EUME Berliner Seminar
Mi. 11 Dez. 2024 | 17:00–18:30

Where Now for Israel/Palestine? The Im/Possibilities of Egalitarian Bi-Nationalism

Bashir Bashir (The Open University of Israel / EUME Fellow 2009/10 / Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2024/25), Chair: Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow 2012-23)

Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Given the demise of the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, the irreversible colonial entanglements between Israeli and Palestinian lives, and the ongoing war on Palestinian nationalism, many scholars and politicians are asking “what next for Israel/Palestine”? This talk suggests that egalitarian bi-nationalism is a promising and defensible answer to this pressing and timely question. It argues that egalitarian bi-nationalism is better equipped to address the underlying issues of the conflict in Israel/Palestine than conventional and new frames in the existing literature. Egalitarian bi-nationalism, the talk argues, better satisfies the urge for self-determination of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews than the benign neglect majoritarianism of the liberal state or ethnic secession and the partition of the two-state solution. The talk concludes that egalitarian bi-nationalism’s insistence on envisioning affective relations of co-belonging based on an ethics of equality, parity, mutual legitimacy, and cohabitation offers rich resources for historical reconciliation and decolonization in Israel/Palestine.

Bashir Bashir is Associate Professor in the department of sociology, political science and communication at the Open University of Israel and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Currently, he is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His primary research interests are nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, democratic theory, decolonization, and the politics of reconciliation. Among other numerous publications, he is the co-editor of The Holocaust and Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018); and The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2020). His writings have appeared in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, and Japanese. In the academic year 2009/10, Bashir Bashir was a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin. As Principal Investigator, she led the European Research Council project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is the author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) and creator of the Arabic-language podcast Balad min Kalam: Conversations on Palestinian Literature available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. She is also a board member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. In 2012/13, Refqa Abu-Remaileh was a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, and continued to be a EUME Fellow in the academic years 2014-16, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Until recently, she remains affiliated with EUME.

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.

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