Bashir Bashir
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Bashir Bashir is a political theorist whose work explores nationalism, decolonization, historical reconciliation, and the politics of memory in Israel/Palestine. As Associate Professor at the Open University of Israel and Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, he examines how competing histories, collective trauma, and questions of justice shape possibilities for democratic coexistence.
His recent research develops the concept of egalitarian binationalism as a framework for rethinking political community beyond partition, grounded in principles of equality, mutual legitimacy, and shared historical responsibility.
Bashir is the co-editor of the influential volumes The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018) and The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2020). His publications on democratic theory, citizenship, historical injustice, decolonization, and the ethics of memory have shaped international debates and have appeared in English, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese.
During the 2024–25 academic year, Bashir was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he further developed his research on egalitarian binationalism and transformative political futures for Israel/Palestine. His work continues to bridge political theory, memory studies, and decolonial thought, advancing new approaches to coexistence, historical justice, and collective remembrance.