 Okay, I think that we can start. Welcome everybody to this Tuesday lecture in the program of Tuesday lectures of the SOAS Middle East Institute. We are also joined by the two directors of the institute where probably you can see their names on the screen. And we are very glad to introduce this evening, this talk, very special one and given the record number of people who registered for it, that's a major event in the series, very obviously. We have the privilege of welcoming this evening, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, who as you probably know, you surely know, I think he doesn't really need to be introduced, but well, he's a professor of government and of anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies, M-E-S-A-S at Columbia University, that's beating us so SOAS, so there it's more, even more detailed. And he's also the director of the Macaree, sorry, Institute of Social Research in Kampala. We are lucky to have Mahmood Mamdani this evening to present his latest book, neither Settler nor Nativ, The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, which is a very stimulating book and which I recommend to everyone who is here with us. Very interesting book, very interesting read, as I'm sure you will understand if you haven't read the book yet through the presentation of this evening. And without further, any further delay, I give the floor, I mean, usually I would have expected the applause for our guest, but only thing we can do on Zoom is just to invite him to speak. So Mahmood, please, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Gilbert. Thank you to all those who are on Zoom attending and those on Facebook or other media. Let me begin by talking about the book. This is a book about the nation state and about post-colonial modernity. The nation state was born in Iberia in 1492. The cleansing of the nation, quote, one country, one people, one religion, set fire to relations between majority and minorities within the same state. It set in motion processes of ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews. The liberal solution was the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Two key concepts of the modern state were born at Westphalia, religious toleration at home and the reciprocal guarantee of sovereignty abroad. The liberal solution was put forward in John Locke's treatise and tolerance. Catholics can be tolerated if they renounce any political support of the Pope or of any power outside England. Locke formulated the key tenets of the liberal theory of the nation state. Only the majority has sovereignty. The minority must not participate in sovereignty. The liberal notion of the nation state turned majority and minority into permanent political identities. This was the original sin. This book explores the export of the notion of different kinds of citizens, sovereign and non-sovereign, from the US to South Africa and Nazi Germany and finally to Israel. This is a book about the United States as a founding experience in modern colonialism and about the reservation, the Indian reservation as the site where core institutions of modern colonialism were forged. It's also a book about extreme violence as a consequence of modern nation state building in the post-colonies. Should we think of extreme violence as the consequence of a criminal project, the criminal model popularized by Nuremberg or as a political project, a notion born of the transition from apartheid in South Africa? What can we learn from the failure of denazification and the relative success of post-apartheid South Africa? Finally, the book asks, what is transportable in the South African experience? What does South Africa have to teach us? To answer this question, the last chapter takes a fresh look. I look through South African lenses at Israel-Palestine, the most intractable contemporary political problem in today's world. In this talk today, I'd like to comment on four issues. First, for a start, since I am speaking from New York City, two different ways of modern subjugation, colonial conquest and racial domination. Second, the difference between an immigrant and a settler. Third, what it means to think of political identity as historical, born of a particular form of the state as opposed to as natural, permanent and trans-historical. And finally, the need to decouple the nation in the state as we seek an alternative to the nation state. I'll begin with the US, American Indians and African Americans. What's in the name? How should we call the pre-Columbian resident communities of the Americas as Indians or as natives? Indian is the name Columbus gave peoples of the New World. Native is a description that the US government and the people they colonized do not accept. The museum dedicated to the pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas is called the National Museum of the American Indian. What difference would it make if the National Museum of the American Indian is called the National Museum of the Native America? Why is it that the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the US did not apply to Indians in reservations so that a separate Indian Civil Rights Act had to be passed in 1968? But the two acts are not the same. The 1964 act is constitutionally binding, whereas the 1968 Indian Act is only advisory. Reservation Indians are not and have never been rights-bearing citizens of the United States in a constitutional sense. There were no reservations before the United States. The reservation was the creation of the United States. The reservation is a separate polity, separate from the United States. The Europeans who came to America were not immigrants. They were settlers. What is the difference? Immigrants come to join existing polities, whether they seek equality or advantage in it. Settlers come to displace existing polities and to establish their own exclusive sovereignty. Indian reservations are not part of the sovereign state we call the United States. In the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in 19th century, reservations are domestic dependent colonies. Politically the term Indian tribal sovereignty masks colonial domination. Reservation Indians are legally wards of Congress. Reservation authorities are overseen by a vast federal bureaucracy known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is no different from the colonial bureaucracy that governed any indirect rule colony in Africa. The Indian reservation was part of a two-state solution. The two-state solution, a sovereign state alongside a non-sovereign protectorate, was Lincoln's contribution to the second half of in the second half of the 19th century. It claimed to provide a permanent solution for Indians who had survived the genocide. America also originated the notion of differentiated citizenship with only some participating in sovereignty. Until 1921 Indians were nationals but not citizens. After that Indians had to be naturalized as citizens. They had first to be purged as members of the Indian polities before they could be naturalized as U.S. citizens. Colonized Indians and African slaves, two different minority solutions with radically different consequences. Reservation Indians have a different relationship to the U.S. from that of African Americans. One is based on colonial conquest, the other on racial domination. Racial and colonial domination are not the same even if racial discrimination is common to both. Economically the American Indian symbolized land which has been stolen. The American slave embodied captive and coarse labor. Politically Indians were governed in a protectorate as part of a two-state solution. African slaves were racially segregated within a one-state polity. The one-state solution provided a political frame for the development of the struggle against Jim Crow and racial domination. Even if it has been preceded by fits and start, sometimes even receded. The one-state framework has made possible the development of alliances. The two-state solution explains the continued isolation and colonial subjugation of the reservation Indians. The American model was exported to a number of places. Among these South Africa, Germany and Israel. I'll begin with South Africa. South African settlers attained state independence in 1910. A delegation visited North America, USA and Canada two years later to study how Indians were governed. Three key elements of governance were imported to South Africa. Homeland, traditional authority and customary law. Every tribe must be territorially contained in a homeland even if only a remnant of the lands occupied by the people was designed designated as their homeland. Every homeland must be administered by a homeland authority sanctioned as traditional and thus not subject to being elected. This traditional authority must enforce a customary law on the homeland with one proviso that custom be excised of all practices or notions that settlers considered repugnant to civilization. I will discuss the lessons of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa after a discussion of Germany and Israel. South Africa was not the only one that learned from the U.S. so did Nazi Germany and Hitler. Hitler learned much. He learned first that genocide is doable and therefore thinkable and then he learned that there can be a second and a third class citizenship as of African Americans, Indian citizens after 1921, Puerto Ricans later. Part of the German preparation for drafting Nuremberg laws was the study of American citizenship laws, a learning process documented by James Q Whitman of Yale in his book, Hitler's American Model. Nazism was a striving for a purified nation state, one that would go beyond distinguishing between a national majority and a national minorities but also expunge the nation of its minorities so as to purify it. Denazification after World War II failed because the allies shut their eyes to the political project that inspired and propelled Nazism. There was an American debate on Nazism after the Second World War. Was Germany liberated or occupied? Was Nazism a state project or a social project? Who should be held responsible for Nazism, the nation or the state? Nazi leaders or the German people? The American consensus was that responsibility for Nazism lay with the German people. At Nuremberg and after millions were considered criminally culpable yet Nazism was never probed as a political project. A similar debate unfolded in Germany, particularly among German left intellectuals, the most prominent being Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse. Their answer, Nazism was neither just a national project nor just a state project, but a project of the nation state, a project of both the Nazi state and the folk nation to eradicate the state territory of national minorities, Jews, Roma, and others. Nazism was above all a political project. Denazification would thus require allies to support internal anti-fascists, but Americans were unwilling to do so. Only the Soviets were willing in the East but only temporarily, not after the Berlin uprising. Unlike the criminal model, which understands violence as the result of anti-social acts of individual perpetrators, I focus on extreme violence as an outcome of group mobilization against disenfranchised minorities or majorities in the nation state. Rather than individualized violence as a standalone act, I point to cycles of violence sustained by groups mobilized as so many constituencies. Rather than catalog atrocities, so as to name shame and punish its perpetrators, I seek to modify the issues around which constituencies are mobilized. Rather than exclude perpetrators from the political process, I seek to include them along with all survivors, victims, perpetrators, beneficiaries, bystanders. I use the term survivor not as the Zionists use them or the post Holocaust survivors did, nor as the term is used in Rwanda. I use the term survivor to refer to all those who survived extreme violence, not just victim to survive, but all who survived the catastrophe. Let me turn to Israel. Are Jewish people in Israel settlers or immigrants? The Jewish population of Mandate Palestine belonged to three groups. First there were those who had never left. They were part of the natives of Palestine. Then there were those who returned on a pilgrimage seeking a religious homeland. They were content to be part of the existing polity. This was the first Aliyah of immigrants. And then there were those who wanted their own exclusive polity, a Jewish nation state in place of the existing polity. They came in the second and the third Aliyah. These were the settlers. The Zionists striving for a nation state cannot be understood unless we also grasp the lesson they drew from Germany. Victims of the nation state project in Germany and in Europe, Zionists decided to set up a nation state in Editz Israel. The first Zionist project was to reduce the Palestinians from a majority to a minority. This was the Nakba. And then to demonize the minority as a demographic threat so as to further cut down its numbers. In other words, the Nakba continues. Palestinians inside Israel cannot participate in sovereignty. They have rights, even political rights including the right to vote, but they cannot participate in power. The clarity of this vision is the transfer from Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to Israel as a Jewish state. The debate on one state versus two state solution means the following. One state solution would be akin to direct racial domination. The two state solution would lead to indirect colonialism under Zionist rule through creating a protectorate. In American terms, these alternatives are represented by the African slave and the colonized Indian. For a third alternative, we have to look at the South African transition from apartheid. In South Africa, the real transition, the politics that led us to 1994, took place in the 1970s. Prior to 1970, anti-apartheid politics reproduced the architecture of apartheid. Each racial group organized itself as defined by apartheid power separately. Africans organized as African National Congress, Indians as Indian Congress of Natal, colors that colored people's Congress, and whites since they could not organize as Congress of whites. They organized as Congress of Democrats. apartheid's ideological hold on the oppressed population was broken in the 1970s. The key initiative came from the student movement, white and black. Black students under BIKO left the liberal white student organization and formed their own separate body, organized township dwellers starting with Soweto. Radical white students left in the wilderness turned to organizing hostile workers on the fringes of townships. The turning point in anti-apartheid politics was not the armed struggle, but the strikes that began in Durban in 1973 and the uprising in Soweto in 1976. Behind this was a change of a changing mindset known first as black consciousness. BIKO said black is not a color. If you're oppressed, you are black. Black consciousness could have led to other outcomes. It could have led to a nation state consciousness claiming that South Africa is a black nation, thus essentializing black as a natural identity. Instead, it led to an epistemological awakening that political identity is historical, not natural. Africaners made a journey from being junior partners of Swedish colonialism to becoming a part of the anti-apartheid coalition. In 1994, Africaners divided with a minority asking for a homeland where Africaners could have their own state. The South African moment was born in the 1780s through a series of transformations. One was a transformation from opposition to apartheid to offering an alternative to apartheid. Second was a transition from a state of the majority from calling for a state of the majority, the national majority, the black majority, to calling for a state of all the oppressed. And finally was the transition from opposition to whites to opposition to white power. 1994 was the birth of a new political community, a community of survivors. People are aware that there was no social justice in 1994. What happened in 1994 was the birth of a new political community, one that provides political equality as the basis for a struggle for social equality. I argue that political decolonization and with it epistemological decolonization has to come before economic decolonization. I return to Israel-Palestine. At the core of political Zionism is the effort to build not just the Jewish religious community in the Holy Land but a Jewish state. This is an essential distinction whose erasure gets to the heart of the matter. The conflation of society with state is the foundation of the nation's state and its program of rule by the permanent national majority. The nation state may call itself a democracy as Israel does but the majority is not actually determined through political process, through political contestation. Rather the majority is defined pre-political as it is the nation itself. So if the nation is the majority then who is a member of the nation? Who is a Jew? The most fundamental of Israel's unanswered questions is who is a Jew? If Israel is to be a state for Jews only it must answer the question of who is a Jew. Its answer cannot avoid flattening the diversity of world Jewry into the Jewry sanctioned by the state. At the legal level the question has bedeviled Israeli authorities since the law of return was passed in 1950. Is a Jew defined by religion or ethnicity? Are Jews members of a religious community or are they a nationality? Or both? As a result the state of Israel now has two legal definitions of who is a Jew. The narrow definition provided by the halakah Jewish religious law which Israeli law enforces in the sphere of personal affairs and the broad definition of the amended law of return. As the political at the political and social level Judaization eliminates unacceptable forms of Jewishness. The acceptable form is associated with Ashkenazim who traced their lineage to Yiddish speaking parts of Europe. Ashkenazim were the founders of the state who embraced the role of civilizers committed to bringing other Jews into line with the national ideal. In particular Ashkenazim have sought to civilize Mizrahim Arab Jews. The Mizrahim are the Arab Jews. They present special challenge to Zionism for Zionism presumes that Arab and Jewish identity are both incompatible and indelibly hostile towards one another. Otherwise there would be no need of a Jewish state in historic Palestine. In the Zionist worldview Palestinians are Canomites who never left home. They are squatters not natives. With the return of the native the squatter must get out of the way to make room. The Palestinian resistance led to multiple shifts in the Palestinian liberation movement. From an early focus on armed struggle the first and second intifadas and subsequent Palestinian mobilization in Israel in the occupied territories has moved to a demand for political change. The goal has been to undo the Jewish state and replace it with a quote state of all its citizens. To fragment their ranks Israel has fractured Palestinians into three disconnected groups. Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied territories and Palestinian refugees. The development of a Palestinian consciousness straddling these three groups has been an outcome of a protracted process whose focus and center of gravity have shifted radically over time. From exile to home and from an all out or nothing demand for Israel's disintegration to a demand for involvement in the Israeli political process. Organizationally this has involved a three-fold transition. At first displaced Palestinians looked for looked to Arab frontline states to be their protectors and liberators. After these Arab states were defeated in 1967 Palestinians turned to the nascent and exile led PLO an armed resistance movement. After Israel crushed the PLO in 1982 Lebanon war Palestinians finally looked inward. The first intifada in the late 1980s solidified the internalization of Palestinian leadership and reflected a definitive rejection of the failed armed resistance or the external leadership that the external leadership like to talk about. The second intifada beginning in 2000 brought together Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories under a single movement. Both intifadas responded to the failings of the official Palestinian liberation movement under the aegis of the PLO. The second in particular reflected frustration over the PLO's capitulation to Zionism at the Oslo course of 1993 and the onward rush of settlement that followed it. In 1982 Israel went to war in Lebanon the purpose of which was in fact total war against the Palestinian. The Lebanon war was the brainchild of Ariel Sharon then the defense minister. The IDF deployed well over 120,000 troops for over 10 weeks. It was the country's largest mobilization since the 1973 war. This is according to Rashid Khalidi. Out of a world the PLO withdrew its trueness but while the PLO was defeated Sharon's strategic objective remained unrealized. Instead the war intended to suppress Palestinian nationalism only stopped it further with the exiled armed resistance smashed. The moment was ripe for political mobilization at home. Arafat made two crucial compromises at Oslo first he tacitly accepted settlement in the West Bank. Second he explicitly accepted Israel's stranglehold over the economy and sovereignty of the occupied territories. Even going so far as to agree that this stranglehold would persist in a future Palestinian state. The success of the second intifada led to mobilization under Balad National Democratic Alliance. A political party led at the time of the second intifada by Azmi Bishara a Palestinian member of the Knesset. The demand that Israel be a state of all its citizens was central to Balad's platform in the 1996 elections. On May 21, 2001 Bishara proposed a new basic law aimed at achieving this. The stated purpose of the bill entitled basic law Arab minority as a national minority was to enshrine in law the status of the Arab minority in Israel as a national minority enlightened and titled to collective rights and complete civil equality. In the months that followed Bishara presented another bill countering the false claim that Israel is a democratic state. It did so by asking the Knesset to rewrite that assertion in its basic law and instead affirm that Israel is a state of all its citizens. Whereas Bishara's first bill sought equal rights for the national minority. Now he was asking the Knesset explicitly to negate the existence of the national minority by also negating that of the national majority. By rejecting the idea that Israel is a nation state a state of the Jewish people the national majority. Over the past decade Palestinian politics have moved from an engagement predominantly internal to one predominantly external. The internal engagement called for a state of all its citizens as a counter to the Zionist project for a Jewish state. The external engagement takes the form of an international boycott of Israeli state and society under BDS. To the extent that BDS calls for the desinization of the state of Israel there is reason to give it enthusiastic support. But BDS also needs to learn from the experience of the South African case that of divestment and boycott which it claims to build on. As a participant in the anti-apartheid boycott I came to realize that its key mistake was to collapse state regime and society into a seamless whole. What I came to understand was that indiscriminate boycotts do not work. The strategy of isolating the state internationally must be aligned with a domestic strategy to isolate the pro-state forces in civil society while backing those that would dismantle it. In other words to differentiate between Zionist and non-Zionist not just anti-Zionist elements in Jewish society. On a broader level we including Palestinians and anti-Zionist Israelis need to draw two lessons from the South African struggle. As in South Africa in Israel too this means overcoming two categories of divisions. The first is the division among victims of the nation state. In South Africa the population was divided among township dwellers and Bantustan residents. A barrier overcome by migrant laborers with the aid of radical white student organizers. The victimized population was also divided racially and tribally. The racial barrier was overcome by black consciousness movement while the tribal barrier has yet to be overcome. Among the Palestinians there is a tripartite division of victims. Those living in the diaspora the occupied territories in Israel proper. Each of these groups has been further differentiated. The diaspora includes those in the refugee camps and those beyond. Residents of the occupied territories are split between the West Bank and Gaza and colonized citizens of Israel include Arabs, Druze and Bedouin. Each microgroup is subject to different political regime designed to produce a different specific subjectivity. The second phase in South Africa led to winning over a sizable number of apartheid supporters. That will be harder in Israel. That said we cannot forget the ground shifted from under the apartheid state where Africaners who provided most of the foot soldiers for apartheid's machinery of repression opened up to an alternative to the apartheid order. The lesson is that no political identity is permanent. But whereas BDS can contribute to Israel's international isolation something else is needed if a non-Zionist alternative is to bloom in Israel itself. Like in South Africa that something else is an epistemic revolution that will open the way to a political one. Phase two of the Palestinian moment will come when it is not just the oppressed who seek political change but also many of the supporters of oppression today. Getting there will require a new kind of political consciousness within Israel. A consciousness based on the recognition that the flourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require political Zionism. Apartheid fell because of a confluence of two developments. The better known of these is the anti-apartheid uprising in the townships. The anti-apartheid struggle brought diverse groups under a single umbrella. The result was not a victory but a deadlock. A deadlock. Why did the national party choose to go to the negotiating table? Because it said began to lose the support of most sections of the war intelligentsia. And thus they could read the writing on the wall. This intelligentsia was convinced that whites did not need to monopolize political power to have a home in South Africa. It is this lesson that needs to be driven home to Israelis as many as possible. That Jews do not need to have a Jewish state to have a secure home in Israel-Palestine. Thank you. Thank you very much Mahmoud for this very interesting talk. And actually we have only a few questions until now which is something I wasn't expecting. I was expecting much more. I presume they will come later. But this gives me the opportunity to act for a few minutes as a discussant and put a few questions to you. My first question is, I mean in your book you basically praise very much the South African model of transition. The truth and reconciliation process and the rest that that is presented or becomes in your book and even here in your talk the let's say the positive example even though you recognize limitations to the process that happened. But my first question to you is, well are these just footnotes or marginal limitations or are they much more than that? In the sense that the South African experience has got rid of apartheid in the right sense, in the formal right sense, in the political sense. But social economic apartheid is very present. I mean anyone visiting South Africa can see it. I mean it's very extremely visible. And isn't that a major failure of the South African process pointing to a strong limitation? And my second question observation is related to the parallel or between that you draw between South Africa and Israel-Palestine. Of course this is something that has been going on the comparison and the use for instance of the notion of apartheid for Israel-Palestine is a result of this very old comparison which goes back to the early stages actually of after the foundation of the state of Israel. But I mean there are major differences between the two cases as you know. And these differences have major implications which are very, which put limitations, limits to the validity of the comparison in my view. The one first major difference is that the South African case was not based on the expulsion of the original population, but on the subjugation of the original population. And that's a huge difference that which leads in the Palestinian case to what you note in your book, that you have a people in three, one could say even more, say even four now with the Gaza and West Bank distinction, but you have the Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state. You have those who are under the facto occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and you have the diaspora, the refugees especially in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria and beyond. And this creates a much more complex issue where for instance you can't dismiss the struggle before 82 as being external because that's also aged by Palestinians, by Palestinian refugees. You can say the center of gravity shifted from one part of the Palestinian population to another part of the Palestinian population. That's a different story, but that remains a Palestinian struggle and that's an important issue. And the second major difference is the demographic balance is not at all the same. The white population, the white settler population in South Africa was a small minority, which is not the case of the Jewish Israeli population on the territory, even if you take the 48 territory of Palestine. And that again creates a much more complex issue to which you can add the fact that you have different cultures, languages and all that even at the level of official. English is the language of the South African state, I mean in the state when it comes to Israel-Palestine you can also already see the problem. And the final remark about that is taking the South African example as a model to criticize the BDS on the Palestinian issue, I think also has its limitations because what does it mean to make a distinction between pro-state and anti-state Israeli institutions and Israeli companies? I mean when it comes to investment, the movement is against investment, against projects, anything that can be seen as contributing to the to upholding economically a settler colonial state which functions as such. How do you want the movement to make distinctions? I mean we make distinctions when it comes to the academic, as you know, I presume, the academic boycott which is part of BDS. And we make distinction between the institutions and the individuals. And so the boycott is not about individually, individual Israelis, it's about institutions, it's about whatever constitutes the economy and the political body of a state that is in its essence a settler colonial state. So these are just a few comments I don't want to abuse of my position as chair but I'm acting here as a kind of discussant and I will offer you to reply first before moving to the questions of the participant which have increased as expected. Thank you, thank you so much. I think these are wonderful questions and I think they get to the heart of the argument in the book. Do I offer the South African model as a transition and do I have the notion of a South African model which is non-contradictory? No. The South African model has inside it two very different roads. I do not offer the TRC as part of the model. The TRC actually was based on the Nuremberg model. The TRC was about acknowledging crimes but forgoing punishment and I have a very sharp critique of the TRC in the book. I contrast the TRC to Codesa, the negotiations, the political process, the negotiations that took place. And I argue that the political process moved South Africa to a very different role. Second question is South Africans got rid of apartheid, formal legal apartheid but not of its social and economic consequences. You're absolutely right. You know there's a larger discussion and the larger discussion is based on the question of decolonization. It has been a discussion in Africa but it's also been a discussion I think throughout the third world which is how do we understand the political independence that took place in Africa in the 1950s and the 1960s? Do we understand this as a step backwards? Do we understand it as a failure to move forward at all? Or do we understand it as a partial success that we welcome? Do we celebrate the independence of the 1950s and 1960s but with eyes open and critical? In other words with a clear understanding that not everything was achieved but something was achieved and that something that was achieved clarifies the situation and brings us to move forward. What was achieved in South Africa and what was not achieved? Is the glass half full or half empty? There is no shortage of books on the African continent which whose main line of argument is it's not here to revolution. There was no revolution in Tanzania. There was no revolution in Mozambique. There was no revolution in Angola and now there was no revolution in South Africa. Of course there was no revolution. There was no revolution in either of these places but did we move forward at all on the plane of decolonization? I believe we did. We moved forward on the plane of political decolonization and by political decolonization I mean that we had misunderstood decolonization politically to be just freedom from external control just restoring the sovereignty of the new state. But actually if you look at the process of political colonization far more important than control from the outside is what happens to the inside is the way the political community is reconfigured inside is the creation of differences between the white areas and the banquistans the different political groups you've said it very eloquently in the case of Israel and Palestine where the fragmentation is even higher and how how do you you know in the African case I talked about the invention of two political identities race on the one hand tribe on the other other hand making both of these into politicized identities and I discuss in detail the depoliticization of both of these. Now you're absolutely correct that the consequences of political apartheid remain to be addressed but they remain to be addressed in a new situation where the vast majority of the population now has formal political rights. It has the right to organize it has the right to to communicate its ideas it's a different situation and in my view in my view this struggle is further complicated or become different by the fact that the rich both the rich and the poor are now far more multiracial than they were before. You have black empowerment has created a layer of rich black people and the white disempowerment has created more than a layer of poor white people and it's a new situation so I do not deny what you say but I have a slightly different interpretation of it. Parallels between South Africa and Israel Palestine you're right again the South African case is not based on expulsion but on subjugation and actually this is what gave the black labor movement its its strength which is that it was at the heart of the political economy of South Africa the Palestinians are not at the heart of the political economy in Israel the Palestinian place is closer to the American case than the South African case in the American case the Indian population was expelled from the political body known as the United States of America they did not have to be moved physically but they were put outside of that political body they did not belong even though physically they were inside the US politically they were not they were external to the US so if you are made external then of course the question of alliances becomes even more important even more central and I believe the question of alliances in the Palestinian case to be critical at two levels one is the alliance between a hugely fragmented population refugees people in the occupied territories and people inside Israel that's it somehow it parallels a little bit the South African case where the challenge between hardcore South Africa and the Bantu stunts how to ally the groups in in in in these two presented a slightly similar challenge although not as great as the one in is the one in Israel South Africa so that's the first challenge the second challenge is inside South Africa itself just as in I'm sorry inside Israel itself just as in South Africa the creation of the alliance between blacks in the Bantu stunts in core South Africa then rethinking the notion of black between Indian colored Africa and then finally fragmenting the cohesion of the white support behind the South African state okay that's the challenge I mean I think in in those three steps to me sum up the challenge okay and I agree with you completely that I think yes I will accept that criticism the pre-82 struggle it should not be considered as external to the body of Palestinians because it's a struggle with its social base amongst refugees I think that's a that's a that's a great insight and and and I'm very happy to learn something from that um so we come to BDS look I have no concrete and specific suggestions as to which institutions which companies that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about a general principle and and the general principle I'm talking about is that the principle of whatever emerges as an anti-zionist or a non-zionist force should be something that we ought to relate to differently from how we relate to Zionist forces that's that's the simple statement on a on a on a slightly more complicated level I am saying that we are at a period where we should not look at everything that preceded BDS as negative but we should take the gains of what preceded BDS and build on it because the major gain of what preceded BDS was the ballad movement and its insistence on a state of all people for what what I find slightly perplexing is the relative silence on the nature of the polity behind which one needs to mobilize a future post Zionist policy and therefore the nature of the mobilization under Zionism itself and I wish to call for as rich a set of alliances as broad a movement without in any way sort of turning it into just a movement which has no texture so that's that's my initial reflection on what you said thank you so much thank you very much Mahmood I mean we we certainly agree on the motivations and that's why I believe that even even though one can differ on some some of the parts of what you say it's a very stimulating book and I think a very useful contribution to this whole discussion about all the the cases that you discussed that's very important actually contribution and very welcome one now we will shift to to the the questions of the audience and let me suggest the following I will kind of read three four questions at a time and then give you the floor as we would be proceeding in a in a room in a hole you know take three four questions and then give you the floor and we proceed like that within the time that we have we still have 30 minutes so we should be able to take a number of questions and I will take them on a basis of first come first served as you would as we would do actually in a in a in an empty theater the first question that was posed it was about the Indian Pakistani case the South Asian case and the the question is how is your frame your framework of your analytic and analytical frame applicable to this the partition and Pakistan India that is this case that's one question a second question is about the role of arms struggle in the South African process in changing the mindsets that's the question about that in in the transition to democracy there is a third question when that's some which a kind of personal question someone asking whether you intend to I mean if you look at what you're doing as a conceptual autobiography I mean this is someone saying that this book seems to this person based on the summary as a continuation of what you started in previous books so let me put it differently how would you yourself describe this book in the evolution of your thinking on on those issues with which you have been dealing indeed for for a very long time and well the last question and then I'll give you the floor back is your reflection on the distinction that seems to exist between bikers because account of political blackness and the emerging afro pessimism school of of thought so to what degree does the divergent experience of colonization account for this distinct traditions of thought I presume you're reading the the question at the same time so you will have gotten the substance of it okay thank you very much um well the first question on the indian pakistani case I'm asking myself the same question it should already be clear from the discussion so far that no two situations are quite alike that one cannot really work by analogy you can make comparisons provided you have studied each case in its singularity so I did not have a chapter on the indian pakistani case because I did not really quite have an answer to the question how how would my framework explain it and one day I hope a few years from now I have that answer and when I do I will write another book about it so we'll have to postpone this discussion until then if you don't mind um the role of the arm struggle in the south african process well the arm struggle begins in south africa is a as an import as an import in a period when the arm struggle is considered the most dramatically successful mode of opposing colonialism and occupation particularly the the vietnam war the the struggle in vietnam itself but also inside africa algeria and mozambique when mandela goes out he goes he goes to algeria um and and he goes to organize an arm struggle uh my own verdict on the arm struggle is not as enthusiastic as you might want me to be the arms arm struggle dislocated the struggle from within south africa and mind you south africa is still a country where the vast majority of the belg population was inside south africa um and where there were few refugees not many refugees is dislocated outside and they did not create from refugees militants of the arm struggle but they actually took militants from inside south africa to train them into a guerrillas armed guerrillas outside south africa in camps whether in yachengwea in in in kanzania or or in algeria or other places and and the unexpected result was that the more militants they took out the more pacific south african society became so the period of the arm struggle the 1960s was is almost to me like a period of a graveyard silence it is the period of maximum foreign investment in south africa it is the period of secondary industrialization of south africa that period comes to an end with when the struggle comes back home and the struggle comes back home when the students break out of their isolated discussion groups had moved to mobilize particular sectors of society whether migrant labor uh in in in the hostels or residents of of townships and communities a new mindset begins then not the arm struggle third question is this my conceptual vocabulary biography you you're giving me too much credit but but i'll tell you how i think about this uh you know 12 years ago in 2010 i took i i took a job at his director of macerator institute of social research um i cut down my presence at columbia to one semester four months and i spent eight months at macerator i gave up my academic summer and at macerator after two years we set up a phd program and in the phd program it was based on a single one single departure from existing programs which was that we said we are not an area studies program we do not believe in studying africa in isolation we believe in a study not only just of africa but we we believe in reintegrating africa into the world and we believe in studying the world for but from an african vantage point because the world cannot just be studied from no vantage point that's the business of god okay for humans we have to have some vantage point somewhere some some place edward salient notion okay some place and and our place to understand the world was was inside africa and this book expands it expands my my the terrain of of of my my my thinking my my endeavor um from from colonialism now to to to political modernity from from africa uh to to to to a global platform in a sense the case studies uh can cannot be defined in terms of area studies they they make sense only thematically i'm now in the process of researching a book on idiamine and so that i i i i think that would be more biographical because this is a whole period to which i was witness and which which in many ways shaped my life um i hope in another few years i'll have that i'll have that out finally reflections on the distinction between between bico's black consciousness and the afro pessimism school i mean i think the two schools are very far apart the the afro pessimism school is uh it essentializes the notion of of african it essentializes and generalizes the experience of of the slave in the us uh to even the periods after the formal abolition of slavery it has some very interesting illuminating and educative remarks on the nature of uh violence to which the african-americans have been subject to whether during slavery or after slavery is gratuitous violence uh and from that i have i have learned i have learned a lot but it's basically trans historical um and uh and i think that distinguishes itself it from from bico and black consciousness thank you thank you another round of questions if okay you um first one is about is ethnic violence inherent to the nationhood model and uh i mean i'm sorry i'm sorry i didn't hear that yeah is ethnic violence is it inherent to the nationhood model and i mean can we or to put it otherwise as long as we operate within nation states violence isn't it intrinsic to the model that's a question uh another question is about the the way that the jewish settlement in palestine was sponsored by institutional power from from from abroad and therefore the question is about the role of international institutions and their failure to get implementation of legal resolutions uh uh in in in this uh in this case a third question well again relating to the nation state someone is asking why do you think the idea of moving beyond a nation state is seen as as radical even by people who do not actually benefit from it uh like members of the minority that's the question um and maybe last question for this round africaners do not have a secure home as a minority in south africa and that seems to be the general consensus among the young africaners who have left the country in robes so what do you comment on this um okay i'm also taking notes as you talk um okay the first one uh ethnic violence and look i i make a distinction between a ethnicity and tribalism a ethnic city to me is a cultural construct um it is not a territorial construct people in an ethnic group live in many places they they they share the same culture without sharing the same territory in the in the colonization of africa um key to to to to the transition from ethnicity to tribe was to territorialize ethnic identity to declare a homeland for each ethnic group and therefore to declare all others who do not belong to their ethnic group as minorities as political minorities not entitled to participate in self-governance within their community um political minority is is a is a political concept which only comes into being with the creation of a nation of a of a type of power which is identified with a nation and and this is the distinction that so my my my move is to say that really what we should be doing is to de-territorialize ethnicity is to is to let culture flourish regardless of boundaries and and and and and to and to and to have the administration within boundaries as an administration which does not is not based on the notion of majority and minority within within me because majority and minority will render both the majority and the minority permanent and and if we are interested in democracy at all then we must think of majority and minority as the result of a democratic process it cannot you cannot have majorities and minorities before the democratic process only to be confirmed by the democratic process if we have that then democracy will only be inside the national majority there will be no no democracy within the nation as a whole within within the country as a whole so i'm talking of of of decoupling state from nation why do minorities have a role of international institutions and their failure to enforce well this is i mean you are absolutely right this is the history of zionisms whether the history whether it's a french finance capital which is backing zionism in the early phases or the british state which which saw zionism as a as a very helpful conduit or or or all the different institutions created by zionists which which raised funds in different parts of of the western world and and how they they they functioned with minimal or scant or complete disregard of the rule of law internationally um now this is what this is what bts is doing this is the strong side of bts is to direct our attention to this international arena which is more or less devoid of laws and ethics in terms of how how things move how things are tolerated and and allowed to move um next question is why do minorities who do not benefit from the nation state continue to support it well look two reasons so long as minorities think that there's no alternative to the nation state so long as they think that the nation state is part of the natural landscape then the only alternative they would see is to establish their own nation state and this is the dilemma everybody wants their own nation state this is this is the explanation behind the constant and ever-growing scale of violence um that's it um young africaners leaving the country in droves well i don't know what droves i don't really know the numbers but the thing is i know that there is a big contrast between how algerians left i mean french left algeria and africaners south africa um if if they had left in droves we would have a very different south africa in very different socioeconomic situation there um but yes they are leaving they're leaving and let's let's grant that they're leaving in significant numbers um significant enough to to to to warrant us to to to think about it i mean look i when i talk of south africa and when i took of 1994 i said very clearly that black consciousness could have become a another black nationalist movement okay and there were strong pressures from within it to become that it could have been it could have become the movement that stopped south africa at the point where we say we want an independent south africa a nation state of the majority black south africa right but somehow i became interested in the transition from this notion of black majority to the notion of a non-racial majority how did this come about right so and amongst africaners also there were those those who joined the udf but there were also those who wanted a homeland for the south for the africaners to feel safe and secure a homeland where they could set up their own political power um yeah they have left but now there are also people beginning to study about those who left and whether they are staying where they went because the leaving the leaving makes sense only from the point of view of the fact that we lost a nation state this was our state we lost it and of course we expect them to behave as we did there was a book published by an african reporter called my traitor's heart in during during the elections in 1994 it became a bestseller in south africa and the the guy who wrote the book was uh he was the great grandson of one of the first african prime minister his name was ryan malan and his father was malan a former state president and he wrote the book called my traitor's heart and he ryan malan was a journalist for the join us bird star and he was on the crime beat and he covered black on black violence in african townships so there's a chapter in each chapter is devoted to a different kind of black on black violence there's one chapter uh devoted to a it's called the hammer man the hammer man is this big black guy muscular strong who wields a hammer at his victim and even if the victim has no nothing more than just a wallet in his pocket and and and in the wallet is just a hundred rand or 40 rand or whatever he wields the hammer and smashes the skull and the victim is dead and then he goes with the loot and ryan malan's the unstated conclusion is this that look if they can do this to their own people with so little gain what will they do to us okay that's what he was saying well when the referendum came and the white population voted whether to continue negotiations with what were called liberation movements the majority voted to continue negotiations in spite of the messaging this book so it's an open question i i'm not i'm saying let's learn from the lessons of south africa without what i'm not saying that there is no there are no issues here to be thought through critically okay i mean it's not easy to come to an alternative to a nation state a non-nation state a state of you know a a state which separates nation from state not easy but i think there would be something to gain if we looked at the kind of polities before colonialism most african countries i have studied places pre-colonial polities they were not nation polities they were multi-ethnic all of them that i know in fact if anything the idea of segregation segregation is a very modern idea the pre-modern idea even amongst empires is not segregation it's assimilation if anything the assimilation is aggressive if anything critique targets them for forcible assimilation for forcible conversion etc but not segregation right so it's a it's a very different kind of political culture and you may learn something if we if we if we read it on its own terms rather than through modern lenses thank you thank you very much muhmud i have to apologize to the audience but there is no way at all that we could take all your questions there are too many of them far too many just imagine the production of some this kind of meeting in a theater there there would be no way anyway to take 67 questions on board so time is almost off let me take one final questions one final question in the singular to give you enough time to to answer it and that will be the the the last one in this very interesting evening very interesting session so the question is about i mean let me read the question itself what under which conditions immigration becomes settler colonialism i mean if you could dwell on this difference between immigration and settler colonialism and the background to the question is the discourse of settler colonialism that is occurring today in kashmir and asam in india where indian state the indian state continues its occupation of kashmir and in asam where nrc a disenfranchisement exercise has happened based on a sub-nationalism that holds Bengali minorities as infiltrators and settlers so how would you comment on all that on this very complex situation i see that i see i would not be surprised if the same friend who asked the first question it's now come back with the last question because this is the first question can i comment on the india pakistan but i will comment on the first part of the question which is a difference between immigration and settler colonialism and and i think i maybe you came late but the first part of my talk discussed that an immigrant is a person who comes willingly to be part of the existing polity and and and the advantage is this person wants in the polity of socioeconomic either equality or advantage but comes to become integrated into the existing polity a settler is a person who comes to establish an alternate polity to destroy the existing polity and to set up a new policy that's basically my answer i'm sorry i cannot i cannot talk of kashmir and bihar um yes of course the kashmiris are learning a lot from the israeli not the kashmiris i'm sorry the indian state is learning a lot from israel and in fact the kashmiri project is very much reads like a second generation project that the israelis would attempt it okay well we're we're about when we are we reached the end of this session and thank you very much professor mandani for this very interesting very stimulating talk and for this very important contribution your book to all these discussions actually you we had only a glimpse at some parts of the book there are other chapters that haven't been even evoked in the discussion about germany about sudan about other issues so this is a very rich book very stimulating and i reiterate my encouragement to everyone to read the book very interesting work so thank you again and thank you to the organizers of of this event to dina matar and narges farzad and toaki el borzi who is the person who set up all this the meeting itself and has been running it so thank you to all and very best wishes since this is the beginning of the year the 2021 and that's our first event so happy new year to everyone despite the the the poor beginning all the best thank you very much thank you to everybody thank you to the organizers and do read the book whether you read it in a library or whether you buy it that's not the main point main point is to read the book thank you