Is There an Israeli History without Palestinian History?
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Workshop
Is There an Israeli History without Palestinian History?
September 14–15 2022
If Israeli history begins in 1948, then it is equally the product of the founding of the State
of Israel and of the inextricably linked events of the Palestinian Nakba. In British Mandate Palestine the majority of the population was Palestinian Arab. Even the population of the Jewish state proposed in the 1947 UN Partition Plan would have been 45 percent Palestinian. The expulsion and dispossession of some 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war enabled the foundation of Israel with a substantial Jewish majority. Early statehood Israel was thus radically different from Mandatory Palestine not only in terms of sovereignty and political apparatus but also demographically and geographically; the majority of its former population, its predominant culture, and its economic backbone were now in exile. Nevertheless, mainstream historiography and popular narratives alike have regarded the shift from the Yishuv to a Jewish-majority state as a natural, if not predetermined, path of the Zionist project from the outset.
This workshop seeks to challenge this view by focusing on how the material, spatial, economic, and cultural consequences of the Nakba shaped the first decades of Israeli statehood. Works adopting the lens of relational history; studies of the entanglements and resonances of history, memory, and trauma in twentieth-century Palestinian and Jewish Israeli narratives; and accounts of the forced fragmentation of Arab Jewish identity have done much to unsettle the notion that Palestinian and Israeli histories can be understood separately. By proposing a Palestinian history of Israel, this workshop seeks to take this unsettling further still.
In particular, we invite papers that examine Israel’s social, economic, ecological, political, legal, and cultural structures after 1948, while addressing the degree to which they were contingent upon Palestinians’ forced migration, the vacuums created by Palestinian absence, and negation of the actual and potential Palestinian presence.
Participants will reexamine chapters in early Israeli history while paying attention to the mechanisms meant to undo the Palestinian social and political realities of the mandate period; contend with the material, spatial, and economic consequences of the Nakba; and maintain the structures that prevented Palestinian return. Historical episodes and developments such as massive waves of Jewish immigration; settlement patterns; the 1950s austerity regime; the military administration until 1966; the state’s financial, industrial, and agricultural development; and the contours of intra-Jewish conflict, among others, need to be retold to account for the previously overlooked roles of Palestinians, their expulsion, and their dispossession.
It is our hope that participants will contribute to recasting early Israeli history in light of its inseparability from Palestinian history, even in the aftermath of separatism’s landmark victory in 1948. The workshop will showcase a diversity of scholarly voices, bringing together both early-career and established experts who seek to rethink the vexed relationships between the intertwined fields of Israel studies and Palestine studies.
We are seeking participants working in Israel studies and Palestine studies, including historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars in other disciplines whose focus is on society, culture, the environment, political economy, science and technology, agrarian change, law, and other fields.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should include a title, an abstract of no more than 500 words, and a brief biography of the author, including name, institutional affiliation, and email contact. Please note that only previously unpublished papers or those not already committed elsewhere can be accepted. Abstracts should be submitted by March 29, 2022, to: phiw@vanleer.org.il.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be required to submit completed drafts of between 4,000 and 6,000 words by August 11, 2022. Panels will be organized around themes that emerge from the accepted papers. Selected papers will be submitted to a leading journal for publication as a peer-reviewed special issue.
Financial support will be made available for international participants. Preference will be granted to non-tenure-track scholars.
Organizing Committee:
Basma Fahoum, Stanford University (basma@stanford.edu)
Dotan Halevy, Polonsky Academy, the Van Leer Jerusalem
Institute (dotanh@vanleer.org.il)
Nimrod Ben Zeev, Polonsky Academy, the Van
Leer Jerusalem Institute and The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem
(nimrodb@vanleer.org.il)