Decolonization with Lara Kilani 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1quWh9vygt7GLFcMzxCt5d?si=ZTrmMJ-rTwS5aXs3aUdzEg

Transcript

Decolonization with Lara Kilani 

[00:00:00] 

Yulia Gilich: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I am Yulia Gilich, your host and a member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today, I am talking to Lara Kilani, a Palestinian-American researcher, PhD student, and member of the Good Shepherd Collective. And in this conversation, we will try to unpack decolonization.

Since October 7, 2023, the term decolonization firmly entered the popular discourse. We have seen quotes from Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s excellent piece “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” and Frantz Fanon’s articulation that “decolonization is always a violent event,” spread far and wide, beyond Indigenous communities and even academic spaces concerned with colonialism and decolonization. We have also seen [00:01:00] populist attacks on decolonization, including by Elon Musk, who tweeted that decolonization, and I quote here, “necessarily implies genocide.” 

And in this moment, in the midst of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, unrelenting settler violence in the West Bank, and escalating state repression of Palestine solidarity movements across the Global North, it is critically important to study how Palestinians theorize, debate, and struggle for decolonization. And Lara Kilani and her colleague Leila Shomali wrote a really important piece in Ebb Magazine called “Anti-Zionism as Decolonization.” We will link this text in the episode notes, and Lara and I will discuss some of its most salient points. 

Lara, I really appreciate you joining me for this conversation.

Lara Kilani: Thank you so much for having me.

Yulia Gilich: I’d like to start by defining our terms, most [00:02:00] importantly, decolonization. How do you use this word in your piece?

Lara Kilani: As we define it in our piece, decolonization is about undoing the violent structures of colonialism, and in the case of Palestine, Zionism specifically, and building something new, something different that’s not defined or limited by these violent structures. So, in Palestine, it means abolishing the state, destroying colonial citizenship, dismantling all of the, hierarchies of life, the infrastructure that maintains the theft of resources from Indigenous people. 

In decolonization, it’s important that we’re also building something new. So returning stewardship of the land and having Indigenous people reclaiming their sovereignty. And I think that since writing the piece, we’re trying to think more about, you know, what does this mean? Specifically, are we going to build a state of Palestine or do we want to envision something else? Because we can think about the [00:03:00] violence of states and the violence of borders. And a lot of times when Palestinians talk about Palestine in the past, stories from before the Nakba, even people who were children at that time, emphasize the fluidity of borders.

So, people who lived in Jerusalem, Ghada Karmi talks about it in her book In Search of Fatima, that she grew up in Jerusalem, but they would travel to Amman for lunch, they would travel to Beirut, they would travel to Damascus. And so, you know, this is one way that we can begin to enter this creative and imaginative space of what decolonization can be, what a liberated future looks like, and what we really want. There are really important questions that people have about decolonization, like, what does it mean for settlers? It’s a legitimate question that we need to answer in order to elucidate how we imagine decolonization.

Yulia Gilich: I think it’s a legitimate question when asked in good faith, but the way I see this question being used is to shut down conversation about decolonization. I can [00:04:00] understand why decolonization scares people who are entrenched and comfortable in and benefit from the current colonial situation, but not having a precise vision of what decolonized Palestine will look like is not the reason to abandon or discredit the project of decolonization. Decolonization is very much about emergence, about a collective process of liberation and, as you said, dismantling of colonial hierarchies of life. And somehow settlers hear in this a call to violence or genocide, like what Elon Musk tweeted in October, and use it to discredit decolonization and disregard, well, one, the real ongoing colonial violence against Palestinians, and two, the liberation that decolonization is about.

Lara Kilani: There are a lot of ways that people like to kind of whack Palestinians or anti-Zionists on the head and get us to shut up by saying things like, you are going to carry out the [00:05:00] same violence against us that we carried out against you. And that’s like a way of shutting down conversation. It’s something that’s embedded in the settler imaginary that the violence that they enact is somehow made legitimate by this idea that Indigenous people have carried out the same violence against them, or will carry out the same violence against them, and historically it’s just not true. 

Yulia Gilich: Let’s switch gears for a moment. You wrote this piece with your colleague, Leila Shomali. Both of you are working towards your PhDs, but this piece does not put a lot of emphasis on the notion of study, be it formal education, collective study, or political education. What is your assessment of the role of study in decolonial struggles?

Lara Kilani: Study is important, but it’s not the most important thing. There’s this idea around Palestine, a lot that people, don’t know enough, or it’s too complex, or they don’t have all the facts, that I think comes from this idea that you need to [00:06:00] study, you need to have a PhD, you need to know all of these dates in order to understand something. I think sometimes there’s an overemphasis on what we need to know when it’s really a very, like, you can see something is wrong even if you’ve never studied anything.

But having said that I think that study is important because in Palestine, it, first of all, reminds us that we’re not alone. You know that Palestine isn’t this exceptional, I mean, I think there are elements of it that are exceptional that are unique, but that the process of colonialism here isn’t divorced or separate, or the first, instance of colonialism and that decolonization also won’t be the first instance, but also I think it’s important because. There have been so many brilliant scholars who talk about decolonization, or colonization, you know Palestinians, non-Palestinians, like other colonized people and so on, who [00:07:00] have so much insight, not only about what’s happening, but also about resisting it and undoing it. And I think that when we don’t look at it, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Because it can really inform our actions in the struggle.

Yulia Gilich: Right, on one hand, here’s this obfuscation of what’s going on in Palestine by overemphasizing study and claiming that it’s incredibly complex and one needs a PhD before forming an opinion about it. And as you said, it’s just not true. On the other hand, I think we don’t study Palestinian thinkers enough, neither in the movement nor in the academy. And we see groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement, PYM, trying to remedy it. Miriam Osman from PYM talks about the value of political education and studying Palestinian authors in the episode about Zionism and anti-Zionism. But when it comes to the academy, the situation is pretty dire. We know that having an Edward Said professorship does not [00:08:00] prevent Columbia University from terminating Mohamed Abdou or arresting hundreds of students protesting the genocide.

Lara Kilani: We see how like these academic spaces have just let us down to such an extent. I saw the interview of Asna Tabassum from USC. She’s the valedictorian and she studied resisting genocide at her university and then had the opportunity to give her speech taken away from her. And I think it’s such a powerful example of how these spaces that are supposed to be about critical thought and all of these things co-opt this notion to make money off of it while silencing people. And it’s not just her like we saw Jairo Fúnez- Flores, professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Palestinian who works at Hebrew university, she got arrested. I mean, she was kidnapped from her home by Israeli police and is being investigated for incitement to terrorism. 

Yulia Gilich: Israel’s [00:09:00] targeting of Palestinian thinkers and trying to extinguish Palestinian knowledge production has a long history. From Mossad’s assassinating Ghassan Kanafani in 72, or destroying the Palestine Research Center and looting the Palestinian film unit archive in Beirut in 82 and up to the scholasticide that we see Israel perpetrate in Gaza right now. Just in the past six months Israel bombed all 12 universities in Gaza, nearly 400 school buildings, as well as numerous archives and libraries. over 100 Palestinian academics and countless students.

Lara Kilani: Israelis have always been afraid of Palestinian intellectuals, Palestinian academics. They steal their diaries. They steal their libraries. They assassinate them. So clearly there’s like, a threat. And I think you’re right. It’s so important and it’s undervalued. I think a lot of people don’t know how many Palestinian scholars there are. There’s this racist [00:10:00] idea that Palestinians are uneducated, but you know, Palestinians are very highly educated in the West Bank and Gaza. There’s something like a 98 percent literacy rate. So, there’s no question about that. And Palestinians have been writing about this for a long time. Almost any Palestinian that you can find in the world will start the story of colonialism, or they might use the word occupation. In 1948 and before, maybe even with the British occupation, most Palestinians wouldn’t say. And then in 1967, everything started but despite that, that’s the common framework that people use. There has been a really long history of decentering Palestinian historical interpretations. When they have advocacy in the United States, when they go talk in the UN, whatever, it’s not the Palestinian analysis that’s being centered. It’s Zionist analysis.

Yulia Gilich: That’s a great segue into the next question I want to ask you. I really appreciate how through the decolonial lens, you clearly [00:11:00] demonstrate that Palestinians are the leaders of the anti-Zionist movement. Palestinians are the authors and caretakers of anti-Zionist decolonial thought. And you aptly note that that there are serious repercussions to not understanding this and to positioning Jewish organizations at the forefront of the anti-Zionist struggle. Can you talk more about those repercussions?

Lara Kilani: First of all, I wanted to acknowledge that, really, anti-Zionism started as a Jewish idea, right, that first it was Jewish people who were the first anti-Zionist before Zionism began in Palestine, so there is that history. And we should acknowledge i, right. But I think, it’s because Palestinians are the primary targets and the primary victims of Zionism and also we make the point in the article to say that it’s not just any Palestinian that you pick up off the street that can tell you this is anti-Zionist, this is Zionist, because it really has to be Palestinians who are engaged in decolonization.

And that doesn’t only mean [00:12:00] decolonization from a lofty scholarly perspective. And really, it shouldn’t at all be that, maybe that in conjunction with real action. But of course, not every Palestinian is engaged in that. And so, it really has to be people engaged in decolonization and resisting Zionism. But it is very important that those are the voices because Palestinians are the ones who are going to be most impacted by the continuation of Zionism or decolonization. When it’s not Palestinian analysis or not decolonial Palestinian analysis that’s centered, then all of a sudden we get very different imaginations of what Zionism is and what resistance is to it.

Somebody actually said to me “Oh, well, Zionism is ambiguous. It’s a complicated term.” And if you look at the history, Palestinian scholarship, Zionism is not an ambiguous term. It’s very clear from the perspective of the people most affected by it as settler colonialism and any other imaginations of it can exist in the imagination, but they’re not what historically has [00:13:00] existed. 

The general move of rejecting Zionism in public is very important and a very positive move. But the people who are doing this can’t be doing it for marketing. They need to be reading Palestinian thought and using Palestinian historical analysis, you know, and taking it really seriously because this analysis of what is anti Zionism impacts also what kind of campaigns we run. It affects who even gets the funding to lead efforts, because if we center Jewish analysis of what it means to be anti-Zionist and not Palestinian analysis, if Palestinians aren’t the voices leading decolonization. Why would they be the ones given the funds to materially put that into action? 

And we can see that. I mean, you can look at who gets the most money in the United States in terms of running these campaigns. This continual thing of we need to have like a Jewish person or an Israeli person say this first, so we don’t look like anti-Semites really support this idea that we don’t have agency [00:14:00] to express our own historical analysis and material experiences, and that we can’t be trusted, our analysis alone can’t be trusted, and that’s really wrong. 

And finally, I’ll just say that the organizations that kind of claim this mantle a lot of times are making political calculations in how they express that. And so what ends up happening, or at least what we’ve seen happening in the last few months is that some of these organizations they get grassroots funding in order to represent Palestinians or be Palestinian liaison in the United States or wherever, that their calculations end up more reflecting the maintenance of their organization and these political connections and funding ties and things like that. And at the same time, people are dying and having their homes destroyed and their families destroyed and their futures deferred in horrific ways that go beyond imagination. And right now we’re really seeing the material effects of this [00:15:00] decentering of Palestinians as the main voice. 

Yulia Gilich: I wonder if this gets at what you talk about in your piece where you write that, and I quote here, “Zionism and liberal Zionism continue to influence the shape of Palestinian resistance.” Can you unpack this more?

Lara Kilani: This happens in a bunch of different ways. A lot of times in Palestine, and I assume also in the U. S. with a lot of these organizations, and that’s why they stay in this framework there are restrictions on these funding packages or whatever. So what will happen is, you get funding to do humanitarian work in Palestine, and the part of the restriction is international law and international agreements, which includes the Oslo Accords. And so the Oslo Accords reframed or completely reconstituted the Palestinian struggle for liberation into one of state building within this framework of two state solution, right? 

And so part of maintaining this imperialist status quo and controlling, the way aid works and the way political [00:16:00] imagination works here is also tied to these funding restrictions. So I think that’s important, but also in Palestine, there is a problem, I’m sure your listeners will know about home demolitions and mass displacement in the West Bank, especially also in East Jerusalem, I mean across Palestine, but in area C of the West Bank, it’s most well known. So a lot of times there are liberal Zionist organizations based in Palestine that are willing to give money or resources as a form of solidarity to villages in these very vulnerable positions. And so this puts people in a difficult position because you can see how having partners who are in a position of privilege over you they’re either internationals or Israeli citizens providing resources, providing money, connecting you to politicians to try to keep displacement and demolitions from happening and all of these different things that could be very tempting right to engage in normalization to protect your homeusually it’s a temporarily [00:17:00] delayed displacement and that’s a political calculation, right? But what happens is, because other Palestinians aren’t willing to engage in normalization, this can really splinter communities across the world on the ground. There’s also a very powerful splintering that happens here through the cynical use of these resources that legitimizes the liberal Zionists and the Zionist NGOs and at the same time tears Palestinian communities apart from each other using this vulnerability.

Yulia Gilich: Thank you for clarifying the splintering politic and the deliberate or even unintended consequences of the Zionist meddling. I want to ask you about groups like Breaking the Silence and others. Who focus on fighting, and I’m using their language here, the occupation within the 67 lines. You write that these groups have a facade of the purportedly enlightened fight against occupation. But can you explain what is hiding behind that facade?

Lara Kilani: [00:18:00] Yeah, for sure. What we talk about in the piece is that there’s this idea of, in this liberal Zionist critique that Breaking the Silence and lots of other similar organizations have ,that settlers inside of the 1948 borders are, either neutral or can even be good and can be like redeemed. And that it’s the problem is actually with the settlers on the other side, within the space of the West Bank. Sometimes they’ll also add East Jerusalem in there. And this creates this very strange binary and this very strange like break in 1967 where everyone who followed after 1967 in the same project of settlement of resource extraction of elimination are the wrong ones and everyone who participated in it before are good or are at least neutral. So it creates this very strange historical break, but the more practical element of it is [00:19:00] that it creates this narrative that everything before 1967 was legitimate, that Zionism is legitimate, Israel is legitimate, settler colonialism is legitimate, but just isn’t legitimate now. We can’t continue it now. Now it’s wrong. Those settlers are bad. And I think this is part of what reinforces this idea that the situation in Palestine is complicated, it creates this confusion in people’s minds because they don’t understand if stealing the land was fine in 1948 why is it different now, and it’s not different now. 

This is part of the narrative violence, the epistemological violence. So this is like an important part of what they do, I think, where they, on the one hand, try to redeem the idea of Zionism in its beginning and critique it now and sort of move away from any possibility of actually it’s the colonial violence that has always existed that’s wrong and needs to be undone and dismantled and try to move [00:20:00] us into this more liberal space where we don’t necessarily have to undo any infrastructure or abolish or take apart or even question historical actions that it’s more that we need to reform, redeem, and that things will, be okay in that way.

Yulia Gilich: Right. This limited critique ends up legitimizing the structure as a whole. And it points to the question I’ve been thinking about a lot. You are very clear in the piece that decolonization is about material goals. The restitution of ancestral lands and resources, the deconstruction of Zionist structures, and the restoration of rights and power to the indigenous community. You also put an emphasis on wrestling back the right to narration, which makes me think of Edward Said’s piece that he wrote in 84, “Permission to Narrate.” So I wonder about the relationship between the materiality of decolonial practice [00:21:00] and the narrative, the rhetoric, the metaphor, if you will. 

Lara Kilani: If we’re not rooted in this historical reality of what’s happened in Palestine and we don’t name it and describe it very clearly as it was, and as it continues to be, then it’s much harder to imagine what the future should look like and to imagine what it could look like. And also I think of Refaat Alareer, we all got to know him one way or another online or some people knew him for a long time. And he was killed by Israel, he was assassinated along with his sister and her children for speaking the truth. So I think like when we talk about Palestinian scholars, and Israel assassinating or imprisoning, for example, Walid Daqqa is another scholar who was killed in prison, just a few days ago. We see that telling the truth unapologetically is maybe one of the most [00:22:00] threatening things in the case of settler colonialism.

Maybe I can just give one more example because I mentioned Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, she was arrested and supposedly being investigated for incitement to violence. And what violence did she incite? You know, she suggested that Palestinians deserve to live in our homeland. And she suggested that maybe a colonial state doesn’t have the right to life and death over Palestinians. And that is the violence that she’s inciting by suggesting that, the state shouldn’t control whether or not we live or die. I think that all of these displays of dignity about speaking the truth are really important for people to think about because literally we are seeing people die over their refusal to accept, or I shouldn’t say die, be murdered or imprisoned for their refusal to accept anything less.

Yulia Gilich: And that’s really powerful. Since you mentioned rights here, let me ask you about that. In the piece you point to the problem with the equal rights for all people [00:23:00] slogan in the context of Zionist settler colonialism. Can you clarify what this problem is for us?

Lara Kilani: I think it’s really important to emphasize that this idea of equal rights for all doesn’t get at the point that we want to dismantle the existing racist and unjust structures. And so, when we say equal rights for all and we don’t say that we want to create something new, we imagine we can keep the state or keep the violent structures or the infrastructure and just bring up the Indigenous people to the same level of rights and privilege as the settler class. And what we talk about in the piece and what’s really important is that the rights and the privileges of the settler class are built on the stolen resources, the refusal of life, and the violence, the daily violence, against Indigenous people.

So you can’t take what is stolen you can’t just build up the rights of indigenous people without the return of material [00:24:00] resources. And so that’s part of why we can’t just say those kinds of things. And, and we have to talk also about economic justice, because when we talk about these material resources, like water, land, homes, you know, physical homes, trees, and that people, not just Israelis, but in this case, primarily Israelis, have enriched themselves from these stolen resources and stolen life as well. When we talk about murder and imprisonment and so we also have to talk about economic justice and undoing these elements.

Like the call is for decolonization, right? So that means, as we said, the dismantling of structures that maintain hegemony and violence and elimination of Palestinians and that is all of the structures that exist within the Israeli state. There’s not a structure within the Israeli state that you could take that does not advance the theft of resources and, hegemony, and violence, and murder, and imprisonment of [00:25:00] Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens. 

And I think a lot of people don’t know this, so I just want to mention it that Walid Daqqa died after 38 years, I believe, in prison. And Itamar Ben Gvir said that he wished that Walid Daqqa didn’t die a natural death, he called it a natural death or something to that effect, that he had been executed by the state. But he was murdered by the state because he died of cancer. He spent the vast majority of his life in prison and he was killed by the state. Not only was his life stolen in the sense that he was imprisoned for the vast majority of his life. He never got to live in freedom with his child or his wife. But also he had cancer and he was denied treatment by the state. He wasn’t given treatment in jail and then died of cancer. He was refused treatment.

And most importantly, he is a Palestinian citizen of Israel. So this shows us that the Israeli state doesn’t place limits of violence on their citizens [00:26:00] and that all of these structures of violence are committed to engaging in this theft, theft of life, theft of resources, of everything. So I think this kind of shows the limits of this framework, international law framework, right? There is a legitimization, right? That the idea that Israel can be legitimate somehow, and it could be legitimate by restoring the rights of its Arab Palestinian citizens. And this, also expects us to accept that somehow Palestinian citizens of Israel could be made equal under a system that is built to extract resources and kill them. 

Yulia Gilich: You write that acts like renouncing one’s Israeli citizenship, like by Nadav Gazit and Yuula Benivolski, are acts that tangibly support Palestinian liberation. It’s clear to me how they do it symbolically, but can you say more about how they do it tangibly? 

Lara Kilani: I think that when these people like Nadav or [00:27:00] Yuula, both who I didn’t know before they gave up their citizenship, and I was very moved to see people engaging in this kind of solidarity because when it comes to giving up access to these kinds of privileges, like mobility, visiting family, would be really challenging for people as a sacrifice. And how I understood this decision by both of them, I thought it really was a decision to sacrifice not only this passport symbolically, but to really relinquish all of the privileges that not only come with it, like having a second passport, but even the possibility of return to take up these material resources that they would be entitled to just by the act of, being born with citizenship.

Because we’re trapped in this, colonial Imagination, right? it’s hard for us to think about, like, what could decolonization look like? What could a future without Zionism look like? And so people do [00:28:00] bet on the longevity of Zionism, and I think that these people very powerfully said, no, we’re not willing to engage in that. And we’re not just on a rhetorical level, not willing to engage in that, but we’re actually going to denounce, cut any ties, remove ourselves of any possible privileges in the future. Is it tangible enough? Is it like meaningful enough? I mean, I would argue even if it was wholly symbolic that it would be worth it. But I think it is something else. 

Yulia Gilich: Lara, thank you so much for this rich conversation.

Lara Kilani: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking me to join.

Yulia Gilich: Listeners, you can read Laila Shomali’s and Lara Kehlani’s piece, “Anti-Zionism as Decolonization,” on EBB Magazine’s website and in the debut physical edition of the magazine. We will link it in the show notes that you can find on our website criticalzionismstudies.org. Until next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical [00:29:00] Study of Zionism.