A talk with Leila Farsakh, Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, UMass Boston.
Introduced by Gil Anidjar, Professor and Chair of Department of Religion, Columbia University.

This talk re-examines the extent to which the struggle for a Palestinian state was a viable or futile effort for the Palestinian national movement and as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Do the notion of partition and the claim to a State constitute the only vehicles for any national group, be it Israelis or Palestinians, to have “the right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt argued? Can the quest for self-determination be protected otherwise, especially in view of present regional and International developments?