From the armed struggle, to the Intifadas, to the contemporary Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Palestine has been a critical cause for the European and American left. Today, international gains on the cultural and intellectual fronts have been accompanied by the destruction or containment of liberatory projects in historic Palestine and the fragmentation of the Palestinian struggle into separate, often depoliticized, issues. The Palestinian Idea should be read as grappling with the meaning of solidarity and the possibility of theorizing change at this conjuncture of hopeful despair.
Burris stakes two central claims about the titular “Palestinian Idea.” First, that it is constituted by “equality,” not as a future ideal, but an “axiom” that “is already being put into practice” (p. 20). As such, the Idea is synonymous with a radical opposition to all forms of domination and hierarchy (pp. 16–17, 68). Over six chapters—one providing the intellectual armature for the Palestinian Idea, two organized around “plasticity,” and the remainder covering time and memory, surveillance, and Black–Palestine solidarity—Burris explores how the Idea manifests itself despite the barriers created by Israeli settler colonialism and, to a lesser extent, internal Palestinian divisions. Second, Burris argues that films, images, and other forms of media are especially important insofar as they function as an archive of hope at a time when change, much less revolution, appears foreclosed (p. 8). Turning our attention from Israeli domination to the promise of the Palestinian Idea, Burris implies, is not only a scholarly exercise, but one that is essential to imagining an emancipatory political project (pp. 15, 29).
But what is a (Palestinian) idea? Where does it come from? How does one recognize it? At least three different possibilities appear in the book. First, referencing a protest in Hebron that adapted language and imagery from the American Civil Rights Movement, Burris offers an example of how the Idea emerges out of Palestinian resistance. Through attention to the conditions in which young West Bank Palestinians engineered a political spectacle, the Idea is a political force that the scholar identifies and contextualizes. Second, within Palestinian texts and cultural products—a genealogy that includes left-nationalist figures and forces, Palestinian film(makers), and most centrally, the works of Edward Said—it is a form of critique that pushes the limits of Palestinian thought and practice. Here, the scholar evaluates the extent to which a given text measures up to the ideal of equality. Third, it is an insurgent philosophy. Burris develops this position through extended discussions of the writing of Jacques Rancière, Cedric Robinson, and others, along with shorter references throughout the book to dozens of thinkers across the critical spectrum, who deepen or extend the Idea in ways that allow us to see how equality, utopia, or transformation can emerge in the present (p. 29). Here, the scholar presents a mode of reading that attunes the reader to a world that both is and could be otherwise.
Although these are all intriguing lines of inquiry, the relationship between them is opaque. While Burris does provide closer readings of films, he gives little attention to differences in form or conditions of production and reception for his other media objects. Instead, these objects are only held together to the extent that their content expresses the ideals of the Idea. Youth protesters from Hebron and the main character of a feature film, for example, are both taken as “representative[s] of the Palestinian Idea” whose actions demonstrate the “existence of that utopian dream in the present” (p. 81), while hip-hop and “media spectacles” matter primarily because they provide evidence of a transnational Black–Palestinian solidarity (p. 127–29). Does the Idea, then, emerge in the process of cultural production, in the reception of the work, or in the reflections of the critic? Often it seems to be the latter, but Burris does little to explain his theoretical choices. If French psychoanalysis and philosophy is the best way to get at “the Palestinian Idea,” fine, but this is a position that needs to be argued for, not assumed, especially when other choices could have been made. Lori Allen, Fadi Bardawil, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Salim Tamari, and Lisa Taraki, for example, all engage with revolution, temporality, and culture in ways that would have deepened (and challenged) the book's interventions into hope, despair, possibility, and foreclosure. Indeed, aside from Edward Said, there is little substantive engagement with Palestinian political writing, literature on political movements, or the works of the Arab and anti-colonial Left. Far from putting Palestine into an “epistemological Bantustan” (p. 21), such an engagement would have grounded the Idea in the intellectual currents and material practices of Palestinian radicalism and the ways it has changed over time.
Despite these issues, The Palestinian Idea can be insightful, especially when Burris focuses on the filmmakers and provides close readings of the films that they create. His analysis of Annemarie Jacir's films, for example, illuminates a range of possible cinematic engagements with the nakba, from raising questions about narrative representation and archival absence (p. 64–65), to exploring the emancipatory potential of movements against stagnation and waiting (p. 73–74). Discussions of the material difficulties of filmmaking in Palestine, how Palestinian filmmakers grapple with the charge that film is an unaffordable luxury in times of occupation, and how the politics of human rights documentation shape cinematic style and reception, situate these readings within the broader landscape of politicized cultural production and consumption.
In the book's final chapter, which draws on the history of Black radicalism, theory, and cultural production to address the contemporary Black–Palestine solidarity movement, Burris's conceptual tools and empirical objects are well aligned. He contextualizes today's exchanges of music, film, protest tactics, and media spectacles as part of a longer history of Black internationalism with roots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam. Against Afro-pessimism's (at least as it is articulated by Frank Wilderson III) rejection of universalism and skepticism towards coalition politics, Burris offers a tradition of Black Radicalism that privileges comparison and connection (pp. 143–46). But the conclusion—a familiar critique of “parochial particularity” and a call for “radicalize[d]” solidarity and “transnational revolution” (p. 149–150)—raises further questions for those, like Burris, who invoke the revolutionary past to accomplish political work in the present. Given that liberal rights and international law have supplanted the revolutionary discourse and infrastructure of the 1960s and 1970s, what does “revolution” mean (and do) in these emergent Black–Palestinian networks? And how might solidarity among artists and activists help reshape how race and racism structure relationships between Black Americans and Palestinians?
The Idea itself, however, undermines the possibility of pursing these lines of inquiry when it becomes a yardstick to measure the extent to which a text or group meets predetermined ideals of equality and to discipline those that fall short. Too often, it reduces cultural criticism to an evaluation of degree—authorizing, for, example, the claim that cinematic representations of everyday life are “far more political” than images of “falling bombs and dead bodies” (p. 97)—and narrows emancipatory politics to resistance and refusal. The result is a number of unhelpful conclusions regarding those who fail to live up to the Idea's revolutionary norms. Burris calls out the “many Palestinians [who] have indeed turned their backs on the Palestinian Idea” through everything from collaboration and sectarianism to “simply [being] lulled into passivity” (p. 51), suicide bombers for “perpetuating” Zionism through mimicking its violence (p. 109), and the Mizrahim (Arab Jews who are often strong supporters of Israel's far-right) whom, according to Burris, have a “clear” choice between demanding “further inclusion in the existing oppressive order” or overturning it (p. 137). But such choices are neither clear nor easy. Palestinians (and, for that matter, Mizrahim) are often compelled to articulate their struggles through terms dictated by the very orders that reject or destroy them. This process complicates easy distinctions between freedom and oppression, or resistance and surrender, and demands approaches that can account for these ambivalent, contradictory entanglements.
In the end, The Palestinian Idea takes up issues that matter both for Palestine studies and for those who see themselves as supporters of the Palestinian struggle. Burris is right to argue that a myopic focus on “Israel's instruments of oppression” causes scholars to pass over the cracks and contingencies of settler colonization (p. 29). But we must be careful not to swing too far in the opposite direction and, in a desire to salvage hope and celebrate heroism, condemn or pass over discourses, practices, and projects that do not meet our political or ethical expectations. While The Palestinian Idea can be commended for raising critical questions and mapping out some of the cultural and theoretical coordinates for radical scholarship and contemporary solidarity, it is best read as offering a, rather than the, means of doing so.
