Describing the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a 'binary conflict' is taken as a value-free and academically neutral depiction. This article challenges the objective nature of the notion of binary conflict. Contributing to scholarship that prioritizes subjugated knowledge, this article poses that the depiction of the situation entirely in terms of conflictand the rigid alterity that such a perspective tacitly transmitsshould be recognized as a paradigm with an inherently Zionist bias. A genealogy of the notion of conflict shows how early Zionist leaders consciously advocated a framework of binary conflict in order to counter accusations of settler colonialism and garner the support of non-Zionist Jews and other potential allies. This exposition draws out how the notion of binary conflict is instrumental in obscuring settler colonial dispossession and Palestinian lived experience; in forging the hegemonic unification of Zionist Jews; and in negating critique from third-party others. An understanding of how this perception of Israel-Palestine came about offers fresh insight into the strategies adopted by the early Zionist movement. Furthermore, acknowledging the power-nexus behind the binary conflict perspective has the potential to deepen our understanding of the discursive and oppressive mechanisms of contemporary settler colonialism.
Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a feminist, Palestinian professor at the Hebrew University in East Jerusalem. Drawing on her practises as a social worker for vulnerable Palestinian women, she passionately advocates that critical scholarship should attentively listen
to the personal stories of women and girls. For Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, she spoke about often unnoticed and unclassified acts of women’s resistance in Palestine. On the far-reaching consequences of Israel’s practise of house demolition and on why this cannot be understood
without looking at Zionist ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. By eloquently moving from the very personal to the political and from the very local to the global, Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian puts forward a critical analysis of Palestinian women’s experiences under Israeli settler
colonialism.
In recent decades in Kenya, public health interventions to address the HIV vulnerability of sex workers and men who have sex with men have been accompanied by a rise in gender and sexual minority (hereby also interchangeably referred to as LGBTIQ) activist initiatives that frame access to healthcare, legal recognition, and social acceptance as a human right. Complementing long-term engagement and ethnographic research among sexual minorities in Kenya, in addition to fieldwork stints between 2016-2018, the authors analyzed online statements regarding priorities and strategies of LGBTIQ organizations (local and global) and legal case files. We examine one case in which transgender and intersex plaintiffs objected to the name and mission of an NGO working towards equality and full inclusion of sexual and gender minorities because it incorporated the words gay and lesbian while applying for its official registration and it would include trans and intersex in the organization’s mission. As such, the politics of naming, identity, and representation are neither new nor exclusive to Kenyan LGBTIQ activism. This case and related files reflect the everyday interactions of groups with seemingly conflicting goals, showing them to be part of a rich, connected “niche activist” scene. Rather than take this as a rigid split between activist organizations, we argue that these tensions are historically rooted in – and form a microcosm of – the politics of the global NGOization of both healthcare access and human rights advocacy in Kenya.
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