Reclaiming Knowledge Production, Resisting Zionist Enclosures. With Heather Ferguson, Pranav Jani, Aaron Kirshenbaum, & Dylan Rodríguez

Reclaiming Knowledge Production, Resisting Zionist Enclosures

EMMAIA: Welcome back to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Our podcast has been on a short summer break, and this is something of a back-to-school edition. While school was out, the Israeli genocide has remained relentless, pressing and pressing its incredible violence, burning families in tents, drowning people in sand, killing those who try to save others; turning its grinding destruction to the West Bank. And the United States is arming and rearming and refinancing the onslaught on Palestine.

So in this episode, we hear from scholars, organizers, and faculty labor leaders who are resisting the genocide — and who are also resisting the upsurging    repression in the US of that mass resistance movement. This panel is moderated by Black studies scholar and ICSZ collective member Dylan Rodriguez, with brilliant talks from Heather Ferguson, Pranav Jani, Aaron Kirshenbaum, and Karim Mattar. It’s really remarkable in its storytelling that traces the long history of Zionist limits placed on knowledge, and in each panelist’s really concrete ways to refuse and break those limits. So in that way, we hope that it’s supportive to everyone who’s returning to school and facing the enormous wall of repression that has been built over the summer. 

We’re also really proud to announce that with this talk, we kick off the Coalition to End Zionist Repression — and its first campaign, called the Right to Reject Zionism. The coalition is a powerful new US-wide effort that brings together the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism with Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, the Palestinian Youth Movement, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, National Students for Justice in Palestine, National Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), and more. We’re working within the Campus & Academia Alliance within that coalition. You can find resources and events online at bit.ly/campus-alliance, and linked in the show notes. We’re also including a ton of resources on tracking and resisting repression. The talk that you’re about to hear is co-sponsored by the faculty union AAUP AFT Local 6741 — which is doing essential work organizing labor against genocide, against the theft of the university, and to protect knowledge and teaching.

Over the summer, with students and faculty out of the way, university administrations across the United States have cranked up repression with a virtual avalanche of new policies. I want to run it down by way of introduction. Under attack are both campuses as communities and knowledge itself, teaching and learning itself. On campus after campus, policies are aimed at quashing political speech by students and faculty, including rules that curtail protest, and drastically heightened policing that clearly anticipates that protest will happen anyway, and plans to repress it with force and violence. Administrators have consulted over the summer with risk managers on controlling protest, with the result that they’ve militarized and “hardened” campuses against disruption. Just for instance, UCLA is currently asking California regents to double the pepper balls and other “non-lethal” ammunition they hold, and buy 8 more projectile launchers to use against students and faculty. After a year in which Zionist students and organizations have brought antisemitism complaints and lawsuits claiming that opposing Israeli genocide is “antisemitic”, administrators are managing those complaints as a fiscal risk — and preemptively setting policy that says exactly what the lawsuits say, without waiting to be sued first. So for instance, NYU has disallowed students to use the word “Zionist” in ways that it might deem oppositional. Attacks on knowledge run the gamut. The University of Florida system is requiring faculty to submit for review any course materials on any courses that mention “Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish or Jews”, to “assess them” for antisemitism or anti-Israel bias. Faculty who teach or talk about Palestine, or who support students, have been fired or simply had their jobs not renewed, they’ve been investigated, suspended, had their classes cancelled, their funding pulled. And wildly, incredibly, virtually all of these acts of repression have been framed by administrators as “protecting” speech, safety, academic freedom, and ethnic and religious identity. 

With this back-to-school episode, we welcome a new wave of resistance to genocide, we welcome so much increased interest in the critical study of Zionism, and solidarity among researchers, academics, activists, and people everywhere. Please visit the show notes for more resources and ways to connect with the Coalition to End Zionist Repression and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

DYLAN: So, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Dylan Rodriguez. He/him pronouns. I’m the co-director of the Center for Ideas and Society and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Black Study and in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. It’s a real privilege to welcome everybody to this inaugural event of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, this co-sponsored conversation titled Reclaiming Knowledge Production, Resisting Zionist Enclosures.

So, I’m grateful to co-sponsor this event alongside the as part of the Decolonizing Humanism programming that I very proudly curate at the Center for Ideas and Society. So, folks, please know that the event is being recorded for potential posting on the Center for Ideas and Society YouTube channel as well as by the ICSZ. I believe captions are available on the zoom interface.

So, allow me to do a brief welcome as people continue to come into the room. For those of you that are unfamiliar, many North American universities now include institutional land acknowledgements as part of a normative introduction of campus events. So I’d like to respectfully refuse to participate in that practice and in doing so, I think I joined many others who reject official versions of the land acknowledgement because they have come to function as a normalization of colonial power, rather than a meaningful challenge to it. So instead, I want to welcome everyone today with an encouragement to embrace the imperative of activating collective, serious, and sustained study and activity that at minimum de-normalize the conditions of occupation, anti-Black violence and coloniality in and beyond places like the University of California.

I continue by honoring Rupert and Jeannette Costo’s legacy of reclaiming, protecting and sustaining Indigenous presence at UC Riverside. Their life work continues to sustain an Indigenous epistemological, archival and physical presence in this institution that would not exist if not for their foundational efforts. The University of California, of course, is a settler colonial institution. This particular campus occupies unseeded land and ecologies, continuously inhabited by the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples on and around the Riverside campus. UC Riverside is inhabited by Indigenous, aboriginal, and First Nations peoples from all over the world, many of whom are among faculty, students, and staff.

UC Riverside is several blocks away from the site where the Riverside Police Department stole the life of 19 year old Tyisha Miller not long before I started working here in 2001. Her absence is permanent testament to the centrality of anti-Black state and extra state violence to this institution and the surrounding geography. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, with which UCR has a cooperating police relationship, is responsible for cruel and frequently fatal conditions in local jails, where the vast majority of people held captive are awaiting trial and cannot afford bail. Relatedly, the University of California’s police forces have a long ongoing record of harassing, intimidating, surveilling, profiling, violating and criminalizing targeted people and communities on and beyond campus borders.

In this moment, University of California administrators, from the local campuses to the University of California office of the president, are accelerating their repression of political, cultural, and intellectual work, supporting Palestinian freedom and liberation. I humbly offer these introductory words with a sense of shared obligation.

It’s an honor and a privilege to welcome all of you to this precious occasion by calling forward new old collective and experimental efforts to create decolonized abolitionist and liberated futures. Welcome to all of you. It’s a pleasure to serve as the moderator and facilitator for this discussion, which includes Heather Ferguson, Pranav Jani, Aaron Kirshenbaum, and Karim Matar. So we’ll proceed with self-introductions and some opening comments from each of our panelists, followed by a cross panelist conversation. And if time permits, we will try to encourage our panelists to engage with any questions or comments that are offered by the audience.

Please use the chat function on your zoom interface to give us any, anything that’s on your mind. And I’ll do my best to curate those things. It’s a pleasure to be here. And I want to pass the mic to Heather to start us off.

HEATHER: Hello and good morning or afternoon or evening, everyone. My name is Heather Ferguson. I’m a professor of history at the Claremont Colleges and a participant in this now global effort to resist Zionist enclosures. And I’m a little bit nervous today, frankly, and I’ll explain a little bit why that is in terms of my own personal scholarly trajectory in a moment.

But my opening contribution is really meant to set the stage for us and this panel to think in terms of a landscape of higher education that demands a framework for global solidarity for our knowledge practices. Our pedagogical interventions and our organizing models are all designed to liberate higher education and destabilize entrenched institutional structures of power and control.

Here with knowledge practitioners that extend from private to public universities across the US and beyond and they also include the extraordinary work of graduate students establishing new orgs to resist Zionist enclosures. So we represent all of those voices here in this panel today. But most importantly, for my own comments, I am building here on not just decades, but over a hundred years, of palestinian voices that have been demanding our attention as their voices, narratives, and histories have not have been not just foreclosed but criminalized. Thus what I say here now is meant as a reminder and an urgent one that to remain in our siloed assumptions of academic privilege we not only are at risk of enabling the US-based assault on higher education but are also complicit in sustaining racialized educational structures and tactics that enclose Palestinian lives and all those working in solidarity with them. Most recently, scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian speaking from the Military Fortress of Hebrew University stands as a model for my comments here, as does the work of Maya Wind and Robin Kelly within the US and internationally to amplify Palestinian research and build a new archival base that bears witness to these foreclosures. But I also want to just pause and share my own personal journey to indicate how I came into the frame of liberatory action within higher education. 

I came from a small private religious college and ended up at Hebrew University in the summer of 1996 to study Hebrew in a program meant for graduate students. I had no understanding whatsoever of the political climate, but I immediately intuited a climate of fear at Hebrew University. Our movement was policed, field trips were carefully scripted, and a visit to the Old City was accompanied by armed guards who took their clips out of their pockets as we walked the street between the old Muslim and Christian quarters. So I fled. Actually, quite literally, I left the program in the middle and went to Egypt without telling anyone I was leaving. It took me 15 years or longer, I would say, to understand the dynamics I experienced in that summer as a young, privileged, white woman in those spaces; years to understand why I kept leaving the settler colonial university for lively spaces of occupied East Jerusalem outside Damascus gate, and years to understand that much of scholarship practices at Hebrew University were practiced within an expectation of silence on topics that are untouchable and taboo.

And even my questions of roommates as to why they moved in certain ways or never went to the Old City were completely ignored and foreshortened. But this experience has also taught me that scholarship and knowledge is, has been deemed political when focused on Palestinian past and present. As I continued my journey as a scholar, I learned that I ditched the modern for the early modern and turned to the Ottoman imperial context in which difference was managed but often coercively, but activated via porous frontier mentality rather than be a rigid walled enclosures. This shift into the early modern, I think was also a liberatory shift because it allowed me as a scholar within my various contexts, and especially as a teacher to teach the transition from empire to nation state as a transition of epistemic and violent rupture and to do so without a lot of attention and scrutiny put on my work.

So unbeknownst to many, my entire career as a professor, I have taught Palestinian history, but I am labeled as an early modern historian. Every single semester I teach a survey, I cross that epistemic rupture and that divide. But today I want to turn really quickly from epistemic rupture to the phrase that Maya Wind uses, which is epistemic occupation, and our panel today is thinking about epistemic occupations of knowledge production and practices.

And here, it’s a reminder that the tactics that curtail academic freedom within institutions of higher learning in Israel have been battle tested and now brought to bear on us in the US. And around the globe, this export trade of curtailing academic freedom accompanies the export of military technologies and is a twin effort to build an edifice that protects the Israeli state and its current apartheid formation and does so by violently imprisoning Palestinian minds and bodies.

If you on your campuses are facing new expressive activity rules, new rules about posting on your office doors, new demands to review syllabi and course outlines, rest assured that our Palestinian colleagues have been facing the same since the founding of Hebrew University in 1919. Unwittingly, my effort to learn Hebrew in 1996 in order to enter a career in religious studies, which obviously I never followed, landed me right in the middle of a period of entrenched discriminatory practices.

So today we’re here to reflect on those foreclosures and build strategies together to reclaim our campuses and thus our roles in the libertarian politics of justice, and to do so as a reminder that the onslaught we are facing as we came back to our campuses in the fall is nothing new, and it’s at our peril that we forget to act in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues. That’s it for me. 

DYLAN: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Heather. We pass the mic to Pranav.

PRANAV: Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you, Dylan. Thank you, everyone who put this together. Thanks to everyone. I’m very honored to be here. I’m Pranav Jani. I use he and him pronouns. I’m a professor of English and postcolonial studies at Ohio State. I guess I have to say the Ohio State. I’m faculty advisor of Students for Justice in Palestine for a long time now. I’m also part of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine which has been amazing to have over the last year.

I am the president of the AAUP at Ohio State but I’m not here officially speaking on behalf of my chapter or anything. Like that’s for identification purposes. I used this opportunity as a way to really think through the new space rules and space standards and the things being thrown at us at Ohio State.

I’m concerned a little bit about being too much in the weeds. But I really use this opportunity to speak as an opportunity to think and to share what’s going on at a big public university in Ohio. So I hope that things are relevant to the audience in general, even as I dive in. So what I’m going to do first.

I’ll just share a few links. It’s not like you have to look at these while I’m speaking or anything. It’s just for your information. You know, these are some of the things I’m going to be referring to and people can look it up later, but these are just some of the kinds of things that are out there specifically kind of to prevent and to discourage our freedom, our students’ freedom of expression and our faculty’s freedom of expression. So, I’m just diving into this. All right. And so, anyone who looks at the new space rules and the guidelines of the Ohio State University sees contradictions at the very level of policy. Just for instance, our state governments dominated by the Republicans and there’s a GOP legislature-mandated free speech policy that’s a kind of an absolutist one, right? It’s basically to let Nazis speak on campus freely and that was sort of imposed on Ohio State about two years ago. So there’s that kind of absolutist free speech policy in which it seemed like the concept of hate speech and all that had disappeared completely. But then in these Ohio State documents, you also see an adherence to the concept of hate speech in a new way in this moment and saying that hate speech won’t be tolerated. So there’s these kind of surface level policy contradictions that we can see. 

There’s also contradictions on the level of practice. So for example, I was recently defending a student who was being persecuted by the university for property damages because they were putting pro-Palestine posters on the lamppost. On the lamppost! As I’m walking to defend the student, I’m passing so many lampposts with so many signs. Find my cat, this and that. They insist that it has nothing to do with content, that it’s about just the space violation, but they’re not going after all those people. In our session, we went through police camera, body camera video to show that this was the student putting up stuff on lampposts. So, on that, on one hand that there’s happening, you know, it is about content. Right, so it’s contradictions on the level of practice. A mass baptism happened on campus the other day involving football players, and it was like 800 people. And the student newspaper reported that it went past 10pm, which was the argument for disbanding the encampments on April 25th. But you know, they chatted, I guess, and it went past 10pm and no police were brought out, no snipers were brought out, no riot police were brought out. So there’s contradiction on the level of policy, and there’s contradiction on the level of practice.

But on every platform they can find, Ohio State Administration and its new president, Ted Carter, keeps repeating that they are doing a masterful job in protecting free speech while securing the campus, this was repeated by the Board of Trustees when they gave him a huge raise eight months into his regime here, and they said explicitly they praise his commitment to free expression while maintaining campus safety.

Sometimes they’re just very honest in these rules with that, which I appreciate. As part of the FAQs in their website on the section on the First Amendment, the university clearly says that civil disobedience is not protected under the First Amendment. And to quote, “civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws as a form of political protest. The First Amendment does not permit individuals to break the law or violate university policies or rules.” So they very clearly say, we’re against civil disobedience, and we’re gonna be on the other side of it. But on MLK Day, you bet they won’t talk about this unless we make them, right? And so these kind of contradictions we can always keep pointing out.

Carter usually brought in a new term. He said, “I hope there’s civil obedience.” And he’s a military man, so he really likes that idea, I guess. Just to go quickly here. So, what have these new rules done? They’ve actually taken away, on the name of what they’re doing is they’re saying they’re protecting free speech, but they’re passing all these rules that limit, this word enclosures is beautiful, they limit the spaces where people can actually speak.

So, for example, the new student union, which has been the historic place for where student protests go since it was built in 2012, started by a Black-led student uprising in 2012 about racist graffiti on the Black Hale cultural center, right? So this is a long tradition. Students have marched, then they go to that place, and they turn it into a rally. That’s what they’ve now banned. You know, they’ve now banned use of megaphones in that space. Even shouting in some places seems to require a permit, right? So there’s free speech by the law but then in practice. So we can talk about this stuff till the cows come home, about the contradictions.

What I want to talk about briefly here is that these contradictions are not just random. They’re not just about prejudice. They’re not just about that. But if we look at some core premises of Zionism, they actually show an adherence to that. And if we understand that the university accepted certain Zionist principles through the lens of white supremacy and imperialist discourse then we can make sense of what might look like a series of contradictions. 

So, for example, I’m going to focus on two of them. One is the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and no human rights abuses or atrocities that Israel commits matter in any fundamental way. If we understand that that’s a premise behind their actions, it actually doesn’t seem contradictory at all. The second is that those who oppose Israeli policies are fundamentally antisemitic and probably inciters of violence, right. And this premise is something that the university, you know, periodically, but repeatedly dips into whenever it needs to demonize or send a signal that we’re going to go after the students. 

So I’ll just go through a couple examples of how these principles operate and what I’m trying to get at looking at the title about humanism and liberalism and all of that. What I’m trying to get at is the way that adherence to the Zionist and imperialist kind of principles and lenses actually rips through the facade of liberalism that we constantly see in these documents. And so one example is what I call the key themes debacle, they have a page called key themes and what the university set out to do at one point is to say that the university will no longer take a position on any issues that matter in the world because they inevitably then act as if one group of students who believe one thing matters and another group of students believe another thing doesn’t matter.

It sounds like liberalism and equity, right? This was before October 7th. On October 7th, the key pages on the website repeated that idea that they won’t take sides, but then they wrote very explicitly, “We condemn Hamas terrorism and all the suffering for Israeli citizens.” That actually didn’t appear on October 7th, but then by October 14th it was there, right? 

It came in repeated evidence with conversations between students and administrators about the harm happening to Palestinians. Not a single word on that website, and there’s not going to be. If we want to go a little bit, you know, does it get a little bit complicated? Sure, once in a while, there is now, after meetings with students, a gesture to sometimes say Palestinians are suffering, and sometimes say Islamophobia is also a problem.

The first instance about this happened right after administrators met students. But this was significant in 20 years. I’ve never heard an administrator say Palestinians. You could say it’s significant, but what it does, it reinforces the limiting Jews versus Palestine Muslims or Jews versus Palestinian the way of framing the situation Palestinian students have repeatedly reminded administrators that Islamophobia does not cover the issue at all because this is a political issue against pro Palestinian students and anti genocide students.

They have repeatedly said that the anti-genocide movement includes many anti-Zionist Jews who have also been arrested, but whose concerns become erased and marginalized when the university talks about antisemitism. Students have repeatedly said that our side is quite diverse, and students who are not Muslim or Arab have also been targeted. So this key theme section illustrates how liberalism and discourses of equity fall apart in the face of a fierce commitment to the notion that what happens to Israeli civilians is far more important than what happens to Palestinians. That’s the only way to explain this surface level contradiction. 

So why do I call this the failure of liberalism? Because as we speak today, and this is a little complicated, Ohio State is not yet a rubber stamp institution for GOP policies as the far right wants it to be. While legal mandates require Ohio State to follow policies made in the Ohio State House, there is still some daylight between the viciousness of the GOP politicians and our administrators. For example, Ohio State has surprisingly come out against the GOP-led anti-professor, anti-DEI, and anti-union higher ed policy that seeks to turn Ohio into Texas or Florida. We in the AAUP have been fighting that bill, SB83, on the ground in conjunction with students and allies. But the Ohio State Board of Trustees made its own comment against this bill and has contributed to the fact that the bill hasn’t passed after more than a year and a half in a GOP dominated legislature.

So you see, do you see what I’m saying? That’s why I’m calling it liberalism. Ohio State Administration has not fully embrace the GOP program. But in this current national context, saturated by a knee jerk acceptance of Zionist talking points and frameworks, in which a bipartisan conviction pervades that Israel ought to be armed regardless of what it does, and in which the Ohio GOP, apologists for white supremacy and antisemitism of the worst sort, have suddenly discovered that they could weaponize antisemitism in that environment. The positions of the OSU administration in suppressing pro-Palestinian voices have come crashing together with the positions of the GOP. The GOP politicians who were gunning for Ohio State as a liberal bastion before are now completely in sync with Carter, praising his actions against students and seeing a growing partnership.

And that’s why I say Zionism is ripping the veil separating the open racism and the liberalist discourse of the university. The, the stuff about students as perpetrators of violence is so disgusting to me you know once at a meeting with Carter, he basically attacked them for increasing tension on campus and creating a climate of fear you know, and so that was going on, on April 20th, after Zionists made a chant from a protest viral, and there was a viral attack, OSU sent out a tweet pretty much saying, and I’m not quoting it here for time, but, but pretty much saying, well, oh, well, here it is when protected speech becomes incitement or threats of violence Ohio State has and will quickly move to enforce the law and university policy.

They say this on April 20th. And they prepare the ground on April 23rd. AAUP has come out against this. They arrested a bunch of protesters for noise violation. April 25th was the mass arrest. May 1st, huge police presence and then arrests of queer activists for Palestine on June 1st. So this demonization of pro-Palestinian students has become just part of the landscape. The president just regularly throws out “attempts to incite violence” as the problem as if they’re already happened. Right? And preparing the ground, justifying what he did before, and preparing the ground for the future. And so I’ll just end by saying: liberalism, we know its contradictions and its problems won’t go away anytime soon. But even with the university as it has today, you could imagine a different attitude. You could imagine a university that actually opens up a forum on settler colonialism, since we have so many experts, and asks is Israel settler colonialist. You can imagine a university actually acting differently even within all of the limits that liberalism puts forward.

But that’s not this university right now because it is far more profitable for them to actually go along with these premises of Zionism and to operate in this way and to have all these contradictions than it is for them to do basic DEI liberalism that they say is important to them. So I’ll finish with that. And thanks so much. 

DYLAN: Appreciate that. There’s a lot more to come from all of our panelists. And let me just remark real quick. On the fact that I, I currently see 82 participants in this discussion. This is remarkable given that we circulated publicity for this event, maybe less than 48 hours ago.

So it just, it’s a small indication of how. Committed and serious, I think a growing community of people. Around this planet are in trying to invest their energy in Palestinian solidarity. Our 3rd panelist is Aaron. I’m going to ask Aaron to introduce yourself and please offer us your opening comments.

AARON: Hi, everyone. I’m really glad to be here and really honored to be on this panel with everyone here. So my name is Aaron. I’m part of Judaism on Our Own Terms as well as the Drop Hill All campaign. Judaism on Our Own Terms, or JUT, is an organization that aims to create and build a network of student governed and liberation aligned Jewish communities on campuses across the continent.

And we are also a nation and nationally an anti Zionist organization and as well as internationalist. And I’ll talk more about what Drop Hill All is Shortly, but as the name implies, it’s a campaign and a strategy to drop Hillel from many aspects of campus life, including campus Jewish life, university ties, and its status as the only legitimate arbiter of anti Semitism on campuses.

And so, I think I’ll start by sort of saying that a big part of what the Drop Hillel campaign is, is sort of an effort to publicly transform the association of Hillel from just merely a religious institution on college campuses, instead as to be perceived as a Zionist institution that is concerned first and foremost with bolstering support for the state of Israel, as well as an explicitly Zionist institution that is.

Complicit and actively supportive of all the harm caused by Israel, as, as Ettler states. And so, A lot of the ways that we are able to come to these conclusions and come to the conclusions of the firmness in which Hillel exists in that manner is through Jute’s history as Open Hillel, which it was its previous organizational name.

And so Open Hillel was founded in 2012. by a group of Harvard students who tried to organize an event with their Hillel, partnering with a Palestinian organization, and were shut down. And the reason that they were shut down was because of Hillel’s standards of partnership that were instituted in 2010, which I’m not going to read for the sake of time, but can paste the link to here which covers the rest of Hillel’s Israel guidelines as well.

But they essentially prohibit any Hillel from partnering with any anti Zionist organizations, individuals hosting individuals that delegitimize the State of Israel and also anyone or any organizations that support boycotts, divestments, or sanctions on the State of Israel. So not just anti Zionism, but anything, but actions critical of purely Israeli policy.

And so, a few Hillels were successful around this time that Open Hillel was active and were able to drop the stands of partnership and become Open Hillels, but Hillel retaliated by suing those organizations some of them, not all of them. And making sure that they would cut all ties with Hillel, drop the name Hillel.

And so what that really solidified was that the standards of partnership were above any degree of campus life. And so if Hillel’s were even going to open up the room for anti Zionism or criticism of Israel, that was going to be shut down immediately. And so it’s, and that was going to come at the expense of campus life that Hillel was founded in campus Jewish life.

And so it’s not just that Hillel represents the Zionist majority within modern day Judaism that’s really taken hold especially post 67, but that it produces that majority actively and through a lot of different mechanisms that I can talk about in a minute helps to make students into active agents and shuts that down.

And so What we learned from Open Hillel was through a lot of students that were also coming to Open Hillel and saying, instead of trying to transform my individual chapters, I want to make new organizations and new Jewish organizations that are able to and this wasn’t just about Palestine as well.

It was also about racism in Hillel spaces, homophobia, transphobia, anti convict sentiment. Basically everything that is revolved around gatekeeping Judaism into, through, and with alliances of the different oppressive forces that are allied with Zionism, namely white supremacy, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, imperialism, and so restricting Jewish identity to those mechanisms.

Also through having police at Shabbat, which of course was, is very alienating to Jews of color and bringing increasing militarization onto campus, which you can currently see today. through Hillel partnering with the Secure with SEN to work with the FBI. And so, a lot of what Hillel, and so that was sort of the new strategy of creating Judaism on our terms or Jude as a way to start to create new spaces and that is a lot of what Drop Hillel as a strategy points to in part.

In part, it’s to help, it’s to alter the perspective of Hillel. into understanding Hillel as a space that continues to produce surveillance. and continues to produce repression, both internally when it comes to ostracizing anti Zionist Jews and pushing students into a pipeline but also more broadly, where Hillel is able to be weaponized by universities, so that the notion of what Jewish identity is on university campuses is synonymous with Zionism, and a Jewish identity that is linked with that very cynically.

To the point that only certain Jewish groups, namely Hillels, are recognized by universities as the legitimate Jewish groups. And so, of course, that’s able to be a guise and protection for university logics, investments and, and using the fear that Hillel manufactures in students that can come from genuine histories and families of anti Semitism, but to say that the new anti Semitism comes from Zionism because people are attacking your form of Jewish identity.

Thank you. Which is of course not true, and there’s very little basis in Judaism, in Jewish texts for Zionism as a state building project, but the, and so that’s a big part of how that happens, and Hillel, as a mechanism of building its donations, and it’s within its history, particularly within the late 80s and early 90s, was about cultivating donors, and a lot of those donors were specifically trying to introduce Israel programming.

And so that comes about in a lot of different ways in campuses nowadays. And so you have Hillel pushing Birthright, the free trip to Israel and, you know, Hasbara fellowships, the training to produce pro Israel advocates on the basis of students. A lot of those then are sent to attack faculty for publishing work in support of Palestinian liberation.

Producing the perspectives trip, which is an attempt to get an understanding of quote unquote Israel Palestine. And then some things just that are present within. everyday Hillel life. There’s stuff like the Jewish Learning Fellowship, which is a 10 week program for students there and that can cover everything from sex and love and relationships, and where do queer people show up in Jewish tradition, really putting sort of a progressive mindset on and facade onto what Hillel is.

to then Israel home and homeland culture, learning about Israeli culture and really normalizing Zionism as a part of Jewish life on campus. Having Israel trivia, having Israel fellows, which are often Israeli college grads and IOF former IOF soldiers that are on campuses and connecting with students because one of Hillel’s principal goals is to institute a strict definition of Judaism, where that will always, no matter what form of.

inside this you have will always be connected to Israel as a key part of that. And so, other things that Hillel does is sort of an astroturfing of surveillance where students will be encouraged to report antisemitism, what they see as antisemitism that is trained through these processes to report to websites that Hillel has partnered with ADL and the secure community network with.

And encouraging students to record all of these things in the meantime. And so when we’re talking about creating alternative Jewish groups in its place as a way to resist this in part, we want to do this for sort of the dual purposes that this serves. Firstly, it takes away the pipeline and disrupts the pipeline of Zionist agency that this creates in students real sort of in the nexus of people’s lives.

College students coming in and connecting with what they feel that their Jewish identity is or their political students, political identity is for on their own terms for this for the first time in their life. And this is where often students become those advocates, those pro Israel advocates that are part of that.

And so it, this sort of through disrupting that pipeline creates a lot of ripple effects within the wider Jewish community and the role of the Jewish community and the diaspora in the U. S. in perpetuating Zionism further. But then also on the campus level, when you have a different Jewish group, That doesn’t have Zionism as a normalized status as part of it or might be actively anti Zionist ideally.

The, that’s able to take away a lot of the leverage that Hillel holds as the predominant force defining what antisemitism, what what Jewish life and experience is on campus. And. That’s able to sort of both serve on the discursive level of what there is for Jewish group that defines Jewish identity on that way help.

Because not all of these groups there have been so many within since October 7 that have popped up and before then. And that’s been helpful on certain campuses, but then sometimes also when groups are registered, that’s able to also take hold in a lot more of a formal way as well, especially with the the increase of title six.

Submissions that are being leveled in universities, where you are able to say that no, like, to protest Hillel is not to protest the one Jewish identity on campus. And, That’s, this is also Hillel’s monopoly is how you get things like the NYU thanks the NYU policy that defines Judaism and Zionism.

And so that’s really what we’re trying to do and trying to, in essence, to sort of borrow from abolitionist terminology, make Hillel obsolete in its role on campuses and sort of produce something else that’s able to be able to to produce sort of these new modes of solidarity. And so work in all these ways within cycles where this comes up when there’s policing on campus and militarization on campus and so to drop Hillel is simultaneously.

We need a lot of educational material to an educational material to change the perception of what Hillel is and make it very justifiable and understandable to protest it and for it to be understood as a political institution, but then also to produce new institutions and modes of solidarity and spaces for Jewish practice.

I was in one in college and it was really beautiful and also just like a less sanitized version of Judaism as well. And. then ultimately and through all this also to develop new leadership in terms of what antisemitism is and understanding tackling antisemitism as a project of solidarity with Palestinians and collective liberation and not have Hillel giving advice to college presidents on how to do that and how to repress protesters.

And so that’s sort of what we’re trying to do. And I think just to try to understand. The significance of within all modes of oppression in academia and beyond. So, thank you. 

DYLAN: Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. Just just to. Emphasize some of what Aaron was saying, I can, I can affirm from numerous relatively highly, highly placed inside sources.

That various. Leadership elements within local and national. Iterations of hello are absolutely saturating the phone lines and trying to kind of occupy the office space of highly the most highly placed administrators in the University of California to just just destroy them with constant demands to fire certain faculty members.

To come crashing down with the most vicious forms of disciplinary repression, if not expulsion of Palestinian students, specifically in Palestinian solidarity. Organizers and leaders particularly this is ongoing to the point where some of these folks who. Have told me there’s. Have have actually advised me to spread the word that those of us that are on the side of Palestinian liberation need to do a better job of doing the same, which is, which is a really profound thing to say, given the policies that you all have been talking about.

Right? Which is basically to shut the hell up to go away to stop camping to do, you know, to do to do to do all those things. And yet inside bureaucrats. Who are actually highly placed administrators themselves are telling us that that Hillel is outflanking us with their incessant kind of saturation of the institution with these kinds of demands.

So this is this is really stuff to be taken seriously as part of the grind of this ongoing struggle. Our 4th panelist, Kareem, could you introduce yourself and offer us some opening comments? 

KARIM: Sure. Thank you so much, Dylan. Thank you to the coalition to end Zionism, especially Heather and Dylan for putting together this event and this extraordinary series of panels and talks over the next few months and into next year.

I believe I’m Kareem. I I’m an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. I work with A A UP coalition for Action in Higher Education, the, the Modern Language association, the Shaah Palestine Policy Palestinian policy network, and a number of local community organizations on Palestine related issues.

I speak today only as myself, but I would like to foreground. The MLA members for justice in Palestine boycott divestment and sanctions resolution, which was published on the MLA website today. So it’s public knowledge. Now the MLA, as you might know is the largest scholarly literary association in the world and one of the largest scholarly associations in the United States.

Even if you’re not a literary scholar, please, please, please consider joining up, signing up for just one year. Anybody can become a member of the Modern Language Association in order to support this important Resolution the details of which you can find in the link of just posted. So I’d like to start with a anecdote about a comment made during a panel.

I participated in last night. One of my liberal Zionist co panelists started discussing the film, Israelism, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with his response when he watched it with a 16 year old daughter was that it was an object lesson of how the lack of exposure to the occupation causes an identity crisis among young Jewish people, especially in the United States, when they witness, when they observe the crimes and atrocities of the occupation in Israel as in his reading happened with the protagonist of the film.

So my response naturally was, so the problem for you is exposure to the occupation and not the occupation itself, to which he naturally had no response. I recounted because it’s on my mind and it sort of demonstrates the nature of the liberal dynamic, the ways in which so called liberal Zionists try to interpret and present the facts of human rights violations, international law violations, crimes and atrocities that they can no longer responsibly and reasonably hide.

It also demonstrates the ways in which this knowledge or forms of interpretation, its ideology, is passed down from generation to generation. For my own comments, I’d like to focus on language and discourse. These comments come from a conviction that it’s no longer enough. To criticize the lies, the hypocrisies, the distortions, and the genocide denial in contemporary American media, culture, politics, and academia.

Palestinian scholars and pro Palestinian scholars have been doing this in the United States for 50 years. And while it’s very much produced. The community that comes together today, it doesn’t seem to have had any kind of significant impact in the political sphere, in the sphere where people’s lives are in the balance on a day to day basis.

Instead of the work of criticism or perhaps as a supplement to it, in addition to it as a foundation for it, I’d like to propose a positive forward looking language for discussing Palestine in our public spaces, as well as our institutional spaces in the U. S. So I’d like to highlight a number of key words around which this positive forward looking vision for the future of Palestine might be articulated.

Keyword one is the land of Palestine. Palestine is the only name there is to refer to the entirety of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. As Noor Massalha unambiguously demonstrates in his masterpiece Palestine, a 4, 000 year history, the name Palestine stretches back at least to 1300 BCE, when the earliest Egyptian tablets naming Peleset, which means in the ancient Egyptian language, our neighbors to the east have been discovered.

From then, the name Palestine has been in constant and consistent use as demonstrated in the Biblical, Greek, Roman, Arabic Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, Zionist, and Palestinian textual record. This is to say, the name Palestine, with reference to the land between the river and the sea, precedes, predates the establishment of the ancient kingdom of Israel in part of Palestine, whether dated in the 10th, 9th, or 8th centuries BCE.

Of course, reference to the ancient kingdom of Israel is one of the main ideal ideological planks of the Zionist movement. And the debate around the dating of the ancient kingdom of Israel emerges out of archaeological evidence from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem which claims that There is only a biblical record that is to say a mythological record of the kingdom stretching back to the 10th century B.

C., and the archaeological evidence demonstrates that it’s actually more accurately located in the 8th century B. C. What I am claiming is that whatever the case, as Nur Masalha’s exquisite scholarship demonstrates is that Palestine as a name to refer to the entirety of the territory, precedes this kingdom.

We might also consider the contemporary geography of Palestine. Within Palestine, we might refer to the southwestern, central, and eastern regions of Palestine, which today are often misdesignated as Gaza, Israel and the West Bank. These are contemporary fictions with a very, very recent history. Palestine is the container for all of these territories or parts of Palestine.

And of course the the city of Jerusalem famously with its four quarters the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Armenian quarters might be thought of as a topographical symbol of this long history, as well as the potential future of Palestine. Keyword two, the Palestinian people, the Palestinian people, as again, Noor Massarha discusses in Palestine, a 4, 000 year history, are all the people who have historically inhabited and who today inhabit the land of Palestine.

These people include Arameans, Samaritans, Phoenicians, Philistines, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Judeans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Europeans. Europeans. Today, the predominant group are Jewish Palestinians of various European and Middle Eastern descents, Christian Palestinians of mainly Arab descent, and Muslim Palestinians of mainly Arab descent, although there are multiple communities who cohabit the land of Palestine today.

All of these people belong to the land of Palestine. They, we are all Palestinians. Keyword three, the Palestine genocide. Not even the genocide is sufficient to explain what’s going on and what has been going on in the land of Palestine. The Palestinian genocide has been ongoing since 1948 when Zionist terrorist groups, including the Haganah, the Ergun and Leahy, murdered approximately 15, 000 Palestinians in a series of brutal and bloody massacres throughout Palestine, ethnically cleansed approximately 800, 000 Palestinians from their homeland, and destroyed 530 villages in 11 cities.

I refer to Sadi Mechtasi’s recent book, Tolerance is a Wasteland, to demonstrate the ways in which this history is systematically covered up in favor for, of an alternative narrative of Jewish return to their homeland. At the, near the beginning of the book, he describes how Yad Vashem, which I visited in 2012 the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, the most important Holocaust museum anywhere in the world was built Adjacently to Deene.

The site of one of the most horrific massacres of nineteen forty eight, one a hundred seventy 107, excuse me. Palestinian villages were lined up and, and shot. Today Deene is covered over by a forest which visiting dig dignitaries to em are entitled are invited to plant treason.

The irony, the hypocrisy, the, the sheer obtuseness of this topography is demonstrated as Sari Meknassi shows in that site. Since 1948, the genocide has been ongoing in the form of war, occupation, settlement, apartheid, blockade, administrative detention, intentional policies of starvation, the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the lies and distortions used to cover up these crimes and atrocities in the international arena.

Beginning on the 8th of October, 2023, Israel’s latest war on the Palestinian people in Gaza is an extension of this deeper history, and represents a culmination of the logic that undergirds it. Most immediately, of course, it is an extension of what Sarah Roy calls Israel’s policies of de development in Gaza since 1967, and what Norman Finkelstein identifies as Israel’s policies of creating pretext to achieve wider military objectives in Gaza since 2007.

Israel’s wars on Gaza, which you’re all familiar with have caused greater civilian casualties, including a greater number of children murdered than witnessed during the Hamas atrocities of October the 7th. However, the idea that October the 7th is the beginning of history is a lie and a distortion that must be exposed and rejected through accurate historical contextualization at every opportunity.

The idea of Israel’s current war and the Palestinian people and Gaza as a conflict between Israel and Hamas is likewise a distortion. Keyword four. Nakba. Originating in the Palestinian case in Constantine Zurayek’s 1948 book, Ma’anit al Nakba, the meaning of the catastrophe. Nakba is a historical marker of the catastrophe that befell the Palestine and the Palestinian people on the 15th of May, 1948, when the events listed above were taking place.

Although Zionism as a European political ideology stretches back further, it’s The Nakba is ground zero of the present catastrophe. Nakba is the only name for the 15th of May, 1948. I have a a bundle of of, of terms for keyword four, political terms, two state solution, final status negotiations, international humanitarian law and so forth.

These are all fictions designed to mask the ongoing Palestinian genocide. They should be replaced in our discourse with the language of the one state solution, wherein the Palestinian people of Jewish, Christian and Muslim descent can live together peacefully within a single secular democratic polity, key word.

Six Israel with reference to the Israeli state established recently in part of Palestine reference to it potentially contributes to legitimizing Israel and obscuring the Palestine genocide. However, it is, as Dahlia Hamdi suggests in her recent book, Imagining Palestine, a convenient shorthand for referring to the systems of thought, policies and practices.

that are responsible for the Palestine genocide. Finally, Zionism. It’s a convenient term to refer to a European political ideology rooted in Orientalism and antisemitism and designed to facilitate the European colonization of Palestine. But you know and this brings us back to the coalition for ending Zionism.

I’m of course aware that The organization is called the coalition for ending Zionist repression, but whether Zionism or Zionist repression, might we think about a coalition for liberating Palestine as an embodiment as an institutional organizational embodiment of the positive forward looking vision for the future of Palestine that we might establish to, to push back against genocide.

That’s it. I’ll close it there. I’m very excited about the discussion that we’re going to have. Thanks everyone for being here. 

DYLAN: Outstanding, no, absolute gems from all 4 of our, of our folks as we bring everybody back, we’ll have the panel, maybe all together. We can be highlighted on this page here. I’m going to encourage the audience to continue posting any thoughts, questions, discussion points in the chat, and I’ll do my best to curate those and put them forward.

If if the panelists can indulge me, I know Heather, I know that you brought something up in chat very early in the discussion about flagging the impartiality clauses. Could you talk about could you raise the question also just talk about the context of that? Maybe we can have that as our 1st point of departure for the conversation among the 4 of you.

HEATHER: Sure thing. So it was something that actually brought up as he was discussing the landscape of. Repression and suppression within Ohio State. And as a reminder, anything that any of us have mentioned, and Aaron really highlighted this well these are, we are well aware that we’re just a tip of the iceberg and kind of gesturing to dynamics that are just inundating.

Us both nationally and globally. And so any of the comments that you as participants in the audience, like we’re creating this space together. And so we’re just trying to kind of pitch out some good ideas and then draw in some of yours as well. So the impartiality clauses. I think this is something that was flagged.

Pretty early on about about a year ago. It’s connected also to the Chicago principles and the Calvin report, and it’s been used. I think it’s a originally a backlash to responses by various institutions of higher education in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Because many in that moment actually came out in statements of what I would even consider solidarity and then established a series of programs that were justice oriented, and at least on the surface had liberatory aims.

As Pranav and others kind of illustrated, we fully understand that those are done within a liberal and a neoliberal kind of framing and it was actually methods to co opt what were otherwise really powerful pedagogical and scholarly practices. And and yet what I’m trying to refer to is like as part of a backlash to that, that we see at state and federal levels.

We also see institutions, especially in the wake of October 7, adopting the impartiality clause as a way of foreclosing any not just position statements on the part of the institution, but actually foreclosing the possibility of any claims that supporting academic freedom is a necessary and established mandate of administrations.

So they dodge The need to actually really stand for the principles that we need them to in this moment and declare neutrality in ways that I think are reminiscent. I just briefly mentioned this where like any topic of investigation of Palestinian history past or why it’s past and present have been deemed political.

I mean, I’m sure all of us have personal stories of this my advisors throughout college, we’re all told like don’t do that. That until you have tenure you can’t research those topics for your dissertation. I think the landscape has changed a little bit, but in any case, by adopting neutrality and impartiality clauses, they’re basically deeming these actions political and not fact.

And by deeming them political, it’s a suggestion, it’s a way of kind of I believe, like further suppressing any liberatory politics that we are attempting to implement. 

DYLAN: I’m going to emphasize, you know, facilitator privilege here and add to add to Heather’s context and questions as well, but alongside the impartiality.

Mess, I wanted to layer another question on top of that, which is. I wanted to ask you all. About strategies for claiming the political space to do solidarity work that does not constantly constantly rely. On invoking policies and so called rights, including free speech and academic freedom rights that we know were never, ever, ever created to protect Palestine liberation solidarity activities, much less criticisms of the politics of Zionism or the ideology of Zionism or Israeli Israeli occupation state.

So, I mean, that as a kind of additional layer on top of what Heather had to say, who wants to who wants to answer these questions once and for all, please go ahead. 

PRANAV: Once and for all, once and for all. I think the you know, it’s so easy to say both and all the time, but what I mean is, I think we just have to, and we do this already, but I think just working in multiple spaces without the kind of like,

If I say something wrong, I’m just trying to, I’m just trying to get shortcuts. Okay. You know, not like the litmus purity test, knowing that there’s going to be messy, and it’s going to require all kinds of things. So, but, but you have to still hold on to your principle. That’s the thing. That’s where we lose people.

So, like, I think having FSJP has been so good for the first time in 20, my 20 years at Ohio State. We have a bunch of faculty. Okay. Creating our own space to talk about the issues that matter to us. We have our own study groups, we have our own teach ins, we have our own networks with students, and we do that independent of the university, right?

Of course, university hierarchies and all that, we have to watch out even amongst ourselves that they don’t shape our discussions, right? We have to be constantly vigilant. But it’s like, this is our own space. Then I’m president of AAUP, right? Some people want AAUP to pretty much do the work of FSJP.

I’m like, no, let AAUP be AAUP. I want the person who is not really committed to pro Palestine politics, but who hates that our president called cops on police, I want them to speak out. against that policy, right? So I’m almost at the risk of over division between these spheres. I’m like, AUP, do the free speech academic freedom that you do.

And then, you know, you want to join FSJP, it’s a different animal. And then similarly, you know, in our teaching, I had to play a role yesterday, kind of interfering between police and students. I hate that stuff. I hate that stuff, but it was a role I could play To let the students do what they could do.

So I just feel like, I don’t know if that makes, I’m just addressing this issue. Like, we’re always in these different spaces. And if we have our direction set by accountability and commitment to the people experiencing the genocide, the people closely connected to them, the people who are focused on that, then we can operate in these different spaces.

That need their own skills and stuff and still kind of remain Focused on our cause but we need that space where we’re always being accountable

HEATHER: I think i’ll build on this just for a moment Given the fact that a lot of my organizing roles right now kind of take place within. I’ll yes within the american association of university professors And have shifted now to actually become a component of the american federation of teachers, which is a union So the american association of university professors This is an advocacy nonprofit group, which has chapters extended kind of throughout college and university campuses.

Some of those chapters are bargaining collectives and have unionized on their own under the umbrella of AUP. But many are so called advocacy chapters, which for example, the Claremont colleges has one and advocacy chapter just aligns with the principles as a method for collective action and interrogation of institutional policies, but it is not a union and does not have union benefit.

It’s important to realize that I’m sure many of you know this, but there has been over the past year an effort to actually redefine. The role of AAP and align it more with labor organizing policies. And this goes to Dylan’s point, actually the way in which academic freedom and free speech and Anna brought this up as well.

It’s actually something that highlights what we have all known in terms of the Palestine exception. In fact, like academic freedom and free speech have been key tools to kind of uphold the status quo and build kind of power infrastructures that limit any interrogation of those safe spaces. So the labor organizing model has been something that actually AUP itself has begun to shift toward and the National Council elections in the, in July actually brought an entire team to the floor at AUP that actually come from a labor organizing background.

And as a part of that, there is a new local that combines all the members of every advocacy chapter into a body that is represented by the American Federation of Teachers. So my suggestion here is that the academic freedom free speech principles are actually not getting us where we need to go. And we need to actually seize onto the language of labor organizing and acknowledge ourselves as workers and unite as workers and to rid ourselves also of this I think really disabling language of faculty and faculty privilege that also disables our ability to connect with students, staff and contingent faculty.

And if we embrace the language of labor, we actually, first of all, recognize the fact that our power is, or our position is very contingent, especially with the increased outsized control of governing boards, trustees. Thank you. And the voices of external donors. And if we recognize that and unite in collective action within an awareness of that, and shed ourselves once again of this notion of like privilege, I think we’re in a better position.

And the example of that is the American Federation of Teachers Convention in July in Houston, where a Palestine coalition formed of reps from almost like many, many different union chapters, and we huddled in Hallways and byways and strategize before each committee meeting and before the General Assembly and, you know, believe me the strategy session worked, but we were also shut down vehemently at every turn.

There was so much effort on the part of the so called progressive caucus at AFT to shut down any effort to actually change resolutions or to acknowledge the deeply harmful language in resolutions. However, the fact that we all met, we created like Almost instantaneously, a group of people across chapters across the nation and then work together to actually derail the General Assembly for 45 minutes.

We didn’t get what we wanted, but we derailed it and thus got like meetings with AFT leadership afterwards. So I’m putting those out as models of what can happen if we embrace labor organizing as our path forward. 

DYLAN: I know you were about to say something. Yeah, that that’s a beautiful 

KARIM: Heather. I just like to make a couple of points, one remaining rooted in the experiences of those on the ground in Palestine.

The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which emerged out of the Palestinian civil society called from 170 organizations in 2005 and articulated most clearly by. In his book on BDS is an important lodestar in the kinds of activism and organizing we might do in a US academic context, which are often distance, which are often divorced and which are often frankly Fragmented by these institutional fires.

We’re putting out on a day to day basis. It’s necessary to attend to them, but let the actual experience of those on the ground in Palestine guide us. BDS is obviously one of the most powerful tools that we can and promote at our own universities in our own FSJP chapters chapters at our professional organizations and elsewhere, but there are other projects which are taking place on the ground.

I’ll refer to ra an Israeli human rights organization which is named after the Hebrew word for remembrance. And what reme their, their form of ZLA is oriented around is specifically the npa. It’s joint Palestinian Jewish run organization that seeks to integrate historical knowledge and the necessary constant context for understanding contemporaries ready Palestinian politics in the public sphere in that country.

Taking our guidance from these kinds of organizations, from organizations that are building towards Jewish and Palestinian solidarity on the. Ground in Palestine is important, I think, in our consciousness as well as our activism and organization in line with Heather’s comments about national organizing at the AFT, at the AUP and elsewhere.

Coalition for action in higher education, which successfully ran the national day of action for higher education this last year on April the 17th is working towards another day of action on the same date in 2025 in coordination, not just with Coincidentally dated April 17th day 2024, but also in honor of the beginning of the encampment movement at Columbia University.

Coincidentally on April the 17th Palestine is at the forefront of our concern, but also project 2025 institutionalized precarity and precaritization Boards of trustees and a network of other issues part of the project for the 2025 day of action is to on a national level, highlight the intersections and connections between these compounding crises in our higher education domain.

And we hope to coordinate between the national organizing. Committee and local FSJP chapters and other academically labor union chapters. So the the local national intersections are manifest in our campus spaces. I’ll post a link to the 2024 day of action. Please stay tuned for the development for 2025.

DYLAN: Excellent. Go ahead, Aaron. 

AARON: Yeah no, I really appreciate this. And I think there’s a few things coming up for me, partially from the student perspective, sort of thinking about my alma mater. I think a lot of how universities handle both student movements and often with professors and just movements within universities is to sort of, universities are simultaneously seen as these movements.

Sites of contestation where there’s hyper importance on how knowledge is produced and how students live within that. But then they also, and so that will be seen when there is resistance to that. Columbia, NYPD, militarization campuses within campus across the country, but that’s partially response to them sort of using the justification of, well, you didn’t try these channels.

And so I’m thinking about at my alma mater sort of a submission form. of saying to the SJP, oh, all these Jewish students are feeling uncomfortable instances of anti Semitism that they reported of this student saying this, this student saying that, and obviously using they were considering a lot of these hate speech, not because they were being targeted for their Jewish identity, but for their Zionist beliefs.

And so Zionists are hyper using these these submission forms and working within the university because they know that those will be heard. And so I think, I don’t know that this is necessarily an answer, but I do think that as many things as possible need to be tried. And one of those is what if sort of I’ve heard talked about is flooding these things with A lot of our concerns that will, in possible partial ways, possibly be able to delegitimize those systems of reporting to begin with, especially if the university is trying to take a neutral stance.

And what that either shows is that they are not actually using those platforms in those ways. or that they will be forced to sort of abandon those completely. I don’t know that that will be the case. That could be a completely failed method and I’m curious on others thoughts on that. But I think also other things like what what Heather was saying in terms of exercising sort of other means like faculty as workers being able to sort of not go within the systems of.

How the university says the right way to do something is whether that’s meeting with the president as the figurehead but not the actual board that makes decisions. But understanding things in the way that they work, and not in the way that sort of the runarounds that universities often sort of say to go through both for students and faculty.

But, yeah, and so that’s just sort of thinking out loud a little bit with that, but yeah, 

DYLAN: thank you. This is this is outstanding. And, and, you know, I want to make sure that we afford just a little bit of time for some of the brilliant points and questions that are coming from folks in attendance. So, Shereen, can I ask you to unmute and maybe bring your question forward?

And I do this with. Advance apologies to other folks whose questions we will not get to. But what I can say is, once we, once we publish the video on the YouTube channel for center for ideas, society, and possibly, possibly through the supercritical study design ism. With your permission, what I’d also like to do is, is actually list the questions and the points that audience members have raised here and put them in the comment section for the video.

So folks can maybe think through that on their own time and other spaces. Sure. Go ahead. 

SHEREEN: Thank you, everybody. And this initiative really is giving me hope in these times. Thank you all. And I was wondering, I’ve been thinking a lot about these exposes that we’ve been seeing about board members and trustees at universities that are war profiteers, that are, you know, arms manufacturers and all of the other elements of, you know, the military carceral system.

And they’re often the same people and they serve on several boards, for example, cultural organizations and think tanks, and they’re funding huge institutes. And they have so much power that in my experience, there aren’t that many either Palestinian Arab or even pro Palestinian voices left on campuses.

And I was wondering. How we, you know, and they have, of course, very powerful lawyers. So I was wondering how you think we can face, face them and sort of survive their, their violence 

DYLAN: insuring. Can I ask you? Sorry. I should have asked you to do this right away. Do you mind introducing yourself real quick?

I know who I know who you are. We have beautiful people that we’re in community with, but it could be great if folks knew who you were. 

SHEREEN: Yes, thank you. I’m currently a PhD student at EGS. I was previously a professor at Brown University and I’ve worked with many cultural institutions and I noticed that the same board members that sat on the cultural institutions committees were also on committees at Ivy and, you know, universities and that they were quite problematic and very, very powerful.

So I realized that there, you know, at the end of the day, without naming names, because you can do your research, they are they’re able to really shut everything down,

DYLAN: which of our panels would like to take this on. 1st, and I’ll go ahead. You unmuted first. So you’re 1st. 

PRANAV: Oh, okay. No, no, I, I don’t have anything profound. I’m just saying like the I think I just, just the point that Shireen, thank you for your point. Like, I think that you raise shows how much research is basic research.

Like, I feel at Ohio State, we still need to do a lot of just basic research. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of rumors. There’s a lot of innuendos. There’s a lot of connections, but actually putting it together. You know, who are the different figures? What is their connection? What’s the best way to challenge that?

You know, while right, while not some, sometimes people can get so focused on those questions and then they get disconnected from the movements on the ground also. So how do we keep, you know, connect those and constantly connect those? I think that’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Go ahead, Heather.

DYLAN: Heather and then Kareem. I see you, Kareem. 

HEATHER: Sorry, Kareem. Maybe I’m also going to make your point. I think, I think it’s interesting because as, as Kareem brought up the question of discourse and language, and just maybe because this is part of my own kind of scholarly activity within the context of the audience.

I’m an empire. I really believe that words matter and that even if in some cases it’s a distraction to fight over like vocabulary. I also think it’s a necessary empowering tool. And often in terms of our FJP here at the Claremont colleges. One of our most active working groups have been has been a counter narrative group.

Where we take things that have been emails that have been pushed out by various administrators across the college and we provide like we reframe and re narrate with alternative vocabularies, and it’s been really an extraordinary empowering move because it also builds on our. Our knowledge as you know as scholars, as producers, or as knowledge producers, but it also builds on all of the work that everybody has been doing like past and present in these spaces, and it does matter.

So again, speaking from. My experience at this college, like when we had 20 students arrested by militarized police on Pomona campus on April 5 of last year, there was all kinds of horrendous language emanating from the president’s email accounts and our counter narrative documents were then sent to every other college president because we were concerned that when they brought these topics up to the faculty, we didn’t want them to just spout the Pomona president’s language.

We wanted to disrupt it. And what was interesting is that our president was so like kind of rattled by it that when they introduced it to the faculty meeting said, well, there’s a lot of different perspectives on what happened on April 5th. I mean, that’s a massive win. That’s a total triumph because instead they could have just written like read out out loud like these were, you know, the, the kind of racialized discourse used to identify student protesters.

Is what would otherwise I think have floated into our faculty space and it enabled a different conversation. So I want to reinforce what Kareem had been suggesting that we, we do need to focus on vocabulary language and discursive practices as a means to disrupt and to do so within all contexts that we have available to us.

KARIM: I’m thinking about two areas. One, the increasing isolation of Palestinians and Arabs on our campuses via direct targeting and excision from our community spaces, as you know, creating networks, creating solidarity. And intersectional approaches to the multiple ramifications of the long history of colonial modernity and all of our communities offers an intellectual and a communal space for engaging with one another and, um, making the, the Palestine question central to our emergent anti colonial politics on our campuses regarding toolkits and looking behind the veil.

I think one thing that’s might be incredibly useful for us to collectively work on is look at divestment strategies at our universities. And in our national organizations so as to develop like working tools for thinking about how and why divestment works in the rare circumstances where it does work San Francisco State University.

Of course, is the key contemporary example, but the American Studies Association and the Middle East Studies Association and other national organizations might offer some useful guidance here, but also importantly, thinking about the ways in which and developing resources on how and why divestment doesn’t work at our campuses would be important to offer us an object lesson and strategies that have not been successful and also to demonstrate the intersecting ways in which university administrators across the country are kind of collaborating with one another to shut down these these movements, and we’ve of course seen that in the university responses to the divestment demand demands emerging from the encampments since April 

DYLAN: Aaron.

I’m gonna throw it to you for any comments on this in a 2nd as well. But but I’ll say that just the, the, the way the way that you all have my gears moving right now, just further renders explicit how. The university and particularly it’s administrative apparatus. Is actively engaged in counterinsurgency experimentation that is closely aligned with the state and may or may not be connected to the state.

Right? So, like, you can actually engage in university and college and institutional counterinsurgency semi autonomously of any state directives. Simply because the logic of counterinsurgency is, is, is in the interest of the apparatus, you know, and if we take that seriously, then what everyone here is saying, panelists and audience alike is that the university is a site, it’s a, it’s an actual theater of Zionist war making.

It’s like they, they understand the Zionist apparatus defines and conceptualizes and treats it that way, you know, and I think in that sense, it’s a coordinate. There’s a theater. There’s a coordination within that theater of struggle and warfare. And I appreciate the way that the language of warfare is being brought up by people here and people in the audience as well.

Aaron, did you want to comment on this particular point before I ask each of you to offer some closing comments since we’re approaching time? Thank you, Aaron. 

AARON: I don’t have that much to add, but I think highlighting everything that Ameya has been posting in the chat about research that’s being done to sort of lift the veil on this and overlapping coordinated strategies.

Also the recent Mondewise piece by I think Carrie Zaremba on the way, on the different institutions that have been involved over the summer and strategizing for further militarizing campuses. 

DYLAN: Excellent. So, so just to, just to kind of, you know, honor everyone’s, everyone’s time and labor energy here.

First, I want to say thank you on behalf of everybody that’s that’s participating and that’s attended and that will be watching the recording. Thank you. Thank you to the for you for the ongoing work, the collaboration. I’m looking forward to be on the team with all for you, whatever ways we can be. And I just want to ask you for any closing comments or thoughts that have occurred to you, closing questions, anything you want to leave folks with, and I’ll do it in reverse order of of the way you’re listed.

So, I think, Kareem, that would make you go 1st. So go for it. Any closing thoughts? Let me have a moment to think about closing thoughts. Okay, so we start with sounds good. All right. You know what? I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll go to, I’ll go to Aaron. I know you just spoke and but I know that folks also are keen to hear from you as an on the ground organizer in this theater of warfare.

AARON: Yeah, I’m also not good at forming thoughts quickly but I will try. I think, yeah, I really appreciate all this I think what’s just really striking to me right now is like I think how coordinated, we need to be. In sort of looking at, like, what are all these different actors, what’s Hillel doing, what’s who’s sort of funding these legal campaigns and militarized campaigns and what are sort of the different ways that we can work within university structures or outside of them to sort of create new things.

Reiterating my points from earlier, just that I think Hillel is and sort of everything working to sort of synonymize Zionism and Judaism like is a big part of this and needing to sort of create a rupture within that in order to sort of create new definitions of how we can be in actual solidarity and yeah, I think just continuing to boost everyone’s work, center Palestinian work and continue to learn from one another.

DYLAN: Yeah, brilliant and I can add something real quick to this. This is more this is more of an encouragement to colleagues here who are employed at universities as faculty members and particularly people who are tenured. I want to explicitly advocate that if there is such a thing. That that folks who are here and our friends.

Volunteer ourselves to be part of the universities. Charges and disciplinary apparatus in order to engage in an, in an institutional analog of jury nullification. I know, I know, in the University of California system that we could effectively nullify a lot of these repressive policies effectively if we have 1 member.

You know, if we have 1 person, 1 solidarity Palestine solidarity person on any of the disciplinary committees or boards, we could effectively nullify pursuit of disciplinary charges against faculty and even possibly against staff and students. So that is a super practical thing, but it is to take seriously the consequences that are being brought down on people’s heads that take up so much energy so much expense, so much resources, et cetera, you know, they want to demoralize us.

So I think it’s important to anticipate that go ahead, Kareem. 

KARIM: Yeah, on that note, I’ll refer to Rashid Khalidi’s classic Palestinian identity for my concluding comment. He reminds us in the last chapter how in the 1936 1939 Palestinian revolution, the British and ably exploited divisions in the existing Palestinian leadership to decimate that movement.

And he continues that the Palestinians effectively entered into the second world war, the predecessor of the 1948 Nakba headless. That’s another one of his words. So I suppose my concluding comment is unity. And I’d like to just, just, Bow down before the brave, courageous, beautiful students and the encampment movement, the most moving thing, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life, supporting our students, you know, unity and support of them and and the struggle I think is, is, is crucial moving forward, given the the ways in which administration administrators and politicians and so forth are exploiting gaps and differences between us.

DYLAN: Unity and struggle to say. I’m a car cabral. 

PRANAV: I love what Karim says. I kind of don’t want to mess that up, but but I’m going to actually put a bunch of questions and tensions that come up in this work. So, 1, that’s come up in F. S. J. P. Are we supporters of students who are the real organizers or are we organizers ourselves?

And there’s a spectrum there. And it’s a weird spectrum. But but it’s actually a good, a good question that opens up a bunch of questions about how we operate in these spaces, you know when is. An act of privilege to step in front of students. You know what I mean? And when is it actually necessary and what we, what we should do.

And so, so these kind of questions what do we, what do we make of the fact that some of the colleagues from Jewish history. Who made brave testimonies against the GOP in these kind of nasty SB 83 bills. Might be on the other side of the line when we come up to this talk about Zionism and encampments and there’s a there’s a way in which we’re working with people and and not on the same side on things.

At the same time, and those things are sometimes confusing. The stuff with language and stuff. There is a welcome kind of space now to publish around Palestine. But you feel like some of it’s turning into careerism sometimes and that balance between actually. Bringing your work together to this. So we don’t we have limited time.

How do we do that? And how do we not do the middle class academic thing again, you know? So anyway, there’s a series of these tensions that we’re constantly going through and but I’ll go with Kareem and like all glory and power to the students and to what’s going on. And what, what, what they’re doing on our campuses is so brave and courageous.

We have to support them however we can. 

DYLAN: Feel you feel you. I know. Thank you. Yeah. Heather had a closer cell with you. 

HEATHER: I just want to pause for a moment and acknowledge so many of the comments in the chat that refer refer to just the importance of this space that has been created and want to thank ICSC for that, but also just all of us on this panel met via signal chats.

This is the first time we’ve actually ever seen each other in person, and yet we’ve had long, sustained dialogues over single chats. And that’s a reminder, really, of the power of collective organizing around a mission of Of of liberatory justice and as Kareem reminded us, I think we need to close out by highlighting some Palestinian voices as well and for me that will be Raja Shahada.

He was the founding member of Al Haq, a non profit organization that has diligently archived and documented all of the egregious acts against Palestinian minds and bodies and he’s also an extraordinary historian and he’s the first author that I, I read that talked about the dismemberment of Palestinian geography and thus of Palestinian lives.

And this dismembered geography is I think helpful for us to think about because as Aaron reminded us of how well organized and orchestrated and Dylan as well, the mechanisms to suppress Any moves toward a liberatory politics? Raja Shahada reminds us that that has been battle tested again within the context of Palestine, that the dismemberment of the possibility for educational collectivity has been long running, and that our work here should be a reminder that Palestinians once again are our leaders in this.

and that their strategies for working in collective solidarity should be ours. And especially with the criminalization of all forms of resistance, whether armed or civil we need to kind of remind ourselves that Those kinds of models are what we can bring to bear within our campuses. And we should figure out how to stand in solidarity and not assume positions of power and privilege when doing so.

So I appreciate Pranav’s questions as well, but here is to a movement that is a movement against the dismemberment of the past and present of Palestine.

DYLAN: Thank you to our panelists. Thank you to the audience for coming through. Thank you to people who watch, listen to study and think about this recording. I hope it catalyzes and generates and stokes the right kind of insurrectory and insurgent and liberationist and anti colonial fires, and I’ll just close this out by expressing my deep gratitude to every person that every community, every geography that is engaged in anti colonial struggle, insurrection, unapologetic opposition to colonial power at this moment.

Thank you. Thank you all. This is precious. Thank you.

EMMAIA: Thanks for joining us for this special episode of Unpacking Zionism. All of the resources mentioned in the talks are linked in the show notes, and on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. To connect with the Coalition to End Zionist Repression and its inaugural campaign, the Right to Reject Zionism, visit bit.ly/campus-alliance.

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