Live with ASI: Episode 3.7 Digest — March 2023

Live with ASI: Episode 3.7 Digest — March 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, and Bassam Haddad 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, both of which deal with contemporary issues in the North Africa region. 

The episode also features interviews with Omar Sirri, Sinan Antoon, Hossam El-Hamalawy, Onur Arslan, Nilay Ozuk Gundogan, Adel Iskandar, and Mouin Rabbani.

NEWTON


MK and Bassam highlighted fascinating interviews with several authors, including Nadya Sbaiti, Laura Deeb, and Tsolin Nalbantian whose new book “Practicing Sectarianism” serves as an intervention into the typical conversations on Lebanese sectarianism. They also spoke about Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed’s “The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution”, which provides a record of the events of that time and the complexity of the individual experiences of those who took to the streets. They also discussed Jessica Barnes’ “Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt” and Michael Francis Labban’s “Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775-1945”.

IRAQ CONFERENCE


On March 31st ASI co-hosted a conference in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and George Mason University’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department, regarding the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Sinan Antoon and Omar Sirri spoke at the conference, then joined Live with ASI to offer their perspectives. 

Sinan Antoon, Omar Sirri and Bassam Haddad discuss the situation in Iraq 20 years after the invasion.
 

FLOW


Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist and activist and is currently pursuing his PhD in Berlin. He joined Live with ASI to discuss an episode of the Flow podcast he had recently recorded with Bassam, about the early days of the Egyptian uprising of 2011.

Hossam el Hamalawy speaks about the legacy of 2011 in Egypt today. 
 

JADALIYYA


LWA was joined by Onur Arslan, a PhD candidate at UC Davis, who along with Ebru Kayaalp has recently published a piece in Jadaliyya on earthquake preparedness in Turkey, and its historical and political dynamics. He shared his thoughts with MK and Bassam on the fallout of the most recent earthquake, as well as some contextual framing for how we got here.

Onur Arslan discussing the recent earthquake in Turkey.
 

The broadcast was then joined by Nilay Ozuk Gundogan, an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East History, to discuss a piece she wrote for Jadaliyya regarding the sale of the only peer-reviewed academic journal of Kurdish Studies to a predatory publisher.  

Nilay Ozuk Gundogan in conversation with MK Smith.
 

STATUS


Pressing Matter is a podcast presented by ASI’s Status Hour, which addresses issues within the modern media landscape. Status contributors Adel Iskandar and Malihe Razazan co-host the program. Adel joined Live with ASI to talk about the first three episodes that they recorded. 

Adel Iskandar on issues with professionalization in media. 
 

CONNECTIONS


Jadaliyya co-editor and host of the Connections podcast Mouin Rabbani then joined the program to talk about the latest episode of Connections, which featured a conversation with Sinan Antoon about the legacy of the Iraq War. 

Mouin Rabbani reflecting on the latest episode of Connections. 
 

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 Cristiana Strava’s book called “Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco” which is an ethnographic fieldwork regarding urban planning and socio-economic inequality. 

They also discussed Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr Elafifi, and Noha Ezzat’s interview with NEWTON regarding their new book “Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-2022” which challenges dominant narratives about the Brotherhood in order to paint a complex picture of a group contending with multiple crises. 

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