Letter Concerning Charges Against Amr Hamzawy

Letter Concerning Charges Against Amr Hamzawy

Letter Concerning Charges Against Amr Hamzawy

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).]

February 18, 2014

Adel Abd al-Hameed
Minister of Justice
Lazoghly Square, Ministry of Justice
Cairo
Arab Republic of Egypt

by fax: 20 2 795 8103
by e-mail: mjustice@moj.gov.eg


Your Excellency,

I write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to express our strong objection to the recent criminal charge levelled against Dr. Amr Hamzawy, a professor at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo, former parliamentarian, and prominent liberal intellectual, of insulting the Egyptian judiciary in a tweet he posted last June.  This baseless charge seems to be part of an emerging pattern of government actions aimed at silencing any expressions of opposition or dissent.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote 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 and has nearly 3,000 members worldwide. 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.

At the beginning of June 2013, an Egyptian court ruled that several Western-backed non-governmental organizations operating in Egypt aimed to “undermine Egypt’s national security and lay out a sectarian, political map that serves United States and Israeli interests”  and were receiving  funding from outside to pursue that aim. The ruling prompted critical responses from both inside and outside Egypt. Several critics suggested that insufficient evidence had been provided to prove the allegations and so, they appeared to be political in intent.   Indeed, this was precisely what Dr. Hamzawy posted in a single tweet on June 5. It reads: “Verdict in case of foreign funding of CS shocking, transparency lacking, facts undocumented & politicization evident.” It is for these words that he is now being accused of insulting the Egyptian judiciary.

We are fully aware that insulting the judiciary is a crime in Egyptian law; however, we fail to see how the above words can be read as defamatory. Instead, the charges against Dr. Hamzawy appear to be part of a broader, systematic effort to stifle critical free expression.  

Dr. Hamzawy is well-known and well-respected in the academic community as a scholar and intellectual, as a man of principles and integrity. He is deeply committed to Egypt, to liberal and democratic values. 

We therefore urge you to dismiss this baseless charge against Dr. Hamzawy immediately. We further call upon you to uphold and protect , in all  instances, the  provisions of the 2014 constitution, most notably Article 65, which guarantees freedom of thought and opinion, including expression of opinion through speech.   We look forward to your timely response.

Sincerely,

 

Nathan Brown
President

 

CC:        

  • Dr. Hazem El-Beblawi, Prime Minister (fax: 20 2 795 8048 or 20 2 795 8016)
  • Dr. Nabil Fahmy, Minister of Foreign Affairs (fax: 20 2 257 67967)
  • Dr. Hossam Eissa, Minister of Higher Education (fax: 20 2 794 1005)
  • Maj. Gen. Mohamed Mostafa, Minister of Interior Affairs (fax: 20 2 796 0682)
  • Dr. Mohamed Fayek, President, National Council on Human Rights (fax: 20 2 376 24852)
  • Dr. Lisa Anderson, President, American University in Cairo (fax: 20 2 279 57565)

 

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