Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Media and the War on Gaza (8 December)

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Dec 6, 2023 Palestine

Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Media and the War on Gaza (8 December)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Session 11

Media and the War on Gaza 


Feauturing:
Amahl A. Bishara
Dina Matar
Adel Iskandar

Moderator:
Bassam Haddad


palestineincontext.org


Teach-In Session 11

Most Israeli attacks against Palestinian life in recent decades have been coupled with parallel media wars which obfuscate realities, deviate attention from their impact on the lives of civilians, create smokescreens for mainstream reporting, and weaponize antisemitism against all who dare criticize the IDF's conduct of these bloody operations. While the current war on Gaza is not an exception, it is an escalation of the patterns witnessed in previous Israeli military actions. In this teach-in, speakers will address the media's role in shaping Western public opinion of the war and how it has become a battleground for the Israeli state and military. They will discuss the maelstrom of conflicting messages, misinformation, disinformation, doublespeak, gate-keeping, silencing, intimidation, fabrication, and most shockingly the targeted killing of journalists and their families by the Israeli military. They will also address how social media have become active players in the conflict by censoring, shadowbanning, biasing against, and suspending users critical of Israel's attack to silence Palestinian voices. In this teach-in, the panelists will speak to the dynamics of media practices in this war as well as the similarities and differences from previous Israeli wars on Palestinians.

Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza endures a massive invasion of potentially genocidal proportions. This follows an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that dehumanize Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, now a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.

The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context. 

Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

Featuring


Amahl A. Bishara is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and an affiliated faculty of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora. She is the author of Crossing A Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford, 2022) and Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, 2013), an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian intifada. Bishara's research revolves around media, settler colonialism, expressivity, and place. She also directed or co-directed the documentaries Across Oceans, Among Colleagues (2002), Degrees of Incarceration (2011), and Take My Pictures For Me (2016). Working with youth at Lajee Center in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, she has co-produced two bi-lingual children’s books, The Boy and the Wall and The Aida Camp Alphabet. 

Dina Matar is a Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS University of London. She is the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies, the Director of the Centre for Global Media and Communication in the School of Law, and the Chair of the SOAS Academic Assembly. Matar is a founding editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication and the editor of the Media, War and Conflict journal. Matar holds a MSc in Comparative Politics as well as a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics. She has conducted research in the Arab World, particularly Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Before becoming an academic, Matar worked as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and then an editor working on the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Her primary research interest is the intersection of communication and politics with a focus on the marginal and the oppressed as well as the relationship between structure and power in the Middle East. Her work and teaching are interdisciplinary, drawing on culture and media studies, politics, visual cultures, Islamist politics, oral history, area studies, diasporas, memory cultures and gendering communication. Matar's works include the edited volumes Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst, 2016) with Helga Tawil-Souri and Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (IB Tauris, 2013) with Zahera Harb. She is the author of two monographs. The first is What it Means to Be Palestinian (IB Tauris, 2010) which has gone on to become an award-winning animated movie. The second is The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (OUP, 2014).

Adel Iskandar is an Associate Professor of Global Communication and Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies (CCMS) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of several works including Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (AUCP/OUP), Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Basic Books), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press), Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing), and Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar's work deals with media, identity and politics and has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. He is a co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

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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