Reports Roundup (December 29)

Reports Roundup (December 29)

Reports Roundup (December 29)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following list is a compilation of the reports, statements, and other materials featured on the Jadaliyya Reports Page this past week.]

Letter Concerning Ongoing Pattern of Arrests of Turkish Academics Researching Kurdish Issues The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association addresses Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan with concerns over the recent arrests and detentions of academics focusing on Kurdish issues.

Bahrain13 Prisoner Group Meets with Delegation from OHCHR The Bahrain Center for Human Rights reports on a meeting between a delegation from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and a group of political prisoners known as the Bahrain13. 

Letter Concerning Allegations of Turkish Universities` Censorship of Subjects The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Assocation addresses Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan with concerns over indications that the Turkish government has censored such sensitive topics as racism against Africans in Turkey, Kurdish rights, and environmental issues. 

Visualizing Human Rights for Migrant Workers in Lebanon The Migrant Workers` Task Force, in collaboration with AltCity.me and Joumana Ibrahim, depicts the human rights abuses faced by migrant workers in Lebanon as a result of the kefala or sponsorship system. 

Censored 2013: Project Censored List of Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2011-2012 Project Censored lists the top 25 censored news stories of the past year. These stories include, among others, "HR 347 Would Make Many Forms of Nonviolent Protest Illegal," "NATO War Crimes in Libya," and "Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Worse than Anticipated."  

Extreme Makeover? (I): Israel`s Politics of Land and Faith in East Jerusalem International Crisis Group reports on Israel`s physical expansion of settlement activity in East Jerusalem and increased usage of religious and historical rhetoric to establish a claim to the territory. 

Letter Concerning Prolonged Denial of Justice for Pinar Selek The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association expresses their dismay at the now fourteen-year-long saga of Ph.D. candidate Pinar Selek, a researcher of Kurdish issues who was charged with PKK membership in 1998 and has since been subjected to a series of trials, imprisonment, and torture. 

Extreme Makeover? (II): The WIthering of Arab Jerusalem In a companion to the above mentioned report "Extreme Makeover? (I): Israel`s Politics of Land and Faith in East Jerusalem, International Crisis Group reports on the decline of Arab Jerusalem and Arab Jersulamites isolation from the rest of the Palestinian polity. 

Statement Regarding the Saudi Ban on Migrant Organizations Migrante International expresses its concern over Saudi Arabia`s recent ban on migrant labor organizations, an attempt to stop migrant workers from protesting. 

Bahraini Authorities Continue to Punish Opponents by Imprisoning Them The Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights voices its concern over the sentencing of Rola Al-Saffar, Head of Bahrain`s Nurising Society, and Ibrahim Al-Demistani, the Society`s Secretary General, for their roles in treating injured protesters in February 2011.

Security Forces Attack Protesters in Kuwait Human Rights Watch reports on security forces` use of violence against protesters in Kuwait in demonstrations since October 2012. 

Eyes on Israeli Military Court: A Collection of Impressions Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association presents reflections of Israel`s military courts from the organizations` volunteers, who witnessed trials of Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds, including minors. 

Calls to Boycott Qatar and UAE for Labor Violations The International Trade Union Confederation expresses its intent to organize a boycott of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and the UAE (if selected to host the 2024 Olympics) unless these nations improve their subpar working conditions for migrant laborers. 

Egypt`s Anti-Freedom Constitution: The Borhami Video In this abridged video, the infamous Egyptian Salafist Sheikh Yasser Borhami, a leading member of the Constituent Assembly, explains that the newly ratified constitution was cleverly drafted to sideline groups such as Al-Azhar, liberals, Christians, and Baha’is who, as "apostates," are not afforded any rights.

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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