2020 Hisham Sharabi Memorial Lecture – “From the Oslo Accords to BDS: Topography of Palestine’s Activism in the US”

with

Dr. Hatem Bazian, Co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College


 

In an online virtual delivery of the Hisham Sharabi Memorial Lecture, Dr. Hatem Bazian will chart the shift in American public opinion around Palestine. This shift is the result of an accumulative process that took shape during the 1980s and early 90s, and finds context in several successful national and transnational movements. As the PLO faced increased regional pressure in the post-Lebanese civil war and the end of the Cold War, the Palestinian diaspora successfully managed to reinvigorate the Palestine solidarity movement and stimulate a steady shift in public opinion. Palestinians in the U.S. also played a critical role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, Central American Solidarity Movement, anti-War mobilization, and national efforts to bring about racial and economic justice. Within this context, Dr. Bazian will discuss the pre-Oslo landscape of Palestine activism and the grassroots challenges resulting from the signing of the Accords that led up to the emergence of a diverse coalition on college campuses, and the birth of the BDS movement.

 

Biography of Speaker

Hatem Bazian is co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States. In addition, Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2002-2007, he also served as an adjunct professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Bazian helped co-found Students for Justice in Palestine on the Berkeley campus in 1992 and worked to promote it on a national level, and in 2005, Dr. Bazian co-founded American Muslims for Palestine. In 2009, Bazian founded at Berkeley the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the Center for Race and Gender, a research unit dedicated to the systematic study of Othering Islam and Muslims. In 2012 he launched the Islamophobia Studies Journal, which is published bi-annually through a collaborative effort between the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California at Berkeley, and several academic institutions.