Category: Palestine Talks

Ilan Pappé: Disrupting the Narrative on Palestine (Palestine Talks Spring 2026 – 06/05)

Palestine Talks Spring 2026

Disrupting the Narrative on Palestine

Professor Ilan Pappé is the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and a senior fellow at the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies. He is also the chair of the board of the charity The Nakba Memorial Foundation.

Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa in 1954. He received his D. Phil from the University of Oxford in 1984. From 1984 to 2006, Pappé taught at the University of Haifa and moved to the UK in 2007 when he started working at the University of Exeter.

Pappé wrote 22 books to date, among them The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) and On Palestine (jointly with Noam Chomsky in 2010). His most recent books are The Ten Myths of Israel (2018), The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation (2019), A Historical Dictionary of Palestine (with Johnny Mansour 2021) and Our Vision for Liberation (with Ramzy Baroud 2022). His last book is  Israel on the Brink (2025).

 

Abstract of the lecture
This lecture will discuss the power of vocabularies and language in the struggle for freedom in Palestine. It will outline the challenges as well as the possible ways of dealing with them, when facing the media coverage and political attitude to Palestine in general and the Gaza genocide in particular.

 

This talk is organised by UGent Palestine Talks in collaboration with Eye on Palestine Festival (https://eyeonpalestine.be/)

 

Date: 06/05/2026

Time: 6pm to 8pm

Venue: Theaterzaal Viernulvier, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 23, 9000 Gent 

Contact: Lisa.Franke@UGent.be; Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be 



Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: The Expansions of Spaces of Killing and the Logic of Evisceration against Gazans (Palestine Talks Spring 2026 – 27/04)

Palestine Talks Spring 2026

The Expansions of Spaces of Killing and the Logic of Evisceration against Gazans

Prof. Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London)

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian – a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonial state’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is a Professor Extraordinarius – University of South Africa, the Global Chair in Law – Queen Mary University of London, and a visiting Professor at Princeton University.   

Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” (Cambridge University Press, 2010;  Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Cambridge University Press 2019);  co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume with Stephen Sheehi entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.

 

Abstract of the lecture
The talk will discuss overkill during the genocide in Gaza, not as excessive brutality but as a settler-colonial formation that organizes death as a totalizing condition of life. As a colonial technology, overkill operates through the systematic evisceration of the colonized sociopolitical body—its cohesion, interdependence, and capacity for regeneration. It subjects populations to continuous and routinized death, rendering human life, family, and community continuity not sacred but instrumental. Death itself becomes capital—extracted, weaponized, and circulated as both power and commodity. In this regime, the destruction of life and infrastructure is not collateral but constitutive: overkill transforms vitality into a means of accumulation and demonstration, a currency of colonial power that is tested, displayed, and sold to produce further capital for the settler state and its global enablers. The talk will conclude by arguing that speaking about the settler colonial regime of overkill centers the unending dispossession and slaughter of the starved, maimed, wounded, displaced, almost dead, and dead as an enfleshed state criminality.

 

This talk is organised by UGent Palestine Talks in collaboration with Eye on Palestine Festival (https://eyeonpalestine.be/)

 

Date: 27/04/2026

Time: 6pm to 8pm

Venue: Theaterzaal Viernulvier, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 23, 9000 Gent 

Contact: Lisa.Franke@UGent.be; Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be 





Ammar Kandeel: Archival Rationality of Palestinian Graphic Narratives before and after the Genocide (Palestine Talks Spring 2026 – 10/03)

Palestine Talks Spring 2026

Archival Rationality of Palestinian Graphic Narratives before and after the Genocide

Dr. Ammar Kandeel (2025/26 EUME Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien)

Ammar Kandeel is a EUME Fellow during the academic year 2025/26 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and an associate member of the Institute of Study and Research on the Arab and Muslim Worlds (IREMAM) at Aix-Marseille University. His research focuses on the creative strategies of countering testimonial/epistemic injustices by Palestinian literature and arts on a transnational level.

 

Abstract of the lecture
This talk explores the documentary role of comics and graphics within a transnational cultural landscape through the idea of archival rationality. While this medium has demonstrated abundant use of written and visual documents in addition to oral testimonies since Joe Sacco’s Palestine, the sociopolitical function of this documentary fever has not yet been sufficiently questioned. By situating them into the modern history of massive destruction of Palestinian cultural capital, before and after Gaza, the talk builds upon the concept of “archival arts” to reflect on the potential of this medium to create social spaces of the material traces of Palestinian lives.

 

Date: 10/03/2026

Time: 4pm to 6pm

Venue: Auditorium C, T2, Campus Ufo, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000, Gent

Contact: Lisa.Franke@UGent.be; Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be 






Hanan Toukan: The Thorn in Germany’s Side: Palestinian Archives and the (il)Logic of Dehumanization (Palestine Talks Autumn 2025 – 02 /12)

Palestine Talks Autumn 2025

The Thorn in Germany’s Side: Palestinian Archives and the (il) Logic of Dehumanization.

Prof. Hanan Toukan  (Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, Bard College Berlin (on leave) and Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, American University of Beirut Mediterraneo.)
 

Date: 02/12/2025

Time: 4pm to 6pm

Venue: Auditorium B, Technicum

Contact : Lisa.Franke@UGent.be; Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be

Selma Dabbagh, Mahmoud Nabil Ahmed and Frank Barat: A conversation about “A State of Passion” (Palestine Talks Autumn 2025 – 3/11)

Palestine Talks Autumn 2025

A State of Passion

Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi

Screening of documentary “A State of Passion” in the framework of the of Palestine Cinema Days organised by the Filmlab Palestine in collaboration with UGent Palestine Talks.

a feature-length documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi.

A State of Passion is a feature-length documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. After 43 harrowing days working under relentless bombardment in Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah emerged as a symbol of Palestinian resistance.

The screening will be accompanied by a conversation with writer and lawyer Selma Dabbagh, film director Mahmoud Nabil Ahmed and producer Frank Barat.

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Her debut novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011) set between Gaza, London and the Gulf was listed as a best book on Israel/Palestine by the Guardian in 2024. Her fiction includes short stories, radio plays for BBC and WDR in Germany as well as productions for stage (Asmahan, Sadlers Wells, 2025) and screen (collaboration on the script of Palestine 1936). She is the editor of We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi, 2021). Since October 2023 she has been writing regular blogs for the London Review of Books and has also written for PORT, INQUE, The Guardian and The Observer. A new short story Katamon will be coming published in the collection Palestine -1 (Comma Press, 2025). Selma holds an LLM in Law from SOAS and a PhD from Goldsmiths, both University of London.

Mahmoud Nabil Ahmed is a Palestinian filmmaker from Gaza, now based in Belgium. He studied directing at ISAMM and film editing at ESAC in Tunisia, where he began shaping a visual language built on stillness, memory, and the quiet details of everyday life. His short films The War Inside Us and Matchstick explore fragile moments of endurance and connection. In 2024, he directed Gazan Tales, a documentary that lingers on everyday life in Gaza — gestures, sounds, and routines that reveal how people keep living, even when everything else falls apart.

Frank Barat is a film producer, journalist and author. He has worked on books with Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Ilan Pappé, Ken Loach, Vijay Prashad and Marc Lamont Hill. He is executive producer on Annemarie Jacir’s “Palestine 36” and Kaouther Ben Hania “The Voice of Hind Rajab”. He is part of the production team of the Together for Palestine concerts, including in Brussels, Paris and London.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a Palestinian filmmaker, now resident researcher at School of Arts (KASK) in Gent, Belgium. He is co-founder of the Ramallah-based production company Idioms Film, the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, and a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute. His first feature film, Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016), premiered at major international festivals.

 

Date: 03/11/2025

Time: 08.30pm

Venue: KASK Cinema – School of Arts Ghent, Louis Pasteurlaan 2, 9000 Gent

Free entrance – Reservation required

 

This event is co-organised by Palestine Talks, CAIMES, MENARG, KASK Cinema, and Palestine Cinema Days.

 

Shir Hever: A Political Economy of the Genocide in Gaza: The Case for Military Embargo (Palestine Talks Spring 2025 – 25/04)

Palestine Talks Spring 2025

A Political Economy of the Genocide in Gaza: The Case for Military Embargo

Dr. Shir Hever studies the economic aspects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory. He is the manager of the Alliance for Justice between Israelis an Palestinians (BIP), and the military embargo coordinator for the Boycott National committee (BDS)

 

Date: 25/04/2025

Time: 1pm to 3pm

Venue: Auditorium C – “Hein Picard” Campus Tweekerken, Hoveniersberg 24, 9000 Gent

Contact: Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be; Lisa.Franke@UGent.be

Refqa Abu-Remaileh: The Parallel Geographies of Palestinian Literary History (Palestine Talks Spring 2025 – 24/04)

Palestine Talks Spring 2025

The Parallel Geographies of Palestinian Literary History

Prof Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin)

Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As Principal Investigator, she led the European Research Council project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) and creator of the Arabic-language podcast Balad min Kalam: Conversations on Palestinian Literature available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20thcentury, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history.

 

 

Date: 24/04/2025

Time: 4pm to 6pm

Venue: Auditorium G, Technicum blok 2, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent

Contact: Islam.Dayeh@UGent.be; Lisa.Franke@UGent.be