In Memory of Michael Hudson

In Memory of Michael Hudson

In Memory of Michael Hudson

By : Leila Hudson

Michael Craig Hudson, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, died on May 25, 2021 at his daughter’s home in Tucson, Arizona. He was one week short of his 83rd birthday when he died of cancer.

Michael was born on June 2, 1938 in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Robert Bowman Hudson, Jr. of Dublin, VA, was an urban planner and pioneer of public educational broadcasting. His mother, Joan Loram Hudson, was born in South Africa and was a champion college tennis player. Michael grew up in Denver, Colorado and attended high school at University High in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and also in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated from Swarthmore College and received his PhD in political science from Yale University, studying with legendary political scientist Karl Deutsch and influenced by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, with whom he took a course as a high school student.

Michael’s lifelong engagement with the Arab world was sparked when, as an exchange student in Beirut, he witnessed first-hand the US military intervention in the 1958 Lebanese crisis. He went on to focus his study of politics and international relations on the Arab world and Middle East. His first book, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon (1968), was widely considered the pioneering English language monograph on that country’s political fragility. Similarly, his second book, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (1977), was a major contribution to the exploration of identity, history, and power as contributors to regional instability. In addition to these two major works which grounded the field of Middle East political science in qualitative research and comparative frameworks, he edited and authored dozens of volumes, scholarly articles, and commentaries. He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association in 1986-87 and was a frequent and sought-after media commentator on Middle Eastern affairs and US foreign policy for decades.

Michael began his career as a lecturer at the City University of New York, later moving to Washington, DC to teach at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. In 1975, he joined the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University as director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and accepted an endowed position as professor of international relations in the Government Department in 1979. He worked closely with his lifelong friends Hisham Sharabi, Halim Barakat, Clovis Maksoud, Ibrahim Oweiss, John Ruedy, Hanna Batatu, Zeina Azzam, Peter Krogh, Barbara Stowasser and Judith Tucker, among many others, to shape the field of interdisciplinary Arab studies. His many students have made untold contributions in academia, journalism, government service, diplomacy, humanitarianism and business. After serving several terms as CCAS director, he was recruited as the founding director of the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore from 2010 to 2014. Throughout his career he advocated for human rights and democratization across the Middle East and was a passionate supporter of Palestinian liberation. 

Michael lost his wife and beloved companion of forty-four years, Palestinian-Lebanese biologist and toxicologist Vera Wahbe Hudson, in 2007. He was an avid bon vivant, delighting in fine food and drink, travel, music, theater, literature and spending time with friends, old and new.  He enjoyed running and swimming until his last days of life.

Michael is survived by his brother Robert B. Hudson III and sister-in-law Perry Hewitt of Chapel Hill, North Carolina; his daughter Leila Hudson, son-in-law Riad Altoubal, grandchildren Zayna and Zayd Altoubal of Tucson, Arizona; and his daughter Aida Hudson, son-in-law Andreas Laursen and grandchildren Annika and Benedict Hudson-Laursen of Copenhagen, Denmark. His family, friends, and colleagues will gather in Washington, DC in July 2021 to remember and celebrate his life.

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