Displaced at Home

Groundbreaking essays by Palestinian women scholars on the lives of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

Groundbreaking essays by Palestinian women scholars on the lives of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

Most media coverage and research on the experience of Palestinians focuses on those living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, while the sizable minority of Palestinians living within Israel rarely garners significant academic or media attention. Offering a rich and multidimensional portrait of the lived realities of Palestinians within the state of Israel, Palestinians in Israel Revisited gathers a group of Palestinian women scholars who present unflinching critiques of the complexities and challenges inherent in the lives of this understudied but important minority within Israel. The essays here engage topics ranging from internal refugees and historical memory to women's sexuality and the resistant possibilities of hip hop culture among young Palestinians. Unique in the collection is sustained attention to gender concerns, which have tended to be subordinated to questions of nationalism, statehood, and citizenship. The first collection of its kind in English, Palestinians in Israel Revisited presents on-the-ground examples of the changing political, social and economic conditions of Palestinians in Israel, and examines how global, national, and local concerns intersect and shape their daily lives.

Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh has taught anthropology and gender studies at New York University and American University. She is the author of Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel and Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military. Isis Nusair is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Women's Studies at Denison University.

"…the volume is distinctive in bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the dramatic and the mundane … In their combination of empirical innovation and theoretical sophistication, these chapters … and the volume as a whole, make an important contribution to the academic scholarship of and about the Palestinians" — Review of Middle East Studies

"By intertwining the themes of ethnicity and gender, Displaced at Home breaks new ground, presenting a counter narrative to studies that posit the Palestinian citizens of Israel only as manipulated and victimised, as well as to Palestinian nationalist histories which present society as monolithic … The fact that all twelve contributors … are Palestinian women, citizens of Israel, gives their research an immediacy and authenticity that make the book engrossing as well as highly informative." — Jordan Times

"Informative, insightful, and thought-provoking." — Mary N. Layoun, author of Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis

"This groundbreaking book helps to fill a huge gap in research on Palestinians in Israel." — Amal Amireh, author of The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction