Against Exclusion: Palestinian Citizens in Israel and the Struggle for a Shared Moral and Political Future

How can citizenship function as a site of resistance within a settler-colonial state that was never intended to fully include those it governs?

In the Wertheim Lecture 2026, sociologist Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury explores how Palestinian citizens in Israel have used their settler colonial citizenship in generative ways inside a settler-colonial state that was never meant to fully include them. After 1948, Israel granted citizenship to Palestinians who remained not as an act of equality, but as a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession and control over land, population, and political life. Over time, however, Palestinians in Israel have turned this limited and hierarchized citizenship into a tool of anti-colonial political struggle.

Through voting, legal action, grassroots organizing, and public protest, Palestinian citizens have demanded visibility, resources, and political rights, while directly challenging Israel’s definition as an exclusive Jewish state. Their political activism and agency, despite ongoing repression and socio-politicide – sustained sociopolitical destruction – demonstrates that even a deeply compromised form of citizenship can be repurposed to resist settler-colonial rule.

This Wertheim Lecture highlights Palestinian political agency in a context where elimination was “incomplete.” It shows how Palestinians in Israel articulate a forward-looking political vision that challenges Zionism and calls instead for a shared decolonized political future grounded in the dismantling of Jewish supremacy, historical accountability, and justice for both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.

About Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor) in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research spans political and historical sociology, settler colonialism, Indigenous studies, and memory. She is the author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford University Press, 2023), a landmark sociological study based on extensive archival and field research, examining how everyday practices of settlement and land appropriation produced enduring structures of racialised hierarchy and domination.

Her work appears in leading journals including Sociological Theory, Politics & Society, Theory and Society, and Current Sociology. She is currently a Fellow of NIAS, has received numerous international fellowships and grants, and is actively involved in academic and civic initiatives supporting equality and Palestinian students in Israeli universities.

About the Wertheim Lecture

The Wertheim Lectures are an annual lecture series organised by the University of Amsterdam’s AISSR programme group Moving Matters: People, Goods, Power and Ideas, bringing leading international scholars to Amsterdam to reflect on questions of power, mobility, inequality, and social transformation. The Wertheim Lecture 2026 is organised in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).