Resistance, Scholasticide, and Counterinsurgency Part 2

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This post follows up on what I wrote previously regarding resistance, scholasticide, and counterinsurgency.

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Like the imperial/colonial narratives articulated since 1492, zionism’s master narrative is contingent upon a pedagogical apparatus of domination. Counterinsurgency in the form of propaganda (or Israeli Hasbara), knowledge production, and other means of communication are an integral part. Palestinians, as Said pointed out, have never been permitted to narrate their own experiences, histories, and struggles for liberation, yet have done so in spite of Israel’s violent mechanisms aimed at erasing and distorting Palestinian history, as well as silencing and discrediting dissent. Since October 7, we have witness this apparatus weakened as the Gaza solidarity movement drew on Palestinian activists, scholars, teachers, and students who unveiled the institutional, juridical, and ideological apparatuses that criminalize those who speak out and organize against genocide.

These protests, also referred to as a Global Intifada, have certainly shaken the foundations of academia and its concomitant theoretical discourses, including decolonial theory, particularly those academics who distort its radical aims. During these times, what exactly does it mean to be a decolonial intellectual? Where do our commitments lie? In academia? In our fields of research? Or do our commitments lie elsewhere? Outside of the Towers of Ivory and Steel (Wind), perhaps? Is an in-between position needed? These questions will be answered by exploring, in subsequent posts, the reemergence of the student movement or the student intifada that has challenged the university’s material and ideological links to settler colonial dispossession Palestine. More and more students are showing the colonial foundations of their miseducation and the way it historically has reproduced an imperial subjectivity. When students begin to question and challenge the university’s deeply entangled relationship with colonial domination domestically and abroad, students are also challenging the reproduction of this imperial subjectivity or way of being. As the Israeli semiotician, Nurit Peled-Elhanas, inquired regarding zionist education, “How do you take nice boys and girls and turn them into the monstrous killers of children by the time they reach age 18? It takes a long, thorough, and sophisticated education to do that.” These questions of course have been asked and explored by many Palestinians (e.g., Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian). This sophisticated colonial education system must be destroyed but so too does the modern/colonial world order that ideologically depends on the former.

In solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and against Israel’s colonial occupation, the world has cried out that a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. The west and its institutions refuse to listen and instead sign bills into laws that criminalize pro-Palestinian organizations and protests. But this has less to do with refusing than it is with a structural link constitutive of coloniality, whereby the US, in this case, is an imperial power with its own settler colonial project at “home” and client settler colonial states abroad.

Universities paralleled other institutional efforts to repress dissent. I happen to be one of the many professors who were suspended for publicly expressing my views on the Israeli settler colonial state and its US-funded genocide.

Although I’ve known for a while about “land-grant” (land grab) universities’ role in both displacing Indigenous peoples and conducting research to justify further dispossession, it is only when one sees institutional machinations responding to resistance when one acquires conceptual clarity of the extent to which universities, including those where one is employed, ideologically support and materially participate in genocide. This suspension confirmed the urgency of insurgent decolonial thought and praxis advanced in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the militant anti-colonial thought of the 20^th century. It led me to question also the so-called decolonial academics comfortable dwelling in the Global North who have said or done little to critique Israel or support Palestinian resistance.

Whatever little liberal meaning academic freedom previously had seems like a thing of the past. In fact, it was always a facade designed to maintain a semblance of democratic forms of knowledge production, which, as decolonial thought has made clear, Western universities are violent institutions that cannot be dissociated from the colonial structures of which they are a part. As some of the most radical decolonial scholar will tell you (or should tell you), the geopolitics and coloniality of knowledge constitute the workings of the Western(ized) university and the dominant subjectivities produced therein. It has never been otherwise.

Within this context, Western institutions revealed, at least to who's who previously had not questioned its colonial foundations, what they truly stand for: violent dispossession and domination. Universities are repressing students, faculty, and staff who are speaking out and organizing against genocide in an ocean of silence and complicity. Faculty, staff, and students continue to organize despite the consequences their actions may have on their careers. In fact, they’ve made it quite clear time and again that losing career prospects pales in comparison to the genocide in Gaza. Other self-proclaimed critical scholars (and surely many “decolonial” scholars), however, go about their days as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening in Palestine. After all, it’s just another war or conflict happening in the Middle East. But it is not just another conflict. It was never a Palestinian-Israeli conflict between two equal warring parties. Israel is a Zionist settler colonial state militarily and financially supported by the most powerful countries. It is a racist state predicated on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Academics who have advanced their careers by publishing on topics such as decolonization have surprisingly remained silent. This includes decolonial and postcolonial scholars, as well as anti-racist and feminists academics.

As Alana Lentin writes in The New Racial Regime, even the most radical traditions have been captured by the counterinsurgent machinery of academia. The “mechanisms of assembly" of the racial regime Cedric Robinson wrote about, Lentin argues, are constantly being recalibrated to respond to insurrectional movements (Standing Rock, BLM, Palestinian resistance, and most recently the LA Uprising against ICE raids). It’s not a surprise that all the laws passed to ban books and subversive forms of knowledge production take place within the context of BLM and the pro-palestine solidarity movement. Two reactionary curricular waves that aim to recalibrate the racial regime. This recalibration or reconfiguration, however, is not always a “progressive” multicultural co-optation of radical movements. As one would expect, the first reactionary wave against BLM certainly entailed a right-wing response, backlash, or whitelash limiting what could be taught or not, especially regarding histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and heteropatriarchy. Important for this analysis is to unveil the multicultural elements where liberal anti-racist books proliferated, corporations symbolically and sometimes financially supported the Black Lives Matter Global Network rather than insurgent movements on the ground, and politicians wore African Kente stoles as they knelt for George Floyd (e.g., Nancy Pelosi among others). The second reactionary wave recalibrated as well, but it’s an entirely different animal.

This recalibration saw the emergence of what many refer to as Blue Mega, those liberal Democrats who could not fathom the reality that their beloved Democratic Party committed genocide in Gaza. Rather than a recalibrated multicultural response to protests, we saw an outright criminalization of student protests and disciplining of faculty and staff, accompanied by a more explicitly dehumanizing rhetoric expressed by liberals. When Kamala Harris lost the elections, even some so-called pro-Palestine liberals went as far as threatening to call ICE on immigrants, since Latinx should be punished for costing them the elections.

When it comes to the US’s and Israel’s settler colonial project, multiculturalism’s symbolic gestures could not possibly be used to address what liberals perceive as a “social justice” issue dissociated from the structural racial violence linked to a longer history of imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Democrats and Republicans alike criminalized dissent. House Representative Ritchie Torres and Senator John Fetterman are perhaps the most well known, but the voting record of the Democratic Party shows exactly where congress stands. Even Bernie Sanders, who so many supported in 2016, continues to refer to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza as genocide. Apparently, it’s still a humanitarian crisis.

When imperialism and colonialism are challenged, therefore, “progressive” forms of redress must be sidelined, showing that the recalibration of the racial regime doesn’t move in a linear fashion where more subtle and sophisticated forms of structural racism are reconfigured. Instead, recalibration here entails returning to older and more explicit forms of racial dehumanization. As Bolivar Echeverria observed in Modernity and Whiteness, fascist forms of racism are not a thing of the past and indeed they tend to make a grand appearance when resistance becomes unmanageable through symbolic forms of redressing racial domination. Fascism has always been here as George Jackson and other black radicals have reminded us. Ignoring this fact reproduces modernity’s Eurocentric linear perspective of history that portrays western societies as progressing toward a utopian future, as long as citizens continue to gradually work toward change at the ballot. Reform, as Jackson also noted, is fascism and counterinsurgency par excellence. The linear historical lens distorts colonial-racial domination, understood solely as a receding past one is gradually progressing away from. Yet this is not true in Palestine, nor is it true in other settler colonial, neocolonial, and so-called postcolonial contexts. Coloniality doesn’t just magically disappear with the creation of the modern nation state after political independence. In fact, settler colonialism has tended to reconfigure itself in more violent forms, as we’ve seen in Argentina, Chile, United States, Israel, and Australia, for the modern/colonial nation-state’s configuration presupposes a personhood that upholds coloniality in its social and institutional arrangements (governance/authority, knowledge, language, race, family, sex/gender, and subjectivity).

Palestinians and scholars of Palestine have known this for quite some time, but the general public, shaped by the mainstream media, has not always been exposed to Palestinian voices. Palestinians, once again, are not permitted to narrate their colonized existence, their displacement and dispossession, their suffering, their collective resistance and re-existence, or their artistic, poetic, and intellectual contributions that keep stories, memories, and histories of settler colonial domination and decolonial resistance alive

I use the term decolonial to discuss Palestine, not because I want to impose a theory, but rather to use what other Palestinians understand as a decolonial struggle of liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy (e.g., Muhannad Ayyash, the Good Shepherd\ Collective, and the Palestinian Feminist Collective). It is still important, however, to discuss what decolonial theory has offered or can offer in terms of understanding the Zionist state as a colonial node that is simultaneously settler colonial, imperial, neocolonial, and racial capitalist. Inspired by Palestinians’ militant critiques, I build upon insurgent politico-epistemic projects—insurgent decolonial thought and praxis that moves beyond critique and toward radical thought situated in sites of struggle. Thought that puts one’s career at risk by militantly, unapologetically, and (ins)urgently speaking out and organizing against genocide. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith teaches us, critique is great and all but it doesn’t stop people from dying.

Along these lines, Palestinian poets, artists, and intellectuals have taught us that the least one can do in times of genocide is to speak truth to power. The poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel on December 6 along with his brother, sister, nieces and nephews, inspired millions to continue to tell the Palestinian story of resistance, to narrate the lives that were prematurely lost because of state-sanctioned death, to resist the disciplining mechanisms at all costs. As Alareer wrote in one of his last poems, “If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.” However impossible it may seem to find hope in times of genocide, Palestinians continue to teach life, as the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah also writes: “We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies. We teach life, sir!” To write insurgently means just that: to find hope and to teach life where dignity is denied and life is made disposable

The book I intend to write stems from the urgent need to speak truth to power and to ask the necessary yet difficult questions regarding decolonial scholarship and the co-opting tendencies of academia to strip concepts of their radical, political content. It is titled (Counter)Insurgency: From the Americas/Abya Yala to Palestine. In following posts, I will share the counterinsurgent role that universities played in Latin America in collaboration with the CIA, paralleling the FBI’s counterinsurgent efforts in the US during the same period, one that responded to the insurrections at a global scale.