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This article asks, why was there no Arab university in Mandatory Palestine (while there were two Jewish universities). Apparently, the colonial mentality of the British authorities who deemed the Palestinians yet another colonized people who had to be oppressed, while regarding the Zionist settlers as fellow colonialists, feared that such a university would enhance the Palestinian national movement. At the same time, Zionist pressure, British anti-Arab racism, and lack of resources also combined to undermine the emergence of a proper Palestinian higher education system. Nonetheless, educators, intellectuals and some politicians of the Palestinian community did not give up on the idea. They used several teachers’ colleges to provide high quality university-level studies, the most notable being the Arab College (al-Kulliyya al-‘Arabiyya) whose graduates went on to pursue careers in universities in the region and abroad. There was also an attempt by the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, with the help of donations from abroad, to build an Islamic, but open to all, university throughout the 1930s. This initiative was foiled by the British Mandate government despite the willingness both in the Arab and Muslim worlds to support it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Document File examines the closure of documents on the Nakba in the Israeli archives and argues that this closure must be juxtaposed with recent intensified U.S. and Israeli attempts to depoliticize the Palestine question and to delegitimize the Palestinian narrative in general, and that of 1948 in particular. The documents are important because they expose the systematic nature of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, both in planning and execution. Many of these documents have been copied and scanned by scholars over the years, but they are now no longer accessible to the public or to researchers. Collating, digitizing, and archiving these documents is the best response to the attempt to cover up the crimes against the Palestinian people in 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue presents essays on the topic of settler colonialism in Palestine, covering conceptual and empirical, historical and contemporary, as well as literary, legal and political aspects of the debate. All essays examine the validity and applicability of the settler colonial paradigm to the context of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the 1948 territories). They approach this paradigm as a powerful means to challenge and disarticulate established historiographies and narratives, and, as such, engage with settler colonialism as a structure (Wolfe 1999, 2006), but also with the various forms of resistance and decolonization that aim at undoing this structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]