Liberatory Institutions with Bassam Haddad

Liberatory Institutions with Bassam Haddad

Emmaia:  Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. We’re coming back to you in a time of expanded crisis. Palestinian students are being arrested by ICE for organizing against the U.S. and Israeli genocide, and beyond taking political prisoners ICE has arrested more people in the last month than in any month ever. Yale suspended a legal scholar because an AI-generated Zionist website made allegations about her. Columbia, which seems to never get enough of punishing its students and faculty at the request of Zionists and white nationalists, got a letter from the Trump regime saying it wasn’t satisfied, so it expelled, suspended, and revoked degrees from 22 more students. In short, many of our institutions are captured. At the same time, resistance is mounting as we figure out how this thing is moving. And it doesn’t depend on those captured institutions. It’s our movements, and also our skills — our shared knowledge about how power works and how it can be challenged, our ability to do actual research.

So in this episode of Unpacking Zionism, which was recorded a few weeks ago actually, we’re talking about “liberatory institutions” as a keyword for critical Zionism studies — we’re talking about building institutions that resist capture. Institutions of knowledge, accountable to communities and principles, not bound by capital and power structures. 

I’m talking with Bassam Haddad from the Arab Studies Institute. The Arab Studies Institute or ASI is such a beautiful model for ICSZ, it holds so much knowledge, and for me, as a scholar/researcher inside the U.S., it’s an invaluable bridge to ideas coming from outside of the empire. You might know it through its projects like its online magazine Jadaliyya, or Bassam’s teach-in series and curriculum guides at Gaza in Context, which have been a beacon of information and analysis during the genocide. We’ll link all of this in the show notes, and it’s all connected to the website arabstudiesinstitute.org.

Usually we center these episodes on a single piece of writing, but this time we’re looking at ASI as a whole knowledge production project — one that’s a model of what we need as universities fail and as the very idea of knowing things, histories, realities, is under really brutal attack.

Welcome and thank you, Bassam! Let’s introduce you.

Bassam: Good afternoon. I am very happy to be joining you. My name is Bassam Haddad. I teach at George Mason University. I am the founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program there and associate professor at the Schar School and have been running a solidarity-based knowledge production organization titled Arab Studies Institute for 33 years now. And I have been quite active recently in producing knowledge with a very large team on the genocide in Gaza. And a few other things that you know, probably can come up as we continue the conversation.  

Emmaia: You’ve been part of Palestine/anti-Zionist/anti-colonial work that bridges academic and activist research for a long time. Can you run down some of that history? Curious especially about how activist/organizing work has led to academic work, or vice versa — how have they flowed into each other?

Bassam: In 2012 we had Ted X come and ask me to do a session on ASI. It’s on YouTube titled Building Solidarity Based Organizations in a Thoroughly Marketized World, which they didn’t like the title, but that’s what I wanted to do. And that’s the theme of what we have been doing since 1992, 33 years now, which is basically we’re a solidarity-based organization that challenges the precepts and motivations and incentives and the entire existence of market-based institutions. We actually, at the Arab Studies Institute, starting in the early 1990s, 1992, I was a student at Georgetown University, I was a master student working on the Middle East — and many of us, including myself, were eager to step out of the ivory tower. And to do that was not easy because there were costs to doing that, even as a professor, so let alone being a student and being sort of subservient to the powers that be. And what we wanted to do is, I mean the initial idea, the germ of the of the idea of the Arab Studies Institute, was a peer-reviewed research journal as as a goal.

So we started in 1992 something called the Arab Studies Journal, and we were intent on providing research based resources, both for academics and for people interested in the region who are not academics: journalists, activists, artists and so on. And that was from the very beginning our mindset that we need to go beyond the walls of academia, not least because most people actually do not read academic papers. And then actually we moved from that, we moved to the realm of documentaries, like full fledged, international level documentaries. Don’t ask me how we did this, but we did it. And we were lucky to be very successful. And then we went to the realm of social media and daily analysis via our storefront institution in 2010, which until today has become a sort of emblematic of what the Arab Studies Institute is, Jadaliyya, which is an online publication. So we’ve moved from peer reviewed journal to documentaries to the online publication. And then in between, we had several projects. 

ASI encompasses five projects. The first was the peer-reviewed journal. The second was the film and documentary collective called Quilting Point, which is a term borrowed from psychoanalysis. Yeah, it’s a bit much. And then we moved to a research arm called Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs in 2008. And then we created Jadaliyya, the online publication, in 2010. And then the last one, the fifth one was a publishing house that aimed to redefine and rethink what is publishable within the academic field. And that is called Tadween Publishing. Everything is under arabstudiesinstitute.org. So this is the nutshell. 

Emmaia: How do you even take that leap? I mean, when we think of rigorous study, the idea of disciplines, we think of the university, right. It’s so authoritative. Even though we question that all the time from inside those institutions, we know they have a real gravity. So to have an alternative vision of producing knowledge that is rigorous, authoritative, academic even, is gutsy. And then to actually build an institution somewhat outside of authority of the university is a big lift. In creating the Arab Studies Institute, you weren’t ditching rigorous research, right, rather, reorienting research and, just as important, reorienting the sharing of research with public audiences, to intervene in power in ways that academia isn’t set up to care about. Maybe just tell us a little bit about how you even did that.

Bassam: We were too ambitious. And when we talked about doing this, and we tried to ask for funding and we went to the director of the center at Georgetown University, telling them we’re going to start this publication and this potential institution. I would talk about it at length, and then at the end they come up to me and they just pat me on the back and say, “Good luck,” because it just sounded grandiose. But we actually wanted from the very beginning to create an alternative reference point to knowledge production on the Middle East, that bridges academia and the public realm, given that we were in Washington, D. C. when we did this. And the emphasis from the very beginning was on the U.S. critical social justice, to identify mechanisms of exploitation at the social, economic and political and cultural levels. With time, when we realized that most people are moving from traditional sources of news to new sources of news, what is called new media and beyond, we had to adjust our approach without ever relinquishing our interest in text, and our interest in history and context.

People want, you know, soundbites, people want quick thoughts. Although we do these things I’m critiquing, we are not confined to this sort of material. And that allowed us to maintain a presence in academia at the highest level through the publication of a peer reviewed journal and all the other research that we were doing, as well as address broader public through the films, documentaries, online publications, and even the publishing house, which actually was like a repository, not the best word, for a lot of our material to actually be in print and be available online, you know, forever in an accessible form. 

Emmaia: Right you’re pointing out this is creative work, the undertaking of putting ideas into the public sphere. I’m thinking about how different that is from the way imperial knowledge institutions have often worked, like the neoconservative institutions that ginned up the Iraq war, that ginned up orientalism, the idea of clash of civilizations, which they did by pumping ideas and policy proposals directly from the academy into the upper echelons of power. And actually a lot of this is your own work, your research, filmmaking, public conversations, alongside the work of so many other thinkers in ASI. I meant to ask for that background — what’s your work, and how does it relate to the interventions that you’re trying to make with the Arab Studies Institute?

Bassam: My work is essentially in the field of political economy, and I focus on political economy of developing countries and in particular on the Middle East. Instead of working and thinking through the lens of culture, I look at the actual challenges that developing countries colonized, or not, by mainly the West — challenges that put them at a huge disadvantage because they have gained their independence from these colonial powers, mainly because these colonial powers have been exhausted by WWII and therefore, they had to sort of relinquish their the former colonies. And developing countries therefore explain to us what actually happens in the context of a world where certain economies have established economies of scale, mostly by actually colonizing other countries.

And we begin asking questions of why some countries are behind others. And the answers are seldom about the history, the answers are usually about culture. Culture is the black box that we throw everything into that we don’t understand, and studying developing countries and the political economy in particular of developing countries in effect debunks and dispels these narratives that are culture-based and border on prejudice and racism and so on. So that’s my work, and my focus is on Syria. I’ve written a book on Syria. I’m writing a second book. I co-edited a volume on political economy of the Middle East with Joel Beinin and Sherene Seikaly in the past couple of years, and have written extensively on everything from politics of the Middle East to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and focused quite a bit on the Arab uprisings. And I’m very much interested in critical theory, and the kinds of things that allow us to explain what has been unfolding, not just now, but you know, beginning in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and until today. 

And here we are. I’m now trying to deal with, like everyone else, with a genocide that is unfolding. And even though we have a sort of a break, the broader patterns that got us here are still in effect in the West Bank and they are being intensified. And there is basically no hope to understand why things happen without understanding how knowledge is produced. If we think that knowledge actually reflects what needs to be known, as opposed to reflecting a particular power structure that is in place, that is actually wielding mechanisms to reproduce that power and to justify that power, we are basically lost. And that is that is why the work of the Arab Studies Institute culminated in the production of this project called the Knowledge Production Project, you can look at it at knowledgeproduction.com, which traces all knowledge that’s been produced on the Middle East in the English language since 1979 and divides it into nine databases that looks at all such knowledge from all books produced, all peer reviewed articles, all TV shows, films, and documentaries produced on the Middle East in the English language, all think-tank papers produced on the Middle East. Which gives you a really good look into how politics is connected to the production of knowledge even outside the governmental realm. And also all websites that actually address the region and a few other databases.And that ends up giving you a set of data that is visually stimulating that connects all of these things together, such that you begin to see how, for instance, the four basic institutions that staff, speakers, and researchers and experts as they circulate among them — media, government, academia and think tanks.

And you can begin, if you zoom out, you can begin seeing the connections between these institutions and what emerges as a cohort or as a clique. For instance, if you look at the 1990s and 2000s, you begin to see the connections between the people that did XYZ outside government, and then went into government after being in think tanks, and actually exercised the same judgments that they had outside and then went on after government because of change of administration to work and teach at universities and went on to actually become media experts.

But then if you again zoom out, you see that it’s certain groups basically dominating certain aspects and certain topics like the oil lobby, the Israel lobby, the gun lobby and what have you. Therefore, if you look at, for instance, this project, it becomes easier to understand. Aha. So this is how these things happen.  

The point is that this connection between knowledge and power, which is the bedrock of knowledge production is what ASI actually works on. You can look at Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State, and then she had an office at Georgetown University close to my office when I was at Georgetown after I finished my Ph.D. And then she is on the media as an expert around that time, and she’s the person who said that yes, killing half a million people in Iraq was worth it, which is a cliche now, but she actually said it, and they actually did. Carry out policies that killed a lot of people in Iraq. That is the sanctions.

And then, of course, that comes after the the first invasion, which was of a different nature that’s after Saddam went into Kuwait. So that’s one person, but you can look at many others, you know, whether it’s I mean, Richard Perle, you can look at David Frum… there’s actually very few people that were involved in that era based on our work, for instance. Because the work was produced in the 2000 teens, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, addressing that period. And you can see a number of people that are, that have circulated through these different organization, type of organizations, the four organization, as I shared, media, government, academia, and think tanks. 

And they basically constitute the, the, the group of people, the cabal that ended up pushing George Bush into the Iraq war. Now you have another sort of, a cabal, from the previous administration. Kirby Miller and the Secretary of State Blinken, as well as the man on the inside, McGurk, and a few others. So you look at these people. And you trace what they’ve done before and you see that they also make the rounds and what that tells us is that, it’s actually very narrow circles that end up determining things at the end. 

Emmaia: That’s a great exposition of why it’s so important to have liberatory knowledge institutions. What kind of work have you been able to do because you built ASI as a place to do it? And how did it allow you to counter and resist the ways that more traditional institutions, whether universities or think tanks funded by corporate money, have fed into repressive political forces?

Bassam: We were always aware and intent on studying the public realm and public discourses and the players within it and direction things are taking. And when we first started, we were simply interested in the production of a, journal that was aiming to be completely viewed.

And it did become clearly viewed was to produce scholarship that has been given short shrift in academia. At that time in the 1990s , the college campus was literally a bastion of free thinking. It’s never perfect, but compared to today, today we’re realizing how much of a bastion of free thinking or relatively free thinking it was and free production of knowledge.

In fact, it was so much so that the emergence of think tanks, especially right wing think tanks connected to power, state media, and money. The emergence of think tanks in the 1990s, the burgeoning of think tanks, was an effort to counter the, quote unquote, the liberal free thinking formula and context of universities.

And this is why you began to see a mushrooming of these think tanks. And we actually have a project on think tanks under the Knowledge Production Project. You can see it, look at it at knowledgeproduction.com where you look at how these think tanks became dominant in almost every field of knowledge production, not least foreign policy in order to combat or to balance the quote unquote liberalism of university knowledge production, university based knowledge production.

On average, not everything produced by the university was actually good or liberal or critical or any of these things. However, definitely today those think tanks that emerged to do this job have done this job. Now, universities are trying to emulate think tanks. Because of their ability to succeed in the market, which aligns with the growing neoliberalization of universities, the commodification of universities to make them more like businesses, which started in the 1990s, interestingly, units and departments actually emulating think tanks, focusing less on the production of knowledge that comports with the social sciences in our field, for instance, and focus more on knowledge that comports with the needs of state policy.

Emmaia: What you’re talking about seems to me, is the need to have research reach people, and for ideas, facts, histories, reality to be the basis of popular thought. Not just academic thought. We’re really seeing the dangerous, deadly effect right now of people losing their connection to knowledge on a large scale. And those of us whose work is literally to examine power, to research how it works, how it hides, how it changes — when we’re in the academy, we’re often too far removed from people, and from the social movements even that drive change, to be in conversation with them.

Bassam: Absolutely. Academics are, are, are actually falling by the wayside because frankly academics are some of the most inefficient social and political conduits on earth, not because they are lazy, but because they’re too careful and Even though care is what I’ve been preaching the whole time and you know being true to one’s mission there are times that require a much more efficiently productive approach. Academics would sit around and they see a problem and they want to solve it. And then the next thing somebody says, all right, next week and decide. And within that week, it’s over.     

Emmaia: And the model for doing that, moving more nimbly to respond as educators to immanent problems, is partly that you’re not tied to institutional funding structures that say “well, you can do this project, but you can’t do that project.” How does that work? What’s the magic of operating outside of the usual flows of capital?

Bassam: Well,  this is actually very important for us on many counts. From the very beginning our interest was in producing something that is not confined to supply and demand, which is why we have a model, and I’m not sure if I can share it here, but you can bleep it out. And that is, fuck the market. Which means that if we want it, if we want to produce material that will gain some sort of, you know, notoriety or popularity or, you know, sort of becomes widespread, we did not want to be dictated by precepts of the market, precepts of what is in what is faddish and what is in fashion, if you will, in terms of consumption of knowledge and what kind of knowledge is consumed widely.

Now at the level of sustenance, this is the hurdle that most institutions that are solidarity based will face. And that is how you actually grow without resources, without funding, without support. For the first 20 years from 1992 to 2012, we did not receive one penny of funding. We actually funded ourselves and volunteered our time, and we were lucky to have means and resources to, to just stay afloat on a, you know, skeleton level structurally. After 2012, after Jadaliyya was produced, everybody wanted to fund Jadaliyya and our condition was, there’d be no strings attached and there were no strings attached. And we produced material on the entire Arab world, the entire Middle East, on the United States, on gender, on culture on sexuality in ways that was quite, quite radical. if you look at the pages of Jadaliyya.

But at the same time, we had a policy from the very beginning. Which is that 66 percent 2/3rds of our labor and work is volunteer. In other words, we’ve decided from the very beginning that the majority of our production will be based on volunteer solidarity based labor so that if that 33 percent is gone, we’re able to continue at some level, which we are actually now entering. So this is precisely what allowed us to survive after the funding was dramatically reduced about five or six years or even less after the uprisings in 2011, everyone was funded. Everyone and their mother, if they’re working on the Middle East, after 2015-16 especially you saw funding dropped dramatically.

A lot of the organizations that emerged and benefited from this funding spree are either now — they either disappeared at the time, like literally, or became irrelevant because they could not produce their production was based on the funding and on paying people to produce knowledge.

We don’t do that. Even on Jadaliyya, nobody gets paid for writing articles for Jadaliyya and clearly not for the peer-reviewed journal. So we kept going because we were not actually affected by the drop in funding because we never used the funding for that purpose, and we never actually relied on funding for you know, compensating people and most of our team until today, including myself.

I’m the executive director of the Arab Studies Institute. I mean, people can look this up like online. We actually hardly make any serious income. So we’re here for the message, for the mission that is solidarity-based, non-hierarchical approach to knowledge production. And that’s how we were able to survive.

So this is, this has been the trick, if you will. The problem is that today, as we are getting less and less funding because people are pulling their funding from any organization that works on Palestine, or at least , the major foundations are pulling their funding, even the ones that worked with critical and radical organizations you are seeing one after the other, use language like, Oh, we’re ending the Middle East program in our foundation, or we’re going to focus on like the climate, you know, or we’re going to focus.

All of that is to prevent the funding of organizations who work on Palestine. We work on Palestine only in part, and yet we were targeted. And this is happening to us like it’s happening to everyone. So if you’re working on a critical study of Zionism today, it’s as you know, Emmaia, you’re confined to individual donors. A very small number of institutional donors are, willing to, to support, especially, you know, when, when the aim is, bold. one has to look for alternatives and I can share with you some of the things that, that we’ve done and others have done to stay afloat in this climate. Even if at a reduced level of production.   

Emmaia:   That’s the kind of activist work that’s historically been done in collectives. It’s somewhat opposite of how academic institutions are set up, right? They’re not collective, we’re not in control of them, but there is a collectivity that we’re working together, even independently of the institution where we’re all collected. And because of that, we really often resent being pressed into free labor. One of the reasons we do that labor, arguably, is because we’re hanging on to our access to the tools. that universities provide. Everything from being able to make copies, to using research libraries that are so corporatized and monetized that we can’t afford them on our own, to having the capacity to be in space with each other, so how do you graft this  extractive, monetized system onto a collective model?

Bassam: There isn’t a formula, but it’s, it’s not also a puzzle. If you don’t want to rely on external funding, you’ve got to build a solidarity based organization that addresses the sort of motivations out there that are not based on supply and demand that are not about material interest and salary and individual ambition.

So the sorts of incentives you need to address are ones that are based on solidarity. And that means that it’s a very long road and it’s not something that you could actually, you know put together, like the organizations that that sprung up after the Arab uprisings, because you’ve got, you know, a million dollar grant or a 500,000 grant or even a hundred thousand dollar grant, you can immediately start, recruiting and working, and that will be your ammunition, your, ability to, compensate people. In our context, especially going forward today, there is no alternative — if you want to build something long term and grand, people have to be part owners of whatever it is that you’re doing of the decision making even, right? Maybe not everybody has to decide on everything, but they definitely will be responsible for the material they are working on.

And second, you’ve got to have a non-hierarchical approach. You’ve got to be able to treat everyone the same, regardless of their degrees, regardless of whatever prestige or gravity they have. Age definitely wasn’t an issue. In fact, you know, most of our remarkable people then and now are, are not the, the quote unquote oldest. And the trick becomes how do you institutionalize that? It requires art, not a formula.   

Emmaia: I want to ask one more time about the how. One lesson from the past year and half — where we’ve seen so many tenured, fairly well-protected faculty kind of shrink back from the political part of being thinkers, even as the walls close in around us — one thing we’ve learned is that it’s hard for people to shift to thinking beyond the walls of the university, to think about research and knowledge as the basis for organizing each other, protecting each other. 

Bassam: I started thinking about this when I was a kid in the eighties, when I was watching you know, the news and documentaries about Palestinians being arrested and jailed you know, what is called administrative detention in Israel. I was thinking that these people who are actually active and then they’re thrown in jail for years, and they’re in jail, not able to do anything, you know, publicly to actually affect the world.

These people are burning to be able to get out and continue the work, to continue to advocate, to act, to defend, to protect. And as I was thinking about this, something occurred to me – a very, very interesting, reflexive thing. And that is, wait a minute, I’m not in jail. I’m not in jail. I can act, I can do what this person cannot do. And if I were them, I would think, Oh my God, if I got out, what would I be able to do? I would be able to do anything I want. I would actually go back to a 24 seven regimen or to what have you. You know, me and my colleagues, actually, we tried to institutionalize this approach. We’re not in jail. We’re not shackled. We’re not in a hierarchy at a university or at a corporation or at a news media institution that limits what we can say and do. That’s why I started with saying it’s our lived negative. It allows you to imagine  anything and to critically produce, to establish solidarity with others horizontally, specifically in ways that usually you cannot in a mainstream institution. 

We can call the university a shackled institution because it is actually mimicking and replicating state power rather than fighting against it, or at least checking it just like the media, they have all abrogated the responsibility the media have the universities have what really needs to happen in my view as you watch The other camp gain more and more power and is exercising more and more power to restrict you There is no alternative to organizing you don’t have to create an organization or a website every time you want to act. But there has to be some sort of formula to make what you’re doing sustain, collective and sustainable. 

Emmaia: So to circle back to our keyword, which is liberatory institutions, which we’ve been talking about a lot, but haven’t mentioned directly much, how do we actually make the intervention and knowledge that’s needed? Why do we need anti Zionist institutions, liberatory institutions of knowledge?

Bassam: First of all, it’s really important not to underestimate the question of volume. In other words, the volume of material that’s being produced is really important. And to organize and produce this volume within a sustainable rubric. Because everything we’re doing is counter cultural. If you’re fighting for justice in Palestine, you’re definitely a counter culture movement and a counter culture movement cannot survive without being institutionalized, at least cannot be effective for a long time without being institutionalized. It cannot actually have an impact in my view, without being connected and bridged with like-minded institutions so that you can create that strength And that capacity that will not be completely undermined, if you get hit, because everybody’s going to get hit, this idea of the critical study of Zionism, because it is so bold and direct and clear you know, it’s, it’s, it is going to take some sort of strategizing and horizontal collaboration. There is a movement to undermine these institutions they are looking at us just like we’re looking at them. And if they see us disconnected from one another, it’s easiest to take us out. So that’s why I can’t underestimate the importance of working together, appealing together, talking with each other.   

Emmaia: And are you seeing that now?

Bassam: What I have seen in the past year and three months is a deluge of production of knowledge, some more consistent than others. But what I’ve also seen is an opening, which is the permissibility of saying certain things, which is precisely why we are seeing the backlash today. Right? It’s like one of my favorite theoreticians, philosophers, social scientists, historians, whatever you want to call them. I’m not going to name them. When they were asking him why is Egypt enforcing the veil in the 1990s, why is there more pressure on women to veil? Well, it’s because people were not veiling, right? So the reason we are seeing this craziness today, this absolute craziness, which is all symbolized. And embodied in the person of Stefanik, our new ambassador to the United Nations, asked about whether she accepts Ben Gvir and Smotrich position that the West Bank is God-given land to Israel, and she ended up saying yes. 

Those people are going crazy that speaking about Israel as an apartheid state, as a settler colonial state, as a military occupation for decades, as a racist entity, as a genocidal entity. They are not able to withstand how mainstream this has become. They hear it, they see it on television. It’s all over independent media. So they’re going nuts. And Now they are, this is the backlash started, of course, many months ago, but it was, they were taken by surprise. And they were also taken by surprise because their own sons and daughters were actually part of that movement, many of them. So in this past year, what I feel we have seen are openings that we should literally exploit, and to actually engage in, which really turns me to the last question you asked, engage in conversations and recruitment in a much broader manner, because this is a long fight. 

Emmaia: Yeah, it really is. Thank you so much Bassam. The Arab Studies Institute is a model and a treasure. There’s so much to learn from it as an institution and as a repository of knowledge. We just appreciate you so much.  

To our listeners, please check out the Arab Studies Institute, at ArabStudiesInstitute.org, Jadaliyya.com, Gazaincontext.com and KnowledgeProductionProject.com.

We’re back with more episodes on keywords for the critical study of Zionism and a new miniseries on Zionist political institutions called From Above.

So subscribe, follow our Instagram at @institutecsz, like critical study of Zionism. Sign up for our email announcements, and till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.