Past is present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

6. März 20115. März 2017

7th Annual Conference, 5- 6 March | Brunei Gallery | School of Oriental and African Studies – London, organised by SOAS Palestine Society and hosted by the London Middle East Institute

For over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society. Too often, this Palestine ‘Question’ has been framed as unique; a national, religious, and/or liberation struggle with little semblance to colonial conflicts elsewhere. The two-day conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, seeks to reclaim settler colonialism as the central paradigm from which to understand Palestine. It asks: what are the socio-political, economic and spatial processes and mechanisms of settler colonialism in Palestine, and what are the logics underpinning it? By unearthing the histories and geographies of the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism, this conference does not only chart possibilities for understanding Palestine within comparative settler colonial analyses. Rather, it also seeks to break open frameworks binding Palestine, re-align the Palestinian movement within a universal history of decolonisation, and imagine new possibilities for Palestinian resistance, solidarity and common struggle.

Opening and Keynote of the first day

Hassan Hakimian – London Middle East Institute Not Another Racism: Zionism, a Logic of Elimination

Patrick Wolfe – La Trobe University

Session One – Empire, Settler Colonialism and Zionism

Chair: Nelida Fuccaro – School of Oriental and African Studies

John Newsinger – Bath Spa University: Playing the Zionist Card: The British Empire and the Middle East

Gabriel Piterberg – University of California, Los Angeles: Literature of Settler Societies: Albert Camus, S. Yizhar, and Amos Oz

Naseer Aruri – University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth: The Settler Colonialism Paradigm and its Place in Palestinian Political Development

Session Two – Zionism Destroys to Replace

Chair: Laleh Khalili – School of Oriental and African Studies

Gershon Shafir – University of California, San Diego: The Palestinian Labour Market and the Politics of Zionist Settler Colonialism

Ilan Pappe – University of Exeter: The Erasure of the Native

Gilbert Achcar – School of Oriental and African Studies: The Second Phase of the Settler Colonial Conquest of Palestine: The 1967 Allon Plan and the Search for a Zionist ‘Settlement’

Session Three – Zionism Controls the Native

Chair: Ruba Salih – School of Oriental and African Studies

Gish Amit – Ben-Gurion University: Chronicles of a Cultural Destruction: The Appropriation of Palestinian Knowledge during the 1948 War

Eyal Weizman – Goldsmiths College: Indigenous Citizens and the Contradictions of Status amongst Palestinians in Israel As’ad Ghanem – Ibn Khaldun, The Arab Association for Research and Development Frontier Wars and Robotic Colonisation

Session Four – A Political Economy of Settler Colonialism

Chair: Elisa van Waeyenberge – School of Oriental and African Studies

Sherene Seikaly – American University of Cairo: A ‘Bad Lot’? Palestinian Businessmen and the British Colonial State

Shir Hever – Alternative Information Center The Exploitation of the Palestinian Economy by Israel

Adam Hanieh – School of Oriental and African Studies Palestinian Capitalism, Regional Accumulation Processes and Implications for Liberation Strategy

Keynote of the second day

Omar Barghouti – Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI): Self Determination, Ethical Decolonization and Resistance: Towards a Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine

Session Five – Indigenous Life and the Reverberations of Settler Colonialism:

Chair: Lori Allen – University of Cambridge Counterfeit Citizenship: On the Politics of Property in Nahr El-Bared

Monika Halkort – Queen’s University, Belfast Ethnic Cleansing in the Naqab: The Razings of the Bedouin Village of Al-‘Araqib

Mansour Nsasra – University of Exeter: Policing, Self-Policing and Indigenous Collaboration

Mouin Rabbani – Institute of Palestine Studies

Indigenous Life and the Reverberations of Settler Colonialism from stuart Platt on Vimeo.

Session Six – Overcoming Zionism, Dismantling Settler Colonialism

Chair: Jan Jananayagam Tamils Against Genocide

Lorenzo Veracini – Swinburne University of Technology Decolonising Settler Colonialisms

Selma James – International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network The Power and Pitfalls of a Support Movement: Campaigning Against the Jewish National Fund

Mezna Qato – University of Oxford Towards Common Liberation