Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. In her book, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.

Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

About the speaker

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on political and historical sociology, particularly in relation to colonialism, Indigenous studies, and memory.

She is the author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023). Her work has been widely published on settler colonialism, citizenship, political sociology, and Israel/Palestine in journals such as Sociological Theory, Politics & Society, Theory and Society, Current Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Sabbagh-Khoury has received research grants and fellowships from the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, Fulbright, and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). She is a member of the General Assembly and the Academic Research Committee of Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research. She is also a member of Academia for Equality. In May 2021, she co-founded the Emergency Helpline, and she is a co-founder of the Palestinian Carmel Forum, a think tank for political and social action in Israel.