The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom

Presentation for the AltSOU'24: the unconference for critical minds and radical futures

Good afternoon everyone. I am honored to be here to talk to you about the Palestine exception to academic freedom. As some of you perhaps know, my university suspended me for my social media posts, so I want to begin my talk by sharing some of the content of my posts.

Decolonization is not a Metaphor

On October 7, 2023, I shared on social media that “Academia loves to decolonize everything besides occupied land. Its silence on Palestine is enough to know how decolonization has become a metaphor, signifying everything besides material change and collective resistance.” I also wrote about Palestinians’ right to resist colonialism and that they have the right to live with dignity on their own land. The next day I drew on Fanon’s (1967) work to historicize violence and resistance within colonial contexts. I then included a frequently cited quote by Walter Rodney: “By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?” In other words, there is no moral equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. All of these Twitter posts went viral and eventually they led to my suspension. The first part of my talk will focus on the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The second part will discuss the importance of writing and speaking truth to power in the midst of a genocide.

The Coloniality of Academic Freedom

The Palestinian Feminist Collective recently wrote that “Existing frameworks for “academic freedom” on our campuses have actually enabled violence against Palestinians and our allies to occur with impunity.” This resonates with what Steven Salaita wrote in 2017 where he stated that “We need academic freedom to criticize Israel, but it takes more than academic freedom to contest the sites of power invested in protecting Israel from criticism.” (Salaita, 2017)

It is crucial to shatter the illusion of academic freedom universities project as a universal ideal, which leads me to ask the following questions: What does academic freedom mean to those who have been historically excluded from the white halls of the ivory tower? What does academic freedom mean when academia continues on its apologetic path of justifying colonial domination? By asking these questions, I’m not suggesting that scholars haven’t created small pockets of resistance within academia to radicalize intellectual work toward liberation. Instead, I ask these questions to reflect upon and historicize Western academia to better understand universities as constitutive of systems of domination. The so-called academic freedom universities purport to uphold are not somehow suspended from the capitalist, colonial social reality of which they are a constitutive part. Salaita (2017) asserts,

Free speech, in both philosophy and practice, is attached to structures of power (seen and unseen, discernible and oblique, steady and unstable).  Despite the state’s professions of fairness and benevolence, free speech is never fixed or disinterested… it’s conditioned by race, gender, nationality, class, religion, ideology, culture, sexuality, and so forth. Ibid

It’s not for nothing that liberal institutions so easily commit to colonial violence—violence they don’t only justify but actively participate in.

One should therefore inquire what academic freedom means when hate speech and dehumanizing rhetoric justify incalculable violence, death, and destruction, as we have historically seen and are now seeing in the ways in which Palestinians are portrayed and human animals and children of darkness. Free speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum nor in a perfect liberal society composed of individual signatories to a social contract where everyone has equal rights to express themselves freely. Academia reproduces an epistemology of ignorance, as Charles Mills put it, whereby white people in general, are unable to understand the world they themselves have created (Mills, 1997, p. 18). Unfortunately, this does not only apply to white scholars but to the whiteness we all can uphold. As Ruha Benjamin mentioned at a commencement speech, Black and Brown faces in high places will not save us.

Despite those who are seduced by whiteness and coloniality, there still exists the presence of radically situated others who threaten dominant discourses that justify colonialism. After all, racialized and colonized others “know where the bodies are buried.”

Knowing where the bodies are buried, in this instance, is not metaphor. As I’m speaking now, Palestinians are searching for their loved ones under the rubble. Others are picking up the limbs that they’re able to find.

Academic freedom cannot be detached from the epistemologies 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 speaking up against 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? 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.”

Edward Said shed light on the complicity of academics who remained silent on what was—and continues to be—a seemingly controversial or complicated topic. As we’ve seen in the past seven months, even some self-proclaimed decolonial scholars refuse to mention Palestine. Colleagues who love land acknowledgments willfully ignore that Palestine is also a territorial struggle against colonial dispossession.

These same academics appear to only care about colonization and 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 praxis-oriented and grounded in liberation movements. Analyzing colonial systems of domination as mere historical legacies—as things of the past—are accepted, while the militant critique of actually-existing settler colonial projects, such as Israel’s, are immediately misconstrued as antisemitic.

On the other hand, as politically committed intellectuals, we have the ethical responsibility to reveal how discourses materialize into the cruelest practices, that is, how they become real, concrete, violent. A decolonial praxis is urgently needed at this precise moment, demanding we commit in material terms by making real sacrifices for the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinian Feminist Collective (2024[MOU2] ) 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 proliferating on many campuses are militantly responding to this call. The Palestine exception to academic freedom, however, has led to coordinated attacks both within and beyond academia. When radical thought linked to questioning genocide and colonial occupation does not neatly fit into accepted notions of academic freedom, what’s revealed are the colonial foundations of liberalism and its false promises of freedom.

It’s for this reason that the emerging student movement urges us to not only question or interrogate academia’s silence and complicity but also to unsettle the technologies of colonial violence in which universities are deeply invested. Student activists are teaching us what a decolonial praxis demands—that is, a radical ethical and political commitment that remains steadfast in the face of institutional and police violence. Take for instance, Christopher Lacovetti, a PhD student at the University of Chicago encampment who was interviewed by Fox News when he expressed the following:

if our government and our academic institutions are complicit in this, there comes a point where we say, “we’re not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us because there are principles and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures.” And that our commitment to Gaza runs deeper than fears for our safety, fears for our careers, fears for ours paychecks.

Students are teaching us a radical form of academic freedom and right to assemble. They’re pressuring universities to divest from weapons manufacturers profiting from Israel’s genocidal campaign.

Writing in the midst of a genocide

I will now discuss why we must write and speak truth to power in the hour of genocide. “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” (para. 1) To answer this question Fargo Tbakhi unsettles the notion of our writing “craft.” He explains that conventional notions of craft represent “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and 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.

What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide? When our writing actively unsettles colonial projects, we must be ready to make sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as some of us personally have experienced, can easily jeopardize our careers.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s  at stake. As Salamanca et al. (2024) inquire:

How does one write in the midst of an ongoing genocide? When the contours of Palestine are being redrawn in blood, and when unconscionable images of starving, injured, and dead children, women, and men have become our daily breakfast? What’s our task as scholar-activists, as human beings, when we become witnesses and thus unwilling accomplices to the ravaging of an ancient people and geography that has stood tall for generations as a cradle of civilisation? (para. 1)

Elsewhere, I’ve tried to explore these questions. I’ve advanced the notion of 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 necessarily means that, as intellectuals, we collectively act as much as we like to critique (Kilani et al., 2025).

As decolonial intellectuals, we must become—or at least aspire to be—what Walter Rodney referred to as guerilla intellectuals. As guerilla intellectuals, we must counteract colonial racist discourses and write with urgency, historicize coloniality and resistance, and carefully study with others to generate ideas that contribute to liberation. Fargo, too, 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?

More than ever, we need to center Palestinian voices whose understanding of colonial reality and resistance is indispensable. We must resist the histories and memories settler colonialism seeks to erase. We must 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). In our work, we will 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 write despite the fact that it’s impossible to account for what Palestinians have lost. How do we calculate their laughter and their hopes and dreams? As Na’ama Carlin writes, how do we calculate for the tens of thousands of “futures wiped off this earth with unfathomable cruelty.” Comprehending this level of pain is beyond us but it’s a lived reality for those who have been living it for 226 days and 76 years.

Despite the incalculable pain and suffering Palestinians endure, we must also speak and write, as Salaita expressed during an interview, as if people in Gaza can hear and read us. Mohammad El-Kurd (2024) suggests that there is much more than colonial reality and that it’s tempting to only focus on loss. It’s more difficult to pinpoint the possibilities as a genocide is taking place.

What once appeared to be seemingly invincible is now revealing its weaknesses, fissures, and cracks, which will only grow until its inevitable collapse. In other words, Zionist settler colonialism’s vincibility has created the conditions to think anew and to dream and build a world free of domination where new life springs from the rubble. As El-Kurd put it,

As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba won’t last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution.

Several people have asked me why I’ve shown unwavering support for the Palestinian struggle and why I’ve risked my career for their cause. The answer is simple yet paradoxically complex. Echoing and extending the words of the Prime Minister of Ireland I don’t only see in Palestinians’ eyes the colonial history of my people and other peoples in Latin America, but I also see the neocolonial present and coloniality of power continuing to violently displace and dispossess Indigenous, Black, and campesino/peasant communities to which I belong. I don’t only see in the eyes of Palestinians the immense suffering they endure but also the collective resistance that has cracked history wide open and created the conditions of possibility for building a world otherwise. I feel that it’s an ethical responsibility to bear witness and to write in militant form, no matter the consequences, because there is no other way to write about a genocide.

More than ever, we need to embody 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. For Palestine and for all other peoples, regions, and communities facing the iron fist of imperialism and colonialism, we must write in an insurgent form so that despair does not become a permanent condition. I write so that their dreams, hopes, and aspirations will one day become reality. I write for the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of all peoples, and not necessarily for the defense of academic freedom.

Thank you.