After Humanitarianism

Title: After Humanitarianism

Abstract: In the ruins of Gaza lie not just the destruction of the post-war “International Order”, as many are arguing, but also, the exposure of fatal contradictions built into its very foundation. In this talk, I explore Israel’s genocidal war and consider how, in the face of all the slaughter and destruction live-streamed every day for over a year, there can remain any doubt about Israel’s “intentions.”

Bio: Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. Professor Abu El-Haj is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022).

Register here! You can find the list of previous and upcoming lectures on our website.

An enlightening and informative exchange with Peter Beinart was conducted by Assaf Kfoury on April 16th. Peter is a writer, a journalist, and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Assaf is a mathematician and professor of computer science at Boston University.
Much of the conversation centered on Peter’s review of his political trajectory over more than 25 years, from his editorship of the magazine The New Republic in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to his initial support followed by his later scathing criticism of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and later years, to his reconsideration of Zionism around the time his book The Crisis of Zionism was published in 2012, to his moving and prescient commentaries about the Palestinian “Great March of Return” in 2018-2019, and finally to his bearing witness to the horrors and atrocities to which Gaza has been subjected since October 2023. Throughout the conversation, Peter repeatedly remarked and warned against the ways in which Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation. Peter’s commentaries and views, especially those he has expressed since October 2023, are amplified in his most recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Materials from this lecture are available here.

This lecture is sponsored by the Bisan Center for Research and Development and Scientists for Palestine.

In light of the urgent need to assist the people of Gaza, who are currently experiencing immeasurable loss of life and widespread devastation, please read this humanitarian aid appeal from ANERA, forwarded to us by a friend of BLS, Dr. Sara Roy of Harvard University. Hoping to see many of you at this webinar, we send you our best regards. 

The Bisan Lecture Series Steering Committee

BLS Statement of purpose In concert with Scientists for Palestine and the Bisan Center for Research and Development, and in keeping with their joint commitment to full integration of Palestine in the global community of learning, the Bisan Lecture Series sponsors discourses on subjects of cultural, scientific, and societal importance by leading research experts and public intellectuals of varied heritage and viewpoint. The interactive webinars are free and open to the public, and recordings of each will be posted soon afterward.