Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Long Form Podcast
(Episodes 3, 4, & 5)


Upcoming Guests:
Francesca Albanese
Lail Al-Arian, Sana Saeed, Assal Rad
Craig Mokhaiber


Hosts:
Bassam Haddad
Sinan Antoon

 

Watch Here:
Youtube.com/Jadaliyya
X.com/Jadaliyya


There can be little doubt we are living in a time of monsters. But is the global order that emerged after the horrors of the Second World War dying in a paroxysm of conflict and violence that are tearing its foundations apart? Or are we experiencing yet another period of upheaval that will be absorbed and leave the world as we know it fundamentally intact?

Long Form consists of a series of lengthy discussions and conversations with leading thinkers, scholars, and activists that explores the most pressing issues of our day, sheds light on their context and dynamics, and in so doing seeks to explore the broader theme of challenges to the global order and how these might affect it.


 

Featuring

Francesca Albanese (Guest) is an affiliate researcher of Georgetown University and the American University of Beirut. She is the co-author, with Lex Takkenberg, of The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law: a Tale of Fragmentation and Opportunity, expected to be published by OUP in 2019. She worked as legal officer in the UNRWA Department of Legal Affairs and before, for OHCHR.

Laila Al-Arian (Guest) is a Washington DC-based journalist and the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has produced documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration's Muslim ban to the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into factory conditions producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. For her work, she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a George Polk Award, Peabody Award, a Robert F Kennedy Award in journalism, Overseas Press Club award and has been nominated for 19 News and Documentary Emmys. She is co-author of the book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

Sana Saeed (Guest) is a media critic, former correspondent at AJ+ and host of the series Backspace, and The Israeli Occupation Style Guide.

Assal Rad (Guest) is a scholar of Middle East history. She works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, and contemporary Iran. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy and more, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, and NPR. She completed a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine in 2018 and is the author of The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Follow Assal on X/Twitter: @AssalRad

Craig Mokhiber (Guest) is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law. He has spent four decades in the international human rights movement, including more than thirty years at the United Nations. He is the former Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, held senior UN positions in Geneva, New York and in the field, and undertook human rights missions to dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America. He has served as the UN’s Senior Human Rights Advisor in Palestine, and in Afghanistan, led the team of human rights specialists attached to the High Level Mission on Darfur, headed the Rule of Law and Democracy Unit, and served as Chief of the Economic and Social Issues Section, and Chief of the Development and Economic and Social Issues Branch at OHCHR Headquarters. He was for five years the Chairman of the UN Task Force for Action Two (a global initiative to advance national human rights protection systems), and later Chaired the UN Democracy Fund consultative group, the UN Working Group on Leadership, and the UN Consultative Group on Inequalities, and the Steering Committee of the UN Human Rights Mainstreaming Fund.

Sinan Antoon (Host) is a poet, novelist, scholar and translator. He has published five novels and two collections of poetry. A third collection of poetry in English, entitled Postcards from the Underworld, was published by Seagull Books this past October. He has been described as one of the most acclaimed Arab novelists. His most recent work in Arabic is a novel entitled, Khuzama. His scholarly works include the book,  Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf: The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry. He is associate professor at New York University. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya. His scholarly works include the book,  Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf: The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry. He is associate professor at New York University. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya."

Bassam Haddad (Host) 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 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). 

 

 

 

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” – Antonio Gramsci

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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