CAF Letter to Egypt on the Detention of University of Washington Ph.D. student Walid Salem

CAF Letter to Egypt on the Detention of University of Washington Ph.D. student Walid Salem

CAF Letter to Egypt on the Detention of University of Washington Ph.D. student Walid Salem

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[This letter was published on the Committee for Academic Freedom's MESA page on 6 July 2018.]

Nabil Sadek
Office of the Public Prosecutor
Fax # +20.2.25774716

Prime Solicitor General Khaled Diauddin
Supreme State Security Prosecution in the Arab Republic of Egypt
Fax # +20.2.26381956

Dear Members of Supreme State Security Prosecution in the Arab Republic of Egypt:

We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America to express our concern regarding the arrest on 23 May 2018 of Waleed Khalil el-Sayed Salem, a University of Washington Ph.D. student who was conducting dissertation research in Cairo at that time and who remains in detention. In this regard, we wish to offer some background on his doctoral research.

MESA was founded in 1966 to support scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

Mr. Salem’s research examines how judges and lawyers in Egypt interact with each other and with other state offices. His research promises to contribute to our understanding of the way that judges and lawyers work as part of the legal system within the context of a particular state. This research will be of great interest to scholars of judiciaries in other countries. For scholars of comparative law, Egypt is the most important country in the Middle East, as it is the home of major innovators in Arab legal thought such as Abd al-Raziq al-Sanhuri, and its civil code has served as the model for many other Arab countries. Egypt has also developed an exceptionally rich tradition of jurisprudence, particularly through the decisions of its administrative courts and Supreme Constitutional Court.  The rulings of these courts are read widely and shape the development of judicial philosophy throughout the region.  

Mr. Salem’s research is based on interviews with judges and lawyers as well as coverage of their activities in the media and examination of relevant archives. Such methods are essential for a scholar to achieve an accurate understanding of how judges and lawyers behave. This work, particularly interviews, is a central part of most doctoral and post-doctoral research conducted in universities throughout the world.  Students in universities in the United States and Europe are encouraged to learn directly from the countries they study rather than rely on sources outside that country.  There is no motivation for Mr. Salem’s work other than conducting research of the highest accuracy and quality that will shed light on the development of the Egyptian judiciary.  

Mr. Salem is a young scholar, but he has already established a reputation among those who know him for the serious and scholarly nature of his work.

We hope that this information is helpful and we ask that you release Mr. Salem and allow him to continue his research that promises to make an important contribution to scholarship on comparative judicial systems.

Sincerely,

Judith E. Tucker
MESA President
Professor, Georgetown University

Amy W. Newhall
MESA Executive Director

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412