The month of May marks a significant point in the history of the Middle East. Seventy-four years ago, on May 15, 1948, the State of Israel declared independence over more than 80 percent of historic Palestine. Some 800,000 Palestinians were expelled in the process, while more than 400 Palestinian towns and cities were destroyed. This trauma is known as the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"), but Palestinians also refer to al-Nakba al mustamirrah, the "continuing Nakba": beyond a historical event, it is an ongoing process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians, numbering some 14 million worldwide, remain in a situation dominated by colonialism and apartheid, where they are denied both their past and their future and where their present seems to condemn them to perpetual waiting. Understanding the current reality of the Palestinian people requires a nuanced view that takes into account both its historical and conjunctural dimensions and is able to connect its recent events with its historical context.
In this round table, Yara Hawari and Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal will address, from different perspectives, the fragmentation of Palestinian society, its resistance, the role of the international community and the importance of shared transnational struggles.
The event will also include the presentation of the book Palestine: Occupation, colonization, segregation by Domínguez de Olazábal, published by Catarata. Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe's International Relations Coordinator, will moderate the event.
Yara Hawari is a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestine Policy Network. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter in 2017, where she taught several undergraduate courses and remains an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for several media outlets, including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English. She is the host of the podcast Rethinking Palestine and in December 2021 published her first novel, The Stone House.
Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal is coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Panel at Fundación Alternativas and associate professor in International Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She has worked, among other projects, as a researcher at the London office of The U.S./Middle East Project, as well as at the European Parliament and the Delegation of the European Union in Egypt. She collaborates with several media, such as Público and El Periódico. She holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is a researcher at TEIM (Taller de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos) at the same university.
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