From Plural Palestine to Exclusive Sovereignty: Samaritans, Palestinian Christians, and Jewish Dissent Beyond the Binary

This article proposes the Broken Kinship/Exclusive Sovereignty framework for reading Palestine beyond the exhausted binary of Arabs versus Jews. It argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an ancient biological war between separate races, nor a simple struggle between Islam and Judaism, but a modern political transformation of overlapping Abrahamic, Semitic, Levantine, Samaritan, Jewish, Christian, and Arab histories into a hierarchy of belonging. Methodologically, the article is a conceptual-integrative and critical-synthetic study: it selects boundary cases that disturb dominant binaries, including Samaritans, Palestinian Christians, local Jews, Jewish dissent, Christian Zionism, Mandate demography, and carefully limited genetic evidence. It uses genetics only as a negative corrective against purity claims and total-foreignness claims, not as a title deed for land. It then reads 1948–2026 through Palestinian experiences of dispossession, occupation, settlement, detention, siege, and fragmentation while maintaining a strict distinction between Judaism, Zionism, Israel, and Jews. The central claim is that justice begins by separating memory from institutionally exclusive sovereignty and kinship from domination.