[By Payal Arora and Usha Raman]
Conversations around Palestine-Israel have become exponentially heated and have permeated into academia. Camps have been formed. Support and condemnation fall along national and religious lines. Many face polarizing choices – are you with us or against us. Silence is viewed as cowardice and a default of being in the other camp. Any attempt to be nuanced is seen as whataboutery and a sign of moral ambiguity at best and relativism at worst.
As emotions run high, many universities have been compelled to release guidelines to avoid engagement with these issues. This is meant to foster peace and avoid potential harassment and violence on their campuses and in the classrooms. This has unsurprisingly faced a backlash in the media and among many academics.
It brings to question – what are universities for? What’s the role of an academic when facing these geo-politically and morally challenging times? As teachers, can we allow for diverse voices to speak or does that translate to circumvention of responsibility in the name of neutrality? What kind of language is needed to operate genuine dialogue against contesting forces? What if any should be the starting points for a fair hearing for justice, dignity, and peace?
Taking a feminist approach in this matter may help here, that which centers our shared humanity and calls for a pathway to inclusive change. At its core, it requires a refusal of binary thinking and doing, and an understanding of the intimate nature of violence on bodies and minds.
Camp politics
With only 8 percent of the world’s nations living in liberal democracies, it is safe to say that state leadership often does not represent their people. Choices are often between the bad and the worse, leading new generations to exercise their power less at the ballot box and more behind closed doors and in digital forums. There are ongoing protests by many Israelis against their own government while ordinary Palestinians continue to face the difficult predicament of fighting for their rights against the Israeli army as well as internally against Islamic militancy. This should stand as an important reminder that we need to separate citizens from the actions of their states. Moreover, there is a shared humanity of suffering which should supersede polarizing politics.
For those fortunate to live in liberal democracies, let us recognize that it is a privilege to protest loudly with few serious consequences. Most states imprison and institute violence upon those who do. Most protests around the world are more quiet in nature – it is the everyday refusal to follow banal rules imposed by those in control, almost always patriarchal in nature. Women painting their nails in Afghanistan or a gay couple holding hands in Uganda shows courage and commitment to carving dignity in the face of chronic oppression.
Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian?
When we are asked to sign a petition or take to the street to protest with a pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian group, what does that entail?
Being pro-Israel shows unequivocal support and compassion for the loss of lives in the wake of the recent brutal attacks by Hamas. It empathizes with Israelis’ deeply felt need to protect themselves in a volatile region where many governments around them have sworn to eradicate their nation and their people. It demands that we say in clear terms that they did not deserve this, and that the means does not justify the ends.
But if you truly care for Israel, should we not want better leadership for their people? Better leadership would aim to establish peace for the long term, and would recognize that the logic of revenge is circular and exponential. Collective punishment as retribution is not just illegal but immoral. A moral leadership would confront the root causes of this escalated brutality and find ways to make peace for their people. If we commend Israel for adhering to democratic values, we should also expect them to do the difficult work of building democracy by taking ownership of past policies of unfair subjugation of the Palestinian people. They should recognize the mirroring of a deep need for sovereignty and dignity for statehood and peace.
Likewise, what does it mean to be pro-Palestinian? It means to legitimize their decades of struggle for autonomy, dignity, and sovereignty against unfair and extractive policies and actions taken against their cultures and people, amounting to subjugation by apartheid. It is about showing solidarity for their right to freedom of self-governance and statehood. If we care for the fate of Palestinian people, we should also support freedom for expression and self-actualization, which includes changes from within against patriarchal norms and oppressive laws against women, and LGBTQIA+ communities.
It also demands denouncing Hamas’s acts of terror and distancing the Free Palestine movement from these inhumane acts of violence. It is about saying in uncategorical terms that this bloodshed is not how we win the moral victory. History is witness to the chronic failure of violence as a long term means to liberate, let alone heal, and flourish. Decolonizing is not about revenge and retaliation at all costs. It is not about dismantling historical forms of violence and oppression only to create new structures that do exactly the same. It is about reclaiming power responsibly, without losing our own sense of humanity.
In this ongoing spiral of violence and eye-for-an-eye logic, both camps lose moral ground. This makes well-meaning bystanders falsify narratives to justify their choice of camp. We spin our stories of convenience, ensuring our chosen camp is the pure victim, and the other, the pure perpetrator. What this will ensure is an end to dialogue and the start of hateful denunciation.
Don’t mention ‘decolonial’ and other such non-conversations: the academic’s plight
Words are never all encompassing. They are only (at best) half the story. We give them meaning through engagement. In academia, we give more weight to freezing concepts as they come with their own politics of citations. Clear messages of denouncements lead to gaming the citation metrics.
Take for instance, the concept of ‘decolonialism,’ which pushes us to deconstruct and dismantle oppressive structures and to center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of marginalized and colonized peoples. Some folks in the media claim that Hamas’s bloodshed is what decolonizing looks like, and Israelis had it coming. Some build an argument around the double-edged mode of decolonization that Hamas follows, explanations that have political logic but do little to lead us out of the bramble. Several political parties in the Global South including those supporting Hamas use the decolonizing logic as a rationale to replace the ‘foreign’ with a local version of their own extractive and oppressive rule on their people.
However, if we are to look at how colonialism and apartheid ended across the Global South, it was a combination of economic bankruptcy post world war II and the rise of a global consciousness against the moral bankruptcy of systemic injustice. The decolonial movement has fostered binaries – the ‘West’ as colonizer and the ‘Rest’ as colonized. If we take the lead from historians however, there was deep complicity between the local ruling elites and foreign corporate entities to jointly exploit the local people.
This metaphorical mess can be magic in an educational setting. Words can be gateways to powerful teaching moments. They hold multiple meanings based on the vantage point of those who are engaging with them. This should be a golden opportunity to help elevate ourselves from cold war style us-or-them ideologies. Judith Butler asks, as she traces the “compass of mourning”- “Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge? Surely we can, and must, do both.”
This is why, as academics, we need to foster the spaces where one can do both. This not just restores the meaning of the university but gives us renewed purpose to bridge the ivory tower with social concerns.
Teaching as radical action
Radical was an adjective borrowed in the 14th century from the late Latin ‘radicalis,’ meaning ‘root’ – “of, relating to, or proceeding from a root.” It helps to be rooted when we feel untethered. The school–or university–as a democratic public institution is perhaps one of the most remarkable modern inventions of human imagination and commitment.
In its ideal sense, it is meant as a platform to bring people together to ponder and investigate questions of material, moral and philosophical relevance. It serves as a foundational glue for democracy by instilling a sense of civility, care, and compassion among strangers whose collective mission in the most idealistic sense is to build a better world–or at the very least, explore the idea(s) of one.
Feminist thinkers across the world have emphasized the radical possibilities of the classroom as a space to foster change. This is just the kind of situation that demands deep listening and sensitive articulation, both of which are necessary to build a shared understanding of such conflicts and empathy with those who suffer on all sides.
What taking a position looks like
“Is it necessary to take a position?” asks a young student, bewildered by the pressure to align himself with one or the other parties in this conflict. “I am horrified, but I cannot make up my mind about which side is right, and which side is not.” He responds, as so many of us do, with revulsion at the techniques employed by Hamas in this recent attack. But he also has been reading the intellectuals who urge him to attend to the decades of oppression of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza, who see this act as a natural outcome of that history.
Many of us have friends on both sides, those with families living in or close to the areas of bombardment, with children who are traumatized both directly and indirectly by the events, or associates twice- or many times removed but who come into sharp focus against the backdrop of such suffering. How does the picture change when it moves from the impersonality of news headlines to the intimacy of a text message that gives you an update about someone you know (or someone known to someone you know)? How can we keep our focus on the intimate in order to regain the humanity that is so essential to finding a path out of this mess?
It is easier to turn away from the turmoil in the world and focus on teaching outside context, or resort to abstractions, particularly in the social science or media studies classroom. Instead, we call upon everyone willing to reflect and respond, to look deeply into what is happening and search from within for civility, decency, and empathy to build moral weight, while attending to histories that shape our understandings. Let us denounce acts and ideologies, but not people. It’s a complex and daunting task, but one that we need to attempt, if we are to seek alternative ways of thinking which possibly can lead to alternative ways of doing.
Moral starting points
All conversation around such deep rooted conflict is fraught. These dialogues present themselves differently depending on where you are located in the world, and on the level and nature of your exposure to and understanding of histories of conflict. We believe that the classroom can be a space of such dialogue that prompts or could lay the foundation for radical change, to begin with at the individual level but through time on a community, societal or even political level. We need to recover the space for a conversation that takes us to a moral starting point, which increasingly is becoming the only place from which we might find an “out.”
In responding to the student who expressed his discomfort with taking a position with or against Israel, with or against Palestine, we offer a non-negotiable that eliminates a series of what-abouts: attacks on civilians is immoral and does not require context to condemn. Violence is never the way to ‘solve’ conflict and achieve sustained peace. It leaves hidden wounds festering and causes them to erupt without warning. Violence forces us to (unquestioningly) accept the inevitability of “collateral damage” and progressively de-humanize those on the other side. But what of moments of justified defense, such as against the Nazis or the ongoing Ukrainian struggle for sovereignty against the Russian invasion? There are contemporary rules of war which provide guardrails so we do not lose our humanity. It prevents victims from becoming perpetrators.
In thinking through a framework for such classroom conversations, we need to set some boundary conditions and dialogic principles. We group these into three categories. All conversation is predicated on an acceptance of open and deep listening, and the securing of a non-judgmental safe space, much in the nature of the truth and reconciliation commissions that followed the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. The difference is that here the only outcome sought is understanding, without the need to allocate blame.
Intent : At the outset, we set out the purpose of the conversation(s) and get used to the radical expectation that we will encounter many different points of view that we need to examine without judgment. We ask ourselves, as a group: Why do we have to talk to each other? Does peace (or even consensus) equate to resolution of an issue? Can we be comfortable with differences? What might this look like and how do we achieve it?
Interact: What do we need to agree on even as we begin to articulate different points of view and acknowledge different experiences? What guardrails are needed so we don’t resort to relativism on essential human values in the name of diversity and culture and yet respect different cultural contexts? How do we ensure the dialogue instills civic and active listening to each other?
Implicate: Often such dialogue requires us to swing between the personal (individual, intimate) and the political (large group or community, nation, social formation). While we find it relatively easy to agree on the principles of interpersonal interaction, the complications spiral when we seek to apply those ideas at the macro level. Feminist politics urges us to continually think simultaneously at both scales, bringing granularity into our analysis of policies and actions. If compassion becomes the foundation of all relational dialogue, what would global politics look like? How can we pivot dialogue to focus on the act over the person? Can the impersonal be the most compassionate way forward?
Collectively grappling with these questions and deep listening is the end goal of learning and teaching. The process is the project here. Decolonisation in this particular instance–both of pedagogy and global politics–is to refuse to be boxed into the maps created by those with power, as well as to refuse reactionary opposing positions. Instead, it demands that we look into the core of human decency, to seek a moral pathway.
The classroom, with all its unruly dynamics, could be the crucible for that kind of change.
FEMLAB 