*In-person and livestreamed at The People's Forum in NYC*

Tuesdays, September 30-October 28, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

This course was originally scheduled to be taught at Columbia University in Fall 2025. However, as Columbia continues its complicity in covering up the U.S.-Israeli genocide against Palestine and capitulates to the Trump administration at the expense of academic freedom and student rights, Professor Rashid Khalidi has withdrawn the course in protest. It will now be offered at The People’s Forum, making it accessible to the broader public.

This course examines the history of Palestine since 1917 in summary form. It starts from the premise that this is not a “conflict” between two equally matched parties, or that it started with the wars of 1948 or 1967. Rather, these episodes are part of a systematic, if intermittent, war that has lasted for over a century, aimed at dispossessing the Palestinian people and transforming their homeland into an exclusive Jewish national home. This war had its origins in several phenomena: the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East; the rise of nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; the settler-colonial methods employed by the Zionist movement to “transform Palestine into the land of Israel” in the words of an early Zionist leader; and stubborn Palestinian resistance to these settler colonial aims and methods. 

Emerging in response to virulent European anti-Semitism, the Zionist movement was, and initially saw itself as, both a nationalist and a settler-colonial project. After searching for other sponsors, in 1917 this movement garnered the support of the British Empire, which considered it to be a tool to achieve its strategic aims in the Middle East, and as a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism,” in the words of one British colonial official. Zionism thereby obtained the wherewithal for launching an externally supported war on Palestine and its people. Since then, the offspring of this movement, the state of Israel, has enjoyed the uninterrupted backing of major global powers, most importantly the United States. These powers saw Israel as serving their regional objectives, and have played crucial roles in supporting all of Israel’s wars since 1948.