First, we had to understand it.

Carlos Saavedra, born in Peru, brought to the US with his parents at age twelve, paid $4000 for his US citizenship after graduating from an American high school in East Boston.

Carlos Saavedra listening to questions from DUO4 participants

The Dream Act is not a gift, it is a pathway for undocumented youth to buy citizenship in the country where they live, learn, and work. Just like Carlos had to work and pay the price for the privilege of US citizenship, so too will every young person who wants to legitimize their existence in America.

The alternative is the laissez-faire creation of a new category of criminal. If The Dream Act fails to pass the Senate (and later the House), DUO4 participant Shelley Wong listed implications:

• children being punished for the decisions of their parents
• adults being blamed for seeking work
• a cycle of forcing youth out of the system, inviting worse societal level problems:
  • health care consequences such as the spread of preventable communicable diseases (such as tuburculosis) because “illegals” can’t get immunized for fear of being caught and deported
  • auto insurance increases because “illegal” drivers involved in accidents are more likely to ‘hit-and-run’ for fear of being named “illegal” and deported
  • violent crimes remaining unresolved because witnesses are afraid to talk with the police for fear of being identified as “illegal” and deported

We agreed that fear is a legitimate basis for concern.  Can the US economy continue to accept new immigrants?  Can American citizens take pride in recognizing and choosing to remain the nation of immigrants as we were at the start?  Factual answers to these questions need to be made widely available. What kind of taxes do undocumented workers currently pay? How many dollars come in to the US economy from these workers? How much more production and consumption could be generated by legalizing these human beings rather than keeping them marginalized on the edge of crime?

Meanwhile, can these young people continue to dream?

Some students have walked 1,500 miles from Miami to DC to demonstrate their belief in the America that DUO conference founder Larry Berlin says he grew up in.  “I was raised to believe that America is doing something more.”

Are Americans still capable of that “more” or has fear succeeded in overwhelming us?

The 13 recommendations:

1) Use lots of metatext (i.e., talk about talk) to explain your linguistic (and political) choices.

2) Be reflexive – show the reader that this narratives comes from someone and is therefore situated and not God’s honest truth.

3) Surrender your unquestioned authority and all-encompassing knowledge: say when something cannot be ascertained, when there’s insufficient proof to make an argument, and so on.

4) Include information about the nature of your historical sources and the process by which their credibility was established.

5) Recognize the constitutive power of language and therefore be careful when using words that label groups of people, events, periods of time, geographical units, etc. Discuss your choices.

6) Recognize the power of language to produce political subjectivities – be careful how you speak of “us” and “them.” Make deliberate use of ambiguous and contradictory identity categories – just as they are in reality.

7) Recognize the power of declarative, unsourced sentences to pass as the unchallenged Truth.

8 ) Do not use language to smooth over ambiguity and paradox.

9) Offer alternative interpretations for historical events and phenomena.

10) Recognize controversies among different schools of historiography and explain their context and roots.

11) Recognize that ideograms like “unity,” “the people,” “nation,” “homeland,” “country,” etc. are linguistic phenomena with powerful ideological, political and emotional effects. Avoid using them uncritically.

12) Avoid presenting processes and events as “just happening” all by themselves (a technique called “agent ellision” through “nomination”).

13) Recognize the metaphoric nature of language, and the rhetorical effects of your choice of metaphors and metonyms (such as presenting a person as the embodiment of a nation).

Jamal Dajani (DUO I: Chicago and DUO II: Abu Dis) is a Palestinian-American political analyst and an award-winning journalist. He produces documentaries and other programming for Link TV and contributes to numerous other media enterprises, including the Huffington Post and Al Jazeera English.

“I call it the scrambled eggs situation: once you’ve scrambled the eggs, you can’t unscramble them,” says Jamal Dajani. He is talking about Israel’s policy of “creating facts on the ground” in the Palestinian territories by erecting a highly contentious separation barrier and by encouraging the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. As a Palestinian-American born in Jerusalem and currently residing in California, Dajani has written and produced hundreds of media programming about the Middle East conflict, and has delivered talks on the subject to many thousands of people all over the world. He has just returned from a trip to Israel/Palestine, where he spent two weeks researching the most recent political developments in the region, including the ongoing expansion of the settlements and the blockade of Gaza. In other words, he went to assess for himself precisely how scrambled those eggs are.

Jamal Dajani, photo from his website

Dajani covered the beginning of the Israeli military incursion into Gaza last year from the vantage point of the Erez Crossing Point, one of three Israeli gateways into the Strip. Last month, he was back at the same spot, this time covering the efforts of a group of Palestinians, Israelis and international activists to protest the continued shutdown of Gaza’s borders. The article he wrote about that experience for the Huffington Post can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/yc7ts39. From Gaza, he left for East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where he documented the story of Palestinian families evicted out of their houses by Israeli authorities “We talked to these two families who had just been kicked out of their house,” Dajani recounts. “The Jerusalem authorities said that the house had belonged to a Jewish trust so that it was illegal for the families to live there. We can’t verify that, but, even if it’s true, those families had moved into that house decades ago after being driven out of their old West Jerusalem houses. Israel is operating with a double-standard here.”

Mindful of America’s weighty involvement in the political games of the region, Dajani is writing for a predominantly American audience. For the time being, however, he is not particularly optimistic about the Obama administration’s willingness and ability to alleviate the conflicts wreaking the Middle East. “They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk,” he says. “Obama’s Cairo speech [delivered on June 4, 2009] resonated with many people in the Middle East. He said he wanted to bridge the gap between the U.S. and the Muslim world. But then he send more troops in Afghanistan! He is losing popularity in America because of the health care and economy issues, but he’s losing popularity in the Arab world because he isn’t doing anything concrete to solve the conflicts.” To read all of Dajani’s dispatches to the Huffington Post, go here: www.huffingtonpost.com/jamal-dajani.

Email: JD @ JamalDajani.com
Personal Website: www.jamaldajani.com
Twitter: jamaldajani

Chaim Noy (DUO II, Abu Dis) is an “interdisciplinary scholar,” currently teaching Communication and Sociology courses at Sapir University in Jerusalem. One of those courses is “Intro to Israeli Society.” “The first part of it is functional and the second part is critical. The students don’t find it very easy to combine the two,” says Noy.

Chaim Noy has recently been asked to serve on the board of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli organization that brings together archeologists, human rights activists and Jerusalem residents. The organization strives to disengage archeology from politics – a particularly difficult endeavor in East Jerusalem, a town that hosts ancient Judaic, Christian and Islamic holy sites. At the present, Emek Shaveh is focusing its efforts on a particularly rich archeological site in the village of Silwan, near East Jerusalem’s Old City. The site, also known as “the City of David,” is being excavated by an Israeli right-wing organization, by permission of Jerusalem’s municipal authorities. Noy and his colleagues argue that this organization is using archeology to prove the historical precedence of Jews in the area – and hence justify Israel’s political dominance of Arab East Jerusalem. Enter Emek Shaveh,

Noy protesting in Sheikh Jarah

“What is nice about Emek Shaveh is that it combines a discourse of archeology with a humanist discourse,” says Noy. “All branches of anthropology have historically had an imperialistic bias, having been developed in Europe and North America. But cultural anthropology, for example, has really done a lot to look into itself and probe into the roots of the discipline. That introspection has been much delayed in archeology. Maybe this is because of all of those heroic images of Indiana Jones and other Western archeologists – who, of course, went to Northern Africa and the Far East and the Levant during the age of imperialism and throughout the two world wars and excavated and stole property. What Emek Shaveh is saying is archeology should not look for the ‘City of David’ itself [which would legitimize the Jewish nationalist claims to the area], but rather for all the different cultures that existed in the past on this site, leading up to the current one: the Palestinian culture.”

One of Noy’s objects of academic research is the discourse surrounding tourism. And in a place like Israel/Palestine, that discourse is inevitably intertwined with some political narrative or another. “I’m currently writing an academic piece about the social actors that are fighting over the tourist consciousness in Silwan,” says Noy. “And you know, we academics, we take things seriously when we write our articles. I’m putting a lot of effort into this, and I hope to publish it soon and bring my contribution in that way.” Another contribution that Noy brings to Emek Shaveh’s activities is joining periodical protests against the evacuation of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. “I was born in Jerusalem, I live in Jerusalem. I feel that I cannot just sign a petition or express my opinion, but that I really should be active,” he says. “The Israelis are the occupiers here and we have a responsibility to protest. The idea is to make noise, to make a fuss. Who knows, maybe Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will hear about it… Or maybe people in Europe – or anyone, really!”

Sidebar
Chaim Noy’s name has recently been included on a so-called “Anti-Zionist list” by an Israeli organization called IsraCampus. Modeled after the American Campus Watch, IsraCampus seeks to identify and denounce what it calls “Israeli Academic ‘Post-Zionist’ extremists in Israel” who speak or write against Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories.

“I don’t take such organizations too seriously,” says Noy. “They would say that all criticism leveled at Israel is anti-Israel and antisemite. Actually, sometimes I think this organization is a good thing – whenever I need to find people in the academia with a political perspective similar to mine, all I have to do is go to this organization’s website and look into their database! But seriously, there are so many fanatics here… I just disregard them completely.”

Website: chaimnoy.com
Blog: http://chaimworkshop.blogspot.com
Emek Shaveh website: www.alt-arch.org
Wadi Hilweh – http://silwanic.net/

Photo caption: Chaim Noy protesting in the neighborhood of Sheik Jarah (January 2010)
Credit: Yonathan Mizrachi

by Amy Hamar

Amy teaches English Composition in Doha, Qatar. She is interested in how holding on to cultural identity can help people remain sane throughout, as well as recover after, conflict situations. Her favorite part of teaching is helping students learn what it means to learn, and what being critical actually means….in other words, critical thinking.

When I was asked to write a small segment of the newsletter, I had no idea what I could, or would, write about. I could write about so many different topics related to dialogue, conflict, language, communication, education, and so forth. In the end, I’ve decided to tell the story of my husband’s grandmother in Palestine who is somewhere between 105-107 years old. She has seen more than most people alive, and has endured more emotional pain than most, especially when her son was accidentally killed by a neighbor at the age of 14. Amazingly, she bears it without the bitterness that usually accompanies catastrophic realities.

She has lived through the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire,

She has seen more than most people alive.

We walked into her room, watching her, wondering what she thinks of this American wife, coming into her room. My mind was flooded with thoughts about measuring up to what they all thought I should be, especially as many were not for our marriage, labeling it a mistake, telling him to just come home and marry a good Palestinian wife. Once our eyes met, however, there was a moment of unspoken kinship between us. I knelt down to kiss her hands and the top of her head, and she started crying, pulling me to her, saying “habibti, ya habibti” (my beloved, oh my beloved). All of the thoughts I had about being inadequate, or not enough for them to accept melted away with the touch of her hand and the sight of her tears. Everyone else was crying and happy to see us, but for some reason, it was her unspoken acceptance that meant the most.

When I look back on sitting with her that first time,

We don't know the origins of these tattoos.

Amy can be reached at amy (dot) hama “at” gmail (dot) com.

This is the inaugural issue of the DUO Newsletter. The conference has been growing exponentially with each new reincarnation, and it was only fitting that the many academics, students and activists associated with it acquire an avenue to keep the dialogue going. This newsletter is an attempt to maintain the lines of communication open between past and future DUO participants, in the hope that the connections forged on the ground, during conference presentations and coffee breaks, can continue on the web and elsewhere.

The newsletter coordinators are past conference participants who have taken a strong linking to DUO due to its demonstrated ability to not only “talk the talk” of “dialogue under occupation,” but also to “walk the walk” by bringing a variety of people together in actual zones of occupation (whether we’re talking about direct physical occupation or occupation by proxy). The last two DUO conferences, held in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem and Bogotá, Colombia, proved the organizers’ commitment to break with the tradition of ethnocentric, navel-gazing, Marriott-hosted conferences that many of us are so familiar with. The fascinating presentations and countless conversations that DUO has repeatedly featured clearly required an online forum where they could be pondered further, elaborated on, challenged and otherwise engaged. Together with an upcoming DUO blog, this newsletter strives to be that kind of a forum.

Each issue will carry a handful of texts written by, or in collaboration with, past and future DUO participants. Some articles will consist of updates about the professional activities of DUO members, while others will deal with issues deemed by the authors to be relevant to DUO’s mission statement. Anyone with an interest in the work carried out by DUO is welcome to contribute a story or an idea. It is our hope that the continued dialogue – in this venue and others – will contribute to the creation of a genuine “DUO community” whose future initiatives we can now only guess at with great anticipation.

Welcome, once again, to DUO. We would love to see you at DUO IV, to be held in Washington D.C. between June 1 – 4, 2010.

Razvan Sibii

DUO’s new permanent website, hosted by DUO founder Dr Lawrence Berlin of Northeastern Illinois University, can be located at www.dialogueunderoccupation.org.  The fourth conference will be hosted this June by the Peacebuilding & Development Institute at American University in Washington, DC, USA (see  the Call For Papers, due 1 February 2010).

Coming soon: a newsletter co-edited by Razvan Sibii and Anna Rita Napoleone. Sibii presented “The Romanian Carnival: A Discourse of Resistance without the Evil Other” at the second DUO conference in East Jerusalem, and co-presented with Napoleone on “Dialogue about Occupation: an ideological analysis of DUO II discourse” at the third DUO conference in Bogota.

Steph Kent (who is moderating this blog) presented “Decentering Conflictual Discourse” on behalf of  a team including Ehya Amalsaleh, Jussi Lassila, and Karin Hansson at the first DUO conference in Chicago, and “Engaging Dialogue Under Occupation: Transforming Discourse into Dialogue” at the second DUO conference in East Jerusalem. She participated in the design of the presentation by Sibii & Napoleone at DUO3 in Bogota.