Palestine in Perspective : A Hundred Years of Unfulfilment
Organisé par Café Palestine
jeudi 2 février à 19:00 — 21:00
La Fleur en Papier Doré
Rue des Alexiens 55, 1000 Bruxelles
Cafe Palestine is back for its first event in 2017 !
This year is of strong symbolic value for Palestine : it marks the 100th year of the Balfour Declaration, the 70th year of the UN partition plan, and the 50th year of the occupation. Much has happened during the past 100 years in Palestine, and, despite the continuous and relentless efforts that have been put forward by the Palestinian people to achieve justice by the means of international law, the latter has proved ineffective and unable to provide Palestinians with even the basic rights they were and are entitled to. International law, together with international politics, has ultimately created a situation wherein Palestinians are stuck between what is legally feasible and what is fair and just. As the determination on how Palestine should have been sliced up was left to the British imperial power, we need to go back to the Balfour Declaration, in order to disentangle the inextricably linked issues that have led to the current situation.
To discuss the challenges of 2017, we are welcoming Azar Dakwar from the Brussels School of International Studies. He will give us a fascinating talk on the gap that has been existing since 1917 between what is legally possible and what is politically just for Palestine and the Palestinian people. The presentation will be followed by a discussion. The Café Palestine team is looking forward to welcoming you at La Fleur en Papier Doré / Het Goudblommeke in Papier on Thursday, 2nd of February at 19:00.
**More about Azar’s talk**
In this talk, Azar will tell the story of the ongoing construction of “Palestine” (as territorialized legal-political entity) and the “Palestinian people” through the mismatch between the international legal discourse and resolutions and the actual and imperative political-normative representations, as they have been shaped and punctuated by key junctures of international politics and legality (i.e., 1917, 1947, 1967, 1974, 1993, 2012). As such, he will argue that the past hundred years of the conflict have been plagued by significant, if not unbridgeable, gap between the legal status of Palestine and its political actuality in terms of the aspirations of the Palestinian people — a gap between what is legally available and what is politically desirable and/or just. This gap, he contends, has progressively interlocked Palestinian politics between tragically unfavourable balance of powers and persisting sense of and pursuit for justice. By the way of conclusion, he will offer a provisional conceptual scheme that shall help us to think a way out of the legal-political entrapment that the world powers have orchestrated for Palestine and the Palestinian people since the Balfour declaration.
**About Azar Dakwar**
Azar Dakwar started his PhD in Political and Social Thought in September 2016 at the Brussels School of International Studies. He holds a BSc (Hons.) in cognitive sciences from the Hebrew University and his a Master degree in Public Policy (with a thesis in political sociology) from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
For the past five years, he has worked as a research and editing assistant to social scientists and political theorists and was a teaching assistant (in strategic thinking and public policy) and then a lecturer (of public policy) at Birzeit University. Also, he worked for about 3 years, in various capacities and positions, for Sikkuy — The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality. In addition, Azar has been an international fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna since 2014, and was awarded its Fellowship Grant in 2015 (March-September).
Azar takes academic interest in the nexus of critical social and political philosophy and political theology and anthropology of secularism.
Some of his publications can be read at : https://kent.academia.edu/AzarDakwar.
The events at “Het Goudblommeke in Papier” are organized with the support of vzw Geert van Bruaene.