The episode foregrounds how imperial colonial intervention and nationalist projects curtailed alternative political futures. The podcast was recorded as part of the Fall 2025 seminar A History of Late Modern Palestine: Before and Beyond the Conflict (1840–1948). In the seminar, students explored political futures imagined for Palestine before 1948 that never materialized, including Ottoman decentralization, the Arab Kingdom of Syria, binational state proposals, communist projects, hopes for federalism under Kemalist Turkey, and the everyday struggles of the Palestinian trade union movement.