Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2022 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2022 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2022 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

By : ASJ Editors

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XXX, No. 1
Spring 2022


This issue provides a diverse and critical foray into history, intellectual production, and institutional organization. 
Arab Studies Journal is privileged to feature two empirically grounded and historiographically challenging articles. Chloe Kattar offers a rare look at the development of Christian conservative thought in the context of the lead up to and first half of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war. Rather than featuring decades-old ideological differences about the organization of political power in Lebanon, Kattar reveals wartime intellectual production to have included new ideas that responded to the realities of the war and exigencies of its international context. She focuses in particular on one of the primary idealogues of (first) the Kata’ib Party and (then) the Lebanese Forces, tracing the intellectual itinerary of Antoine Najim as a key site of a broader reconfiguration of Christian conservative thought. Noureddine Jebnoun tracks the introduction of foreign recruits into coercive apparatuses of the Trucial States and the various transformations in their composition and role through the establishment and development of the United Arab Emirates. Utilizing a range of archival, media, and secondary sources, Jebnoun's article shows how the various logics of British imperialism, postindependence institution building, and shifting regional environments combined with the domestic and regional ambitions of UAE leaders to produce a labor shortage in the armed forces that was constantly (even if differently) addressed through the recruitment of foreign personnel at both the leadership and frontline levels.

Complementing these articles is another robust installment of our book reviews section. The works under review cover Algeria, Israel, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States. They offer insight into a range of topics, including US foreign policy, Islamist institutional organization, moral ecology, and training in the decorative arts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Articles


“Are We the Last Byzantium?”:
The Evolution of Antoine Najim’s Thought and the Radicalization of Christian Conservatism in Wartime Lebanon (1952–1982) 
Chloe Kattar

Outsourcing Violence: Para-Institutional Coercive Actors in
the United Arab Emirates’ Regional Activism 
Noureddine Jebnoun
 

Reviews


Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power
 
by Jessica Gerschultz
Reviewed by Natasha Marie Llorens

Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie, 1882–1962 by Augustin Jomier
Reviewed by Benjamin Claude Brower

L’Algérie des oulémas: une histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1931–1991) by Charlotte Courreye
Reviewed by Sara Rahnama

How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey by Caterina Scaramelli 
Reviewed by Ekin Kurtiç

Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict by Walter L. Hixson
Reviewed by Lawrence Davidson

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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