About the Author

Sa’ed Atshan is an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University. He is also an associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore. Atshan previously served as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and senior research scholar in Middle Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. He earned a joint PhD in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies, an MA in social anthropology from Harvard University, and a Master in Public Policy (MPP) from the Harvard Kennedy School. As an anthropologist, Atshan’s research is focused on a) contemporary Palestinian society and politics, b) global LGBTQ social movements, and c) Quaker Studies and Christian minorities in the Middle East. His forthcoming book, Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, is under contract with Stanford University Press in their Anthropology of Policy Series. He is also the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020), and is co-author of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020).

Supported by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of: Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013); Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East (2009); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1996); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986); British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); and co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf (1982), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City (2020).

Palestine VR offers a glimpse into the reality of life in Palestine. You will hear directly from the people living there, as you embark on tours of six different regions, including Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza City, Bethlehem, Ramallah and Khan Al Ahmar. See for yourself the daily struggles — but also resilience — of the people in Palestine.

Please note that space is limited and on a first-come-first-serve basis and mobile app download is required to participate in the virtual reality tour.

A Palestinian Studies lecture.

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? In his book, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, March 2019), Greg Burris argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. The author employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present. 

In this talk, drawn from Burris’ book, the history of Black-Palestinian relations is examined through the lens of media and culture. Focusing on a number of recent instances in which links between these two communities have been fashioned through an array of media forms including YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, spoken word poetry, hip hop music, and television news spectacles, Professor Burris argues that Black-Palestinian media activism presents an opportunity to critically examine and challenge our notions of race, identity, and solidarity itself.

Greg Burris is an assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut. A film and cultural theorist, his work focuses on race, media, and emancipatory politics. His writings have appeared in such publications as CineAction, Cinema Journal, The Electronic Intifada, Film Quarterly, The Guardian, Jadaliyya, Middle Eastern Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the anthologies Futures of Black Radicalism and Global Raciality: Empire, PostColoniality, and Decoloniality. The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) is his first book.ok.

This talk examines the economic and juridical forces shaping Palestinian land defense in the highlands of the West Bank. Since Israel’s occupation in 1967, different land defense projects have sought to protect collective territory from land dispossession and settler encroachment. On the one hand, Palestinians—from rural communists to urban real estate developers—find themselves drawing on private property to protect collective territory from the settler state. On the other hand, capital has transformed rural social relations and land use in the West Bank and, as a result, the sorts of collectives that land defense projects can assemble. As a decades-long unfolding of legal struggles and engagements with rural political economy, antagonistic land defense projects should be taken as different answers to a shared problematic: how to hold territory and maintain collective life against forces that pull it apart? In this talk, Palestinian Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate Paul Kohlbry, will sketch out the ways in which different land defense projects have responded to agrarian crisis, why market-centered solutions have come to dominate, and where West Bank land politics may be headed.

Paul Kohlbry is an anthropologist who works at the intersection of law, economy, and settler colonial studies. His current project explores how private property has come to orient land politics in the West Bank, tracking how shifts in rural political economy and transformations in property law have shaped Palestinian land defense projects since the 1980s. More broadly, his writing tries to bring Palestine into conversation with a broader range of Indigenous experiences through the lens of political economy. He has also worked with grassroots Palestinian organizations in the West Bank and is interested in learning how research can speak to the needs and concerns of movements. He completed his dissertation at Johns Hopkins University in 2019. At Brown, he will be teaching on land and labor politics, beginning his book manuscript, and surfing Point Judith as much as possible.

A Palestinian Studies lecture.

In 1948, Israel managed to solve the demographic problem of Palestinian majority by expulsion, creating the Palestinian Refugee problem. But Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza reintroduced the problem apparently solved in 1948. The first attempt to solve the re-emerging problem was based on territorial separation, “the two states solution,” but this attempt has failed. With the recent Nationality Basic Law, a new mode of separation is underway: instead of territorial separation, an ethnic-religious separation, within one geopolitical unit.

Given the overwhelming power of Zionism and its expansive nature, the Palestinian Question is being re-conceptualized; the struggle with Israel has become a struggle within Israel – a struggle for a different Israel. The “internal” question regarding the nature of the Israeli regime and its democracy, and the “external” question regarding the future of Palestine are being entangled in an inextricable manner like never before.

Raef Zreik is a Palestinian legal and political theorist. He is an associate professor of law at Ono Academic College, the academic co-director of the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, and a senior researcher at Van Leer institute in Jerusalem.

Director: Mai Masri
103 minutes
Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles
Based on true events and set in the 1980’s, Director Mai Masri’s movie “3000 Nights,” tells the story of a wrongfully convicted Palestinian schoolteacher who gives birth to her son in an Israeli prison where she fights to protect him, survive, and maintain hope. The film won the Audience Award at Valladolid International Film Festival in Spain and the Jury Award from The Women’s International Film and Television Showcase (The WIFTS).
Following the film screening, comments by director Mai Masri and conversation and Q & A with Beshara Doumani, Director, Middle East Studies and Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History.
In collaboration with Brown University Film Forum (BUFF)

Do boycotts foreclose or open up socially productive conversations about the ethics of cultural and academic production? What are the political possibilities embodied in emerging forms of intersectional solidarity around boycott movements, such as BDS? The panelists take on these and other questions raised in the recently published book, Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production.

Chair:
Beshara Doumani, Brown University

Panelists:
Nasser Abourahme, Columbia University
Ariella Azoulay, Brown University
Kareem Estefan, Brown University
Laura Raicovich, former director of Queens Museum
Sherene Seikaly, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

Presented by Guy Ben-Porat, visiting associate professor of International and Public Affairs, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Watson Institute.
Young people in Tel-Aviv protesting police violence against Israelis of Ethiopian descent, were holding signs saying “Black Lives Matter.” Several months later, and a few miles south, it was Arab residents in Jaffa protesting the police killing of a young man. As the custodians of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, Police carry a heavy symbolic load as well as practical importance for citizen’s well-being. Yet, for minority groups the legitimacy of police is questioned.
In this work, through analyzing the experiences of minority groups in Israel, police and policing are embedded in wider questions of citizenship, belonging and legitimacy. While police violence is similar in some aspects, Ben-Porat argues that minority groups’ relation to police and policing involves different histories, concerns and expectations, reflecting hierarchies and exclusions within citizenship regimes.
Guy Ben-Porat is an associate professor at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University (Israel) and an Israel Institute Visiting Scholar at Brown University. He is the author of “Global Liberalism, Local Populism; Peace and Conflict in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland,” (Syracuse University Press, 2013) and “Between State and Synagogue, the Secularization of Contemporary Israel” (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Organized by Hanan Toukan, Adrienne Minassian Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies, and Kareem Estefan, PhD student in Modern Culture and Media.
The act of bearing witness, associated with the visual documentation of state violence and cultural practices of “speaking truth to power,” is central to international human rights discourse after World War II. But it has come under increasing scrutiny from artists, writers, and scholars working on and amid the political conflicts of the Levant region, who have questioned the impact that images of suffering have on global publics and critiqued the exceptionalization of the figure of the “witness” as a neutral, truth-telling individual. This symposium will examine the uneven, retrospective, and intergenerational temporalities of witnessing, the archival constructions and mediations involved in representing what are often traumatic moments of violence and rupture, and the ways in which artists filter these personal and collective histories through processes of fabulation and speculation. It does so in the context of urgent political events in Syria, Palestine-Israel, and the broader region, which demand witnesses, but perhaps even more so, new methods of representation, mediation, distribution, and translation that can extend and deepen the meaning and impact of bearing witness.
This symposium will consist of three panels, each featuring four speakers giving 20-minute presentations.
It will be preceded by a program of contemporary film/video works from the Levant to be screened November 3, 5:00 p.m., the evening before the main event.
Conference Schedule:
Friday, November 3, 2017:
5:00 p.m. Film/video program
Q&A with artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme
Saturday, November 4, 2017:
9:00 a.m.Registration, welcome, and introduction
9:30 a.m. Panel 1: Archival Afterlives
11:15 p.m. Coffee break
11:30 p.m. Panel 2: Speculative Images, Potential Histories
1:15 p.m. Lunch for invited participants
2:30 p.m. Panel 3: Traveling Images
4:15 p.m. Concluding Remarks
Visiting Speakers: Basel Abbas
Ruanne Abou Rahme
Kay Dickinson
Chad Elias
Gil Hochberg
Lamia Joreige
Laura U. Marks
Nat Muller
Kamran Rastegar
Ghalya Saadawi
Stephen Sheehi
Helga Tawil-Souri
Stefan Tarnowski
Nadia Yaqub
Speakers from Brown University:
Ariella Azoulay
Beshara Doumani
Kareem Estefan
Hanan Toukan
Organized by Middle East Studies with generous funding through the Adrienne Minassian gift in honor of Dr. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina ’62
Cosponsored by:
The Cogut Institute for the Humanities
The Pembroke Center
The Department of History of Art and Architecture
The Department of Comparative Literature
The History Department
The French Department
The English Department
The Photographic Archives Research Group
The Department of Modern Culture and Media
The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies

Presented by Adi Ophir, Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies. Registration on MES website is required.
Abstract: Palestine in general, and “the occupation” in particular have often been understood as a blatant exception to existing rules and historical patterns, but also as their paradigmatic example. Following a brief survey of some instances in which Palestine is presented as either an exception to the rule of its paradigmatic instantiation, I will argue that “the occupation” has become a synecdoche for Palestine, and as such serves critical scholars today as a show case in which the exemplary demonstration of the rule meets its paradigmatic exception. With this observation in mind I will question the unusual status of “the occupation” as a privileged site for critical studies and theory as well as academic and non-academic activism and ponder the reasons that have made “the occupation” a popular object of knowledge and a no less popular site of leftist activism.
Bio: Adi Ophir is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and a visiting professor at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the program for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Among his recent works: The One State Condition (co-authored with Ariella Azoulay; Stanford University Press 2012), Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (Hebrew 2013); Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, co-authored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Hanan Toukan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Visual Arts
Title: Starting the Revolution from a Different Place: Art, Dissent and Diplomacy in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan
Bio: Hanan Toukan is Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies. Toukan has taught at the Free University of Berlin as well as at SOAS, University of London in media and film Studies, cultural studies, as well as politics and international studies. She has also guest lectured at Goldsmiths University in art history and visual cultures as well as Campus in Camps in Palestine. She was a EUME postdoctoral Fellow in Berlin in 2012-2013 and a Kenyon Institute Visiting Scholar in East Jerusalem in 2012. Toukan completed her award winning PhD at SOAS in 2012 and she is currently working on her book manuscript “ Intimate Encounters: Globality, Art and Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Lebanon”. Toukan’s scholarly writings and reviews have appeared in Arab Studies Journal, Cultural Politics, Journal for Palestine Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, SCTIW Review, Jadaliyya and Ibraaz amongst others. She has published chapters in Dina Matar and Zahera Harb (eds), Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (2013) and in Frederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil (eds), Commitment and Beyond: Locating the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden:Reichert Verlag) (2015)
Registration on Eventbrite is required and will open closer to the event date.

8th Critical Conversations Panel / Palestine-Israel in the Trump Era
Thursday, March 2, 2017
5:30p.m. – 7:45p.m.
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
With Keynote speaker Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Department of History, Columbia University
Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
and Brown faculty:
J. Brian Atwood, Senior Fellow for International and Public Affairs,
Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History,
Beshara Doumani, Director of Middle East Studies, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Palestinian Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate, Middle East Studies, Brown University, “The Zionist left: Settler colonial practices and the representation of the Palestinian Nakba in Northern Palestine.”
By registration only. Eventbrite will open for registration closer to the date and is required. Please stay tuned.
Abstract:
Mining the national archives, the post Zionist historian in Israel focused on debunking the Zionist myths while most prominently focusing on the question if there was a master plan to displace Palestinians. Doing so, this kind of questions and similar others, that shed light on the practices of the Zionist establishment and forces distracted the research from inquiring the responsibility of the Zionist settlers and Israeli society on the displacement of refugees and not less important from controlling the Palestinian lands and property and banning the return of Palestinian refugees. Based on a meticulous examination of local Zionist archives of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir Kibbutzim in Marj Ibn `Amer, I will track some of the discussions that accompanied the process of expulsion of 1948 and the pillaging of the Palestinian property from neighboring Palestinian villages. Furthermore, I will explore how the politics of remembering by members of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair kibbutzim reconstructed memories of the colonization practices that preceded 1948 Nakba and their role in the Nakba.
About Areej Sabbagh-Khoury:
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is the Inaugural Post-doctoral Research Studies Associate in Palestine and Palestinian Studies at Brown University 2016-2017. She is also an associate researcher at Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research. Her current book project examines relations between members of leftist Zionists kibbutzim and Palestinian villagers in Northern Palestine within a settler colonial framework. Sabbagh-Khoury completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She contributed to several book chapters and articles on citizenship, memory, gender and settler colonialism, among them “Palestinian Predicaments: Jewish Immigration and Refugees Repatriation.” She also co-edited two volumes of The Palestinians in Israel: A Guide to History, Politics, and Society: the first volume was published in 2011 and the second on December 2015 (both volumes were published in English, Hebrew and Arabic). She has received several awards and grants for her research, among them the PARC fellowship; the Fulbright Post-doctoral Scholar Award year 2015-2016; the 2015 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Columbia University.

Luncheon Seminar. By registration only. 10 days before event date.
In October 1956, a group of former Palestinian citrus farmers, who had all become refugees in 1948, sued Barclays Bank in a Jordanian court in Jerusalem for £1 million. This amount represented the total value of the citrus crop exported collectively by them in 1947 via the Palestinian Citrus Marketing Board, which was a marketing board set up by the-then Mandatory Government of Palestine to regulate all citrus exports from Palestine.
Sreemati Mitter is the Kutaiba alGhanim Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
More information on website.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are both architects and researchers in urbanism, co-directors of DAAR, an architectural office and an artistic residency program that combines conceptual speculations and architectural interventions. Hilal and Petti were awarded the Price Claus Prize for Architecture with DAAR, nominated for the Curry Stone Design Price, the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Artist Award, the New School’s Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, the Chernikhov Prize with DAAR and showed in various biennales and museums around the world (www.decolonizing.ps). Alongside research and practice, Hilal and Petti are engaged in critical pedagogy. They established an experimental educational program in Dheisheh refugee camp Bethlehem in partnership with Al Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Center (www.campusincamps.ps). More recently they co-authored the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.

Sara Roy (Ed.D. Harvard University) is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.Dr. Roy began her research in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1985 with a focus on the economic, social and political development of the Gaza Strip and on U.S. foreign assistance to the region. Since then she has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and on Gaza’s de-development, a concept she originated.Dr. Roy is the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995, 2001, third edition forthcoming); The Gaza Strip Survey (The West Bank Data Base Project, 1986); Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Pluto Press, 2007); and editor, The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment, Research in Middle East Economics, Volume 3 (Middle East Economic Association and JAI Press, 1999). Her most recent book, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton University Press, 2011), was a winner of a 2012 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. It was also chosen one of Choice‘s Outstanding Academic Titles and one of the Top 25 Academic Books for 2012. The research for this book was funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Roy also has authored over 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, The Middle East, and Australia among other international venues.In addition to her academic work, she serves on the Advisory Council of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), and has served as a consultant to international organizations, the U.S. government, human rights organizations, private voluntary organizations, and private business groups working in the Middle East.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Haneen Zoabi
Member, Israeli Knesset
Tajamoe/Joint Arab List
CHAIR
Brian Meeks, Brown University
PANEL
Shira Robinson, Washington University, DC
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Columbia University
Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego
Beshara Doumani, Brown University
Keynote speaker is member of the Israeli Knesset, Haneen Zoabi. Panelists are sociologist Gershon Shafir (UCSD), who is one of the founders of the settler-colonial approach to understanding the conflict; sociologist/anthropologist Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a recent Ph.d, who works on the role of left-wing zionist collectives in ethnic cleansing of Palestine and question of memory; Shira Robinson (Washington Univ, DC) who wrote a book, “Citizen strangers,” about the relationship between citizenship and colonial rule with focus on Palestinians in Israel; and Brown faculty and Middle East Studies director, Beshara Doumani. The panel will be chaired by Brian Meeks, Chair of Africana Studies at Brown.

“Omar” (2013) written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad.
Arabic with English subtitles. 1 hour 38 minutes.
Organized by MESGSA and BUFF on behalf of Middle East Studies
Omar – This 2013 Palestinian drama tells the story of a young Palestinian freedom fighter, who agrees to work as an informant after he is tricked into an admission of guilt-by-association in the wake of an Israeli soldier’s killing. Within the film is a powerful love story between the main character, Omar, and his high school love, Nadia. The film successfully tells both an intense drama and an honest love story set in the backdrop of Palestinian politics.
Omar was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ann Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and History at The New School will present from her forthcoming book “Duress: Concept-Work for Our Times” and address the place of Palestine in (Post)Colonial Studies.

Sept. 23, 7 p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute.
Middle East Studies Film Screening presented by Nicola Perugini, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and Middle East Studies.
The film is being submitted as the Palestinian entry to the Oscars.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/award-season-focus/palestine-enters-the-wanted-18-into-foreign-language-oscar-race-118466.html
Film Synopsis:
Humorous and thought-provoking, The Wanted 18 shows the power of mass mobilization and nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation during the First Intifada. The film tells the story of 18 dairy cows being brought to the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, as part of a self-sufficiency movement, which were then declared a threat to the security of the state of Israel. Using stop-motion animation, archival footage, interviews, and graphic novel cartoons, the film uses humor to get at a serious subject. This is a poignant film about nation-building from the bottom up, by the people not the politicians. Variety called the film ‘mind-opening’ & ‘ingenious.’
About the directors:
AMER SHOMALI (Director, Artist)
Amer Shomali uses fine art, digital media and technology as sociopolitical tools for change. After studying at the Van Art School in Canada, he completed an MFA in Animation at Bournemouth, UK. One of the founders of Zan Studios in Ramallah, Amer works as an animator and illustrator of children’s books, posters, and multimedia productions. His work has been exhibited in galleries across the Middle East and Europe. Amer’s short film “Dying of the Light” was screened in the UK, Belgium, Lebanon, and Palestine. He was also co-director and animator of “Animated Concerns”, the animated TV series, in Palestine from 2006-2007.
PAUL COWAN (Director, Writer)
In his 25-year career as a filmmaker, Paul Cowan has never been one to shy away from controversy. He’s chronicled the rise and fall of renegade billionaire Robert Campeau, followed Dr. Henry Morgentaler on his controversial abortion crusade, dramatized Donald Marshall’s landmark battle against Nova Scotia’s justice system, and stirred up a storm of debate in the Canadian Senate with a hotly-contested docudrama about First World War flying ace Billy Bishop. His strength is creative documentaries that combine documentary techniques with evocative images and recreations. Paul recently wrote and directed the feature documentary Paris 1919.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
ARAB WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, ABU DHABI, 2014
Co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Culture and Media

Middle East Studies Luncheon Seminar// Registration required through Middle East Studies website.
About the lecture: During Israel’s 2014 operation ‘Protective Edge’ in Gaza, human shielding became a central trope in the semiotic warfare surrounding the military campaign. Israel repeatedly claimed that Hamas uses human shields and therefore it is to blame for the killing of hundreds of civilians during the military campaign. Why is human shielding a prominent topic of discussion in relation to Israel/Palestine and almost completely absent when analyzing violence in other countries where warfare extensively involves civilians? What does the legal concept human shield do? And why does the accusation of using human shields apply only to certain actors?
About the speaker: Nicola Perugini is an anthropologist and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (Cogut Center) who teaches at Brown Middle East Studies and Italian Studies. In 2012-2013 Perugini was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). His current research focuses on the relationship between human rights and domination in Palestine/Israel, the politics of human shielding and the mobilization of the category of the human in contexts of political violence. He has published articles on law and spatial practices, embedded anthropology, asylum seekers, humanitarianism, politics of the gaze, and trauma and settler colonialism. Perugini collaborates with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Beit Sahour, Palestine) and the research project “Forensic Architecture” (Goldsmiths, University of London).

“1948–Once upon Palestine” movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media. “Jaffa – The Orange’s Clockwork” Director: Eyal Sivan (2010), Israel (Arabic/Hebrew/English, English subtitles, 88 min). Civil Alliance, Palestine 47-48” Director: Ariella Azoulay (2012), Israel/Palestine (Arabic, English subtitles, 50 min).
Presented by Ariella Azoulay.
Organized by the Middle East Studies program.
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
About “Jaffa – The Orange’s Clockwork”:
This film gives a rich visual history of the world-renown citrus fruit brand – “Jaffa Oranges” – originating from Palestine and exported worldwide since the 19th century. The history of the orange, as depicted by Sivan, is the history of Palestine. Orange groves and the citrus fruit trade were spaces of rich collaboration between Arabs and Jews, until 1948. Jaffa’s orange was one of many symbols used in Zionist discourse to epitomize the “desert we have made bloom”. Based on photographic and cinematographic documents, some going back as far as to the 19th century, Sivan’s film shows the orange groves at a time when Jaffa was one of Palestine’s most populated and thriving cities.
About “Civil Alliance, Palestine 47-48”:
Between November 1947 (The Partition Plan by the UN) and May 1948 (The creation of the State of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. Around a map of Mandatory Palestine, thirty Arabs and Jews of varying ages, speaking Hebrew and Arabic, recite the archival documents depicting these events.

Middle East Studies is pleased to announce the screening of “1913: Seeds of Conflict” on April 14. The documentary film explores the divergent social forces growing in Palestine before the start of World War I and features Beshara Doumani, director of Middle East Studies.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ben Loeterman and Beshara Doumani.
About the film:
Most observers consider the Balfour Declaration and Mandate period of the 1920s as the origin of today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Breaking new ground, 1913: SEEDS OF CONFLICT, a one-hour documentary directed by filmmaker Ben Loeterman, explores the divergent social forces growing in Palestine before World War I, when Arabs and Jews co-existed in harmony as Ottomans, each yearning for a land to call their own.

“1948–Once upon Palestine” movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media. “Kings and Extras – Digging for a Palestinian Image” Director: Azza el-Hassan (2004), Palestine and Germany (Arabic, English subtitles, 62 min).
Organized by the Middle East Studies program.
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
Presented by Ariella Azoulay
About “Kings and Extras – Digging for a Palestinian Image”:
The question what happened to the PLO film archive in particular, and to Palestinians archives in general, moves this film and leads the filmmaker to pursue a long journey that cannot be answered simply. All the semi-answers and speculations raised in the movie – such as the archives being destroyed during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut or confiscated by the IDF – are part of the story and create another Palestinian image in addition to the lost one. The looted Palestinians archives, books, photographs etc. have preoccupied many scholars in the past decade, and this cinematic account is another contribution to the general question of how to address the past whose many records are still held, controlled and monitored by the political regime in place. This quest led al-Hassan to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon – and paradoxically not to Israel – in search of the lost archive.

“What is to be Done?”
The fourth in the series of panel discussions on
“After Oslo: Critical Conversations on Palestine / Israel”
Q&A to follow.
The panel will feature:
Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian legislator, activist, and scholar
Stephen Robert ’62, Chancellor Emeritus Brown University, co-founder and chairman of the Source of Hope Foundation
Hani Masri, director general of Masarat, the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies
Ilan Pappé, director Exeter University European Centre for Palestine Studies, co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies
Beshara Doumani, director Middle East Studies | Brown
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Cosponsored by the Watson Institute
Watch the event webcast live: http://www.brown.edu/web/livestream2/

Please note: Date has changed to 2/27.
“1948–Once upon Palestine” movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
“Return to Haifa” Director: Kasem Hawal (1982), Palestine (Arabic, English subtitles, 84 min), based on a novel by Ghassan Kanafani. “Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction” Director: Michel Kheilifi (1984), Israel/Palestine (Arabic, English subtitles, 30 min). Presented by Ariella Azoulay. Organized by the Middle East Studies program. Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
About “Return to Haifa”: The film is based on Kanafani’s novel the plot of which takes place in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the newly occupied territories had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa in 1948, visit the home that had been their own. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple had been uprooted. The Palestinian couple returns to Haifa hoping to discover something about their baby, Khaldun, whom they had left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby had been adopted by Miriam and her husband who gave him a Hebrew name – Dov, now a soldier in the Israeli army. This tragic encounter depicted by the movie emblematizes the Nakba’s being not only the tragedy of the Palestinian people but also of the Israeli Jews who cannot escape confronting this past and becoming accountable for it.
About “Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction”: Ma’aloul, located 6 kilometers from Nazareth was destroyed in 1948 and its residents were not allowed to return but rather declared by the State “present absentees,” not allowed to have their property back, just as were Palestinians expelled out of the country. This movie makes even more explicit the assumption that the history of Israel cannot be narrated without acknowledging the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians and their dispossession. The movie these internally displaced Palestinians’ testimonies about the destruction of their village Ma’aloul and their dispossession and the curricula taught in a history lesson in Arab schools, compelled by the state to teach the Zionist version of the events.

Please note: Date has changed to 2/27.
“1948–Once upon Palestine” movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
“Return to Haifa” Director: Kasem Hawal (1982), Palestine (Arabic, English subtitles, 84 min), based on a novel by Ghassan Kanafani. “Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction” Director: Michel Kheilifi (1984), Israel/Palestine (Arabic, English subtitles, 30 min). Presented by Ariella Azoulay. Organized by the Middle East Studies program. Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
About “Return to Haifa”: The film is based on Kanafani’s novel the plot of which takes place in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the newly occupied territories had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple expelled from Haifa in 1948, visit the home that had been their own. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple had been uprooted. The Palestinian couple returns to Haifa hoping to discover something about their baby, Khaldun, whom they had left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby had been adopted by Miriam and her husband who gave him a Hebrew name – Dov, now a soldier in the Israeli army. This tragic encounter depicted by the movie emblematizes the Nakba’s being not only the tragedy of the Palestinian people but also of the Israeli Jews who cannot escape confronting this past and becoming accountable for it.
About “Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction”: Ma’aloul, located 6 kilometers from Nazareth was destroyed in 1948 and its residents were not allowed to return but rather declared by the State “present absentees,” not allowed to have their property back, just as were Palestinians expelled out of the country. This movie makes even more explicit the assumption that the history of Israel cannot be narrated without acknowledging the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians and their dispossession. The movie these internally displaced Palestinians’ testimonies about the destruction of their village Ma’aloul and their dispossession and the curricula taught in a history lesson in Arab schools, compelled by the state to teach the Zionist version of the events.

Middle East Studies Lecture Series
In collaboration with the Watson Institute Security Seminar Series
Speaker: Karam Dana, University of Washington Bothell
Watch the event webcast live: https://mediacapture.brown.edu:8443/ess/echo/presentation/a2d49762-a7ad-4f94-81e7-889688807c41
About the lecture:
An exploration of Palestinian public opinion and attitudes in relation to a variety of social, economic, and political issues. A survey was conducted in the summer of 2013 in an attempt to assess the extent to which the Israelis occupation affects the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank (Sample, N=832 responses), and how specifically Palestinians are being affected. This study includes questions related to the local economy and jobs, education, social structure and its transformations, gender and the changing roles, political future and full statehood. In addition, the respondents were asked a variety of questions to measure how they feel with regards to the practices of the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas/Fatah divide and its socio-economic and political ramifications, the approval ratings of key figures in Palestinian politics, the US role in the peace process, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, the overall conditions in the Palestinian Territories, and the future of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
About the speaker:
Dr. Karam Dana is a Palestinian-American academic. He is Assistant Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Washington, he was on the faculty of Harvard University and Tufts University. His research explores elite politics in Palestinian society in the 1920s and 1930s, contemporary Palestinian public opinion, transnational Palestine, and studies how religious identity and religiosity inform political identities and participation in the larger Arab Middle East. Dr. Dana is the co-principal investigator of the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey (MAPOS), and the Arab American Public Opinion Survey (AAPOS). Dana is the Director of the Middle East Public Opinion Project (MEPOP) and the Director of the American Muslim Research Initiative (AMRI). Both centers are housed at the University of Washington Bothell.

“1948–Once upon Palestine” movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media. “The Time that Remains” Director: Elia Suleiman (2009), France (Arabic/Hebrew/English, English subtitles, 109 min).
Organized by the Middle East Studies program.
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
Refreshments provided.
About the film:
The Time That Remains is one of the rare Palestinian fiction films to address 1948. The film is based on the director’s father’s diaries and his mother’s letters to family members who were expelled from Palestine in 1948. These are not presented as past memories but are revived from the director’s point of view as a Palestinian citizen of the state of Israel who is identified by the state as an Israeli-Arab.
About the presenter:
The film will be presented by and followed by a conversation with Nicola Perugini, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and Middle East Studies. Perugini is an anthropologist who teaches at and directs the Al Quds Bard Honors College Human Rights Program in Jerusalem.
About the series:
The film series is part of an ongoing research project to re-visit the history of Palestine-Israel outside the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unending “national conflict” and to study the catastrophe of 1948 not merely as an internal Palestinian affair.

This talk explores the dynamics of policing and security in the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian Administration (1948-67). Drawing on a rich and detailed archive, I track a range of police encounters. Many such encounters were mundane, including investigation of petty crime. Many were evidently repressive, including the surveillance of political activity and speech. All were part of a broad security milieu that helped to define governance, political action, and life possibilities in Gaza in the years after the loss of Palestine. I use the analytic lens of “security society” to explore how policing both operated as a mechanism of governance and control and provided opportunities for action and effect. Criminality, politics, and propriety were all matters of concern for the police and the Gazan public.
Ilana Feldman is an associate professor of anthropology, history, and international affairs at George Washington University.
Co-sponsored by Watson’s Security Seminar Series and Middle East Studies.

“Dreaming of Tomorrow: Youth Culture in the Middle East” film series curated by Sa’ed Adel Atshan, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies. “Frontiers of Dreams and Fears” Director: Mai Masri (2001), Palestine (Arabic with English subtitles, 56 mins). Organized by Middle East Studies. Discussion following.
About “Frontiers of Dreams and Fears”:
This documentary traces the (pen pal) friendship between two Palestinian refugee girls, one based in Bethlehem, and the other in Beirut. It provides an intimate window into their lives, hardships, and hopes for the future.

1948 - Once Upon A Palestine Movie Series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
Screening of “1948,” director: Mohammed Bakri (1998), Palestine-Israel (Arabic, English subtitles, 54 min)
Mohammad Bakri will be presenting his own film.
Organized by the Middle East Studies program
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department
1948 became a mythological year in the process of the ruination of Palestine and the creation of Israel that lasted several years. This films series, directed by filmmakers from different origins (Palestinian, Syrian, French, British or Israeli), invites the public to join an open and ongoing conversation about the impact of the events of that year on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectation to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, some of these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. Surprisingly, after almost six decades and a half, not many more films have been made on the 1948 catastrophe, and interestingly enough some of those included in this series are based on literary texts (Kanafani, Khouyi and Izhar), as if their makers needed some authority with which to share the burden of accounting for what happened.
The series is part of an ongoing research project to re-visit the history of Palestine-Israel outside the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unending “national conflict”, and to study the catastrophe of 1948 as not merely an internal Palestinian affair.
Each film will be presented by the series’ curator or by guests lecturer and their screening will be followed by an open discussion. All films will have English subtitles.

MES luncheon Seminar. Oct. 30. 12:00-1:30 p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute.
Registration for event required.
This event is part of the Middle East Studies Luncheon Seminar Series.
Speaker: Ian Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania.
In politics as in science, sets of presumptions–hegemonic beliefs– guide activity to produce effective work. We call them projects in politics, and research programs in science. It is hard for researchers to learn that one’s program itself needs to be changed, because there can be no clear rules, within a program governed by certain presumptions, for identifying when commitments to those beliefs are themselves the obstacle to effective work. That is the meaning of presumption and hegemony. But good Lakatoshians can tell when a research program is headed south. We can use those symptoms to evaluate the behavior of those who are struggling to continue political activity within the two state solution framework regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That analysis can help guide choices and navigate the difficult period during which, as Gramsci put it, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.

1948 - Once Upon A Palestine movie series, curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
“The Dupes” (al-Makhdu’un), director: Tewfik Saleh (1972), Syria (Arabic, English subtitles, 107 min). Based on Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. Presented by Mayssun Succarie.
Organized by the Middle East Studies program.
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department.
1948 became a mythological year in the process of the ruination of Palestine and the creation of Israel that lasted several years. This films series, directed by filmmakers from different origins (Palestinian, Syrian, French, British or Israeli), invites the public to join an open and ongoing conversation about the impact of the events of that year on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectation to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, some of these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. Surprisingly, after almost six decades and a half, not many more films have been made on the 1948 catastrophe, and interestingly enough some of those included in this series are based on literary texts (Kanafani, Khouyi and Izhar), as if their makers needed some authority with which to share the burden of accounting for what happened.
The series is part of an ongoing research project to re-visit the history of Palestine-Israel outside the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unending “national conflict”, and to study the catastrophe of 1948 as not merely an internal Palestinian affair.
Each film will be presented by the series’ curator or by guests lecturer and their screening will be followed by an open discussion. All films will have English subtitles.

Middle East Studies Lecture Series / Cosponsored with Watson Institute’s Security Seminar Series. *Note start time 5:30 p.m.
About the lecture:
After Oslo, occupied Palestine became subject to new imperial modalities for the management of self-determination struggles in the post-Cold war era. These involved a large material and discursive apparatus through which Palestinian subjectivities could be brought under imperial tutelage through contemporary mechanisms of global governmentality as they relate to zones of conflict. The doctrine of “Earned sovereignty” became the larger political logic through which Palestinian aspirations became channeled into specific regulatory paths. In tandem was the entry of the vast assemblage of international institutions, NGOs and private contractors tasked with “state and peace building” under the terms of the liberal peace. Taken together these modalities over twenty years have produced an imperial trusteeship over Palestinians that rather than challenging Israeli sovereign power, works within it and simply mitigates some of its effects. Simultaneously, this process has been profoundly transformative of Palestinian subjectivities and forms of knowledge production. The presentation analyzes the unfolding of this process on the ground with a particular focus on its effects in terms of knowledge production around gender and the way it became contained within the discursive formations of developmentalism/ humanitarianism that is so crucial to these particular modalities of global power
About the speaker:
Rema Hammami is associate professor of anthropology and founding member of the Women’s Studies Institute at Birzeit University, where she chairs the Graduate Program in Gender and Development. Her publications cover an array of issues as they relate to the Palestinian context, including: gender, nationalism and armed conflict; NGOs, politics, and civil society; and ethnographies of spatial control and resistance. She serves on the editorial boards of the Arab Studies Journal, Jerusalem Quarterly File, Middle East Reports and Development and Change. Founder and chair (2002-04) of the Birzeit University Right to Education Campaign and founder and executive director (1993-94) of the Women’s Affairs Centre in Gaza, she serves on the boards of the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy (Muwatin); the Centre for Global Dialogue and Democracy (Miftah) and the Institute for Jerusalem Studies and is a jury member of the Prince Claus Awards for Culture and Development. Her recent publications include: Who Answers to Gazan Women? A study in security and economic rights. UNWomen: New York. 2011; “Home and Exile in Jerusalem” in Shehadeh, R and P. Johnson (eds.) Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Home and Exile. Northhampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press. 2013.

1948 - Once Upon A Palestine Movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
Screening of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Giv’a 24 Eina Ona‎), director: Thorold Dickinson (1955), Israel (Hebrew/English, English subtitles, 101 min)
Presented by Orly Lubin.
ABOUT THE FILM
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Giv’a 24 Eina Ona‎), director: Thorold Dickinson (1955), Israel (Hebrew/English, English subtitles, 101 min)
Presented by Orly Lubin
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Thorold Dickinson, 1955) is one of the very few Israeli films about the 1948 war. It consists of three personal stories, told on the way to capture the strategically crucial Hill 24 so as to make sure the UN includes it within the new state’s borders. The film opens with the dead bodies of the four fighters: one woman, a Yemenite, who does not tell her own story of volunteering; the Irish James Finnegan, previously a cop with the British mandate who fell in love with an Arab-Jew woman fighter; The American Allan Goodman, a tourist wounded in Jerusalem under the Jordanian siege, who fell in love with the volunteering nurse; and David Airam, the only Sabra, who captured an Egyptian soldier who turned out to be a Nazi officer. With “imported” director and cinematographer (Gerald Gibbs) who made a visible effort to navigate an all-Israeli lavishly budgeted production, it nevertheless ended up as national propaganda, highlighting dedication, sacrifice, and especially the variety of justifications of the foundation of a Jewish state for the Jewish victims.Organized by the Middle East Studies program
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department
Some refreshments provided
1948 became a mythological year in the process of the ruination of Palestine and the creation of Israel that lasted several years. This films series, directed by filmmakers from different origins (Palestinian, Syrian, French, British or Israeli), invites the public to join an open and ongoing conversation about the impact of the events of that year on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectation to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, some of these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. Surprisingly, after almost six decades and a half, not many more films have been made on the 1948 catastrophe, and interestingly enough some of those included in this series are based on literary texts (Kanafani, Khouyi and Izhar), as if their makers needed some authority with which to share the burden of accounting for what happened.
The series is part of an ongoing research project to re-visit the history of Palestine-Israel outside the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unending “national conflict”, and to study the catastrophe of 1948 as not merely an internal Palestinian affair.
Each film will be presented by the series’ curator or by guests lecturer and their screening will be followed by an open discussion. All films will have English subtitles.
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ORLY LUBIN is an associate professor at Tel Aviv University, specializing in cultural studies focusing on feminist and poststructuralist theories. She published on literature, cinema, theatre, and visual culture. Her book, Women Reading Women (Hebrew; Haifa University Press, 2003) offers a feminist theory of reading/spectatorship. She is currently working on a book on ethics and the gaze in literature and in visual culture.
Dr. Lubin served as chair of the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, and later of the Literature Department; chair of The NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program; and is currently chair of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, all at Tel-Aviv University.

“Why Gaza Matters: The War and its Consequences.”
Teach-In on Gaza with Brown faculty,
Beshara Doumani, Omer Bartov, Nina Tannenwald, Melani Cammett, Sa’ed Adel Atshan.
Macmillan 117
5-9:00 p.m.
This event will be livestreamed. Link on Middle East Studies website.

Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m.
1948 - Once Upon A Palestine Movie series curated by Ariella Azoulay, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.
“Khirbat’ Khize,” director: Ram Loevy (1978), Israel (Hebrew, English subtitles, 48 min)
“al-Midya”, director: Dani Gal (2014), Israel (Arabic/Hebrew, English subtitles, 26 min)
Presented by Ariella Azoulay
Organized by the Middle East Studies program
Co-sponsored by Modern Culture and Media department
Some refreshments provided.
1948 became a mythological year in the process of the ruination of Palestine and the creation of Israel that lasted several years. This films series, directed by filmmakers from different origins (Palestinian, Syrian, French, British or Israeli), invites the public to join an open and ongoing conversation about the impact of the events of that year on Palestinians and Jews. Documenting something that goes beyond the suffering of the victims and the glory of the victors, transcending more conventional expectation to either expose details of the catastrophe or veil it from view, some of these films enable spectators to witness a variety of forms of Jewish-Palestinian co-existence to which the event of 1948 put an end. Surprisingly, after almost six decades and a half, not many more films have been made on the 1948 catastrophe, and interestingly enough some of those included in this series are based on literary texts (Kanafani, Khouyi and Izhar), as if their makers needed some authority with which to share the burden of accounting for what happened.
The series is part of an ongoing research project to re-visit the history of Palestine-Israel outside the framework imposed by the paradigm of an unending “national conflict”, and to study the catastrophe of 1948 as not merely an internal Palestinian affair.
Each film will be presented by the series’ curator or by guests lecturer and their screening will be followed by an open discussion. All films will have English subtitles.
About today’s movies:
Khirbat’ Khize, director: Ram Loevy (1978), Israel (Hebrew, English subtitles, 48 min)
Khirbet Khizeh is a TV drama directed by Ram Loevy in 1978 based on a novel (bearing the same title) by S. Yizhar, published in 1949. The novel is a step-by-step depiction of the expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. One of the soldiers repeatedly questions their deeds. The moral voice recurs and so is its rejection by the others, in ritual-like form. This ceremonial repetition, which the movie makes more explicit, can be read as a rite of passage through which Jews in Palestine became the masters of the land. Since the 1960s, the novel was included in high school curricula. In 1978, when the film was to be broadcast, the Minister of Education and Culture banned it and the workers of the Israeli TV turned spectators’ screens dark for 50 minutes, the duration of the movie.
“al-Midya”, director: Dani Gal, Israel (2014, Arabic, English subtitles, 26 min)
al-Mydia was chosen as the location for shooting the film Khirbet Khizeh in the mid-1970s. The villagers did not see the movie until Dani Gal, the director of this film, went to the village and screened it. The film documents the encounter of al-Mydia’s residents with the movie, but no less so, the way they experienced in the late 70s the arrival of a troop of actors dressed as soldiers to shoot a movie that revives the expulsion of 1948. In the absence of subtitles in Arabic (in Khirbet Khizeh), one of the local residents serves as a simultaneous interpreter. The Israeli soldiers’ words dehumanizing the Palestinians, repeated in Arabic by a Palestinian, produce remarkable moments of estrangement.

Middle East Studies Luncheon Seminar
Jasmin Habib, Cultural Anthropologist from the University of Waterloo. “An Ethnography of Presence: Palestinian Narratives of Place and Belonging.”.
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute. May 16, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Registration for lunch is required.
Register by emailing CMES@brown.edu
ABSTRACT:
Ethnographic analyses of the loss of Palestine usually focus on economic and political aspects, paying less attention to the emotional and cultural pain of that loss. In this respect, these analyses tend to anaesthetize the effects of colonial, militarized, and racialising processes. Although they have been unable to reclaim their lands by military force or political means, Palestinians continue to resist military occupation and the confiscation of their lands; and to defend their right to return. They have also been moved to write and to recite poetic expressions of their experiences, sharing the depth of their losses among themselves and others. Such poems write the life of Palestine into the memory and history of a world that has sought to make their experiences invisible. Jasmin traces such narrations of place and belonging in what she is calling an “ethnography of presence.”
BIO:
Jasmin Habib is a cultural anthropologist who teaches in Political Science as well as the Balsillie School for International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. Among her publications is her book, Israel, Diaspora and the Routes of National Belonging. She is completing Transnational Palestine: History, Memory, Community, Activism.

Middle East Studies Film Series. Love and the City: Urban Lives in the Middle East. “A Jihad for Love”. 5:30 p.m. Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
Refreshments provided.

Middle East Studies Film Series. Love and the City: Urban Lives in the Middle East. “Paradise Now”. 5:30 p.m. Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
Refreshments provided.

Middle East Studies Film Series. Love and the City: Urban Lives in the Middle East. “My Brother, The Devil”. 5:30 p.m. Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
Refreshments provided.

SA’ED ATSHAN / MES LUNCHEON SEMINAR OCT 9, 2013, 12:00 – 1:00 PM MCKINNEY ROOM, WATSON INSTITUTE
The Geography of International Aid in the Palestinian Territories
Abstract
In this Middle East Studies community-building event, Atshan will discuss the relationship between international aid and space in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with an emphasis on the different regimes of mobility for aid workers, Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers and settlers; contestation over sovereignty among the three groups; and manifestations of “mobile sovereignty” in the OPT.
About the Speaker:
Sa’ed Atshan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies at the Watson Institute. He holds a PhD (2013) and MA (2010) in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. He also received an MPP (2008) from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA (2006) from Swarthmore College. His dissertation, “Prolonged Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories” explore the politics of international development and humanitarian assistance to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
RSVP required. Limited space availability.

“After Oslo: CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS ON PALESTINE/ISRAEL” with Hanan Ashrawi and Brown Faculty, Beshara Doumani, Omer Bartov, Ariella Azoulay, Adi Ophir, and Sa’ed Atshan.
Open to the Public.
MORE INFORMATION ON WWW.MIDDLEEASTBROWN.ORG
September 2013 brings the 20th anniversary of the OSLO PEACE ACCORDS. To mark this historic anniversary, Brown’s Middle East Studies Initiative is bringing in a key participant at these talks, Hanan Ashrawi, to kick off a year of events related to this issue.
The agreement signed between the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat marked the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The Oslo Accords did not settle issues of statehood, borders, refugees, or settlements.
“After Oslo” is an interactive discussion on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict featuring a distinguished panel of scholars, including Hanan Ashrawi. It is the launching event for a bi-annual series, “Critical Conversations on Palestine/Israel,” sponsored by Middle East Studies.

Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian leader, legislator and activist, will visit Brown University Sept. 25 and 26, 2013, to deliver a lecture and take part in a panel discussion as part of the “Oslo is Dead; Long Live Oslo” series offered by the Program in Middles East Studies. The lecture and discussion are free and open to the public and will be streamed live online.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Palestinian leader, legislator, and activist Hanan Ashrawi will visit Brown University Sept. 25 and 26, 2013, to kick off a series of events organized by the Middle East Studies Initiative marking the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn. All events in the series, “Oslo is Dead; Long Live Oslo,” are free and open to the public.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, Ashrawi will deliver a lecture titled “Process Versus Peace,” which will examine how the process took over to displace peace as an objective. A participant and close observer, Ashrawi will present what she sees as the structural, procedural, and substantive flaws inherent in the “peace process” that has been the center of the U.S. policy in the Middle East following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. She will also suggest a framework that could lead to a resolution of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ashrawi’s lecture will take place at 4 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, De Ciccio Family Auditorium. It is free and open to the public and will be streamed live on the Brown website.
On Thursday, Sept. 26, Ashrawi will take part in a panel discussion titled “After Oslo: Critical Conversations on Palestine/Israel,” which will bring together Brown faculty to talk about lessons learned from the Oslo experience. That event will take place at 4 p.m. at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Joukowsky Forum. It is free and open to the public and will be streamed live.
Both events are part of a larger year-long series, “Oslo is Dead; Long Live Oslo,” hosted by the Middle East Studies Initiative, that is organized around the 20th anniversary of the Oslo signing and seek to examine the peace process — what has changed on the ground since the signing and what the possible future of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be. The series will include another “Critical Conversation” panel in the spring and a major international conference “New Directions in Palestinian Studies.”
These public events will be supplemented by several courses on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, including a new seminar by Beshara Doumani, director of Middle East studies, on the history of Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, to be offered in the Spring 2014 semester.
“Ever since Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House Lawn under the watchful gaze of President Clinton in 1993, the ‘Peace Process’ became a household phrase and the centerpiece of U.S. policy in the Middle East,” Douomani said. “The Oslo Accords, as it has become known, has led nowhere, and the lack of progress threatens to drive the region into another major cycle of violence and war. There is perhaps no better place than the University campus for a frank and informed discussion about what happened to the ‘Peace Process’ and where we are going.”
Information on these events can be found on the Middle East Studies website. www.middleeastbrown.edu
HANAN ASHRAWI
is a Palestinian leader, legislator, activist, and scholar. She was the first woman to be elected to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (2009) and she currently holds a seat in that organization, which is the highest executive body in Palestine. Ashrawi has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 1996 and was also appointed as the Palestinian Authority Minister of Higher Education and Research in the same year. Ashrawi also served as a member of the Leadership Committee and as an official spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace process, beginning with the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991.
As a civil society activist, she founded MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, in 1999 and continues to serve as head of its board of directors. The same year, Ashrawi founded the National Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN). Additionally, she is the founder of the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) and has served as its commissioner since 1994. As an academic, she founded and chaired the Department of English at Birzeit University and became dean of the faculty of arts. She is the recipient of a number of honorary degrees as well as distinguished awards from various international and local organizations.

MIDDLE EAST STUDIES LECTURE series presents Salim Tamari, Editor of The Jerusalem Quarterly, Visiting Professor at Center for Middle East Studies, Harvard University 2013.
Ottoman ethnographic mapping of Palestine and Syria. An examination of Ottoman mapping practices in the Syrian provinces, and their political implications.

The MES Lecture Series begins 2013 with Ariella Azoulay, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, presenting “Potential History of Palestine.”
Q&A, signing of 3 books (titles below) and reception. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 4:00-6:00 PM.
All welcome.
POTENTIAL HISTORY is an attempt to develop a new model for writing history, using photographs and citizenship to recuperate history from the clamp of sovereignty and the perspective of the national conflict, and to extract from the past its unrealized possibilities as a necessary condition for imagining a different future.
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The concept of “potential history” emerged out of the two photographic archives that Ariella Azoulay assembled – Act of State 1967-2007 and From Palestine o Israel 1947-1950. In the text, she shows how an archive of constituent violence creates the conditions for the emergence of “potential history” as an object of research and a new way to relate to this particular type of violence. Potential history should be understood in the dual sense of unrealized possibilities that still motivated and directed the actions of various actors in the past, and of possibilities that may become our own and be reactivated to guide our actions. Potential history is first of all history not shaped by the dominant perspective of sovereign nationalism. Potential history insists on restoring within the order of things a polyphony of civil relations and forms of being-together that existed at any moment in history without being exhausted by sovereign order.
Potential history, Azoulay claims, helps us see in those images of violence – notwithstanding all the paradoxes involved – evidence of endless reiterations of a constitutive moment that can never be completed and terminated. The framework of potential history enables us to see that this series of reiterations can be interrupted only through a new form of relations between all those involved in the production of violence—victims, perpetrators and spectators. It helps one see this new form of relations as a real possibility.
More information on http://www.middleeastbrown.org/
The books to be signed are:
Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, (2012, Verso)
Ariella Azoulay, From From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (2011, Pluto Press)
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (2012, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern)