform my editorial approach – as well as the challenges and limitations of engaging with scholarly writing in a policy-focused environment.

This was particularly pertinent last week, while I was editing an forthcoming policy brief for Al-Shabaka on the situation of Palestinian Bedouin communities in the E-1 corridor, an area east of Jerusalem that the Israeli government has been planning to annex. The policy brief outlines how Israel forcibly displaces these Bedouin communities to advance annexation – not only via home demolitions, but also by denying them basic economic and social rights. Moreover, it argues that humanitarian aid programs in E-1, backed by the US, EU, and other donor states, have not only failed to protect Palestinian Bedouins from Israeli aggression but also fueled a vicious cycle: donors help Bedouin communities rebuild after Israeli demolitions, only to have Israel destroy donor-funded projects, necessitating additional aid and leaving Bedouins more dependent on support. 

As I worked on this brief, I was reminded of our seminar discussion on humanitarian aid in the so-called Third World, and how scholars have criticized the basic assumptions of humanitarianism as a force for good. I also thought about my own reading on economic development and aid in the Palestinian context, and how academics have argued that aid programs are structurally inadequate to the task of Palestinian liberation.

Yet this piece was a policy brief – in other words, it had to move beyond the realm of academic critique and offer concrete recommendations for how to secure the rights of Palestinian Bedouins in E-1. In some ways, this is a more challenging task than mere critique, especially when dealing with the topic of humanitarian aid, whose structural flaws in Palestine are blatantly clear. So it was enlightening to see how the authors of this brief navigated this tension – rather than abandon the aid framework all together, for example, they suggest that donor states should restructure their aid programs to ensure accountability, achieve buy-in from Bedouin communities, and allow international legal bodies to oversee the aid delivery process. I’m eager to develop my own skills in this type of policy writing, which doesn’t shy away from critical analysis, but also offers specific paths forward.

Jonathan Adler / Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network / New York, NY

On May 5th, I awoke to the news that the Israeli High Court had approved the state’s decision to forcibly transfer over one thousand Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank. In a case that has extended over twenty years, the judges issued a unanimous opinion that dismissed the international prohibition on forced transfer of civilians in occupied territories as a mere, non-binding “treaty norm”.[1] The decision constitutes one of the largest instances of forced expulsion in the fifty-five-year history of the Israeli occupation, and, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, only reaffirms that “the occupied cannot expect justice from the occupier’s court.”[2]

We often think of the worst human rights violations as the ones that go unseen – state-sanctioned torture in secret prisons, or extrajudicial executions – and that the role of human rights advocates is to bring such abuses to light. But, as legal theorist Susan Marks has asked, what if the worst violations take place in broad daylight?[3] This is particularly apparent in the Israeli context, where clear violations of human rights and international law are routinely green-lit by the Israeli legal system and thus there is no need to hide them. Yet such abuses are only plain to see for those who know where to look; while this instance of forced expulsion will hopefully generate widespread media coverage and international outrage, many violations of Palestinian human rights often go unreported, especially here in the United States.

My hope is that I’ll be able to help address this knowledge gap through my work this summer, as an intern at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Al-Shabaka is an online Palestinian-led think tank, that for the past decade has provided critical analysis of policy issues that affect Palestinians, for both an English and Arabic-speaking audience. The organization aims to “educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self determination,” with specific reference to international law. And by drawing upon its large member network, which includes activists, academics, human rights advocates, journalists, and others from across Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, Al-Shabaka has played an important role in amplifying Palestinian voices – voices that have long been left out of mainstream Western media and policy circles.

The bulk of my work at Al-Shabaka will be editorial, where I’ll solicit and edit policy briefs and roundtables, organize panels and podcast episodes, and craft op-eds for placement in mainstream outlets. Much of Al-Shabaka’s output provides an analysis of current political realities in Palestine, and helps to place individual human rights abuses in their larger structural context. But given Al-Shabaka’s equal interest debating political futures, I also hope to explore how human rights and international law will continue to play a role in ongoing political and social movements to achieve justice for Palestinians.

[1] Bethan McKernan, “Israeli Court Paves Way for Eviction of 1,000 Palestinians from West Bank Area,” The Guardian, May 5, 2022, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/israeli-court-evict-1000-palestinians-west-bank-area.

[2] “The International Community Must Prevent the Forcible Transfer of Masafer Yatta Communities, Approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice,” B’Tselem, https://www.btselem.org/press_release/20220505_international_community_must_prevent_the_forcible_transfer_of_masafer_yatta_communities_approved_by_hcj.

[3] Susan Marks, On Four Human Rights Myths, LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 10 (2012)