Lebanese Studies Association Letter to Universities Concerning International Students from Lebanon

Lebanese Studies Association Letter to Universities Concerning International Students from Lebanon

Lebanese Studies Association Letter to Universities Concerning International Students from Lebanon

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[In response to the financial and other stresses facing students whose funding sources are based in Lebanon, the Board of the Lebanese Studies Association has written a letter encouraging academic institutions to do what they can to support these students. The letter is below is reproduced below, and also available as a PDF at this link. The LSA asks faculty, staff, and students at colleges and universities to to consider sharing this letter with the appropriate administrators at their institution (for example, the Dean of Students, Dean of Faculty, President or Provost, Financial Aid Director, etc), and passing it on to colleagues at other institutions so that they may send to their administrators as well.]

Dear Colleagues,

We write to you as the Board of Directors of the Lebanese Studies Association (LSA) to call your attention to the unfolding situation in Lebanon and how it might affect currently-enrolled students whose funding sources (such as family) are based in Lebanon. 

The LSA was founded in 2017 to promote scholarship and teaching on Lebanon. The LSA is also committed to serving as a resource to institutions of higher education. Lebanon is currently experiencing a monetary crisis as part of a broader set of crises. In this context, local banks in Lebanon have implemented ad hoc policies of capital controls on dollar-denominated accounts. The most salient aspect of these policies are the drastic limitations on cash withdrawals and a near total ban on outbound international transfers. (More information can be found in this New York Times article from December 2019, though the situation continues to worsen).

In this context, many students with bank accounts in Lebanon or whose Lebanon-based family provides financial support are experiencing financial distress. These individuals’ international student status also means they are unlikely to be able to seek or secure employment in their host communities to make up for the loss of income. 

The LSA Board of Directors strongly urges colleges and universities to take the above-described circumstances into consideration and devise mechanisms to provide affected students with any form of financial accommodation possible, in addition to highlighting available counseling and other student services. While we recognize that the capacity to do so is dependent on the specific institutional context of a given school, the LSA Board of Directors recommends the following measures until the capital control measures have been lifted: waivers for tuition; cancellation of fees associated with late payments; relief from billing-related enrollment holds; and communication highlighting campus- and community-based support services, including academic counseling, sensitive assistance navigating their financial situation, mental health counseling, campus employment opportunities, assistance procuring necessary course books and supplies, and other resources. 

The length or future contours of the current monetary crisis in Lebanon is unclear. We hope the above information provides some sense of the challenges faced by students at your institutions of higher education who depend on funds based in Lebanon. We urge you to keep aware of the situation in so far as it can shape your provision of the support necessary to ensure the continued enrollment and success of those students in your institution.

Sincerely,

The LSA Board of Directors*

Akram Khater (Co-President), Professor of History, North Carolina State University

Nadya Sbaiti (Co-President), Assistant Professor at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, American University of Beirut

Lara Deeb (Historian), Professor of Anthropology, Scripps College

Stacy Fahrenthold (Treasurer), Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Davis

Ziad Abu-Rish (Fundraising Chair), Assistant Professor of History, Ohio University

Ghenwa Hayek (Member-at-Large), Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, University of Chicago

Tsolin Nalbantian (Member-at-Large), Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Leiden University 

Catherine Batruni (Graduate Student Representative), PhD Candidate, American University of Beirut 

Owain Lawson (Website Editor), PhD Candidate, Columbia University

* all institutional affiliations listed solely for identification purposes

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

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