Shu'un Filastiniyya

Shu'un Filastiniyya
Former editors
CategoriesPolitical magazine
Frequency
  • Monthly
  • Quarterly
FounderPalestine Research Center
Founded1971
First issueMarch 1971
CountryPalestine
Based in
LanguageArabic

Shu'un Filastiniyya (Arabic: شؤون فلسطينية, romanized: Shu'ūn Filasṭīnīyah, lit. 'Palestinian Affairs') is a quarterly theoretical journal published by the Palestine Research Center which is one of the agencies of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The journal has been in circulation since 1971 with some interruptions. It is based in Ramallah, Palestine. It was edited by various well-known Palestinian figures, including Anis Sayigh, Sabri Jiryis and Mahmoud Darwish.

History and profile

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Shu'un Filastiniyya was first published in March 1971.[1][2] It is published by the Palestine Research Center which is also its founder.[3][4] Fayez Sayigh, a scholar and the founding director of the Center in 1965, contributed to the establishment of the journal.[5]

Shu'un Filastiniyya was headquartered in Beirut where it was printed until the issue 136 dated April 1983.[2] It temporarily ceased publication shortly after the Palestine Research Center was attacked in April 1983.[2][6] The journal resumed publication in Nicosia, Cyprus, in February 1985 and was based there until August 1993 when it folded again due to the financial problems.[2] It was restarted in Ramallah in 2011.[2]

Shu'un Filastiniyya was started as a monthly journal, but later its frequency was switched to quarterly.[7][8][9]

Some of the articles published in Shu'un Filastiniyya were translated into German and featured in the leftist publications supporting the Palestinians in the mid 1970s.[6]

Editors and contributors

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The editors-in-chief of Shu'un Filastiniyya include leading Palestinians such as Anis Sayigh, Sabri Jiryis and Mahmoud Darwish.[3][10] Of them, Anis Sayigh was its founding editor.[1][5] Between 1975 and 1979 Elias Khoury was the editor-in-chief of Shu'un Filastiniyya.[11] Samih Shubayb also served in the post.[12] The others who assumed the post are Faisal Hourani, Bilal Al Hassan, and Mahmoud Al Khatib.[2]

Hanna Mikhail was a member of its editorial board between its start and July 1976.[13] Early contributors of Shu'un Filastiniyya included Mahmoud Labadi, Mahmoud Abbas[14] and Habib Qahwaji.[15] Ghassan Kanafani also published articles in the journal until his assassination in July 1972.[16]

Content

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Shu'un Filastiniyya features articles on politics, economy and culture with a special reference to Palestine.[3][17] The journal publishes the official political communiqués of the PLO.[18] It covers interviews with the Palestinian personalities, and autobiographies and oral testimonies of those who experienced the Nakba.[19]

Shu'un Filastiniyya has improved the intellectual basis of the Palestinian resistance movement.[20] Because it has provided a platform for the Arab writers to share and discuss their scholarly views about all issues related to Palestine.[21]

Shortly after its start Shu'un Filastiniyya developed an analogy between apartheid regime and the situation of Palestine under the influence of Fayez Sayigh.[5] In the period between 1971 and December 1975 articles on the West German leftists groups supporting the Palestine cause were frequently published in the journal.[6] The frequency of such articles significantly decreased from January 1976 to December 1982.[6] Then the journal began to focus on developments in the West Bank, the Iranian revolution, and the Lebanese Civil War.[6]

The PLO leader Yasser Arafat's speech at the United Nations General Assembly was featured in Shu'un Filastiniyya in December 1984.[18] A 1985 editorial in the journal welcomed the departure of the PLO from Lebanon arguing that the Lebanon's internal conflicts prevented the PLO from concentrating on its own agenda.[22] In the same editorial the PLO's Lebanon period which ended in 1982 was termed as the 'Fakahani Empire'.[22]

While serving as the editor-in-chief of Shu'un Filastiniyya Sabri Jiryis published an article in the journal in 1987 harshly criticizing the PLO due to its concentration on the Palestinian diaspora which led to the negligence of the major problems.[23]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Anis Sayigh: A Profile from the Archives". Jadaliyya. 3 August 2014. Retrieved 3 November 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d e f "Palestinian Affairs Magazine". The Palestine Poster Project Archives. Retrieved 3 November 2023.
  3. ^ a b c "Palestinian Affairs Magazine (Shu-un Filastiniyya)". Yasser Arafat Museum. Retrieved 3 November 2023.
  4. ^ Amal Jamal (2000). "The Palestinian Media: An Obedient Servant or a Vanguard of Democracy?". Journal of Palestine Studies. 29 (3): 48. doi:10.2307/2676455. JSTOR 2676455.
  5. ^ a b c Nina Fischer (2020). "Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance and the Apartheid Analogy". Interventions. 23 (8): 1129. doi:10.1080/1369801x.2020.1816853. S2CID 234662442.
  6. ^ a b c d e Joseph Ben Prestel (September 2022). "A Diaspora Moment". The American Historical Review. 127 (3): 1205, 1212–1213. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhac260.
  7. ^ "Anis Abdullah Sayigh". Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. citing Abdul Hadi, Mahdi. ed. (2006) Palestinian Personalities: A Biographic Dictionary. 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Passia Publication
  8. ^ Dina Matar (2018). "PLO Cultural Activism: Mediating Liberation Aesthetics in Revolutionary Contexts" (PDF). Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 38 (2): 360. doi:10.1215/1089201x-6982123. S2CID 148869236.
  9. ^ Rashid Hamid (Summer 1975). "What is the PLO?". Journal of Palestine Studies. 4 (4): 107. doi:10.2307/2535603. JSTOR 2535603.
  10. ^ Rashid Khalidi (2008). "Remembering Mahmud Darwish (1941––2008)". Journal of Palestine Studies. 38 (1): 75. doi:10.1525/jps.2008.38.1.74.
  11. ^ Farah Aridi (2019). "Elias Khoury". In Rita Sakr (ed.). The Literary Encyclopedia. Vol. 6.
  12. ^ Hana Sleiman (2016). "The paper trail of a liberation movement". The Arab Studies Journal. 24 (1): 47. JSTOR 44746845.
  13. ^ Jehan Helou; Elias Khoury (2012). "Two Portraits in Resistance: Abu 'Umar and Mahjub 'Umar". Journal of Palestine Studies. 41 (4): 68. doi:10.1525/jps.2012.xli.4.65.
  14. ^ Meir Litvak; Esther Webman (2004). "The Representation of the Holocaust in the Arab World". Journal of Israeli History. 23 (1): 114. doi:10.1080/1353104042000241947. S2CID 162351680.
  15. ^ Elie Rekhess (1989). "The Arab Nationalist Challenge to the Israeli Communist Party (1970-1985)". Studies in Comparative Communism. 22 (4): 339. doi:10.1016/0039-3592(89)90004-5. JSTOR 45367451.
  16. ^ Barbara Harlow (1996). After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. London; New York: Verso Books. p. 67. ISBN 978-1-85984-180-8.
  17. ^ Omar Shweiki (2014). "Before and Beyond Neoliberalism: The Political Economy of National Liberation, the PLO and 'amal ijtima'i". In Mandy Turner; Omar Shweiki (eds.). Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 237. doi:10.1057/9781137448750_12. ISBN 978-1-137-44875-0.
  18. ^ a b Joseph Massad (1995). "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism". The Middle East Journal. 49 (3): 473. JSTOR 4328835.
  19. ^ Edward Said (1988). "Spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question". Race & Class. 29 (3): 38. doi:10.1177/030639688802900302. S2CID 143850671.
  20. ^ Katlyn Quenzer (2019). Writing the Resistance: A Palestinian Intellectual History, 1967-1974 (PhD thesis). Australian National University. p. 175. doi:10.25911/5d5149b41c470. hdl:1885/155195.
  21. ^ Maha Nassar (2020). "Non-Zionists, Anti-Zionists, Revolutionaries: Palestinian Appraisals of the Israeli Left, 1967–73". In Laure Guirguis (ed.). The Arab Lefts. Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 171. doi:10.1515/9781474454261-013. ISBN 9781474454261.
  22. ^ a b Avraham Sela (2014). "The PLO at Fifty: A Historical Perspective". Contemporary Review of the Middle East. 1 (3): 305. doi:10.1177/2347798914542326. S2CID 143758672.
  23. ^ Hillel Frisch (2012). "The Demise of the PLO: Neither Diaspora Nor Statehood". Political Science Quarterly. 127 (2): 245. doi:10.1002/j.1538-165x.2012.tb00726.x.
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