Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind
Live from South Africa, Dr. Haidar Eid joins us on Friday, March 21 for the 7th installment of the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan that includes a showing of the short film, Returning to Zarnouqa. As a leading Palestinian scholar at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Dr. Eid has been outspoken in advocating for liberation that is uncompromising on the Palestinian right to self-determination, return, and equality. This session draws from Dr. Eid’s recent book, Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (2025), an urgent and uncompromising call for Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, grounded in a fiery rejection of Orientalism and normalization, and a profound engagement with the South African experience. In the words of Ronnie Kasrils, South African anti-apartheid icon and former liberation fighter, “This book is an impassioned call for breaking down the constraints of the Oslo surrender—a strategy imposed from above that has led to a dead end and worse. It is said that dynamite comes in small packages. This book offers ideas that will make the earth shift within historic Palestine, the Middle East, and beyond.” In offering an insurgent counter-narrative, Dr. Eid speaks back to the empire in the grand tradition of deconstructing the oppressor’s narrative vis-a-vis Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. This seminar engages Dr. Eid in what this counter-narrative approach means for how we archive for liberation and return.
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association, Publishers for Palestine, Archives & Digital Media Lab, and Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide and the War on Lebanon project; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, we here, Interference Archive, and up//root.
Register here.