Even in the context of what Edward Said once called the Palestinian 'national inferno,' the 22-day war on the Gaza Strip in 2008-09 that Israel dubbed 'Cast Lead' produced arguably the most acute distillation of Palestinian existential vulnerability, collective and individual, since the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe, of dispossession in 1948.) This paper examines particular difficulties in Gazan narration of the war as a discrete event.

Discussion with visiting Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu.

Co-sponsored by the Alliance Program.

Ussama Makdisi, Rice University, is Arab American Educational Foundation Professor of History at Rice University. In April 2009 the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar for his contributions to enriching the country's discourse on Islam. His previous book, Artillery of Heaven, won the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize.

In this riveting account of U.S.-Arab relations, award-winning author Ussama Makdisi explores why Arabs once had a favorable view of America and why they no longer do. Firmly rejecting the spurious notion of a civilizational clash between Islam and the West, Makdisi instead demonstrates how an initial zealous American missionary crusade was transformed across the nineteenth-century into a leading American educational presence in the Arab world...