The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been oversimplified in mainstream media and scholarship as an intractable bloody confrontation fueled by religious hatred.
An event presented by Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies will take a look at the complex key issues in the conflict, and map alternative scenarios that could lead to a just and lasting peace.
“Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Israeli-Palestine Conflict: Identities, Struggles, and Representations,” featuring scholars from San Francisco State University and the State University of New York Plattsburgh, will take place on Tuesday, April 18, at 6 p.m. in the university’s College of Education building, room CE-105. The event is free and open to the public; parking is $6 at CSUSB.
“We decided to invite a Palestinian American professor and an Israeli American professor to discuss a topic that is usually framed as one-dimensional to shed light on the complexity of other factors integrated in this conflict such as race, gender, and sexuality,” said Ahlam Muhtaseb, interim director of the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and CSUSB professor of communication studies.
Guest speakers Rabab Abuldhadi, associate professor of ethnic studies/race and resistance studies at San Francisco State, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh, will examine critically the relationships between militarism, sexism, racism, and homophobia as well as between political violence and gender-based violence.
And while a pathway to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be the primary focus of the program, it may also provide insights on how conflict transformation could be extended to other conflicts, whether territorial or social.
Abdulhadi is an expert on the Middle East, and includes among her expertise Arab and Muslim communities transnationally, race and ethnic relations, gender and sexuality and feminist movements (in general and in global south in particular). She is also very involved in the new Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative minor program at SFSU, and is a Senior Scholar in Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies.
She co-edited “Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging,” which won the 2012 Arab American Book Award, non-fiction category. The book is a collection of contributions from poets, creative writers, artists, academics and activists.
Sharoni is an internationally known feminist scholar, researcher and activist. She is the author of “Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance, (Syracuse University Press, 1995).”
She has conducted field research and written extensively on gender dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the North of Ireland. Militarization and de-militarization and the relationship between violence against women and the violence of war have been among her primary topics of interest. She is currently working on a project on feminist critical pedagogy and a book on men and masculinity in the age of empire.
The April 18 program is sponsored by CIMES, the University Diversity Committee, CSUSB Intellectual Life, The Mediterranean Studies Academy, the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies, the Department of Communication Studies, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Doctoral Studies Program and the Ethnic Studies Program.
For more information please contact Professor Ahlam Muhtaseb, interim director of the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, at amuhtase@csusb.edu.