Present Absentees: Professor Joseph Massad

Address by Professor Joseph Massad at MEMO’s ‘Present Absentees: Palestinian Citizens of Israel & the Nation-State Law’ conference held in London on April 27, 2019.

A Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York, Massad is the author of many books and dozens of scholarly and journalistic articles including ‘The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians’, ‘Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan’, ‘Desiring Arabs’ and most recently ‘Islam in Liberalism’. Massad’s books and articles have been translated into scores of languages including Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian, among others.

PANEL: The travesty of Palestinians in Israel

Since Israel passed the Absentee Property Law in 1950, the term “present absentees” has beenused to describe the reality facing Palestinian citizens of Israel. Physically present but legally absent,Palestinian citizens of Israel have routinely been denied access to their ancestral villages, deprived ofthe right to family reunification and, in the case of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev, forcibly removedfrom their homes on the grounds that their villages are “unrecognised”.