Nadim Rouhana

Nadim Rouhana has been a featured speaker at numerous controversial conferences, whose subjects have included the dissolution of Israel and Israel as an apartheid state.  

In his writing, Rouhana has characterized Israel as a colonizing state and has suggested that Jewish Israelis are all immigrants from Europe, while Palestinians are the country’s true indigenous people. 

Rouhana is a professor of International Affairs and Conflict Studies and is the director of the International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at Tufts University (Tufts).  

In March of 2012, Harvard hosted a highly controversial conference entitled “The One-State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution,” whose subject was the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state. 

Despite the university’s insistence that it was an entirely student-run initiative, not officially supported by the institution, several professors took leading roles in the planning and execution of the event. 

Rouhana was a featured speaker at the conference.  

In June 2009, York University held an event entitled “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace.”  

Because of the apparent biases held by the panel’s participants, the conference was condemned as one-sided and anti-Zionist. 

Rouhana was one of the speakers at the event.   

On September 2, 2007, Rouhana was featured as a speaker for Israel Apartheid Week at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).  

Rouhana also delivered a lecture entitled “The Holocaust and Psychological Dynamics of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict” at Northeastern University.  

In his lecture, Rouhana stated that “the Zionist movement, and later Israel, make every political [use] of the Jewish Holocaust to gain support for the Jewish State.” 

Rouhana was one of the authors of a petition, published by Electronic Intifada on November 29, 2007, entitled: “The One State Declaration.” 

The petition characterized Israel as “a colonizing state and military occupier” and called for the “Right of Return” for Palestinians.   

In an article published on May 29, 2009, Rouhana questioned the Jewish connection to Israel, claiming that the land “has been claimed by people who immigrated there and made exclusively Jewish.” 

Rouhana expounded on this claim in a chapter he contributed to the 2012 book, “Pretending Democracy: Israel, an Ethnocratic State.”

In the chapter, Rouhana stated that, “in the case of Israel and its Palestinian citizens, the state began as a settler-colonialist project in which settlers from outside – first from Europe – claimed the homeland as exclusively their own and, in a long and violent settlement project, managed to take over the land from the indigenous inhabitants.”  

In an article published in June of 2011, Rouhana accused Israel of settler colonialism and suggested that Israeli Jews were all European immigrants who forcefully displaced the true indigenous population.  

In the same article, Rouhana went on to accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and “Judaizing of time and space.” 

Rouhana also made this claim on a panel discussion, in which he argued that “establishing a Jewish State in Palestine inevitably entails uprooting the indigenous population. How else can immigrants establish an exclusive state for themselves in another people’s homeland?”