Axis 3 seminar: "Rethinking Palestine after Gaza"

Tuesday 25 November 2025 | 18h15-20h | Amphithéâtre René Cassin, Sciences Po Aix

This session in Axis 3, “Religion and politics in the contemporary world”, features a Palestinian and an Israeli researcher looking at ways of rethinking the links between Israel and Palestine since 7 October and the war in Gaza, by offering alternative knowledge to the dominant discourse.

This round table will be presented by in English.

Speakers:

• Tal Dor, Lecturer in the Middle Eastern Studies Department of the ALLSH Faculty, AMU (IREMAM)

Title: Becoming Anti-zionist and the Urgency for Decolonizing of Palestine

In a society that is largely in favour of the destruction of Gaza and its population, a small minority of Jewish-Israelis, that defines itself as Anti-zionist, historically committed to opposing settler colonial violence in all its forms, continues to resist, despite state repression that has intensified considerably since October 2023. Members of this radical minority, who engage in critical dialogue with Palestinian knowledge, often relate to themselves and to the Israeli society as a whole, as settlers rather than natives.

For this Jewish-Israeli Anti-zionist minority, the word radical refers to a praxis that seeks to get to the root of the problem: zionism as a project of settler colonialism. In this sense, Anti-zionist activists and actors refer to the current violence as al-Nakba al-Mustamirra (“the ongoing Nakba”), or even genocide. They understand this violence as a continuation of the elimination of the indigenous population since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Through the analysis of the subjectivities of several settlers who have broken with Zionism I will examine the (trans)formative processes of first unbecoming Zionist and then becoming Anti-zionist as feminist decolonial praxis.

• Honaida Ghanim, Assistant Professor of Israeli Studies at Birzeit University and Director General of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR)

Title: The Decolonial Hinge: Palestinians Inside Israel and the Structural Reorientation of the Zionist Crisis

This lecture argues that the Zionist project has entered an organic crisis expressed in two converging trajectories: genocidal violence against Palestinians and an intensifying internal “cold civil war” among Jewish groups. These dynamics, though unequal, reveal the collapse of Zionism's capacity to sustain a coherent political order.

Within this context, the lecture reframes Palestinians inside Israel as a decolonial hinge: a liminal, structurally decisive position that can redirect the crisis rather than allow it to accelerate towards an apocalyptic outcome. Their presence opens a narrow political possibility-one that becomes viable only if segments of Jewish society are willing to relinquish structures of privilege and ethnonational supremacy.

Thus, Palestinians inside Israel are not a solution in themselves but the pivotal point through which a post-Zionist, egalitarian horizon may begin to emerge.

Moderator: Alix Philippon, Lecturer in Political Science at Sciences Po Aix (MESOPOLHIS)

Registration required: https://www.sciencespo-aix.fr/agenda/rethinking-palestine-after-gaza/