These are all my responses to the lectures we have received over the past few days. They were by a professor named Bashir Bashir who is a Palestinian who studies political science and teaches at the Hebrew University. He is an Israeli Arab, but he made his point very clear that he is a Palestinian. Again, I don't have the room to summarize what he said, only provide my response to it. Hopefully, you can kind of get his arguments from the context of my writings. I am posting these so you get a slight flavor of the "class" that I am taking while in Israel/Palestine which involves visiting a number of politically charged sites as well as listening to lectures done by academics on all sides of the debate.
Bashir Lecture #1 - The Stages of Palestinian Nationalism
I found the lecture to be very interesting and insightful. He definitely has different opinions and beliefs than a lot of the other things that I have seen, heard, or read that have to do with this conflict. Tracing the history of the Palestinian state movement through his eyes was extremely useful and I have to agree with a lot of what he had to say. However, I think each of those movements still plays a much larger role than he made it sound like. I feel like there are people entrenched within each of those movements that are not willing to let go of their ideologies and beliefs. They are strongly internalized and have become almost doctrine-like to how they live their live their lives. The majority of Palestinians might have changed their views and beliefs with the progressive movements or the leadership might have, but I think there is still a sizable part of the population that has not changed and perhaps will never change. They are a force to be reckoned with and I would like to know what kind of part they will play in the various ideas that he laid out.
Bashir Lecture #2 - Discourses
The way he presented his ideas on discourses was bold and quite different from the apologetic approaches taken by most professors or teachers I have had in the past. It was refreshing I thought. I agree with Bashir's ideas that the "peace-making" discourse is flawed from the outset because it supposes the two entities to be on a level playing field. Aside from lacking institutions among other things, the Palestinian Authority is not the legitimate government of Palestine in the eyes of many Palestinians and in the eyes of some of the international community. Working from this context will never be the stability that people want because the PA itself is not stable. On the other hand, I think he trivialized the humanitarian causes of the Palestinians too much though. If the Palestinians could find a way to use international media more to their advantage to publish their humanitarian plights, I think many would respond demanding that the Palestinians gain more rights and greater equality. I think that is evident with the recent war in Gaza - Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and other social media forms were utilized to show what was going on there and people around the world responded outraged. If Palestinians continue to use these newer forms of media to show the world their problems from their point of view (and not through the lens of Western media), there might be a way to bring great sympathy to their side. I think that is why there is greater sympathy already on the behalf of Europeans and more and more of the American public. Humanitarian discourse could become a tool to vastly improve the condition of Palestinians while waiting for the much more complicated and longer process of decolonization to take place.
Bashir Lecture #3 - Shifts
I feel this lecture was a lot more rushed due to timing and due to the fact that Bashir also felt he covered the material in his previous lectures. I agreed with the general ideas that he presented in this lecture. I believe that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is shifting from being under USA control to international control. I think social media has led to major changes in the international playing field here as well. No longer does media censorship or bias govern what people hear and see, now they can get information right from the people on the street in the area where a crisis or war or whatever is happening. They get access to all the opinions and ideas as well as pictures, videos, memes, and so on. This puts the conflict in more of an international and public opinion context and not just in the hand of the elites of the government. I also agree that Palestinians should fight more for rights than for a state at this point. Forming two separate states would be kind of ridiculous at this point. The notion is nice, but the application would be brutal and complicated to the point of almost being impossible. I think again here that Palestine needs to ask for rights and appeal to the emotions and humanitarian tendencies of the people of the global community.
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