On a NY Stage: Four Strong Characters Seek Out the Meaning of Gaza and the Arab Spring

[Image from screenshot of project website.] [Image from screenshot of project website.]

On a NY Stage: Four Strong Characters Seek Out the Meaning of Gaza and the Arab Spring

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This report was written by Phillip Weiss and originally published on Monoweiss.]

Last night we had an event about Gaza in Manhattan with the Culture Project. It was so great and affirming that I was up most of the night savoring the experience. It was in a grand hall in midtown Manhattan, it was sold out, people actually paid money to go in, and they were rewarded with wisdom about Gaza, Goldstone and the Arab spring. Of the five people on the stage that night, four were women. Many people commented on that, and god knows I`m proud to have had a hand in that staging. But what did they say?

The four experts were like four big characters in a David Hare play. They were all so distinct. Each time they spoke you wanted to hear that character come out then, in the life of the evening. No one dominated, until the end. The thaumaturge (I think I get to use that word, you know I am a helpless showoff) was the moderator Laura Flanders, host and founder of Grit-TV, who called the players out of the shadows with deft phrases. Naomi Klein was the headliner, and she did what she always does, takes a conversation to a big plane. At the start she said, we did not need human rights reports and international law and the 450 pages of the Goldstone Report, we knew what we saw in the last days of 2008 in Gaza and it was wrong. That is why we are here tonight, because we all saw that-- and when she went to Gaza in June 2009 she met people who felt abandoned by the world.

Then at the end she tied it into global warming, and Jewishness too. She is working on a book and a movie on the subject and she said we will face more intensified water wars (implying that they have already begun) and people will become countryless. They will lose their land. And how can I as a north American Jew, Klein said, justify having not one but two countries, one as a possible refuge, in these circumstances. There was huge applause. I was deeply grateful to her for the injection of the privilege/selfishness note, and the Jewish note.
Seated across from Klein was Colonel Desmond Travers of the Goldstone Mission. He has a clipped white military mustache and a military mien and a twinklin sense of humor. He said that he had wanted to go to Gaza because it was a perfect lab for studying the new theories of asymmetrical warfare and counterinsurgency. He spoke of shells and command posts and control towers and tanks and mortars and reminded me a little of the fabulous Uncle Toby of Tristram Shandy, the hobbyhorsical military man. But a moral thread ran through everything he said: he doesn`t know what this asymmetrical warfare means, it is a justification for killing civilians whenever anyone walks toward a post.

Many an army practices scorched earth, many of them poison (pysen he pronounced it) wells, but Travers has never witnessed the terrain-destruction he saw in Gaza. 140,000 olive trees destroyed, 130,000 citrus. Farms and factories bulldozed and sacked, the border turned into a no-man`s land. The intention, he felt, was to burn into the Palestinians` minds that they must never resist, and in answer to Goldstone`s reconsideration in the Washington Post, Travers said that were he to write the Goldstone Report all over again today, it would only be more emphatic.

But Travers offered a ray of hope. He spoke about Northern Ireland. He said the British had actually learned: you cannot arrest and abuse boys for throwing stones, they will be resistance fighters. And yesterday the Queen came to Ireland and bowed before the monument to the Irish resisters. We never thought we would see that day. Oh, can the Israelis learn?

Lizzy Ratner is my co-editor on the Goldstone volume and she was the storyteller of the event. She laid out what Gaza was, that Guernica of 22 days, she laid out the meaning of the Goldstone Report as a utopian document about international law and accountability. I know this stuff, but afterward a couple friends told me it is a rare thing to have a speaker so vigorously and clearly lay out the matter of the evening. "She was incredible," says my sister-in-law, a film editor. "She opens her mouth and you`re just comfortable being in her space because she`s so confident and clear and speaks directly to the problem, and she`s accessible." Ratner has a beautiful voice and I liked it when she took apart the Obama speech of earlier yesterday. She had found it so inspiring when he talked about the democracy movement in the Arab world, and the suicide of the Tunisian peddler. Then as soon as Obama came to the Palestinian case, "it was tsk-tsk." He began by warning them not to undertake the "symbolic" action of seeking statehood at the U.N. in September. But what was the Tunisian peddler`s electrifying act if not a "symbolic" gesture? All the ideals ended when it came to Israel and Palestine... And in the Goldstone Report, she said, the U.S. fears the enforcement of international law to our drones and disproportions, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Isn`t that what shock and awe was all about?

Finally there was Noura Erakat. She is a Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist and at the end of the night she stole the show. For she spoke almost entirely in political terms. To Travers`s fear that the imprisonment of stone-throwers would create resistance fighters, she said that she honored acts of resistance to occupation, on the part of Hamas and Hezbollah. There was applause, I was surprised how much; but it shows how much the left has now accepted the Palestinian cause. The way to express Palestinian solidarity is through supporting the boycott movement, with its nonviolent language of human rights.

The politics of the Arab spring...  Erakat spoke of the effect of Oslo on the Palestinian movement. It splintered it into three or four parts: Israeli Palestinians, Palestinians under occupation, refugee populations in the Arab world, and the Palestinian Diaspora in the west. The Palestinian National Council was to represent the Diaspora but it has only met twice in the last 18 years, so it is "defunct."

But the Arab spring has reunified the Palestinian national movement. It is coming to Palestine, liberating Palestine. People were thrilled; the affliction of the Palestinians was so much the matter of the evening that again, I say, the left is with her all the way.

But I also heard her selfishly. That was Laura Flanders`s specific effect on me: she said that solidarity must come from a selfish place, and I believe her all the way. I am in this movement selfishly, as an American Jew, two damaged communities. Noura Erakat and the refugees are the Jewish inheritance, they are ours. We rewrote the European Jewish experience on the backs of the Palestinians. We dispossessed them, we transferred them, we cleansed them, we subjugated them, we did to them much of what was done to us. And in the process we built what Europe created, a powerful Diaspora. However you feel about such power, such emotional displacement, the Jewish American achievement on my parents` generation and mine was built out of such materials.

And now the Palestinian Diaspora is rising, and no one will be able to shut them out, and the world`s abandonment is coming to an end.

P.S. Please note that the event was part of the Culture Project`s Blueprint for Accountability series. It began with a very powerful reading by the actress Trudie Styler of the Khaled Abd Rabbo testimony to the Goldstone mission on the shootings of his three daughters and the panel spoke before a backdrop of photographs of Gaza by Kent Klich.

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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