Holding Palestinian Ground: Lessons from Gaza to Sheikh Jarrah (Video)

Holding Palestinian Ground: Lessons from Gaza to Sheikh Jarrah (Video)

Holding Palestinian Ground: Lessons from Gaza to Sheikh Jarrah (Video)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Holding Palestinian Ground

Lessons from Gaza to Sheikh Jarrah


Featuring

Amjad Iraqi
Issam Adwan
Mariam Barghouti
Mouin Rabbani  
Noura Erakat 
Samer Abu Aysheh
Sherene Seikaly
Yasser Qous
Ziad Abu-Rish 



Palestinian activists and scholars from across Palestine and in the United States and the Netherlands discuss the developing situation on the ground in Palestine, as well as the opportunities and challenges of transnational mobilization and resistance to the current unfolding developments. 

Click here to find a list of resources designed to offer starting points for those looking to place the current situation in historical and political context, and materials for those looking to expand their knowledge of the Israeli state’s efforts to expel Palestinians from their land and to change Jerusalem’s demographic balance by forcing Palestinians from their homes.

Click herehere, and here to watch Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat place the protests mobilizing around the ongoing developments of Sheikh Jarrah in context as she dispels prevailing Israeli talking points.

Click here to watch Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani discuss the growing civil conflict in numerous Israeli towns and cities between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. 

Featuring


Amjad Iraqi is an editor and writer at +972 Magazine. He is also a policy analyst with the think tank Al-Shabaka, and was previously an advocacy coordinator at the legal center Adalah.
 
Issam Adwan is the Gaza Project Manager for We Are Not Numbers, a trained translator/interpreter, and a journalist and English teacher with more than four years of experience. In 2019, he was chosen by The Carter Center to be the first Palestinian independent observer for the Tunisian elections.
 
Mariam Barghouti is a writer and researcher based in Ramallah.

Mouin Rabbani has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He was previously Senior Analyst Middle East and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria. He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine.
 
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
 
Samer Abu Aysheh: شاب مقدسي من مواليد البلدة القديمة في العام ١٩٨٧ ، حاصل على شهادة البكالوريوس في الاعلام وفنون الاتصل من جامعة ٦ اكتوبر في جمهورية مصر العربي واعمل في مجال الاعلام منذ تخرجي في العام ٢٠٠٩
 
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seikaly is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and a policy member of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.
 
Yasser Qous is a Masters student in the department of History and Civilization at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, in Paris. His research interests are social history in Palestine, focusing on the historical construction of the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem. 
 
Ziad Abu-Rish is a 2020-21 American Druze Foundation Fellow at CCAS. He is Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. Abu-Rish’s research interests center on the intersections between state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the mid-twentieth-century Levant, especially Lebanon and Jordan. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya.
 
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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