Live with ASI: Episode 2.1 Digest – June 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.1 Digest – June 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.1 Digest – June 2021

By : Arab Studies Institute

Live with ASI is a monthly broadcast program that showcases recently published content from the Arab Studies Institute’s various branches. This content includes articles, reviews, pedagogical resources, podcasts, and more. Also featured in the broadcast are brand new interviews and discussions with authors and contributors.

In this episode, which marks the first show of our second season, hosts Bassam Haddad and MK Smith announced some upcoming events and publications, discussed a wide range of Palestine-focused content, shared New Texts Out Now interviews, and pointed out must-read pieces on Jadaliyya. The duo interviews a diverse group of scholars, including Mouin Rabbani, Muriam Haleh Davis, Sherene Seikaly, Adam Hanieh, Jehad Abusalim, and Noura Erakat. As always, this episode also features recurring segments: “The Catch-Up” with Carly A. Krakow on international current affairs, and a graduate-student focused segment with Cat Haseman.

All of the materials mentioned in the broadcast are listed here, categorized by their themes. Also listed are additional recent materials that we highly recommend. 

Announcements (1:54)


The Political Economy Project held its fifth annual Political Economy Summer Institute, bringing together select faculty leaders and students for four days of intensive discussions on key texts in critical political economy. 


On 11 June 2021, ASI will hold the sixth signature panel in the
Ten Years On project, titled “Media Framing of Political Events in Lebanon,” moderated by Maria Bou Zeid and featuring Hatem El Hibri, Ayman Mhenna, Dima Issa, and George Eid.

Quick Thoughts on the Gaza Ceasefire (3:15)


Mouin Rabani discusses the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani published a Quick Thoughts piece on the ceasefire agreement between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government. He analyzed the meaning of the ceasefire according to the objectives of the Israelis and within the broader context of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. 

Year III of the Hirak Between Repression and Optimism: Revisiting the Algerian Uprising (7:54)


Muriam Haleh Davis joined live to recap a recent panel event on the Hirak and the upcoming Algerian parliamentary elections. 

Jadaliyya Maghreb Page Co-Editor served as a panelist in a recent ASI-hosted event with George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) program titled “Year III of the Hirak Between Repression and Optimism.” Haleh Davis discussed the format and content of the panel, which looked at the trajectory of the Hirak, analyzed how the movement has shifted since 2019, and considered the Algerian regime’s strategies as well as the activists’ strategies. 


Sheikh Jarrah: Urgent Teach-In Roundtable and Middle East Learn & Teach Series (12:51)


Live with ASI Producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala interviews Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sherene Seikaly about knowledge production and teaching related to Palestine. 

Jadaliyya published a bouquet of articles, podcasts, live event recordings, and more as part of ASI’s Middle East Learn & Teach (MELT) series. The collection, titled "Palestine: Sheikh Jarrah, Expulsion, Occupation, and Settler Colonialism” contains resources that 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. 

Jadaliyya Palestine Page Co-Editor Sherene Seikaly joined Live with ASI Co-Producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala to discuss the MELT, which features her 2014 piece “Palestine as Archive.” Seikaly also discussed her participation in a recent roundtable discussion on academic and media narratives related to Sheikh Jarrah, “Urgent Teach-In Roundtable on Sheikh Jarrah.”

The MELT was curated and introduced by Jadaliyya Managing Editor for Special Projects Carly A. Krakow, and features pieces by ASI’s own outstanding experts including Sherene Seikaly, Noura Erakat, Mouin Rabbani, Maya Mikdashi, Lisa Hajjar, and many more. 

Ten Years On Project: Exploring New Regional Dynamics (19:35)


Adam Hanieh discusses Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project.

ASI co-hosted the fifth signature panel of the year-long Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project, which brings together seventeen partner organizations to produce resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to more critically understand the Arab Uprisings, and their various dimensions, over the past decade.

Haneih joined LWA live to discuss this month’s panel, “Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East.” Hanieh recapped the participants’ discussion of patterns of inter-state rivalries and reconfigured alliances have dramatically shifted how the Middle East is conceptualized as a “region” or “area,” and how it interacts with the rest of the globe. 

Ongoing Nakba: Reflections on Palestine from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza (25:59)


Jehad Abusalim discusses the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.

The ongoing attempts to expel Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah are not new, but they have brought fresh attention to the movement for Palestinian liberation worldwide and triggered mobilizations across Palestine unlike anything that has been seen in recent years.

Jehad Abusalim joined this episode to discuss a recent ASI co-sponsored event, “Ongoing Nakba: Reflections on Palestine from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza.” According to Abusalim, Palestinians from either side of the Green Line, in Gaza, and in exile came together to talk about the latest developments and mobilizations in Palestine. 

Pedagogy (33:46)


MESPI Managing Editor Mekarem Eljamal speaks about the latest edition of the MESPI newsletter. 

The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) published parts three and four of the Peer-Reviewed Articles Review, which synthesize a variety of articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world from this past winter season. 


MESPI also published Issue 2.1 of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative Newsletter. This iteration of the MESPI newsletter features reflections from scholars on accessibility and reassessing the priorities and purposes of research during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Catch-Up with Carly A. Krakow (39:08)



Carly A. Krakow analyzes international current affairs in her recurring segment, “The Catch-Up,” soon launching as its own video podcast! 

Carly A. Krakow’s international current affairs segment, “The Catch-Up” will be launching soon as its own video podcast! For this month’s LWA episode, Carly’s analysis focused on Palestine, including the one-year anniversary of the killing of Iyad al-Hallaq, the thirty-two-year-old disabled Palestinian man who was shot and killed by an Israeli police officer while on his way to a school for people with disabilities in Jerusalem last May. 

Carly also addressed police violence against people with disabilities in the United States, the latest bombardment of Gaza, and the damage caused by the US arms industry. The segment included a preview of Carly's interview with Afrah Nasser, Human Rights Watch Yemen Researcher and International Press Freedom Award-winning journalist. The full interview aired on 9 June 2021 and can be viewed on Facebook. The video will be posted on Jadaliyya soon! 

Grad Student Corner (45:48)



Cat speaks with Jadaliyya Managing Editor Kylie Broderick.

In this month’s Grad Student Corner, Cat spoke with Jadaliyya Managing Editor Kylie Broderick about the purpose and content of institutional statements in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Specifically, Kylie shed light on the importance of combating institutional biases via Boycott, Diverestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Kylie also discussed the recent roundtable she organized with several colleagues at the University of North Carolina, which dissected and corrected narratives about Sheikh Jarrah circulating within academics, news media, and social media. 


Solidarity Statements Published on
Jadaliyya: 

Holding Palestinian Ground: Lessons from Gaza to Sheikh Jarrah (51:37)


Noura Erakat joins Live with ASI in the studio.

In an ASI-hosted panel discussion titled “Holding Palestinian Ground,” Palestinian activists and scholars from across Palestine, the United States, and the Netherlands spoke about 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. Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat spoke, among other things, about the unity felt among Palestinians from geographically different regions and in exile. She also shared her experiences over the past month speaking on several mainstream media outlets about Palestinian struggle and liberation, noting how media coverage of Palestine has shifted in some major ways but stayed the same in other ways during this latest period of struggle and resistance. 

Must-Reads and NEWTONS (59:22)


Co-hosts Bassam and MK rounded out Episode 2.1 by sharing must-read
Jadaliyya articles and New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) interviews. Tune in to the last few minutes of the episode for insightful descriptions of each of the following pieces: 

Must-Reads

NEWTONS

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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