We are living in a world on fire. Ignited by wars and global warming, fires burn forests, fields, and homes. Fueled by hate and racist ideologies, fires feed on despair, authoritarianism, colonialism, crime, oppression, and poverty. In 2019, fire swept across the globe in the form of a pandemic, bringing death and misery to staggering numbers of people who live in regions where public health has been decimated by neoliberal policies and replaced by unaffordable (private) services.
Millions of people are destitute because of these infernos, living with constant fear and in many cases forced to seek life elsewhere. The outcome is the largest movement of refugees the world has witnessed since the Second World War. Depictions of scorched gray, white, and black landscapes in films of a postnuclear or postpandemic world are not incidental; real and metaphorical fires threaten our world. However, they are not evenly spread. The Global South is seared by flames of destruction more deeply and regularly than the Global North, which exists as if shielded from future disasters by borders, immigration policies, and physical barriers. Lives are lived, suspended, and lost in the im/balance.
Yet people are not solely victims of the world ablaze. Rather, they show incredible agency and resilience in the face of catastrophe. In this century, those who refuse to continue living under conditions of colonialism, racism, and inequality communicate and coordinate— they meet one another, whether physically or virtually, to build solidarity movements. Raising political awareness, analyzing injustice, exposing the roles of capitalism and imperialism, questioning the relationship between knowledge and power structures—shared concerns about how we live and who we are become tools for fighting the fires in front of us.
Palestine in a World on Fire brings together leading voices in the struggle to name, confront, and redress the global crises with/in which we live. These conversations invite us to reflect on how the climate emergency, planetary racism, and public health intersect with neoliberalism, migration, and border policies. We are encouraged to think deeply about indigeneity, subalternity, and Third World feminisms in relation to colonialism, imperialism, and rightwing nationalisms. We are compelled to question the meaning of academic freedom in the context of the Prevent duty, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine.
As we revise our introduction in May 2024, Palestine is on fire. Cities, neighborhoods, camps, homes, and loved ones in Gaza are being lost to aerial bombardment, ground assault, strategic deprivation, and forced migration in almost incomprehensible numbers. Journalists, activists, educators, and organizers are being detained and silenced within the borders of the Israeli state for daring to challenge the narratives that justify genocide. Young people in the West Bank are being killed by sniper fire from Israeli soldiers, or under the wheels of Palestinian Authority armored vehicles, for protesting the collusion between these two forces. While our conversation series sought to center Palestine as a crucial entry point for understanding and confronting the global crises named above, today we feel even more certainty in arguing that Palestine is the point. Palestine, Palestinians, and their supporters “can teach us to live and struggle in the current conjecture,”1 but only to the extent that we rise to our responsibility to fight alongside them, to insist on talking, seeing, and doing when those in positions of power would have it otherwise. Perhaps never has it felt so urgent, as we witness ethnic cleansing unfolding before our eyes.
Within the pages that follow, we trace the story of our conversation series and explore what these dialogues might teach us about decolonization as a material, intellectual, and creative practice. Our introduction gleans “tools” from honest and critical encounters, with the understanding that true decolonization will respond to the context from which it erupts—there is no single path to liberation, and it is not our place to suggest this. Instead, we distill lessons through which strategies and tactics might be developed based on the knowledge shared by scholars, organizers, activists, and educators whose commitment to Palestine shines as a guiding light. It is with awe and humility that we recognize how a young generation is already taking up these lessons and tools, actualizing and sharpening them in the service of resistance and solidarity. Ignited by the community at Columbia University and spreading rapidly to campuses around the world, the fire of the student encampments burns brightly, providing inspiration and hope in this moment of darkness. These activists ensure that Palestine will not be denied or forgotten, and that support for its people will only grow.
HOW IT BEGAN
From January 2021 through September 2022, we reached out to public intellectuals from across the globe and conducted eleven online conversations, making use of the digital platforms that became “everyday” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hosted by the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, these events were attended by two hundred to seven hundred online viewers on a given night and later made available as recordings on YouTube for access by organizers, activists, scholars, and educators. They take shape here as an edited written volume, in hopes of cultivating and sharing knowledge in another form.
As often happens, the emergence of the Palestine conversation series is a story of how discrete processes, seemingly disconnected, fused together. One process was the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought online discussion platforms to the fore; these technologies connected us across time and space, even while “locked down” in our homes. The pandemic also unexpectedly made people much more available—speakers who would ordinarily need to be booked months, if not years, in advance to join events in person were suddenly able to jump on calls to share their wisdom and experience. We owe credit to how people innovated and maneuvered in conditions of uncertainty and loss, finding ways to connect and generously share their time.
A second development was the emergence of a new network at the University of Exeter: the Exeter Decolonizing Network (EDN). EDN was formed in 2019 as a collective of staff and students whose intellectual, creative, and political work focuses on decoloniality and antiracism. Members of EDN understand and engage in decolonization as an intersectional politics, confronting colonialism and racism as these modes of violence articulate with capitalism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, and more. EDN is both a response and action group—holding the university accountable to its stated values and commitments while coordinating events and activities that support decolonial approaches to teaching, learning, research, and organizing. Recognizing the importance of Palestine to local and global struggles for decolonization, EDN mobilized its expansive network to facilitate and support the conversation series.
The final development was a renewed interest among British universities in Black history, which surged in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA), in May 2020 and the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol (UK) in June of the same year.2 These events drew attention to Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a movement for justice and liberation, animated by activists organizing on local and global stages. BLM demands accountability for police and historical violence as aspects of a broad systemic matrix, directing attention to how racism is cultural and structural. In doing so, BLM implicates spaces of teaching and learning—including universities—as sites of racialized violence and radical change. The University of Exeter responded to pressure from students, staff, and the local community by funding and promoting activities that advance the work of antiracism and decolonization on campus and beyond.
Through this confluence of actors and events, we opened our conversation series in January 2021 with Angela Y. Davis.3 While the interview transcript included in this volume relays her exchange with Ilan, it cannot capture the excitement in our (virtual) room with a sold-out Zoom audience and over four hundred additional attendees on YouTube.4 In that evening and the dialogues that followed, we were graced with the courage, wisdom, and imagination of intellectual and political leaders. We learned from scholars, educators, and organizers who toil tirelessly and actively participate in struggles for justice, liberation, and self-determination—in their local communities, in Palestine, and across the globe.
Our guests have devoted their careers and lifelong activism to unearthing the structures and discourses that maintain political violence, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism. They shared knowledge gained from rigorous research, difficult discussions, self-reflection, and investment in initiatives that refuse the status quo. Each speaker also shares a belief in the transformative potential of dialogue. Their conversations with Ilan demonstrate how the exchange of ideas and experiences does not solely enrich our understanding of the past and present—rather, discussion enables us to imagine new futures.
The bleakness of our present time is clear. Yet so is the urgency with which we must confront it. The conversations that compose Palestine in a World on Fire grapple with financial crises and regional uprisings, national identity and sectarianism, vaccination policies and social welfare, fascism and the rise of the extreme right, the future of the left and coalitional politics, immigration policy and border violence, how conflict and death are represented in global media, and the limits of personal empathy and political mobilization. However, every exchange ended on a note of hope—as a political emotion, a foundation of community, and a catalyst of action. In these moments, an energy was felt across time and space among organizers, speakers, and attendees; distances dissolved, and we stepped forward, together.
PALESTINE IN THE WORLD
For more than two years, we were graced with the time and attention of scholar-activists whose work is at once intellectually incisive and politically useful. Following their inspiration, this section considers what we might take away from the conversation series as a whole— the lessons that we might carry with us in the struggle for decolonization.5 Here we reflect on their offerings as imperatives that we must contemplate and actualize as we commit to liberation, self-determination, and justice as material practices. While the first “lesson” below draws extensively on Ilan’s experience in cultivating historiographical knowledge of Palestine, the subsequent sections are driven by the voices of our guests. Their words constitute the core of the series’ thematic teachings, with limited mediation from us as editors. In doing so, we underline the importance of memory, experience, dialogue, inquiry, and imagination as forms of knowledge—and we insist on the presence and significance of Palestine in the world.
First Lesson: Learn Your History
From Edward Said’s “Permission to Narrate” to Rana Barakat’s “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies,” much scholarly attention and activist energy has been devoted to the question of who tells the story of Palestine.6 For the speakers in our series, this is not solely a matter of discourse or intellectual pursuit; the struggle to articulate Palestine’s past, present, and future is both existential and material.
Ilan spoke with each of our guests about the role of narrative, in connection to Palestine and the broader movement for decolonization. Sustained by academic work, narratives influence school curricula, mainstream media discourses and reportage, cultural productions, and political policy. As seen in Palestine, Israel invests an incredible amount of energy and resources in attempting to validate its territorial claims and justify its policies, often on the basis of “scientific” academic research. In many ways, the contest over narrative can be seen as a zero-sum game, where acceptance or successful validation undermines—and even prevents—any counterclaims. Gabor Maté reminded us of the depth and pervasiveness of this phenomenon:
If you ask the average Israeli, Canadian, or British person, “Put together three intelligent sentences about the history of Palestine,” they couldn’t do it. You can ask the average British person, whose country participated in the invasion of Iraq with the death of over half a million people, “Put together three intelligent sentences on the history of Iraq or of Afghanistan.” Or right now, “Give me three intelligent sentences about the history of Ukraine in the last ten years.” They couldn’t do it. Because an ingrained passivity is built into the social character, which serves the interest of the social-political structure that it is designed to perpetuate.
While Israel has long held the upper hand when it comes to representation in global mainstream media, political decision-making, and (Western) public opinion, the presence and mounting strength of the Palestinian story galvanizes support for liberation. Through the conversation series, we sought to provide a stage upon which this story—or rather these multiple Palestinian stories—could be shared and linked to nodes in other anticolonial narratives and decolonial struggles. In this way, the history of a place and people is never isolated; we are always already connected.
In the case of Palestine, a robust field of scholarly knowledge enables us to access and engage—to learn—that history in part through a process of institutionalization. Palestine studies, as a discipline, makes knowable the stakes in the contest over narrative; the richness of Palestinian political, intellectual, and social life; how settler-colonial violence is experienced and resisted; and what a decolonial future might look like. Told one way, this disciplinary story is tied to the emergence of other fields of study: Israel studies and Jewish studies. It is indeed possible to see Palestine studies taking shape as a decolonial antidote to a project of erasure and denial. These roots tell the story of a riposte, an insistence on presence and audibility—a knowledge project as a strategy for survival. Yet narrating the emergence of Palestine studies as enabled by the development of Israel studies risks reproducing the violence that Palestinian scholars, activists, educators, and organizers are fighting to make known. Tying Palestine studies so firmly to Israel studies enacts a form of epistemic violence that we are obligated to acknowledge and confront if we are truly committed to working in decolonial and anticolonial ways.
As we learned from those who gave life to our series, “histories shape what surfaces”—whether objects, sensations, or political realities.7 Learning our history means detailing a trajectory of Palestine studies that honors the wisdom, courage, and vision of those who give substance and meaning to an academic discipline as practice of liberation and self-determination. The Nakba constitutes a watershed moment that rattled every aspect of Palestinian life, including the scholarly and academic structures that emerged during the British mandate. Rather than ending with the establishment of the Israeli state, the Nakba is ongoing—al-Nakba al-mustamirrah8—meaning that the cultivation and sharing of knowledge remains a target for elimination, whether through destruction, omission, or assimilation. And yet a rich intellectual practice has persisted, growing in depth and driven in part by noninstitutionalized ways of knowing. Palestine studies owes credit to storytelling, embodied memory, and artistic expression as much as academic labor.9
In the years after 1948, energy and resources were dedicated to (re)building scholarly institutions in sites that circumvented territorial control and in ways that defied the project of erasure. Two major Palestinian research bodies appeared in Beirut, Lebanon, in the space of two years: the Institute of Palestine Studies (1963) and the PLO’s Palestine Research Center (1965). Between 1965 and 1982, forty researchers associated with the Palestine Research Center produced more than three hundred publications, creating the foundational body of work for a discipline.10 Knowledge of and in the Arabic-speaking world was brought to English-language audiences by the Institute for Palestine Studies’ publication of the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1971, as well as its establishment of a branch in Washington, DC, in 1983. This investment in research and publication emerged in the context of sustained attacks on dispersed Palestinian archives and the continuing oppression of academic life in the occupied territories. In places like Beirut and Jerusalem, repositories of collective knowledge faced looting, seizure, and destruction—often at the hands of the Israeli state. Yet these concerted attempts at further dispossession and erasure have failed to deter generation after generation of Palestinian scholars from reconstructing the past, analyzing the present, and imagining the future, wherever they may be.
The effort to cultivate, protect, and circulate knowledge of Palestine has been enriched by the development of intersectional fields of inquiry elsewhere, including cultural, decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, Marxist, and postcolonial studies. On these broad shoulders rests the present field of Palestine studies, now a recognized area of inquiry in a growing number of academic centers around the world. Between 2010 and 2020, centers, units, and projects of Palestine studies were opened at Brown and Columbia universities in the United States; University of Cambridge, Oxford University, SOAS, and the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom; and most recently at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Similar initiatives have appeared in Qatar, Malaysia, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, complementing a growing interest in the Arab world and the development of dedicated academic programs. By working across contexts and struggles, researchers, educators, and organizers are speaking to new forms of solidarity, means of resistance, and imaginations of the future.
And yet we are still listening to and learning from Khalil, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), who underlines the stakes of this effort:
I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into only one leads only to death. We mustn’t see ourselves only in their mirror, for they’re prisoners of one story, as though that story had abbreviated and ossified them … You mustn’t become just one story … I see you as a man who betrays and repents and loves and fears and dies. This is the only way if we’re not to ossify and die.
Second Lesson: Develop an Old/New Language
Learning our history and shifting the story requires a specific vocabulary, a way of reaching and moving people. When we asked our first guest, Angela Y. Davis, what the nature of this vocabulary might be, we were blessed with a clear and powerful reply:
We need a new lexicon, we need new vocabularies. And that can be transformative. I’m simply thinking about the fact that when many of us first began to do abolitionist work around prisons, we asked ourselves how we could begin to encourage a critical stance toward the assumption that crime is responsible for the massive prison build-up. How can we disarticulate crime and punishment, and bring a popular understanding of the role that racism and capitalism play in mass incarceration? And we began to use the term “prison industrial complex.” That helped to shift the conversation away from individuals who committed crimes and therefore deserved punishment, to the ways in which economic and political systems were very much responsible for this growth in the numbers of people incarcerated.11
Through her experience of abolitionist work in the United States, Davis makes knowable how shifts in language or terminology can radically transform public knowledge—shaping not only how people speak, but also where they see power and the structures it creates. She points to a precedent that those working toward abolition and decolonization in other contexts can take up, a story to learn from and share as they confront macro-political power and ingrained social passivity.
As the Palestine conversation series unfolded, our speakers added layers to this lexicon of transformation. Many invoked an academic language built through efforts in gender, Indigenous, and subaltern studies to question the hegemonic frameworks and phrases that dominate public discussion and scholarly research. Drawing on their changing relationship to feminism, Judith Butler cautioned against the impulse to universalize terminology or assume shared concerns in movements and struggles:
There’s no single model that we can develop in one part of the world and impose upon the other … I have emerged in the last thirty years through US feminism, which too often thought that feminist theory takes place in English. That whatever is said in English is therefore universally true! This elaborates a kind of cultural imperialism at the level of language, but even the term “gender” is not easily translatable. Many feminists have had to push back on the term gender, or to find innovations within their own languages because it doesn’t fit with the syntax or perhaps it’s not the central category for feminist concerns.
From this history of feminist scholarly critique and organizing, we learn about the limits of language and its entanglement with power. At the same time, we are reminded of the potential for words to do work in the service of justice. Women “push back” and “find innovations” through drawing on their own languages and bringing this richness of experience to the struggle. Butler also underlined the importance of engaging with what exists as we develop a lexicon, signaling how the new is often old or familiar:
For me, the work of linguistic and cultural translation is key. We’re constantly learning! Feminism has not just been about the equality of women, or the emancipation of women from violence and subordination. It has also been a question: What is it to be a woman, or how is that category built, regulated, or reproduced? And that means that the category is being rearticulated through time.
This rearticulation of categories and language is not solely the domain of scholars, however. Everyday life, familiar interactions, and mundane occurrences can also provide us with a vocabulary of transformation. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian drew on the voices and words of children, those indomitable askers of questions, insisting that we attend to their language as we seek to build our own:
Following the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, I went to Haret al-Sa’diyya and there was a little girl, seven or eight years old, and a large group of soldiers. The soldiers were talking and suddenly she started calling her friend in a loud voice, “Fattoum! Fattoum! Come play hide-andseek!” And she looked at the soldiers, telling them in a loud voice, “If you killed Shireen Abu Akleh, do you think I’m not going to play hide-and-seek? … If you fill the graveyards with our bones, do you think we’re not going to play hide-and-seek?” And she kept on calling Fattoum.
Listen, just hearing her voice. This is a voice of clear defiance, of resistance, of refusal of power. I look at those things that maybe many people would pass and wouldn’t notice—her voice and her call for Fattoum…. We are trying to understand but also respect children’s walk to school, children’s language—how they speak life when the system speaks death and unchilding.
Grounded in academic labor and everyday life, expressed in analytical and defiant tones, our language can name past and present injustices—and enable us to develop imaginative tools for rebuilding the world.
Third Lesson: Question How Things Work
Our commitment to learning history and building an old/new vocabulary must be driven by a particular kind of intellectual and political curiosity—one that compels us to dig beneath the surface of appearances. Each conversation pushed past a “simple” answer to pursue knowledge of the complex logics, mechanisms, and ideologies that sustain political violence and inequality. In doing so, our guests drew attention to how connections across contexts and scales underpin the status quo, unearthing often deeply woven coordination and complicities.
Every transcript in our edited volume does this precise work of excavation at length, elucidating how things work, from the global economy to legal frameworks and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we follow these stories, we learn about the entanglements and agreements that fuel the world’s fires—even while political leaders claim to be fighting them. Yanis Varoufakis spoke to the interconnection among crises by grounding his reflections in an approach to economics that invites questioning. This was not the narrow, individualist view that characterizes neoliberalism, but a way of understanding the content, flow, accumulation, and effects of capital that attends to the collective:
We need to start talking about the historical necessity of shedding light on events that seemed indecipherable…. What is it that gives rise to wealth creation? How is income distributed? What is the mechanism by which competition leads to innovation, innovation leads to capital accumulation, capital accumulation leads to investment, investment leads to technical progress, technical progress leads to social ruptures, and so on? These were the big questions that the first economists tackled, without actually calling themselves economists.
Varoufakis is concerned with the ideas of economics—its global history—as central to its contemporary practice. By questioning how the current frame became dominant, we become aware of a discrepancy between economics as a “holistic organic approach” and the mathematized, scientific, professionalized field it is today. The devastating effect of this “disengagement between economic theory and really existing capitalism” was felt globally in 2008, when economic models proved incapable of forecasting crisis. Varoufakis’s ideas clearly resonate in Palestine when we ask how flows of capital and power sustain Israeli settler colonialism; but his warning about disengagement is just as instructive:
You wrote, “It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as disparate events; unconnected to anything that happened in the past, and not associated with any ideology or system.” That is racism in action. The moment you take just the figures of a conflict out of the context of ongoing ethnic cleansing, of pushing a native people off their land. The moment you’re allowed to get away without commenting on this underlying project is when you become complicit with the crime being perpetrated.
Nadine El-Enany followed this thread further, challenging us to question what is taken for granted with a focus on how the rule of law is implicated in violence. By adopting the language of “mythology,” El-Enany traced connections between Britain and Israel while revealing cracks in their political claims:
In my work I tried to dispel the myth that Britain is a postimperial, legitimately bordered, sovereign nation-state. Challenging this myth is the first step toward a project of practically dismantling the violent border regime. The myth that Israel is a democratic state has a similar kind of cataclysmic power in how we begin to understand, or not understand, particular situations…. It is important to dwell on the status and power of these kinds of myths because they are actually what obstruct the very kind of solidarity that Palestinians are calling for, and that we are calling for—the kind that supports the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
This is a profoundly different story about the power and legitimacy of states than the narratives promoted through mainstream media and political discourse. In turning a sharp curiosity toward what is accepted as truth, El-Enany names the constructions, norms, and relations that underpin our present political realities. While we gain new understanding of how logics and mechanisms animate and maintain power, we also become aware of their contradictions:
This is how myths work, because Israel cannot be a democratic state and be an apartheid state—it cannot be a democratic state and a settler-colonial power at the same time. Britain cannot be a domestic space of colonialism and also a postimperial, legitimately bordered, sovereign nation-state. Because there are certain principles that underlie a democratic state, like the rule of law and equality before the law.
These principles cannot be sustained in a context in which a section of the population is oppressed, regarded and treated as nonhuman, subject to targeted state violence and murder daily. Where state laws and policies are specifically designed to promote and propagate the supremacy of one section of the population. These laws and policies are also designed to cleanse the land of another section of the population through police and military violence, evictions, the destruction and occupation of property, allowing violent groups to torment people and act with impunity, controlling the economy to ensure a specific part cannot survive, thrive, or flourish. And through legal judgments, which replicate and legitimize that violence.
Through questioning foundational claims, El-Enany makes visible the threads connecting state power, violence, political policy, and legal judgments in Britain and Palestine. However, this is not solely the work of diagnosis; rather, we begin to see a clear basis for the kind of solidarity that supports struggles for justice and liberation. Asking and understanding how things work—identifying logics, mechanisms, connections, discrepancies, and contradictions—means that we might better challenge the knowledge and structures that produce and sustain violence. We are given targets for action.
What brought El-Enany to the framing of mythology and Varoufakis to an awareness of disengagement? What compelled them to ask how things work to maintain power and how the world might be otherwise? Intellectual curiosity and political determination, certainly. However, the guests in our series point to other energies that motivate the search for knowledge and movements for transformation: sensation and emotion.
It is not a far stretch to suggest that intuition attuned El-Enany to the power of myths in political claim-making, or that discomfort drove Varoufakis to ask whether the history of economic thought inevitably leads to crisis and complicity. Emerging as suspicion, worry, or frustration, the feeling that things are not right animates intellectual inquiry as it serves the project of material decolonization. While institutional gatekeepers have largely managed to exclude emotion and sensation from the realm of “knowledge,” these ways of being and making meaning have long been sources of individual and collective wisdom.12
Emotion and sensation shaped the conversation series in powerful ways, not least as our topics and speakers responded to ongoing violence in Palestine and around the world. Guests reached back for memories, shared their lived experiences, and dared to imagine—this wisdom was conveyed with warmth, honesty, anger, sadness, and hope. With pride we write that the events were marked by fearlessness and friendship. While feeling enriched the atmosphere of exchange, it also sharpened and deepened our analysis of settler-colonial violence. For the final conversation, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian joined us from her home in the Old City of Jerusalem, “where daily military occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, dispossession, and kill-ability is confronted with Palestinians’ livability, togetherness, joy, love, and growing solidarity here and around the world.” Her words forced us to face the reality of how Palestinian women’s bodies are “used and abused” by the settler-colonial project—whether alive or dead. Harrowing narratives relayed experiences of Israeli control that target not only land and community but also psyche and senses:
By occupation of the senses, I refer to the technologies that are managing the language, the sight, the sound, the time, the light. Come here and listen to the darkness, look at the light and the space in the colony! It is the administration of who acts, who speaks, who gives birth and how. Who walks, who moves, who drives where and how. What kind of language, music, smells, marches, colors, cultures, and scenes are promoted or inscribed over spaces….
My inquiry is concerned with the ways in which the settler colony uses sensory stimuli in a confrontational manner with the aim of invading the experience of the colonized, producing exclusivity and hegemony on the basis of one culture, one religion, one national and security claim.
Paying attention to sensation and emotion—feeling our way—enables us to name and know violence better, understanding how it permeates both life and death. But also it reminds us of Fattoum and her friend, whose call to play hide-and-seek rings out as a refusal of power.
Taking feeling seriously can result in clarity of vision and precision of analysis, as demonstrated by Shalhoub-Kevorkian; this is indispensable for projects of decolonization. However, making space for emotion and sensation can also reveal ambiguities and tensions that complicate this work.13 Judith Butler alerted us to the pitfalls of affinity in their reflection on the struggle to overcome dehumanization:
I sometimes worry about compassion, that it involves setting up identification: “These other people are just like me.” Just as I suffer, so others suffer. Just as my people suffer, so others suffer. That is a principle of equality and it’s an important one, but there’s also a different history. If I really want to be affected by the catastrophe of the ongoing Nakba, if I want to make myself open to the suffering of others, it may be that I should not assume an absolute parallelism between the lives of others and my life…. As you say, rightly, “How do we convince people, persuade people, or get them to understand this quite systematic dehumanization of Palestinians?” That’s a perfectly great question. The problem I see is that there’s an idea of the human that’s lodged within the critique of dehumanization. If Palestinians or non-Palestinians want to say, “Palestinians are human just like everyone else,” which version of the human are we invoking at that moment?
Through their discomfort—with compassion, identification, and notions of “the human”—Butler urges us to (re-)consider the grounds on which solidarities are built. Pity, charity, and compassion prove unstable and insincere. Instead, the struggle calls for “[recognizing] Palestinians as empowered, purposive peoples with desires and goals of their own, and as being completely invested and engaged in the project of their own liberation in that context.”
Feeling our way in the practice of material decolonization means holding these things together: the pain of occupation in its fullest sense and the necessary discomfort of solidarity work. The result must not be paralysis, but a renewed commitment to grapple with these tensions—as crucial to liberation.
Fifth Lesson: Acknowledge Failure
Staying with pain and discomfort in our political, intellectual, and creative work requires more than a view that looks beyond our own feelings or interests to train focus on the collective horizon. Somewhat surprisingly, we learned from our guests about the importance of acknowledging failure. These prominent figures in the worlds of scholarship, activism, education, and organizing were honest about how frustration and despair can result from experiences where ideas are misunderstood, actions are partially or even wholly unsuccessful, or politics reveal their limitations. Yet each time a failure was shared, it was not framed as an end point but as a moment in which new directions, questions, strategies, and spaces might appear. Rather than leading to paralysis, these “defeats” were recast as opportunities.
These moments of blockage and growth relate to both language and action—our frames for understanding and changing the world. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak shared challenges relating to how her work on “subalternity” has traveled, particularly in the translation of ideas to categories that are materially and politically useful:
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” was really a beginning, and then things changed…. When the rights of citizenship cannot be accessed, as in the case of Palestine, that is certainly subalternity…. And when our Palestinian colleagues suffer absolute discrimination in international professional travel, that is subalternization. Subalternity and subalternization are two different things, again asking for different kinds of strategies…. We certainly need to engage with them—not just to learn from them how to teach, but also to consolidate infrastructure so that someday they can be heard.
If you just keep it as an idea, or especially if people come forward and say, “I’m a subaltern, I can speak. Hey, listen!” they haven’t understood that it’s not about self-promotion. Not every kind of suffering or location is subalternity as one can use it…. Someone asked me, “How can you do it?” I can’t tell you. I’m just failing. I’ve learned for thirty-six years. Because you don’t undo the denial of intellectual labor—which is another condition of subalternity—by just being nice. I’m learning how to learn from failures and not think of them as failures.
Rather than descend into an academic debate that guards the territory of what subalternity is, Spivak reorients the discussion toward what subalternity can do if taken up as originally formulated. Failure becomes a commitment to learning.
The question of how to do it—utility and strategy—was picked up by Mustafa Barghouti, whom Ilan invited to speak precisely to the question of failure in their conversation about “the left.” For Barghouti, the standards against which success and failure are measured must be reevaluated by expanding our field of view:
The question about failure must be addressed from three different angles: the global context, the regional context, and then the Palestinian internal context. Globally speaking, we know that capitalism has been hugely successful and actually morphed into new forms, including neoliberalism and what I call “global colonialism.” … We [also] know that there are counter-democratic and counterrevolutionary forces that are against liberation and against democratization of the region…. [W]hen we talk about the Palestinian context, and that’s the third aspect, one has to look at certain factors which have affected classical left parties in Palestine, weakening and marginalizing them to a large extent.
The “failure” of the left in Palestine cannot be isolated from global and regional contexts in which capitalism, colonialism, and counterrevolution articulate together—we are reminded to question how things work. While the result of this alignment of power across scales appears to be the foreclosure of liberation or democratization, Barghouti stops short of accepting failure as absolute. Instead, he directs our attention to what might emerge when “success” is seemingly delayed or thwarted:
One has to see a new question that the failures probably are creating new opportunities, creating new spaces. But the failure here is not related to the left only. It is also related to the failure of those reactionary groups that took over in solving the economic and social problems. That combination is creating space for change, globally and locally.
Perhaps the lesson here is that failure is seldom what it seems to be, though we must never dismiss the costs and effects when ideas and actions fall short: economic crisis, viral pandemic, climate catastrophe, and genocide, at the extreme. Like Spivak and Barghouti, movements for decolonization can hold these things to be true and at the same time find value in questioning whether failure signals simply an ending. In doing so, we make space for the possibility that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”14
Sixth Lesson: Engage with/in the Arts
This volume draws together the work and words of esteemed intellectuals, many of whom contribute to material decolonization by using their public and institutional platforms in the service of movements for justice and liberation. Yet a subtle current ran beneath our conversations, at times gently breaking the surface to urge us to reflect on how people are reached and moved to join us. As academics and editors, it is uncomfortable to admit that sometimes the language of concepts, theories, policies, and law fails. When this happens, which means of communication rise to carry the work of agitating, educating, and organizing? What might have always already been there, telling the story and building solidarity better than we could hope to?
Our clearest voices belong to artists, poets, and writers—those for whom reality and imagination exist in generative, often intimate, relation. As made visible within our first lesson from the conversation series (“Learn your history”), the intellectual life of a people or place emerges not solely through academic labor and institutionalization. Rather its fullness is expressed through memory, embodiment, sensation, emotion, and even dreams. These forms of knowledge are crucial to political and intellectual consciousness, as Paul Gilroy relayed in a personal story:
In my own life, the invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s was a very important and formative experience for me…. And here, my teacher was the African American poet and writer June Jordan. She was the person who instructed me, informed me, and educated me as to how that concern, that openness, that attachment to the struggles of Palestinian people could be interwoven, interlaced, or productively entangled with the kinds of things that were emerging in my own work at that point.
Gilroy pointed to Jordan’s poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”15 as significant in helping him to develop the ability to connect his work on racism and racialization in Britain with Palestine and the lives of Palestinians. Poetry elicited “concern,” “openness,” and “attachment” in a way that aligned knowledge across contexts and communities.
Yet a poetic mode of expression is also valuable for how it leads us toward what is not yet known or cannot be fully grasped. Again, we turn to Gilroy’s lived experience:
Like June Jordan, Ammiel Alcalay is a great and thoughtful poet. He’s an extraordinary poet. So maybe there’s something about poets in this who are able to do things that political theorists, philosophers, and historians aren’t able to do. And that poetic payoff is something that we should try to study, because it seems to me that there’s something about the way that language is being used. There’s something about the way in which newness is being brought into the world in this very difficult and massively overdetermined area that suggests that poets are able to summon and conjure with words in ways that are extremely important.
The “payoff” of expression is not a single poem that might be read and shared, but the ways in which poetic language calls us to the world. Whether through poetry, literature, film, photography, or music, the arts open us up—we are made new to the world and to each other. The newness of which Gilroy speaks is not an ability to see differently, as if through a previously hidden or unknown lens; it is the entry of something that has not been before. A possibility, a future.
With this in mind we turn to Elias Khoury, a storyteller of the highest regard, to close our sixth and final lesson:
You need a dream. You need a dream to write books. You need a dream to make a revolution. You need a dream to teach deep from your heart. Otherwise, it’s meaningless…. We need a deep reconciliation of accepting the other and trying to build a new democratic place—a place where our religious identity is not the dominant identity. The dominant identity is our human identity. This is how I dream.
And I think this is what gave me the potential to write a novel like Children of the Ghetto. This dream enabled me to go through this very dark history, which is as if you are going inside your dark selves—this is the heart of darkness. This is the real heart of darkness that literature can help us to understand. Not to solve, but to understand. How to solve it is up to the new generation, who must teach us.
FOR THE FUTURE
Our task now is to take these lessons forward, into our struggles and commitments. The conversations that unfold within these pages speak to the difficulty of the road ahead, just as they relentlessly imagine a future of justice, liberation, and self-determination—in Palestine and beyond. From settler-colonial violence and authoritarianism to climate change, health inequality, and food insecurity, researchers, educators, and organizers are doing the work of critical analysis. At the same time, this energy is oriented toward a material decolonial horizon. For some, the labor of prognosis—forecasting or anticipating—reveals a desire to help produce an antidote to the political disunity that pervades the Palestinian national movement. For others, their future work draws Palestine together with aligned struggles in which they are also active or invested—these visions move us toward a renewed sense of the international.
As the speakers in our series made knowable, the discipline of Palestine studies might be understood as a point of confluence: a place where streams meet and join, and from which they flow together as something greater. Our guests spoke to how Indigenous studies, literature, social psychology, economics, international law, transnationalism, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies offer theoretical nuance, comparative or parallel case studies, and strategies for resistance and organizing. Yet despite clear rigor and innovation, the pursuit of knowledge through activism-engaged scholarship is met with a special kind of vehemence, particularly when it comes to Palestine. In Britain, the Prevent program is increasingly mobilized to silence debates and research on Palestine. Developed as a counterterrorism initiative that identifies those most vulnerable “to being drawn into extremism” prior to radicalization,16 Prevent empowers institutions and their employees to provide the police with information about activities, ideas, and identities. A similar attempt at regulation can be seen in the equation of criticism of Israel with Holocaust denial, made possible through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.17 Its widespread adoption among institutions, from states to universities, threatens to silence and punish those who question Israel’s narrative and actions.
While the degree of coordination vis-à-vis Palestine is noteworthy, the force of reaction is not dissimilar to that previously unleashed on anticolonial struggles such as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, the Mau Mau in Kenya, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (or Viet Cong) in Vietnam, or other liberation movements deemed “terrorist organizations” by those in positions of power. However, Noam Chomsky offered a surprisingly optimistic reading of recent attempts at suppression:
I think the increase in intensity of efforts to silence discussion on this topic is a sign of increased desperation among supporters of Israeli policy. As they see the control of opinion slipping out of their hands, they’re resorting to harsher and more desperate measures to try to block any discussion, any condemnation. In a way, it’s sort of a good sign to see the extremism of attempts to silence discussion—it means the situation is getting out of their control.
In these moments, we must remember precisely what we pledge when aspiring or claiming to be committed thinkers, scholars, and activists. Faced with increasingly desperate and sometimes violent measures as control begins to slip, we must continue to challenge dehumanization in all its forms—wherever it arises. This commitment is the basis of an old/new form of solidarity. We turn once again to Angela Y. Davis:
Solidarity is especially important for people who are engaged in struggle in the US. Because Black people, for example, have always been the recipients of solidarity from the era of slavery—when Frederick Douglass traveled to Ireland and Scotland, and when Ida B. Wells got support during her travels abroad in organizing the anti-lynching movement. That has become an instinct—for the world to pay attention to Black struggles in the US.
We forget that as we have been recipients of solidarity over the years, decades and centuries, we also need to learn how to generate solidarity with people who are struggling in other parts of the world. This is central for the continued progressive radical development of the antiracist movement in the US. And it’s important for us to make connections with struggles against settler colonialism. The US is a settler-colonial country, and therefore we can learn a great deal from Palestinians’ struggles against settler colonialism. And from recognizing that Palestine is still subject to that process—Israel is the only settler-colonial nation that continues to try to expand.
During this period when technology creates possibilities of communicating across national borders, we need to share with each other, learn from each other, and figure out how we might begin to create global movements. This will require us to try to popularize analyses of the role that global capitalism plays today; it will also require us to share different feminist approaches. Ultimately, I think we all want a world in which national boundaries do not define relationships among human beings—we want to try to imagine new modes of community that do not depend on the idea of the nation, which is a production of capitalism. So, I’m going to use the old term “international solidarity” because I think it still really resonates. We still need international solidarity.18
This is the future to which we devote our intellectual vision, our political will, and our material labor. Working toward decolonization entails a commitment to constant education—to learning our histories, developing new languages, and questioning how things work. It also means engaging with the aspects of transformation that are less readily grasped, from emotion and sensation to failure and artistic expression. These lessons become tools with which we tell stories of struggle and community, tales of the worlds we are actively building. Palestine in a World on Fire offers our belief that words, stories, and dialogue can play a role, modest as it might be, in creating a future where knowledge does not fan the flames of injustice and devastation—but serves the aims of justice and liberation.