Was the current catastrophe in the Middle East inevitable, or could it have been averted by a political agreement? Were there genuine political possibilities on the table before the seventh of October? And how do different actors among Jews, Arabs, and others define compromise?
The talk challenges the claim that Palestinian intransigence is the main reason for the ongoing Nakba. It traces the political and intellectual history of the two-state solution around three key concepts: settler colonialism, partition, and binationalism. It examines how both settlers and the colonized have attributed meaning to these concepts over more than a century, and how those meanings have shifted—from the British Mandate period, through the establishment of the PLO, to the present genocide in Gaza. This political and intellectual history illuminates the meaning of compromise and intransigence under colonial conditions and opens new space for imagining a future of Arab-Jewish coexistence between the river and the sea.
The talk draws, among other sources, on the open-access essay: Eli Osheroff, “Settling a State; Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist-Arab Relation,” Palestine/Israel Review 1, no. 2 (2024): 363-391. (https://doi.org/10.5325/pir.1.2.0005)
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist relations. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli is also a regular contributor to the Forum for Regional Thinking, a think tank of Israeli Middle East scholars seeking to understand Israel’s place in the region from a critical perspective. In the academic year 2025-27, he is a EUME Fellow of the Minerva Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Georges Khalil works for the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2009, and has been the academic coordinator of Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) since 2006. He has been working in the field of academic administration and exchange since 1998. Khalil studied History, Islamic, and European Studies in Hamburg and Cairo, and co-edited Di/Visions: Kultur und Politik des Nahen Ostens (2009), Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century (2012) and Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (2015).
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.