Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Dr Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's 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.

About the author

Dr Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology with research interests in political and historical sociologies, colonialism, indigenous studies, memory, and critical social theory. She has published widely on settler colonialism, political sociology, and the Palestinian citizens in Israel in journals including Sociological Theory, Politics and Society, Theory and Society, Current Sociology, and The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, among others. She is the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships from foundations like the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, Palestinian American Research Center, Fulbright, and the Council for Higher Education.

Sabbagh-Khoury is a member of the General Assembly and Academic Research Committee of Mada al-Carmel—Arab Center for Applied Social Studies. She received her doctorate in sociology from Tel Aviv University and subsequently held postdoctoral appointments at Columbia, New York, Brown, and Tufts Universities.

About the co-hosts

This event was co-hosted by Decolonise Sociology and the Race, Empire and Education (REE) collective. REE is an interdisciplinary research collective that supports critical discussions of race, racialisation and racism in education.