Public lecture: Gaza as an epicentre - the breakdown of the international order

Tuesday 2 Jun 2026, 18:00 → 19:30 Europe/London

The Brighton Centre

Opening the #BISA2026 conference, this lecture will attempt to provide an explanation why the events in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 unsettled the international order. 

The events there in that period exposed the crisis of confidence in the non-western world towards the allegedly universal institutions, systems of justice and political guidelines established after the second world war. A crisis born out of the continued exceptionalism in the Western engagement with crises in the global south in general and in Palestine in particular. This is a two fold deep fracture that threatens civilisations all over the globe: the ever-growing gap between elites' agendas and concerns and that of their societies and the return of what Eric Hobsbawm called "the Age of Extremes" that in its previous cycle began with the age of catastrophe (1914-1945). As an epicentre, Gaza exposed this crisis, but also holds a certain promise for moving to a different age, as had been done before after ages of extremes and catastrophe, to an age Pappe would call "the age of sobering wisdom" and one of its multiple epicentres would be Gaza and Palestine.

Speaker

Professor Ilan Pappe is the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and a senior fellow at the University of Exeter's Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies. He is also the chair of the board of the charity The Nakba Memorial Foundation. 

Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa in 1954. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1984. From 1984 to 2006, Pappe taught at the University of Haifa and moved to the UK in 2007 to the University of Exeter UK.

Pappe has written 26 books to date, among them The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) and On Palestine (jointly with Noam Chomsky in 2010). His most recent books are The Ten Myths of Israel (2018), The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation (2019), Our Vision for Liberation (with Ramzy Baroud 2022) and Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic (2024). His latest book is Israel on the Brink (2025).
 

This public lecture is organised in partnership with the University of Brighton's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. 

If you are registered for the BISA conference you need to also register separately for this event due to limited space. For this reason we also recommend anyone wishing to attend registers as soon as possible.