OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Recent years have witnessed the framework of Setter Colonialism gaining hegemonic explanatory dominance among attempts to elucidate the Palestine/Israel trajectory. Scrutiny of many texts in this (newly-awoken) domain ultimately reveals that a modest number of new insights have been added to those already published by (anti-Zionist) Arabs and Israelis between 1962 (the foundation of Israel’s Matzpen) and 1974 (the PLO’s adoption of its Ten Point Programme). Whereas the pre-1974 Settler Colonial school was ‘historical’, the 21st century one appears somewhat ‘ahistorical’. This draft-verdict grows out of what I view as three lacunas detectable equally in these ‘old’ and ‘renewed’ schools spotlighting the Palestine/Israel case: (i) insufficient attention to comparative anti-colonialisms; (ii) obliviousness vis-à-vis the (post-WW1) phenomenon of ethnonationalism; and (iii) a puzzling epistemological detour around social constructivism. In his seminal 1999 essay, The One State Solution, Edward Said advocated for a single binational state. In the aftermath of his 2003 passing two asymmetric schools emerged: (i) a miniature Saidian one warranting the label ‘bi-national’; and (ii) a non-Saidian liberal and Eurocentric school which is home to practically all affiliates of ‘Settler Colonial Studies’. These schools make dissimilar sense of the concept ‘de-colonisation’ and of notions of individual and collective rights.