Recently, several friends and I accompanied Dr. Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA), to the "Israel and the Middle East" Conference at Tel-Aviv University where he was scheduled to be a speaker. It was a two-day conference sponsored by a variety of Israeli and French academic institutions and was comprised of several sessions, including a forum on Israel and the Palestinians.
Dr. Mahdi was the last of three presenters, along with Alain Dieckhoff and Asher Susser, in the Israel and the Palestinians session and labeling the response of the audience to his speech as 'cool' would be an injustice. Literally every time Dr. Mahdi mentioned the words Nakba, which refers to the process of Palestinian dispossession before, during, and after the War of 1948, massacre, in reference to the recent War on Gaza, and apartheid, in regards to the closure and permit regime in the West Bank, the crowd irrupted in a frenzy of booing and heckling. The jeering became so overwhelming that at one point Dr. Mahdi directly addressed the audience and essentially stated, if you don't want to hear what a Palestinian has to say then don't invite a Palestinian to speak; however, the taunting continued throughout his twenty minute speech. At no point were the six or seven most raucous protesters asked to leave by the conference organizers or even asked to refrain from making remarks during his presentation.
The response of the audience to a Palestinian perspective of the conflict exemplifies the difficulty Israelis have in understanding and accepting the valid presence of a collective Palestinian narrative and further reiterates the difficulty in achieving a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Perhaps even more elucidating, five sessions at the Conference involved Israel and other countries in the Middle East (Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and the Lebanese Equation, Israel, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Nuclear Question, and Israel, the Middle East and the United States under Obama), but of the 11 presenters at these sessions Dr. Mahdi was the only Arab speaker. This reinforces the reality of Israel's unilateral vision of the region and one of the major stumbling blocks towards achieving peace in the Middle East.
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