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Abstract

The systematic expulsions of Palestinians from Palestine/Israel, which have been ongoing since 1947, can be traced back to the European history of British colonialism and German National Socialism, among others. Yet the Palestinian experience of violence is excluded and tabooed from European collective memory and public discourse.

In her recently published Ph.D. thesis, Sarah El Bulbeisi explores the impact of this taboo on first and second-generation Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland and the traces it left on conceptions of the self and parent-child relationships. She shows how the traumatic experience of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine/Israel is continued in the Western European societies they live in.

Short Bio

Sarah El Bulbeisi joined the OIB in November 2019 after completing her PhD at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich, Germany. Before joining the OIB, she coordinated the DAAD project “Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany”, a Higher Education Dialogue between Palestinian and Lebanese universities as well as with the LMU Munich. Prior to that, she worked as a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the LMU Munich. Her PhD thesis “Taboo, Trauma and Identity: Subject Constructions of Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960 to 2015” draws on conversations, life stories and participant observation and explores the tension between the (family) histories of first and second generation Palestinians, which are characterized by the experience of expulsion and dispossession, and the reshaping of this experience in the Western European representation of the so called Middle East conflict.