Declaration of Municipal Elections Boycott by Group of Saudi Writers and Intellectuals

[Provinces of Saudi Arabia. Image from mena-electionguide.org] [Provinces of Saudi Arabia. Image from mena-electionguide.org]

Declaration of Municipal Elections Boycott by Group of Saudi Writers and Intellectuals

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was recently released in Arabic by a group of Saudi writers and intellectuals in regards to the upcoming municipal elections in the Kingdom. The Saudi Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs announced on March 22, 2011, that municipal elections would be held on September 22, 2011. Translation by Ziad Abu-Rish. The Arabic version of the statement can be found here.]

Announcement of Boycott of the Saudi Municipal Elections

After the experience of the 2005 municipal elections and the postponement--without explanation--of the elections that were supposed to be held in 2009, it was announced that municipal elections would be held by the end of this year in its same old mold without any additions or changes and without addressing the negatives of the first experience.

In light of the previous [electoral] experience and its attendant deficiencies in the work of the municipal councils, and in the shadow of the historic transformations the region is witnessing in the direction of increased democratic practices and popular participation in decision-making, we believe that boycott is the most appropriate position in dealing with these elections for the following reasons:

1- The absence of prerogatives that would enable the municipal councils to effectively perform their role as they enjoy neither financial nor administrative independence. Also absent are the prerogatives to set and oversee project budgets which are needed by the cities. The experience of the previous six years have proven the absence of any effective role for these councils even in the small issues related to municipal work such that they have no presence in the lives of citizens.

2- The insistence on the election of half the council and the appointment of the other half. Therein lies the killing of democratic practice and the lessening of the value the electoral process and its effects. Furthermore, it is an unacceptable signal of the inability of voters to produce a fully-elected council whose members conduct their duties in the service of citizens.

3- The exclusion of women from participation for the second time as candidates or voters through the same worn out excuses that were used six years ago. This effectively disrupts the electoral participation of half of society and thus opposes the true meaning of popular participation.

4- The failure of the elections in their current form to meet the aspiration for expanding popular participation in decision-making as expressed in the numerous reform statements, which include a fully-elected parliament with broad legislative and oversight prerogatives that quench the popular thirst for complete and effective democratic practice.

We consider the aforementioned reasons to contradict the heart of the electoral process in the sense of popular participation in decision-making. These elections elections hold no decision nor does its ballot boxes express the authority of the citizens.

Consequently, we declare our boycott of these elections and call on all those with the right to participate to boycott them both as nominees and as voters. We affirm our commitment to the demands found in reform statements that express a view towards democratic transformation that guarantees real participation in decision-making.

We believe boycott today is the foundation for effective participation tomorrow.

 

 

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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