Professor em. Bichara Khader (UCLouvain, Founder of CERMAC) will deliver the lecture on “Palestine: Cemetery of international law” on November 21st, 2025 from 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m. Bichara Khader is Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and Founder of the Study and Research Centre on the Contemporary Arab World (CERMAC). He has been member of the Group of High Experts on European Foreign Policy and Common Security (European Commission) and Member of the Group of Wisemen on cultural dialogue in the Mediterranean (European Presidency). Currently he is visiting professor in various Arab and European universities. Bichara Khader was born in February 1944 in Zababdeh, a Palestinian village with a Christian majority located near Jenin. He arrived in Belgium in 1965 to pursue his university studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain). After graduating in political, economic and social sciences from UCLouvain, he joined The Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center (Bologna, Italy), then returned to UCLouvain for his PhD. He has published almost 30 books on the Arab World, the Euro-Arab, Euro-Mediterranean and the Euro-Palestinian relations. “Le Grand Maghreb et l’Europe, Enjeux et perspectives”, Publisud-Quorum, Paris, 1992; “Conflits et processus de paix au Proche-Orient”, Academia-Bruylant, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996; “Le partenariat euro-méditerranéen, après la Conférence de Barcelone”, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1997; “Le partenariat euro-méditerranéen vu du Sud”, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2001; “Le Monde Arabe expliqué à l’Europe”, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2009 (French and Spanish); “Les migrations dans les rapports euro-arabes et euro-méditerranéens”, L’Harmattan, 2011; “Le printemps arabe : un premier bilan”, Sylleps, 2012. The most recent books are:  “Palestine: Cimetière du droit international”, SAMSA, 2025; “Europe and the Arab World”, Zed Books, 2013 (English, Arabic, Spanish), “l’Europe pour la Méditerranée”, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2015 (French, Arabic and Spanish).  [read more]

For more than a century, a people has been stripped of its possessions, displaced, abandoned. While 80,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza since October 8th, 2023, colonization continues in the West Bank and the two-state solution is becoming more and more distant with each passing day. Europe watches… and does nothing. In this rigorous and accessible essay, Bichara Khader traces the origins of the Palestinian tragedy from 1897 to 2025. This is not yet another history of Palestine. It is a different way of looking at it, highlighting the structural asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians and its domino effect on the Middle East, the Mediterranean region, and Europe. The West bears a heavy historical responsibility for perpetuating this tragedy. The United States’ unwavering support for Israel and the EU’s diplomacy of window dressing and indifference have allowed the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation, rampant colonization in the West Bank, the destruction of Gaza, and ultimately the religious and supremacist drift of the State of Israel. It is in this sense that the Palestinian question reveals our moral bankruptcy.

The essay ends with a humanist reflection calling on Israelis and Palestinians to leave behind the ecology of suffering and hatred that obstructs the paths of the future, and to negotiate a reasonable solution to this conflict which cannot be resolved by the explosive formula «them or us».