The Muslim Ban and MESA

The Muslim Ban and MESA

The Muslim Ban and MESA

By : Beth Baron

Last year we watched as the condition of academic freedom eroded in Egypt, Gaza, Turkey, and elsewhere in the Middle East. The situation for scholars in Turkey, in particular, has reached a low that none of us could have imagined, with hundreds of those who signed the peace petition protesting the government’s actions in southeast Turkey losing their jobs. Our colleagues on the MESA Committee for Academic Freedom have been indefatigable in documenting abuses of academic freedom by the Turkish government and other governments in the region, as well as challenges to academic freedom in the United States. They have issued letters, reports, and started fundraising initiatives to help scholars and students.

This year has brought a new set of challenges to our doorsteps. President Donald Trump issued the first executive order banning the entry of Muslims from seven countries on 27 January 2017. That order was blocked by a federal district judge in Seattle, Washington. His decision was upheld by a panel of federal judges in the ninth circuit. Rather than continue to contest that order through appeals, President Donald Trump issued a revised order on 6 March 2017. At that time, MESA reached out to members and colleagues to collect stories of harm caused by the executive orders. The responses helped us to gauge the impact of the travel ban on the research and careers of students and faculty, and to MESA as an organization. We thank those of you who took the time to share your experiences or encouraged others to do so.

MESA signed on as a plaintiff (one of three associations along with six individuals) in a lawsuit in district court in Maryland contesting the revised executive order. In that case, the federal judge in Maryland approved the motion to block the Muslim ban, following a similar decision by a federal judge in Hawaii. Rather than appeal the Hawaii decision in the ninth circuit court, the federal government decided to contest the Maryland decision in the fourth circuit. Briefs have been filed, and the full court will hear arguments in Richmond, Virginia, on 8 May 2017.  It has been enormously inspiring to work with Cody Wofsy and the team of lawyers at ACLU, and to stand with the other clients in the case. For more information on this historic case and MESA’s role in it, please see http://mesana.org/newsworthy/.

As a result of the Muslim ban and difficulties in getting visas, a number of scholars in the Middle East from targeted countries may not be able to join us at the annual meeting in November in Washington DC. Moving MESA to another country in North America to accommodate these scholars would create problems for visa holders already in the United States. The MESA board has formed a special committee to explore technological options, including but not limited to Skype, to ensure the participation of those excluded from entry to the United States.

Some scholars have already indicated that they may not come to MESA out of solidarity with those who may not be able to enter the United States and in exasperation with the current US policies. We respect this stance and share your exasperation. Yet MESA depends on revenues from meeting registration and membership for our operations, and we urge those of you in the United States and abroad to continue to support MESA.

Our organization is more than a fall meeting. We are a collective of scholars working year round to protect academic freedom, scholarly exchange through unfettered travel, and the interests of our field and the Middle East region. This winter we launched a Task Force on Civil and Human Rights to advise members on best practices in confronting new legislation. Our Board has issued statements, and we joined a lawsuit. We have mobilized our resources to fight the Muslim ban and to advocate for Middle East studies, and we ask for your continued support by keeping your membership current and making a donation to one of our funds. We have so much work ahead.

[This article first appeared in the bi-annual newsletter of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Issues Middle East Studies 39, no. 1 (April 2017)]

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