On Monday, Nov. 10, Professor of Israel Studies Dr. Lihi Ben Shitrit and Professor of History Dr. Arie Dubnov visited Swarthmore to speak on a panel titled “The Future of Israel.” The event kicked off a pair of lectures and will be followed by “The Future of Palestine” on Nov. 17. The panel was hosted by Swarthmore’s department of peace and conflict studies, moderated by Swarthmore Associate Professor of Religion and Department Chair Gwynn Kessler, and co-sponsored by several departments across the humanities and social sciences divisions and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
The event was impacted by ongoing tensions over violence in Gaza and protests on Swarthmore’s campus. College IDs were checked at the door by Public Safety (PubSafe) officers, a rare measure for events. Interim Director of Public Safety Colin Quinn told The Phoenix that PubSafe is occasionally asked to check IDs at events, and was requested for the “Future of Israel” lecture because it was intended for the campus community and not open to the public.
A fire alarm went off midway through the lecture, interrupting Dubnov’s lecture and forcing the audience to evacuate into Kohlberg Courtyard for a few minutes. According to Quinn, someone physically pulled an alarm in the building, but PubSafe was not yet able to identify who at the time of publication.
“Unfortunately, the fire alarm stole a few precious minutes from our important discussion, which is a pity … I think Swarthmore College students are lucky to have such a wonderful professor such as [Associate Professor and Peace and Conflict Studies Department Chair Sa’ed Atshan ’06] who is not only a brilliant scholar, but also a noble soul, bringing people together and creating platforms for such conversations,” Dubnov wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “I was sorry to see there are others trying desperately to silence and break down dialogue.”
The morning of the event, an email protesting the lecture was sent to Swarthmore students and signed by Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group banned from campus as of September 2025 following violations of the Student Code of Conduct during interim suspension after a sit-in. The email called the invitation “disgusting and shameful,” claiming Swarthmore’s invitation of scholars who have attended Israeli universities to campus amounts to “normalization” of oppression and manufacturing “consent for occupation and genocide.”
“Academics like Shitrit and Dubnov play a crucial role in the Zionist project, serving as ambassadors of ‘israeli’ culture and scholarship as part of the entity’s long-term campaign of normalization,” the email read. “Shitrit and Dubnov’s scholarship on ‘israeli’ history and identity attempt to reify the zionist lie that such things exist.”
Quinn said PubSafe was aware of the email but that it did not raise any safety concerns or impact the security measures at the event.
Despite the email’s accusations, the scholars spoke with a critical lens on the militarism of Israel’s government, Netanyahu and his far-right allies, and the erasure of Palestinian death in the media.
Dubnov — the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies, associate professor of history and international affairs, and director of the Middle East Program at George Washington University — presented a timeline of Israeli academic history, from commemorative veteran accounts to critical New Historian thought.
In her lecture, Ben Shitrit — director of the Taub Center for Israel Studies and the Henry Taub Professor of Israel Studies at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies — discussed the instability of and protests against the Israeli government, and called for attention towards Palestinian and Israeli grassroots activists.
Atshan gave the following statement to the Phoenix: “I routinely invite speakers to my classes and to campus who are experts in their fields so that our community can hear insights from a range of informed perspectives and experiences. At our panel last Monday, the speakers were principled and brilliant, and the students engaged them thoughtfully with sophisticated questions. The space was filled with open hearts and minds. I look forward to our next panel this Monday as well. Intellectual curiosity and rigor are at the core of a Swarthmore education.”
Dubnov, who researches the intellectual history of Jewish nationalism and the British mandate in Palestine, outlined the development of academic thought on Israel. The first wave he identified was post-independence commemorative veteran history, followed by the nostalgic re-emergence of Labor Zionism characterized by the dominance of “ahusalis” — a term coined by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling to describe the Ashkenazi, secular, socialist, and patriotic population that took a leading political and cultural role. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the “New Historians” pushed against dominant narratives of Israeli history, uncovering previously classified archives. In the 1990s backlash to this— called “the post-Oslo blues” by Dubnov— scholars worked to discredit the New Historians as post-modernists and push forward new standards for scholarship constraining narratives that criticized the nationalist mythology of Israel’s founding.
Part of the post-Oslo blues guides for history included emphasis on oral histories, but only from certain Israeli voices. Dubnov pointed out that many of the archives maintained by the Israeli government would become sole sources of information without alternative oral histories, which could lead to an asymmetrical and incomplete historical picture. Additionally, there are not as many Palestinian archived materials due to a lack of archival infrastructure and resources.
Dubnov drew a connection between the rejection of the validity of the oral history of Palestine and the ironic implications of what that would mean for Holocaust history.
“Of course, we need to be super critical of oral histories, and we need to take them with a grain of salt and so on. But to discredit any oral history at all, it means that 80% of Holocaust histories will go down the drain if we are able to reconstruct what happened only from German documents,” he said. “We will have a very thin understanding of what happened.”
Out of the New Historians wave, which Dubnov described as a fleeting moment that didn’t result in a coherent academic school of thought, emerged the Association for Israel Studies (AIS), a scholarly society “devoted to the academic and professional study of Israel,” according to their website. In 2019, AIS published a special issue titled “Word Crimes,” which, among other essays, declared the term “settler colonialism” should not be used against Israel. A number of scholars, including Dubnov, left AIS in protest of this issue.
“Academic discussion of Israel/Palestine is already, and inevitably, politicized. The field is characterized by deep engagement on the one hand, and deep disagreement and contentions on the other hand,” a 2019 letter in protest, signed by Dubnov, read. “This is what makes it so interesting, relevant, and worthwhile. However, for the discussion to be meaningful and scholarly, basic academic standards need to be maintained.”
Dubnov concluded his portion of the lecture by discussing other modes of recording and studying history, including entangled (exploring the interconnectedness of Palestinian and Israeli communities) and emotional (studying emotional intersections with history, such as the connection many Israelis and others feel to the development of Israel) history. He also discussed the concept of diasporic nationalism, where a diaspora maintains strong bonds and political loyalty to their homeland while forging a unique identity around the globe.
Dubnov said that, in many progressive circles, diaspora is wrongly seen as the polar opposite of Jewish nationalism.
“To believe in diaspora does not mean rejecting the homeland or being indifferent to what happens ‘there,’ in the homeland, or to say that American Jews in the U.S. are the only ones to capture the ‘true spirit’ of Judaism,” he explained in an email to the Phoenix following the event. “Similar dynamics can be observed within the Palestinian diaspora.”
He also pointed to tensions between diaspora and homeland, such as diasporic academics presenting narratives on behalf of those in the homeland.
“The voices that one hears coming from Nablus and Ramallah are not necessarily the same as the one that you hear from Columbia University. But we are more accustomed to listening to the latter rather than the former.”
Ben Shitrit’s lecture, which focused more on the complex politics of Israel, was divided into three sections: the recent history that shortly preceded the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the political context in the two years since, and what the future of Israel might look like.
Shitrit began by showing a graph of the domestic political leanings in Israel, with the two main groups simplified into Likud and right of the Likud (right-leaning, and against a territorial compromise with the Palestinians) and Labor and left of Labor (open to that compromise).
Overall, she showed, there has been a large shift in Israeli electoral support away from Labor and towards the Likud and centrist parties in the last several decades. She noted that there is also growing support for far-right parties. Across both Israelis and Palestinians, Ben Shitrit pointed to the consistent decline in public opinion for a two-state solution.
In the few years before Oct. 7, domestic political instability exploded in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently on trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust after being indicted in 2019. Between 2018 and 2022, there were five Israeli parliamentary elections as coalition groups lost their shaky majority status, and crucial members left. In 2021, Netanyahu was briefly unseated with a surprising coalition of left, center, far-right, and Arab members; it quickly disbanded because the only thing the group agreed on was their hatred of Netanyahu.
“You have hard-right Jewish parties, the Muslim Brothers, and the left together, and they all come together over one thing: they don’t like Netanyahu, and they want to unseat him,” Ben Shitrit said. “But of course, they don’t agree on anything.”
After the coalition against Netanyahu failed, in 2022, Israel elected what Ben Shitrit identified as “the furthest right government in Israeli history.” Following the election, in 2023, Netanyahu pursued what Ben Shitrit described as a “judicial coup,” trying to put Israel’s judicial branch under control of its executive branch (along with the legislative branch, already under executive control).
While parts of the move ended up being struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court, the attempted judicial coup led to the largest mass protest in Israel’s history. As Ben Shitrit pointed out, discussions of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories were largely on the margins of the protest movement, despite the powerful link between the erosion of democratic institutions and the cause of ending the occupation. The judicial coup would have made it easier for Israel to annex the West Bank, as Netanyahu’s far-right allies desire.
After outlining the political context, Ben Shitrit shifted to talking about the impact of Oct. 7. She described the constant rockets, missiles, and drone alarms and messages of threat shared by the Israeli government, and said civilians originally collectively rallied around retaliation against Hamas out of fear of additional attacks and for the return of the hostages. However, after the initial shock of the attack, political fractures and anti-Israeli government protests returned.
“A picture like this [Netanyahu’s face covered with a bloody handprint] over here in the United States, it would be considered a sign of antisemitism,” Ben Shitrit said. “In Israel, it was the families of the hostages and the people that were supporting them that were fighting and protesting against the Israeli government [saying] ‘We deserve better leaders, stop blowing up ceasefire deals’”
Despite the return of protests against Netanyahu, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the issue of the occupation was still not at the forefront. Additionally, dominant Israeli pro-government media, like Channel 14, attempted to erase or justify the loss of Palestinian life in Gaza.
Ben Shitrit shared an Israeli report that counted 250 calls for or supportive statements of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or war crimes on Channel 14, which she paralled to the incitement by Radio Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide.
Oct. 7 led to a continuation of the current Israeli government’s agenda through the creeping annexation, continuation of attempts at judicial reforms, and postponement of Netanyahu’s hearings, according to Ben Shitrit. Rather than hide calls for genocide, language pushing for it from Israeli leaders was openly published on X. The instillment of fear from Netanyahu of the world being against Israelis in pro-Palestine protests following the attack, Ben Shitrit said, helped the suppression of government protests.
Currently, there is a majority support — 80 to 90% — for the ceasefire reached in October 2025, which the majority considers to be beneficial to Israel, with many feeling it could and should have been reached earlier. However, approval for a two-state solution has declined even further since Oct. 7, and there is growing support for annexation, which Ben Shitrit describes as de jure apartheid on top of the de facto apartheid she said is happening. Netanyahu is likely to win reelection due to a slight advantage from the demographic majority of his supporters.
This report of the current state of Israeli politics brought Ben Shitrit to her overall takeaway: everything has changed, but the politics remain the same. She hopes to see international backing for the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the allegation of genocide, and growing international recognition of Palestine as a state. She also said she hopes to see international support for Palestinian and Israeli grassroots nonviolent peace efforts, and education for American Jewish communities about the harm the Israeli government is enacting on its own state.
“Hundreds of thousands of Israelis [are] saying, ‘Please save us: SOS,’” Ben Shitrit said, projecting a photo of a protest with a large SOS banner. “They’re not saying save us from Hamas. They’re not saying save us from Iran. They’re not saying save us from antisemitism. They’re saying save us from the Israeli government.”
