Sara Roy at the Seymour Centre



Tonight we walked to the Seymour Centre for another of the Sydney Ideas talks: Sara Roy, in Australia to deliver the University of Adelaide's Edward Said Memorial Lecture last Saturday. It was a grim evening. After a very long introduction by a Sydney University academic, who very much wanted us to know that Edward Said had been a beacon of intelligence and hope for the Middle East, and quoted him as having said very nice things about Sara Roy, Doctor Roy took the stage, and the only cheerful thing from then on was the beautiful floral design on her jacket.

I found the lecture hard to follow, partly because of its academic manner -- both Dr Roy's dry delivery and her reliance on abstractions like 'the donor community' -- and partly because I wasn't up to speed with the assumed prior knowledge. I do know what the Oslo Accords were, in the sense that if you told me about them I'd be able to say, 'I knew that,' and mean it. (I've read at least two whole Books -- this and this -- about the recent history.) But if you want me to follow an argument about the Oslo Accords having been instrumental in deepening the suffering of the Palestinian people, you need to jog my memory a bit more than Dr Roy did. This is hardly a criticism of the lecture -- more an acknowledgment of my limitations.

But the gist of the evening wasn't hard to get. Things have been getting progressively worse for the Palestinians. There has been a paradigm shift by which they have been diminished from a sovereign people to a humanitarian problem, intruders in their own land, perpetrators of violence. After decades in which their economy was made completely dependent on the Israeli economy, Israel disengaged, leaving a mess. The occupation of the West Bank is increasingly seen as the new normal, so that calls for it to be ended come to sound bizarre. When the Palestinians elect a government, the US led west refuse to deal with it.

There are some glimmers of hope, to do with activists who reach for progress based on people rather than territories. By the time we reached the hope, I was so dispirited I stopped taking even my usual very skimpy notes, so I'm not at all confident that I've described those glimmers accurately. They did sound like very faint glimmers.

Questions were interesting. The last one of the evening gave Dr Roy an opportunity to quote trenchantly from David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel: 'The state of Israel will be judged by how it treats its Arabs.'

PS: I noticed when looking up the Edward Said Memorial Lecture that the price of entry for that prestigious event was about half what we paid to get into the Sydney event. Is that something about the different cost of living in Adelaide and Sydney, do you think -- as in, the punters here will expect to pay more, so let's charge them?

Posted: Tue - October 14, 2008 at 09:59 PM           |

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