The Arab and the Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond

Key information

Date
Time
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
Virtual Event

About this event

This book talk discusses the attempts of leading scholars to consider how the “Jewish Question” and the “Arab Question” are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of Palestinian identity and political rights. Together, the essays of the book under discussion show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities—a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.

Recording

About the speakers

Bashir Bashir is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel  and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is the co-editor of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Leila Farsakh is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Among her publications are: Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (second edition, 2012) and Commemorating the Naksa, Evoking the Nakba (2008). Her forthcoming book, Rethinking Statehood in Palestine , is due to be published in 2021.

Registration

This webinar will take place online via Zoom.

* The webinar will also be live-streamed on our Facebook page for those that are unable to participate via Zoom.

Discussant: Yair Wallach (SOAS)

Chairs: Gilbert Achcar (SOAS) and Dina Matar (SOAS)

Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute and the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS

Contact email: smei@soas.ac.uk