This is an I-Heart podcast.

Hello, everyone.

My name is Donna El-Kurd, and this is It Could Happen here.

I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics

and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center,

Washington. Today we're joined by Shidine Seikadi, a professor of history at the University of California,

Santa Barbara. Her book, Men of Capital, Scarcity, and Economy in Mandate Palestine, explores

economy, territory, the home, the body, and she's also

editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Today, I wanted to invite Shadine on to

discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for

writing, researching, analyzing, et cetera. So yeah, Shuddin, thank you so much

for coming on. Thank you for having me. So let's maybe start with a very basic question.

What is the Journal of Palestine Studies? Could you give us kind of an overview?

Sure. So the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian Studies in the English language. It

was established in 1971. So that makes it 54 years old. First, it was part of the then-Berut-based

and still Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University,

which sponsored what was understood at the time as an international forum to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab Zionist conflict.

And really, the people who established it were looking for

shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really

interesting one because they were people like Hisham Shariq, Walid Khalidi, Burhan Dushani, Fuad Zarruf, and Constantine Zerik,

who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the Nakba, in his book, Manal Nakba,

that he wrote in 1948 in which he coined this term,

...