​On Thursday, 13 November 2025, the conference “Palestine and Europe: The Weight of the Past and Contemporary Dynamics” began in Paris. The event is organized by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Paris (CAREP). The event brings together a distinguished assembly of scholars and researchers representing universities across France, Europe, the United States, and the Arab world. The conference explores the historical and political dimensions of the relationship between Europe and Palestine and examines the role of European powers in shaping the Palestinian question and its contemporary transformations.

The opening session began with an address by CAREP Director Salam Kawakibi, who emphasized the importance of the conference, which deals with one of today’s central issues – the relationship between Europe and Palestine – with the participation of a distinguished group of scholars specialized in Arab–European relations from both Europe and the Arab world. He referred to the decision by the Collège de France administration to withdraw from hosting the conference, as well as to the far-right campaign that contributed to the decision. Kawakibi stressed that the conference is first and foremost a scholarly and academic event, and that the decision not only concerns Palestine, but also academic freedom and the right to think and debate without fear. He welcomed attendees and extended his gratitude to all those who contributed to organizing the conference, including researchers, professors, and students, as well as to those who signed statements in protest of the decision. Four major Middle East Studies associations – DAVO, BRISMES, SeSaMO, and MESA – issued a joint letter addressed to the President of the French Republic, the Minister of National Education and Youth, and the Chairman of the Collège de France condemning the decision, lamenting its implications for academic freedom, and calling for the conference to be convened as planned.

Professor Henry Laurens, Chair of Contemporary History of the Arab World at the Collège de France, delivered an opening lecture. He focused on the evolution of Palestine’s place in European imagination and politics, noting that its historical uniqueness stems from its status as the Holy Land and its centrality to the monotheistic religions. He explained that the Palestine question in the nineteenth century was, at its core, a question of holy places and the struggle among European powers to protect them. Laurens recounted how a dispute between monks in Bethlehem in 1846 over church keys and rights triggered a series of developments that culminated in the Crimean War. The establishment of the Sanjak of Jerusalem as a special administrative unit to oversee these holy sites, along with the concentration of financial and judicial administration there, gradually contributed to the emergence of a Palestinian identity centred on Jerusalem.

Laurens also discussed the “economic revolution” that took hold in Palestine with the expansion of citrus groves and the rise of Jaffa oranges as one of the main exports to Europe – the fruit of Arab farmers’ labour – before the organized waves of Jewish immigration began in the late nineteenth century under European consular protection. He noted that these migrations would not have been possible without such colonial cover, and that the Zionist movement understood from its inception that its project in Palestine depended on the backing of a major European power, within the context of imperial rivalry in the Arab region that which made every political change between the Mediterranean and the Indus part of a broader contest for influence among empires.

Azmi Bishara, General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, delivered an opening speech in which he explained that addressing the Palestine question requires returning to the nineteenth century, with the rise of European colonial interest in the Arab Mashreq, and that the European origins of the Zionist movement provide a natural entry point for this approach. Bishara discussed the early role of European Christian travellers, theologians, and geographers in “discovering”, mapping, and projecting a biblical imagination onto Palestine – in stark contrast to the near total absence of Jewish scholarly interest in Palestine prior to the emergence of Zionism. He pointed out that the “Jewish question” was a purely European issue, the product of modernity’s internal conflicts between policies of Jewish integration and nationalist, racist, and antisemitic currents that opposed equality.

He further explained that Zionism emerged in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), yet also as a negation of it – transforming Jews from religious communities into a “nation” seeking a state, through colonial projects. Bishara noted that opposition to Zionism initially arose within Jewish circles, and that Palestinians did not resist it on religious or “antisemitic” grounds, but rather as a settler-colonial project threatening their land and existence. He emphasized that the success of the Zionist project was a result of major European transformations such as the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration, and the Holocaust, and that it could not have been consolidated without the displacement of a large part of the Palestinian people. Bishara also observed that official Europe has largely accommodated the realities of settler colonialism and apartheid in Palestine, yet, at the same time, a new generation is emerging in Europe and the United States that embodies universal human rights values and rejects double standards in dealing with the Palestinian issue.

The two-day conference continues with eight sessions devoted to discussing the roots of the Zionist project in its European context, the role of the British Mandate in shaping the Palestinian national movement, and the evolution of European foreign policies towards the Palestinian question.