OCTAGON 2022

Israel-Palestine: New Era, New Narrative, and New Strategies
Madrid, Spain | 5 November 2022

OCTAGON2022_ Report
OCTAGON 2022 Report.pdf
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Presentation
Saturday, 5.11.2022 | 10:00 hs -18:00 hs – Hotel Wellington

The institutionalisation of a system of segregation, discrimination, and dispossession into a widely-recognised apartheid state in Israel-Palestine has not occurred by chance or in a day. Through silence and inaction, and by supporting empty initiatives and asymmetrical negotiations, the international community has endorsed the impunity of this system since its inception, letting it grow and settle. But the world in itself keeps wavering: before we could see the last overlapping ripples of the global meta crisis caused by COVID-19, the Russo-Ukrainian war has kickstarted yet another wave of unprecedented ramifications. New opportunities for action and alliances arise as old, and new geopolitical allies and rivals reposition. And a new era demands a new narrative.

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The last edition of the OCTAGON concluded with the need to break with an intentionally stalled “peace process” designed to underpin the current status quo between the two nations. The gathering resolved that transcending this framework was the first step toward the much-needed unravelling of the strategies and aspirations in this conflict.

This year’s edition will analyse how the critical factors behind and ahead of a global tectonic rearrangement can draft new resolution paths for Israel and Palestine, focusing on the potential of international efforts to fight an established regime of apartheid. For that, this encounter will draw from the experiences of civil society organisations, working on ways to engage and foster cooperation among the international community.

Sessions

1st SESSION
A New Era: the Changing Setting of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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This session will analyse global international trends post-invasion of Ukraine and how the emerging great power competition and the ongoing regional reset in the Middle East redefine the global and regional context of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It will delve into new challenges and opportunities presented by this new phase, exploring key aspects affecting the resolution of the conflict.
2nd SESSION
A New Narrative: the Coming Language of the Conflict
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This session will focus on how the apartheid conceptual framework can reshape the narrative and vocabularies of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Recent reports of reputable human rights organisations have provided a promising intellectual environment to reflect and support the new languages emerging in the Palestinian civil society. By drawing from old lessons and new possibilities, this session aims to expand on this new framework to build a new narrative of the conflict further and brainstorm how it can be made more mainstream both in the global North and South.
3rd SESSION
New Strategies: Fighting Apartheid
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This session will build on the second session, offering policy and legal steps based on the reports from the international Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, their conclusions, and experiences. It will explore legal, political, and social avenues to seize global momentum, create awareness, and take concrete action against apartheid.

4th SESSION
The Way Forward
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The failure modern nation-states exhibit in addressing existential threats worldwide calls for a questioning of the social and territorial experiments of the XXth century. That requires us to transcend the same political imagination crisis that safeguards the foundations of apartheid in Israel-Palestine. The two state-solution is practically and intellectually a dead project, despite remaining the dominant international narrative for the conflict. All the while, the most regressive form of a one-state reality has taken hold on the ground. How can a more democratic and legitimate one-state solution be advanced and achieve broader appeal and international acceptance? Can we think beyond the conventions that bound states to borders, and change how communities relate to territories and each other?

Photo gallery OCTAGON 2022