A two-day international conference at Birkbeck, University of London, 14-16 March 2015
This post was contributed by Professor Lynne Segal, of Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies.
For all those who hope to see an end to conflict, the climate of uncertainty, fear and for many, despair, grows year on year in Israel/Palestine. The collapse of every state-brokered ‘peace’ initiative, the continuing devastation from Israel’s bombing of Gaza last summer, alongside Israel’s ongoing annexation of Palestinian land and the constraints and humiliations that occupation inevitably loads on Palestinian lives daily, means that it becomes hard to see any way forward for Israel-Palestine. The horrifying terrorist targeting of Jews in Europe recently has been exploited by Netanyahu to insist more strongly than ever that he speaks and acts as “a representative of the entire Jewish people”. It is therefore imperative that the voices of Jews working for peace and justice are heard. Netanyahu has never spoken for us.
Given the gargantuan imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians, externally brokered peace agreements have proved entirely futile. Rather than simply despair, our aim in organizing this conference is to join with progressive people and governments everywhere searching for fresh ways to surmount the complex political and juridical hurdles necessary for enabling Israelis and Palestinians to live together in peace. One way of doing this is to refocus on the rights and responsibilities that make co-existence possible. That is the alternative direction that this IJV conference hopes to facilitate. It means creating a broad platform for all those working together at present to promote joint Israeli-Palestinian movements for reconciling competing nationalisms, and sharing of civil and political rights across Israel and Palestine. It is an old dream, and one that we believe offers the only hope for peace.
At this conference, we will hear from others who have been venturing along this path for many years. Our sessions include politicians such as Mustafa Barghouti and Avrum Burg, scholars such as Avi Shlaim and Bashir Bashir, alongside a host of other community leaders and minority rights organizers, from Gaza, the West Bank, as well as their supporters near and far, whose voices are less often heard. Our aim is not just to learn about progressive movements in Israel/Palestine, but also to make hope possible, in what many see as this most hopeless of all conflicts. The goal is also to deepen and expand the strategies for increasing international pressure for change to end this conflict, rather than – as so often happens – allowing other issues to divert our attention from it. We hope you will join us in supporting this initiative, knowing that, as Raymond Williams always said, ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’.
Interested? Find out more
