The Palestinian Question: Presentation by Raef Zriek

Professor Raef Zreik is a jurist and a scholar, an expert in political philosophy and the philosophy of law, a lecturer on property law and the theory of law at Ono Academic College, academic co-director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University, and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Zreik holds first and second degrees in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also has an LLM from Columbia Law School and a PhD from Harvard Law School. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Kant’s concept of legal right and the transition from questions of ethics to questions of law.

His main fields of research include legal and political philosophy. His recent publications include Historical Justice. His research addresses questions pertaining to legal and political theory and issues of citizenship and identity, Zionism, and the Palestinian question. His many publications in these fields have appeared in anthologies and in legal and interdisciplinary journals.

His talk will focus on the shifting nature of Palestine and the Palestinians which is becoming an internal question of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people writ large. The Palestinians are not outsiders that the State of Israel and Jewish Israelis had to make peace or reach a settlement with. They are constitutive of the current Israeli Jewish identity; forcing Israel to move away from questions of existence. Questions about achieving peace, a two-state solution, or ending the occupation are entangled with questions about the character, constitutional structure, and democratic nature of Israel. The external question of war and peace, and the internal questions of Jewish/democratic or religious/secular are bearing one name: decolonization. The future of Palestinians and Jews has never been this intertwined and while this might have been the case all along, in recent years what has been latent has become more visible.

Zriek’s talk at 4:30 pm in Herrick Auditorium is free and open to the public. His visit is organized by the Middle East & North African Studies and International Studies Programs and made possible by support from the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Philosophy Department, Religion Department, and The Laura C. Harris Endowment.