Job Announcement: Director of Museum Operations; Welfare Association Palestinian Museum Taskforce

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Job Announcement: Director of Museum Operations; Welfare Association Palestinian Museum Taskforce

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Director of Museum Operations
Job Overview

Job Title Director, Museum Operations

Deadline for receiving applications is Sunday August 7, 2011.

Send all application materials to palestinianmuseum@gmail.com

Visit http://welsfareassociation.org for more information.

 


Brief Job Description

The Director is the chief operating officer of the Palestinian Museum accountable to the Palestinian Museum Taskforce for the realization of the approved vision, mission and values, and the implementation of Taskforce approved business and corporate plans.

Reporting to the Taskforce, the Director is responsible for conducting the affairs of the Museum, interpreting and applying board policies while co-ordination of all aspects of the Museum. The Director ensures that the Museum is managed according to the institution’s mission and objectives, Board policies, and the accepted standards of the larger international museum community. The Director demonstrates excellent and proven leadership abilities and superior management skills.

General and Operational Duties and Responsibilities

  • Responsible for Museum’s liaison with the Taskforce.
  • Charged with the maintenance of high standards of professionalism and ensures that all programmes and public affairs are conducted in accordance with applicable legal requirements and the international ethical standards of a public museum.
  • As Director recommends to the Taskforce, on the recommendation of the Heads of the Divisions, partnerships and links with key bodies in the public, private and voluntary sectors.
  • Ensures that written management practices are in place to implement the policies and directives of the Board of Trustees and that responsibilities for their implementation and efficacy are assigned to the appropriate member(s) of the Senior Management team by the Taskforce.
  • Directs the management by the Senior Management team of the day-to-day operations of the Museum, and sets direction for its operational aspects to ensure compliance with local laws, grant requirements, and generally accepted accounting principles.
  • Must engage by active participation in fundraising and advocacy and actively solicits support and cultivates gifts and bequests.
  • Presents for Board approval the annual and three-year rolling operating budgets and reviews quarterly with the Task Force, the Museum’s progress against the approved annual budget.
  • Presents for Task Force approval the annual and five-year corporate plan and reviews quarterly with the Task Force the Museum’s progress against the approved corporate plan highlighting both operational achievements and challenges.

Supervisory Duties and Responsibilities

  • Provides direct overview of the Heads of the Divisions who constitute the Senior Leadership team as to the performance of their duties, their efficacy, and their adherence to all appropriate policies, practices and directives.

Financial Duties and Responsibilities

  • Oversees and leads the preparation and monitoring of the Museum’s annual operating budget, including establishing a budget planning team, analysing budget requests, analysing budget variances, and directing corrective action as necessary to the Task Force as appropriate.
  • Evaluates and reports financial status and progress to the Task Force on a regular basis.

General Requirements and Qualifications

  • A minimum of five years of progressively responsible experience in a museum or related educational/research organization.
  • A Ph.D in a relevant discipline such as history, sociology, archaeology or art and/or an advanced degree     in museum studies or an advanced degree in business with extensive experience in leadership in the not-for-profit sector, or the equivalent in additional work experience.
  • A record of professional accomplishments and publications (academic or other); demonstrated success in fundraising, audience development and institutional planning.
  • Excellent managerial, planning, organizational and administrative skills; exceptionally strong interpersonal and written/oral communication skills; high level of presentation, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills.
  • Ability to provide strong leadership, vision and strategic direction; inspire and motivate staff, volunteers and donors; establish and maintain effective working relationships with a variety of representatives of public and private organizations, members of boards, foundations, universities, support groups, and the general public.
  • Demonstrated ability to manage and work within a team and to delegate appropriate responsibilities and authorities while providing appropriate oversight.
  • Ability to reside in the West Bank and travel extensively internationally.
  • Ability to speak and write proficiently in Arabic and English, with preference for skills in other languages as well.

Nature of Employment and Compensation

  • The Director is to be hired in accordance with a contract, 3 years in duration, renewable indefinitely for three years terms by mutual agreement with the Task Force.
  • Salary is to be negotiated, based on relevant and related experience and education.
  • Benefits are to be negotiated but will be competitive for comparable positions at organizations similar in activities and scope in the region.

 

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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