“Maybe we should start by admitting the truth” – 5in10 with Eli Osheroff
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist conflict. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Truman Institute, at the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University, and in the Dan David Society of Fellows at Tel Aviv University. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli’s articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Israel-Palestine Review, and other venues. In addition to his academic work, Eli is also a regular contributor to the Forum for Regional Thinking, a think tank of Israeli Middle East scholars seeking to understand Israel’s place in the region from a critical perspective. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?
My research asks how Arabs and Palestinians thought about the future of their country, and what place Jews—both settlers and indigenous—were supposed to have in that imagined future.
To answer this, I read Arabic sources of many kinds: archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and literature. After about ten years of research, I can say that, generally, over the past hundred years, Palestinian society—represented in my research through its intellectuals and politicians—took this question seriously and usually offered sincere, pragmatic, and peace-oriented answers. In other words, the idea that Jewish residents of Palestine should have equal citizenship in an independent Arab state was almost taken for granted. This tendency came both from the long historical memory of coexistence among different communities in the Mashriq (the Arab East) and from practical political reasoning. Palestinians who fought against colonialism and imperialism for decades wanted independence to live normal lives—“with a flag and a passport,” as people used to say in the 1970s and 1980s. Accepting a large Jewish minority in Palestine, whether through equal citizenship or later through acknowledging partition, was seen as a natural step toward achieving that goal.
2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?
In a broad sense, as a Jew and an Israeli, I always felt that some secret about the history of my own country was being hidden from me. Maybe that’s why I started learning Arabic in high school and continued at university. The deeper I studied, the more I realized there really was a secret, the Arab history of my country, and I wanted to uncover it.
More specifically, I remember having to choose a seminar topic for my master’s degree at the Hebrew University. I was browsing the history shelves (back when that was still common) and randomly picked up a thin book printed in Egypt in the 2000s titled The History of Palestine.
When I began reading it, I discovered it referred to the ancient Jewish rebels of the Second Temple period—the Maccabees—as Palestinian patriots fighting against the Greek Empire, which played the part of the foreign occupier. Later, I found out that the book had only been reprinted in Egypt, but it was actually the first Palestinian history book ever published, in 1923. I eventually wrote my MA thesis about such representations of Jewish history in early Palestinian historiography. That work led me to my current research.

3. What were formative encounters or challenges?
An important intellectual and professional challenge (besides writing, getting grants, and taking my younger son to school) is being a Jewish Israeli scholar who studies Palestinian and Arab history. It’s not a position that fits easily into today’s division of labor in academia and public discourse, where you’re often not expected to speak in the name of those you’re involved in oppressing. Still, my research deals with the Jewish and Zionist presence within Arab thought, so perhaps that tension becomes a kind of bridge. In any case, I can’t imagine really understanding the history of my own society and country without seriously studying Arabic texts and Palestinian history.
4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?
Maybe we should start by admitting the truth—the situation is difficult, confusing, and uncertain. Academia, like humanity, faces a collapse of meaning-structures caused by multiple crises—populism and authoritarianism are only symptoms, not the root problems. There’s the climate crisis; we experience reality through social media and live in an economy where resources are distributed extremely unequally; and meanwhile, people in Gaza and other places are being killed and starved every day by my society, with the active or silent approval of many governments around the world. In such a reality, the thought that artificial intelligence might soon make us scholars unnecessary feels like a shadow over an already cloudy day.
So what can we still do in the humanities? We should, I think, insist on our basic practices—to study, to observe, to discuss, to contemplate, to write—and protect our autonomy in doing so. That autonomy should include time for students to experiment intellectually for a few years, and academic freedom for researchers to ask questions and speak openly. I don’t know of any other institution besides the university where a person is allowed to focus deeply on a question simply because it’s interesting—even if its usefulness isn’t clear yet—and to have the time to find the answer. I believe we should defend this autonomy without apologizing for it. The ability to study, observe, think, contemplate, write, teach, and discuss should be seen as a right, one that should be expanded as widely as possible. These are not privileges, but practices unique to academia, even I dare to say way(s) of life, that are vital to healing a wounded world.
5. What book, article, film, exhibition, or song would you recommend, and why?
It’s almost a cliché, but since I spoke about a deep, multi-layered crisis, I can’t help recommending Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Its strength is that it offers a theory for the complex crisis we’re living through: social media, economic inequality, climate crisis, and a political system that condemns “superfluous” populations to death or endless suffering. It’s a book for those of us who feel horrified and paralyzed by these overlapping crises, but still want to understand and draw hope from a sober and empathic analysis.
Citation: “Maybe we should start by admitting the truth” – 5in10 with Eli Osheroff, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.12.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/63047
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (December 18, 2025). “Maybe we should start by admitting the truth” – 5in10 with Eli Osheroff. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15dkl


