Live with ASI: Episode 2.11 Digest — May 2022

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May 5, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 2.11 Digest — May 2022

By : Jadaliyya Reports

This month, LWA producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala filled in for MK Smith as co-host with Bassam Haddad, and they discussed a new issue of Status / الوضع Audiovisual Journal, a curated virtual reality exhibit titled “Geographies of the Future,” a panel on sectarianism in Syria since the 2011 Uprisings, the significance of recent French elections, new episodes of Connections Podcast and Search Files Podcast, a panel on the political ethics of sanctions, and marked the second anniversary of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page.

This episode featured engaging interviews with Paola Messina, Basileus Zeno, Alain Gresh, Mouin Rabbani, and Naveed Mansoori.

Status/الوضع Issue 9.1


Status / الوضع Issue 9.1 is Live! This issue of the audiovisual journal contains over 35 entertaining and thought-provoking interviews with more than 50 guests, including activists, students, researchers, musicians, poets, authors, and journalists, 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. 

Some highlights of this issue include a panel discussion about MESA’s vote to endorse BDS and several Arabic-language interviews focused on topics related to poetry, music, and literature. 


Status producer Paola Messina joins the show to preview the newest edition of the audio-visual magazine.
 

Artists’ Talk! Geographies of the Future


On our last show, we discussed the curated exhibit titled, “Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality,” which experiments with virtual media to render experiments with virtual media to render possible impossible worlds. 

A few weeks ago, the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at GMU held a follow-up panel with the artists participating in this exhibit, where they discussed what it was like to reimagine geographies of the Arab-majority world in order to analyze political violence or to chart anew known landscapes.


Co-host Mohammad Abou-Ghazala interviews Bridget Guarasci, one of the co-curators of “Geographies of the Future.”
 

The Making of Sects: Boundary Making and Sectarianisation of the Syrian Uprising, 2011-2013


Last month, ASI co-sponsored an event with George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program titled, “The Making of Sects: Boundary Making and the Sectarianisation of the Syrian Uprising, 2011–2013.” 

In this event, Basileus Zeno, who is the Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College, discussed the main factors that contributed to the increasing visibility of sectarian frameworks, and the sidelining of non-sectarian actors in the context of the Syrian Uprising and the subsequent war.

Basileus Zeno recaps a recent online seminar he hosted about the increasing visibility of sectarian frameworks in the context of the Syrian uprising. 
 

Partner’s Feature


This month for our Partner’s Feature we are excited to highlight our productive, transnational partnership with OrientXXI and its publication director Alain Gresh. 

OrientXXI brings together journalists, academics, and social activists to produce incisive, undistorted analysis and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa. 

Co-hosts Bassam and Mohammad highlight the work of OrientXXI and Alain Gresh for this month’s Partner’s Feature, and discuss the domestic and regional significance of the recent French elections.
 

Connections Podcast 


The ever-impressive Mouin Rabbani has released two new episodes of the Connections Podcast, where he discussed with expert guests the matters of protecting cultural heritage, and the struggle for human rights in the Middle East.

Mouin spoke with author Heghnar Watenpaugh about the rights and responsibilities involved in the protection of cultural heritage, as well as the challenges in preserving threatened heritage using examples from Armenia, Syria, and elsewhere. 

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani describes the three most recent episodes of the Connections Podcast and offers a sneak peak of what’s to come.
   

The Political Ethics of Sanctions: Lessons from Iran and Iraq


Jadaliyya and ASI put on a panel last month titled, “The Political Ethics of Sanctions.” In the wake of sanctions placed on Russia in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine, the panelists looked to the cases of Iraq and Iran for lessons on the history and impacts of Western sanctions. 

Their discussion addressed the common assertion that sanctions are a peaceful alternative to warfare, and interrogates what it even means to say that sanctions “work.”

Jadaliyya’s Iran Page Co-Editor Naveed Mansoori discusses the nuances of sanctions-related discourse offered in the recent panel analyzing the impact of sanctions on Iran and Iraq.
 

Environment Page’s 2nd Anniversary

We are delighted to share that Jadaliyya’s Environment Page is now two years old! Launched on Earth Day in 2020 with a bouquet of stories and a mission statement that emphasized the need for critical perspectives which did not treat the environment as an apolitical question. The Environment Page has been working diligently since then to provide readers with critically engaged resources on the various dimensions of the environmental question in the region.

Over the past year, the Page has published seventeen stories—both written work and podcasts—in both English and Arabic, focusing on themes of race and the environment, climate change and disasters, scarcity narratives, the built environment, and environmental knowledge-production.

Must-Reads


This article by Roxanne Panchasi is titled “An Atomic ‘Adventure’ in Empire: Algeria, April 1961.” The article describes the history of the last atomic denonation in a series of the French bomb experiments in Algeria after World War II. The stories that have been told about the bomb testing have highlighted it as chapter in French technological history. But, this article speaks to how the nuclear imperial campaign left a painful legacy for Algerians. 

Search Files Ep 3: Decolonizing Anthropology and Opening Palestine Maps


There is a brand new episode of the Search File Podcast available! For those that don’t know, Search Files covers trends in knowledge production and pedagogy on the Middle East and North Africa based on a constantly evolving dataset and pedagogic research, and brings together members of ASI’s Knowledge Production Project and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative to converse with experts, educators, and faculty from industry and academia.

In episode three, titled “Decolonizing Anthropology and Opening Palestine Maps,” myself and Managing Editor of MESPI Mekarem Eljamal spoke with Ahmad Barclay and Girish Daswani discussed the role of open source data and mapping on Palestine studies, and what it means to decolonize anthropology and how that work appears in the classroom.

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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