Conference: Self-Critique Two Decades After Oslo (5-6 October, London)

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Conference: Self-Critique Two Decades After Oslo (5-6 October, London)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Self-Critique Two Decades After Oslo

9th Annual Conference

SOAS Palestine Society and hosted by London Middle East Institute and the Centre for Palestine Studies (SOAS)

5-6 October 2013 (9-5:30 PM; 10-6 PM)

Brunei Lecture Theater, SOAS, London  

On 5-6 October 2013, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its ninth annual conference, Self-Critique Two Decades After Oslo.

Twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, much continues to be written about the structural and subsequent failings of the Accords to achieve justice for the Palestinian people. While conventional views still regard Oslo as a winning formula that only suffered from a lack of implementation, critical analysis of the Oslo process agrees that the Accords only accelerated the Zionist settler colonial project, allowing Israel to lay siege and further expand its grip on Palestinian land, while expelling and destroying the lives of more Palestinians. This conference aims to move beyond this critical consensus and identify the internal failures prior to, and at the moment of, the conception of the Oslo accords, as well as in its aftermath. In doing so, we will attempt to understand how Oslo has transformed Palestinian life and struggle. The conference situates itself within a long history of self-criticism after defeat – a self-criticism aimed at assessing the strategic failures of the movement, and formulating the necessary steps ahead. This is a self-criticism premised on a commitment to the political rebuilding of the Palestinian liberation movement, and the struggle against settler colonialism.

In its embrace of self-criticism, the conference will focus on the ways Palestinian leadership and elites have become embedded in the logic of settler colonialism, embraced neoliberal capitalism, and reproduced social and political accommodation of the Oslo process. However, it also aims to widen our lens, and examine the growing socialisation and reproduction of Oslo logics in Palestinian political and social life, and the ways in which Palestinian resistance against Oslo and Israel, and international solidarity with that resistance, has reproduced the very conditions it seeks to overturn. In particular, we hope to highlight the context and consequences of the re-orientation of the liberation struggle into a legal and rights-based approach; the political, geographical, and social separation of the Palestinian body politic in movement discourse and strategy; the proliferation of an unaccountable “political solution/vision market” and unchecked practices of solidarity; and growing alienation and distancing of Palestinians from others engaged in similar struggles against settler-colonialism.

With this conference, SOAS Palestine Society hopes to build on its long-standing commitment to critically rigorous movement thought and analysis in an emancipatory and committed space.

 

 DAY ONE               |    Saturday 5th October 2013

 

 

9.00-9.30

Registration and Refreshments

9.30-9.35

Opening remarks – Director, Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS

9.35-10.15

Keynote Address – Overcoming Oslo, Restoring Popular Sovereignty – Karma Nabulsi, University of Oxford

10.15-11.45

Session 1: Situating Palestine

1. Unsettling Exceptionalism: Bringing a Race, Class and Gender Perspective to Palestine – Nahla Abdo, Carleton University
2. The Continuity of Colonial Control Mechanisms in Palestine – Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
3. Olso and the Taming of National Liberation Struggles in the Arab World – 
Gilbert Achcar, School of Oriental and African Studies, London

11.45-12.00

Coffee, Tea and Refreshments

12.00-13.30

Session 2: Subjects of Self-Criticism

1. Histories of Self-Criticism within the Palestinian Liberation Struggle – Abdel-Razzaq Takriti, University of Sheffield
2. Promises not Reached, Dreams Waiting to be Realized: Oslo and its Aftermath – 
Eileen Kuttab, Birzeit University
3. The Roots of Oslo: Beyond an Ideological Critique – 
Adam Hanieh, School of Oriental and African Studies, London

13.30-14.15

Lunch

14.15-15.45

Session 3: Oslo and the Fragmentation of the Body Politic

1. The Palestinian Citizens in Israel After Oslo – Nimer Sultany, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
2. Wadi ‘Araba: Precarious Citizenship and Palestinians in Jordan – 
Mohammad Al-Masri (tbc), Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies
3. On Loss and Renewal in Lebanon – 
Diana K. Allan (tbc), Cornell University

15.45-16.00

Coffee, Tea and Refreshments

16.00-17.30

Session 4: International Law, the Human Rights Turn, and the Struggle for Palestine

1. International Law as Anti-Colonial Struggle – Hassan Jabareen (tbc), ADALAH: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel
2. Settler Colonialism and International Law in the 21st Century
– Darryl Li, Columbia University
3.
In the Land of the International: Palestine, Revolution and War – Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley

   

DAY TWO               |    Sunday 6th October 2013

 

 

9.30-10.00

Refreshments

10.00-11.40

Session 5: Social Reproduction Under Oslo

1. Water as Political Tool to Encourage or Discourage Settlement – Mark Zeitoun, University of East Anglia
2. Solidity and Fluidity in the Bubble: Housing Development, State-building, and Cultural Reproduction in the Contemporary West Bank – 
Kareem Rabie, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
3. Breaking the Popular, Securing the Local: Aid and Its Fragmentary States – 
Lisa Bhungalia, Syracuse University
4. Hooked on Electricity: Colonizing Palestine on the Grid – 
Omar Jabary Salamanca, Ghent University

11.40-11.55

Coffee, Tea and Refreshments

12.00-13.40

Session 6: Oslo and the Consequences for Resistance

1. International Investigative Commissions in Palestine, Before and After Oslo – Lori Allen, University of Cambridge
2.
Contextualizing Contemporary Palestinian Popular Resistance – Ala Al-Azzeh, Rice University
3. Palestine De-Osloized! – 
Haidar Eid, Al-Aqsa University
4. The Oslo Generation on Exile Politics: Between Solidarity and Leadership – 
Nour Joudah, Institute for Palestine Studies

13.40-14.25

Lunch

14.30-16.10

Session 7: Integrating Critique and Moving Forward

1. Co-opted Solidarity and the Challenge of Joint Struggle – Sara Kershnar, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
2. Rebuilding the Movement: From the Popular Committees to the Labor Unions – 
Jamal Juma, Stop the Wall 
3. Organizing in Yarmouk Camp – 
Youssef Fakhreddine, Ajras Al-Awda, Yarmouk Camp, Syria
4.
Don’t Mourn - Organise: Organisation, the struggle against apartheid and the Palestinian Predicament – Steven Friedman, Rhodes University/University of Johannesburg

16.10-16.25

Coffee, Tea and Refreshments

16.25-18.00

Session 8: Roundtable

  

Tickets

Please note SEATS ARE LIMITED – book in advance!

Prices:

£25 Standard and £20 Concessions (i.e. students, unemployed, pensioners)

To buy your tickets

Online: www.soaspalsoc.org/conference

By cheque: Send cheques payable to SOAS Palestine Society with attached note of email address to:

SOAS Palestine Society, Thornhaugh Street, London, WC1H 0XG

Location

SOAS Brunei Gallery, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square London, WC1H 0XG

Contact

palestineconference@gmail.com

www.soaspalsoc.org/conference

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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