‘I’m here for the lecture’, I said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one in the Khalili lecture theatre’.
The receptionist gestured that I should sign a visitor book. After signing, I was given a SOAS visitor sticker which I stuck on my lapel. I walked over to the bored looking security guard who stood outside the automatic gates. Seeing by sticker, he pressed a button and waved me through. I was in.
SOAS, or the School of African and Oriental Studies, is one of those institutions that I feel as if I have always known but never really had a sense of where it was or what it was all about. I was surprised to find it nestling in a corner of Russell Square, a part of London that I regularly travel through to get to my office.
I had walked from Charing Cross, passing the ever busy Holborn underground station, and had picked my way through a sequence of Georgian terraces, most of which were now expensive hotels. Arriving at the square, I caught a glimpse of the brutalist architecture of the Institute of Education and saw ‘SOAS’ emblazoned in big letters on the side of a striking modern building.
The lecture I was going to listen to was entitled ‘The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories: state-building without a state’.
I was worried; I was out of my comfort zone. I had no problem dealing with technology Meetups and lectures: I could use my knowledge to figure out roughly what was going on. Political science, on the other hand, was something very different: I felt that I lacked the training, knowledge and history. I felt that I didn’t know how to talk to others about it. All I knew about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict what was I picked up from the media. I didn’t know anyone who was directly touched by the conflict other than an open mic comic I had once met. I felt profoundly ignorant.
I followed signs to the lecture theatre and discovered an area where visitors were queuing for cups of tea and coffee. I asked the tea vendor, who was obviously connected with the lecture, whether he knew Natalie, and whether he could point me in the direction of the ‘Meetup people’. He shook his head slowly. He couldn’t help. I thanked him, had a look around to see if there were any people that looked as if they might be connected with the group, but all I could see were a group of students who obviously had SOAS security passes. I asked a few more people.
‘Meetup?’ they asked. I was struggling. No one had heard of the group. Feeling uncomfortable and defeated, I decided to head into the lecture theatre and take a seat. I looked at the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation: I was obviously in the right place.
I wondered whether the presenter would have an agenda or an angle. I wondered what connection he had with Palestine or the EU. The speaker, it turned out, had recently completed his doctorate and had published a book that was all about how EU policies can influence ‘state building’. The timing of the lecture was impeccable; a week earlier the UK government had voted to recognise Palestine as a state.
I looked around. The lecture theatre was almost full to capacity; I estimated around one hundred and fifty people. Our speaker, Dimitris, began his speech. He introduced himself as a former visiting lecturer from Kingston University and was someone who worked for the ‘institute of postgraduate studies’ at an institution called the College of Europe.
After five PowerPoint slides, my eyes started to glaze over. It was tough going: slides were packed with tables that contained loads of text. We were given a question: how can the EU help to build states? A table neatly summarised different approaches: diplomacy, the provision and development of security, administration of a jurisdiction, and economic approaches.
After reeling from the shock of the amount of information that was being thrown at me, I started to recover: the talk started to become interesting. Dimitris presented a brief history of the EU’s engagements with Palestine: the EU ran civilian missions and supported education programmes. By way of balance, we were also shown a list of EU policies, directives and frameworks that were connected to Israel. I suddenly understood: this was all thoroughly academic; there were no stories about those who have to live through the realities of the conflict. We were instead given cold hard facts about laws and directives.
Our speaker pressed on, telling us about different missions, leading us to a set of concluding slides which highlighted ‘high politics’ and diplomacy.
There was a polite question and answer session which had an atmosphere that was lightly tinged with emotion. One questioner suggested that the policies were abstract, but our speaker disagreed. Another member of the audience referred to the Palestinian economy and a recent World Bank report, and suggested that Israel was deliberately scuppering projects. Other questions were more direct, such as ‘do you think that the funding of the Palestinian authority is preventing an Intifada?’ and ‘do you ever envisage that the European Union will exert sanctions against Israel?’ The speaker handled them deftly and with authority: ‘Europe speaks with different voices; there will be no sanctions since Germany will never agree to it’.
It was the end of the talk. Everyone clapped and started to file out of the lecture theatre. A few people went to speak to the lecturer. I made my way to the lobby area and looked around one last time. I saw a group of smartly dressed people who all had visitor stickers like mine; they all seemed to know each other and were deep in conversation.
‘Excuse me…’, I nudged myself into the corner of the group, whilst wearing a friendly smile. ‘Are you all a part of the Meetup?’ I interrupted.
‘No, sorry…’, came back the reply.
I thanked them for their time, and looked around again. The lecture theatre was nearly empty, and people were leaving the lobby area. I had tried to find the Meetup people, but I had failed.
The moment I left the SOAS building and made my way onto the London streets, I started to become angry with myself: I should have spoken to more people. This Meetup told me something: it told me something about my ignorance. My ignorance was talking to me, telling me that I should have stayed longer; it was encouraging me to be bolder.
As I started towards Goodge Street underground station I felt a delicate mixture of frustration and sadness. My frustration came from my ignorance and my sadness came from a realisation that I had been confronted by academic echoes of an intractable problem that suggested unimaginable challenges that I knew very little about.
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