Reports Roundup (October 13)

Reports Roundup (October 13)

Reports Roundup (October 13)

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.]

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon Awarded National Translation Prize for Darwish Translation Sinan Antoon, a co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya, was unanimously chosen to receive this award for his translation of Mahmoud Darwish`s In the Presence of Absence

Bahraini Medical Professionals Arrested and Imprisoned for Legitimate Exercise of Medicine The Gulf Center for Human RIghts calls for the immediate release of six arrested medical professionals in Bahrain. The supposed charges for the six date back to the doctors` assistance to pro-reform protesters in the spring of 2011. 

On the 2012 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference On 2 November 2012, student activists from across the country will gather at the University of Michigan to discuss the changing dynamics of advocating for Palestinian self-determination on college campuses. 

Inaugural Issue in Journal on Postcolonial Directions of Education Postcolonial Directions in Education studies the diverse aspects to education in former colonies, for example, multiculturalism in education, the promotion of local linguistic and literary traditions, and the culture of empire in education. 

Text of Manal El-Tibi`s Resignation Letter to Egypt`s Constituent Assembly In this letter, human rights activist Manal El-Tibi explains her reasons for resigning her position on the Rights and Freedoms Committee of the Constituent Assembly, the body responsible for drafting the new Egyptian constitution. El-Tibi cites the lack of motive for true systemic change of the constitution as the main reason for her resignation. 

Appeal to Defend Freedoms of Expression and the Press in Jordan The Coordination Group of Electronic Websites, an organization representing the Jordanian press sector, opposes a proposed amendment to Jordanian law that allows increased censorship of "online publications," which could be interpreted to include both online news sources and blogs. 

HRW Call for Investigation and Punishment for Lebanese Army Attackers on Migrant Laborers Human Rights Watch calls for the investigation of the abuse of seventy-two Syrian, Egyptian, and Sudanese male migrant workers by army officers in Beirut. 

Report Back on The Freedom Bus: First Palestine Freedom Ride The Freedom Bus, a new initiative in the West Bank inspired by the Freedom Rides of US South, summarizes each stop on its first tour. 

The Struggle for Palestinian Rights Is Incompatible with Any Form of Racism or Bigotry: A Statement by Palestinians Electronic Intifada reiterates its firm opposition to all forms of racism, including both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, in all efforts to achieve equality and justice for the Palestinian people. 

Tentative Jihad: Syria`s Fundamentalist Opposition International Crisis Group addresses the strain of Salafism in the Syrian opposition movement: specifically, from where the movement arose, how conservative it is, and how it should be addressed by the majority opposition and the West. 

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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