8/28/13
Speaker(s): Dr Karma Nabulsi, Professor Ilan Pappe, Professor Rosemary Hollis, Peter Kosminsky
Chair: Jon Snow
Recorded on 26 April 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
"The pretty well certain death of the two-state solution". -JS
"There's no talk in part because there is within the media a very serious Palestine fatigue...the commitment in the media is very very low...consequently, the pressure on politicians to do anything about Palestine is virtually nil, and that is the terrible base from which we have to proceed."
Professor Rosemary Hollis:
Olive Tree Programme (Israeli+Pal undergrads)
address the international dimension:
1. legality of situation is clear: UN endorsed 2 state, Pal rec as non-member observer state of UN, EU and US say occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem illegal, settlements illegal, blockade of Gaza constitutes collective punishment (by EU def) so must be lifted.Hamas still required to embrace 3 principles...
2. the US renewed committment to Israelie security, Obama notes Pal rights, impresses the left, ignored by govt
3. EU has advanced trade and cooper with Israel. European Neighborhodd Policy and Partnership Agreement. Continuing. at same time, EU condemns specific moves to expand settlements
US official position wants resumption of direct talks by PA (not PLO) and Israeli govt
4. EU is main funder of human rights organizations in Israel, main champions as well. The EU is main funder of PA! Successive pronouncements on the Pal economy today make the point (including IMF and WB) that it cannot progress any further without a solution, and that the illness lies on Israel to lift blockages.
This is an extraordinary picture in terms of the legality, official positions,actual activities, facts on the ground, trade relations, funding commitments, Pal training of security forces. What are the explanations on the disconnects between pronouncements, official positions, and actualities?
On the US side: domestic (pol costs) Obama calculated too great to explore more
EU: given financial crash, internal consensus within the EU is prized, consensus building>bold action without
If EU were to go alone, they can't get anywhere without the US taking a lead, though it won't...
riveted by the spectre of Syria unraveling, and the possibility of regional war with Iran?
2 Suggestions:
1. Context: the release of doc buried by British govt which were buried (no release under 30 yr rule)...the British under mandate predicted there WOULD be war between Zionist movement and Arabs/Arab states...Arabs would lose. Pal had started to flee home in 1947.
Now is the time during revival of 2 state solution (plan on table in 1947/48), that international players CONCEDE DEFEAT and tell Israel that they are not prepared to reverse on the international legality but NOR will they buy into, any longer, the narrative that if only the Pal would change the situation could be solved. Pal capitulation will not bring peace and would not actually be in conformity with international legality. It is time to open up a new, more honest conversation.
2. For Israel: 5-10 yr time horizon to discuss scenarios for honoring the rights and needs of ALL the people under Israeli occupation and control.
These could include unilateral separation (on what terms?), federation with Jordan modalities, bi-nationalism (how will it work?) (to name a few).
Professor Ilan Pappe:
Author of Out of the Frame: the struggle for academic freedom in Israel; Director of European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter.
Fatigue: Understandable for Palestinian Question. The main reason we all feel tired and exhausted is because we tend to compare and contextualize Palestine in the contemporary scene. You ask yourself, "How do I compare what occurs in Palestine to what occurs in Syria? What is more horrific? What needs my attention, now?" Mundane, daily oppression of a Pal prisoner who dies in an Israeli jail on a hunger strike, the imprisonment of 3 pal children, or the killing of one of them, compared to the horrific events that occur on a daily basis in Syria. This is the main issue we must discuss. Palestine should not be contextualized contemporarily. It should be contextualized historically if we want to understand the extent of the evil that is raging in that land. It is very difficult for the media to accumulate, assess, and present knowledge that has to be evaluated within a historical perspective. When we talk about dispossession in Palestine, we cannot talk about what happened yesterday. We have to talk about what happened yesterday in the context of what happened in the last one-hundred years and understand that the same impulse, the same ideology, the same policies and strategy, that brought to the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 the policies that are still intact today and are gaining the same international immunity they had when they first started in the late 19th century. And this is a point that is not mentioned again and again. The fatigue here is not because people have heard this before. The fatigue here is because you ask your viewers, your listeners, or your readers, to do something that usually consumers of news don't do: to have a wider perspective of the case study that they are asked to address. So I think it is very important (my 1st pt) not to forget the history of the dispossession. Not because history is always important-sometimes it is good to leave behind historical events in order to move forward. But when the same historical event is happening in our lifetime, and the event I'm talking about is a settler colonialist movement trying to dispossess the native people of Palestine- this hasn't changed since 1882, we are just in a different phase of the project, when this is the project we are covering as journalists, or analyzing as scholars, or want to engage with as activists, we have to make sure we have found the right ways of conveying this truth and reality to whoever we think it is important to talk to. The second reason there is a fatigue is that we have been using the wrong dictionary for many many years and we have been propagating the wrong solution to the question for years. And it is tiring if you use the wrong language, and then you get exhausted yourself, because there is a gap between what you describe and the reality on the ground. And we have all sinned in that. And when you offer a solution that has nothing with the reality on the ground, there is a limit for how many times you can repeat again and again the same solution when you know there is no chance in the world that it would ever be implemented. The language we are using, and understandably, is the language of parity. There are two national movements. There are two sides to the story. There are two sides to the coin. No there are not. There is a victim-izer and the victim. There is the the dispossess-er and the dispossessed. There is the colonizer and the colonized. This is not a parity. This is an imparity. This is an imbalance. And our role from the outside is to redress this imbalance-not to support it, not to perpetuate it. And I think that this idea that we are continuing to talk about realities on the ground as if we have already accepted them, such as the dispossession of the Palestinians with no right of the refugees to return, such as the idea that the Pal state if it would ever come into being would be a fraction of what used to be Palestine, such as if Palestine became a state we would find no definition for it in any political science books because it would have no sovereignty, no taxation, no government, so God knows why you would call it a state-you can call it a municipality at best, but not more than that!
And the last point I will make is that we are using the wrong paradigm or we are captive, captivated by a false paradigm. Now the power of that paradigm is that the international community is behind it. The power of that paradigm is that even Palestinian leadership gave it blessing. But that doesn't mean that is it the correct paradigm. In Palestine today, there is one state. There is one state. It controls the whole of Palestine, including the Gaza Strip. It imposes different regimes on the Palestinians who live there, and a different regime on Palestinians that used to live there. The only appropriate language for change on the ground is not the language of a solution. It's not even the language of a peace process. It is a language of regime change. The current regime, that draws the life of the Palestinians, who are half of the population between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, that regime is not democratic, is racist, uses apartheid, colonization, and dispossession as its mains means of control because it subscribes to ideology that says that only a Jewish demographic majority can produce a Jewish democracy. And unfortunately for Pal, from the very beginning, the Zionist movement was possessed, or rather obsessed, that the Jewish state has to be democratic and Jewish. Which meant that you are obsessed daily and annually with the idea of how many Palestinians are in this space that you regard as a Jewish state. Only one other ideological movement in history was so possessed with the idea of how many people live in a certain country-I won't mention its name. It is very sad that the victim of that ideology are using even the same system of finding out whether a Jew of a third generation can be defined as a Jew in the state of Israel. This pathetic, pathological obsession with demography is at the base of the conflict and the reality in Israel and Palestine. And the two state solution was born as means of finding a way of reconciling the wish to have Jewish majority with Jewish democracy. It is the wrong impulse that produced the wrong solution. The impulse to push us all in Israel and Palestine, is the following: the Zionist settlers' colonialist movement now have a third generation of settlers. I'm sure most of the Palestinians accept that the third generation don't have to go home, and they don't even have a place to go home to. That their home is the homeland of the native people of Palestine. But we have to re-frame the relationship between the settlers in the third generation, the native population, and the people who were expelled from Palestine in 1948. There are clear, universal, ethical, and moral guidelines on how to re-frame relationship between natives and settlers in the 21 century without criminations, re-criminations, without additional injustices and on the basis of a sound political logic. It's not in the sky. It's a reasonable paradigm for re-framing the relationship and finding a solution that maybe will wake us all up, even the media that has been exhausted, for understandable reasons.
