The Palestinian Anti-Colonial Movement

From Liberation and Return to Zionist Cooptation

Wednesday, November 2, 2022 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EDT

The Global South Research Hub, CSSR presents a public lecture by Anaheed Al-Hardan. 

The establishment of the state of Israel on Palestine in 1948 was made possible by a systematic Zionist paramilitary campaign that led to the annihilation of 4/5 of Palestinian society in the conquered territories of historic Palestine. This expulsion of the major part of Palestinian society from Palestine, and the destruction of more than five hundred villages and more than ten urban neighborhoods or towns, meant that the vast majority of Palestinians were over the course of just under a year made refugees “internally,” under Israeli military rule, in east and south-west Palestine under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, and in Syria, Lebanon and beyond. Shut out from their homeland that Israel transformed into a sectarian Jewish settler-colonial state, the Palestinian anti-colonial national liberation movement was born in exile, and its rank and file were made up of Palestinian refugees. This talk will examine the evolution of the Palestinian national liberation movement, with an initial strategy of liberation and return to a democratic non-sectarian Palestine, and its eventual permutation into a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation in the parts of Palestine occupied by Israel in 1967. 

Anaheed Al-Hardan is an associate professor of sociology at Howard University and the author of award-winning Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is a Principal Investigator on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded research program “Afro-Asian Futures Past,” a collaborative research program in four Arab and African universities on the post-World War II decolonization era.