Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine

Introductory essay by Danya M. Qato opening a special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies (Volume 49, 2020) on public health, contextualizing a special collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic and mapping the terrain of extant public health research on Palestine and the Palestinians. The essay argues that Palestinian public health cannot be meaningfully studied without engaging the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that are systematically erased within mainstream epidemiology, and imagines a future public health research agenda that centers health, and not simply survivability, for all Palestinians. Essential for scholars and students working on Palestinian public health as a field, as this introductory essay for one of the most significant dedicated engagements with Palestinian public health by a major Palestine studies journal provides the foundational framing for understanding Palestinian public health as simultaneously a scientific and a political project.