Connections Episode 67: Syria Today with Omar Dahi (8 June)

Connections Episode 67: Syria Today with Omar Dahi (8 June)

Connections Episode 67: Syria Today with Omar Dahi (8 June)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Connections Episode 67
 

Syria Today

Mouin Rabbani interviews Omar Dahi


Thursday, 8 June 2023
2:00 PM EST | 20:00 CET | 21:00 Damascus

 

Join us on Thursday, 8 June for a conversation with Jadaliyya co-editor Mouin Rabbani and Omar Dahi about Syria. This episode of Connections will examine the current situation in Syria and its future prospects. 

Connections offers timely and informative interviews on current events and broader policy questions, as well as themes relevant to knowledge production. It combines journalism, analysis, and scholarship. 

Guest


Omar S. Dahi
is Interim Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Economics at Hampshire College. He is the founding director of Security in Context, an international research initiative on global affairs. Dahi serves as an Associate Editor of the Review of Social Economy, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, and was previously on the editorial committee of Middle East Report. He is a founding member of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies within the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), and served as a lead expert on the United Nations Economic and Social Commission of West Asia's National Agenda for the Future of Syria program. He has published in academic outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics and Applied Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Political Geography, Middle East Report, Forced Migration Review, and Critical Studies on Security. He is co-author of South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence.

Host


Mouin Rabbani
 has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He was previously Senior Analyst Middle East and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria. He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine.


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Connections Episode 61: Nakba75 with Jadaliyya Palestine Page Editors

Connections Episode 60 - Nakba 1948: What Washington Knew with Josh Ruebner

Connections Episode 59: The Israel Lobby and US Academia with Nader Hashemi

Connections Episode 58: Germany Censors Palestine with Hebh Jamal

Connections Episode 57: Saudi-Iranian Normalization with Ibrahim Fraihat

Connections Episode 56: Peace in Yemen? with Helen Lackner

Connections Episode 55: Crisis in Sudan with Khalid Medani

Connections Episode 54: The Iraq War and Its Legacies with Sinan Antoon

Connections Episode 53: The UK Labour Party Antisemitism Crisis with Jamie Stern-Weiner

Connections Episode 52: Universal Palestine with Zahi Zalloua

Connections Episode 51: The New Antisemitism with Jamie Stern-Weiner

Connections Episode 50: Sextarianism with Maya Mikdashi

Connections Episode 49 - Israel: Continuity and Change

Connections Episode 48: The International Court of Justice and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein

Connections Episode 47: From COP27 to The World Cup with Laleh Khalili

Connections Episode 46: Twitter Madness with Marwa Fatafta

Connections Episode 45: Inside the Legal Campaign Against US Torture with Lisa Hajjar

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Connections Episode 43: Another Israeli Election with Mairav Zonszein

Connections Episode 42 - Palestine: The Right to Self-Determination with Francesca Albanese

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Connections Episode 40: Uprising in Iran with Manijeh Moradian

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Connections Episode 33: The Struggle for Human Rights in the Middle East with Sarah Leah Whitson

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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