Sponsored by:
UW-Madison Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
George L. Mosse Program in History
This talk examines how the public in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America perceived the post-World War II Palestine question and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The year 1948 marked the transformation of the world’s abiding interest in the region – an interest inspired by factors beyond actual events on the ground in Palestine/Israel. In Europe, sympathy for Holocaust survivors was laced with guilt for having perpetrated, abetted, or stood by while European Jewry perished by the millions. Antisemitism, however, continued to flourish, catalyzing both support for and opposition to a Jewish state. In South Asia and the Middle East, sympathy for Jewish refugees was also present, though it was overshadowed by fury over the constriction of Arab rights of self-determination, antisemitic fantasies about Jewish designs on the Arab world, and the traumatic impact of the partition of the subcontinent. In Latin America, as in Asia, anti-colonial sentiment shaped views on Palestine, but whereas in the latter anti-colonialism led to passionate support for the Palestinian cause, in the former Zionism was widely seen as an anti-colonial and progressive force.
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He has published a dozen books, including Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022); and Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. He is a past president of the American Society for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.