Abstracts
Panel 1
Taking it to the UN: an analysis of the recent uptick in Palestinian
diplomatic efforts to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip (Philip Leech-Ngo)
2017 marks 50 years since the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the
Palestinian territories. Technically, under various statutes of international law
(Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations and Article 2, of the four Geneva
Conventions, 1949) military occupation of foreign territory is permissible for
self-defence. However, the way Israel has prosecuted its control over
Palestinian lands and Palestinian lives is in blatant violation of numerous
international norms.
In an effort to bring about the end of the occupation of the Palestinian
territories the Palestinian leadership, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, began
pursuing a strategy of formal internationalisation of the conflict. This revolved
around seeking recognition of Palestinian ‘Statehood’. Despite resistance
from the US, Israel and Canada (inter alia) The PA was ultimately successful
in this endeavour (November 2012), but was subsequently denied similar
recognition by the UN Security Council.
Following from its success at the General Assembly, the ‘State of Palestine’
has joined a range of international organisations, sparred with Israel over
access to the International Criminal Court. But it is, as yet, unclear what this
diplomatic surge means for the status of Palestine in the context of its
relationship with Israel or in terms of the PA’s standing, at both the
international and domestic levels. Moreover, it is an observable reality that
thus far the uptick in Palestinian diplomatic activism has had no effect at all in
terms alienating the day-to-day reality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian
lands and Palestinian lives.
This article explores and examines the nature and meaning of the recent
Palestinian diplomatic surge by addressing the following questions: (a) What
precisely is the strategy behind the recent uptick in Palestinian diplomatic
activism? And (b) what are the likely outcomes of the recent uptick in
Palestinian diplomatic activism when examined at international, regional and
domestic levels? And (c) given the long record of non-application of
international legal norms to the Palestine-Israel conflict, what is the broader
potential impact of the recent uptick in Palestinian diplomatic activism on the
way settle colonialism is understood as an international legal concern.
African Solidarity with Palestinian Struggles: A Historical Analytical
Study (Ibraheem Mikail Abiola)
What the 6th Palestinian congress said in 1969 may have been true then. The
struggle is Palestinian only in the sense that the original problem emanated
from the territory of Palestine, but the struggles now are universal in character
and have international dimension. The then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel
Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella were very much instrumental in trying to link the
struggles of the Africans and Arab peoples. They did so by correcting pointing
a finger at imperialism and situating Zionism and apartheid within its orbit.
Naser’s realization of the danger posed by Israel was not based on so-called
Arab ‘tradition’ hatred of Jews. It was based on Israel’s policy of wars which it
uses as a means for territorial expansion, and also Israel’s alignment with
imperialist powers.
Naser first sounded the danger of Israel at the
Casablanca conference of African states. He also introduced to the African
leaders the problems of the national liberation movements in Africa and the
Middle East. The first Africa and Arab states Summit in 1964 said. With all
these, this conference paper is going to shed light on Africa solidarity with
Palestinian struggles and the methodology adopted for this conference paper
is qualitative research method.
Palestine in the German Imaginary (Isabelle Hesse)
This paper examines how Palestine is imagined and engaged with in
contemporary German literature. Palestine has been, and continues to be, a
thorny issue in a German context, since Palestine can rarely be invoked
without also thinking about Israel and its political and historical relationship
with Germany, including the Holocaust.
However, as Caroline Pearce has argued, in contemporary Germany
engagement with the Nazi past is shaped by ‘a dialectic of normality,’ which
she defines as ‘a conflict between the perceived need for remembrance and
the desire for “normality”’ (2007: 2). Interestingly, Antje Schumann has argued
that solidarity with the Palestinians also stems from a desire for normality, as
it allows Germans to ‘reclaim[] the basic rights of free speech and
uncensored publication’ (Schumann 2005: 170). Thus, fighting for the
Palestinian cause is not only seen as an act of rebellion but also contributes
to turning Germany into a ‘normal’ nation again.
By examining the narrative strategies that contemporary German travel
writers employ to represent Palestine and the Palestinians to their German
audiences, I consider how Palestine functions as a locus for rebellion and/or –
paradoxically – as a site for achieving normality and to what extent these
representations of Palestine are shaped by the memory of the Holocaust in
21st century Germany.
Panel 2
Before and After: Palestinian cultural production and the politics of
legitimation (Sary Zananiri)
Palestine has long history of importance to the Western imaginary, firstly as a
site for biblical narrative and since the 1960s as an emblematic site of anticolonial resistance. The first Intifada can be seen as not only a seminal
political marker in Palestinian history, but also as a moment of political
legitimation in its ultimate outcome – the Oslo Accords and the creation of the
Palestinian Authority (PA). In this paper I will unpack the impacts of political
legitimation on Palestinian cultural production. Specifically, I will focus on the
dramatic shift in the ways in which Palestinian art circulated before and after
the First Intifada as well as well as the ways in which such cultural production
is consumed.
Prior to the Intifada much artwork was circulated as
reproductions on posters or other media through international solidarity
networks. Such artwork lived within the immediacy of streetscape, posted on
walls as part of a solidarity efforts. With Palestinian political legitimation in the
form of the PA, artwork retreated from its exilic existence in the street,
auspiced by the politics of solidarity, to a more culturally legible modes of
practice in international art arenas.
In responding to the assimilation of Palestinian contemporary art into the
international art market, contemporary Palestinian curatorship has employed
innovative grass roots strategies reflective of specific political and cultural
circumstance. I will explicate these curatorial modes through the two case
studies. Firstly, the newly built Palestine Museum in Bir Zeit and their plural
attitude towards Palestinian identity and, secondly, the collaborative nature of
Qalandia International, which uses a model that undermines the
fragmentation of Palestinians.
Translating Palestine: Paratextual Elements in The Woman From
Tantoura and the Humanization of Memory (Ahlam Mustafa)
Gerard Genette describes Paratext as “what enables a text to become a book
and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.”
(Genette, 1997, p. 1), This includes elements that surround the text , which
are not the simple string of narrative, such as: name of author, title, subtitles,
name of the publisher and various distribution and marketing materials, such
as interviews with the author and book signing events. My choice to focus on
Paratext is due to its helpfulness in assessing authorial assumption of
responsibility, while also highlighting the elusive nature it beholds and the
continuously changing conditions of its means and manifestations across
varying cultures, works, authors, genres and editions. Paratext here is not
interpreted as a border or a barrier between the text and the reader, but rather
as a space that puts the reader in transit, where s/he is neither inside nor
outside the text, but on a ledge. Combining the assumption of responsibility,
and the changing nature of Paratext, I will look at the ways in which the
translation of the Arabic novel Al-Tantoureyya by Radwa Ashour into English
as The Woman From Tantoura By Kay Heikkinen demonstrate how
Paratextual choices can be a reflection of the contextual specificity of these
elements. I argue that while the Arabic edition highlights the historical and
political nature of the Palestinian experience, the English translation aimed for
a humanized, depoliticized effect. Paratext as a form of representation reveals
some of the underlying paradigms of representation directed to respective
audiences, and exposes how this selective process of representation takes
part in the practice of shaping collective memories, voicing the Palestinian
trauma within regional and international contexts, and achieving solidarity.
Hegemony, Credibility and Credulity (Mike Griffiths)
A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for
overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light,
and for punishing those who try to tell the truth.1
—Edward Said
In this presentation, I tell the story of a Palestinian friend who was imprisoned
under administrative detention. I relayed this story to interested academic and
other friends in mid-2014 in order to bear witness to Palestinian
dispossession. I was disbelieved by one such addressee. As such, the
presentation becomes a meditation on the conditions under which modes of
dispossession are rendered credible—or incredible—in Western discursive
spaces. In doing so, I draw on Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Edward
Said and others to assess the hegemonic force that determines what is
received as credible and what credulous when it comes to the situation of
occupation in the West Bank.
Panel 3
Between Complicity and Critique: New Representational Strategies from
the Palestinian Diaspora (Gretchen Head)
In a 2011 article, “The Performative in Ilyas Khuri’s (Elias Khoury’s) Bab alShams (Gate of the Sun),” I argued that the conditions prevailing in the
Palestinian diaspora, particularly Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps,
created a representational crisis whereby older narrative forms failed and
alternative representational strategies resulted in a series of empty simulacra
that severed the camps’ residents from any real connection with their
collective history. This paper will suggest a potential solution to this crisis
through the work of Larissa Sansour, a video artist born in East Jerusalem
who was educated in the United States and now lives in London. Through an
analysis of her video work Nation Estate (2012), In the Future, They Ate from
the Finest Porcelain (2015), and her collaborative graphic novel The Novel of
1
Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” 30
Nonal and Voval (2009), I will consider how Sansour's imagining of what
Reem Fadda has called an “active futurity” represents a new stage in
Palestinian aesthetics. Although the explicit use of the term postmodern would
be inappropriate in this context, Sansour’s work shares many of
postmodernism’s modes of representation as Linda Hutcheon has
characterised them: historicity paired with self-reflexivity and parody, an
interest in process over product, the breakdown of the boundaries between art
forms and between art and life, and a reimagined relationship between the
artist and her audience. Sansour’s appropriation of popular genres, from
science fiction to the archetypal superhero comic, aims to be an especially
salient way to subvert popular culture, bringing it into the service of political
action. Yet her deliberate play with the lines separating complicity and critique
risks appearing to have abandoned the political in favour of empty parodic
reference. This paper will argue that the ironic speculative futures offered in
her work are a critique designed to change the present.
The role of co-resistance in the imagery of the Palestinian struggle
(Marcelo Svirsky)
Thinking the Palestinian struggle as comprising an element of Arab-Jewish
co-resistance is to connect the future to the past through the present. It
connects the image of the future polity and society, as it is imagined by those
who participate in the project of decolonisation, with actual social formations
of the past, asking in what forms can it materialise today. Thus, co-resistance
is not the madness of the few but a real concern of Palestinians and all those
struggling against the present settler colonial regime in Palestine. Historically,
Zionism has targeted forms of Arab-Jewish partnership, since the times of
Arab-Jewish shared life in Ottoman Palestine and up to these days. Nothing
upsets the settler colonial Zionist common sense more than the image of
Arabs and Jews working shoulder to shoulder. Then – for historical, cultural,
and political reasons – co-resistance boosts the thinking and vision of
Palestine from the viewpoint of decolonisation.