The recording of our book talk with Louis Fishman and Rashid Khalidi about Fishman’s recent publication, Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era 1908-1914, Claiming the Homeland is available now on our Youtube Channel!
Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.
Louis Fishman is an associate professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University