Letter to Hosts of the International Conference for the Reconstruction of Gaza

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Oct 11, 2014 Palestine-Israel
Letter to Hosts of the International Conference for the Reconstruction of Gaza

Letter to Hosts of the International Conference for the Reconstruction of Gaza

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association]

Hosts of the International Conference for the Reconstruction of Gaza
Børge Brende
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway
via utenriksminister@mfa.no
via fax +47 23 95 00 99

Sameh Shoukry
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt
via fax + 20 2576 7967

Your Excellencies, 

I write on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express grave concern over Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, including the destruction of 22 schools, significant damage to an additional 198 schools and two universities, and the targeting of six United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools which killed 47 civilians in July and August, 2014.  It is imperative that these assaults be understood as part of an ongoing, intentional attack on education by Israel in the context of continued military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Rather than continue to pay for reconstruction of what Israel has destroyed, donors should demand that Israel end its punitive blockade of the Gaza Strip and its repeated military assaults on the territory. Israel is flouting its obligation as the occupying power in the Palestinian territories to protect the population from harm.   The willingness of donors to continually pay for reconstruction without clear condemnation of the military occupation relieves Israel of responsibility and allows it free rein to continue its attacks on Palestine’s educational system.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. It is the preeminent organization in the field. The Association published 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.

According to the United Nations Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), in the most recent assault on the Gaza Strip, Israeli shelling badly damaged at least two universities, the Islamic University of Gaza and al-Quds Open University, as well as four colleges. Israel targeted the Islamic University’s central administration building on the grounds that it housed a weapons development facility, the same rationale marshaled to justify bombing the university in 2008-2009. No evidence has ever surfaced to support Israel’s allegations that a weapons development facility existed at the university. Al-Quds Open University was raided at least three times the latest onslaught. Israeli forces also destroyed several buildings of the University College of Applied Sciences, including the central administration building, a conference hall, computer laboratories and classrooms. All of the institutions of higher education in the Gaza Strip canceled summer courses during the July-August onslaught, affecting tens of thousands of students. Given the destruction of physical plant—not to mention lives, homes and livelihoods—none of these institutions were able to open at the beginning of the new school year. 

In addition, Israel damaged 220 schools (141 operated by the government, 75 by UNRWA and four by private parties) in bombing raids. Twenty-two of these schools require complete reconstruction. Moreover, unexploded ordnance litters educational facilities and will need to be cleared before their reopening. 

Israel also targeted six UNRWA schools that were serving as civilian shelters, killing 47 civilians and injuring hundreds. Nine UNRWA staff members were among the dead: four teachers, two social service workers, a school principal, a school attendant and a laborer.  

The summer 2014 Israeli attacks upon the Palestinian educational system are an extension of decades-old military occupation policies that systematically undermine this sector. Palestinian universities suffer immeasurably from Israeli collective punishment policies, foremost among them campus raids and restrictions on movement that, in some cases, prevent students from attending classes. Furthermore, when these latest attacks commenced, the Gaza Strip had yet to recover from the damage caused by Israel’s bombing campaign of 2008-2009. By the end of those military operations, Israel had killed 250 students and 15 teachers, and had injured 866 students and 19 teachers.  Its bombing campaign damaged 16 kindergartens, 217 schools, and all eight of the Gaza Strip’s institutions of higher education—the Islamic University of Gaza, the University College of Applied Sciences, Al-Aqsa University, Al-Quds Open University, the College of Applied Sciences and Technology, the College of Dar Al-Da`wa and Humanities, Al-Azhar University, and the University of Palestine.  At least six university buildings were damaged beyond repair. The total damage to educational facilities was estimated at over $32 million.

Even prior to these massive air assaults, the Gaza Strip’s educational facilities were already severely weakened by Israel’s blockade: the building of new schools to accommodate natural population growth has not been possible, and many schools, especially at the elementary level, were already overcrowded, operating on a shift system and undersupplied.  

Since 2009 numerous UN bodies have called upon international donors to hold Israel accountable for the cycles of destruction in Gaza. We echo this call.  All outside commitments and pledges of aid will be virtually useless if the blockade and other policies of military occupation persist. To protect academic freedom and the right to education, the fundamental circumstances in the Gaza Strip must be transformed.

Sincerely,

\"\"

Nathan J. Brown

MESA President

cc: 

  • US Secretary of State, John Kerry (fax: 202-261-8199)
  • Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyhu (pm_eng@pmo.gov.il; fax: 972-2-566-4838)
  • United Nations Special Coordinator to Middle East Peace Process, Robert H. Serry (fax: 972 -2-568-7288)
  • World Bank Country Director to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Steen Jorgensen (sjorgensen@worldbank.org)
  • Head of the European Union Delegation to the West Bank and Gaza, and United Nations Relief and Works Agency, John Gatt-Rutter (delegation-west-bank-gaza@eeas.europa.eu; fax: 972-2-541-5848)
  • Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Pierre Krähenbühl (c/o Christopher Gunnes, c.gunness@unrwa.org)
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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