Yemen: Beyond Breaking News – Afrah Nasser in Conversation with Carly A. Krakow (Video)

Yemen: Beyond Breaking News – Afrah Nasser in Conversation with Carly A. Krakow (Video)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

FEATURED EVENT –

YEMEN: BEYOND BREAKING NEWS


Presented by Jadaliyya and the Arab Studies Institute 

Afrah Nasser

International Press Freedom Award-Winning Journalist and Yemen Researcher, Human Rights Watch

 
Hosted by Carly A. Krakow

Jadaliyya Managing Editor for Special Projects



This conversation, which aired on 9 June 2021, features International Press Freedom Award-winning journalist and Human Rights Watch Yemen Researcher, Afrah Nasser, hosted by Carly A. Krakow, Jadaliyya Managing Editor for Special Projects and Environment Page Co-Editor.

The war in Yemen recently entered its seventh year, and western media continues to lack coverage that addresses the dire humanitarian conditions or analyzes Yemen’s political situation. More than 24 million people are currently in need of humanitarian assistance (80 percent of the population). In this interview, Nasser and Krakow discuss the role of the Saudi and UAE-led coalition, the Houthis, and more, drawing on Nasser’s experience as a journalist and her work collecting testimonies from Yemeni civilians devasted by more than six years of war.

President Biden has promised that the United States is “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales” but Biden’s administration recently proceeded with a $23 billion weapons sale to the UAE. Where does this leave Yemenis as they continue to cope with violence, cholera, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the risks of famine? Tune in to hear why Afrah Nasser argues that Yemen is not only ‘forgotten’—it was never sufficiently remembered in the first place.


Guest


Afrah Nasser 
(@Afrahnasser) is a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch investigating humanitarian law violations and human rights abuses in Yemen. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, she was an activist, independent journalist, and analyst reporting on Yemen’s social and political changes for over a decade. She is the founding editor of the Sana'a Review. Nasser has written for and made appearances on numerous news outlets, including Al-Jazeera, The Monitor, Atlantic Council, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and others. She is the recipient of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society Organization's 2017 Eldh-Ekblads Peace Prize, the Pennskaft Prize in 2016, the Swedish Publicists Club's 2014 Dawit Issak Prize, and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award in 2017. In 2013, Nasser was named by BBC as one of the "100 Women Who Changed the World," and has been featured three times as one of the 100 most influential Arabs by Arabian Business Magazine. Her blog, created during Yemen's 2011 uprisings, has won her the recognition of CNN and Al-Monitor as one of the most influential blogs in the Middle East for her coverage of human rights. Nasser holds a B.A. in English Linguistics from Sana’a University and an M.A. in Communication from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a native Arabic speaker and is fluent in English, Amharic, and Swedish.

Host


Carly A. Krakow 
(@CarlyKrakow) is Jadaliyya's Managing Editor for Special Projects and Co-Editor of the Environment Page. She is a writer, researcher, and activist, and currently a PhD Candidate in International Law and Judge Rosalyn Higgins Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her writing has appeared in publications including Al JazeeraJadaliyyaopenDemocracyOpinio JurisTruthout, and the academic journal Water. Carly’s research focuses on environmental injustice and human rights in contexts of statelessness and displacement. Over several periods of fieldwork in the Palestinian West Bank, she has investigated the law and politics of water access and exposure to environmental toxins. Her research has also included fieldwork in South Africa, analyzing the impacts of Cape Town’s water crisis on the city’s most marginalized communities, and in Greece, examining living conditions and access to healthcare for refugees and displaced people. She earned her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge and her BA in Human Rights Law, Environmental Policy, and Comparative Literature from NYU. Read her writing and watch her public speaking appearances at www.carlykrakow.com. She is on Twitter @CarlyKrakow.

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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