Statement by US-based Egyptian Academics and Professionals in Response to Attacks on Protesters Since November 19

[Image from statement issued below.] [Image from statement issued below.]

Statement by US-based Egyptian Academics and Professionals in Response to Attacks on Protesters Since November 19

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued on 24 November 2011.]

When uprisings began in Egypt earlier this year, the Obama administration wavered in its support for the revolution. Hilary Clinton openly advocated for a transition led by former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. Her aide Frank Wisner actually recommended that Hosni Mubarak remain in power throughout the transition process. The reasons for this are no secret to anyone familiar with US Middle East policy. Egypt has for decades received US aid packages in exchange for maintaining US interests in the region. Political stability in the Middle East is a top priority for the United States administration due to economic dependence on a steady flow of oil, primarily from Saudi Arabia.

Thus, it also comes as no great surprise that Hilary Clinton and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have repeatedly praised the de facto rulers of Egypt, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), for their job in managing Egypt’s transition. This praise has been offered in spite of SCAF’s systematic attempts to undermine the revolution by detaining and torturing revolutionaries, subjecting women to virginity tests, and sentencing protesters in military trials. More than 12,000 Egyptians have been sentenced in speedy, unjust military trials since February, deprived of basic conditions ensuring due process of law. To secure a regular criminal trial, one must face corruption charges as a member of the former regime. SCAF has also demonstrated political opportunism in trying to secure within Egypt’s constitution the power to intervene in governmental procedure. Furthermore, the council has manipulated electoral process, continually postponing election dates and changing election rules without real participation from political forces in Egypt. To protect these actions, they have censored criticism in Egyptian media, and journalists and activists who criticize the council are called in for questioning and are subjected to intimidation. Needless to say, under such circumstances, the bulk of the revolution’s goals were never achieved.

The Obama Administration is backing this military council, and not only in the form of praise. SCAF Chairman Mohamed Tantawi has also been granted a partnership role in AFRICOM, an arm of the US military that intervenes in African conflicts. Such support for Egypt’s military dictatorship has impacted the reputation of the United States, as the US appears both complicit and complacent in the abortion of democratic process in Egypt. This image has only been exacerbated by the US supply of weapons currently being used against peaceful demonstrators in Egypt. Most injuries in Tahrir in the last few days are from CS gas, deployed almost continuously since November 18 in excessive quantities. Inhalation can cause lethal respiratory problems, and the canisters can also be used as projectile weaponry. There is also substantial evidence that CR gas has been used against protesters, which is classified as a “combat class chemical weapon” by the US military. CR gas causes permanent liver and heart damage and is a potential carcinogen. More than 40 protesters have been killed, and well over 1,000 injured.

How can the Obama Administration continue to support this? The Egyptian people have made it clear over the past several days that they are done with military rule. They demand a civilian government be implemented today. The time has come for the United States to withdraw its political support for SCAF and to halt weaponry supplies to the Egyptian military. The US must allow Egyptians to determine the shape and course of democracy in Egypt. This means abiding by the will of the people with regard to the elections scheduled to begin on November 28. Although SCAF would like to portray these elections as legitimate, the council’s monopoly and distortion of the electoral process would create a farce of democracy, ruled by bullets and not ballots.

We call upon American taxpayers to demand an end to US support for Egypt’s military council. Any statements released by the State Department that fail to relinquish this support signal US backing of a lethal assault on the basic human rights of Egyptians. Please write to and call your representatives. Ask them to pressure the Obama administration to desist in backing SCAF. This is not a request for US assistance, but the very opposite. We are asking the US government to disengage and to end its support for military dictatorship in Egypt. We are asking the US to respect the hard-earned, democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people.

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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