The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on a very old story; so old that it became a myth. And since the distance between the Jewish present and the Jewish past was vast, the wish to make Palestine a home for a modern Jewish nation called for creating that nation anew. It was an immense claim that required an equally immense innovation. The lecture reexamines this well-known story by looking at some of the cultural innovations of Zionists - body culture, space, art, music - and considering their fraught legacy a century later.

Historians of the Middle East have extensively explored how imperial powers and international institutions during the interwar period used the idea of “minority rights and protection” to solidify their rule and influence over large parts of the region. Rather than focusing on the Eurocentric premises of this idea, the present lecture considers the role of Muslim anti-colonialists in challenging the utilization of the humanitarian discourse of protection by colonial powers.

Isaiah Berlin famously described the new state of Israel as the "last child of the European Risorgimento". This paper seeks to unpick that claim by exploring the relationship between the revolutions of 1848 and the foundation of the State of Israel exactly one hundred years later.