Thursday, April 21, 2022
4:00 – 5:15 p.m.
Watson Institute, Stephen Robert '62 Hall, True North (101), 280 Brook Street, Providence, RI 02912
About the Event
Since 2021, several Israeli and mainstream human rights organizations, have concluded what Palestinians have long known and insisted upon: Israel is an apartheid regime. Despite the welcome, and long-awaited, synergy between them, there remains significant analytical divergence among these organizations and Palestinian activists and scholars. In particular, while the reports emphasize that Israel has become an apartheid regime as a result of its failure to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians have pointed to Zionist ideology to insist that Israel did not become become a discriminatory regime but is defined by such discrimination. This lecture will explore the implications of this analytical divergence by examining the juridical framework of apartheid embodied in the 1973 Convention consecrating it as a crime against humanity. It will also trace the Palestinian intellectual tradition to highlight that Zionism is not like apartheid but that the ideologies constitute intellectual and political bedfellows. Finally, by visiting the drafting history of UNGA Resolution 3379 (1975) declaring Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, the lecture will help fill a glaring lacuna in the recent apartheid reports regarding racial theories of Zionism.
Organized by Noura Erakat, Darwish Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies
The event is funded by the Mahmoud Darwish Chair in Palestinian Studies at Brown University