Launch of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism with Diana Buttu and Robin Kelley

Launch of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism with Diana Buttu and Robin Kelley

Yulia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, your host and amember of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today’s special episode is a recording of an event the Institute hosted just two weeks ago, on October 28, 2024. The event was the launch of the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism (JCSZ), which is an open source publication that is available on our website and we will link to in the episode notes. 

For the launch event, we invited two esteemed guest speakers, Diana Buttu and Robin D.G. Kelley, to reflect on the devastation wrought by Zionism over the past year and the past century. We asked Diana and Robin to help us think through the question of how Zionist historiography and memorialization of October 7 is used to gin up anti-Palestinian racism, justify this latest chapter of the Nakba, and rationalize colonial violence.  

We recorded this event before the US presidential elections so it does not come up all that much in the conversation. Except, Diana and Robin both highlighted the importance of the Critical Study of Zionism as a necessary tool of the anti-Zionist, anti-colonial struggle and that struggle continues no matter which genocide supporter was ultimately elected president of the United States. 

As always, you can find links and resources in the show notes and our website, criticalzionismstudies.org.  

Emmaia: Thanks so much to everyone for being here. I’m just going to give a very brief introduction before handing the event over to your moderator, Heike Schotten. My name is Emmaia Gelman. I’m the Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is largely a collective project among scholars and activists, and so is this journal that we’re launching today. It has been put together by an incredible committee, a collective, a publications work group. And it is just one of the sort of larger pieces of work that the Institute is doing, but also really critical intervention in the project that we set out to do. And the project that we set out to do almost exactly a year ago was to create space for the critical study of Zionism – a project that’s been underway for a very long time, since in fact, the advent of Zionism, but a project that is increasingly critical as the material force of Zionism is more and more destructive and genocidal. 

So nobody needs me to remind them that we are now past a year of genocide in Gaza that is extending to the West Bank, that is extending to Lebanon, and now Iran, Syria. In the United States, we know it’s close, right? It’s not just because it hasn’t had its full force here yet doesn’t mean it’s not at the door. So studying Zionism as a driver, as a politics, and sort of power structure that’s driving this violence is just incredibly important and also incredibly difficult, right?

So we launched a year ago with a conference on the IHRA definition. We couldn’t have known at that time that we would be a week into or just several days into a genocide, right. But the energy from that has been incredibly protective, and we have made space together for this work. The journal sort of concretizes that, and I just could not be prouder of the publications workgroup that put it together.

I really am appreciative of our ability to come together to gather renowned scholars who have been working on this for a long time and to try and see what we can do together. So the launch of the journal, I welcome you to a historical moment that I hope is a turn. It’s a marker in a project that’s been ongoing, and it’s a gathering of our power. I’m going to turn this over to Heike Schotten, who’s your moderator and get out of the way and just listen. I just want to express my enormous gratitude to all of you for being here.

Heike: It’s really a pleasure to be here and it’s really an honor to be joined by our two incredible speakers who insisted that I was not allowed to give them a proper introduction and I’m going to disregard their pleas in this regard, because as honored as we are to have them here with us, we wanted to honor them in turn. So I’ll just introduce them in the order in which they’re speaking, and then I’ll turn it over to them. And I also realize that in this crowd, probably they need no introduction, but I also feel like that’s all the more reason for us to remind ourselves of what distinguished and amazing accomplished scholar-activists that we have with us to commemorate this really important moment of institutionalizing, concretizing the intellectual study, critical study of Zionism.

 So Diana Buttu is a self-identified demographic threat and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. She is a lawyer specializing in negotiations, international law and international human rights law. She participated in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and served as an advisor and spokesperson for the negotiation support unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 2000 to 2005. She was also part of the team that assisted in the successful litigation of Israel’s Apartheid and Annexation Wall before the International Court of Justice. She has worked as a political analyst at the Institute for Middle East Understanding and held positions at Stanford, Harvard, and Birzeit universities. She frequently comments on Palestine for international news media outlets, such as CNN and the BBC and national US outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. She’s a political analyst for Al Jazeera International and a regular contributor to the Middle East Magazine. And she maintains a law practice in Palestine, focusing on international human rights law. 

Next we have Robin D.G. Kelley, who is a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine He is the Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History and Professor of African-American Studies at UCLA. He specializes in the history of social movements in the U.S., the African diaspora, and Africa, Black intellectuals, music, visual culture, contemporary urban studies, historiography and historical theory, poverty studies and ethnography, and organized labor. His essays have appeared in a wide variety of professional journals, as well as general publications, including the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, The New York Times, and Color Lines, Counterpunch, Souls, Black Renaissance, Renaissance Noir, Social Text, The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which he also serves as a contributing editor. Kelley is the author of several books. I mean, there’s so many, there’s so many. Highlights include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional !: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, which was selected as one of the top 10 books of the year by the Village Voice. He is the co author of Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, and a co-editor of Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Yeah, thank you so much, both of you for being here and Diana, I’ll turn things over to you.

Diana: Thank you. Thank you very much. I first want to begin by thanking you for the journal. It’s incredible. And thanking you for this space. To be a Palestinian means that you spend a lot of your time explaining and explaining again, explaining it again, and again, and again, and again. And it’s rare that we’re given a space where I don’t have to explain, right, where I don’t have to describe to people and tell people, actually, I’m human. And instead, I get to share a space with people who understand exactly what’s going on, what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment in this space. So thank you very much. And I also want to thank Robin Kelley for agreeing to appear alongside with me. I’m such a fan and so honored. And really, this is an incredible opportunity.

So in thinking about this talk, I was trying to think of something that all of you, as activists, scholars would maybe not necessarily know about Palestine, and the only thing that I could think of was to share my experience of what it’s like to be living in ‘48 Palestine at this moment, where, which is where I’ve lived for quite some time, but in particular at this moment. And so I’m going to share a few anecdotes about what life is like here so that that may be able to then illuminate just why this journalist so very important and what all and the incredible articles, by the way, that are in there that I’m looking forward to reading even more that give an academic voice to what is my personal experience.

So to be a Palestinian here now is to be somebody who’s been living in the aftermath of the Nakba and people often view the Nakba as just a singular event, but it wasn’t, and it isn’t. And the only way that the Nakba could have been carried out back in 1948 was through the very deep dehumanization that accompanies Zionism, the only way that a person, that somebody can live in the land of another people, in the home of another person, is if they so deeply dehumanize them as to somehow view that they have no right and that they do not belong.

And so that has been the experience of Palestinians from the creation of the state of Israel up until the current day. And, you know, oftentimes as a Palestinian, I’m told that I need to understand Zionism deeper, et cetera, but there’s no person better to understand Zionism than the people who’ve actually felt Zionism on their very bodies and with their very skin. And so, you know, I get tired of having to explain and to hear that there’s different forms of Zionism, cultural Zionism. At the end of the day, I’m the one who feels it on my skin and other Palestinians are the ones who feel it on our skin as well. And so with that said, I want to describe what it’s been like to live here over the course of the past year, in particular in the wake of this genocide and what Israel is doing. 

And I want to share a couple of anecdotes. So I live in a place called, I live in a city called Haifa. Haifa is the city that people often tout as being one of like coexistence. You hear this a lot, oh there’s Palestinians and there’s Israelis and they’re just living side by side. And yes, there are Palestinians living here and there are Israelis living here, but it’s hardly coexistence, it’s what I call sub-existence. We exist, and as long as we don’t raise our heads, as long as we don’t show that we’re Palestinian, as long as we, you know, make good hummus and good falafel, then we’re the good Arabs.

But the minute that we raise our heads and we raise our voices and say that we’re Palestinian is when you feel the weight of the state on you. And over the course of the past year, I’ve seen everything from militias being formed in my, I live in a mixed neighborhood, by the way, I’ve seen militias being formed in my neighborhood with these militias going around policing the neighborhood.

I know firsthand that my name is on the militia watch list, meaning that they are actually watching what I’m doing, what I’m saying. After appearing on television, I’m one of the few people who is inside Palestine, who’s actually going on international television and I’ll describe why in just a moment, after appearing on Al Jazeera and, you know, saying something so outrageous as it’s illegal to bomb hospitals, I was then doxxed with my home phone number, my personal phone number, my husband’s phone number, and my home address and my child’s school published in the open with the, the police called and with me being questioned for even making these statements about whether it’s legal to bomb hospitals. 

And yet, I’m just one person and I’m the privileged. Why am I the privilege? Because I’m actually the privileged of the privileged of the privileged. I was born in Canada, which means I have a Canadian passport. I don’t work with Israelis, and I don’t work in an Israeli hospital. And over the course of the past year, we’ve seen that hundreds of Palestinian students have been expelled or disciplined from universities, just for liking a social media post. Others, including a very well known singer named Dalal Abu Amneh was thrown in prison because she wrote on Facebook “there is no victor but God.” She, as a result, got death threats. Instead of the people who gave her the death threats being thrown in prison, instead of them being questioned over it, she was the one who was thrown in prison. After she was released, her neighbors, her very neighbors, were the ones who were protesting in front of her house, holding up signs saying that she should be raped, that she should be sent to Gaza, and that she should be stripped of her citizenship. Dalal Abu Amneh doesn’t live here any longer. She left, and I’m not surprised that she left. 

And so over the course of the past year, we’ve seen the systematic attempts to quiet, to go after, and to silence Palestinians, particularly those Palestinians who live inside ‘48, and while the attempts against me have failed, there’s still ongoing attempts. And yet at the same time, it’s important for people to understand that this face that the Israelis portrayed to the West is very different than the one that’s portrayed here, to inside the country. To the West, the face that is portrayed is that of the victim, of the person who is always under threat, who is always under risk of being demonized, of antisemitism. Inside the country, it’s a totally different face. And inside the country, it’s the image of being strong, of being the victor, of being the person who will crush you. 

And we see this in forms of things like the endless TikTok videos that I’m sure you have seen, where they’re very proudly talking about the war crimes that they’re committing. Just the other day, even in eulogizing a former soldier, a soldier who had been killed, in his eulogy, his friends and family said, “You loved to go and seek revenge, and kill children, and kill women, and blow up houses, even unauthorized.” So we see this all the time, over and over and over again with the TikToks, we’ve seen that Israeli soldiers have become TikTok stars and have gotten a very good following for displaying their war crimes. They even become TV stars, with them becoming commentators on some of the news channels. We even see that at one point in time of the top 10 songs, these are Hebrew songs, that had come out in the country, six of them, six of them were songs that were promoting genocide. One of them was so successful that it has 30 million views on YouTube and Billboard magazine actually ended up placing it as one of the songs on its Hanukkah list, as being a good Hanukkah song. The lyrics of that song say everything from, “We are going to turn Gaza into an amusement park. We were no longer going to just do a knock on your roof. We’re going to flatten your home. Watch out, Dua Lipa. Watch out, Mia Khalifa. We are coming for you.” I mean, it’s full on genocidal. 

And the last anecdote that I want to share is that of a person who is my neighbor, a woman I’ve known for about 14 years now, who is a self-described, when I say I’m a demographic threat, that’s the way I describe myself, because it’s kind of a joke, because that’s the way Israel labels us, but she describes herself as being a leftist. And this leftist neighbor of mine decided immediately after I think the first week of the attack on Gaza, that she was going to put up two bumper stickers on the back of her car. Bear in mind that she’s living in an Arab area. And the first bumper sticker that she put up was one in Hebrew that said “Together we will succeed.” And the second one was one that was in English that said “Finish them.” That’s, you know, the Nikki Haley line. So when I asked her what did the bumper stickers mean, why was she putting up these bumper stickers, she kind of feigned like I didn’t understand Hebrew, which I do. And she did this like, “Together, you know, you and me, together, together, you, me, you, me, we will succeed.” And I said, “There’s no, like, we’re not, we’re not together in this. I don’t believe in bombing kids. I don’t believe in bombing hospitals.” And then I said, “What does success look like?” And at the time that I questioned her there were probably about 10,000 kids, it’s now 17,000 kids that Israel has killed. And I said, “Sherry, you know, there’s 10,000 kids that Israel has killed. Is that really success?” And she kind of, she did this, she like threw her shoulders up and, you know, put her hands up and she says, “You know, what, what can you do? That’s the price. If you have a problem, take it up with the Hamas complaints department.” And it was that, that line, “You know, what can we do?” And this idea that she can so glibly just wash away and just, you know, shake away the killing of 10,000 kids, the flattening of the largest Palestinian city that is going to take 18 years just to clear the rubble in Gaza.

But for her, it’s so simple to dehumanize. That has become so part and parcel of Zionism, that it’s okay for you to just shrug your shoulders and say, 10,000 kids, what’s the problem? Take it up with the Hamas complaints department. And today, when I look at what’s happening in Gaza, well, to the West, the image is that of the victim. To us, what we see happening is there are now boat tours to take you along the coast of Gaza so you can point out where your new plot of land is. There are now places where you can use high powered binoculars to see Gaza burn, particularly in the north, where they are starving Gaza. And you can even go to the southern part, where borders Egypt, and block vital humanitarian aid from getting in as they have done by putting up bouncy castles and distributing cotton candy to children. And so our genocide has become their entertainment. Our genocide has become their entertainment and that is what Zionism is about. That is what Zionism is about. I’m going to stop here because I don’t want to take up more time. And again, I thank you for this space.

Robin: Wow. That was, that was very powerful. And I’m trying to process all that and not surprising, but you know, it’s where we are. Anyway, just thank you. Thank the organizers. Thank the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, of which I’m a board member. I love being on the board of the Institute, despite the fact that I never began my career thinking I’d ever study Zionism. But this is part of the lesson I think we’re all trying to grapple with. So let me, let me also say one thing, just how important it is to have Diana, who’s really a treasure for all of us doing this work. I mean you know, she carries a lot on her shoulders and for some reason never ages. I don’t know how that happens, but there’s so much weight there. 

But let me begin what I’m going to begin with part of what we’re doing today is commemorating lots of things, but I want to commemorate recognize November 10th, 1975, which is when Resolution 3379 of the United Nations was adopted, and that is, of course, the UN General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism and racial discrimination. So I know that next year will be a major anniversary, and we’re going to, as the Institute, we’re going to do something around this, because when I was reading Emmaia’s beautiful introduction to the journal, framing the project of the Institute and the journal, you know, it would not be controversial if, you know, in writing, you know, what was written there, that we substitute racism for Zionism. In other words, as Emmaia says, Zionism should be studied as a power structure mobilized by ideas, institutions, and actors, and leveraging material resources. And, you know, of course, we’re opposed to racism, and thus we’re opposed to Zionism and call for its elimination. And, you know, Zionism, as the introduction also lays out, is not limited to any particular region. It is like W.E.B. DuBois said at the turn of the century, when he wrote, “The color line belts the world.” And we can say that Zionism is a global phenomenon upheld by people who have never set foot in a synagogue, never stepped foot in Palestine, never read Theodor Herzl, right? It is an ideology that has evolved over time like any ideology, and it’s marked by different historical conjunctures. And you think about, like, what are those conjunctures. There’s so many, but think about from the Balfour Declaration, the Arab Revolt of 1936, the Holocaust, the Nakba, which is ongoing, the creation of the Zionist state, the Naksa, the 1973 war, the rise of OPEC and the global slump, the invasion of Lebanon, the first and second intifadas, the rise of the neocon movement and its alliance with Christian fundamentalism, which is driving, has been driving war on Iran for a long time, Oslo, 9/11 and the war on terror, Hezbollah’s defeat of Israel in the second Lebanon war, Israel’s so-called withdrawal from Gaza, followed by two decades of continuous war and so forth. We can go on and on. Each of these conjunctures had global implications. They were never contained within the borders of Palestine or the Eastern Mediterranean or West Asia, each related to the history and hegemony of Zionism.

The Al Aqsa flood, October 7th, represents the key conjuncture that we’re still in now. And it also marks the greatest human catastrophe, concentrated catastrophe, facing the Palestinian people. When I say concentrated, what I mean by that, it’s not the beginning, and as Diana pointed out, you know, you go back to 1948 to the present and it’s part of a continuum, which ebbs and flows in terms of intensity, but it’s still there. 

But it also, you know, October 7th also represents the greatest crisis for Zionism. I mean, we’ve witnessed the largest demonstrations in support of Palestine and critical of Israel in the history of the United States and possibly in the West. And with that has come waves of repression. We’ve also seen like the biggest, most extensive political witch hunt since the second Red Scare, the 40s and 50s. We’re also in the middle of a struggle that, you know, one year later has not abated, not one bit, the violence continues to escalate, not just in northern Gaza, but across the region. And of course, here, in the U.S., and throughout other parts of the world, people are still being fired for wearing keffiyehs, you know, or engaging in peaceful protests. 

We witnessed this whole sort of slew of so called antisemitism task forces that are peddling false narratives, some coming out of Columbia, some coming out of my institution, UCLA, and elsewhere, all continuing to use, if not explicitly, certainly implicitly, the IHRA definition of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism and any criticism of Israel. And again, this is after witnessing the mass murder of way more than 42,000 people, you know, way more. I mean, the numbers are still yet to be determined. And, with this coming presidential election, unfortunately, it’s not a referendum on US policy toward Israel. That’s another conversation we can have, but it’s definitely not a referendum because no matter who’s elected, we’re going to see more of the same with respect to, supporting this war.

Let me just kind of close very quickly by talking about what I know best – the university. University administrators, no matter how DEI rainbow they may be, you know, no matter what identities they represent, they’ve spent the better part of the summer devising even more punitive and draconian measures to stifle any sort of Palestine advocacy. Our students just recently erected a Gaza Solidarity Sukkah and they faced the full force of UCLA’s new police state, which is, by the way, headed by this guy, Rick Braziel, who’s making like $54,000 a month to basically, you know, turn the university into a police state. And, oh, fun fact, I should add this, UCLA spent $12.3 million to suppress the anti-war protests against Israel on our campus, basically dismantling our Palestine solidarity encampment. And this is spring alone, just $12.3 million in spring alone. $11.8 million of that went specifically to security and law enforcement.

Again, this is just the spring. UC system-wide spent $29.1 million, which meant that UCLA accounted for 41 percent of the entire UC-wide budget, suppressing Palestine advocacy, suppressing anti-war activists. And we recently learned that our campus UCPD has increased the annual budget for weapons requests by double, like doubled it. And they’re asking for more sponge and foam bullets, more pepper balls, more projectile launchers, and more drones. Meanwhile, while our students are having their sukkah encampment sort of torn down. On October 7th, students on our campus, mainly from Hillel, placed 1,200 Israeli flags on the lawn with no disruptions. 

Which brings me to this question of the commemoration, of the memorialization of October 7th which, you know, it’s been written about, I’m not going to say much about it, but we have to remember, and I think we all agree, that the memorialization began on October 8th, 2023, and it has not stopped. Every day, vigils, rallies, and then I live, you know, in LA, I drive by Beverly Hills on the way to UCLA every day. And if you look in that park on Santa Monica Boulevard, they had 1,200 Israeli flags protected by private security and the police, Beverly Hills Police and which I think is so interesting, because I’m always reminding people, like, why do you have 1,200 Israeli flags and keep saying that 1,200 Israelis were killed when the actual numbers are 695 Israeli civilians, 24 Arab Israeli citizens, that is to say Bedouin for the most part, 71 Thai and Nepalese migrant workers, and 373 police and soldiers, right?

So basically, just in closing, all this is to suggest that we have a lot of work to do, that this institute is incredibly important, that the study of Zionism is a project that we all have to engage in, not to uphold it as some kind of, you know, legitimate field to legitimize Zionism, but rather like the study of racism, it’s the study to be able to dismantle it. And what we know, even at this point in time, as much as we’re seeing a kind of groundswell of opposition to this war, the end of Zionism is not a fait accompli. Anyone who studies racism knows that this cannot be the case because racism, Zionism, rises like Banquos, ghost. It keeps rising, which means we have to fight vigilantly and constantly, not just against the ideology of Zionism, but as practice and that is to say its colonial structure. However, to say that Palestine is the last colonial outpost, the last anti-colonial war implies that the rest of the world is decolonized. And if this were true, then the nations of the world would have intervened and dismantled the settler colonial state of Israel long ago.

The genocide persists precisely because the colonial order on a global scale is still intact. It just takes on a different appearance. It takes a form of transnational, multinational, non-national, corporate entities that drive and manage global production of commodities, finance, services, security, violence, and all the beneficiaries of genocidal war. You know, we know, I mean, the most obvious ones are Hewlett Packard, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and the like. And genocide is ultimately not about weapons anyway, or machines, or measuring efficiency of mass killing. It is about death and bodily destruction, erasure of entire families, cultural destruction, the dismemberment both physically and emotionally of people, of children buried under the rubble, who starve to death, who die from dehydration. It is about limbs missing. 

So one thing just to leave us with is that we are facing a catastrophe. No one denies that. But catastrophe is one of these interesting terms that derives from the Greek catastrophin, which means to overturn, which mirrors the definition of revolution. Catastrophe originally referred to the conclusion or final event of a dramatic theater work. And today, it refers to misfortune, to ruin, the destructive natural event that occurs. Edward Glissant’s metaphor of the Middle Passage, the world’s greatest catastrophe as a womb in an abyss through which new world culture was born in the amniotic fluid of unremitting violence, perhaps best ties catastrophe to rebirth in revolution.

So if anything, our work ahead as anti-Zionists, as anti-colonialists is to make revolution and hopefully that’s what we’re here for.

Heike: Wow. Thank you. I kind of need a minute just to take all that in. As I was listening to both and as I was watching the comments filtering in on the chat, one thing that struck me was a real sense of gratitude and community and belonging and maybe a feeling of dis-alienate, like the opposite of alienation and being here and coming together. And I know that that was one of the motives or animating drives for Emmaia and the founding of this institute to create resistant space for people who are otherwise separated out and taken apart and taken down by Zionism and ostracized from one another. And Diana, you began by saying what a relief it was to be in a space where you didn’t have to explain yourself. And also what a relief it was to be in a space where no one was explaining to you the infinite complexities and varieties and multiplicities of Zionism, which I appreciated a lot. And you offered, you know, who better to understand or explain Zionism than those upon whose bodies it is visited. And you concluded with an alternative, definitely, you said a number of things about Zionism that it’s dehumanization, that in Haifa, it’s not coexistence, but sub-existence. But you concluded by saying that our genocide has become their entertainment. And this is Zionism. 

And Robin, you opened your remarks by saying, you know, that you had never thought that you would come to study Zionism, but as a scholar of racism, it became obvious and inevitable that that would become part of your work and concluded with this very stirring call to rethink the possibilities of catastrophe. I guess, maybe to just put a very broad question on the table for us, would each of you think about, or how do each of you imagine the ways in which the kind of solidaristic community of critical thought and study the Institute is trying to convene and with this journal to publish and institutionalize and formalize, what do you see as the relationship between that work of critical Zionism studies and these projects of, I hesitate to put words in your mouth, Diana, but of rehumanization, of this rebirth that you’re talking about, Robin. Like, how do we connect the violent estrangement of us from each other that Zionism creates and how does the critical study of Zionism undo that estrangement at the same time as it also forges, Inshallah, a resistant practice, a resistant praxis in the face of Zionism or in response to Zionism.

Diana: I actually don’t know where to begin on this. I think in part, you know, Robin said something that really connected with me. And his point about when you’re looking at racism, one of the paths that racism leads you to is to this study of Zionism and the problem as a Palestinian, of course, is that we’re now in a place where it’s just such huge levels of dehumanization, which also accompanies racism, right? It’s the same, it’s the same structure that you’re left with at which, how do we begin to tackle this? And so for some Palestinians, it’s been, we need to put a face, you know, we need to start humanizing. We need to start putting this human face on who the victims of Zionism are.

On another level, I think that it’s also important to highlight what Zionism is not just from the standpoint of its victims, but what it inherently is. And that’s where I think that there’s some work that could be done on this. And so when you ask about, like, how do we connect with this violent estrangement I actually don’t know. I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because right now being in the throes of all of this and, and living with this on a daily basis, I just don’t know. 

And Robin also said something that connected with me, which is that it isn’t obvious that the outcome is going to be the dismantlement of Zionism, and I agree with that. And yet the optimist in me has got to live with this knowledge or with this belief that it is going to see its conclusion. And so one of the problems for me has been, and now I’m getting personal, is that on the one hand, you know, I keep seeing exactly how this country is, Israel, how it’s imploding and how society is turning onto itself. And on the other hand, I see just how much money and how much support is going into propping this project up from the outside. And, and I’m left wondering, at what point does the money run out? Or at one, at what point is it that it’s too irredeemable to, to sustain as a project? And so all to say, I just don’t know.

Robin: Yeah, it’s a hard question. And I should say that I completely agree that we don’t have a choice, but to move as if we can dismantle Zionism. We don’t have a choice. I mean, this is what it means, because of course, Zionism is racism. It’s settler colonial ideology. And so, that’s how we move.

To say that it’s not a fait accompli is really pushing back against the people who are like saying, “Oh, well, liberal humanism will prevail over Zionism.” But liberal humanism is a problem. You know, I go back and I think about the terms that people are using about humanitarian catastrophe, for example. And this devastating war in the way that Kamala Harris could so easily say, “Oh, such a tragedy, such a tragedy. But Israel has a right to defend itself.” I mean, this is, that’s liberal humanism at its height. And what struck me, you know, was how the lead up to October 7th, I mean, I’ll never forget this. We watched week by week as Palestinians in the West Bank were being killed by settlers. Right? Week by week by week, we saw it escalate. And that was also the same time that Oppenheimer, right, was released around the bombing, around the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there’s that scene in the film, which I hate that film by the way, but that’s another story, where Oppenheimer is like, you know, he’s looking at the detonation of the atomic bomb and he quotes the Bhagavad Gita, and he says something like, “Now I become death” or whatever. And, you know, that happens, which is supposed to present him as a consummate humanist. He reads Sanskrit, he worships at the altar of poetry, he’s all that stuff, literature, classical music. But of course he’s like the consummate humanist, because that is how it is. He’s the same humanist who says, we need to, we need to see the maximum capacity of the bomb by bombing civilian, by bombing cities to see the capacity. And as long as we hold on to the idea of a kind of liberal humanism as opposed to critique of liberal humanism, it allows for this, what Sylvia Winter talks about in terms of the creation of the human subject as European man, it allows for the kind of hierarchy of who’s human, who’s not. The whole history of the reinvention of the Palestinian as terrorists is part of that dehumanization where you can witness this massive killing and still, it’s so hard to get people who call themselves humanists to say this is completely unacceptable. And yet, 1,200 people, you know, 700 of whom are Israeli civilians, that is a catastrophe equivalent to the Holocaust. That is foundational to liberal humanists. So we have to have a critique of that in order to move forward. I think part of the Institute’s task is both to, you know, interrogate critique Zionism, but understand Zionism emerges on the grounds of liberal humanism – it was not an opposite. That is the foundation of it. You know, the idea of the Zionist state as the outpost of democracy, the civilizing mission, not as a colonial outpost, but as one that could kind of save the land and eliminate the people. So all that stuff I think is really important in terms of what our project is and, and not get caught up in using the numbers of killed and murdered, maimed as like, this is the weight that’s going to justify reforming the Zionist state or using the protests against Netanyahu as somehow evidence that there’s a human soul that is have to emerge and new regime and everything’s going to be okay. It’s not because the foundation of settler colonialism is humanism.

Heike: Well said, well said. We have a question in the chat about the relationship between language and education and the anti-Palestinian moral depravity that you were discussing, Diana. And the question says, what are educators and linguists in Israel doing or not doing in relation to language? So that and then maybe just a broader question for the two of you in terms of language and education, but also the fact that resistance and protest is largely in the U.S. at least taking place on college campuses. We seem to be at least in the United States in a moment of people more and more seeing that what Zionism is, precisely what Diana said was the sort of the task for the Institute is to understand what Zionism is. What does that mean? What does that do for us, for Palestinians, for anti-Zionism, for movement work, for solidarity? 

Diana: You know, so I want to pick up on something that Robin ended with and then I’ll answer the question, where he was talking about the protests that are happening inside Israel. And then I’m going to tie this into the issue of language. So, before October of 2023, there had been I think it was like nine sustained months of protests inside the country. And they got a lot of international attention. And the reason that they got a lot of international attention was because they were huge. They were huge. But one thing that was glossed over in all of those protests was that those protests were not about Palestinians at all. They weren’t at all about Palestinian lives. They weren’t about the occupation. In fact, when there were attempts to bring in anti-occupation, meaning the two state solution people, when they even attempted to join the protests, they were kind of shoved into a corner and said, thank you very much, but you’re not really welcome here. You don’t belong here, you know, to take up your little space, but you can, you can go in the corner. And I say this because you could at the time have been a person who’s an Israeli settler who has killed Palestinians and be partaking in these anti-Netanyahu protests. One of the reasons that the English language spokesperson for Netanyahu during, in the aftermath of October 7th, Ilan Levy or whatever his name was, one of the reasons that he was fired was because, and here’s a guy who justified the killing of thousands, of flattening Gaza, you name it, the reason that he was fired was because he had been found to have been participating in one of the the judicial reform protests. Okay, so again, you could have been somebody who was protesting being anti-Netanyahu and at the same time being violently anti-Palestinian. 

And the same is true now. The same is true now. Now there are more and more protests that are happening. And I’ve been to many of them. They’re right up the street from my house. And at these protests which have gone on for quite some time, it happened just last week, but I’ll tell you what, up until last week, you would never even see anything in relation to Palestinians. It was “Bring them home now,” “Cut a deal,” but the whole focus of it was Israeli-centered. Palestinians don’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what we’ve done to them. They’re not human, so it doesn’t matter. Just last week, a guy held up, this poor guy, held up a sign that said Palestinian Lives Matter. This guy had like all of the Israeli press surrounding him. Like, what do you mean Palestinian Lives Matter? What do you mean Palestinian Lives Matter? And the journalists actually interrogated him about him holding up a sign that said Palestinian Lives Matter. These are the same journalists, by the way, who are now in Southern Lebanon and participating in the bombing of Southern Lebanon and blowing up houses. This is true. And yet interrogating him over Palestinian Lives Matter. 

Why do I say this? Because this is the state of Israel now, and when you look at that and you look down at the way educators are behaving, this isn’t a society that is looking at language and looking introspectively and asking critically, what have we done? It’s quite the opposite, that unless you buy the line, hook, line, and sinker that what Israel is doing is right, and that it’s for self-defense, then you are ousted. And just the other day, I mean, reminiscent of some horrifying things that happened in the U.S., a 12-year-old girl who is a Palestinian girl, wears hijab, was at her school, in an Israeli school, in the Naqab, in the Negev, where she dared to say, that you know, kids in Gaza are starving. She was surrounded by a mob that then started jumping up and down next to her saying may your village burn. And the girl ended up being, the Palestinian girl, ended up being disciplined at school for daring to say that children in Gaza shouldn’t be forced to starve. So this is what Israeli society is about, is that you can on the one hand claim to be left wing and on the other hand, if a person dares to hold up a sign that says Palestinian Lives Matter, or dares to question anything that the state is doing, it’s that you become the enemy of the state and and enemy of the state really means something here. It truly, truly, truly means something here. So, you know, the levels of resistance that are happening here, right now, the level of resistance that’s happening in Palestine is people just trying to stay alive. That’s the level of resistance. They’re thinking now is just stay alive, just weather this, because us staying alive, our existence at this point is resistance, our very existence. And that’s the level of where we’re at with this society.

Heike: Is there anything you want to add to the conversation, Robin? Before we wrap up on the subject of language, knowledge of Zionism. 

Robin: Right. Well, I feel like it’s all been said. I do want to just mention, I don’t know if this is helpful, but it’s amazing how so many of those stories that you’re telling, Diana, are replicated here. Just a very quick anecdote. My daughter’s violin teacher teaches all these kids in Beverly Hills, right? This one really quiet Korean kid – family are Korean nationals that moved here – went to Beverly Hills. He did an art project where he just, this is very early on, had a picture, right, of Palestinian kids and saying something like “They have a right to live.” It was Beverly Hills High School. They drove him and his family out of that school, drove them out. I mean, I saw the artworks, a sweet kid who never speaks, beautiful violinist, and they drove them out. And that’s Beverly Hills High School, right?

So it’s amazing when you think about the absurdity of saying, “What do you mean Palestinian Lives Matter?” It’s as bad as that protester in Germany who held up a sign saying Jews Against Genocide got beaten by the police. And he’s like, “What should I say? Jews for genocide? Like, would you leave me alone then?” I mean, this is how bad it is. And I think it just adds a layer of urgency, but also the kind of, in terms of language, there’s this sort of double speak that is kind of acceptable. You know, and it’s in terms of other manifestations of racism, there’s certain things that you can get away with with respect to talking about Palestinians that you can’t get away with, even with people who have experienced historic racism for generations and centuries.

You know, to even criminalize “Palestine will be free.” What you’re saying is this negation. That is to say, “Palestine can’t be free.” We’re just, it’s not acceptable. So, so if they’re not for freedom, what are they? This is sort of where we are. This is the nature of the world we’re in. And it’s a very dangerous place, but we have to do, you know, this work is very important to try to overturn that.

Heike: Many thanks to both of you for this really important and sobering conversation. I think as we wrap up, I’m going to turn things over to my colleague and comrade Terri Ginsberg, also a member of the publications working group who helped us bring this issue to fruition. Terri. Terri: Thank you, Heike. So we have reached the conclusion of our journal launch on behalf of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I would like to thank everyone who’s made this event possible, especially Diana Buttu, Robin D.G. Kelley for their participation, insightful commentary. I also want to thank the journal editorial collective for their sustained effort towards a successful publication of this first issue. The contributors of articles and other texts for their commitment to the journal and to last October’s Institute conference on Battling the IHRA Definition from which the contributions were drawn, most of them. And last but not least, today’s audience members for your attendance and useful questions and commentary. The Journal for a Critical Study of Zionism will publish its second issue in the coming months. That issue will also draw from last year’s Battling the IHRA Definition conference, and subsequent issues will expand upon topics raised by these interventions. Together, we hope to build a historically informed, materially grounded, ideologically attuned, still very much needed, perhaps more than ever, platform for anti-Zionist analysis and critique. So if you haven’t already done so, please sign up on the Institute website, that’s criticalzionismstudies.org to receive notices about the journal and other Institute projects and activities. For now, I want to wish everybody safety and health as we move forward in this struggle during these very precarious and difficult times and wish you a do.