We invite you to a moderated conversation around a forthcoming special issue of the journal Palestine/Israel Review, titled “Imagining Palestine-Israel” guest-edited by Ebileeni and Pinsker.

The call for papers from spring 2024 stated that in thinking about Palestine-Israel, to imagine is both problematic and crucial insofar as imagination might offer different and new horizons and futures or further preserve the political impasse as well as diverge from the atrocities of the present into even more dangerous territories. The editors also raised some of 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 the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?
– Is a dialogue based on 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.