The Alternative Lexicon

This article examines academic space in Israel/Palestine as shaped by political separation, unequal power relations, and the exclusion of Palestinian knowledge, language, and presence. Drawing on the Shared Homeland Paradigm, it reimagines academic space through language and identity, knowledge production, political climate and militarization, and epistemic exile and mobility. It also offers a preliminary exploration of the “Academic Right of Return” as a way of thinking about a shared academic space in which Palestinians are recognized as active producers and shapers of knowledge.

The transcendent can help cultivate a shared appreciation for the land and its significant sacred sites, rather than the sectarian divisions created by the zero-sum game of colonialism and nationalism.

Democracy is a set of formally agreed rules and institutions designed to contain internal conflicts peacefully within the borders of a state. The concept of two separate autonomous democratic states, coordinated through parity-based confederal institutions, is suggested here as a democratic institutional framework for containing conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in their shared Land, and as a viable path toward decolonization.

"Flag" examines the Israeli flag as an instrument of settler-colonial power that inscribes ownership and exclusion onto space, and proposes a temporal, practice-based alternative; grounded in time, naming, and silence, for a shared homeland beyond the territorial logic of flags.

Dependence can become interdependence when it is symmetrical, just, and sustainable. This is a continued process, perhaps never fully achieved, rather than a fixed objective or endgame.

Following October 7 and the genocide in Gaza, Israeli identity has reached a breaking point. Instead of the expansionist and recyclical modes of self-preservation, its decomposition might be an opportunity for (Post-)Israelis to negotiate their preconditioned identity with a real investment in a just future in Palestine / Eretz-Yisrael, recomposing themselves towards a shared homeland.

People have been moving into Palestine/Israel for thousands of years, but following the Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state the presence in the country of people who are neither Jewish nor Arab (NJNAs) has been invisibilized. This contribution begins to imagine a decolonising project that includes NJNAs, mobilising ethical injunctions from the Jewish and Muslim traditions that valorise migration and cut against (bi-)nationalism.

The Green Line can play a prominent role under an “emancipatory peacebuilding” paradigm (ibid.) by being a border between two internationallyrecognized states, on the one hand, and a porous membrane in everyday nation- and state-building on a local, national and supranational level, on the other.

Can we imagine a future bi-national\shared cities by Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, based on equal terms administered by a decentralized, urban federal-type, democratic regime?