Seminar by Jeff Halper at UQ -The best prospect for peace
Posted August 2nd, 2008 by peripalestini
POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Jeff Halper and other activists have been delayed in their bid to sail to Gaza to break Israel's siege.
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ACPACS Seminar: A rights-based approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict: The best prospect for peace
Date: Tuesday, 02 September 2008
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Room: Don Carruthers Room, Level 5, Dorothy Hill PSE Library (Enter library and take the lift to Level 5)
UQ Location: Hawken Engineering Building (St Lucia)
In this seminar, Prof Halper will discuss the ongoing failure of the peace process to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Highlighting its fundamental flaws, he will explain why a rights-based approach to conflict - in the case of Israel/Palestinian or anywhere in the world - is the best and most just for the achievement of conflict resolution.
This approach not only encompasses specific articles of international law but also more universal human rights norms including freedom, equality, and dignity.
Jeff Halper is an Israeli Professor of Anthropology and the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), a non-violent Israeli peace and human rights organisation that resists the Israeli Occupation on the ground. He grew up in the US and received his Ph.D. in Cultural and Applied Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before moving to Israel in 1973.
After doing research among the Jews of Ethiopia in the 1960s, he became an active advocate for their struggle to come to Israel and find a place in Israeli society, serving as the Chairman of the Israeli Committee for Ethiopian Jews. Prof Halper served as the Director of the Middle East Centre for Friends World College, an international college which he eventually headed, and has also taught at universities in Israel, the US, Latin America and Africa.
His academic work focuses on the history of Jerusalem in the modern era (he is the author of Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century, Westview, 1991), contemporary Israeli culture, nationalism and the Middle East conflict. He is the author of Obstacles to Peace, a resource manual of articles and maps on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, published by ICAHD.
His new book, An Israeli in Palestine, on his work against the Occupation, is published by Pluto Press. He was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
The seminars are free, and all academics, staff, students, and interested persons are welcome.
Don Carruthers Room, Level 5, Dorothy Hill PSE Library (Enter library and take the lift to Level 5), Hawken Engineering Building (St Lucia), The University of Queensland
