Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies: Special Issue in Memory of Edward W. Said (Introduction by Professor Salim Vally, April 2017)

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John Docker excoriates another field — Genocide Studies. Mainstream Genocide Studies has scored a temporary ideological victory by dismissing those who have compellingly showed why the Nakba, in fact the ongoing Nakba should qualify as an example of genocide. Furthermore, the gatekeeper of Genocide Studies have clearly aligned with Zionist Israel by holding a conference on the Hebrew University’s campus in Occupied Jerusalem despite a Palestinian-led call to desist from going ahead. Docker usefully shows how Damian Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide resonates with Said’s The Question of Palestine. Short, as explained by Docker, embraces Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide as a two-phase process of destruction and replacement constituted by:

… convergent processes that attempt to destroy the foundations of a society so that it can no longer exist as a society; processes that certainly might involve mass killing including massacres, but can also encompass methods of destruction and replacement that engage many dimensions, including the political, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic.

Continue reading at http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/hlps.2017.0149

Update: PACBI writes to UN genocide prevention chief over complicity with Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem on BDS National Committee

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Mr Adama Dieng has ignored PACBI’s appeal and his talk at Israel’s settlement university, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, continues advertised at the website of INoGS.

Continue reading at https://bdsmovement.net/2016/pacbi-writes-genocide-chief-complicity-israels-ethnic-cleansing-jerusalem-14187?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bdsmovement+%28Palestinian+BDS+National+Committee%29

An open letter from human rights defenders to Mr. Adama Dieng, concerning participation in the INoGS 2016 annual conference on BADIL

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Mr Dieng,

We, the 28 undersigned organizations, call upon you – in your capacity as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide –  to withdraw your participation from the annual conference of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), scheduled to take place June 26-29 2016, at the Hebrew University in occupied East Jerusalem.

… Palestinian and international human rights organizations are currently in the process of presenting evidence of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court, including compelling evidence of international crimes with close associations to genocide, such as murder, forcible transfer and persecution. These efforts have been met with threats and harassment from governmental and non-governmental actors.

For the above reasons, both the location of the INoGS conference and its attendance are incompatible with your mandate, which strives to protect populations from the worst international crimes. We, the undersigned, therefore reiterate our call for you to act out of principle and in accordance with the spirit of your mandate, and withold your participation in the conference until such a time that the event is relocated to another country. Failure to do so would represent tacit acceptance of Israeli-perpetrated grave breaches of international law, and severely undermine the legitimacy of the mandate.

Continue reading at http://www.badil.org/en/publication/press-releases/77-2016/4597-pr-en-240516-25.html

Palestinians call for boycott of genocide conference in Jerusalem by Rania Khalek

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The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has called for a boycott of this year’s conference of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) in Jerusalem… The title of this year’s conference is, ironically, “Intersections: Holocaust Scholarship, Genocide Research and Histories of Mass Violence.”.. One of the scheduled speakers is Adama Dieng, special adviser on the prevention of genocide to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

… The conference is scheduled to take place from 26 to 29 July at Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, some of which was constructed on land that Israel illegally expropriated from Palestinians in East Jerusalem after Israel militarily occupied the West Bank in 1967… “The conference is sponsored by five deeply complicit Israeli academic institutions,” PACBI states. “Israeli universities are profoundly complicit in developing weapon systems and military doctrines deployed in Israel’s recent war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza; justifying the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, rationalizing the gradual ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians; providing moral justification for extrajudicial killings and indiscriminate attacks against civilians; systematically discriminating against ‘non-Jewish’ students in admissions, dormitory room eligibility, financial aid, etc.; and many other implicit and explicit violations of human rights and international law.”

… At the very least, says PACBI, “Whether Israel’s decades-old crimes against the Palestine people meet the UN definition of genocide or not, they should make any honest scholar think twice before participating in a conference on genocide organized by Israeli universities on occupied Palestinian land.”

Continue reading at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/palestinians-call-boycott-genocide-conference-jerusalem

Top Israeli recipient of EU grants is based in occupied East Jerusalem by David Cronin

Hebrew University has kept on lending its support to Israel’s acts of genocide. When Israel attacked Gaza in the summer of 2014, the university undertook a fundraising drive so that soldiers taking part in the offensive could be offered scholarships…

Its staff have been known to sit on committees assessing planned appointments at Ariel University, which is located deep in the West Bank. Despite its cordial ties to that school for settlers, Hebrew University refuses to recognize degrees awarded by Al-Quds University, a Palestinian college in Jerusalem.

 

Continue reading at http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/top-israeli-recipient-eu-grants-based-occupied-east-jerusalem

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