Recognizing Genocide in Our Classroom
by Sophia Azeb
* Presented at a teach-in for teachers (faculty and students) at UC Santa Cruz on October 24th, 2023
What the last 2 weeks have inexorably demonstrated is that the post-colonialists will not save us.
For myself, it is through Black studies and Black study where the possibilities of our collective liberation can be realised. Black studies is after all a pedagogy of liberation, and public education must be first and foremost in service to the public good. To my mind, the global anticolonial uprising demanding an immediate end to the genocide perpetrated upon Palestinians by the state of Israel; an immediate end to the siege on Gaza and state-sanctioned settler pogroms of Palestinians in the West Bank, and an immediate end to the Israeli occupation and 75 years of the Nakba constitutes The Public Good.
Katherine McKittrick has lately and frequently reminded us that “anticolonial theorising is a mode of living,” which I understand to mean, in part, that anticolonialism is a theory of practice and a practice of theory which moves us ever nearer to the horizon of decolonisation. It has never been more apparent to me than now how the long practice of extractive citation has excised from the study of anticolonial theory that many of us are actively theorising for our lives.
Though I am not a scholar of Palestine, my Palestinianness informs every part of my commitment to Black studies. With that context, I’d like to share some approaches I have used in my classroom this quarter to directly address this genocide, part of the ongoing Nakba that Jennifer historicized for us all.
Unfortunately, I have prior experience with the urgent need to address state-sanctioned racial violence in the classroom in the absence of any administrative acknowledgement or support in the face of such violence, because the structure of US policing - so often in congress with Israeli Occupation Forces through official channels (In the midst of the movement to Stop Cop City, Atlanta’s city government praised the participation of local police in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program with the IDF) - is such that we are as desensitised to the police murders of Black and Indigenous and Latinx [and on, and on…] peoples as we are to the daily trauma and violence meted upon the people of Palestine, Haiti, Congo, African migrants in north Africa and Europe, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and far too many other imperialist cartographic imaginaries to name.
Avenues into these conversations? Pre-empting common questions
Q1: Why single out Israel?
A1: Because the U.S. state offers a singular form of support to the Israeli state, in the form of billions of dollars per year and an alibi for every violation of international law, to the extent that at least 37 states have enacted or attempted to enact laws, executive orders, and resolutions specifically targeting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
A2: Because oppressive regimes are always interconnected: we have only to look at the US’s greatest allies for evidence of that. The Israeli state exported anti-riot vehicles and arms to during the global embargo and boycott of the apartheid state; Guatemalan state forces that carried out the genocide of Mayan peoples were armed and trained by the Israeli state - the “Galil” assault rifle was standard issue in the Guatemalan army by 1980; the Israeli-made bullets, rifles, and grenades exported to Rwanda during the genocide of Tutsi civilians by Hutu militias in 1994 made the slaughter of 1 million Tutsi peoples in 100 days possible. Indeed, just a month ago we collectively witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh by Azerbaijan, directly enabled by Israeli arms sales. Indeed, Azerbaijan today secures 70% of its military arsenal from Israel, one of numerous colonial regimes and authoritarian nations – including many in the Arab world – reliant on Israel’s booming arms trade. Israel is, in fact, not singled out at all. Its influence throughout the globe is one that magnifies the displacement, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of other colonised and racialised people, including in the U.S.
Q2: Didn’t Palestinians in Gaza vote for Hamas? Why don’t the Palestinians employ nonviolent means of resistance? Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Why don’t they leave?
A1: This one has way too many moving parts to adequately handle all at once - namely that many, successive Israeli governments have used Hamas to their advantage (Netanyahu’s political bloc begin only the most recent among them) - but if we must fetishize non-violence so that Palestinians are appropriately deferent enough to deserve to live and move and love freely, without their olive trees razed; water wells poisoned; homes stolen or destroyed; ancestral villages planted over with pine trees to be forgotten, bones deliberately broken; tortured in military detention without charge, shot as they march towards the barrier - not a border, according to the Oslo accords – between Gaza and the homelands many of the people living in Gaza now were forced from. Leave Gaza? How? And only to become refugees twice over?
A2: Oh, why bother: the answer to the question “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi” is always “The Israeli Occupation Forces killed them,” or tried to, or targeted their home to indiscriminately murder their family, or…
Q3: What about women/queer and trans people/Black folks/[insert marginalised community here]? They couldn’t walk around Gaza! They are far safer in Israel.
A1: According to whom? What preconceived notions or stereotypes are you relying on for these assumptions? There have been Black people in Palestine for hundreds of years, and Afro-Palestinians are as impacted by the Israeli occupation as any other of their fellow Palestinians: Fatima Bernawi was the first Palestinian woman to be arrested and incarcerated for her revolutionary (read: militant) organising. Bernawi was a Black woman. Indeed, so many Palestinian women were guerrilla fighters before entering the realm of politics, Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh notably among them. Palestinian women have always been the center from which our collective struggle for Palestinian liberation emanates, for instance innovating and practicing a sonic technique known as “Trawidah,” or “malulah”; a method and genre of singing that communicated key terms and information to fellow revolutionaries, refugees, and lovers by encrypting them with additional consonants to safely communicate with their compatriots beginning in the Great Palestinian Revolution of 1936. And Queer Palestinians can and have spoken for themselves, so I will simply share a few pinned notes shared on the Queering the Map app, from Gaza and the West Bank (and all historic Palestine), after the Israeli onslaught began:
One pin along the sea marks “a place where I kissed my first crush. Being gay in Gaza is hard but somehow it was fun. I made out with a lot of boys in my neighbourhood. I thought everyone is gay to some level.”
And another, south of Jerusalem: “Being out doesn’t mean anything to me. I wish to see Haifa I wish to see the village my parents had to leave I wish to see my brother who got killed I wish to be free but my freedom is beyond being out it’s being Palestinian first and foremost. God have mercy on my brother and my Palestinian siblings.”
And another, in Gaza: “I’ve always imagined you and me sitting out in the sun, hand in hand, free at last. We spoke of all the places we would go if we could. Yet you are gone now. If I had known that bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”
These celebrations, lamentations, calls for justice and dreams of freedom sound not so different from the many and divergent structural and interpersonal realities of being Black, queer, and a woman in the U.S. – or, indeed, in Israel itself.
Q4: Finally, why bring this into the classroom at all?
A1: Because we can not not. Our faculty, staff, and students have had either no or the worst sort of victim-blaming acknowledgement from our administrators, as reflective of most other students and staff throughout the U.S. higher education system. Palestinians and Arab and Muslim peoples - or anyone mistaken as any of these peoples, or anyone in solidarity with these peoples - are being doxed, unhired, fired, suspended, blacklisted, questioned by police and the FBI, beaten, shot at, run over by cars, and stabbed to death by their landlord. Allah yerhamo Wadea Al-Fayoumi: you were only 6 years old and we failed you.
A2: Less emotively? A NYT headline changed three times on the day Al Ahli hospital in Gaza was deliberately annihilated by the Israeli military, and with it at least 500 people among the thousands seeking medical care and shelter inside of the hospital and on its grounds.
The first iteration read, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say”
The second: “At least 500 dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say”
The third: “At Least 500 dead in Blast at Gaza hospital, Palestinians say”
“Palestinians Dead, Palestinians Say”: this is basic grammar. This is the grammar of the unhuman, of genocide. Palestinians die, Israelis are killed. We can each of us recall a dozen equivalent grammatical obfuscations in the aftermath of state-sanctioned murders of Black and Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada, and probably in the last few months or weeks. This is the genocidal grammar that insists there are “NO HUMANS INVOLVED,” as Sylvia Wynter reminds us. We are witnessing mass baptisms among Palestinian Christians in Gaza, in case their children are stolen from them by Israeli airstrikes; toddlers so dehydrated and starving they do not have the energy to cry or scream when brought to a hospital with broken femurs; pregnant women undergoing caesarean sections without anaesthesia; men in the West Bank rounded up and tortured by settlers and the IOF and openly, publicly posted and broadcast by the perpetrators of this violence, just 20 years removed from Abu Ghraib. NO HUMANS INVOLVED.
The abstractions, derailment, and false equivalencies relied on by those who have long defended the settler colonial ethno-state formation of Israel is laid bare in open letter collectively composed by writers including John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Christ Abani, Gore Vidal, and Toni Morrison, published in The Nation on August 18, 2006 during the so-called “Second Lebanon War” and shortly after the so-called “2006 Gaza-Israel conflict.” This latter “conflict in Gaza” (the grammar of genocide again) was reported to have been sparked by the capture of an Israeli soldier by “Palestinian militants” on June 25, 2006. But of course, that’s not what began this particular “unprovoked” meeting of unequal forces. A day prior, on June 24, 2006, Israeli forces had abducted 2 civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. This was reported almost nowhere in the West. Thus, “A Letter from 18 Writers” insisted:
That this ‘kidnapping’ was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systemic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in the face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last 70 years…Each provocation and counter provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations, and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic, and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.
Toni Morrison’s co-authorship is of particular relevance for me, as a Black studies scholar and instructor of Black studies courses. What does Palestine have to do with a gen ed course on “Approaches to Black Studies?” And perhaps the most common question I must pre-empt with my students, colleagues, administrators, and peers is indeed something like, “What does Black studies have to do with Palestine at all?”
For myself, and in deference to Toni Morrison, the answer is simple. In tracing an African American “literary archaeology” from slave narratives and abolitionist treatises through contemporary Black fiction in her 1995 essay, “The Site of Memory,” Morrison insists that in her fiction, when confronted with “’proceedings too terrible to relate’ to a non-Black audience, she instead inhabits the position that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory.” Her novels are about the pursuit of truth, rather than fact. The responsibility of Black authors – for Black peoples – while narrating the historic truths of anti-blackness, is to “trust my own recollections…and the recollections of others” alongside “the act of imagination.”
Morrison continues, “the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. So if I'm looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn't write it (which doesn't mean that they didn't have it); if I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left...then the approach that’s most productive and most trustworthy to me is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the image.” Very much like Palestinians in diaspora (all of us, distinct and divergent in our attempts towards collectivity as we are) who can recite every inheritance and its theft – every displacement, every law, every incursion, every dispossession, every massacre, every onslaught – from generations before our own consciousness comes to being, because of the generations who lived so our being was assured, Morrison affirms “these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own life…the images that float around them – the remains, so to speak…surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.”
It is through and with the relational practice of Black study as Morrison exemplifies it that a series of truths emerges in the face of so many lies: the lie that we do not exist, the lie that we did not cultivate our land, the lie that we did not welcome our kin who came as refugees fleeing from genocidal European antisemitism, the lie that we do not love our children, the lie that we have no history… there is no satisfactory way to end this essay (which began as a small portion of a powerful teach-in), and so I will end it with what I know to be true: Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, Congo, Tigray, Yemen, Hawaii, Kashmir, West Papua - and all my kin I am too ignorant to know better of – we will be free. “My grandparents lived the Nakba, my parents lived the Naksa, and I WILL LIVE THE LIBERATION.”
