Jadaliyya Environment Page Co-Editors Statement in Support of Samer Alatout

Jadaliyya Environment Page Co-Editors Statement in Support of Samer Alatout

Jadaliyya Environment Page Co-Editors Statement in Support of Samer Alatout

By : Environment Page Editors

Jadaliyya’s Environment Page editors condemn the harmful and slanderous attacks by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) against Dr. Samer N. Alatout. Professor Alatout is Associate Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies water, environmental politics, and borders in the Middle East and the United States. The DHFC has falsely accused Professor Alatout of antisemitism and included him in its list of “Top Ten Jew-Hating and Terror-Promoting Professors.” An online campaign on Facebook against Professor Alatout has ensued, targeting the UW-Madison affiliated community with the DHFC’s inflammatory charges. The Middle East Studies Association of North America’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) has denounced the DHFC’s incendiary defamation of Professor Alatout as “an effort by that notorious organization to harass and muzzle faculty members who express opinions about Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East with which it disagrees.”

We affirm CAF’s 3 June letter to the University of Wisconsin–Madison protesting the DHFC’s attack on Professor Alatout. As the letter highlights, the DHFC is a disreputable organization known for launching defamatory attacks against faculty and students across institutions of higher education in the United States. Their activities have entailed “compiling McCarthyite lists of students, professors, and administrators and plastering campuses with posters accusing them of being subversive.” The organization promotes anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate speech and activities on university campuses.

This attack on Professor Alatout is part of a broader strategy to criminalize and delegitimize Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) organizing, anti-Zionism, and broader Palestine solidarity advocacy on US campuses as antisemitic. Such smear campaigns, which spuriously claim Palestine solidarity organizing is “hate speech” particularly harm Palestinian academics and faculty and students of color. The DHFC’s incendiary allegations against Professor Alatout and the other scholars named in their blacklist take place amidst heightening suppression of Palestine solidarity work and other social justice movements under the Trump administration.

As academics and journalists working on environmental issues in the Middle East and North Africa, we further condemn this attack on Professor Alatout as an attempt to discredit and defame scholarship that rejects imperialist and colonialist environmental framings. It is no coincidence that these false allegations are directed against Professor Alatout, a scholar whose work interrogates the intersections between settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and dispossession in Palestine and North America. Professor Alatout has brought together activists from Palestine and across the Middle East and United States to produce precisely the kind of engaged and vital scholarship on water to which we are committed.

The issue of Palestine reveals most starkly the limits of freedom of speech within US universities[1]. We reject an exceptionalist approach to the intensified suppression of scholars who work on Palestine, including Dr. Alatout. Instead, we consider this attack to have grave implications for all scholars dedicated to environmentally just futures across the Middle East and North Africa and beyond. We therefore call on the University of Wisconsin–Madison to publicly provide their institutional support for Professor Alatout as he faces these incendiary attacks and harassment.

____________________

[1] Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, editors. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2014)

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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