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Palestine, One Hundred Years of Colonialism and Resistance

May 16, 20237:00 p.m.

MADRID

Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62) and on Casa Árabe’s YouTube channel. 7:00 p.m. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.

In English and Spanish, with simultaneous translation.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, Casa Árabe and the Capitán Swing publishing firm are presenting this book on Tuesday, May 16 in Madrid, written by award-winning writer and scholar Rashid Khalidi, holder of the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University. He will be attending this event.

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, Jerusalem’s mayor, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the dangers looming ahead and ended his note by saying: “For God’s sake, leave Palestine alone.” With these words, Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-grandson, begins this comprehensive history, the first general account of the conflict told from a Palestinian perspective.

Palestine: One Hundred Years of Colonialism and Resistance challenges the usual interpretations of the conflict. Khalidi traces one hundred years of colonial warfare against the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then by Israel, with the backing of Britain and the United States, the major powers of the era. It highlights key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, and from Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to the endless, ineffective peace process. Original, authoritative and significant, Palestine: One Hundred Years of Colonialism and Resistance provides an enlightening new view of a conflict which continues up to this day.

Teresa Aranguren, a journalist and writer specialising in the Middle East, will be talking with Rashid Khalidi. The event will be presented by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe's Culture and International Relations Coordinator.

Rashid Khalidi is an American historian and writer of Palestinian-Lebanese origin who specializes in the Middle East. Khalidi currently occupies the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University and was an advisor to the Palestinian delegation for the peace negotiations in Madrid and Washington from 1991 to 1993. He is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He was born in 1948 in the New York borough of Manhattan. His father, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem, worked on the United Nations Security Council, and his mother was an interior decorator. After finishing high school at the United Nations International School, he graduated from Yale University in 1970, and in 1974 he earned his PhD in History from Oxford University, with a thesis on British policy in the Middle East before World War I. From the 1960s until 1983, he mainly lived in Beirut, where his children were born and he taught at several universities. He returned with his family to the United States because of the First Lebanon War. After teaching at Columbia University for a few years, in 1987 he was named a Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago, where he stayed for sixteen years and befriending the future President of the United States, Barack Obama.

The event will be broadcast live on Casa Árabe’s YouTube channel.

Book sold at the Balqís Bookstore