Lecture on Arab Uprisings by Fawwaz Traboulsi at AUB's Issam Fares Institute

[Professor Fawwaz Traboulsi. Image from video posted below.] [Professor Fawwaz Traboulsi. Image from video posted below.]

Lecture on Arab Uprisings by Fawwaz Traboulsi at AUB's Issam Fares Institute

By : Jadaliyya Reports

As part of its Arab Uprisings Lecture Series, the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs recently hosted Fawwaz Trabulsi. In his presentation, entitled: “Revolutions Also Topple Ideas: How the Uprisings Shattered the Prevailing Political Constructs of the Arab world,” Traboulsi critically reviewed how the uprisings have called into question the main concepts that have dominated intellectual production and public practices in the Arab world over the past quarter of a century, including the state-society binary, governance, corruption, human rights, and neoliberalism.

The Arab Uprisings Lecture Series at the American University of Beirut (AUB) is an ongoing multi-disciplinary lecture series given by experts in their field on the nature of the Arab revolutions from an indigenous perspective. Fawwaz Traboulsi has an ongoing column in Lebanon’s As-Safir newspaper on the Arab Uprisings, and will be teaching a course at AUB entitled, “Arab Revolutions.” He is the author of numerous works, including, A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2007) and most recently, Democracy is Revolution (2012 ,سيرلا راد).

 

Event Synopsis

The ongoing Arab revolts, propelled by the goal of transforming political structures, have earned them the right to be described as democratic revolutions, said Fawwaz Traboulsi, a leading political scholar and faculty member at AUB, during the first of a lecture series on the Arab uprisings.Traboulsi, speaking on February 20, said that those calling for the overthrow of their regimes have been careful to mark a distinction between oppressive state authorities and the state.

“Whichever way we look at what’s happening, this process is trying to impose very radical political, social, ethical, and economic change,” he said. “We are in a situation where, for a whole year, we have had people in the streets willing to shed blood as they do in the villages and towns in Syria, Yemen, Egypt and everywhere else in order to radically change regimes which they believe to be both repressive and unjust.”

Organized by the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), Traboulsi’s lecture was entitled “Revolutions also Topple Ideas: How the Uprisings Shattered the Prevailing Political Constructs of the Arab World.” 

Karim Makdisi, associate professor of political studies in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration and the IFI associate director, moderated the talk and explained that the lecture series along with a research program on the Arab uprisings were launched to better understand and frame issues emerging from the ongoing rebellions.

Traboulsi dismissed a popular notion that the uprisings have been spearheaded exclusively by a young, internet-savvy generation, noting that while youths played an instrumental role in the beginning, their forces were quickly joined by diverse layers in society including workers, slum dwellers, and in some cases even members of the upper class.

The lack of jobs, largely due to a failed system of economic neo-liberalism imposed by global institutions and managed by the Arab regimes for decades revealed itself as a driving force for revolutionaries, Traboulsi said. Their sentiments were captured by a popular slogan shouted across the region: Work, freedom, bread. He noted that the Arab world suffers from the highest rate of unemployment in the world, and that the revolts challenged not only the autocratic leaders themselves but the failed economic and social order they presided over.

“This is a rebellion of the youth, not because they have discovered democracy through the internet,” Traboulsi said, “but because they discovered that they are ruled by regimes that have blocked their futures.”

He added: “If this process is going to continue, and it needs to continue, it`s not enough to have revolutionary youth. The youth should link more and more to the needs and demands of wider sectors of the population.”

The Islamists, Traboulsi said, had gained the right to govern democratically but did not have the answers to the pressing social and economic problems. This, he added, would provide an opportunity for the progressive movements in the Arab world to organize and respond to the real needs of the people.

Traboulsi reminded the audience of the cozy relationships the United States had maintained for decades with Arab regimes. In an attempt to preserve those regimes and their economic and social orders once the uprisings began, he explained, the United States, beginning with ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and continuing up till today with Bashar Al Assad in Syria, has pushed leaders to relegate power to their vice presidents.

“Attacking your enemy in the name of democracy and covering up the violations of democracy among your puppets or allies has been the hallmark of US diplomacy in the region,” Traboulsi said. What is needed in political terms, Traboulsi concluded, was a shift away from presidential systems of power prevalent in the Arab region to parliamentary ones, along with constitutional guarantees for equality and citizenship for all Arab citizens.

[This event synopsis was written and first published by the American University of Beirut (AUB).]

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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