Future with Sophia Azeb

Future with Sophia Azeb

YULIA: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, a member of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today I am joined by Sophia Azeb to talk about “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. This is part three that, at least for now, wraps up our mini-series about “future.” We conceived of the the conversations, with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Eman Abdelhadi, and Sophia Azeb, as a series to illustrate the plurality of approaches to Palestinian futurity, to make explicit that future is not predetermined and it is precisely what is at the center of the Palestinian liberation struggle and all liberatory struggles in fact. They are fights for what kind of future we and future generations are going to live in. 

We started planning this series in May 2024, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza was raging for eight months then. At the same time we were seeing an unprecedented wave of international solidarity with Palestine, especially visible on college campuses. At UC Santa Cruz, where Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and I am a former graduate worker and a current occasional lecturer, we saw students establish an encampment that for 31 days served as a bastion of solidarity, militancy, and determination to end our university’s complicity in the genocide by divesting from Israel. When graduate workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses joined the fight for divestment by going on strike, victory felt within reach? But then, the university administrators crushed the strike by having a conservative judge issue a temporary restraining order against all strike activities. They called the police from all over the state to raid and dismantle the encampment all the while violently arresting 122 students, workers, faculty, Sophia Azeb among them, and community members.

So now, it is September 2024, we are nearing an anniversary of the genocide that Israel continues to perpetrate with no repercussions. Its deadly violence is not letting up, instead it’s expanding. In addition to Gaza, Israel has also been targeting the West Bank and Lebanon. Israel has sabotaged every cease-fire deal negotiation and the US is not event pretending anymore that it is pushing for one, universities are firing workers and changing their student conduct policies to further curtail student organizing. Now, to be clear, the fight continues, Palestinians continue to resist and we continue to organize in solidarity with them, but it is a different world than it was a few months ago and a conversation about “future” today has a different tone than it did when we first started this series.

So with this long caveat, I want to welcome our guest. We will discuss two pieces by Sophia Azeb published in the Funambulist magazine, one called “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity”, from 2019, and “The “no-state Solution”: Decolonizing Palestine Beyond the West Bank and East-Jerusalem” from 2017. We will link these texts and other resources we mention throughout the conversation in the episode notes and on our website criticalzionismstudies.org. 

One more thing I want to highlight is that on November 3rd, Sophia Azeb is partnering with Wrokshops4Gaza to give a remote workshop titled “Black Studies and the Black Radical tradition.” The registration fee for this workshop and all Workshops4Gaza are going directly to active campaigns fundraising for Palestinians in Gaza. We will link the registration page in the episode notes and we encourage you to sign up for Sophia’s workshop and other Workshops4Gaza.

With this, let’s jump in. Sophia, welcome. 

SOPHIA: Thank you for having me. 

YULIA: I want to start by talking about your piece, Who Will We Be When We Are Free, which I read as a conversation you are having with and alongside Mahmoud Darwish, I was especially thinking of “Who Am I, Without Exile?” Both of your pieces not only have questions in their titles, but are fundamentally about posing existential questions. So can you tell us what you were grappling with in that piece? 

SOPHIA: Yeah. At that time I had already been sort of grappling with this question that was really frustrating from my perspective as an academic in the US, Palestinian, but not a scholar of Palestine, a scholar of Black Studies, which was thinking about how often in Palestine solidarity organizing, the Palestinian and Palestinianness was represented as this very homogenous identity formation. And often, you know, Palestinians ourselves were the ones exacerbating this perception of a sort of singular Palestinianness that there was, you know, a kind of universalist perspective or approach that we maybe had towards our liberation and what that looks like whether, in terms of statehood or multiple states, or in my, case for a long time, no states.

And so I was thinking really about what Darwish’s poetry had sort of long gestured to, which is an emphasis on harnessing Palestinianness beyond the Nakba. And it’s not a denial of the potential of Palestinian unity and coming together as Palestinians in our liberation, but acknowledging that that is in fact part of the process that we must understand our heterogeneity as an international community, many of us in exile, many of us as refugees, many of us at home; and also Palestinians who are racialized in distinct ways, who have different faiths, who are gendered in different ways, who have very different experiences of being Palestinian in relation to the occupation and to our positions in exile. So, Darwish, I think, in Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence, is having this conversation with himself about these same things, which is, you know, on the eve of his death, thinking through what it meant for him to be a poet and a Palestinian and what it meant to be in exile, what it meant to be absent-present as Palestinian in relation to Palestine. 

And that was really informed by my study of Black thought and it is one that is not attached to identity, but one that has a political imperative to explore what it is to think with Black thought at the center rather than hinge onto Blackness as a fundamentally somehow a liberationist position.

The same is true, I think, of Palestinianness. That to be Palestinian really means nothing until we invest in it the meaning that we wish for it to have. And in my case, I was thinking through what we think about Palestinianness in the context of liberation. 

YULIA: Yeah. And you highlight in that piece that asking such questions is about attunement to a future oriented praxis of being, of being Palestinian. Can you say more about how these questions orient us towards Palestinian futurity, and how your answers to them might have changed between when you wrote it and now?

SOPHIA: Yeah, I think, I’m not alone in this amongst many other Palestinians in the last 11 months, as we near a year of this Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, but also throughout historic Palestine, and perhaps reflecting a bit less on the theoretical questions that we have of ourselves in our own movement and, you know, really just kind of desperately hinging onto the need for our survival. But I will say that the question of our futurity and the need for our recognition of our own heterogeneity amid that still remains a really important point for us. And in a way we can kind of see how this has manifested in the fact that the Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live-stream their own destruction, the destruction of their homes, of their communities, of their mosques, of their churches, the maiming and murder of their kin, of their children, of their parents, of their neighbors; the incredible selflessness with which Palestinians are digging each other out of rubble with no equipment, right, and sandals; taking in other people’s children, children who may not, have any living family left, or if they do, they cannot be found. We see that despite all of the differences that necessarily exist in, you know, even an area as forcibly enclosed as Gaza is, that despite all those differences, people have been forced to come together to survive as Palestinians, as Palestinians in Gaza, and that means overcoming difference in a lot of ways. But we also see that it involves reconciling with difference. So many Palestinians in the diaspora, many non-Palestinians all over the world have really realized like how many distinct communities exist in Gaza alone, right? In this awful, constant, you know, live streaming of the slaughter, the robust black Palestinian communities of Gaza, for instance. There’s often this kind of, especially recently the past 10 years or so, this renewed emphasis on Black and Palestinian solidarity. This conversation has tended to really focus on non-Black Palestinians, and then Black people elsewhere, with the exception perhaps of the, you know, much known Afro-Palestinian community of Jerusalem. And, it’s always sort of represented as like this unique Palestinian community. But those of us who are kin or adjacent to Black Palestinian communities know that actually Gaza and Jericho and other cities have just as robust long histories of Afro-Palestinian or Black-Palestinian overlap, and that while Black Palestinians are also oppressed for being Palestinian, they also face anti-Blackness within Palestine itself. And so we see that in Gaza, this cannot dictate how people are relating to one another. In this moment, it’s about survival. But it is also important for those of us in the diaspora who are not present to take these lessons to heart, which is that this isn’t about overcoming or looking past these longer histories of racialization and harmful gendering and so on and so forth, but it is about reckoning with these histories while we are fighting for our collective liberation. 

YULIA: This reminds me that early on in this genocide, you were the one, at least in my orbit, who reminded us that the language we should be using is Palestinians in Gaza, not Gazans because 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from other places in historic Palestine. And I really appreciate your insistence that we need to resist this kind of flattening and homogenization, even in the face of genocide. 

SOPHIA: Yes. And, you know, living as Palestinian in the Diaspora as I do, we recognize these distinctions amongst ourselves freely. And in fact, it’s a point of celebration. I was just in Chicago to protest the DNC. And, you know, there’s this new cafe that opened up like two blocks from where I used to live when I was teaching at the University of Chicago and it’s called Nabala Cafe. I remember going in there for the first time and I was so happy. I mean, I was envious because it opened after I left Chicago, but I remember going in and, you know, after having a coffee with a friend approaching the owner and asking, you know, “Are we from the same village? My family’s from Bir Nabala,” which is outside of Ramallah. And they said, “No, they’re from Beit Nabala,” which was a 48 village so it doesn’t exist anymore. But it does because they opened this little cafe in Chicago. And also getting to explain to one another where our people came from. And this is really important especially for those of us from very small villages or 48 areas that were completely depopulated to keep the living memory of that past alive. So that, you know, Beit Nabala has a namesake cafe in the city of Chicago. And in this way, it’s like, yeah, we’re Palestinian, but we actually have way more entrenched distinctions than that and those are as important to our collective understanding of Palestinianness as is the fact of history that we’re from the same general place.

YULIA: It makes me think of a Funambulist podcast that we will link to in the episode notes, where you were asked, what is for you a moment of true decolonization. And you said that for you it is conversations with your grandmother about the time before the Nakba. So this memory of the past, of what it meant to be Palestinian and to be in Palestine before the Nakba, how does it inform the decolonial struggle and the fight for the future? 

SOPHIA: I’m not remembering the person I need to cite for this. But I do want to clarify, this is not like my brilliant thought.  But the fact is is that the imperial world insists on our timelessness and that Palestinians are from one part of history that no longer exists, right? You freeze people in a time and in a place so that they cannot move beyond that as a people, as a divergent and robust community. But what we know is also that because we are forced to live in timelessness, there is this really amazing way that our past is always futurist or informs our futurity because we are compelled to live a memory that we have not experienced as individuals. I do remember having that conversation about, you know, asking my grandmother questions about, I mean, just day to day things, right? You know, her telling us a funny story about her neighbor’s goats getting free, and then arguments about, “No, that’s our goat.” Like, “No, that goat’s from the Aggie family.” “No, that one belongs to whoever lives down the road.” 

And now that my grandmother’s much older, she’s 95 now, her memory is starting to fray a bit more, right? That seems especially kind of sweet to me. But it also, at the beginning of this genocide, sort of struck me that all Palestinians have this memory encoded into our bodies of a time and times that we were not even alive ourselves as individuals that is simply living trauma. So realizing that I can recite every massacre that happened from the Balfour Declaration until the present and I can’t even remember all of my first cousin’s names. There are a lot of us to be fair, but, you know, that is such a bizarre thing to realize at this moment. 

Another way in which the past continues to inform our future. And it’s not a Memory for Forgetfulness, I guess to borrow from Darwish, right? It is, precisely what Darwish is insisting in that prose piece, which he writes in Lebanon during the Civil War, it’s that so much of our history is the repeated indignity of displacement. It’s this repetition in a way that is so exhausting that you hold it all in and don’t even realize that you’re carrying it with you. And yet, when a catastrophe strikes again, that memory surges forward. And so it’s a generational trauma but it is also one that fixes firmly, like, who we are.

And that’s something I was wrestling with in Who Will We Be When We Are Free was this idea that, you know, what if we became Palestinians, like, as a whole, understanding all of us as Palestinians together in the Nakba? And that just seemed like such a horrifying proposition, because of course we know that Palestinianness existed before, and we know that it endures in many and multiple ways since then. And I guess I’m always just kind of weary of risking that memory of the past dictating our Palestinianness in catastrophe just as I am cautious that if we are Palestinian and consider ourselves uniformly Palestinian because of these legacies and memories of displacement, of occupation, of oppression, of slaughter, that we may not realize a way of being free in which we can be free with everybody else.

So I worry that the more we feel ostracized and oppressed and alone, which I think is what Palestinians in Gaza right now feel is alone and helpless. And that they’re fighting for their own survival because nobody else is fighting with them, that threatens a kind of protective insularity that risks reproducing a lot of the harms that colonialism has forced upon us.

YULIA: You talk about these risks in the No-State Solution piece, where you insist that it is not a question of one or two or however many states, but the state itself as a proposition is the perpetuation of the violence that we’re fighting against. Now I understand that you’ve been thinking and talking and writing about no-state solution since at least 2014. So I want to ask you what that idea meant to you then and how you relate to it now. Is no-state in fact a solution?

SOPHIA: What I was thinking then was really just, you know, the predicament of Palestinianness and displacement for Palestinians was in fact the creation of a nation state for people without a nation. Yikes. I’m like, what do we do with that? Does that mean the solution for us is a nation state? Because it seems that in the formation of the state of Israel, which immediately is predicated on who does not belong and firms that boundary of citizenship and belonging immediately in violence, it seems that that would be the precise wrong way to address Palestinian dispossession.

And I was thinking very much in the framework of, Indigenous studies scholarship that articulated how Indigeneity in many senses is about a relationship to land and to sovereignty rather than the insistence on ownership, possession, and of course delineating who does and who does not belong. So that’s where I was 10 years ago, and I’m very much in a similar framework now, except now the question is, and this is the real one, how can we expect Palestinians to cohabitate with the people who, in the Pew poll I saw the other day, 70 percent of whom, Israeli citizens, think that what’s happening now is fine. You cannot cohabitate with people who think a genocide is acceptable. 

And this is precisely the logic that antisemitic Europeans used to force European Jews to go somewhere like Israel and that Zionists were complicit in. We didn’t expect Jews who had been slaughtered by the millions to remain and stay with the people who had murdered them. And the best solution anyone can think of now is that, well, there’ll be one democratic state for all, and I’m sorry, maybe once I believed that that was possible, but I don’t think it’s possible anymore. And I don’t think it’s fair to expect that Palestinians should be inured to that as a possibility. 

But where else are we supposed to go? And that’s the real question. So I was never really a nationalist but now that I think about nationalism not necessarily as an expression of like nation statehood, but nationalism as in professing an alliance with one’s nation and thinking of Palestinian this as a nation on its own, even without the question of land and land displacement. It seems kind of an imperative to rethink nationalism in the vein of Indigenous approaches or Black liberationist approaches to nation that have nothing to do with a nation state and everything to do with protecting our sovereignty and our ability to live. And that’s really what it is – our ability to live and be free. 

YULIA: Yeah, and as you say, it’s an impossible ask of Palestinians to live next to people who have perpetrated genocide against them and want to continue. And I also don’t think that we can trust Zionists to stop perpetrating genocide. And this horrifying reality goes in direct opposition to the Zionist talking point that has been so pervasive in conversations about Palestinian liberation and futurity, right? Zionists love to ask how can we ensure their safety if they were to live together with Palestinians. But what we should be asking is how we can ensure Palestinian safety. Because what we are seeing and what we have been seeing for a century is that it is Palestinians who are not safe living together with Zionists. That’s where I see the contradiction of the one state solution or whatever we call it. 

And this brings me to another thing you wrote, which also has to do with the rejection of a nation state, which is, I’ll briefly quote here, “We must refuse to be recognized as Palestinians within the confines and language of a nation state, because we make space, not states.” And I’m going to need you to unpack that statement for us.

SOPHIA: I want to be very clear that when I said then, “We must refuse to be recognized as Palestinians within the confines of a nation state. We make space, not states.” It is not meant to articulate a position that wherever we end up, right, we’ll be fine. And it’s not meant to relinquish our relationship to the land that we cultivated for a thousand years. Because that is a legitimate relation and it is essential for us to recognize that, you know, it is since 1948 that the land has been devalued and destroyed by those who would claim that they are themselves Indigenous to it. Indigenous people don’t destroy their own land. That is something that we all recognize to be true. 

And in fact, it is also true, and we recognize this again in many Indigenous movements throughout the world that, Indigenous relationships to the land are often about sustaining it for generations to come. And so looking at systems of working the land and the sea and caring and tending for it so that it is able to replenish itself and be planted again and roots more and more generations of Palestinian culture and life in addition to, you know, our basic sustenance and so on. So that was, you know, not necessarily a wherever we end up we’ll be okay and we should just give up our fight for our land.

But it is also important to recognize that there are millions of Palestinians that are not in Palestine and we are no less Palestinian for it. Again, those memories that we live through that are not our own and that we bring with us and pass along, those memories that are marked on us and through us, our forms of knowledge production about what it is to be Palestinian. In the same way that Black study has existed generations before a field called Black Studies existed in the US Academy, Palestinians have been making knowledge about Palestinianness and Palestinian life and culture and arts generations and generations past.

And despite the fact that there are millions of us who are not in Palestine, whether it is because we are refugees from ‘48 or ‘67, or in the case of my family, we’re not ‘48 refugees, but who opted to leave because the living was so difficult and who hope to send money home and to sustain future generations that way and who ended up making new generations of Palestinians in exile. That continues our development of Palestinianness. So wherever we are, we are Palestinian. And that is not devalued by the fact that my passport doesn’t say Palestine on it. My grandmother’s does though. But even without a nation state, right, because Palestinianness and Palestinians have gone nowhere, right? Just as, you know, the Haudenosaunee nation exists, whether or not the US federal government recognize the Haudenosaunee people, they’re still there. You know, Mohawk are still here, Seneca, Onondaga, these are nations that continue to thrive and exist and produce knowledge about themselves. That makes the spaces where they are part of their nation. And so, yeah, we’re going to claim the, you know, little Palestine in Chicago, just as much as we claim Bir Nabala outside of Ramallah, right? Those are Palestinian spaces where Palestinians are and Palestinian knowledge continues to be produced.

YULIA: And I think the fact that we’re seeing Israel commit a scholasticide, deliberately destroying knowledge and infrastructure of archiving and reproducing Palestinian knowledge is evidence of how threatening to the settler colonial project Palestinian knowledge production is. And it also makes me think of how academic institutions are also threatened by Palestinian knowledge production and knowledge production about Palestine and Palestinians. 

So I’m hoping we can talk about the near future of going back to school, at least in the Northern Hemisphere and what our future is at these academic institutions that repress speech about Palestine, enshrine anti-Palestinian racism in student conduct policies, and continue to participate in and benefit from the genocide. So what is the terrain of struggle here at our schools, colleges, and universities? And we can use UC Santa Cruz as a case study if you want.

SOPHIA: So there’s two fronts. Obviously, the most dangerous is, of course, university administrations. That has spent all summer planning how to stifle and suppress student organizing first and foremost but also how to mobilize existing university infrastructures of discipline to hurt student organizers the most. So I think we’re going to see just an alarming amount of violations of student speech and of academic speech as a whole. That’s not to say it wasn’t happening and it hasn’t been happening for literal decades. We know this. But it is certainly at such a crisis point that, you know, we also have state governors and governments and the federal government just throwing their all to prevent open inquiry as much as they possibly can.

The other threat though, and it’s a related one, is those of us who over-intellectualize what it means to stand in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians. And by that I mean, there are people who are making their career off of this genocide, and they may not recognize it as such. But if you’re able to give a press quote or show up to a protest, but you’re not there for the behind the scenes work of sitting in countless student conduct meetings as a support person, if you’re not speaking at an emergency Senate meeting after over a hundred of your students were arrested in a violent assault by 500 police officers called in from 17 different precincts, then you may need to rethink what it is that academic freedom means to you. 

Because the power that we have as faculty, and of course I mean faculty on the tenure line, people who are US citizens, there are many reasons that you cannot do this, but there are many more of us who can and are choosing not to. We need to put our bodies between these administrations, the police that they call in, and our students. That is the one thing that we are able to do that more of us need to be doing. So this is a call for us to recognize that simply being professional academics is not a form of defense of our students. And I think that’s something that all of us who are in these positions at the head of a classroom, you know, there’s more that we can do when we think together about how to protect our students and in that same way, how we are standing for Palestine and Palestinian liberation.

YULIA: What baffles me about faculty not showing up for their students is that they completely misrecognize the stakes of the fight. And it is precisely because these students will leave in four years. But faculty will stay at the institution that they allowed to repress and criminalize student organizing, call the police to brutalize their students and colleagues, fire graduate workers. That’s the institution you want to work at? I think we all, and especially faculty, need to take the cue from our students who take tremendous risks to challenge and change the institution that faculty will basically inherit.

SOPHIA: And we should mobilize that. This should always be a constant threat to our administrations. All right, you’re going to count on the fact that all the students in Students for Justice in Palestine and Jews Against White Supremacy and UC Divest are going to be gone in four years, but we are not going anywhere. We’re here. Sorry. You hired me to do what? You hired me to teach Black Studies? I’m going to teach Black Studies. And that means more than just knowledge for knowledge’s sake, right? The political imperative of Black Studies is that our knowledge production and what we recognize as knowledge production, which is not traditionally viewed as legitimate knowledge production, is always intended to be mobilized for the liberation and freedom of all people. It is an emancipatory field. It is an emancipatory practice. Or at least that’s my preferred interpretation of it. 

And right now what our students are demonstrating is that they are putting this knowledge to good use. They’re putting decades, legacies of standing up and shutting down the institution to practice, because that is what we taught them. And if our students can put in the labor of re-centering Gaza every time the administration wants to make this about vandalism, which I’m a huge fan of actually, or destruction of property, or whatever nonsense excuses that these administrators use; if our students can be the ones that are like, this is not about us getting arrested. This is about the suppression of support for Palestinians being free from genocide, from dispossession, from arrest without charge from torture, from sexual violence, from being blackmailed because they’re queer; if our students can be the ones constantly reminding us what is at stake in these movements that they are building, which is their university’s direct complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, then we have to do better about recentering that for ourselves all the time too.

YULIA: Absolutely. And bringing it back to the idea of the future, I noticed after the Wildcat Strike at UC Santa Cruz in 2019 and 2020 that I was a part of is that many graduate students who sought out UCSC for their graduate education after were inspired by the Wildcat Strike and wanted to come to UCSC to join that struggle and continue that fight. So I hope to see cohorts of undergraduate students come to this university because they were inspired by our students this past year and they want to continue that lineage of struggle. And that’s what faculty and university administrators will have to contend with. 

SOPHIA: And that’s what it is when you think about the future is this future memories of the past, which is bringing all of that movement memory forward and reinterpreting it and re-enlivening it to continue to inspire the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation. And it’s so important to see this as so deeply intertwined with all of these other future memories of the past that we bring forward. And what that means for how this movement work brings all of us together and forces us to contend with our heterogeneity and our many divergences and our many distinctions, because it is always in contending with those differences, that we reimagine how to be together and to be bonded together. Doesn’t require sameness. It actually mandates that we are always navigating our distinctions because that’s the only way in which these bonds are recrafted and crafted. And anyone who has ever had to sew a button onto their shirt knows is that the more times you add thread to that stupid ass thing, the stronger it gets.

YULIA: Well, Will I, for one, feel fortified by this conversation before going back to campus. 

SOPHIA: Well, happy new school year, everybody.

YULIA: Thank you so much, Sophia. See you probably on the literal barricades. Listeners, you can find links to Sophia Azeb’s writing in the Funambulist magazine in the episode notes, and on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. 

Until next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.