HIS 276 - Zionism, Israel, Palestine

This course introduces the historian’s craft by guiding students through ongoing historical debates surrounding what is often called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the late nineteenth century to 1948 and beyond. The small territory, known today as Israel, Palestine, or the Holy Land, has been a site of contestation and violence for over a century, shaped by imperial, colonial, nationalist, and religious interests. Israeli and Palestinian historians have and continue to play an important role in shaping debates about the land’s past, present, and possible futures. This course is structured around several areas of extensive historiographic debate in the enmeshed histories of Zionism, Israel, and Palestine. We will begin with interpretations of Zionism, a Jewish political movement that emerged in the context of European nationalism and racialized antisemitism in the late nineteenth century. Was Zionism continuous with Jewish hopes and prayers for messianic deliverance or a sharp break with tradition? Was it a movement of national liberation or a settler-colonial movement? We will also examine scholarship on the British declaration of support for Zionism during the First World War. What motivated the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration, and how did it hinder or facilitate Palestinian and Zionist aspirations in interwar Palestine? Finally, we will analyze opposing interpretations and representations of the War of 1948, which resulted in the founding of the State of Israel in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, and the dispossession, forced expulsion, and flight of close to one million Palestinians.

Satisfies History major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.