Lecture | Book talk
Colonizing Palestine: the Zionist Left and the making of the Palestinian Nakba
- Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
- Date
- Wednesday 15 April 2026
- Time
- Explanation
- Walk-in event, no registration required
- Address
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 3.60
Colonizing Palestine (published by Stanford University Press) examines the formation of settler-colonial hierarchies in Mandatory Palestine and the crucial role played by socialist Zionism in shaping the conditions that culminated in the 1948 Nakba. Drawing on a meticulous and historically grounded analysis of eight Zionist and Israeli archives—examining two periods, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s and from the 1970s to the 1990s—the book traces how practices of domination, dispossession, and territorial control were developed, institutionalized, and normalized over time.
Challenging conventional narratives that portray the socialist Zionist left as a force of coexistence, the book demonstrates how this political tradition was deeply implicated in the consolidation of settler-colonial logics. By examining the material and symbolic mechanisms of land appropriation, population transfer, and legal-political governance, Colonizing Palestine reveals how the structures established during this formative period continue to shape the sociopolitical landscape of Israel/Palestine today—including enduring patterns of dispossession and resistance.
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on political and historical sociology, particularly in relation to colonialism, Indigenous studies, and memory.
She is the author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023). Her work has been widely published on settler colonialism, citizenship, political sociology, and Israel/Palestine in journals such as Sociological Theory, Politics & Society, Theory and Society, Current Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Sabbagh-Khoury has received research grants and fellowships from the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, Fulbright, and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). She is a member of the General Assembly and the Academic Research Committee of Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research. She is also a member of Academia for Equality. In May 2021, she co-founded the Emergency Helpline, and she is a co-founder of the Palestinian Carmel Forum, a think tank for political and social action in Israel.
