Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba

Hosted by the Consortium for Palestine Studies, Department of Sociology, Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History

Areej Sabbagh-Khouri

“Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba”

March 9, 2026

12 to 1:30 pm

Rolfe 2125

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and Palestinian cultivators under British imperial rule. 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.

Bio:
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer (Tenured) of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.