Palestine is a Global Issue: Situating the Genocide and Beyond is an international conference that brings together scholars, activists, and practitioners to critically examine the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalating colonial violence across the West Bank within a broader historical, political, and global framework.

Over the last two years, these events have been widely understood not as isolated ruptures, but as the continuation of decades-long Israeli policies of settler colonialism, military domination, and systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people. As several scholars have argued, this moment may also signal a historical turning point — raising urgent questions about the future of Zionism and the structures sustaining Israeli settler colonialism. These processes are embedded in a long-term, intentional strategy of forced displacement and replacement, unfolding alongside forms of violence that often exceed existing legal and conceptual vocabularies.

This conference responds to the urgent need to confront not only the material devastation inflicted upon Palestine, but also the epistemic violence that accompanies it: the systematic erasure, silencing, and marginalisation of Palestinian knowledge, histories, and voices within academic, political, and cultural spaces. As language itself frequently fails to name the realities on the ground, this gathering seeks to critically interrogate dominant narratives and to expand the frameworks through which violence, resistance, and survival are understood.

Documenting and analysing the unprecedented levels of destruction and dispossession currently taking place is not merely a scholarly endeavour, but an ethical and political responsibility. This conference affirms the importance of bearing witness, asserting the right to narrate, and defending the right of the Palestinian people to exist — materially, historically, and epistemically.

Organised by the Observatory for Palestinian Studies (Iscte), and hosted at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, the conference will take place on 20–22 May 2026 and will be structured around three interconnected thematic areas:

• Connecting Palestine: Resistance(s), Transnational Solidarities, and Activism

• Reckoning Palestine: International Law, Justice, and Education

• Preserving Palestine: Politics of Memory, Heritage, and Erasure

By situating Palestine as a global issue, this conference aims to foster critical dialogue, transnational connections, and collective reflection on the political, ethical, and epistemic stakes of the present moment — and what lies beyond it.

More information about the programme soon.