LSJP x LPE: Palestine and the Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship

Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) and Law and Political Economy (LPE) at Berkeley Law are delighted to welcome Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a Palestinian sociologist and Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley, to speak with us at the law school.

Professor Sabbagh-Khoury is the author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

Sabbagh-Khoury will discuss her article, Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship, which articulates how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance.