GREENFIELD — A renowned expert on the Middle East will visit western Massachusetts next week for a pair of speaking engagements to discuss the situation in Palestine and her new book.

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C., will speak at All Souls Church in Greenfield on Monday, April 7, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Tuesday, April 8, at 7 p.m. She is expected to focus her talk on the Gaza war and the United States’ role in it while also presenting her book, “Understanding Palestine and Israel,” which was published Feb. 25 by Palestinian-owned, Northampton-based Interlink Publishing.

The Israel-Hamas conflict has dominated international headlines since Oct. 7, 2023, when the militant group attacked Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people, but Bennis is quick to point out that the hostilities “didn’t start that day.”

“I start with the question of, ‘When do you start the clock in looking at Palestine?’” she said.

Bennis said examining the situation since October 2023 will paint a particular picture, while putting the region under a microscope since Israel’s blockade in 2007 offers a very different one. But picking the Six-Day War in 1967 as a starting point presents still a different perspective.

“It’s always dependent on when you start the clock,” she noted.

Bennis is coming to Greenfield at the invitation of the Traprock Center for Peace & Justice, Western Mass CODEPINK and other organizations. Admission is free and doors open at 6 p.m.

“[Bennis] is such a deep expert, but she is not an academic only. She really knows how to answer people’s concerns and questions, and she has knowledge that goes back 30 years and more,” said Anna Gyorgy, who serves on Traprock’s board of directors. “She’s an expert on the whole Middle East.”

The termination of British responsibility for the administration of Palestine created the state of Israel in its place on May 14, 1948. It was the result of Zionism, a political movement that is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and supports a Jewish homeland. This ideology received a huge endorsement in 1917 in the form of the Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government announcing support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people.” It gained momentum following the Holocaust, when approximately 6 million European Jews were killed by the Nazis, as many saw a Jewish state as a safeguard against future persecution.

Advocates of Zionism view it as a return of a people to their ancestral homeland. Jews lived on the land before and during the Roman Empire and throughout the rule of Islam from 637 until the end of World War I in 1917. But 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled for Israel’s creation in 1948.

Israel responded to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack with a large-scale ground invasion and at least 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that time. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2 million people have been displaced and the health care system has been badly affected, as hospitals often become the center of fighting. There is also a humanitarian crisis and famine in parts of Gaza because Israel blocked aid from entering in March.

Bennis said most young Gazans have lived every day of their lives trapped on a 141-square-mile strip of land, in a system many describe as apartheid. She said this does not justify the civilian deaths of Oct. 7, 2023, but “it explains things.”

Many who are critical of Israel or its actions are accused of antisemitism, or hatred of Jews, but Bennis said she is proud of her Jewish faith.

“I’m very much Jewish,” she said. “I’m not a Zionist.”

Bennis is an international adviser to Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization.

Some have a proposed resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution, or the creation of two states on the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine, a geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 under the terms of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine.

“I think the solution has to be based on international law, equality for all and human rights,” Bennis said. “I think what’s needed is an anti-apartheid movement. The problem is not the presence of Israelis — the problem is the system of apartheid.”

Bennis is also scheduled to speak at the Latchis Theatre at 50 Main St. in Brattleboro, Vermont, at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or
413-930-4120.