Ussama Makdisi was recently in Berlin where he gave an interview to members of the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics (PJA).
To mark 77 years since the Nakba—Arabic for “catastrophe”—which refers to the mass displacement, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, PJA spoke with Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History, Chancellor’s Chair, and May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies at the University of California Berkeley, about his recent book Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. In this timely and important work, Makdisi sheds light on a little-known and often overlooked history of the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire—one in which coexistence among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was not only possible, but central to the social fabric of the region. Challenging dominant historiographies that portray these communities as inevitably sectarian and divided, Makdisi traces the contours of an age shaped by religious pluralism. In doing so, he disrupts the dominant narratives and reveals how colonial interventions—manifested in the rise of Zionism—played a pivotal role in unraveling this coexistence and laying the groundwork for the Nakba.
Today, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives and displaced millions, Makdisi’s work takes on a profound new resonance. The Nakba is not a closed chapter but an ongoing reality, its violence escalating under a settler-colonial regime. This conversation is a call to reimagining solidarity and collective struggle. If history shows that coexistence was once a lived reality, then a future beyond colonial Zionism—one rooted in equality and collective liberation—is not only possible but imperative. Speaking with Makdisi in Berlin, we asked ourselves what this means in a German context in which Palestinians and Jews are pitted against each other as natural enemies based on distorted historical narratives of both Europe and the Middle East. Makdisi’s work reminds us that the struggle for Palestine is a collective effort to both combat fascism and reclaim that ecumenical vision, dismantling the structures of oppression and apartheid.
PJA: In your latest book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, you address the historical reality of coexistence before the Nakba that seems to go against the hegemonic narrative of sectarianism in Palestine and in the broader Mashriq. Could you elaborate on this?
UM: There’s a long, underappreciated history of coexistence in the Mashriq, the eastern part of the Arab world. Within the region, this history is often either romanticized or dismissed, while in the West, it is often either entirely unknown or orientalized. In other words, people look at the Mashriq and see only sectarianism, or differences across and between sects, or they reduce its history to a simplistic Muslim oppression of minorities, often reflected in the misleading narrative of “dhimmitude” based on a totally ahistorical notion of the status of non-Muslims, primarily Christians and Jews, under Islamic rule. There is a vague idea that medieval texts somehow shaped how people lived their lives. The result is a flattening of extraordinarily rich, diverse, pluralistic, lived experiences of different societies, groups, peoples, individuals, into monoliths such as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Sunni and Shiite, depending on what we’re talking about.
In other words, there’s a profound history of coexistence that stretches back over millennia that varies across cities, locations, villages, quarters, depending on which year, decade, or century we’re talking about. So there isn’t one form of coexistence, but rather a dynamic history of coexistence. The tendency to overlook, or minimize, or devalue this history is the result of modern, as in post-WWI, propaganda and histories that encourage us to think of ourselves only in sectarian terms. Thus, we think of diversity in the Mashriq as synonymous with religious or sectarian differences. We don’t appreciate the fact that within each of these communities, there were different kinds of Muslims and Christians and Jews. In other words, there is a wide range of thought and lived experience that cannot be simply reduced to one-dimensional sectarianism or nationalism.
PJA: Apropos such a rethinking, you position 1860, the year of the massacre of Christians in Damascus, as a major turning point in ecumenical history. What happened and what role did this play in fostering an ecumenical framework that offers valuable lessons for the present? And what is the difference also between this ecumenical frame and a secular context today?
UM: So first, the reason I chose the word “ecumenical” is because it’s used both in Christian and Islamic traditions. “Ecumenical” explains that we can have and acknowledge religious and sectarian differences, such as Sunni and Shia, Maronite and Protestant in the Arab East. And then we can transcend these differences in a shared collective, community, city, nation or any overarching sense of being and belonging. We acknowledge each other’s festivities, holidays, and traditions. This is very different from secularism, especially the French Laïcité, which is basically in opposition to religion. There is a well-known critique of secularism, namely that it derives primarily from Europe and responds to European history, European theorizations, and European experiences, especially the French Revolution, which is not the history of the Middle East. So let’s not fall into this trap of secular versus religious, because that’s not really what ultimately divides people in the region. The real differences in the modern period concern colonialism: how people adapt to, submit to, or resist colonialism. That’s really a much more powerful part of modern Middle Eastern history.
Secondly, regarding 1860, I discuss a massacre that took place in Damascus for many reasons that I will not delve into now. But there was a massacre, and it was significant. There were hundreds of Christians killed in this massacre in Damascus in 1860, as well as in a war that preceded the massacres in Mount Lebanon between the Maronites and Druze. The point is that we have sensationalized this history and looked at it in isolation from the rest of the world. We need to understand it, explore it, and come to terms with it as historians, especially as people from the region who care about it and who must not engage in denial. On the other hand, we also need to acknowledge that after this massacre there were all sorts of people condemning it and asking how to make sure that these kinds of events never happened again.
In other words, some people took the lesson of 1860 as a denial of coexistence. They took it to say that we are, in fact, opposed along sectarian lines: Muslims can’t live with Christians, and Christians can’t live with Muslims, for example. Jews weren’t attacked at all in 1860 in Damascus whatsoever, which is an interesting facet of the story. But the point is that many other people took a different perspective, affirming that we actually could live together, that we are one people. They decided that the way to make sure that such violence didn’t happen again was to commit to new forms of education, especially new forms of ecumenical education. As a result, famous schools were opened after 1860 by Christian and Muslim Arabs committed to the idea of belonging to a national polity. They saw themselves as members of one community and sought to educate people to respect other religions, but also to transcend them into a national Syrian or Ottoman commonality. It wasn’t that there was a massacre and that was the end of everything. The massacre had its underlying sociological, economic, and political causes. But in the end, people reacted to this by saying that this is absolutely not who we are. Nor are we going to be shaped by this event, except in the sense that we’re going to be doubly conscious to make sure that we don’t repeat these kinds of things via a commitment to educating our children for a common future. And that’s what happened. The remarkable thing is that there were no other Christian massacres after 1860 in Damascus.
PJA: But there was a different reaction to the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941.
UM: Yes, there was also a different reaction to the Adana massacres of the Armenians in 1909. The point is that 1860 was an exception to the rule of coexistence. And yet, it’s been orientalized into the essence of who people are in the Middle East. The irony is that it was exactly the opposite: it was the exception to the rule. Not only that, but it was a catalyst for an extraordinary modern culture of national coexistence based on the idea of equal citizenship. That’s the difference between post-1860 and pre-1860. After 1860, there was a redoubled effort to figure out communal identities as Syrians, Arabs, and Ottomans in the Mashriq, while embracing conscious coexistence as equal citizens. The difference between the massacre of 1941 in Iraq, or the massacres of Armenians that took place in Adana in 1909, as well as the Armenian genocide later during WWI, is the fact that those were major ruptures. And the question is why one set of massacres, that of 1860, was a catalyst for a culture of coexistence. Why, on the other hand, did these other instances lead to the complete fraying apart of very long histories of coexistence? It is very clear that in the Arab or the Syrian case, there was no ethno-religious nationalism and rather a common ecumenical form of national belonging. Whereas Zionism, supported as it was by British colonialism in Palestine, was a settler colonial movement dedicated to transforming multi-religious Palestine into an exclusively nationalist Jewish state; Ottoman-Turkish nationalism in the case of the Armenian massacres and then genocide, was also an indication of the final breakdown of a long history of Ottoman pluralism and the dawn of a different, and far more sinister and ruthless nationalist approach to dealing with difference in an age of Western imperialism.
PJA: You also touch on this attitude to difference in relation to Zionism. In your book you make the point that Zionism doesn’t emerge from the social fabric or the reality, the lived experience, or the history of the Mashriq, nor from the history of coexistence. Could you talk about this a bit more?
UM: Right, it was exactly the opposite. Zionism emerged out of a European history that has no relationship whatsoever to the dynamics, the history, and the culture of the region of the Arab Mashriq – it’s completely antithetical to it. It’s antithetical to the Arab-Jewish histories in the region as well as to Christian, Muslim, and Arab belonging to it. It’s antithetical to all these things because it didn’t emerge in dialogue with or in response to the history of the Mashriq. It emerged in Europe as a response to European antisemitism and European nationalism. It thus proposed a European nationalist solution. Where? Overseas. How? Through colonialism. Zionists thought about other places, but ultimately they settled in 1897 on Palestine for obvious historical, metaphorical, and religious reasons. But at the end of the day, the leaders and theorists of Zionism were almost all European Ashkenazi Jews who were responding to and thinking through how to deal with this question of antisemitism and then resolve it overseas.
PJA: There is an ongoing debate in academic spaces, in Germany and beyond, defending certain types of Zionism, like cultural or liberal Zionism. Do you think your research sheds any light on this?
UM: First of all, anyone who tells you this in the context of the genocide of Gaza is probably engaged in either denial or distraction. Yes, of course, there have been multiple forms of Zionism. Remember that Zionism doesn’t represent Judaism. It emerged at a very specific moment in middle to late 19th century Europe and it didn’t have hegemony among Jews generally, because Jews are diverse, just like everyone else. Anyone conflating Judaism and Zionism is in denial of the pluralism of Jewish history, which is much richer than Zionism. The reality is that in the end Zionism is a national project. At first, it was a fantasy in the sense that it was rooted in the question of imagining a Jewish state in different lands, spaces, and societies.
Once it was brought into politics and into Palestine, starting with British colonial support—in other words, the Balfour Declaration in 1917—it moved from fantasy to colonial practice. And ultimately, this colonial practice was inherently and explicitly coercive vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Hence, there may be many forms of Zionism, as theory, as abstraction, as fantasy, but the reality for Palestinians is that there is one principal form of Zionism, as Edward Said put it decades ago: “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.” In other words, Zionism in practice then became the ideology of the state of Israel, which itself is profoundly and inherently anti-Palestinian at every level: ideologically, politically, militarily, culturally, socially. The reality is that there is one form of Zionism that matters today, and that’s the hegemonic form.
To give an analogy from the US, imperfect as this might be, you cannot talk about the white culture in the U.S. south during the era of slavery or Jim Crow segregation without acknowledging how it relates to Black Americans. The same can be said about virtually every other form of hegemonic nationalism vis-à-vis various minorities in these nationalist spaces. European nationalism in the late 19th century in places like Russia, Poland, Germany, or Austria, for example, went hand in hand with the rise of nationalist European antisemitism.
PJA: Perhaps another way to think through interrelated contexts is that the 1920s and 30s were a time of the material intensification of both Zionism and fascism. How does this relate to our present moment?
UM: There are many scholars who have written about the dialectical relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. Zionism emerged in response to antisemitism. Yet it also tried to disprove antisemitism by saying, “we also are like you, Europeans, we belong like you to this idea of “civilized” Europe. But we’ll become like you outside of Europe,” which is more or less what Theodor Herzl suggested. The whole Zionist project is ultimately one of allegedly modern civilizers in an allegedly backward, primitive part of the world. Zionism as a political and colonial project is a coercive endeavor based on denying, ignoring, and imposing itself on the indigenous population. This is why the Zionists in the Mandate of Palestine required British colonial control to suppress the Palestinians. That’s why Zionists like Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement in Palestine wrote a letter to Arthur Balfour (of the Balfour Declaration infamy) in 1918 in which he explicitly underlined that democracy is not an option in British-occupied Palestine. His point was that we can’t have democracy in Palestine because he said, if I remember correctly, that “the brutal numbers operate against us.” In other words, the vast majority of the population of Palestine was Palestinian. It was thus impossible to have democracy, because with it, the Palestinians would have remained the vast majority of the population, and thus the Zionists wouldn’t have been able to create a sovereign state. Therefore, there was a move to suppress the natives and suppress democracy. When you suppress democracy, you suppress people’s will. You suppress democratic representation and you coerce them into what sounds to me like, well, colonialism. Even more than just fascism, it’s colonialism. That’s really what Zionism in Palestine shares with virtually every other settler colonial movement. They’re all based on the negation and denial of the indigenous population.
I think the connection to fascism is much more a contemporary issue in the sense that the Israeli state, political parties, and political discourse vis-à-vis the Palestinians are now not just openly contemptuous of Palestinian life, presents, and futures, but actually genocidal as we see in Gaza. And so you have Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party, translated as ‘“Jewish Power”. And you have people like Bezalel Smotrich and Benjamin Netanyahu who say the most appalling things about Palestinians, which are, to me and decent people around the world, totally unacceptable. And yet most politicians in the official West (and Germany in particular) go along with it. The alliance between the Zionist Israeli right and the fascist right in Europe or the racist ultra-right in Europe and the United States is manifest today. The irony is that the alliance between these actors is based on supporting ethno-religious nationalism.
The Jewish-American journalist Peter Beinart has a new book called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Peter used to be very much a liberal Zionist, but he’s shifted over time. Now he’s appalled by what the state of Israel has become. In his book, he says that he is filled with sorrow at his realization that many supporters of Zionism he knows believe in the idea of a Jewish state even as it dominates and subjugates millions of non-Jewish Palestinians. He believes in an ethical practice of Judaism that entails liberation for Palestinians. Peter is an ethical person, someone who takes his faith very seriously. He goes on to say that not only is this state of oppression profoundly unjust to Palestinians, but it’s injurious to the idea of an ethical community. He asks what it means to be complicit in the obliteration of people, or to be associated with a state that has annihilated an entire society in Gaza. What about the destruction of every university and hospital, the killing of children, the deliberate starvation of millions of people? It’s absolutely shocking. It’s so disgraceful. It’s such a depravity. I think his target audience with this book is fellow Jewish Americans who are dealing with Zionism. He’s not writing to or for Palestinians. He’s speaking to a Jewish audience unsure how to react to the aftermath of October 7th and trying to tell them that those continuing to support Israel are ultimately becoming what he describes as tribal nationalists. He warns that they’re supporting tribal nationalism, even in countries where they’re not the dominant tribe, as in the United States or in Europe.
Beinart’s ethical call takes place in the context of a thriving Jewish community in the United States which has prospered within conditions of a secular state where everyone is supposed to be an equal citizen, irrespective of their religion and despite the long history of structural and pervasive racism in the US. American Jewish communities, in other words, have thrived in a state that is legally and ideologically a contrast to the explicitly discriminatory ethno-nationalist state of Israel. In this context, it is clear to Beinart (and to me) that the growing number of fascists and supremacists who hate Muslims, Arabs, Black and Latinx Americans, and non-white immigrants, also hate Jews. Beinart says that it is wishful thinking to believe otherwise. In other words, his whole argument is that if you ally yourself with fascists, don’t think that’s going to protect you from the fascists. When they get rid of the Palestinians and the rest of the low-hanging fruit such as visa holders, dissident students, and those who support Palestine, they’re going to go after others. Because these people are ultimately ethno-nationalists.
PJA: Fascism and Zionism are so interconnected, does that mean they are contingent on each other?
UM: Yes, but I think that as a scholar, as a historian, you have to also understand that Zionism also had a very strong alliance with liberalism long before fascism. I think we tend to obscure that fact today. People like Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, amongst other liberal politicians after WWII, was very enthusiastically in favor of the idea of Zionism. In other words, the “restoration” of the Jewish people to Palestine was a notion beloved of many liberal figures in the West. So it wasn’t just fascists who have supported the anti-Palestinian State of Israel. In other words, Zionism does have this liberal genealogy as well. This is extremely important because that is what gives people in Germany, from what I understand of the German case, the idea that they have to support Zionism to be opposed to fascism. But the history of liberal Zionism is also based ultimately on the negation of and extraordinary systemic violence towards Palestinians.
Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics 