Academia is not only complicit in Genocide. It actively participates in it.

AERA Presentation

Presentation

Good morning everyone. I usually begin my presentations by saying that I’m honored to be here today but in fact I am ashamed…I am ashamed to be here because AERA Council is complicit in genocide.

I’m here to talk to you about the Palestine exception to academic freedom, in addition to academia’s silence, complicity, and active participation in genocide.

The Coloniality of Academic Freedom

The Palestinian Feminist Collective argues that “Existing frameworks for ‘academic freedom’ on our campuses have actually enabled violence against Palestinians and our allies to occur with impunity. Steve Salaita suggests that “it takes more than academic freedom to contest the sites of power invested in protecting Israel from criticism.” (Salaita, 2017)

It’s crucial, therefore, to shatter the illusion of academic freedom that academia projects onto to the world as universal, which leads me to ask the following questions: What does academic freedom mean in the structurally exclusive white halls of the ivory tower? What does academic freedom mean when academia justifies and participates in, as well as profits from, colonial domination and genocide? Why is it that when I emailed the Petition for the Resolution for Justice in Palestine with so-called critical AERA Division and SIG chairs, only one chair responded.

Why is it that AERA Council members disregarded the demands of over 700 signatories of this same petition? Why is it that AERA refuses to conduct itself in the same way toward Palestine as it did when Russia invaded Ukraine? Why the Palestine exception? Why the silence?

I ask these questions not to point fingers but to guide us into thinking of Western academia as a central pillar of racial, colonial, and capitalist domination that seduces even the most critical and radical scholars. We must think of Western academia as a counter-insurgent institution that promises change but never actually delivers.

Take for instance AERA’s theme last year. It was a call to action to Dismantle Racial Injustice…. And this year’s theme is on Research, Remedy, and Repair…Yet AERA’s silence on Palestine is sufficient to know where this organization truly stands. It’s enough to know that it chose silence… when speaking up.. mattered most.

Even those who self-identify as abolitionist and decolonial scholars, including those on AERA’s Council, remain silent because, apparently, they don’t know enough on the matter or because things are much more complicated. Their “unwillingness to take discursive…risks at the podium or in the public sphere”, as Mohammed El Kurd writes, “reveals an unwillingness to disrupt the norms that sustain these [complicit] organizations” (p. 47). One can only hope that historians of education will one day trace the archives we are leaving behind today to absolve those who spoke out against genocide. Perhaps these same historians will also condemn organizations that, through their silence, indifference, and inaction, enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It's important to remember that universities don’t only justify genocide in the ideological, discursive, epistemological sense. This has been too much of a focus in academic work trying to “Decolonize” X, Y, and Z. Always remember that universities actively participate in genocide since there are material links with weapon manufacturers, companies that produce technologies of colonial violence, surveillance, and even the social sciences produce knowledge that contributes to colonial dispossession. One should therefore inquire what academic freedom means when research justifies and contributes to colonial violence. Once again, the links between academia and settler colonialism aren’t solely ideological or discursive but material relationships that have very real consequences.

Equally important to remember is that free speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum nor in a perfect liberal society where everyone has equal rights to express themselves freely. Academia reproduces an epistemology of ignorance whereby the signatories to the racial contract are unable to understand the world they themselves have created and greatly benefit from (Mills, 1997, p. 18). The epistemology of ignorance doesn’t only apply to dominant groups but, more importantly, to the whiteness and coloniality we all can potentially uphold. As Ruha Benjamin mentioned at a commencement speech, Brown and Black faces in high places won’t save us.

Despite those who are seduced by whiteness and coloniality, there still exists the presence of those who resist dominant discourses. After all, racialized and colonized others “know where the bodies are buried.” Knowing where the bodies are buried, in this instance, is not a metaphor. Right now, Palestinians are searching for their loved ones under the rubble. Parents are carrying the pieces of their children in shoeboxes or plastic bags.

Our understanding of academic freedom must unveil how the epistemological is intimately intertwined with material systems of domination. Otherwise, academic freedom merely becomes a mirage one chases in vain. Academic freedom is indeed a facade that’s easily unmasked when it comes down to the colonial occupation of Palestine. When critiquing Zionism and speaking out against genocide are the exceptions to academic freedom, we cannot possibly say that academic freedom is a universally understood concept or practice. Why then do so many scholars remain silent and complicit or, worse yet, continue to support an ethnonationalist state predicated on the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians? For Edward Said (1994): “Nothing…is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.”

Said shed light on the complicity of academics who remained silent on what’s presented as a seemingly complicated topic. For the past 18 months, we’ve seen self-proclaimed decolonial scholars refuse to show solidarity with Palestine. These academics only care about decolonization in abstract, metaphorical terms. Colonialism and decolonization become desired commodifiable topics that refer to the distant past rather than the colonial present. Decolonial thought is valued insofar as it’s not grounded in liberation movements. Analyzing coloniality as a mere historical legacy—as a thing of the past—is accepted, while the militant critique of actually-existing settler colonial projects is not. The selfish careerism and moral apathy, as Richard Solomon writes, is precisely what’s wrong with academia. If we don’t go beyond the conceptual decolonization academia values so much, we risk freezing anticolonial resistance in the past tense.

As intellectuals, we have to reveal how discourse materializes into the cruelest practices, that is, how it becomes real… concrete… violent. The Palestinian Feminist Collective (2024 ) invites us to reveal “the unprecedented levels of institutional violence against Palestinians, including our own universities’ investments in the Zionist settler-colonial regime and their tactics of repression and censorship.” The Gaza Solidarity Encampments responded to this call, yet the Palestine exception to academic freedom has resulted in coordinated attacks both within and beyond academia. When speaking out against genocide and colonial occupation in Palestine is the exception to academic freedom, academia’s violent foundations are revealed.

The student movement urged us to interrogate academia’s complicity and to take direct action to unsettle the technologies of colonial violence in which universities are deeply invested. Student activists remained steadfast in the face of institutional and police violence. Take for instance, Christopher Lacovetti, at the University of Chicago encampment, who stated that “our commitment to Gaza runs deeper than fears for our safety, fears for our careers, fears for our paychecks.” Mahmoud Khalil, who was abducted by ICE in March, dictated the following words from a detention center in Louisiana: “my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation…even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.”

The vast majority of tenured professors, however, have remained silent, refusing to show minimum levels of solidarity with their students and colleagues who have been beaten, arrested, abducted, deported, and attacked by a violent Zionist mob as was the case in UCLA. Yet they are somehow shocked by the current state of higher education under Trump, despite the fact that their years of indifference toward Palestine has significantly contributed to the attacks on the little that remains of academic freedom. This is what the epistemology of ignorance looks like.

Writing in times of genocide

I’ll now discuss why we must write and speak truth to power in the hour of genocide. Fargo Tbakhi asks, “What does Palestine require of us, as writers…within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” (para. 1). Tbakhi unsettles the dominant notion of our writing “craft” which represents “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences… of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities…of empire” (para. 2). We cannot become what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent (para. 7). To write with urgency, we must refuse to play the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. These opportunist academics will one day edit special issues and publish books on the Palestinian genocide. Mohammed El-Kurd states, that they will one day lecture the world about genocide in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. You probably know who they are and you probably know if you’re one of them. These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum.

What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide, when bombs continue to drop, when mangled bodies are strewn in the streets, when paramedics constantly carry real beheaded babies for the world to see? As writers, we must be ready to make real sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, even if our careers are jeopardized.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake. Elsewhere, I’ve written about a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of and uprising against the dehumanizing racial theories, narratives, and myths that shackle and thus limit our interrogation of and collective action within the modern/colonial world. A decolonial theoretical intifada or insurgent decolonial mode of theorizing extends far beyond accepted notions of academic freedom; it means that, as intellectuals, we must collectively act as much as we like to critique (Abu Zuluf et al., 2025). This is what Walter Rodney called guerilla intellectuals. We must write with urgency, historicize coloniality and resistance, and carefully study with others to generate ideas, tactics, and strategies that contribute to liberation. Tbahki invites us “to engage in a guerilla war on the page” (para. 25). In this case, academics must be modest and ask what liberation movements require of us, if anything at all. What stories must we write and how should we express them in the process of showing unwavering support for those who have been represented as barbaric, subhuman, terrorists?

We need to center Palestinian voices whose understanding of colonial reality and resistance is indispensable. We must resist the distortion of history and refuse to forget the memories of those who have lost their lives prematurely—those whom Israel decided to kill simply because they were Palestinian. As Maldonado-Torres (2007) suggests, we must not only reclaim “memories of suffering and displacement, but also of happiness and hope in the midst of challenges to human existence by repressive and inhumane social orders” (xiii). We must bear witness to remember those who are no longer here—those who are more than numbers but aspirations and dreams of a Free Palestine. We must write despite the fact that it’s impossible to account for what Palestinians have lost. After all, how do we account for their hopes and their dreams? As Na’ama Carlin writes, how do we calculate for the tens of thousands of “futures wiped off this earth with unfathomable cruelty.”

Despite the incalculable pain and suffering Palestinians endure, Steve Salaita suggests we must speak and write as if people in Gaza can hear and read us. As the Zapatistas wrote in 2009 when Israel was bombing Gaza, “words from afar may not be able to stop a bomb, but they do crack open the dark room of death [that is Gaza], letting in a small ray of light”. It’s tempting to only focus on loss and colonial violence, as El-Kurd writes, but “As deadly…and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba won’t last forever. The world is changing because it must.”

Several people have asked me why I’ve shown unwavering support for the Palestinian struggle. The answer is simple yet paradoxically complex. I don’t only see in Palestinians’ eyes the colonial history of Latin America and the Caribbean, but I also see the neocolonial present and coloniality continuing to violently displace and dispossess Black, Indigenous, and campesino/peasant communities, the latter of which I also belong to. I don’t only see in the eyes of Palestinians the immense suffering they endure but also the collective resistance, including armed resistance.

I believe it’s an ethical responsibility to bear witness and write in militant form, despite the consequences…because there is no other way… to write about a genocide.

More than ever, we need to follow Ghassan Kanafani’s militancy to encourage others to continue resisting even when overwhelming despair is felt in their heart. It’s this despair that has the potential to transform itself into hope and collective action. We must write in an insurgent form so that despair does not become a permanent condition. We must write so that their dreams, hopes, and aspirations will one day become reality. We must write for the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of all peoples resisting the iron fist of imperialism and colonialism, and not necessarily for the defense of academic freedom….

Thank you.