Campaign Update: Hebrew University Oral History Conference Dealt Two Significant Blows

Campaign Update: Hebrew University Oral History Conference Dealt Two Significant Blows

Campaign Update: Hebrew University Oral History Conference Dealt Two Significant Blows

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Campaign to Boycott the Oral History Conerence at Hebew University. For the original campaign peitition, click here.]

Hebrew University Conference Dealt Two Significant Blows

Statement from Campaign to Boycott the Oral History Conference at Hebrew University

We are pleased to announce that the planned June 2014 “International Oral History Conference” being organized by Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been dealt a double blow with the cancellation of their two international keynote speakers: Alessandro Portelli (Italy) and Mary Marshall Clark (USA).  The university’s claim to be hosting the “first international oral history conference” was unfounded when they made it; it is even less true now.

Much to our disappointment, Portelli, despite cancelling his keynote address, will still be attending the conference and participating in a workshop. Nevertheless, since he is no longer a featured speaker, Hebrew University has been denied the opportunity to use his name to cover up its deep complicity in violations of international law and human rights.

Clark’s full withdrawal from the conference, on the other hand, was met with praise and support from academics concerned about Israel’s cynical use of international figures to cover up its regime of occupation and apartheid.

We continue to call on Portelli and other international oral history practitioners and scholars from all disciplines to refuse to participate in this or any conference at an institution that is as deeply complicit in Israel’s flagrant and persistent infringement of Palestinian human and political rights as the Hebrew University. 

The initial campaign launched four months ago by Palestinian, Israeli, North American and British oral historians --among other academics--has now been endorsed by almost 400 academics, including many oral historians, from 27 countries in Europe, South Africa, Asia and Oceana, as well as North and South America.[1] We thank all those international scholars and professionals who, by adding their names to the public letter/boycott call, are heeding the 2004 Call of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). This calls not only for the boycott of academic and cultural institutions involved in Israel’s system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid but also to “refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions.” 

While all Israeli universities are deeply involved in Israel’s regime of oppression against the Palestinian people, the Hebrew University is particularly noteworthy.[2]

§ The land on which some of its Mount Scopus campus buildings and facilities were expanded was acquired as a result of Israel’s 1968 illegal confiscation of 3345 dunums of Palestinian land, land which is deemed occupied territory under international law.

§ It maintains close ties to the Israeli military industry, which is accused of war crimes against Palestinian civilians; provides special privileges to Israeli soldiers and security personnel; and collaborates with the Israeli army in training officers and recruits.[3]

§ It discriminates against Palestinians, including those who are citizens of Israel, by failing to provide teaching services to the residents of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas in contrast to those provided to Jewish groups; and not offering any courses in Arabic.

§ It denies freedom of speech and protest to its few Palestinian students, as evidenced by the prohibition of a commemoration event during the 2008-2009 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip during which approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed; at the same time, offering special consideration and benefits to student-soldiers who participated in that invasion.

§ The staff from the Hebrew University take part in the supervision and promotion committees of students and staff at Ariel University, which is illegally built on confiscated Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.

§ It does not recognize degrees awarded by the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Jerusalem while those awarded by the Ariel University in an illegal colony are recognized.

The call to boycott the “international” oral history conference at the Hebrew University is part of the growing international tide to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinian human rights and international law. From Cape Town to Catalonia, Sydney to San Paolo and London to Lahore, faculty and students are challenging their institutions to honor the Palestinian call for a non-violent response to Israeli apartheid and colonialism, as they had done against apartheid institutions in South Africa.  Even in the US, as Alex Lubin has noted, what Edward Said dubbed “America’s last taboo” was broken, as senior scholars and youthful students vigorously debated an academic boycott resolution at the American Studies Association conference – the outcome of which is still being determined.[4]

We call on oral historians and related professionals and activists around the world to honor the boycott and refuse to be a party to sanitizing the reputation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and to covering up its close association with Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism.

To sign on to the public letter/boycott call, email: hebrewuconferenceboycott@gmail.com



[1] For the list of signatories, go to: http://www.aurdip.org/Call-to-Boycott-the-Oral-History.html

[2] To see the detailed documentation regarding Hebrew University, see the letter/call cited above

[3] http://www.bdsmovement.net/files/2011/02/EOO23-24-Web.pdf
http://www.idf.il/1283-13885-en/Dover.aspx ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_program 

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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