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

In May 2026, VU Amsterdam hosted the wonderful Areej Sabbagh-Khoury to talk about her book Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Marina de Regt, of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and I were the organisers of this event and we were delighted to see such a healthy turnout for it at the VU 3D Centre.

Areej 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.

Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians under British imperial rule. 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.

Areej's presentation was followed by a lively and most enjoyable round of questions and answers with the audience. Many thanks once more to Miranda van Holland of the VU 3D Centre for graciously hosting us, and to my own department — Political Science and Public Administration — for supporting the event.