Reports Roundup (October 27)

Reports Roundup (October 27)

Reports Roundup (October 27)

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`s First Book Is Now Available from Pluto Press The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings, now available in paperback and Kindle format, documents and analyzes the first nine months of the rebellion that spread throughout the Arab world beginning in December 2010.

Joint Letter to Kuwaiti Emir on Bidun Rights Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International call on His Highness Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah of Kuwait to actively address the problem of human rights abuses against the "stateless" population, including extending rights to employment and health care services to Bidun and allowing the Bidun to legally contest their citizenship status. 

The North Caucasus: The Challenges of Integration (II), Islam, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency International Crisis Group reports on the role of fundamentalist Islam in the political violence in the North Caucasus region, including the rate of growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the incorporation of Salafists into local communities, and the government`s responses to the insurgency.  

New Details of Israel`s Gaza Food Consumption "Red Lines" Presentation Gisha -- Legal Center for Freedom of Movement reports on newly revealed details of the Israeli government`s "Red Lines" presentation, which outlined the policy of restricting the entrance of food into the Gaza Strip. 

The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies Announces New Website One of Lebanon`s oldest independent think tanks, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies` new website will include features such as Setting the Agenda, Interactive Quick Lebanon Facts, Featured Analysis, and a newsfeed of links to other sites and articles. 

Call for Women`s Right to Abortion in Lebanon Nasawiya argues for the legalization of abortion in Lebanon in order to increase women`s access to safe abortion services and potentially decrease the number of abortions sought in the country. 

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Arab Studies Journal on "Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond" Arab Studies Journal is seeking papers that study cultural production such as art, music, and literature as a site of political expression in the case of Palestine. The deadline for submissions is 4 March, 2013. 

Open Letter on Israeli Beverage Company Operating Illegally in Palestine Corporate Watch addresses SodaStream, an Israeli carbonated beverage company with a plant operating in the illegal Mishor Adumium settlement zone in the West Bank. This letter refers to SodaStream`s new store premises in Brighton, United Kingdom, and the company`s recent statements denying the illegality of its actions. 

New Master of Arts in Middle East and Islamic Studies at George Mason University George Mason University announces a new Master of Arts program headed by Dr. Peter Mandaville and Jadaliyya`s Dr. Bassam Haddad. The Master of Arts in Middle East and Islamic Studies places the region in a global context and understand the issues in light of current events and changing historical paradigms. 

Amnesty International Calls for Release of Bahraini Teachers A Bahraini appeals court upheld the conviction of two teachers arrested in 2011 after they called for teachers` strikes to support the larger protest movement in Bahrain. In this petition, Amnesty International calls for their immediate release. 

Human Rights Organizations Call for Investigation of Migrant Worker Abuse in Lebanon Following the 7 October attack on Syrian refugees and migrant workers in Lebanon, a number of human rights organizations including Alkarama Foundation call for more executive oversight of security forces and the army and for a investigation by the judiciary into the attack.  

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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