The Preventable: Israeli Fantasies and Techniques of Population Expulsion by Amira Hass

‘The Oslo process precipitated an internal compromise in Israel: between the urge to make Palestinians vanish and the realization that the geo-political circumstances do not permit a repetition of the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians. This compromise is best expressed in the systematic policy of creating Palestinian enclaves, which successive Israeli governments have meticulously pursued in tandem with the internationally sponsored negotiations process. The enclaves best exemplify the way in which Israel divorces the Palestinians and their very existence from land, history, space and movement – both mentally and physically. As Israeli politics loses its last traces of shame and sheds the final, tattered remains of its liberal pretensions, the danger of more audacious mass expulsions of the Palestinians from their land is growing.’ – Amira Hass.

Amira Hass will present the 2018 Edward W. Said London Lecture. Hass has been a correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1993. She lived in Gaza between 1993 to 1997 and, since then, in the town of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. She is the author of two books: Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (Metropolitan, 2000) and Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land (Semiotex, 2003).

The annual Edward W. Said London Lecture series is supported by The Mosaic Rooms/A. M. Qattan Foundation and London Review of Books. Find out more about the series and previous speakers here.