Call for Papers -- Settles and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society (Deadline: 31 August 2016)

Call for Papers -- Settles and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society (Deadline: 31 August 2016)

Call for Papers -- Settles and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society (Deadline: 31 August 2016)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

 

 

 

 

Call for Papers:

Settlers and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society

Special Issue of Settler Colonial Studies

In Collaboration with the SOAS Palestine Society

We invite contributions for a guest-edited special issue of Settler-Colonial Studies on the topic: “Settlers and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society”.  Papers should be between 8000 and 9500 words and should be submitted to soaspalsoc.conf2015@gmail.com by 31 August 2016.

This special issue aims to contribute to the growing body of literature that intersects settler colonial studies with empirical studies of Israel/Palestine, and is based on the 10th annual SOAS Palestine Society Conference, held on the 17th-18th October 2015. Its thematic focus is a concrete and contemporary interrogation of the structures and mechanisms of Zionist settler colonialism through the lens of Israeli politics and society. Bringing critical studies of Palestine into conversation with critical studies of Israeli society offers a platform through which the two conflate and form a united body of knowledge on Israeli settler-colonial realities. Our aim is to develop an analysis of the relations between the colonisers and the colonised.

The designation of Settler Colonial Studies as its own disciplinary arena has been an important development for understanding its particular machinations, as linked to but distinctive from Colonialism as a whole. Authors such as Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini and others have helped to identify the specificity of the settler colonial frame, and the overall forms in which historical processes – ranging from the colonisation of North America to the colonisation of South Africa, through that of Australia, Algeria, Zimbabwe and others – are inscribed.

Also in the case of Palestine, a rich body of literature has emerged on the historical development, and contemporary realities of Zionist settler colonialism. Historians such as, among others, Gershon Shafir, Salim Tamari, Walid Khalidi and Ilan Pappe, or social scientists such as Nadim Rouhana, Shourideh Molavi, and Mansour Nsasra have detailed the ways in which Zionist colonisation took form in Palestine from the late 19th century onwards, how this project interacted with the indigenous population, and how it continues to play itself out today. The Journal, Settler Colonial Studies, itself, produced a seminal issue on settler colonialism in Palestine, calling for a new praxis for analysing and challenging the political and social spectrum it has produced (Salamanca et al, 2012).

The issue aims to advance this body of literature, in its specific focus on social, political and economic relations within contemporary Israel. Moving beyond the critical work that has already established the efficacy and analytical astuteness of the settler-colonial paradigm in this case, the issue’s contribution to the field will be framed by the materiality of ‘the settler-colonial logic’. While its structural features reach across place, space and time, settler-colonialism takes on concrete form through the colonisation of people and land. It then evolves and is entrenched through the production, maintenance and dissemination of knowledge, which then further sustains its dominance over territory, capital, institutions and people. The concrete produces the contours of the settler-colonial space, and the titles in this issue will trace these lines through the complex relations, modalities and mechanisms that embed Zionist settler-colonialism as part of the everyday life of present-day Palestine.

For this special issue, we are seeking articles that interrogate the material ambiguities of the Israeli case, and thus can contribute to advancing our theoretical understanding of the settler-colonial frame. The different titles will answer the question: What are the material, cultural, ideological and legal manifestations of Israeli settler colonialism, and what do they teach us about the potential for decolonisation?

While we are open to any range of topics, we hope to specifically explore:

·       Productions of knowledge and the construction of the colonising subject

·       Logistics, legalities and infrastructure that seek to make indigenous space and people legible to the coloniser

·       The impact of settler colonial analysis on shifting discourses of ‘race’ and racism inside Israel

·       The violence of settler colonialism in Israel

·       Limits to power and limits to resistance in Israel

·       The political economy of Israel’s war machinery

·       International patrons of contemporary settler colonial society in Israel

·       Relations between marginalised Israeli-Jewish communities and Palestinian citizens of Israel

·       The role of religion in the Israeli settler colonial logic

Through these different approaches, the special issue aims to situate the analysis of Israeli society firmly within the boundaries of Palestine studies. Too often, the subjects discussed herein are considered to be the sole preserve of Israel Studies’ publications and tend, therefore, to approach the subject through the limits of this lens. By challenging these boundaries – in physical and disciplinary terms – the task of understanding the particular modes of the settler colonial society, become part and parcel of the process of explaining the colonial process, in order to contribute to its dismantling.

Submissions should be between 8,000 - 9500 words in length, including endnotes and bibliographic references, and sent to the guest editors at soaspalsoc.conf2015@gmail.com by August 31st, 2016. These will undergo a stringent peer review process; the results of which will be communicated to authors within three months of receiving the papers. We expect to publish the special issue in the first half of 2017.

Please see and follow the journal’s submission guidelines, in particular its eligibility requirements and reference style guide. If you would like to discuss your contribution, please contact the guest editors at soaspalsoc.conf2015@gmail.com.

This special issue is being developed in collaboration with the SOAS Palestine Society and co-edited by:

  • Yara Hawari (University of Exeter)
  • Dr. Sharri Plonski (SOAS, University of London)
  • Dr. Elian Weisman (Council for British Research in the Levant) 

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