Bashir Bashir is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008). Amos Goldberg is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (2017). Elias Khoury is a literary critic and novelist whose books include Gate of the Sun. Jacqueline Rose is a professor of humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Rarely do scholarly collections attain the moral and political significance of The Holocaust and the Nakba. Bashir and Goldberg's essential volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of prominent thinkers to address one of the world's thorniest problems: how to think through the conflicting narratives of Israelis and Palestinians about their respective traumatic experiences. Without flinching but with considerable nuance, the editors and contributors confront the painful contradictions and ironies that define the relation between the Nazi genocide of European Jews and the Israeli expulsion and erasure of Palestinians from their homeland. Out of a frank grappling with these divergent but inextricable histories, this volume offers a crucial ethical and political vision of binational coexistence premised on decolonization and mutual recognition.--Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators The key to unlock the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hiding in the field of psycho-politics. This book offers the readers a new courageous reading for the painful traumatic rivalry that continues to mold the two national communities-the Holocaust and the Nakba. The remarkably insightful, yet challenging, arguments pursued by leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals and scholars in this volume bring a ray of hope during these gloomy times.--Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, author of The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes The Holocaust and the Nakba is an original and timely volume that sheds new light into our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By putting these two traumas together, it challenges what many would consider a blasphemous comparison and refutes any binary approaches to explaining one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century. It provides us with new modes of thinking needed for transcending the ongoing political impasse and building a true historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.--Leila Farsakh, author of Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation Of the many points of conflict in Israel-Palestine, none is as confounding as the intersecting claims of collective suffering. At once historical and normative, this landmark volume is the first to reprise the many ways in which the relationship between the Holocaust and Nakba have been imagined since the 1940s. The editors propose a bold, even revolutionary framework for relating these traumas that is a necessary provocation to entrenched patterns of memory.--A. Dirk Moses, author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past