Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Present-Absent: Part 3 (22 February)

Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Present-Absent: Part 3 (22 February)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Session 24
 

Present-Absent: '48 Palestinians

Part 3


Conditional Citizenship, Restrictive Laws, and the Rise of the Far Right in Israel


Featuring:
Honaida Ghanim, The Rise of the Far Right and Its Impact on Palestinians in 1948
Sawsan Zaher,
The Israeli Legal System: Grounds for Political Persecution
Raef Zreik,
The Invisible Hand: What Israel's Laws Obscure
Leena Dallasheh, The Military Regime and Citizenship Restrictions after 1948


Moderator:
Bassam Haddad
Isis Nusair


Teach-In Session 24

Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Palestinians in Israel have faced an increasing number of measures aimed at silencing them, with calls to have their citizenship revoked. In this series, we examine various aspects of “citizenship” as well as repressive measures, laws, and regulations that restrict it.

Speakers
 
Honaida Ghanim is the General Director of The Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR) in Ramallah. She received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the Hebrew University with distinction (Suma Cum Laude), and lectures at various Palestinian universities. She has published various articles and studies in the fields of political and cultural sociology and gender studies. Her book, Reinventing the Nation: Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel (in Hebrew), was published by the Hebrew University Magnes Press in 2009. She was the editor of On Recognition of the “Jewish State” (in English), published by MADAR in 2014, and a co-editor of On the Meaning of a Jewish State (Arabic), published by MADAR in 2011. She was also the chief editor of the Qadaya Israelieh Journal (2000-2011). Since 2009 she has been the chief editor of MADAR’s Strategic Report.
 
 
Raef Zreik is a jurist and a scholar, an expert in political philosophy and the philosophy of law, a lecturer on property law and the theory of law at Ono Academic College, academic co-director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University, and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Dr. Zreik holds first and second degrees in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also has an LLM from Columbia Law School and a PhD from Harvard Law School. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Kant’s concept of legal right and the transition from questions of ethics to questions of law. Dr. Zreik was a guest lecturer at Georgetown Law and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. His research addresses questions pertaining to legal and political theory and issues of citizenship and identity, Zionism, and the Palestinian question. His many publications in these fields have appeared in anthologies and in legal and interdisciplinary journals. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Dr. Zreik is involved in several projects and teaches in Intellectual Journeys, a program for young intellectual leadership
 
 
Sawsan Zaher is A Palestinian human rights lawyer based in Haifa. Sawsan manages her private law firm in Haifa specializing in human rights; she serves as the legal advisor for the Civil Society Coalition for Emergency in Arab Society; she also she serves as an instructor at the Human Rights Clinic in Tel Aviv University. 
During her 20 years experience in the field of human rights and international law, Sawsan litigated major landmark cases before the Israeli Supreme Court and other courts on behalf of Palestinian on both sides of the Green Line in several fields of human rights. Up until August 2021, she served as the deputy general director and senior lawyer at Adalah Legal Center (Haifa) where she worked for 16 years. She was selected for several fellowships, including: Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2015); Yale World Fellow at Yale University (2013); Public Interest Law Fellow at Columbia University in NYC (2008) and others.
 
Leena Dallasheh is an independent scholar. Her research focuses on the history of Palestine/Israel, with a particular interest in Palestinians who became citizens of Israel in 1948. She is currently finishing a manuscript on the social and political history of Nazareth from 1940 to 1966, tracing how Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 negotiated their incorporation in the state, affirming their rights as citizens and their identity as Palestinian. Her article “Troubled Waters: Governing Water and Struggling for Citizenship in Nazareth” appeared in IJMES 47 (2015). She also published articles and reviews in JPS and edited collections. She received her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at NYU. Before coming to NYU, she received a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
 
 
Moderators
 
Isis Nusair: Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies & International Studies at Denison University. She is the co-editor with Rhoda Kanaaneh of Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel, and translator of Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq. Her upcoming co-edited anthology with Barbara Shaw examines feminist collaborations in teaching and learning. She is completing two book projects focusing on Iraqi women refugees in Jordan and the USA, and refugees from Syria in Germany. Isis is the co-writer/director with Laila Farah of the one-woman performance, Weaving the Maps: Tales of Survival and Resistance. She is currently researching the body of war in Syrian TV series post 2011. She serves on the editorial committee of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She previously served on the editorial committee of MERIP and as a researcher on women’s human rights in the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch and at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. 
 
Bassam Haddad is 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 is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel 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 Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).


Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza endures a massive invasion of genocidal proportions. This accompanies 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


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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