Webinar Series: Anti-Black Racism In SWANA + Diaspora (English, Farsi, and Arabic Events; Multiple Dates)

Webinar Series: Anti-Black Racism In SWANA + Diaspora (English, Farsi, and Arabic Events; Multiple Dates)

Webinar Series: Anti-Black Racism In SWANA + Diaspora (English, Farsi, and Arabic Events; Multiple Dates)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Following a statement made after the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, between July 10th and July 24th, 2020, Mizna with the US-based organizations including the Imagining Transnational Solidarities Research Circle at the University of Minnesota, and Arab Resource and Organizing Center will host a series of online panels in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Panels in Arabic, English, and Farsi will address the history, present, and future of joint struggles between Black and non-Black South West Asian and North African communities, as well as solidarities and coalitions between SWANA  communities and Black American communities in the United States. The series will also interrogate anti-Black racism in the SWANA region and its diasporas, and acknowledges the ways in which the SWANA communities have contributed to, profited from, and perpetuated forms of anti-Black racism and violence, while being subjected to anti-Arab, anti-Iranian, and anti-Muslim violence both locally and globally. 

These dialogues are some of the ongoing actions that Mizna and its partners are taking to address anti-Black racism prevalent in the laws, distribution of resources, and cultural productions in SWANA communities. We seek to confront the biases and racism present within ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our businesses, and our organizations. Among a wide variety of topics, we will grapple with the charges of racism and discrimination against some SWANA businesses, the surfacing of anti-Black racism perpetuated by some members of the SWANA communities, the intensification of fascism, xenophobia and white supremacy, increased policing and surveillance, and the performances of model minority citizenship and market virility that contribute to white ascendency. We aim to collectively develop strategies of organizing without subsuming Blackness under Arabness or Iranian-ness, and without falling into the divide and conquer trap that distracts our political energies. Our conversations will be rooted in multi-issue organizing traditions, joint solidarity approaches to social justice, and building sustainable movements transnationally by making connections between the violence of slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, cis heteropatriarchy, and militarism. By centering Black lives in these webinars, we hope to highlight the necessity of confronting and meaningfully challenging anti-Black racism in our communities and in our social justice work. 

Panelists from North America, Europe, and Southwest Asia, East Africa, and North Africa will offer their expertise and experiences on these topics. Stay tuned for more information and mark your calendars to join the conversations below.

This project is co-sponsored by AGITATE!, Arab American Cultural Center, Arab Studies InstituteNew Arab American Theater WorkRadius of Arab American WritersArab American Action NetworkUS Palestinian Community NetworkMamasGender & Sexuality page of Jadaliyya.

 

English –July 10, 2020 // 11am CDT // 4pm GMT


PANELISTS:
 Moustafa Bayoumi, Ramla Bile, Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, Lara Kiswani, Nadine Naber, Ash Stephans
MODERATORS: Sima Shakhsari, Farid Matuk
PANELISTS + MODERATOR BIOS HERE

Farsi / فارسی –July 17, 2020 // 11am CDT // 4pm GMT


PANELISTS:
 Alex Eskandarkhah, Parisa Vaziri, Priscillia Kounkou-Hoveyda, Dr. Assal Rad
MODERATORS: Sima Shakhsari, M. Shadee Malaklou
PANELISTS + MODERATOR BIOS HERE

Arabic / العربي –July 24, 2020 // 11am CDT // 4pm GMT


Read more information on the mizna.org website.

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