Conference: Palestine Center Annual Conference (Washington DC, 9 November 2012)

[Image from thejerusalemfund.org] [Image from thejerusalemfund.org]

Conference: Palestine Center Annual Conference (Washington DC, 9 November 2012)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Where Are We Headed? The US and Middle East After Elections
Palestine Center Annual Conference
9 November 2012
Washington, DC

The Palestine Center is an independent think-tank committed to communicating reliable and objective information about the Palestinian political experience to American policy makers, journalists, students and the general public. Established in 1991, it is the educational program of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development.

The Palestine Center brings together people and resources within the American and Palestinian communities to educate about Palestine and the Palestinian people`s ongoing quest for sovereignty on their land, civil and political rights, and an end to Israeli occupation.

The need for an organization such as The Palestine Center can be found in the effects of the economic, cultural and political oppression Palestinians have endured and which continues on a daily basis in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the surrounding refugee camps and for Palestinians world-wide as they struggle to retain their homeland. 

Palestinians` ability to maintain their daily lives and strengthen their democratic political system depends on international humanitarian and non-governmental organizations such as The Palestine Center.

Schedule of Events (Tentative)  

8:00 - 9:00 a.m.
Registration

9:00 - 9:15 a.m.
Welcome Remarks

9:15 - 11:00 a.m.
Panel I – U.S. Policy After Election: A Reason for Change? 
What will the outcome of the Presidential election mean for U.S. Middle East policy? If re-elected, will President Obama maintain similar policies or make significant adjustments? If Governor Romney is elected, what changes can we expect? Panelists will discuss the impact of the election on US policy towards various actors in the region.

Hrair Balian
Director, Conflict Resolution Program
The Carter Center


Mark Perry
Independent Author

Helena Cobban
Independent Publisher and Journalist

11:00 - 11:30 a.m.
Coffee and Pastry Break

11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Panel II – Taking Stock in the Arab Uprisings: Where are we headed? 
Uprisings have led to the disappearance of some governments and the emergence of others. The political map of the region is changing and many questions remain about the direction in which the region is headed. Panelists will discuss the foreign policies of states in the region, the role of regional organizations like the Gulf Corporation Council, and the impact of election outcomes in shaping policy changes.

Nathan Brown
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
George Washington University


Adel Iskandar
Scholar of Media and Communications, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
Georgetown University


Kristen Diwan
Assistant Professor of Comparative and Regional Studies, School of International Service 
American University 

1:00 - 1:45 p.m.
Break for Lunch

1:45 - 3:15 p.m.
Panel III - Public Discourse on Palestine: Reasons for Optimism?
As occupation persists and technology develops, a growing number of Americans are challenging the long-held Israeli narrative of events and history in the region. We ask what changes there have been in US media coverage, what role new and social media plays in that, and what we can expect of these trends going forward.

Samer Badawi
Communications Manager
Institute of Middle East Understanding

Will Youmans
Assistant Professor of Media
George Washington University

Yousef Munayyer
Executive Director
The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center 

3:20 - 4:45 p.m.
Panel IV - Palestinian Strategy: Reform, Representation, and a New Framework 
Two decades after the start of the Oslo process, there are more settlers and settlements in the West Bank today than ever before. Panelists will discuss whether the two-state solution is still viable and what challenges Palestinian reconciliation and representation present, and evaluate Palestinian strategies for liberation.

Noura Erakat
Freedman Teaching Fellow, Temple Law School; 
Legal Advocacy Coordinator, Badil

Khaled Elgindy
Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Brookings Institute


Leila Hilal
Director 
New America Foundation Middle East Task Force

Click here to register. 

 

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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