Palestinian Queers Respond to NY LGBT Center's Decision to Cancel 'Party to End Apartheid'

[Queers Against Israeli Apartheid: Image From Unknown Archive] [Queers Against Israeli Apartheid: Image From Unknown Archive]

Palestinian Queers Respond to NY LGBT Center's Decision to Cancel "Party to End Apartheid"

By : Jadaliyya Reports

alQaws and Aswat Statement to the LGBT Center in NY

Dear Glennda Testone,

We, Palestinian queer activists from alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society and Aswat Palestinian Gay Women, are writing to you to express our shock and dismay at your recent decision to cancel the "Party to End Apartheid" event and ban activists working for human rights in Israel/Palestine from the LGBT Center.

We have recently concluded a first of its kind tour to the US, where we shared our personal, social and political struggle as Palestinian Queers living in Israel and Palestine with diverse audiences and activists in 6 cities, including New York City. During those open discussions, we met with human rights activists, lawyers working at the forefront of LGBT rights campaigns, and LGBT people of color who organize on a grassroots level, and were greeted warmly and enthusiastically at every venue at which we spoke. The support and acknowledgment we encountered were both overwhelming and inspiring.

We wish that you could have attended one of our panels. Perhaps, instead of acquiescing to the demands of a neoconservative gay pornographer, you would have the courage and insight – like so many members of the LGBT community in the US – to conclude that the struggle for human rights in Israel/Palestine is a queer struggle.

Certainly, this connection is clear to us. As organizations that work with and for LGBTQ Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, we are forced to deal with the severe consequences of the Israeli occupation and its apartheid system on a daily bases. Israel` apartheid wall, army checkpoints and frequently imposed curfews on entire populations oblige us to deal with legal issues and face many challenges, including mobility. In addition, some of our members live in the US and have been relying on the Center for vital services and activities. They draw much inspiration from the Center’s history and the LGBTQ struggle in the US.

Your decision to cancel the "Party to End Apartheid" event has sent a clear message that debate over Israel/Palestine will not be allowed at one of the most progressive institutions in the US.  Your decision to ban an activist organization focused on Israel/Palestine limits the freedom of expression for everyone who relies on the Center as a safe haven.  In addition, your decision also tells LGBTQ Palestinians in New York and our community in Israel/Palestine that their human rights as Palestinians are not welcome at the Center, and that while they visit the Center, a part of their identity must be left at the door!  How can the Center be, as you claim, "a safe haven for LGBT groups and individuals," if Palestinians and pro-Palestinian groups are either unwelcome or outright banned?

After experiencing such overwhelming support from prominent LGBT organizations and LGBT leaders in the US, we never imagined that the LGBT Center of New York would not join us, and the larger community, in connecting the struggle for LGBT rights to the struggle for human rights.  We are saddened that the LGBT Center has chosen to act in a way that betrays its mission of inclusion, openness, and progressive values. 

Indeed, if debate on Israel/Palestine is forbidden at the Center, what can that mean for other LGBTQ communities also facing extraordinary challenges? Will they, too, be unwelcome at the Center?

Your decision damages the multicultural, inclusive nature of the Center’s community. We would like our expatriate and Palestinian American members, as well as LGBTQ individuals from diverse communities all over New York, to feel safe and welcome there.

We strongly urge you to reconsider your decision and allow the event "Party to End Apartheid" to take place as scheduled. Rest assure that this will mark a new era for your center; one of multicultural inclusiveness and genuine solidarity

alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society:

www.alqaws.org

Aswat – Palestinian Gay Women: www.aswatgroup.org

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412