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Sydney Peace Prize Lecture: 2003#4

In the light of this one sided account I want to return to pick up the thread in this post and continue with Hanan Ashrwai's 2003 Sydney Peace Lecture. The lecture was entitled, 'Peace in the Middle East: A Global Challenge and a Human Imperative'.

In it Hanan makes two remarks that are often overlooked in debates in Australia about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The first point is the importance of self-determinaton:

"Self determination to the Palestinian people is not an abstraction, but the actual realization and enactment of their identity on their own land, and a motivating force for independence and statehood. It is the final negation of the myth of a “land without a people for a people without a land” that has long framed the rationalization for the most extreme forms of Zionism that sought to deny the very existence and humanity of the Palestinians."

That kind of insight is rarely heard in Australia now that the key discourse is terrorism. Barry Cohen in the above linked article makes no reference to it in his article, which is structured around reason versus prejudice.

The second point that Hanan talks about is what the Palestinans and Israeli's have in common:

"Neither side can lay claim to a monopoly of pain and suffering, in the same way as it cannot claim exclusivity of narrative and legitimacy. Clearly, peace cannot be made incumbent upon converting all Palestinians to Zionism or transforming all Israelis to espouse Palestinian nationalism."

She then goes on to observe:

"It should also become apparent that, ironically, in this context the Palestinians and Israelis have reached the stage of dependent legitimacies rather than a competition over a singular and mutually exclusive legitimacy. Since the essential requirement for peace lies in sharing the land of historical Palestine, it follows that there has to be a shared legitimacy based on parity and mutuality. Neither side can (or should be allowed to) destroy the other physically, morally, or legally."

And she highlights another commonality:

"......there can be no exclusivity of claims—whether to the land or to security or to the discourse and public presentation of the issues. Shared boundaries exist both as territorial and as moral/human concepts of proximity and interaction. Security, therefore, is a factor of mutuality and interdependence...."

So what Hanan is doing is using the idea of peace in a world of violence to open up some middle ground. It is a thinking otherwise or differently that involves a critique of fundamentalism, power politics and coercion.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 25, 2004 03:28 PM | TrackBack