Live with ASI: Episode 3.6 Digest — February 2023

Live with ASI: Episode 3.6 Digest — February 2023

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 MK Smith, Bassam Haddad and Nadya Sbaiti highlighted several newly released books that are featured in New Texts Out Now series and also offered some Must Read selections which also featured some New Texts, which both discuss the post colonial development of Oman and respectively.

The episode also features interviews with Katty Alhayek, Brahim El Guabli, Amir Marshi, Mouin Rabbani, Zeynep Gambetti, Mekarem Eljamal, and Dina Hadad. 

NEWTON


MK, Bassam and Nadya highlighted fascinating interviews with several authors, including Michelle Hartman and Malek Abisaab, who have written a book highlighting the stories of working women during the Lebanese Civil War. There are also discussions with Helen Lackner about her book “Yemen in Crisis, Jacob Norris about his new work “The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub”, and Nora Derbal discussing “Charity in Saudi Arabia: Civil Society Under Authoritarianism. 

FLOW


Recently on the Flow podcast, LWA host Bassam Haddad spoke with a panel of experts about the situation in northern Syria following the earthquake. Among them Katty Alhayek, an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. Katty reflected on the conversation and gave us updates on the situation. 

Katty Alhayek offers her thoughts on the situation in northern Syria.
 

MOROCCO AND FOOTBALL


Brahim El Guabli is a Moroccan scholar and Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at Williams University. In the wake of Morocco’s thrilling World Cup run, he and some colleagues have begun a dossier of online articles on Morocco, Football, and the social and political implications of the game in the region.He joined LWA to discuss a new piece in the dossier that he published alongside Idriss Jebari.

Brahim el Guabli discusses upcoming work in the Morrocco football dossier.
 

STATUS


LWA was joined by Amir Marshi, a student activist and researcher, to discuss the Status series Emancipatory Dialogues, which consists of conversations that take place between researchers who deal with the Palestinian experience in the academic context in several research fields. 

He offered reflections on the series, and spoke a bit about the context of organizing around Palestine in the current moment. 

Amir Marshi in conversation with Nadya Sbaiti and Bassam Haddad.
 

Mouin Rabbani then joined the broadcast in order to offer some thoughts and updates on the current situation in the West Bank, as well as the newly formed government in Israel. 

Mouin Rabbani in conversation with Amir Marshi and the LWA team.
 

Jadaliyya


Nadya then highlighted a new piece published in Jadaliyya by Amin Bozorgiyan titled “Revolutionaries with Revolution: The Unfolding Case of Iran” which frames the protests in Iran in the context of the global neoliberal order

  • Amin Bozorgiyan: Revolutionaries without Revolution
     

Staying with Jadaliyya, the broadcast was joined by Zeynep Gambetti, a retired professor at Istanbul’s Bogazici University, who spoke about a piece that she and three other colleagues had recently published which describes the latest attempts by the Turkish state to seize control of the university, and the resistance it continues to face from faculty. Zeynep put these latest developments in context of the government’s response to the earthquake as well. 

Zeynep Gambetti in conversation with Nadya Sbaiti.
 

MESPI

 

Associate Editor of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative, Mekarem Eljamal, then joined to give a preview of the knowledge production coming out of the initiative next month. 

Mekarem Eljamal speaking with LWA.
 

The final interview of the program was a pre-recorded segment with Dina Hadad, who is a specialist in international law with first-hand knowledge of the socio-legal and political complexities of the Arab world. She recorded a lecture for Jadaliyya which addresses socio-legal changes with regard to women’s rights in Syria. 

Dina Hadad on a changing society for women in Syria.
 

MUST READS


As always Mk and Bassam wrapped up the broadcast by offering some must reads, both of which were from NEWTON this time around. 

They recommended Amal Sachedina’s book called “Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman” on the development of a country which is all too often overlooked in Middle East studies.

They also discussed Muriam Haleh Davis’ interview with NEWTON regarding her new book “Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria” which tackles the relationship between decolonization, economic development and Islam.

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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