Live with ASI: Episode 2.10 Digest — April 2022

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Apr 8, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 2.10 Digest — April 2022

By : Jadaliyya Reports

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.

This month, co-hosts Bassam Haddad and MK Smith discussed content dealing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pedagogy, a panel on Lebanon’s upcoming parliamentary elections, a virtual reality exhibit, a new episode of the Connections podcast on Yemen’s Endless War, a bundle of pieces on Palestinian political prisoners, and more.

This episode featured engaging interviews with Mouin Rabbani, Maria Bou Zeid, Bridget Guarasci, Jessica Holland, Randa Wahbe, Rabea Eghbariah, Nour Joudah, Omar Al-Sarayreh, and Cat Haseman.

Quick Thoughts: The Invasion of Ukraine



Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabanni discusses his experience speaking at an Israeli Apartheid week event at a Dutch university and brings this story into the context of discrepancies between how the West treats occupation in Palestine and Ukraine. 


In late March, friend of the show, Mouin Rabbani, spoke in a panel discussion as part of Israel Apartheid Week at Leiden University in the Hague. He spoke about the cognitive dissonance between the way the West has responded to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Israeli aggression in Palestine—especially when it comes to boycotts. His panel contribution was transcribed and published on Jadaliyya.

Mouin also published yet another insightful Quick Thoughts piece on Ukraine. In it, he answers questions by Hesham Sallam regarding the response of Arab governments to the Russian invasion. 

Ten Years On Project: Lebanon’s 2022 Parliamentary Elections


Maria Bou Zeid shared some notable insights from the panel, and discussed the stakes of Lebanon’s upcoming elections.


Late last month, ASI co-sponsored an event along with the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at George Mason University, Notre Dame University-Louaize, and the Asfari Institute at AUB about Lebanon’s upcoming Parliamentary elections.

This event was part of the collaborative project, Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World, which brought together seventeen of ASI’s partners to produce resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to more critically understand the Arab Uprisings, and their various dimensions, over the past decade. The panel offered an interdisciplinary analysis of the Lebanese electoral process, with experts from a variety of fields exploring effective approaches to challenging the status quo of the current political system in Lebanon.

Bassam and MK were joined by the event’s moderator, Maria Bou Zeid, who is Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Media Studies Department at Notre Dame University-Louaize, and also is the Executive Director of ASI’s Beirut Office, to share some of the panel’s insights.

Palestinian Prisoner Bundle


Jadaliyya’s three newest Palestine page Co-Editors, Nour Joudah, Rabea Eghbariah, and Randa Wahbe, reflect on their recent collaborative work and explain why the topic of Palestinian prisons is academically, politically, and personally important.


In late March, Jadaliyya’s Palestine Page released a bundle of incisive content on the topic of Palestinian Political Prisoners.

This bundle was initiated as part of an effort to welcome Jadaliyya’s newest Palestine Page editors, Randa Wahbe, Nour Joudah, and Rabea Eghbaria, and is dedicated to exploring the realm of Palestinian imprisonment, settler-colonial carceral technologies, and resistance. The newly expanded editorial team solicited articles, reflections, and collated additional resources on the matter, such as past Jadaliyya articles as well as Prisoners’ letters.  

Arabic Page Feature


LWA producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala spoke with Arabic Page co-editor, Omar Al-Sarayreh, on what the page has been up to in recent months. Omar shared some of the most notable pieces published in recent weeks, ranging from Arabic translations of West African poetry, pieces on the futility of applying the Left-Right binary framework on the Arab world, and Syrian refugee mothers in Europe.

Connections Podcast: Yemen’s Endless War


Connections Podcast host Mouin Rabbani produced several episodes in March. In one of these episodes, Mouin interviewed journalist and award-winning filmmaker, Safa Al Ahmad, on the war in Yemen, its regional dimensions, and ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the country. Their conversation focused on Al Ahmad’s work about the war in Yemen and its staggering human toll.

Geographies of the Future


Jessica Holland and Bridget Guarasci speak on the experience of curating this exhibit, and the future of virtual reality in Arab and Middle East studies.


George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies program held an event on a new exhibit titled, “Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality,” which experiments with virtual media to render impossible worlds, possible. Artists participating in the exhibit reimagined geographies of the Arab-majority world in order to analyze political violence, or to chart known landscapes in new ways.  

The exhibit was curated by Jessica Holland, who is the Manager of Knowledge Production and Pedagogy at the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, and Bridget Guarasci, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College.

Pedagogy 


Comparative Perspectives on the Arab Uprisings in Peer-Reviewed Articles (2010-2020): Theoretical and Temporal Lenses

The MESPI team curated a bouquet of peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2020 that all place the Arab uprisings into conversations on theory and temporality. You can find this resource at MESPI.org. It’s titled, “Comparative Perspectives on the Arab Uprisings in Peer-Reviewed Articles (2010-2020): Theoretical and Temporal Lenses.”

The Ten Years On Project module on the MESPI website is fully operational and ready for dissemination! This module contains all of the events, signature panels, books, essential readings, publishers’ collections, and peer-reviewed articles produced as part of the Ten Years On project’s mission of interrogating the Arab Uprisings and their aftermath. Be sure to check it out at MESPI.org.

Grad Student Corner: Must-Reads 


Cat Haseman calls in for the Grad Student Corner segment. 


In this episode, Cat pointed LWA’s student audience to three must-read articles published on Jadaliyya this month. 

First, Co-Editor of the Jadaliyya Maghreb page, Muriam Haleh Davis, wrote an analytical piece in response to French President Macron’s speech about the sixtieth anniversary of the Evian Accords, between the French State and the Algerian FLN. She argues that Macron pays lip service to the idea of “reconciliation” but has not addressed any of the root issues that have made Franch less democratic and egalitarian and more Islamophobic.

Second, Alix Chaplain wrote an article titled “Strategies of Power and the Emergence of Hybrid Mini-Grids in Lebanon,” which analyzes how households, businesses, and cities in Lebanon have stopped relying on the failed national electric grid and found alternative modes of electricity. In the article, Chaplain discusses how this necessity has bred a novel decentralized organizational model. 

Third, Mouin Rabbani interviewed Erella Grassiani in a Quick Thoughts piece about how the Dutch government acquired an Israeli wiretapping system for its police forces. The two have an insightful back and forth about the controversy of outsourcing  wiretapping operations to foreign companies and about the story’s wider implications across Europe. 

NEWTONs 


This month there were several New Texts Out Now interviews with authors of recently-published books. In this month’s show, we highlighted two NEWTONs—and strongly recommended that viewers take a look at the others here.


Hisham Bustani’s collection of short stories The Monotonous Chaos of Existence, translated brilliantly by Maia Tabet, – a variety of forms and narrative styles and jumps in time and space, in a way showing the impossibility of pinning down the contemporary Arab world; themes range from personal to political.


The second NEWTON covered was “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation” by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi.  This book surveys how Palestinian psychoanalytic clinicians see their own practice as a form of resistance to settler-colonial violence.

Spring 2022 Call for Interns


The Arab Studies Institute is now accepting internship applications for Spring, 2022! You can apply today for a number of positions with ASI’s branches, like the Arab Studies Journal, Jadaliyya, Quilting Point, the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, and Tadween Publishing. 

You can apply for a general internship or for specific positions, which you can find in the Call for Interns linked in this Episode’s Digest. All internship positions are virtual unless stated otherwise. 

Applications are now being reviewed on a rolling basis, so apply today!

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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