Palestine versus the Palestinians

This course explores alternatives to the common view that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a struggle between two nationalist movements over the same land. Moving away from state-centric political discourse, it engages the questions of imperialism, settler-colonialism, and displacement from a bottom-up perspective of everyday life of Palestinian communities in historic Palestine and the Diaspora. How do these internally divided and spatially fragmented communities negotiate the present and imagine the future? Ultimately, the course asks: What does it mean to be a Palestinian? And what can the Palestinian condition teach us about the modern world?