Chibli Mallat, a professor of law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, will provide the opening presentation of the 2010-2011 Forum for Questioning Mind series at the Salt Lake City Main Library, 210 E. 400 South. Mallat’s presentation, titled “A Federal Israel-Palestine, Ending 100 Years of War?”, begins at 2:00 p.m. and runs until 3:30. It will be preceded by a meet-and-greet at 1:45 p.m. in the library’s Main Floor Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
In his discussion, Mallat asks, “What if we have been dead wrong in our search for peace in the Holy Land? What if we read what happened in Palestine-Israel in the past hundred or so years with the incorrect lens? What if we have been misdiagnosing the conflict and continue to do so? What if we saw it mostly as a West-East conflict of civilizations, or an Arab-Israeli conflict, instead of reading it as a civil war? What if we simply ignored our democratic, human rights values in the conflict of individuals and peoples over Palestine? And what happens if we reverse our reading, and seek a way for people to live together, with equal rights, over that small stretch of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, instead of seeking their separation and respective ethnic cleansing? And we substitute a federal Israel-Palestine to the two-state solutions deadlock?”
Questioning Minds is a non-profit, educational forum with 501(c)(3) status. Meetings are held on the second and fourth Sundays of each month, September through May, except major holiday weekends, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, fourth floor. Click here for coming events and speaker-suggested readings.