SBS Department Hosts Lecture on the Palestine Issue

Professor Ilan Halevi

In his lecture entitled "Local, Regional, and Global Politics on the Palestine Issue," political writer and researcher Ilan Halevi slammed Israel's relentless hegemony over Palestine, bemoaned the ruling party Hamas's lack of sovereignty, and anchored the July 2006 war on Lebanon within the global politics of Israel.

Halevi opened his lecture with the much bandied expression, "statistics of horror," explicating Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians. To compensate for the expropriation of civilians from their houses, ethnic cleansing through bigoted administrative measures, indiscriminant destruction of private property, and the much-hated construction of the apartheid wall, Israel allowed Palestinians to elect a new government in 2006. Halevi pointed the irony of electing "an ostensibly democratic government under occupation" and then crippling its ruling potential by abducting half its members so that the Hamas government itself became "an opposition movement." He also spoke of the intense conflict on the internal level among Hamas officials and their competitors in the Fateh party. He said that future clashes between these groups seem inevitable, mainly because of the politicians' short-sighted refusal to "share a virtual power that is non-existent."

On the regional level, Halevi described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as a "metastases of the Palestinian situation," adding that Israel's years of waging war against stone-throwing Palestinian minors have weakened its military wit and vision. Halevi concluded that, on the global level, many regional and international fiascos can be attributed to America's unshakable support of Israel's unilateral philosophy of "making peace with itself" while successfully excluding and demonizing its enemies.

Halevi's heavily attended lecture was hosted by the Social and Behavioral Science (SBS) Department and held on October 25 in West Hall. A prolific and widely read writer, Halevi revealed intricate and comprehensive knowledge of Palestinian political and power dynamics. He was an advisor to the Palestinian delegation in the Madrid and Washington peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993 and a member of the Palestinian delegation in the Multilateral Working Group on Refugees from 1992 to 1996. Halevi's most recent book, Face a la guerre, Allers-Retours (Facing the War: Departures-Returns), was published in France in 2005.