From the Editors:

Fall 2024 (Vol. XXXII No.2)
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In this issue, we are proud to publish, “One Year Into the Genocide,” a collection of essays on an
unfathomable year of genocide in Palestine, guest edited by Nour Joudah. The past year has
prompted an entire spectrum of emotion, reflection, and analysis from a world coming apart at
the seams. This genocide has left Palestinians reeling in new ways, grasping for expression, and
treading in constant mourning at depths previously unknown.
 
This issue’s essay section offers critical insight, motivated by love and sumud, across the fields
of education, geography, and anthropology. But much more than academic comment, Zena
Agha, Hadeel Assali, and Amanda Najib call on us as readers and as individuals living in the
empire to take seriously our responsibility to undermine the structures of power that fuel the hell
we continue to witness. Agha’s essay evokes a landscape of Gazan resilience that rejects the
genocide’s attempt at erasing Palestinian toponymy. Assali’s essay explores the act of tunnel-
building as an intimate experience of the land that defies colonial logics. In the face of attacks on
academic freedom led by university administrations themselves and mounting faculty
complacency, Najib insists upon the classroom as a critical site to reject the erasure of Palestine.

​Although each of the three essays engage with and write from an array of perspectives and
literatures, the authors all summon something connected and essential: Palestine lives. Our
classrooms, the cities whose names we utter, the land under Palestinian feet . . . each present us
with a choice as educators and researchers: will we center Palestinian life and the places that
house it in their own right, or will we allow the abyss of memory to transform it?

Complimenting these essays, this issue features an article by Sara Farhan on the work of Jewish
Iraqi doctors in building Iraq’s public health sector in the first half of the twentieth century. This
cadre were critical architects of the Iraqi state, and their experience of navigating the
intensification of anti-Jewish discrimination reveals key contradictions and ambivalences in the
production of an Iraqi biopolitics. The issue concludes with a reviews section on major recent
works that push the boundaries of temporal and geographic scope in studying revolution,
political economy, and migration.