Much of what we are experiencing with respect to the American government's position on the current assault on Gaza reflects how American law has been structured to deny both solidarity with, and resistance by, the Palestinian people to Israeli military occupation and apartheid. This talk will examine this state of affairs and offer remarks on whether there is room for reimagining an American legal landscape to offer the possibility of truly supporting the Palestinian people in their quest for self-determination.

Poster image Naim Sharif, Aiad Barakat and Bashar Amer wave to supporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles after being released on bail. The three men, along with four other Palestinians and one Kenyan woman, faced years of deportation proceedings over their association with a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. 1987. (UCLA Library Special Collections)

Join the Center for Palestine Studies and the Department of Anthropology for a conversation with AREEJ SABBAGH-KHOURY about her recent book, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023). NAOR BEN-YEHOYADA will chair the event.

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer. 

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created. Read more

AREEJ SABBAGH-KHOURY is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include political and historical sociology as it applies to colonialism, indigenous studies, and memory. She is the author of the just published Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023), the first empirical study that carefully traces the process of the dispossession and displacement of rural Palestinians by kibbutz settlers in Northern Palestine’s Jezreel Valley before, during, and after 1948. Based on research in eight archives, Colonizing Palestine also examines the representation of colonial violence in the “socialist” discourse of kibbutzim. She has published widely on settler colonialism, political sociology, and the Palestinian citizens in Israel in Sociological Theory, Politics and Society, Theory and Society, Current Sociology, and The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She is the recipient of research grants and fellowships from the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, Palestinian American Research Center, Fulbright, and the Council for Higher Education. Sabbagh-Khoury is a member of the General Assembly and Academic Research Committee of Mada al-Carmel—Arab Center for Applied Social Research, she is also a member of Academic for Equality and in May 2021 she co-founded the organization helpline. She received her doctorate in sociology from Tel Aviv University and subsequently held postdoctoral appointments at Columbia University, New York University, Brown University, and Tufts University.

NAOR BEN-YEHOYADA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean. His monograph, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017), offers a historical anthropology of the recent re-emergence of the Mediterranean. He is specifically interested in the processes through which transnational regions form and dissipate. He proposes to view such spaces as ever-changing constellations, and show how we can study them from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view. He has also written shorter pieces about the different phases of the dynamics of maritime unauthorized migration and interdiction, as well as on the role that the Mediterranean’s seabed plays in Italian political retrospection.

How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians.

Join us for a conversation with MAYA WIND about her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (2024). Introduction and commentary by NADIA ABU EL-HAJ.

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.

As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project. Read more

MAYA WIND is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. She has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. 

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.

Join us for “Holding My Brother: Resistance as Affective Practice in Contemporary Palestinian Art,” a talk by Alessandra Amin (UPenn) on 18 March 2024 at 6pm. Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia) will chair the event.

The spate of Israeli assaults on Gaza between 2008 and the present have saturated our screens with images of Palestinian suffering. Concurrently, rising public interest in Palestinian visual art has focused on the iconography of resistance, examining the history of nationalist symbols such as the watermelon and the poppy. Lost in discussion of both photojournalism and resistance art is the question of their relationship. How have Palestinian artists navigated an era of unprecedented visual access to real-time violence? How does their work intervene in discourses crystallized by the proliferation of traumatic imagery? This talk revisits To My Brother, a 2012 series of white-on-white etchings by Gazan artist Taysir Batniji, to consider how its engagement with visibility subjugates an iconography of resistance to its affective practice. Rejecting a paradigm of Palestinian representation that demands documentary over emotional truth, To My Brother performs a multi-sensory reclamation of mourning from a scopic regime that deliberately trivializes Palestinian death. In doing so, this extraordinary work invites speculation on the radical potential of masculine intimacy as an agent of visual decolonization.

This event is co-presented by the Center for Palestine Studies, the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Middle East Institute.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities for a talk by SAMI HERMEZ and SIREEN SAWALHA about My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2024). Opening remarks by NADIA ABU EL-HAJ.

IN 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra'i. From Sireen's early life growing up in the shadow of the '67 War and her family's work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the First and Second Intifada, Sami Hermez, with Sireen Sawalha, crafts a rich story of intertwining voices, mixing genres of oral history, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Through the lives of the Sawalha family, and the story of Iyad's involvement in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hermez confronts readers with the politics and complexities of armed resistance and the ethical tensions and contradictions that arise, as well as with the dispossession and suffocation of people living under occupation and their ordinary lives in such times. Whether this story leaves readers discomforted, angry, or empowered, they will certainly emerge with a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. MORE INFO

SAMI HERMEZ is director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. He has held posts as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh’s Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues, a visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

SIREEN SAWALHA, born in the small village of Kufr Rai in Jenin, Palestine, comes from a family deeply connected to the region's rich history. She moved to the US in 1990 and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Rider University. Recognized by Cornell University for her outstanding contributions to education in 2022, Sireen serves as a social studies teacher in New Jersey. Beyond academia, she is a passionate chef and compelling storyteller, sharing her family's experiences under occupation. Sireen raises awareness about Palestinian culture and actively contributes to the struggle for Palestinian freedom. My Brother, My Land is the story of her family.

Important Notes about the Venue
The Heyman Center is located in the East Campus Residential Facility. Please allow extra time if you are attending an event and have not visited before. If you wish to use Google Maps to help you navigate to the Heyman Center, please search for Ancel Plaza and use the map above to find your way. Click here for a printable PDF download of the map.

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Please be aware that seating is first come first served and an RSVP does not guarantee seating; we recommend early arrival.

DATE
4:30-6:30PM
5 February 2024

LOCATION
Jerome Greene Hall 105
Columbia Law School
435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10027

Join us as Ardi Imseis discusses his new book, The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on primary archival materials and the author’s first-hand experience as a UN Official in Palestine for over a decade, this first of its kind volume aims to provide a critical international legal perspective on why and how the question of Palestine remains a festering wound on the conscience of the international community. 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the UN on the question of Palestine. This book explores the UN's management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the organization's position and international law. What forms has the UN's failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN's fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls 'international legal subalternity', according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization is interminably withheld. More info

Ardi Imseis is Assistant Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. Member of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts, the UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into the civil war in Yemen (2019-2021). Between 2002 and 2014, he served in senior legal and policy capacities in occupied Palestine with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and is former Senior Legal Counsel to the Chief Justice of Alberta. He has provided expert testimony in his personal capacity before various high-level bodies, including the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and to members of the UK House of Lords and the French Senate. His scholarship has appeared in a wide array of international journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Professor Imseis is former Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law (Brill; 2008-2019) and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Human Rights Fellow, Columbia Law School. He holds a Ph.D. (Cambridge), an LL.M. (Columbia), LL.B. (Dalhousie), and B.A. (Hons.) (Toronto).

Venue Note
Access to the Law School is controlled by a guard and advanced registration is required for this event. Please be prepared to show an ID upon arrival.

Seating is first come first served. RSVP does not guarantee seating and we recommend arriving early.