A conversation between Rashid Khalidi and Lana Tatour about recent events and the historical context, laid out in Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020).
READ | JOINT STATEMENT BY PALESTINE STUDIES CENTERS
We the undersigned, directors and operators of Palestine Studies Centers are anxiously following the events unfolding in historic Palestine. We are as committed as ever to using our academic skills and scholarly know-how to help the Palestinian people, wherever they are, in their just struggle for freedom and liberation. We strongly condemn the Israeli ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the brutal Israeli violation of the sacred Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa mosque, which are not just religious but also national symbols of the Palestinian struggle.
We ask the world to immediately intervene to stop the callous Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, which costs the lives of many civilians - among them children - and end the blockade immediately. We ask the world to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and inside Israel from the brutal force of the police and the violence of Israeli settlers and their supporters.
Only when Israel treats Palestinians inside Israel as equal citizens, recognizes the right of the Palestinian refugees to return and the right of the Palestinians to live free of colonization and occupation, will there be hope for peace and reconciliation in historic Palestine.
Dina Matar and Gilbert Achcar
Center for Palestine Studies, SOAS, UK
Ilan Pappe and Nadia Naser-Najjab
European Center for Palestine Studies, Exeter, UK
Khaled Faraj and Muhamad Ali Khailidi
Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut, Lebanon
Nadia Abu El-Haj and Brian Boyd
Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, New York, USA
WATCH | Rashid Khalidi and Hanan Ashrawi on Democracy NOW! 14 May 2021
Watch the 14 May 2021 segment with Rashid Khalidi and Hanan Ashrawi on Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, the impacts of Joe Biden’s continued defense of Israeli actions and how the historical events since 1948 continue to echo into the present.
Transcript of the segment is also available on Democracy NOW!’s website.
ATTEND | The Palestinian Nakba: What Happened in 1948 and Why It Still Matters
Join The Middle East Institute and Project48 for
The Palestinian Nakba: What Happened in 1948 and Why It Still Matters
Monday, May 10, 2021 at 11 AM ET / 6 PM Palestine
Every year on May 15th, millions of Palestinians around the world commemorate the Nakba, or the catastrophe that befell them in 1948. This catastrophe resulted in the dispossession of an estimated 750,000 refugees from historic Palestine, and the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab population and their society in the process of the creation of the State of Israel.
73 years later, the Nakba remains central to Palestinian national identity and political aspirations, as evidenced by the 2018-19 Gaza March of Return and even the recent protests in Jerusalem. However, despite being a core Palestinian grievance, the Nakba continues to be whitewashed or denied outright by pundits, lobbyists, and even policymakers.
The Middle East Institute and Project48 are pleased to host an esteemed group of experts to shed light on what transpired in 1948 and why the events of the Nakba still resonate today and remain central to understanding Israel and Palestine. This event is co-sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Institute for Palestine Studies.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Keynote address:
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is Representative, 13th District of Michigan, US House of Representatives.
Speakers:
Rashid Khalidi is Professor, Columbia University, President of Institute for Palestine Studies-USA.
Lubnah Shomali is Executive director, BADIL.
Umar Al-Ghubari is Program director, Zochrot.
Mohammed El-Kurd is an Author and Poet.
Nooran Alhamdan, (moderator) is Graduate research fellow, Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, MEI.
Khaled Elgindy, (moderator) is Senior fellow and director, Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, MEI.
WATCH | The Trouble with the Archive, public talk by Nadia Abu El-Haj
A public talk by Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj, as part of the inaugural lecture series of the Palestine Land Studies Center. Dr. Abu El-Haj is Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co- Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of Columbia’s Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities. She is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of journal articles on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine, to the question of race and genomics, to the workings of American militarism during the post 9/11 wars. Dr. Abu El-Haj is the author of two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Her third book, to be published by Verso (2022), is a study of contemporary American militarism as it operates in and through the idiom of combat trauma and the obligation of American citizens to care for soldiers sent off to war in their name. Abstract: For decades now, post-colonial studies has been invested in the work of re-reading the archive –– reading “against” or “along” the archive grain in order to recuperate histories suppressed or erased by colonial projects. Recovering the histories of the colonized or enslaved is understood as a radical political project, important not just as a scholarly project but also, as crucial to contemporary anti- and post- colonial struggles. In this talk, I draw on my work on Palestine and Israel in order to reconsider this faith in the power of historical recuperation, and suggest a very different configuration of knowledge and power with which we need to contend today.
READ | Interview with Palestinian artist Rana Bishara by Lila Abu-Lughod
Rana Bishara, Bannest—Cactus Nest (2020), prickly pear cactus fruit in a nest.
Photo credit: Rana Bishara.
Art, Activism, and the Presence of Memory in Palestine: Interview with Palestinian Artist Rana Bishara
In this interview conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod on October 17, 2020, Palestinian artist Rana Bishara discusses the three artworks that appear on the covers of volume 41 of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as numerous other multidisciplinary and multimedia artworks she has made and exhibited from the 1990s to the present, focusing specifically on art as a form of political activism.
WATCH | Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era 1908-1914, Claiming the Homeland
The recording of our book talk with Louis Fishman and Rashid Khalidi about Fishman’s recent publication, Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era 1908-1914, Claiming the Homeland is available now on our Youtube Channel!
Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.
Louis Fishman is an associate professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University
ATTEND | The Trouble with the Archive
Nadia Abu El-Haj will give her talk, “The Trouble with the Archive” as part of Lecture Series at the Palestine Land Studies Center at the American University in Beirut, on 3 May 2021 at 5pm Beirut and 10am New York.
For decades now, post-colonial studies has been invested in the work of re-reading the archive –– reading “against” or “along” the archive grain in order to recuperate histories suppressed or erased by colonial projects. Recovering the histories of the colonized or enslaved is understood as a radical political project, important not just as a scholarly project but also, as crucial to contemporary anti- and post- colonial struggles. In this talk, I draw on my work on Palestine and Israel in order to reconsider this faith in the power of historical recuperation, and suggest a very different configuration of knowledge and power with which we need to contend today.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co- Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of Columbia’s Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities. She is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of journal articles on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine, to the question of race and genomics, to the workings of American militarism during the post 9/11 wars. Dr. Abu El-Haj is the author of two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Her third book, to be published by Verso (2022), is a study of contemporary American militarism as it operates in and through the idiom of combat trauma and the obligation of American citizens to care for soldiers sent off to war in their name.