48th SBF Meeting
48th of the traditional SBF meetings of our Faculty, Prof. Dr. Sami Al-Arian's presentation entitled "Ending the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Geopolitical Analysis" was carried out. Our event was held through digital platforms due to pandemic conditions.
Prof. Dr. Sami Al-Arian, during his presentation, addressed the birth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the problems at its core, the understanding of the Zionist state built as a solution for regional conflict, the strategies that Israel has applied to accomplish the Zionist project, and finally the prospective solution scenarios of this conflict.
In the history, Jews lived together with the Muslim Ummah, and this period was described as the Golden Age of Jews, Sami Al-Arian noted that during this time, Jews thrived on philosophy, culture and science.
In the following period, Jews who emigrated to Europe had difficulties among Christians. Children of Jews who did not even have the right to inherit were Christianized. They were also judged according to Roman law rather than their own Jewish law. They were forbidden to perform their own religious rituals. Jews were subjected to harsh assimilation. Especially in the 19th century, with the rise of nationalism in Europe, Jews were discriminated and in no way tolerated.
The tragedy experienced by Palestinians today is actually a direct result of the xenophobia and discrimination inflicted on Jews by intolerant Europeans, including Russia. What made the fantasy of the Jews real was the European attempts to fragment and colonize Ottoman Empire in particular, the Islamic world in general. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Zionist movement put in practice an aggressive program to establish a state on the Palestinian territories.
According to Prof. Dr. Sami Al-Arian, in order to achieve peace in the region and global scale, the political Zionist movement and its aggressive projects on the Palestinian territories should be confronted, and defeated, and all organizations associated with the Zionist movement should be dismantled. At this point, Al-Arian notes that Jewish organizations and organizations associated with the Zionist movement differ from each other, stating that there are no similarities between the two. In this context, the Jewish tradition must be saved from the destruction of the Zionists.
According to Sami Al-Arian, the strategic fundamental principles and imperatives of the Zionist state are as follows: to bring together Jews in the Palestinian territories, to drive Palestinians from this land, to expand and colonize, to take control of all the Palestinian lands like in the Golan Hills through fait accompli, to establish a state dominated by military understanding, to have technological and military capabilities that its competitors cannot resist, to being the state with the only nuclear power in the region, to provide and maintain unquestioned support of the EU and US with the help of lobbying and funds, to weaken regional states and fragment their allies, to weaken and break up other regional states by utilizing ethnic and sectarian differences in order to build Israel's regional hegemony, to make alliances with minorities and separatists in the region to weaken states in the region.
Prof. Dr. Sami Al-Arian expressed that the Palestinian-Israel conflict can be ended by making these strategic principles and imperatives of Israel nonfunctional, transforming regional balance of power and later international power structure, utilizing internal differences of Israel, building global solidarity to eliminate the apartheid regime, and saving Judaism from the domination of Zionism.
