Join us for a webinar by Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. Register here!
Wednesday December 13, 2023, 7 pm Palestine time
Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba
Abstract: 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. In her lecture, following her recent book “Colonizing Palestine: the Zionist Left and the making of the Palestinian Nakba“, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury will investigate 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.
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Biographical Sketch
Dr. 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.
Join us for a webinar by Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. Register here!