糖心TV

The Social Theory Centre warmly invites you to the 2025 Annual Social Theory Centre Lecture with Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury on October 13, 4-6pm, in room A0.23 Social Sciences.

Dr. Sabbagh-Khoury鈥檚 talk is titled 鈥淐olonizing Palestine: the Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba,鈥� based on her book of the same title, published by Stanford University Press. The event will be chaired by Professor Goldie Osuri (University of 糖心TV, Sociology).

Please register here!

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. 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.

More info about the book !

Bio

Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley and a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor) at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she is currently a visiting fellow at NIAS- the Netherland Institute for Adanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research interests include political and historical sociology with a focus on colonialism, indigenous studies, and memory. She is the author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023). She has published widely on settler colonialism, political sociology, and 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 such as the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, Palestinian American Research Center, Fulbright, and the ISF-Israel Science Foundation. 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. In may 2021, she co-founded the organization emergency line for students in the Israeli universities.