On the 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference

[Crop of logo for 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference. Image from sjpnational.org.] [Crop of logo for 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference. Image from sjpnational.org.]

On the 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference

By : Andrew Dalack

A little over a year ago today, hundreds of students from dozens of colleges and universities arrived at Columbia University to participate in the 2011 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference. The purpose of the conference was to reinvigorate a national student Palestine solidarity movement by providing a space for student activists to coordinate, organize, and develop politically. The energy at the conference was palpable. Students that had been working together for months over the internet finally had the opportunity to build with one another in person. The workshops were packed as activists from all over the country learned from one another’s experiences, working together to create new campaigns and advance existing ones. The conference was not only productive for experienced Palestine solidarity student activists. During one workshop, entitled “How to start and successfully run an SJP,” students learned how to mobilize and sustain a cohesive student group, build relationships with school administrators, and effectively handle attacks from groups opposed to the rights of Palestinians. These same students have played a crucial role in creating new SJP chapters from California to Kansas.

On 2 November 2012, hundreds of SJP activists will once again converge, this time at the University of Michigan. After coming extremely close to passing a student government resolution calling for divestment from companies complicit in Israeli human rights violations more than a year ago, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) is excited to host the 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference. SAFE has been working tirelessly with a body of national organizers to make the most of the momentum generated by last year’s conference in New York City. Specifically, this year’s program reflects the changing realities confronting student Palestine solidarity activists. While there is still an emphasis on organizational and political development, the conference will feature several workshops that address discrete challenges facing SJP chapters. For example, a “Know Your Rights” workshop will help familiarize students with their free speech rights and connect them with attorneys fighting back against attempts to censor and criminalize Palestine solidarity activism on campus. Another workshop will address the intersection of social identity and power dynamics within local and national SJP bodies, with an emphasis on gender and sexual orientation.

This conference is possible because students have chosen to make it a priority. There is no safety net. Each organizer volunteers hours of her time per week to fundraise and participate in countless email exchanges, conference calls, and meetings. Each individual’s dedication to Palestinian self-determination is supported by a commitment to one another. The 2012 National SJP Conference will be the product of a selfless team effort that reflects a collective desire to strengthen and sustain a national student Palestine solidarity movement that is independent, yet accountable to Palestinians. Although the conference is less than one month away, SJP activists that have not yet been directly involved in organizing the conference are invited to participate and attend. Community members that have cooperated with SJP chapters in the past are encouraged to support student activists in making this conference a success. Although each SJP chapter is responsible for creating and implementing its own agenda, the setting of a national conference gives student activists the rare opportunity to share their skills and ideas with one another in a space exclusively committed to long-term movement building. This year’s conference promises to have a lasting impact on the activism of its participants and attendees.

For details on the 2012 National SJP Conference, please visit http://sjpnational.org

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