On the ADC, Arab-American Community, and Empowerment

[Left to right: ADC President Warren David, Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, and Anas \"Andy\" Shallal. Image from adc.org] [Left to right: ADC President Warren David, Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, and Anas \"Andy\" Shallal. Image from adc.org]

On the ADC, Arab-American Community, and Empowerment

By : Anas Shallal

[The following speech was delivered in acceptance of the Hala Salam Maksoud Leadership Award on 23 June 2012 at the Gala Awards Banquet of the Annual National Convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).]

I want to thank the ADC for giving me this great honor. This is doubly special since I knew Haleh Maksoud and worked closely with her on several issues including the then-looming war against Iraq back in 1996. Haleh understood the meaning and importance of grass-roots activism and the value of nurturing and advancing the next generation of activists and change-makers.

I am thrilled at the new leadership of the ADC under the guidance of Warren David and I am looking forward to working with him and Nabil and others on many fronts. I look forward to seeing this organization become once again the true voice for the voiceless – an organization that is truly representative of the energy and activism that fills these convention halls year after year. I want to urge the leadership of the organization to become bolder, to fight harder, to stand taller and to speak truth to power.

Frederick Douglas, the great African American abolitionist, said that “power never concedes anything without a demand, it never has and it never will.” We here at the ADC must take heed of such a statement and understand that every civil rights struggle in this country required principled leadership that did not sell out its constituency for the lure of a seat at the table. 

The problem we have now is not that we don’t have a seat at the table, it`s that each time we are invited to sit at the table we walk away hungry. It seems that too often we tend to settle for crumbs.

It`s time for Arab American leaders to stop settling for crumbs and it`s time for them to demand nothing less than the whole loaf. A seat at the table may serve the person sitting there but too often it does not serve the people they represent. For a period of ADC history, we have had such leaders – leaders who were willing and continue to sell out the civil rights and aspirations of Arab Americans for the lure of being invited to the White House or being part of the mainstream. They were afraid to speak out and keep their mouth shut for fear that they would never be invited again. These leaders were misinformed at best, and unwilling at worst, to do the hard work that is needed to achieve the lofty goals of this great organization. Perhaps they would have been served well to have read Frederick Douglass or studied the late historian and activist Howard Zinn who said that you cannot be neutral on a moving train. 

Ladies and gentlemen, these are not neutral times and we cannot afford to be neutral. We don’t need another Arab American organization that panders to the mainstream. If we continue to be polite and keep our mouths shut we will be swept aside and left to the dustbin of history. 

We are not the mainstream—we are the conscious of America. We must not settle for the America that is but aspire to the America that could be—the America of liberty and fairness and equal rights for everyone. 

We must also understand that America is a schizophrenic country and that we, many of us Americans by choice, are its medication.

Langston Hughes, the great African American poet who lived in the early part of the twentieth century, spoke about the duality of America – the America that is and the America that could be – and admonished us to continue to fight for the America that could be despite all its failings.

He wrote in his poem, "Let America be America Again," about this duality:

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free. 

(America never was America to me.) 


Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above. 

(It never was America to me.)

 

He continued at the end of the poem:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

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