'The Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question'

The International Studies program welcomes Raef Zreik presenting “The Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question.”

The question of Palestine and the Palestinians is shifting to become an internal question of Israel, Zionism and Jewish people. The Palestinians are not an outsider ‘other’ that the State of Israel and Jewish Israelis have to make peace or reach a settlement with. They are constitutive of the current Israeli Jewish identity; forcing Israel to move away from questions of existence. Questions about achieving peace, a two-state solution, or ending the occupation are entangled with questions about the character, constitutional structure, and democratic nature of Israel. The external question of war and peace, and the internal questions of Jewish/democratic or religious/secular are bearing one name: decolonization. The Nationality Basic Law of 2018 and the protests of May 2021 mainly in mixed cities in Israel, are both an internal and external event, as are the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the Palestinian Authority elections. The future of Palestinians and Jews has never been this intertwined. This might have been the case all along, but in recent years what has been latent has become more visible.

Zreik holds an LLB and LLM from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an LLM from Columbia University, and an SJD from Harvard Law School. His dissertation deals with Kant’s philosophy of rights. He is an associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel and senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute. His main fields of research include legal and political philosophy. His recent publications include Historical Justice: On first order and second order arguments for Justice in Theoretical Inquiries in Law; The Ethics of the Intellectual in Philosophy and Social Criticism; On the political Theology of Zionism; and Kant on the Future in Iyyun. He recently published a book titled Kant’s Struggle for Autonomy: On the structure of Practical Reason.

Co-sponsored by Middle East & North African Studies, International Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies, Philosophy Department, Religion Department, The Laura C. Harris Endowment