Understanding Palestine

Palestine: Occupation, Settler Colonialism, and Apartheid 

Tuesday, Feb 6, 2024

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPKXpwHGcNU   

Audio:

Palestine and the Law

Thursday March 7, 2024

Indigenous Resistance, Settler Decolonization, and Palestine

Thursday April 25, 2024

The panels are not intended to be immediate reactions to current events in historic Palestine or its global ramifications, though that is of course the context into which we will inevitably be speaking. Their main intent is to offer the sorely missing background for understanding Palestine, one of the most significant and consequential issues of our time, as the colonization of Palestinian lands continues and Palestinian resistance to Israel’s appropriation of its lands and destruction of its institutions and means of living continues apace. The current war on Gaza threatens to spark regional and even global conflicts and to impact the upcoming US elections. Simply as a matter of informed citizenship, understanding Palestine is critical. But for those who wish to take action to bring justice to Palestine, a nuanced and informed understanding of the situation and of the history of Palestine’s struggle is imperative to inform our tactics and strategies. Hopefully the, this series will perform a double function of information and of informing the actions we urgently need to take, first to end the slaughter and then to end the ongoing Nakba or catastrophe.

Since US media remains dominated by the perspectives of Israel and of its most ardent material and political supporter, President Biden’s White House, these panels have sought to foreground the voices of Palestinian scholars, legal experts, and activists as far as possible. It is a small way to correct the balance in what is, as well as being a destructive military assault, also an information war.

Co-sponsors: Center for Ideas and Society and part of the program stream Decolonizing Humanism; cosponsored by Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Departments of English, Ethnic Studies,Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Hispanic Studies and by the Holstein Family and Community Chair in Religious Studies. 

On Ireland, Gaza, Césaire, Beckett, Kant, Schiller, aesthetics, creativity, and Cabral 

Though the inevitable context for this talk was Israel’s ongoing and genocidal war against Gaza and the Palestinian people—the latest and most vicious phase of a series of wars since 2008-9—I step back from that war to explore what Israel is as a state and how that helps us to understand the fuller context of the destruction and ethnic cleansing under way now in continuity with the Nakba of 1948.

Each term of my title creates a somewhat different angle of analysis and orients activism in solidarity with Palestinian rights and liberation in distinct ways.