A panel of three experts gathered Saturday morning to speak about the history and future of the Palestinian movement. Starting 45 minutes later than scheduled due to security delays, the event was one part of the weekend’s Palestine Solidarity Movement conference.
The experts, in separate speeches, spoke about the dissent within Israel, the history of the conflict and the role of Zionism—a term which refers to the creation of a Jewish state.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor from Yale, began, illustrating his claims of “Zionist colonization” through a series of demographic maps portraying Palestinian and Israeli populations in Israel over an 80-year period.
“As the Palestinian area is shrinking, Palestinians are basically being left on reservations and in ghettoes,” he said, adding that he thought Zionism was incompatible with a two-state solution to the conflict. “There was never really a two-state solution for this.”
Rebecca Stein, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, spoke about the history of dissent and protest within Jewish Israeli society. She cautioned against casting the Palestinian situation and Jewish Holocaust as competing narratives.
“These tragic histories are by no means equivalent in their scale or effects,” Stein said. “Neither Jews nor Palestinians can claim a historical monopoly on tragedy.”
Nasser Abufarha, author of the Alternative Palestinian Agenda, then criticized the Israeli campaign of renaming geographical features as “reconfiguring the landscape of Palestine to their preferences.” He also agreed with Qumsiyeh that a two-state solution is untenable.
Abufarha also spoke on the difficulty of accommodating a unique Israeli identity in a Palestinian homeland. “We recognize an Israeli identity that is an integral part of Palestine today,” he said. “If Israel continues to define itself as a Jewish state exclusively for Jews, Palestinians will continue to resist.”
The moderator accepted several questions at a time, allowing the panelists to select the topics of their responses.
An anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox Jewish man dressed in a traditional black suit and fur hat waited in line to ask a question, but refrained from speaking into the microphone due to the Sabbath. “They kidnapped us out of the Bible—we have nothing to do with Zionism,” he said. In response, Abufarha said, “we need to understand things the way they are practiced. Zionism is Jewish nationalism.”
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