Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar with Sara Roy

[Music] hello everyone good afternoon good evening my name is felipuri and i have the great privilege of chairing the emil bhustani middle east seminar at mit we're in our 36th year and we wouldn't be here if it weren't for the bhustani family and mrs mirnaboustani in particular who has supported this seminar all these many years and we're so grateful to her um in particular mirna she created this seminar at mit in memory and honor of her father enormous figure in the world of middle east commerce industry construction and politics and who passed away a tragic accident in 1963 and was an alumnus of mit class of 33 1933 that is i'm really pleased that dr sarah roy is with us this afternoon or evening depending on where you are i've had also the privilege of knowing sarah really from her school days her school days being her edu university days at harvard where she got all her degrees there from her undergraduate right through her doctorate um she is today senior research scholar and associate center for middle eastern studies at harvard and she co-chairs the middle east seminar at the weatherhead center for international affairs in the center for middle east studies both at harvard of course she's had a lot of very varied professional experiences with different agencies usaid unctad unido and others she serves on a number of boards concerned with gaza with mental health foundation um with the american near east refugee aid and others and um she's won a number of grants and awards as you might expect and she's the author of five books that she authored herself and one just came out this year titled unsilencing gaza reflections on resistance second is hamas hamas and civil society in gaza engaging the islamic social sector the third is failing peace gaza and the palestinian-israeli conflict the fourth is the gaza strip the political economy of development and also the economics of middle east peace reassessment which she was the editor of so she's had a her and her pen is hardly run dry so um sarah is going to really reflect today's her title is gaza reflections on decades of research and we'll come to that in just a moment but i want to uh make sure that i am going over the protocols for this meeting and so let me just say this after sarah's talk we will take questions using the q a function of zoom which you could open by clicking the q a button at the bottom of your screen feel free to add questions during the talk and afterward please do not use the chat function to submit questions only the q a function and questions will be answered after sarah's talk concludes and if at any point in time your you need technical assistance please use the chat function to let our producer and technical assistant know they're going to try their best to help you so we really hope you'll enjoy sarah's lecture sarah roy thank you thank you phillip very much for the invitation to address the seminar again i've always enjoyed doing so and deeply appreciate the opportunity um i also want to apologize to everyone up front from my very raspy voice uh i'm trying i'm apparently fighting a sore throat and a cold so please bear with me all right well in thinking about this talk i decided that i did not want to focus on the grave conditions in gaza which i assume many of you are aware of rather i want to reflect on some of what i've learned in my near four decades of research in gaza this is a huge topic which i cannot cover fully but hope to explore in greater detail in subsequent writings here i shall focus on some reflections and themes that have run through my work and that speak not only to where gaza is but how it got there and why i i shall begin with a story one that i've written about before but it bears retelling it was the summer of 1985 during my very first visit to gaza i was taken on a tour of the area by a woman who would become a dear friend named alia as we drove along gaza's coastal road i saw an elderly palestinian man standing at the shoreline with some boxes of oranges next to him i was puzzled by this and asked alya to stop the car one by one the elderly palestinian took an orange and threw it into the sea his was not an action of playfulness but of pain and regret his movements were slow and labored as if the weight of each orange was more than he could bear not understanding what i was seeing i asked alia why he was doing this and she explained they've been prevented from exporting his oranges to israel and rather than watch them rot in his orchards the old man chose to cast them into the sea i've never forgotten this scene now over 36 years ago and the impact it had on me nearly 40 years later after peace agreements economic protocols road maps so-called disengagements donor conferences reconciliation attempts airports and seaports and proposals for offshore artificial islands gazans are still casting their oranges into the sea yet gaza is no longer where i found it so long ago but it is someplace far worse gaza's trajectory over the last 54 years has taken it from a politically and economically integrated territory to an isolated enclave from a excuse me relatively functional economy to a dysfunctional one from a productive society to an impoverished one and from people with nationalist claims to a humanitarian problem where most men women and children now require some form of humanitarian assistance to sustain themselves these damaging transformations among others have become formalized and permanent shaping a future that is both partial and disfigured what is happening to gaza is catastrophic it is also deliberate conscious and planned in my early research i was primarily concerned with the occupation and its economic impact on the gaza strip because it was the economy that so starkly and unsparingly illustrated the profound inequities that form the structural and philosophical core of occupation policy my initial focus on the economy stemmed from the profound shock and confusion i felt when i first lived in gaza over 35 years ago the chasm between what i had been taught and what i encountered in israel's treatment of the palestinians stunned me as an american jew growing up in the 1960s and 70s and educated at in elite schools i was told often implicitly to believe and never question israeli beneficence and morality and arab incompetence and incivility although my parents taught me to think critically and often provided much-needed counterpoints the intellectual and political weight of the times was difficult to cast aside there was little of any context for speaking critically about israel or sympathetically or ethically about arabs who were forbidden as we were to embrace the word palestine or palestinian although i had visited israel many times during my childhood my first visit to the west bank in gaza occurred as i said in the summer of 1985. i traveled there against the protestations of the israeli part of my family to conduct field work for my doctoral dissertation which examined an american program of bilateral economic assistance to the palestinians my thesis asked whether economic development was possible under conditions of military occupation and my search for an answer immersed me in a reality indeed a world i was totally unaware of and unprepared for as a well-trained graduate student i felt i understood the political complexities of the area the actors involved their histories and the many arguments and sides of the conflict i went i believed with a critical but opened mind i went i believe prepared for anything in that i was wrong those first months in gaza and the west bank changed my life i distinctly remember the day i i first entered gaza i had been in the west bank for some time and had acquired some familiarity with the people and the region and felt comfortable living there despite the harshness of the occupation however the thought of living in the gaza strip made me nervous even scared i had heard terrible and frightening stories about gaza and its people especially from my israeli friends and family i was taken to the marna house which was then one of only two hotels in the gaza strip and i was told the best i read the safest a place for foreigners to stay the hotel was managed by aliashawa who belonged to one of god gauss's oldest and wealthiest families and who as i said earlier would become one of my dearest friends aliyah welcomed me but clearly viewed me with some suspicion after all why would an american be visiting gaza the implicit answer was obvious and when she learned i was jewish her concern and my anxiety grew in those days prior to the first palestinian uprising which began in december of 1987. one of the first questions i was often asked by gazans was are you a christian i never lied and told everyone who asked that i was jewish to my surprise it was not fear or anger i typically encountered when people learned i was jewish but shock suspicion some confusion and considerable curiosity i took advantage of their curiosity and my somewhat unique status to begin a discussion of why i was there explaining that i had come to gaza to learn about its economy people society and history and about military occupation and how it affects their lives i thought it would take a long time to gain their trust but again i was wrong within one week of arriving in gaza i was immersed in local life in a manner i could not possibly have foreseen taken from one end of the strip to the other by people i barely knew but whom alia initially vetted i entered area seldom if ever seen by foreigners helped by people whose support and encouragement would have been unimaginable to me just days before many of those same people would later risk their lives to help me collect data during the first palestinian uprising for my book on the political economy of d development i was invited into homes both rich and poor where no request was too great or questioned too burdensome not only did my being jewish cease to be a source of concern it actually became an accident people could people could not do enough to help me although i could not possibly have known it at the time the summer of 1985 set the stage for the next decades of my life the injustice of the occupation and the inability of palestinians to defend themselves against it affected me deeply my research among them was not only a matter of scholarship it went to the core of who i was where i came from the meaning of my judaism my identity as a child of holocaust survivors my relationship with israel and the nature and purpose of my work one of the most troubling and frightening aspects of the occupation during my initial encounter with it was its mundane prosaic nature for palestinians occupation was the ordinary a way of life that had to be lived defensively without recourse or appeal without protection or choice largely absent of accountability predictability rationality or control furthermore the distortion of palestinian life remained unquestioned by those beyond beyond it for whom the realities of occupation were wholly unknown what was for palestinians a narrative of crisis of territorial dispossession and displacement was for others an example of benign and legitimate control it is this absence of context and its continued mystification that my research has always sought to address from my earliest time in gaza the underlying impulse of my work has always been towards society women children families neighborhoods and communities i focus not only on the occupation's destructive impact on people but on how they whether as individuals or communities we're able to resist it and maintain a meaningful way of life the strength of gaza's people amazed me and it still does a topic that has received far too little attention in the literature on the conflict my most powerful experiences in gaza and the most poignant memories i have are not a violence or or despair but of kindness and generosity creativity and determination the qualities that drew me to the people of gaza from the very beginning society in gaza has long struggled to remain whole and humane despite the immense and largely unevaded pressures imposed upon it pressures that in the last 15 years have assumed new dimensions of cruelty which have impoverished and imprisoned gaza's people denying them the right to live as we do to work to plan to contemplate an ordinary and productive life to live with possibility and dignity in other lectures and writings i have examined in detail some key paradigm shifts in the way the conflict and palestinians are perceived and treated here i will briefly highlight four of the most important of these shifts because they have had a damaging and defining impact on gaza and provide a critical framework within which to understand some of the themes i shall subsequently discuss the first paradigm shift concerns the belief that occupation is reversible and should be reversed which was largely unquestioned and uncontested and was the catalyzing force behind many social political and economic initiatives this belief that the occupation and the forces that sustain it can and should be stopped was long ago reversed and is powerfully illustrated in the formalization and acceptance by israel and key members of the international donor community of palestinian territorial and demographic fragmentation division and isolation within this framework established by oslin gaza and the west bank were separated demographically and geographically as a result a largely isolated gaza came to be seen as exceptional or marginal existing outside a palestinian state and a palestinian nation this in turn supports israel's strategic interest to thwart any political settlement that treats gaza the gaza strip and west bank as one entity thereby preserving palestinian division the policies that have come to define gaza as exceptional are simply extensions albeit more extreme of policies long used to separate and isolate palestinians in the west bank and in israel in this regard gaza status is part of a long and consistent policy continuum of containment irr removal and now erasure as such gaza became the model for the fragmentation of the west bank into small disconnected enclaves under constant assault hence it is important to understand that these policies of separation and exclusion make it difficult if not impossible for palestinians to imagine a larger sense of a collective and without that sense exclusion becomes the defining basis for politics and policy in fact given the years of separation and division of gaza and the west bank and the consistent failure to achieve reconciliation between fatah and hamas a local analyst writes that there is a growing feeling among some some segments of palestinian society that the gaza strip must seriously consider finding exits from the humanitarian crisis that include an independent gaza entity hamas also sees the division as a way of stabilizing and maintaining its control over gaza and as some analysts have argued as a springboard for extending its control into the west bank israel has long pursued this division which is one reason israel continues to impose the blockade and why israel house also allows humanitarian relief and monies into gaza critically the occupation which now includes the damaging 15-year blockade has long remained unchallenged by an international largely western order hence in the absence of meaningful legal and political pressure from the west the presence of the israeli army on palestinian territory and military assaults against palestinians especially in gaza remain unopposed indeed after the may 2021 hostilities the new israeli government announced that it would continue the blockade of gaza and prevent the reconstruction process however in order to avert another conflagration and under pressure from the u.s in particular the israeli government announced some measures to ease conditions in gaza including an increase in the number of work permits for palestinians working in israel which would include several thousand gazans and allowing the entry of qatari money for grants of humanitarian aid totaling around 100 per month per recipient israel also said it would allow the entry of more building and other materials and widening the fishing zone however the blockade remains in place this points to a second paradigm shift prior to oslo there was a belief among israelis and within the international community generally that peace and occupation were incompatible the former could not be achieved in the presence of the latter this too has changed peace and occupation are now considered compatible arguably complementary as seen most recently in the abraham accords the so-called peace agreements between israel the uae and bahrain and in an expanding settlement enterprise which is now considered vital to the protection and security of israelis hence palestine's effective dismemberment and the permanence of territorial fragmentation and division are accepted by key members of the international community as legitimate and benign and totally manageable this reality to which the international community has largely acceded is further characterized by a willingness to legitimize israel's occupation as long as there is no accepted agreement to end excuse me in this way the occupation was transformed from a political and legal issue with international legitimacy into a simple dispute over borders where the rules of war apply rather than those of occupation this is the third paradigm shift this recasting from occupation to war is acutely clear and defining in israel's relationship with gaza and was made easier after hamas 2006 election victory and 2007 takeover of the gaza strip a recasting the international community has largely come to accept if not embrace henceforth gaza was identified solely with hamas and therefore as hostile and alien the growing inapplicability of occupation as an analytical and legal framework introduces a fourth paradigm shift regarding israeli policy towards the palestinians and their territory in the west bank the shift in israeli policy is away from occupation towards annexation and imposed sovereignty in gaza the shift in palace in israeli policy moved from one that sought to control and dominate the palestinian economy shaping it to israel's own interest to one that undermines and ruins the economy through the imposition of a blockade which is really an intensified military closure it should be said also that some form of closure has been effect in gaza since 1991 and formalized in 1993. the closure on gaza has never been lifted what is subject to change is the intensity of a closure and the blockade of course represents its most extreme expression perhaps most striking of all the ruination of gaza's economy has transformed palestinians from a people with national political and economic rights into a weakened community dependent on humanitarian assistance for whom the international community is holy responsible and has long been it is no longer and in fact has not been for quite a long time a question of economic growth change or reform freedom or liberation but of essential humanitarian needs of reducing the needs and rights of over 2 million people in gaza to an exercise in counting calories and truckloads of food is it correct that to say therefore then humanitarianism has now become an instrument of the military the deliberate reduction of palestinians to a humanitarian issue deprived and by extension undeserving of political and economic rights and dependent on the international community for sustenance positions relief not progress as the primary if not only political option for gaza as such humanitarianism has come to define the way the international community interacts with palestinians who are made irrelevant and disposable as political and national actors in effect invalidated in this way israel and the west maintain a humanitarian problem to manage a political one in this case subduing an undesirable and inconvenient population a senior official at the israeli human rights organization isha that monitors conditions in gaza distilled israel's approach and here i quote in the rest of the world we try to bring people up to the humanitarian standard gaza is the only place where we're trying to push them down to keep them at the lowest possible indicators in this way humanitarian aid is used not only to meet the rapidly expanding needs of an increasingly impoverished population but is also used to prolong conflict and suffering if a policy exists it is one of not finding solutions the resulting context has proved increasingly resistant to testimony evidence and fact assigning little little if any value to them and this raises the question of what more can be done to move to change and make a difference consequently over time the occupation has deepened and assumed a particularly destructive quality in gaza the occupation is meant to prevent any kind of normal environment from emerging emerging institutionalizing in both practical and psychological terms a form of abnormality that resists change the longer it is allowed to last and take shape this abnormality is rooted fundamentally in cutting most of gauss's ties to the outside world for example young people in gaza have no conception or very little if any conception i should say of the world beyond gaza they do not know what it means to board a plane or a ship or even a train the withdrawal of law and with it justice in gaza combined with economic collapse has not only necessitated humanitarian intervention but has also situated gaza between periodic conflict and potential catastrophe as a colleague of mine put it in a context where catastrophe has an effect become a form of governance resistance becomes disarrayed leading to a crisis of how to resist hence israel rules rules by maintaining a liminal indeterminate state where the sites of resistance are narrow and ineffective and as my colleague put it quote israel governs by how near to the disaster threshold gaza is allowed to go and within this mode of rule palestinians are regarded as terrorists or charity cases where relief assistance is now treated as a salary in this regard some local economists have argued that gaza is in a state of post-collapse israel's objective in gaza therefore is limited and contained to avert any large-scale disaster such as starvation which is a new and terrible metric gaza is controlled by the threat of wholesale calamity be it hunger institutional destruction or continued economic demise where suffering has become a legitimate instrument of control one must ask how has division and separate how are division and separation embodied in the palestinian experience and in the israeli experience as well now having articulated a framework based on these paradigm shifts i'd like to turn now to some of the prominent themes in my research the first one i'd like to address is the nature of violence and again i cannot go into great detail about all of these but hopefully can um cover some of the most important points by the nature of violence i mean what constitutes violence in the palestinian context the pressures on the population are immense and unrelenting and include high levels of unemployment and impoverishment considerable infrastructural damage and destruction and environmental degradation where it is no exaggeration to say that gaza's water and soil are dangerously contaminated what one scientists refer to as a toxic ecology or biosphere of war this is a topic that requires a great deal more research hence violence in gaza is not only or even primarily defined in militaristic terms but in prosaic ones in everyday ordinary acts the absence of clean water insufficient supplies of electricity the struggle to find a job the struggle to feed one's children accessing schools safely reaching a hospital even burying a loved one and can humanitarianism itself be considered a form of violence that is keeping people alive through subventions while they are being impoverished and attacked by operating in an environment excuse me where the emergency is not temporary but permanent and through the aid provided by the humanitarian community which is clearly needed the occupier is able to enforce and sustain oppression in this regard when donors speak of restoring gaza to a state of pre-conflict they reveal a fundamental if not cynical misunderstanding of life in gaza and always have gaza has never truly enjoyed a state without conflict or violence broadly defined gaza exists in a state of perpetual conflict where quiet is not the absence of conflict nor is it peace defining it as such as the international community has often done introduces yet another distortion into gaza's lived reality similarly nothing in gaza is post trauma and such a definition ignores the nature of trauma among palestinians especially in gaza minimally ten percent of the population well over two hundred thousand people need serious mental health intervention according to the gaza mental health gaza community mental health program the intergenerational impact of trauma on both an individual and societal level is not to be underestimated the second theme i want to address is the failure by israel and the west to connect palestinian actions both violent and non-violent with underlying conditions of impoverishment and desperation this failure born of political interest and racism has been consistent throughout my experience even during major assaults on gaza as far as gaza is concerned the blockade as i said earlier is now an accepted if not largely unquestioned and institutionalized part of the occupation in gaza the 15-year blockade has proved to be one of the most destructive measures imposed on society and economy by 2016 for example less than 10 percent of the homes destroyed in the 2014 summer assault known as operation protective edge had been rebuilt because of restrictions on the entry of building materials referring to the damage inflicted during the may 2021 hostilities the middle east director of the international committee of the red cross stated quote the damage inflicted in less than two weeks will take years if not decades to rebuild and the blockade is not about toppling the hamas regime as stated by the israeli government it is about exactly the opposite maintaining the division and separation of the two territories by containing hamas within gaza under israeli control and emissoriating gaza's people society and economy so that gaza remains removed from any future political equation or resolution thereby ensuring that no viable palestinian state or political construct can emerge social problems which arise from poverty and discrimination are described in terms of culture or religion and or nationalism and are treated as terrorism the larger objective of course is to marginalize palestinians and their rights and claims as one palestinian scholar put it palestinians have come to be viewed as present absentees in israeli eyes and i might add in official american and european eyes as a provocation to the state excuse me the next theme concerns dehumanization if there is one theme over my decades of research that is the strongest and most consistent and unrelenting it is the dehumanization of palestinians primarily by israelis but also by american and european officials and other arabs this dynamic has not changed in my long experience and it finds a range of expressions from the more benign relatively speaking a kind of disdainful tolerance to the more pernicious condoned erasure where entire families in gaza are according to the israeli journalist emir hass now being targeted and killed the question remains why has the international community remain silent or fail to respond in any humane manner a friend in gaza wanted me to share the following with you excuse me it speaks to a more subtle form of dehumanization or degradation that is also harmful and damaging my friend is a young professional woman who works for an american ngo talking about the 11-day assault on gaza last may she said quote we all had lived through terrible days it was so terrifying when it ended my boss told me and the other palestinian employees to return to work immediately just a day one day after the aggression ended when we asked for some more time to grieve and recover and to process what we had been through he responded by saying at least you have a job i felt like we were all commodities as if we were cheap where suffering and resilience are expected we are not allowed any space to navigate exhaustion it was really painful did you return to work the next day i asked yes of course she said i need the job i would like to read an excerpt from my recent book on silence in gaza i devote two chapters of the book to looking back at gaza in the early days of my research what follows is based on field notes i kept during the first intifada in 1988 and 89 when my husband and i lived in gaza in this excerpt i describe acts of humiliation by the israeli army which were common and widespread these acts typically involved beating and otherwise humiliating women and children especially in public and private spaces and while i cannot say this was an official policy of the idea i can say it was a pattern of behavior that while aberrant was purposeful recurring throughout my time in gaza that year the most disturbing aspect of these beatings was a tacit understanding the soldiers had managed to impose on the population we will beat your women and children we will stop beating your women and children if you beat them i do not know how this understanding was formed all i know is that palestinians responded in a way that was meant to mitigate harm and eliminate the possibility of greater violence teachers told stories of how soldiers would enter classrooms and begin hitting some of the children knowing that the only way to get rid of the soldiers was to take over what was to take over teachers would start slapping the children until the soldiers would leave they would then comfort the children and then and try to distract them with play a friend of mine at the time a foreign diplomat who worked for andra as a refugee affairs officer told me she saw soldiers dragging a 15 year old girl up some stairs before beating her the palestinian driver of her car went over to the girl and started to hit her at which point the soldiers left why do you think this is happening i asked she answered to perpetuate a cycle of violence within palestinians society thereby breaking the bonds that hold families and society together something palestinians clearly understood and resisted the meetings of course also were intended to humiliate and demean men all men not just those related to the woman or child being attacked but those witnessing the assault and powerless to defend against it the beatings were designed to instill submission more than fear and for a time they failed to do so which is why they recurred today the situation is far worse but the goal as as i have come to understand it remains unchanged to make palestinians believe in their own worthlessness and make others believe in it as well as some of my friends in gaza fear nothing we can do will prevent our children from coming to the same end they also argue that the question of who counts that is in their view palestinians do not count as human beings is not the only question that must be asked the other question is how do they count for many of my friends palestinians matter only as subjects on which new military technologies are being tested and sold this is a common belief in gaza as is the sense of abandonment that no one including their own leadership both fatah and hamas is accountable for or cares about palestinian suffering palestinians in gaza truly believe that they are on their own as i wrote in my statement before the u.n security council following the 2014 summer assault people in gaza now finally believe israelis when they say there are no civilians in gaza yet palestinians are still shocked at the dehumanizing manner with which they are treated their sense of disbelief and incredulity remain the next theme concerns the present versus the future perhaps one of the saddest changes i have witnessed over the last three decades is the belief that the future will only bring greater suffering than the present the contrast with the first intifada is striking then people truly believed that a better future was not only possible but attainable and organized around that belief today as one friend in his twenties young man recently told me quote it is a crime to think about things improving it is a crime even to think about things staying the same so diminished people live their lives with whatever they have according to deprivation and scarcity having enough food clothing or electricity have been elevated to an aspiration many of my friends organize their day according to when they have electricity there is no interest or energy to think about much else let alone larger political or national issues another colleague a highly educated woman and mother of two young children told me that no one thinks about jerusalem or the right of return anymore but about finding a job and feeding their families one young refugee said my dream is to see a concrete slab as my roof the craving is not for a homeland and the fear is not its absence the craving is for a livelihood no matter how meager clean water and sanctuary and the fear is that they are unattainable in a recent conversation with another friend and colleague he described the attenuation of life in this way quote we do not even think about jobs anymore all we think about is electricity and when we will have it the constriction of life and the individual and collective accommodation to it has been accompanied understandably by detachment from politics and an absence of demands beyond those that are immediate narrow and basic to survival in this regard my young female friend whom i quoted earlier also told me quote my friends and i ask ourselves do we know what we are passionate about what is passion when you are in survival mode there are no solutions so we just talk do you know what it means when you cannot imagine life outside gaza or inside it we live with what we are given palestinians emphasize their existence but it is no longer or it no longer seems connected to a larger context of national liberation as it once was hence the increasing difficulty of people to connect as indigenous to their own land in gaza this is expressed in rising levels of emigration the dream is to leave gaza many of my friends tell me the director of a local human rights organization in gaza put it this way this referring to immigration is a new smarter nakba it's slow but it's very much in progress how did palestinians get pushed to the point where its youth are willing to pay to leave the whole point of our struggle used to be about coming back end quote in this way israel has achieved through economic deprivation what his government once called economic warfare what it failed to do through limited economic prosperity during the first two decades of occupation and that is to compel palestinians to turn away from their national and political aspirations and here i want to introduce the next theme which is the permeation of loss and the waning of deterrence simply put palestinians in gaza have reached a point in fact i believe it was reached some time ago where they feel they have little if anything left to lose this sense is not only measured materially at but more so in my view psychologically where more destruction does not inflict appreciably more pain the sense of loss was particularly pronounced following the summer 2014 assault my last trip to gaza was in the fall of 2016. and my observations from that trip were published in an article in the london review of books where i asked what more can israel inflict when the loss of entire families is now a daily topic of conversation and as one israeli analyst put it this sense of having nothing left to lose is also true of hamas where continued material losses have reached a point of saturation with little of any added pain in this context israel's deterrence policy he argues carries little of any weight which strengthens hamas's strategic position i would also add here that although many perhaps most palestinians in gaza criticize if not condemn hamas governance and ideology there has been continuous support for its central role in resistance what is most concerning in my view is that even with the infusion of aid or increased levels of economic assistance to gaza with some donors erroneously called development assistance little will change in the continued presence of the blockade and the occupation the next scene almost i'm almost done i refer to removing gaza from the sphere of politics for now gaza has been largely removed from the sphere of politics relief is the primary if only choice left is gaza a template for a new politics of exclusion that can be found in other contexts and here i borrow from a recent essay i co-authored with a colleague in france we write quote gaza of course is an extreme case but there are similar situations developing around the world other places of inattention in the us for example making america great again still goes hand in hand with sending sending people back to where they came from where they will remain unseen similarly millions are kept in refugee camps in turkey libya or europe itself with very little prospect of leaving or earning a living families are kept for years in camps caught between the hope of an improbable asylum in europe and the fear of being sent back they are increasingly seen as a nuisance to be contained and isolated rather than welcomed and integrated they are the european versions of gaza without the bombing many gazas are developing around the world from gaza to lesbos from lesbos to afghanistan and beyond sites of exception are growing where people are barred from legitimate political discourse unrecognized but kept alive without claim to community or nationhood where the principal aim of politics is to control unwanted populations with no vision of anything but further control and what then it is often difficult to end a presentation on gaza and israel palestine on a positive note but there are positives and i shall conclude with one excuse me and this is the last theme i'll discuss which i term palestine as an idea in a recent webinar i attended one speaker asked the question what is palestine is it a place a country a site of desire a site of return an idea he argued that the palestinian struggle has been globalized via the internet and incorporated into other struggles like black lives matter the global feeling for palestine for what palestine stands for he continued speaks to the idea of palestine as a struggle against injustice and for justice as defiance and steadfastness in this way the idea of palestine like that of black lives matter means something as it speaks to power not only or even in binary terms but in larger conceptual terms such as justice in my long engagement with israel-palestine i have seen a great deal of change much of it negative but also positive i very much agree that palestine has come to stand for an idea and not just a place and i believe this will continue to grow what has also changed for the better and dramatically so is the expanding space for a counter-narrative for asking different kinds of questions and for understanding palestinians and israelis outside the binary straitjackets in which they have often been placed the changes within the progressive jewish community in particular over the last two decades have been striking and in the long run these changes can only benefit both peoples and as i've also seen there are fewer forms of counter-attack although the attacks do continue in my ongoing discussions with friends and colleagues in palestine several things are clear palestinians refuse to believe that they belong where israel and the west have placed them that they are facing that what they are facing is a result of what they have done to borrow from james baldwin it has also become clear that for more and more palestinians it is not jewish sovereignty per se that they object to but jewish supremacy and this leads to my last point the situation in palestine is tragic yet a certain political options erode such as two states and are extinguished by facts on the ground support for a rights-based approach grows stronger gaza cannot be marginalized nor can the palestinian issue and neither will disappear ultimately the resolution to this tragic conflict lies in equal rights for all people israeli and palestinian thank you

Channel: MIT Center for International Studies

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Length: 52min 30sec (3150 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021