Will this world ever be the same? ＆ Perspectives on Palestine: Dialogues on History, Humanity, and Hope[Report Recording]

「這個世界會永遠如此嗎？」
巴勒斯坦電影放映／映後會，與 Qais Assali、Shuruq Harb 和 May Marei 的對話

2024/1/15(一)
14.00-15.00：電影放映會
15.00-16:30：映後會：與電影導演的問與答

人社二館 F106

“當各種危機同時存在於身體中時，我們無法將時間劃分為不同的危機。”
⎯文字引自Instagram 上的 @palestinewritingworkshop

我們正在反思韓裔美國詩人洪朴凱西（Cathy Park Hong）在《我受傷，故而我存在》（Minor Feelings）中所思索的：“我用什麼代價獲得了這樣的生活？我以何種代價獲得了這樣的安全……我並沒有經歷前人經歷過的，但我仍然是那些沒有時間去復原的人的後代；他們沒有時間，也沒有被允許去反省。”

我們也在思考和擴延巴勒斯坦詩人馬哈茂德·達爾維什在《為了遺忘的記憶》（Memory for Forgetfulness）中提出的一些問題：流亡和失落的意義是什麼？在戰爭時期，作為一個人可以扮演什麼樣的角色？而寫作和拍片（時間和記憶）與歷史（記憶正是一種遺忘的方式）的關係是什麼？ 懷着愛與憤怒之情，這次的短片放映匯集了巴勒斯坦電影導演/藝術家 Qais Assali、Shuruq Harb 和 May Marei 的作品，希望能够為觀眾提供一種渴望或能量，可以持續提出問題、思考、行動，並想像另一個世界是可能的。

⎯電影放映會策劃人 : 王虹凱（Hong-Kai Wang）

電影放映
Griever of the Sea (2022) by May Marei
The Kingdom (2015) by Qais Assali
The Seventh Sarha by Qais Assali
White Elephant (2018) by Shuruq Harb
The Jump (2021) by Shuruq Harb

策劃人:王虹凱

主辦單位
國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心
國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心亞際文化研究國際碩士學位學程(台聯大系統)
「衝突、正義、解殖：21世紀轉型中的亞洲」計畫：子計畫三「遷移、不平等公民、批判法律研究」+子計畫六〔藝術介入與社會行動〕

Filmmaker’s Website
The Kingdom – Qais Assali
The White Elephant | IFFR
The Jump by Shuruq Harb – Jameel Arts Centre

Film Programme & Symposium on Palestine (google.com)
*Film screening and symposium will be held in person and online.

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研討會：巴勒斯坦觀點：歷史、人性與希望的對話
日期： 2024/1/15日（一）
時間： 17:00 – 19:30
地點： 陽明交大光復校區 人社二館 F106

講者和與談人：
1) 哈澤姆·阿爾瑪斯里(Hazem Almassry)，來自加薩，獨立研究者，臺灣國立陽明交通大學 社會與文化研究所博士

2) 阿蘭·布羅薩特（Alain Brossat），法國巴黎第八大學哲學教授

3) 賽法立．阿拉塔斯 （Syed Farid Alatas），新加坡國立大學社會學教授

4) 魯巴·薩利赫（Ruba Salih），意大利波隆那大學人類學教授

5) 邁克爾·弗曼諾夫斯基（Michael Furmanovsky），日本龍谷大學大眾文化研究教授

Coordinated by Kahlan A. Alradhi & Hanh T. L. Nguyen

策劃人： 阮蘭欣與安凱蘭

活動概述：
For the purpose of examining the political and humanitarian crisis in Palestine, the International Center for Cultural Studies, NYCU, organized the symposium “Perspectives on Palestine: Dialogues on History, Humanity, and Hope.” It particularly focused on Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip following the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The Israeli bombardments, conducted through land, air, and sea, have ruthlessly targeted Gaza’s population, resulting in approximately 30,000 casualties as of January 15, 2024, predominantly among women and children. UNRWA estimates suggest that more than a million people have been displaced, causing a collapse in the health sector and leading to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
Organized by the International Center for Cultural Studies, the event brought together a distinguished panel of speakers to share their insights on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The symposium aimed to cultivate an unwavering sense of empathy, ignite compassion, and instill a genuine desire for the well-being of all individuals affected by the ongoing situation.
We invited five speakers. They included Dr. Hazem Almassry, an independent researcher from Gaza; Prof. Ruba Salih, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna, Italy; Prof. Farid Alatas, a professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, Singapore; Prof. Alain Brossat, an emeritus professor of Philosophy at Paris 8 University, France; and Prof. Michael Furmanovsky, a professor of Cultural Studies at Ryukoku University, Japan.
The symposium, held at the Humanities Building 2 (人社二館) F106 of National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, took place on January 15, 2024 (Monday) from 17:00 to 19:40 Taipei Standard Time (GMT +8). It was coordinated by Kahlan A. Alradhi and Hanh T. L. Nguyen, providing a platform for a comprehensive exploration of various perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

講者簡介：
Dr. Hazem Almassry
Is from Gaza and an independent researcher with a doctorate degree in social research and cultural studies from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He specializes in Middle East issues, particularly the Arab Spring and its social, political, and economic impacts, with a focus on democratic transition. He also researches political Islam movements and their influence on public life in the Arab world. Dr. Almassry has been invited to speak at institutes in Taiwan on his areas of expertise.

Prof. Ruba Salih
Is a Professor of Anthropology at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, Italy. From 2010-2022 she was based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests and writing cover transnational migration and diasporas across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Islam and gender, the Palestine question and refugees, trauma and conflict in the Middle East. She has been an elected Member of the Board of the Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences from 2015 to 2019. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University, at the University of Cambridge, and at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, Italy.

Prof. Syed Farid Alatas
Is a Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. He lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to joining NUS. His areas of interest are historical sociology, the sociology of social science, the sociology of religion, and inter-religious dialogue. He has many books and research published and translated into several languages. His research interests span Philosophy of Social Science, Sociological Theory, and Political Economy.

Prof. Alain Brossat
Is a philosopher. He is an emeritus professor at the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis. He is the author of many books, notably The Term of Disaster, The Body of the Enemy, and To End the Prison. His research principally involves political philosophy and contemporary philosophy, with the main axes being violence and politics, forms of modern violence, state(s), political systems, totalitarian powers, genocides, and civil war(s).

Prof. Michael Furmanovsky
Is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Ryukoku University, Japan. He grew up in the close-knit Jewish community of Zimbabwe as the child of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and a German-Jewish mother. He lived in Israel for a year in the 1970s and hitchhiked through the West Bank. Although his academic work is in Japan Studies, he has been following the Israeli-Palestine conflict and has been personally affected by it, for over 50 years.

研討會紀要：
The symposium began with the contribution of Dr. Hazem Almassry, who comes from Gaza. He obtained a doctorate from the NYCU. He now lives in Taiwan with his wife and children, while the rest of his family are still living in Gaza. Dr. Hazem shared a personal account, providing a historical context of his experiences as a Gaza resident. His narrative reflects the extensive suffering endured by Palestinians under the oppression of the Zionist occupation. This suffering is evident in various aspects, including land seizures, displacement, imposing sieges, racist policies, economic rights violations, and the deprivation of basic services. Hazem highlighted key events such as the First Intifada (1987-1993), the Peace Process (1993-2000), the Great March of Return (2018-2019), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and the blockade of the Gaza Strip and how these events affected the lived experiences of himself and his family.

Throughout his presentation, Hazem illustrated the general hardships faced by Gaza residents, starting with mass displacement during the 1948 establishment of the Zionist state and the 1967 hostile and expansion war. His personal experiences included the destruction of his family’s farm, the loss of classmates and colleagues during Israeli attacks, water and electricity cuts, and the comprehensive siege causing scarcity of essential resources and difficulty in moving, traveling, and obtaining an appropriate education or job. The recent collective annihilation war resulted in the death of his mother, the destruction of his house, and the scattering of his family members across different parts of the Strip.

In her presentation, Prof. Ruba Salih underscores the ethical and political importance of contextualizing current events within the long-term history of injustices against Palestinians since 1948, particularly in the ongoing Gaza conflict. She highlights how the oppressed, especially Palestinians, have faced epistemic violence, limiting their visibility to Israeli perspectives. Critiquing the one-sided representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict post-October 7th, she points to a new perspective that neglects historical context. Despite abundant scholarly studies on Palestine, persistent denial of Palestinian erasure prevails. The author introduces DAVRO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) as a tool to understand epistemic violence, stating, ” How does the persistent denial of erasure in the case of Palestinians work? We might resort to psychoanalysis or to a particular form of narcissistic behavior known as DAVRO .” Lastly, she stresses the ethical and political necessity of reorienting the world’s moral compass, exposing the intertwined processes of humanization and dehumanization of both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians to recognize the equal value of all human lives.

Prof. Farid Alatas argued that it is appropriate to classify Israel as a settler colonial state, aligning with the broader global discourse on this intricate and enduring conflict. Contrary to the prevailing narrative in the West, the media, and even in Malaysia, which suggests an international conflict in Palestine as if there are two independent entities – Palestine and Israel, the actual reality is different. In his words, “The reality is that the whole of what we called Palestine is a colony with three forms of colonialism taking place – settler colonialism, semi-colonialism and exploitation colonialism.”

Prof. Alain Brossat provided a Marxist analysis of the Israel/Palestine situation, with four main talking points. First, opposing the Western narrative framing the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, as the trigger of Israeli aggression on Gaza, Prof. Brossat strongly established the attack as a retaliation for Israel’s oppression of Palestine in general and Gaza in particular. It is a response to ongoing bombings in Gaza, violence against residents of the West Bank by settlers and the army, and the desecration of Islamic holy sites, particularly in Jerusalem. Second, Prof. Brossat delineated terror as a recurring tool for asserting power and sovereignty, highlighting the inseparable connection between politics and war. The situation in Israel/Palestine exemplifies this, with the Palestinian population in Gaza enduring massive, persistent, and increasingly destructive forms of terror. Prof. Brossat further elaborated that, today, hegemony relies heavily on industrial-scale terror. In the third point, he examined hegemony through narrative construction, focusing on language and the portrayal of “terror” and “terrorism.” Narratives such as the “war against terrorism” attribute global and local disorders to terrorists, framing them as forces of evil in opposition to Western “democracies”, or forces of good. In his last talking point, Prof. Brossat pointed out that the modern democracies in the West have been relatively successful in this “discursive swindle” because they have long portrayed themselves as peaceful, emphasizing internal civility and efforts to eliminate violence. However, if one is to consider the sufferings on the ground around the world at the hand of these “democracies” – invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, French military campaign in the Sahel, major maneuvers intended to raise tensions in China Sea, proxy war tirelessly fueled by Western powers in Ukraine, etc. – their image of “civilization” and “democracy” falls apart.

Prof. Michael Furmanovsky offered personal reflections rather than academic or political analysis, acknowledging the saturation of discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Reflecting on his Jewish background, he discussed his upbringing in a Zionist-Socialist youth movement and subsequent divergence from mainstream Zionist views. He highlighted the decline of leftist movements in Israel and frustration with their failure to build alliances with Arab Israeli communities. He attributed the shift to the right in Israeli politics to demographic changes and political miscalculations by leftist parties. He criticized the Israeli left for its inability to prevent the rise of right-wing leaders like Netanyahu and shared his personal experiences of estrangement from family members due to his political views.

After all 5 speakers had delivered their speeches, the floor was opened for questions and comments from the audience both online and on site. There were some questions about the role of the left in the U.S. in influencing Israeli state and society in their actions towards Gaza, to which Prof. Furmanovsky responded that changes had to come from within Israel, and from the U.S. government and, to a lesser extent, the Jewish communities in the U.S. and Europe. However, there were also strong sentiments from most of the invited speakers and the audience that highlighted the agency of the Palestinian people, and the strength of international communities in calling out Israel’s oppression and ethnic cleansing towards Palestinians in Gaza.

The concept of colonial settler colonialism sparked some disagreement among the speakers and participants. Nonetheless, overall, the symposium provided an opportunity for individuals to unite, exchange their experiences, and foster discussion and reflection. As coordinators of the symposium, on this matter, Kahlan Alradi and Hanh Nguyen both think that the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement should be one of the main measures to pressure Israel to stop oppressing Palestinians. Israel will be a pariah state since the world has seen its crimes against humanity in Palestine.

In summary, the symposium offered a diverse range of perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict, providing valuable insights into the historical, ethical, political, and personal dimensions of this intricate and enduring issue. Collectively, these perspectives underscored the multifaceted nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, urging a comprehensive and nuanced approach to its analysis and resolution.