The human rights struggle for 
Palestinians has been ongoing for decades, and understanding the conflict and its implications can be complex. Palestine on the Air, the
newest volume in the Common Threads series, brings forward individual stories and experiences to illuminate this global conflict. Through the use of interviews conducted by Karma R. Chavez at WORT public radio station at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Palestine on the Air highlights the voices of journalists, activists, and scholars who are deeply invested in sharing what has long been an underrepresented perspective.
The author’s longstanding commitments to social and immigrant justice, particularly on the U.S.-Mexico border, are what brought Chavez’s attention to the Palestinian struggle. With many activist groups finding common ground and solidarity with the plight of other marginalized communities worldwide, Chavez notes that coalitions with transnational focus can better position those groups to resist state violence.
For Chavez, the unique perspectives shared by activist groups experiencing similar
struggles made clear the need for the conversations to better understand the struggle to
add to the growing body of scholarship on Palestine. Though Palestine is a controversial topic, she notes, “this book was a passion project for me, a way to make good on my commitments to Palestinian friends, to producing public scholarship, and to tackling tough issues even when it’s not popular”
The relationships formed between activists addressing different struggles worldwide and
firsthand access to their accounts helped give this work a route to publication. Journal of
Civil and Human Rights editor Michael Ezra, says “the reason we are publishing
Palestine on the Air is to give people a meaningful, accessible, and brief study of important issues related to the Palestinian people over the last twenty years. Readers without much knowledge of Israel/Palestine will find the text to be plentiful but digestible. Those with a deep understanding of the subject will still discover an assortment of new perspectives and firsthand testimony not found anywhere else.”
Contributors include Michael Ezra, Karma R. Chávez, Haitham Salawdeh, Ghadir Shafie, Johayna Saifi, Charlotte Silver, David Lloyd, Katherine Franke, Sarah Roberts, Steven Salaita, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Sarah Schulman, and Jeff Halper.
Palestine on the Air is a supplement to the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and
supports the mission of the journal by addressing a global human rights struggle that
has inextricable ties to U.S. foreign policy and with which many U.S. based civil and
human rights groups find solidarity. It is currently available in print and will be available
open access on JSTOR November 1st.
