In the spring of 2024, a few months after the massacre of October 7, 2023, and in the midst of the genocidal onslaught in Gaza that has followed it, Maurice Ebileeni and Shachar Pinsker decided to guest-edit a special issue of the journal Palestine/Israel Review titled “Imagining Palestine-Israel.” The call for papers raised the following questions:

• Is it possible to envision a way forward in this present moment?
• Is it possible to imagine together an equitable future that will account for the atrocities and injustices of the past and still make room for a Palestine and an Israel on this land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?
• Is a dialogue based in honesty and accountability possible at all anymore?
• Are dialogues about Palestine and Israel in academia at all beneficial?

Scholars across various disciplines (literary and cultural studies, anthropology, history), from around the globe, responded to the call and these questions. They tried to make sense of the ever-escalating destruction of Gaza, and to engage in the difficult task of imagining what the future could look like. Now, two years after the “Imagining Palestine-Israel” scholarly initiative started, amidst a US and Israeli-led war on Iran and its subsidiary front with Lebanon, the questions we raised back in 2024 are even more relevant. We invite you to take part in this difficult, but necessary, ongoing conversation.