Students of Palestine

Students of Palestine Talk 1

Date: 26 March 2013, Friday

Time: 3:37pm

Talk Duration: 2:00-3:15pm

So I have just returned from the Students for Palestine talk at the Monash Campus Centre Cinema. There were 3 speakers present, each presenting a different experience of experienced injustice and the justice that needs to be inspired by students such as ourselves here at Monash to even do a little bit to change the circumstance of those people overseas. A speaker spoke of indigenous rights, another of the Northern Ireland British Occupation which strikingly reminded me of the I.B. English book I studied last year, and Reem, a speaker as one of the diaspora kids from Palestine. I am not very good in articulating things in person so after deliberating on my bike ride back to the halls, I have decided to type out this response of mine to the talk today.

Just like many who you may I ask, my first argument would be, “But those places are so far away. How in the world could we help?” This is a logical argument but as most say a little bit counts. However, what my mind lingered on after the talk was how people who consider themselves helpless will never be able to trigger change by themselves. And people such as ourselves overseas, no longer view them as people but instead of idols of change. Many people who are part of the real experience of genocide or brutal oppression are barely looked at as the people they are but instead as ideals others should strive for change.

It is important to remember that these individuals location such as Papua New Guinea, North Ireland, Palestine (Israel), Australia, have over time developed their own complex weave of society. Sometimes sacrifices are needed, whether it is to the chagrin of another community. Could human development and technology developed to the extent it has today without the sacrifice of natural resources? The many mountains hacked into steppes, or forests chopped for harvest of the natural timbers?

Many of these activists have the best in mind but I think tend to lose trail of a majority of the other variables that makes it virtually impossible in the current day to trigger a monumental change. Even if we on Monash act now for Palestine, the very presence of a club of Israel collaborating with the Engineering department, in itself is already a contradiction. So we are meant to make changes externally when we can barely compete with the internal opposition?

Politics just makes things look black and white; where the grey parts are completely ignored.

When one of the members asked me today if I was involved or interested in other matter of politics. I told him, “No,” which is the truth since I think politic does nothing but ruin our society.

Todays speakers were:

Reem
is a prominent Palestinian socialist. Reem is also a leading activist from CAIA (campaign against Israeli Apartheid) and an activist with the Australian Education Union

Vivian Moore
Viv is an Indigenous activist on police violence and black deaths in custody. Viv was a key organiser of the Invasion Day demonstration in Melbourne that saw over 600 people protest the Northern Territory Intervention, deaths in custody and ongoing dispossession. 

Barry Kearney
Barry is the Chairman of the James Connolly Association- an organisation that stands against British rule and is particularly active in campaigning for the rights of Irish political prisoners