This is the latest panel from the International Manifesto Group. The panel will take place Sunday, November 14 @ 9:00 AM EST.
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About this event
In the late 1970s Edward Said wrote that the defining characteristic distinguishing the Palestinian experience from that of the rest of the Arab world was “its traumatic national encounter with Zionism”, launched by the arrival of the first wave of Zionists to Palestine in the 1880s. Close to 150 years later this experience is alive and well: the settler colonial ethnocratic state of Israel controls all of historic Palestine. This control is sustained politically, economically, and militarily by all leaders of the capitalist West, their allies, and a “peace process” designed to indefinitely normalize and prolong what the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has dubbed “an apartheid regime”.
Can historic Palestine ever harbour a true democratic state? What would that state look like? Can those who desire a better world support this goal and what would this support look like? This panel explores these and related questions drawing from the perspectives of selected figures with decades long, joint, collective experience in the struggle for a democratic state in Palestine.
Speakers
Munir Nuseibah is a human rights lawyer and academic based in Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Palestine. He is an assistant professor at Al-Quds University’s faculty of law; the director (and co-founder) of Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic, the first accredited clinical legal education program in the Arab World; and the director of the Community Action Center in Jerusalem. He holds an LL.M in International Legal Studies from the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington DC and a PhD degree from the University of Westminster in London, UK, where his thesis dealt with Forced Displacement in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, International Law, and Transitional Justice.
Jonathan Kuttab is Executive Director of Friends of Sabeel North America, co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and co-founder of Nonviolence International. A well-known international human rights attorney, Jonathan practices law in the US, Palestine, and Israel, serves on the Board of Bethlehem Bible College, and is co-founder and board member of the Just Peace Advocates. He was the head of the Legal Committee negotiating the Cairo Agreement of 1994 between Israel and the PLO.
Lamis Deek is an internationally practicing attorney who engages in litigation, compliance and policy work related to human rights, corruption, commercial and charitable activity.
Based in NY, Lamis has litigated and crafted policies to protect against anti-Muslim/Arab and anti-Palestinian state/institutional practices in the US and abroad. She also advises on and has litigated invalid manufactured terrorism cases, attempted shutdowns of mosques. Lamis collaborates with several national and international legal groups and is the Co-Convenor of the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation.
Miko Peled is a writer and human rights activist born and raised in Jerusalem. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, (BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights on all of historic Palestine. Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative he has written a book about his journey called “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” In the forward to the book, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker writes: “There are few books on the Palestine/Israel issue that seem as hopeful to me as this one.” In 2018 Peled published a second book, “Injustice, The Story of The Holy Land Foundation Five.” The book describes the persecution and the closure of what was America’s largest Muslim charity organization, The Holy Land Foundation, and the subsequent trials and convictions of five innocent Palestinian Muslim-Americans. Pulitzer Prize journalist Chris Hedges wrote: “Miko Peled shines a light on one of the most egregious cases of injustice committed to date against Muslim leaders in the United States.” 10/27/2021Miko is a regular contributor to MintPress News, a podcast that can be found on patreon.com/mikopeled and youtube channel.
Jeff Halper is the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the One Democratic State Campaign. He is the author of ‘War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification’, ‘An Israeli in Palestine’, and ‘Obstacles to Peace’. In his latest book ‘Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State’, published by Pluto Press, argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community, through the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion.
Moderator – Claudia Chaufan has a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a doctorate in Sociology with a Notation in Philosophy from the University of California. She is Associate Professor of Health Policy and Global Health, Special Advisor in Curriculum Internationalization to the Dean of the Faculty of Health at York University in Canada and has a long career of national and international teaching, writing and activism.
Sponsor – The International Manifesto Group began discussing the evolving geopolitical economy of the world order at the beginning of the pandemic. It has members across and around the world, from the Americas to China. It meets fortnightly and many of its meetings are public panels and presentations, announced at this webpage.
