Amahl Bishara, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression. Stanford University Press, 2022.
In Crossing a Line, anthropologist Amahl Bishara offers a compelling ethnographic inquiry into the political expression of Palestinians divided by the Green Line—those holding Israeli citizenship and those living under occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Drawing on years of fieldwork, protest participation, and deep personal ties, Bishara investigates how law, violence, and geographic separation shape not only Palestinian resistance but also their everyday acts of care, mourning, and expression.
Bishara’s central analytical tool is solidarity—not in its conventional activist framing, but as a layered concept that navigates inter-Palestinian relations, positionality, and broader transnational alliances. While some Palestinians prefer not to use the term, favoring instead the notion of shared national struggle, Bishara demonstrates how solidarity remains embedded in advocacy across uneven terrains of vulnerability. As she writes:
“First, in one sense, I am analyzing solidarity. While Palestinians sometimes distanced themselves from the label of ‘solidarity’ for activism across the Green Line, preferring to assert that they were simply part of a shared political project, there are elements of solidarity in their practices, since often one group would advocate on behalf of another that was apparently more vulnerable. Denying ‘solidarity’ might have more performative than analytic value. Second, there is my relationship as a Palestinian-American anthropologist to those with whom I worked. Third, there are forms of political solidarity between Palestinians and other non-Palestinians, especially, today, in the US” (P.1, Kindle Edition).
The book is structured around six ethnographic chapters, in addition to an introduction and conclusion. Interwoven with personal narrative “passages” between locations (Haifa, Aida Camp, Jaffa, Lubya, Jerusalem), the book maps the fragmented geographies of Palestinian life and struggle. Each chapter offers a distinct lens:
- "The Shifting Ground of Palestine"reflects on the contested meanings of Palestine, as both place and promise, exploring how national space cannot be confined to legal or colonial definitions.
- "Protesting the War on Gaza Together, Apart"juxtaposes Palestinian protests across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories during the 2014 Gaza War, revealing how divergent tactics emerge from distinct colonial legal systems but converge in shared political urgency.
- "The Momentum of Commemoration"explores political rituals such as Nakba commemorations, showing how repetition creates continuity and sustains collective memory, even when outcomes are not immediate.
- "A Juxtaposition of Palestinian Places"captures how everyday political and artistic practices—such as exhibitions in Jaffa and Aida—render visible the tensions and connections between communities divided by the Green Line.
- "Territory and Mourning on Social Media"focuses on digital mourning practices, showing how Palestinians forge a “counterpublic of grief” that mirrors traditional condolence rituals while navigating censorship and surveillance.
- "Bonds of Care: Prison and the Green Line"highlights Israeli carceral spaces as paradoxical sites of both repression and cross–Green Line connection, where Palestinians detained from different zones forge communal ties.
Bishara's method is deeply reflexive. She foregrounds her position as a Palestinian-American anthropologist whose life is entwined with the very communities she studies. This reflexivity enhances rather than detracts from the analysis, allowing for a textured account that acknowledges affect, power, and relational accountability. Her embodied experience—shaped by dispossession, diaspora, and reconnection—situates her research within, rather than outside, the structures she critiques.
One of the book’s key contributions lies in its challenge to liberal assumptions about the “public sphere.” Rather than idealizing a unified public, Bishara conceptualizes “environments of expression” to show how speech is shaped by place, legal frameworks, and power dynamics. In her words:
“We can think beyond the nation-state by noticing different kinds of collectivities that political expression creates, imagines, and announces, by keeping an eye out for publics that are hardly spherical but rather may have uneven or undefined edges. What purports to be a liberal public sphere—which is actually a racialized colonial public—could never contain the liberatory dreams of many of the Palestinians in this book” (p. 31, Kindle Edition).
What distinguishes Crossing a Line is its refusal to flatten Palestinian experiences or romanticize unity. Bishara instead traces the fragmentations produced by Israeli policies—both geographic and legal—while also documenting how Palestinians push back through acts of care, memory, and political imagination. The Green Line emerges not just as a border but as an ongoing apparatus of disconnection and differentiation.
Ultimately, Crossing a Line is both a critical ethnography and a political intervention. It refuses to accept the divisions imposed by settler-colonial regimes as natural or complete. Instead, it reveals how Palestinians—across borders, legal categories, and registers of expression—continue to craft spaces of resistance, reimagine collectivity, and challenge imposed silences.
Reviewed by Noura Kamal
A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine - Lori Allen
To gain a thorough understanding of the contemporary Palestinian struggle, this book is an essential resource, providing critical insights into the essence of Palestinian suffering under colonial regimes. Through an anthropological lens, Lori Allen explores the Palestinians' struggle, particularly highlighting how various national commissions since the 20th century have been used as tools to suppress the Palestinian resistance movement. By extensively employing ethnographic research, Allen offers a profound analytical reflection on the global political matrix. She asserts, “for a hundred years, international law has been a black hole: the massive weight of its mechanisms, both ideological and institutional, have pulled energies and actors, ideas and motivations deep within it, suffocating their vitality.” (251)
The author meticulously analyzes the Palestinians' engagement with commissions of inquiry that have investigated Palestine over the decades. She provides a detailed account of how these commissions, far from supporting Palestinian liberation, have often played a role in perpetuating their suffering. Allen exposes the complicity of Western powers, particularly the United Kingdom, in creating and sustaining the conditions that have led to the ongoing plight of the Palestinians, with the United States continuing to suppress their right to self-determination.
The first chapter of her book outlines the Palestinians' initial hopes and expectations towards international law. It highlights their early efforts to secure political independence and establish a polity grounded in liberal values. Allen begins with the King-Crane Commission of 1919, which she describes as the first instance in a recurring pattern of Palestinian self-representation, investigation, and subsequent disregard by international bodies (70).
In the second chapter, Allen examines the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), a significant Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule aimed at halting Jewish immigration and achieving national independence. The revolt resulted in over five thousand Palestinian deaths and nearly fifteen thousand injuries. In response, the British government established the Peel Commission, which Allen discusses in detail, particularly focusing on the Palestinians' attempts to boycott it. She notes that this boycott was one of the few examples in Palestinian history of collective resistance to the mechanisms of international law. Despite initial resistance, Palestinian leaders ultimately engaged with the commission, which recommended the partition of Palestine—a proposal that sparked widespread protests across the Middle East (99).
The third chapter explores the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, focusing on how it leveraged the humanitarian politics of Jewish suffering. Allen discusses how Palestinians recognized early on the political use Zionists made of Western sympathy for Jews in Europe, particularly after World War II. She critiques the committee for sidestepping the fundamental question of why the resolution of Jewish suffering should come at the expense of Palestinians, rather than being addressed in Europe, where the persecution originated. The committee's work, like others before it, failed to resolve the Palestine issue but succeeded in entrenching humanitarian sympathy for Jews as a political-moral value, sidelining Palestinian demands for a democratic solution (143).
In the fourth chapter, Allen examines the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and the broader context of third-world solidarity at the UN General Assembly in 1947. UNSCOP recommended partitioning Palestine, allocating 57 percent of the land to Jews despite their significantly smaller population and limited land ownership. This decision, Allen argues, epitomized the failures of previous British commissions and marked a pivotal moment in Palestinian history, as the Palestinian leadership fully boycotted this commission.
Allen continues by discussing the aftermath of the British mandate in 1948, which culminated in the Nakba, the expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Israel's establishment as a state and subsequent recognition by the United Nations, while Jordan and Egypt took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively, is analyzed through the lens of Palestinian engagement with the UN. Allen emphasizes that despite their investment in the UN's proclaimed universal principles, the Palestinian struggle has often been met with international law's limitations, reinforcing its authority as a tool of governmentality without effecting real change in their political reality (140).
In the fifth chapter, Allen explores the Mitchell Committee (2000), which aimed to investigate the causes of the Second Intifada and recommend a path towards peace negotiations. She describes the committee's report as a blend of diplomatic and technocratic approaches, infused with the human rights rhetoric that has become central to UN commissions. However, like its predecessors, the report ultimately became irrelevant in the face of ongoing political shifts.
The final chapter discusses subsequent UN missions and the Palestinians' waning trust in international law. Despite renewed efforts, such as the "road map" of 2003, which sought to outline a path towards a permanent status agreement, these initiatives failed to achieve their goals, leaving Palestinians increasingly disillusioned with international investigations, as evidenced by the lukewarm reception of later UN missions in Gaza.
In conclusion, Lori Allen's book successfully takes the reader into the historical context of the Palestinians and their enduring hope for liberation through engagement with international law and humanitarian discourse. Although the commissions ultimately failed, Palestinians consistently emphasized their right to liberation grounded in international principles. Despite the international community's inability to enforce the law and bring an end to decades of colonization, Palestinian efforts have been recognized globally, affirming their right to liberation. The author in her work was aware of everyone who contribute to the knowledge she is prodcuing in a very profound way:
“I have tried to become familiar with these people, their “faces and pains, emotions and the authorities created to control them” in order to articulate the past historically and, in Walter Benjamin’s words, seize hold of memory “as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” And like any anthropologist, out of respect and gratitude to those who have shared something of the dangers of their lives, even those who have done so without consent from the grave, I have been anxious to prevent any imposition of meaning upon them, and eager to allow their sense and sensibilities—including those I found objectionable—to come through, not without interpretation, but by some humble facilitation. In attempting this, the obverse of a magician’s trick, I have included many long quotes of speeches and interchanges between Palestinians and their interrogators, investigators, and sympathizers. It is from a sense of humility, respect, conviction, and mission that I have attempted to smuggle them past the editor’s scythe.” (240-241)
At the end, if you want to understand the current Palestinian struggle, this book will offer you a deep insights of the knowledge you are seeking.
Reviewed by Noura Kamal
