Reports Roundup (February 9)

Reports Roundup (February 9)

Reports Roundup (February 9)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following list is a compilation of the reports, statements, and other materials featured on the Jadaliyya Reports Page this past week.]

International Fact-Finding Mission on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugee Rights reports on the various ways in which the human rights of Palestinians have been violated by the existence of settlements. 

HRW Statement on Sweeping Injustices in Saudi Arabia Human Rights Watch reports on the recent crackdown on activists in Saudi Arabia and the need for judicial reforms. 

Month-by-Month Summary of Developments in Syria (Updated) International Crisis Group issues a monthly "Crisis Watch" report on Syria. These briefs are compiled here, showing the progression of the Syrian conflict.

This Is A Mass Sexual Assault... We Will Resist (Video) Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault highlights the attack on female protesters in Egypt`s Tahrir Square on 25 January 2013. 

Military Justice? Palestinians in Israeli Courts (Video) In this new project, the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia University hosts a series of panels with some of the world`s leading legal scholars on Palestine in order to promote innovative academic thought on legal questions related to Palestine.

Statement on 43 Bahraini Protesters Arrested Days After Calls for Dialogue The Bahrain Center for Human Rights expresses its concern over the excessive use of force used against protesters in Manama on 25 January 2013. 

UK Spyware in Bahrain: Company`s Denials Called Into Question Bahrain Watch reports on new evidence that contradicts British software company Gamma International`s claims that they did not sell their "lawful interception" computer spyware to the Bahraini government. 

National Students for Justice in Palestine Stands in Solidarity with Brooklyn College National Students for Justice in Palestine announces its support for the Brooklyn College Political Science Department in its con-sponsorship of an event discussing the boycott, divest, and sanctions campaign against Israel. 

HRW Report on Repression and Reform in Morocco and the Western Sahara In its World Report 2013, Human Rights Watch highlights the wait for improvements to the human rights situation in Morocco after the adoption of a progressive constitution last year. 

Pakistan: Countering Militancy in PATA International Crisis Group reports on the possibilities for stabilizing the Provinicially Administered Tribal Area in Pakistan, which has remained volatile after three years of efforts to oust Islamist insurgents. 

Email Exchange between Glenn Greenwald and Alan Dershowitz This exchange between writer Glenn Greenwald and Professor Alan Dershowitz occurred amidst a public campaign by certain politicians to pressure the Political Science Department at Brooklyn College to rescind its sponsorship of an event discussing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. 

Lawfare and Armed Conflict: Comparing Israeli and US Targeted Killing Policies and Challenges Against Them In this public lecture, Lisa Hajjar discusses both the legal rationales that have been used to justify targeted killing policies in Israel and the US and the challenges against those policies, thus depicting in a larger sense the modern relationship between law and war.

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