Zionism, White Innocence and Islamophobia

Public talk by Dr Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (King’s College).

In 2013, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that ‘Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews’ and that the idea of the Final Solution was suggested to him by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem in mandatory Palestine. This talk examines the archaeology of this claim and situates it within a successful Zionist historiographical project to transfer the history of European antisemitism and the Holocaust onto Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims more broadly.

Dr Reza Zia-Ebrahimi joined the History Department at King’s College London in 2013. He is a graduate of the University of Geneva, the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford (St Antony's College).

Dr Zia-Ebrahimi is a historian of nationalism and race. Focusing on the period from the 19th century onwards, he has extensively worked on the development of racial forms of nationalism in Iran. His current research analyses the modalities of racialisation of Jews and Muslims in the Western apparatus of representations; and highlights the connection between conspiracy thinking and racism. More broadly, his work aims to retrieve the many points of contact between the histories of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racism, which have been ignored, or deliberately obscured.

Dr Zia-Ebrahimi has been a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Oslo Holocaust Centre, and the Leverhulme Trust. In recent years, he has given seminars in Britain, France, the United States, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Lebanon and Russia. 

Registration is not required, and the event is open to the public.