CHS - Middle Eastern Studies talk: Eli Osheroff, 'Settling a State, Settling for a State: Another Look at Missed Opportunities in Israel/Palestine'

Was the current catastrophe in the Middle East inevitable, or could it have been averted through a political agreement? Were there genuine political possibilities on the table before the seventh of October? And how have different actors—Jews, Arabs, and others—defined the idea of compromise?

This talk challenges the claim that Palestinian intransigence is the primary cause of the ongoing Nakba. It examines how both settlers and the colonized have ascribed meaning to political compromise for more than a century, and how these meanings have shifted—from the British Mandate period, through the establishment of the PLO, to the present genocide in Gaza. This political and intellectual history illuminates what compromise and intransigence mean under colonial conditions and opens new space for imagining a future of Arab–Jewish coexistence between the river and the sea.

The talk draws, among other sources, on the open-access essay: Eli Osheroff, “Settling a State; Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist-Arab Relation,” Palestine/Israel Review 1, no. 2 (2024): 363-391. (https://doi.org/10.5325/pir.1.2.0005)

Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist relations. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. In the academic years 2025-27, he is a Minerva Fellow at EUME, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany.