Palestine is a Global Issue: Situating the Genocide and Beyond

Looking at the last two years in the land of Palestine, the Gaza genocide and the escalating colonial violence across the West Bank have been depicted as a continuation of decades-long Israeli policies and military strategies (Achcar, 2025), but also as a possible last chapter of Zionism and end of Israeli settler colonialism (Pappé, 2025). This is not happening in a vacuum, but it is part of a long-term intentional and systematic forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinian people (Albanese, 2024). And, in this current reality, the language we use to describe facts on the ground often fails us because, as Azeezah Kanji from the Yellowhead Institute writes in A Dictionary of Unnameable Violences: From Aerocide to Zygoticide in Palestine (2024), “there are no legal terms for many of the forms of violence inflicted by Israel on Palestine”.

This conference aims to underscore the urgent need to confront not only the material destruction but also epistemic erasure or, in other words, the silencing of Palestinian knowledge, voices, and histories, within academia and socio-political as well as cultural spaces. Israel’s epistemic violence has been perpetrated through different levels and in different fields, as an ongoing narrative of silencing and erasing the Palestinians as a people. We recognise that documenting the unprecedented violence and dispossession currently taking place, is not only a scholarly task, but an urgent and ethical one - one that bears witness and asserts the right to narrate and to exist.

In the last decade, Palestine Studies has opened new interdisciplinary avenues and comparative analyses to question the ongoing invisibilisation of the Palestine question in several domains, starting within academia. As a newly established Observatory for Palestine Studies and the first academic initiative of its kind in the European Union, in this conference we suggest that it is necessary to focus on three central thematic lines that are at the core of the current academic discourse as well as at the level of civil society. It will thus be structured as follows:

1. Connecting Palestine: Resistance(s), Transnational Solidarities, and Activism

2. Reckoning Palestine: International Law, Justice, and Education

3. Preserving Palestine: Politics of Memory, Heritage and Erasure