The Fleming Peace lecture this year was given by Tony Bing, emeritus professor of Peace and Global Studies at Earlham College. Bing spoke about “Palestinians and the Land,” at 7:30 in the Leak Room of Duke Memorial Hall on Nov. 5. The lecture was sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Studies Dept.

According to Professor and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies Vernie Davis, “The money for the Fleming series was left by James Fleming. He particularly left this money to be focused on programs related to world peace through international law.”

Bing was partly chosen by Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Amal Khoury, who is currently teaching a class titled “War and Peace in the Middle East.”

His lecture took place on the 92nd anniversary of the signing of the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the British. The Balfour Declaration is a British policy that was instituted by Lord Balfour to facilitate and support the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Bing began his lecture by explaining the title and said that it was taken from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Diary of a Palestinian Wound,” because Darwish’s words “capture the physical and spiritual connection Palestinians have with their ancestral land.”

“They help explain why millions of Palestinian refugees keep alive for themselves and their children and grandchildren the memories of the villages and lands from which they fled in 1948,” said Bing.

Bing gave an over view of the politics, beginning with an analysis of the Balfour Declaration and a series of maps that showed the diminishing land of historic Palestine, ending with a map showing 10 percent of historic Palestine, which is now under the control of the Palestinians, yet has been subject to the establishment of new settlements.

“Settlements and the decision to keep building settlements become not just illegal acts under international law, what our government keeps calling ‘obstacles to peace,'” said Bing, “but represent an attempt to take away the identity of an indigenous people by separating them from the land to which they are inextricably linked, both physically and spiritually.”

Campus Ministry Coordinator Max Carter said that Bing legitimized the Palestinians’ attachment to their land.

“In the United States we hear a great deal about the Jewish connection to the land,” said Carter, “but we hear very little if any about the history of the Palestinian diaspora, their connection to the land and their displacement beginning 1948.”

Carter said that some of the older Palestinians in the audience were brought to tears, as Bing “evoked ghostly memories of their own childhood, the lost land, villages, olive trees and hope of their youth.”

Senior Robin Nicholson said that Bing equated the memories of the Palestinian diaspora with similar representation in Jewish history, including a reference to Psalm 137.

“He read from the Bible about the sadness of the Jews when the Babylonians exiled them,” said Nicholson, “and then he read heart-wrenching poetry about the Palestinians and the loss of their land in the creation and expansion of Israel.