Thinking Palestine (In Person)
Two decades ago, the late historian Tony Judt described Israel as an “anachronism” — an ethno-nationalist state born through violent expropriation and seeking demographic superiority in “a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law.” Yet today, with thickening borders, nationalism resurgent, and international law routinely ignored, Israel appears less an anachronism than the vanguard of a dark future.
In the aftermath of the Shoah, Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Jewish refuge from European antisemitism gained renewed urgency. Zionist leaders deftly navigated the collapsing imperial order, and in 1948 Israel was established on the ruins of the indigenous Palestinian society. Eight decades later, Palestinians remain largely stateless and denied basic political freedoms, confined to refugee camps throughout the region and — in the territories under direct Israeli occupation — subject to chronic violence at the hands of the state and its irregular settler proxies.
This seminar will explore the ideological origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How did the obscure nineteenth century movement known as Zionism grow from a utopian obsession to a powerful nation-state presiding over the longest military occupation in modern history? How did Zionism and Palestinian nationalism co-evolve against the dramatic backdrop of two world wars, the fall of empires, and the efflorescence of American global power? How can we interpret the development of the Palestinian liberation movement alongside the history of earlier anti-colonial independence movements? How did a state founded as a refuge from genocide come to be charged today with committing one?
The seminar moves through four moments. We begin with early Zionist thought, examining what the movement’s founding figures understood themselves to be doing. We turn to the political thought that emerged from Palestinian contact with Zionism: from the 1936 revolt (particularly Ghassan Kanafani’s analysis) through the Nakba, the long catastrophe of statelessness, and the successive failures of the Palestinian national liberation movement that culminated in what Edward Said called the “Palestinian Versailles” at Oslo. We will examine responses to the military occupation that began in 1967, the settlement enterprise, and the institutionalization of what all major human rights organizations today call apartheid. We close with the question of genocide in Gaza, asking what justice can possibly look like in the face of such unprecedented destruction.
Readings will be drawn widely from primary sources as well as contemporary analysis, including Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Martin Buber, Ghassan Kanafani, Rashid Khalidi, Abba Eban, Fayez Sayegh, Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, Hannah Arendt, Leila Khaled, Yassir Arafat, Meir Kahane, Eyal Weizman, Enzo Traverso, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Neve Gordon, and Francesca Albanese, among others.
