Status / الوضع Issue 9.1 is Live!

Status / الوضع Issue 9.1 is Live!

Status / الوضع Issue 9.1 is Live!

By : Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts

The Status/ الوضع team is pleased to share Issue 9.1 (Spring 2022) of the critical and collaborative audiovisual journal, which covers a broad range of topics related to politics, media, society, religion, and daily life in SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and their diasporas. This issue contains over 35 interviews and panels with a combined total of more than 50 guests, including activists, students, researchers, musicians, poets, authors, journalists, and others, contributed by Status team members as well as partners such as the Arab Studies Institute/Jadaliyya, Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, the Stanford Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at AUB. 

We are excited to feature a panel moderated by Noura Erakat on the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) vote to endorse BDS, which officially passed on March 22nd. Sherene Seikaly, Charles Hirschkind, Maya Wind and Kamran Rastegar discuss the argument for academic boycott, as well as the direct role and responsibility of the Israeli academy in the state’s racial violence against Palestinians.

From our partners at the Stanford University Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, we are pleased to share two episodes of the podcast Mofeed-19 as part of Issue 9.1. This program, hosted by Hesham Sellam and Amr Hamzawy, deals with different aspects of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Arab world. In this issue, we are featuring episodes two and three of the podcast, featuring Lina Attalah on the coverage of the pandemic in the Egyptian media and Ibrahim Nasrallah on the impact of Covid on Arab literary production (in Arabic), respectively. 

This issue also featured several episodes of the Connections program, hosted by Mouin Rabbani. Connections combines journalism, analysis, and scholarship to offer timely and informative interviews on current events and broader policy questions related to the MENA/SWANA region and beyond, as well as themes relevant to knowledge production. This issue of Status includes eight episodeswhich cover a variety of topics, including the Lasting Legacies of US Torture in the context of the “War on Terror,” the human and political and dimensions of digital espionage, and Israel’s campaign to criminalize Palestinian human defenders and civic organizations

Issue 9.1 includes several Arabic-language interviews focused on topics related to poetry, music, and literature, including a special episode entitled When Home is Carried Within a Voice, a conversation between Raghad Makhlouf and Syrian vocalist and composer Dima Orsho about her art, education, and life, as well as the above-mentioned interview with Ibrahim Nasrallah about Arab literary production as part of Mofeed-19. 

We are also excited to welcome previous collaborator and contributor Mohammad-Ali Nayel back to Status/الوضع as part of this issue, with a two-part Arabic-language interview with Palestinian-Jordanian songwriter, rapper, drummer, and producer El Far3i. This interview delves into how the wave of Arab uprisings in 2011 brought with it new sounds and musical novelties that became fixed music genres, and how these new musical acts became individual and collective experiences encompassing the whole Arab world and beyond.

This interview is one of several in the issue that reflect on the aftermath of the Arab uprisings over a decade after their eruption. Episode 17 of Connections, featuring Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Nabih Boulos, goes in-depth on the past decade of upheaval in the Middle East. Issue 9.1 features four panels and interviews that were organized as part of the Ten Years On project, covering topics such as Activism in Exile: Diasporic Communities in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings, Media Framing of Political Events in Lebanon, and Egypt’s 2011 Uprising

Status / الوضعhost Katty Alhayek also contributes to the Ten Years On project in an online panel discussion with prominent women Arab filmmakers Naziha Arebi, Sarah Ishaq, and Safa Al Ahmad. Continuing with the subject of film and its intersections with migration and decolonial creative processes, Katty Alhayek speaks with doctoral student from McGill University Farah Atoui, who is involved with Regards Palestiniens and Regards Syriens screening collectives in Canada.

Our longtime partner at AUB, the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship, brings three webinars on themes relating to feminism, political struggles, and bodily agency, with a range of guests from the region. Watch these conversations here: ‘Glocal Voices: Discussing Feminist Blogging as Political Practice, Women of Afghanistan: My Voice to my Home, Feminist Circles: Dress Code and Bodily Agency.

Finally, we are excited to highlight the voices of three Georgetown students who produced their own podcast interviews on a series of engaging and important themes. These are: Nisrine Hilizah’s conversation with Houda Mzioudet and Amuna Ali on Online Activism & Antii-Black Racism in the Arab World; Aisha Jitan interviewing Dr. Samah Jabr on Siha Wa Sumoud (Health and steadfastness): Reconceptualizing Mental Health in the Context of Gaza; and guests Omar Zahzah, Rasha Anayah, and Yasmeen Mashayekh, in conversation with Nooran Alhamdan in an interview entitled Decolonizing the Digital: Weaponization & Reclamation of Online Spaces in the Palestinian Context.

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