16. April 2025 | 19.30 Uhr | Lettrétage in der Veteranenstraße 21

Photo: (c) Bashir Bashir

Kilmé is a monthly talk series dedicated to Palestinian artists, intellectuals, and academics; a platform to present their work and speak about subjects that are important to them. Kilmé means word in Arabic. The organizers are dedicated to presenting palestinian voices in all of their diversity and creativity, thus contributing to the cultural landscape of Berlin, a city with the largest Palestinian population in Europe.

In the April issue of kilmé talks, Bashir Bashir will be the guest. The evening will be moderated by Tyme Khleifi and Michael Barenboim.

Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the department of sociology, political science and communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Currently, he is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His primary research interests are nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, democratic theory, decolonization, the politics of reconciliation, and alternatives to partition in Palestine/Israel. Among other numerous publications, he is the co-editor of „The Holocaust and Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History“ (Columbia University Press, 2018); and „The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond“ (Columbia University Press, 2020). His writings have appeared in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, and Japanese.

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Ergänzung: 11. April 2025: Hybrid-Veranstaltung im ZMO | 24. April 2025, 17.00 Uhr

Egalitarian Bi-nationalism for Israel/Palestine

There is a growing agreement among scholars, politicians and experts that the oppressive realities and colonial policies in Palestine/Israel are politically unacceptable and morally indefensible. Leading human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem have published extensive reports that identify these colonial policies and their disastrous impacts on the lives and rights of the Palestinians. The question of putting an end to these wretched and segregationist realities and policies and moving to more transformative and inclusive solutions has preoccupied several scholars and politicians in Israel/Palestine and beyond. Liberal and national principles in the forms of one-person one-vote or territorial and ethnic partition have been at the center of debates on these transformative solutions.

This talk argues that egalitarian bi-nationalism is better equipped to address the underlying issues of the conflict in Israel/Palestine than the liberal and secessionist national frames. Egalitarian binationalism, the talk goes on to argue, better satisfies the urge for self-determination of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews than the benign neglect majoritarianism of the liberal state or ethnic secession and the partition of the two-state solution. The talk concludes that egalitarian bi-nationalism’s insistence on envisioning affective relations of co-belonging based on an ethics of equality, parity, mutual legitimacy, and cohabitation offers rich resources for historical reconciliation and decolonization in Israel/Palestine.