Event: Syria in the Context of the Arab Uprisings (17 November, New York City)

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Nov 13, 2013 Syria
[Bombed out vehicles in Aleppo. Image from Wikimedia Commons] [Bombed out vehicles in Aleppo. Image from Wikimedia Commons]

Event: Syria in the Context of the Arab Uprisings (17 November, New York City)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Syria in the Context of the Arab Uprisings

Sunday, Nov. 17, noon-6pm

NYU Silver Center, Room 405

 

Join leading Syrian and other Middle East scholars and activists at an afternoon teach-in on the Syrian uprising. Hear from activists on the frontlines in Syria and Palestine as well as from writers and scholars who`ve lived and studied there. Learn, discuss and debate what led to the uprising, who are the forces on the ground today and why Americans should defend Syrians` right to resist Assad`s dictatorship and oppose Western intervention. We will explore the relationship between the armed and non-violent resistance, the counter-revolutionary role of jihadists like Al-Nusra, and prospects for a just and democratic peace in Syria.

 

Snacks and literature will be available.

 

Doors open at 11:30 am

Registration ($5 donation requested, nobody turned away for lack of funds) 

 

Program starts at Noon

Session 1: Roots and Grassroots of the Syrian Uprising

with: Razan Ghazzawi (from Syria*), Leila Shrooms*, Ella Wind, Mohja Kahf*

 

Session 2: Myths and Realities of the Syrian Uprising 

with: Sara Ajlyakin (from Brazil*), Nader Atassi, Budour Hassan (from Jerusalem/Al-Quds*)

 

Session 3: Syria in the Context of the Arab Uprisings 

with: Yasser Munif and Gilbert Achcar

 

*Asterisk denotes video conference presentation.

 

This teach-in is a project of the Middle East North Africa Solidarity Network-US, please check out our website for our founding statement and excellent news analysis on the region, 

http://menasolnetus.wordpress.com/ and Like us on Facebook, 
https://www.facebook.com/MENASolidarityUS

 

NYU Silver Center - Room 405, 31 Washington Place

(between Washington Square East and Greene Street)
*Wheelchair accessible. Photo ID is required for entrance.*
Go to W. 4th St. stop (A, B, C, D, E, F, M) or 8th St. NYU stop (N, R) and Astor Pl. (6).

Endorsed by the NYU Radical Film and Lecture Series.

Speakers
Gilbert Achcar
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon, researched and taught in Beirut, Paris and Berlin, and is currently Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. His many books include: The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder, published in 13 languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky; the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. He published most recently a collection of essays on Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, in addition to his latest book: The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. Gilbert Achcar will also be speaking on The Arab Uprising: Results and Prospects, Monday, Nov. 18, 7pm at NYU Silver Center, 405.

Sara Ajlyakin

Born and raised in Damascus, Sara Ajlyakin is an activist with the International Workers League - Fourth International. She conducted research on gentrification in Old Damascus, and received her Master’s degree in Sociology from the American University of Beirut in 2010. She left Syria in 2012 and is currently residing in Brazil. She is now in the second part of a Campaign in Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution. In 2012, she traveled around 16 cities in Brazil on a tour organized by ANEL (National Association of Free Students) and CSP CONLUTAS (federation of trade unions and popular movements). This year, they invited two members of the Union of Free Syrian Students to participate in the second congress of ANEL. She is currently on an international speaking tour with a member of the Revolutionary Local Council of the city of Minbej meeting with students, trade unions, and popular movements in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Argentina. 

 

Nader Atassi
Nader Atassi is a Syrian political researcher and writer originally from Homs, currently living between the United States and Beirut. He runs the blog Darth Nader, reflecting on events within the Syrian revolution.

 

Razan Ghazzawi
Razan Ghazzawi is a blogger from Syria who started blogging using an alias, Golaniya, when Israel launched a war against Lebanon in 2006. She blogged against racism towards Syrian workers in Lebanon, where she completed her master’s degree. Razan started blogging under her real name two years later advocating along many Syrian bloggers for freedom of speech in her country. When the Syrian revolution broke out in March 2011, Razan was among those who disseminated updates on demonstrations taking place across Syria using her real name. She was detained twice during the revolution due to her work with the Syrian Center for Media Freedom.

Budour Hassan
Budour Hassan, originally from Nazareth, is a Palestinian blogger and Law graduate based in Jerusalem/Al-Quds. She has written about Syrian political prisoners and the myth of Palestinian neutrality in Syria.
 

Mohja Kahf
Born in Syria, U.S.-naturalized in the 1980s, Mohja Kahf is an associate professor of literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas where she has taught for eighteen years (Ph.D. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 1994). Author of the novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf; poetry book E-mails from Scheherazad, Kahf marched against the U.S. war on Iraq and was an early signatory of the U.S. Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She visited the Turkish border with Syria in 2011 and has written recent articles on Syria here and in openDemocracy. Kahf is a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement.

Yasser Munif
Yasser Munif is a professor of sociology at Emerson College where he teaches courses on nationalism, political economy, Middle Eastern politics, and social movements. He is a co-founder of the "Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution" which aims to shed light on the minutiae of resistance and everyday struggle. He recently spent two months in Northern Syria where he is conducting research on local governance, post-Assad reconstruction, and internally displaced persons.

 

Leila Shrooms
Leila Shrooms is of Syrian origin and worked for a number of years as a human rights acti­vist inside Syria. She is the co-foun­der of Tahrir-ICN, a net­work to build connec­tions bet­ween the anti-autho­ri­ta­rian move­ments in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

 Ella Wind
Ella Wind is a co-editor of the Syria Page on Jadaliyya, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Middle East Studies from New York University. She lived in Syria until April 2011, where she was conducting research on Syrian-Turkish economic relations, and has more recently lived in Lebanon. Her writing on Syria has appeared in outlets such as Jadaliyya, BBC Persian, and the Majalla.
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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