SOAS conf. on settler colonialism
Issandr El AmraniI am posting the following as a public service announcement — there will be a conference at my alma mater, SOAS, on Israel/Palestine. If you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know I think it's important to cast the Zionist project as a settler colonial one to counter the narrative, particularly in US media, of a conflict that existed "since time immemorial." Otherwise, the conference is entirely its organizers' work.
PAST IS PRESENT: SETTLER COLONIALISM MATTERS!
SOAS Palestine Society Conference Organizing Collective
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."
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"?
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.
Reader Comments (4)
You gotta love it......a People, the Arabs, who have been the biggest colonizers in the history of the world calling Jews returning to a land where throughout history it is only they that have held National sovereignty......colonists. And even then they were ready and willing to accept a tiny portion of what had been historically their homeland, and to accept Trans-Jordan being given 80%, and sharing the rest with a new Arab country.....which would be celebrating it's 63rd birthday had the Arabs also accepted the Partition Plan.
The problem isn't the "settlements", or "Palestinian" rights. It about, and has always been about Dar al-Islam refusing to accept even a microscopic slice of Jewish sovereignty within its' midst.
At least be big enough to admit it.
Arabs came from Arabia, this there is no refuting. That they now control some 22 countries is purely a result of militant colonial expansionism.
I guess since that was a long time ago, that makes it okay, eh?
Sabasarge, you're so funny.
Thanks for open my eyes sabasarge. Until I read your post, I always thought that us Europeans were the greatest colonizers ever. That damned natives in North- and South-America are spreading their lies for over 500 years now!!11!! All theese arabs are to blame for!
Please give us more history lesssons, master!
LOL
Amen to everything sabasarge said.
No one much remembers, or cares, that the Middle East's identity was once Aramaic, Coptic, Berber, Jewish, Greek etc. The descendants of these various peoples who now identify as Arab and resent the seizure of "Arab" lands are blithely unaware of how accidental their identities are. The memories of peoples are continually being wiped clean and refashioned in new molds with new imagined pasts. So it has been, and so it always will be. 500 or 1,000 years from now the Palestinians will be as forgotten as the Sabaeans or the Moabites, and their descendants will speak different languages (maybe Hebrew) and will hold different allegiances. Who knows, maybe the Jews will have lost their identity as well there will no longer be an Israel to colonize lands that no longer will be Arab.
But if I had to place bets on an eternal people, my money's on the Jews.