Highlights from the Georgetown Univ. conference on Palestine

I was extremely privileged to be one of the speakers in the conference the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies held Thursday and Friday on “Palestine and the Palestinians Today.” (If I haven’t blogged much the past couple of days, that is why, especially as I was trying to take good notes. Also, I got a big migraine along the way there…. C’est la vie.)
Anyway, just quickly I want to share some highlights.
Yesterday, there was a really good exchange between Ali Abunimeh of Electronic Intifada and Amjad Atallah, a Palestinian-American who’s working with Daniel Levy at New America. (He’s replaced the viciously anti-Hamas Jordanian person Ghaith al-Omari in that slot, which is something of an improvement, though imho not enough of one.)
Amjad was trying to argue that Palestinians should do a lot more to organize at the grassroots, and that Palestinian-Americans in particular should “start” reaching trying to reach out explain their case to people inside and outside government in the US, and that there’s a real chance the US government can become a main ally for the Palestinians once some relatively small misunderstandings have been cleared up. That brought forth howls of protest from Ali and several others at the conference who have actually been doing such organizing and outreach work for many years already (much more than Amjad), and who seemed generally less optimistic than him that it would be easy to swing the weight of the US corporate and decisionmaking elite behind the Palestinians’ cause.
Amjad did make a couple of good points, though. He said that Fateh and Hamas seem to be arguing right now over “who gets to run which parts of the PA administration on behalf of the Israelis” He noted that this was very similar to what happens, in fact, inside the Israeli jails as well. (Or, as I would call them, the Israeli “small jails”, as opposed to the Israeli “big jails” which are what Gaza and all the tiny enclaves in the West Bank have become.
Ali made a strong pitch for stepping up the BDS work (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions); and said it has been starting to have some small victories in this country already– more so, in Europe.
His best throw-away line was to decsribe the title of Martin Indyk’s recent book Innocent Abroad as “the most dishonest book title in the history of writing.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Anyway, that was a good exchange.
Another highlight was a panel, also yesterday, with the anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis Gabi Piterberg and Oren Yiftachel. You may recall that i blogged here recently about the review Gabi had in the LRB on some of the recently translated works of the Hebrew-language novelist S. Yizhar. So I was really pleased to meet him. He’s a historian, and his paper was on the history of the concept of “settler colonialism” as a discrete form of colonialism that has been largely under-studied, for reasons he explained; and on why he believes that concept is the one most applicable to the history of the Zionist settlement project in the Middle East.
He had some really powerful historical examples, including looking at the shift from what he called the “French style” of (labor-exploiting) colonialism that was applied during the “First Aliyah”, under the “Rothschild model”, and how that was then dropped in favor of “pure settler colonialism” under Ruppin and Oppenheimer during the Second Aliyah…
The difference being whether you want to keep a large body of indigenes whose labor you plan to exploit, or whether you just seek to uproot, expel, and if necessary genocide them.
Anyway, he looked at various periods in the history of Zionist colonization projects both within and outside the Green Line– and continuing on both sides of the line until today.
Yiftachel is a geographer at Ben Gurion University, in Beersheva/B’ir Sab’a, whom I had met once before– a long time ago. He’s been working on the situation of the Bedouin Palestinians of southern Israel, a group that, despite being citizens of the State of Israel, are subject to nearly continuous attempts to uproot them from their ancestral lands.
He said he had documented 77 ways in which the state claims it can “legally” expropriate the lands of the Bedouin Palestinians– and that in some cases, four or five of these might be applied simultaneously to the same plot of land.
In the Naqab/Negev area of southern Israel some 55,000-60,000 homes of Bedouin Palestinians have been declared “illegal” and are subject to demolition at the whim of the authorities. Therefore– this is my comment here– their situation as a community is very similar to that of East Jerusalem Palestinians, where the very present threat of home demolitions that may be carried out at any point, at the whim of the authorities, serves as a potent factor that keeps the whole community in a state of constant dread.
The Bedouin Palestinians are citizens, which gives them a few more rights than the EJ Palestinians.
One of the most potent parts of Yiftachel’s presentation was a short series of photos he showed, of the high glass towers of “modern” downtown Beersheva gleaming in the mid-background, while in the foreground were the rude makeshift shacks of Bedouin villagers previously dispossessed but intent on hanging on to their lands.
His description of the situation was “creeping apartheid.”
Sarah Roy gave a very hard critique of the role the “international community” has played in aiding, abetting, and underwriting the costs of all of the strategies of de-development, dispossession, humiliation, and control that Israel has pursued in both Gaza and the West Bank. She ended with a few heartbreaking comments she had heard from friends in Gaza… “People have no sense of protection, no sense of safety, or of rules… We have lost all sense of the ordinary and have no way of thinking how we can regain it.”
She also noted that the old argument that Israeli peaceniks used to make, that Israel cannot have both peace and occupation, now seems to have been disproven for the Jewish-Israeli public. They live in peace, they maintain the occupation– and indeed, the costs of maintaining the occupation, which used to be a constraining factor for Israel, have all now, since Oslo, been lifted from Israel, and are borne by the US and its allies.
She talked about Israel’s “engineering of the Palestinians into becoming perpetual beggars, in both the West bank and Gaza”, and how the international donors have shifted their focus from an emphasis on building up Palestinian capacities for self-determination to focusing just on keeping them alive while controlling them. (She aptly described the procedures whereby aid is delivered into Gaza as being like delivering food to animals in a corral.)
Oh my, there were so many excellent panels! I wish i could write about all of them. I did see that the organizers were videotaping everything, so I hope the tapes of the individual seessions will be made available as soon as possible.
I was on the very last panel, along with Daniel Levy and Saree Makdisi (son of Jean said Makdisi). Saree gave an excellent presentation of his critique of the ethnonationalist underpinnings of the two-state concept, and his arguments for the one-state concept. I wish we’d had a lot more time to brainstorm on exactly how people might get from the present situation to building a powerful and inclusive movement for the one-state outcome.
Daniel surprised me a bit, since I’d always previously heard him as a very articulate advocate of the two-state solution; but he sounded a lot more nuanced and realistic than I’d expected.
His main argument, I think, was for what he called a “Godfather option”: that the US should, after broad consultations, put its own plan on the table and “Make Israel and everyone else an offer they can’t refuse.” He said this need not– and probably would not– look exactly like any of the plans that have previously been discussed, at Camp David 2, Taba, Geneva, or wherever. That was interesting, given that he played a big role in the Geneva back-channel “shadow talks.”
He was much more critical of the traditional Israeli peace movement than I’ve ever heard him before, describing Liebermanism as the bastard child of the fact that so much of the Israeli peace movement used the ‘demographic’ argument to try to make its case.”
He said, I think, that there remains a clear possibility of further ethnic cleansing. (I didn’t gather whether that was from inside or outside the Green Line… should have asked.)
I spoke a bit about my recent trip to the Middle East, with some observations on the main Palestinian political movements, and also on the geographic shifts in the balance of power inside the Palestinian movement.
Oh, I just saw that the video of the talk I gave at the Palestine Center Tuesday, which covers some of the same material, is up on the PC’s website.
Good for them.
Now, I wonder if I can bear to watch myself.
(My own impresssion is that, just in terms of presentational and time-management skills, I did better at the Palestine Center that at the GU event. At the GU event, yesterday, I tried to cram too much in.)