Lecture: The Historical Foundations of Palestinian Political Consciousness
CEU Events
Monday, November 11, 2024, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Speaker
The Historical Foundations of Palestinian Political Consciousness
This lecture examines the emergence of Palestinian political consciousness on the eve of Britain’s occupation of Palestine in 1917 and over the course of its 30-year mandate there. With the termination of 400 years of Ottoman rule, residents of Palestine and Greater Syria more broadly sought the national self-determination they were promised by their new European overlords. And though Palestinians’ confrontation with Zionism and British colonialism was critical in isolating Palestine and its inhabitants regionally, the presentation makes clear that the pursuit of Palestinian self-determination in this period was inextricable from the larger call for a united Arab kingdom that included Palestine. The presentation also shows that the ultimate failure of the Palestinian nationalist movement to secure a nation-state in the leadup to 1948 was a result, on the one hand, of concerted British and Zionist efforts to subvert it, and, on the other, of elite Palestinian leaders’ attempts to curry favor with British colonial authorities—a significant factor in the emergence of the first popular Palestinian uprising in 1936 and in the subsequent British suppression of political Palestinian mobilization.
Recommended readings:
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) (https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/ks65hc256)
James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
Dr. Nadim Bawalsa
Nadim Bawalsa is a historian of modern Palestine and the author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022), winner of both the 2023 Palestine Book Award and the 2023 Nikki Keddie Book Award. He earned a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017 and a master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in 2010. He currently serves as the associate editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.
This is part of a year-long lecture series, “Israel, Palestine and Us.”. The lectures are open to the CEU community and will be live streamed for the wider public.
Please note that due to strict security requirements, only those will be allowed to attend in person who are members of the CEU community (faculty, students, staff) and have registered beforehand as in-person attendees. We ask the wider public to register and attend online.
All Lectures will take Place at 17:30 CET in D001, CEU Vienna campus (Quellenstrasse 51-55) and are co-organized with the University Wide Course Initiative.
To attend in person or online, please sign up through this link: https://tinyurl.com/5n98uk9k
https://events.ceu.edu/2024-11-11/historical-foundations-palestinian-political-consciousness