Video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=massad+100+balfour
One hundred years ago, immediately after the British subjugation of Palestine, Arthur James Balfour, the foreign minister of the British empire, in a now historic declaration, assured the Zionist movement of the support of the British Crown for their goals.
His paper, now known as the Balfour Declaration, is considered to be one of the most important milestones of political Zionism in the realization of its goal of a Jewish national state in the former Ottoman province of Palestine.
In the context of colonial world politics, within which Zionism offered itself as a bulwark of Europe against Asia and as an “outpost of (white) culture against barbarism,” the contemporary Israel arose on the rubble of ethnically cleansed lands in the span of three decades. To this day, Israel is among the bloody and unresolved colonial conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
What continuities and discontinuities in colonial politics does Israel illustrate?How much Balfour was there in the partition plan of 1947, in the war of 1967, or in the Oslo peace plan of 1994. Was it possible to solve the problem of antisemitism by the creation of “a home for the Jewish people” to which Zionism aspired?
In his presentation, Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies of Columbia University, will trace these continuities and discontinuities by means of the historical and current situation of Israel/Palestine.
#100YearsBalfourDeclarationVienna
04. November 2017, 18 Uhr
Ort: Palais Strudlhof, Strudlhofgasse 10, A-1090 Wien
