Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem and Khaled Jamal Furani (eds.), Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2022).
Jadaliyya (J): Could you explain the title?
Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem and Khaled Jamal Furani (YSI & KJF): “Inside the Leviathan” invokes a metaphor drawn from the prophetic tradition and mobilized in modern political theory. It relates to the story of the prophet Jonah (Younis/Younan), who was swallowed by a sea monster commonly rendered as a “leviathan.” This title signals the book’s attempt to illuminate a complex condition facing Palestinian students and faculty fated to remain in their homeland occupied in 1948. It is about finding a complicated “refuge” in Israeli universities, where we are “swallowed” into the beast’s darkness, which is not singularly privative. As the prophetic tradition teaches, going into “the wilderness” may induce learning to ask questions anew in ways that edify the ethical dimensions of searching, re-searching, and thinking.
Illuminating this condition, conditioned by the 1948 “abduction” of our ancestral homeland by the complex of the modern nation-state, implies a certain “calling.” This calling may beckon us to think of ways out, out and beyond this complex. Indeed, it seems that not only is it we who are abducted. This endemic abduction is often confused—by the bewitching state’s pernicious promises of safety—with freedom.
Remember how the modern nation-state rests upon the political paradigm of sovereignty, famously evoked by its founding celebrant Thomas Hobbes as “the Leviathan.” Our title thus also evokes our existence within the wider monstrosity of modern sovereignty. We raise the question about the ways in which the modern university, as if a tentacle of a great beast, may do the bidding of modern powers—the state and market—with fatal consequences to ethical life.
Yet it is important to caution that as a metaphor, “leviathan” has its limitations. For one, we must not assume that the leviathan is a single bounded institution (for example, the university or the state). It may be more profitable to think of a series of leviathans, one inside the other, akin to a Russian matryoshka. Second, the leviathan may not only contain us, but also live within us. Finally, we must also notice how the leviathan can engage in self-destruction and, like a Frankenstein, turn tragically against its creators.
J: What made you edit this book?
YSI & KJF: This book grew out of about two years of monthly gatherings of the “Critical Greenhouse” (الدفيئة النقدية) at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a project for Palestinian graduate students in the humanities and social sciences at Israeli universities. Khaled supervised the group and Yara coordinated it. This project aimed to create an academic environment for critical thinking in Arabic, the participants' mother tongue, a forum vastly lacking at their respective universities. The meetings aimed at equipping young Palestinian researchers to navigate the unique challenges they encounter at Israeli universities and contribute new ideas to their fields out of their own perspectives and experiences. Our discussions explored critical methodologies and knowledge production anchored in Palestinian reality, through readings from various specializations such as philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, literature, and anthropology.
Many guest lecturers from these fields joined our meetings and presented the complexities they face personally and academically. Our guests shared their personal experiences of grappling with decolonization from within the Israeli education system’s hegemonic discourse on Palestine and the Palestinians. Their narratives on the price they paid, the tense moments they lived, and the limitations and challenges they faced, as well as how they tried to overcome them, sparked stimulating discussions on the position, agency, inheritance, and future of Palestinian scholars remaining in their crushed and concealed homeland.
Toward the end of the year, members of the group suggested that we work on a book that would bring the experience of their participation to a broader readership in Arabic. We hoped that our book would accompany students and faculty in their academic journeys, help them recognize their relation to wider decolonial predicaments, and feel less alone in their struggles.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
YSI & KJF: The book consists of three sections, each presenting diverse voices and a distinct epistemology. The first section, entitled "Dialogues," contains interviews that our group’s participants conducted with leading Palestinian scholars who graduated from Israeli universities, some of whom teach there at present and others in the diaspora: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Criminology and Social Work); André Elias Mazawi (Educational Studies), Raef Zreik (Legal Theory); Khawla Abu-Baker (Behavioral Science); and Nahla Abdo-Zubi (Sociology and Anthropology). These dialogues delve into the personal academic journeys of the interviewees to explore the meanings of decolonized knowledge in the Palestinian context.
The second section, entitled “Testimonies,” contains five narratives from Palestinian students at Israeli universities, three by project participants: Amir Marshi and Amir Nassar, Lubaba Sabri, and Samah Abbas. Aiming to offer a broader historical perspective, we also included two testimonies from past students, emeritus professor Abed Al-Salam Abed-Alghani from the “The Progressive National Movement” and human rights attorney Taghreed Jahshan, then active with “The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality,” both of whom reflect on student conditions at Israeli universities during the 1970s. Not only do these testimonies offer insights into our contemporary individual experiences, but they also begin to record the collective, longitudinal journey of Palestinians at Israeli universities, which, unfortunately, has been hardly documented.
The book’s final section, entitled “Comparisons,” features four texts that attend to the experiences of academics from other racially struggling communities at other mostly Western universities. It contains a chapter from Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a selection from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s The Dream Weaver, and a piece from Maboula Soumahoro’s Le Triangle et l'Hexagone - Réflexions sur une identité noire. This final section serves two primary purposes. First, it makes these texts available to a Palestinian and perhaps a wider public in Arabic. Second, for Palestinians—inhabitants of the site of a colonial encounter—it offers resources that may emanate from a comparative understanding of their location. They impart the significance of learning from experiences beyond the borders of geography, states, identity, and language, and also offer a way to refuse the exceptionality of the Palestinian condition. Khaled penned the introduction, Yara the postscript, and sociologist Nadim Rouhana the epilogue.
If we were to prepare such a book today, it would likely encompass similar experiences, with some more prominent and widespread as in the current moment. For example, the surveillance and profiling of Palestinian students has become a source of fear. In the past months, several Israeli higher education institutions, as though self-appointed agents of the state including its hasbara machinery, have taken disciplinary and punitive actions towards dozens of students—some without due process—for expressing even banal views on social media, even while mobilizing for the carnage inflicted on Gaza. This unthinking complicity by universities that seem incapable of conducting any critical deliberations on war has also not spared professors. As the lives and futures of Palestinians at Israeli universities have become undeniably more unsettled, our book serves as a reminder of our long journey but also testifies to the parallel spaces and times we can still create.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
YSI & KJF: This book was generated in Arabic by and for Palestinian students and faculty at Israeli universities. In a most immediate sense, we want it to help them recover their voices and restore their ways of relating to truth. Along the way, they may also help Palestine bear witness to our world.
Following the destruction of his village Saffouriyyah in 1948, the poet Taha Muhammad Ali proposed: “I will remain a blood stain, the size of a cloud, on the shirt of this world!” These lines evoke the story of Joseph (Yousef), whose brothers presented his blood-stained shirt to their father to deceive him. They claimed that Yousef had been devoured by a wolf, when it was they who had committed the crime of expelling him. As a stain upon the “shirt of the world,” Palestine bears witness. It provides a space for living and speaking truth, as if a stethoscope detecting a host of afflictions of the human condition.
When we published this book in November 2022, we had no way of anticipating how its resonance might be amplified by new eruptions of “floods and fires” within a year’s time. It is striking to witness truth-speakers about Palestine worldwide today facing repressive consequences with which we are all too familiar. Tragically, we are finding that our book may not only be for Palestine but also from Palestine to the world.
Recognizing this leviathanian condition from within the ruins of Western Enlightenment, our book points to the limits of tools wrought within it, such as “post-colonial epistemology,” “critical theory,” and “decolonial methodology.” It appears that the struggle for Palestine, and countless interconnected struggles, require new tools for thinking (including returning to discredited forms like the prophetic).
Palestine inside the leviathan reminds us that there lies an ethical task for the universe-ity: thinking freed from the monster, thinking that can ethically re-start our political communities. A Palestine freed from the leviathan, to which the book’s contributors aspire, may be empowered to reclaim its universal capacities, those that embrace all peoples from, and coming to, the land.
Excerpts from the book (a selection of translated excerpts from the Introduction, by Khaled Jamal Furani, pp. 8-21, with citations removed)
See here for the complete introduction in the Arabic original.
Let us listen to how the Arabic language mints two words of three identical letters that differ in their sequence: amal & alam, “hope” and “pain.” Does Language mean to remind us of the bond between them, on the premise that out of our pain our hope is born and through our hope we can comprehend our pain?
You may confront this question in contemplating the state of Palestinian students who currently attend Israeli universities. You can observe the ways pain and hope walk side-by-side, accompanying them (as the supposed bearers of a “double consciousness” or “exilic consciousness”) throughout their studies. It is as if the students are each fated to bear a share of “pessoptimism,” just like the paragon of their condition, Saeed the luckless pessoptimist, described by writer Emile Habibi in contemplating the state of Palestinians who remained in the land under a state of occupation in 1948.
Undoubtedly one of the sources of the bond between pain and hope is the indelible and ineluctable affinity between past and present. Students’ condition today retains this affinity. It was only a few decades ago that the rulers of the Zionist regime openly declared their intention to turn our grandfathers and grandmothers into water-porters and wood-hewers in the service of the lords of the land, particularly during the first military rule (1948-1966). Yet today we are witnessing a new generation still remaining in the ancestral homeland, throngs of young men and women forging their way through Israeli universities. More than that, we even see the Israeli universities offering “open days” that, with the help of attractions, stimulants, and enhancers in Arabic, woo prospective students to enter them, or conversely, the universities to enter the students.
Here a question emerges about transformations along the long journey of Palestinian loss as manifest among students’ situation today: has a present arrived to expiate the “sins” of the past or does the present entail a renewal of old sins? In the face of an avalanche of sins, some washed off and others refreshed, day in and day out, it is crucial that we consider the probability that Palestinian students today attend universities in the thicket of a multi-faceted war against their proper existence. This war is even “multi-mural,” to draw on a word used by Amir Marshi and Amir Nassar in this collection, with some facets that meet the eye while others cannot. It is a war that takes on multiple names: “peace” here and “assimilation” there, “objectivity” at one point, “excellence” at another, and “specialization” at yet a third. However, ultimately and ceaselessly since 1948, this war negates students’ existence by negating their language, their memories, their bodies, and their thoughts. Perhaps a testimony to this ongoing war—an assault on mere Palestinian presence in the land through dismantling the society’s institutions and leadership—is the continuing absence of an Arab research university in the lands occupied in 1948 (although we don’t suppose that such a university would necessarily be safe from cooptation). One must at the same time also observe the proliferation of Arab professional training colleges in the last decades of the twentieth century.
This mushrooming of these colleges here and wooing of Arab students to universities there do not necessarily amount to the abandonment of the sin. In fact, it is probable that these processes could be pointing to a sin being even further entrenched. It is thus probable, for example, that the war for erasing our existence remains ongoing and, true to its habit, goes on dismantling not only institutions and leadership, but lives as well.
Since the October 2000 uprising (al-Aqsa Intifada), within the lands of 1948, “mundane” acts of murder pluck a life every three days on average. This societal threat seems to occur in tandem with acts throughout the Arab and Muslim world serving to undermine the future of generations under regimes of fragmentation, dispersion, alienation, and normalization. Over the last two decades, we find the Israeli state “outsourcing” murder to the “black market,” where weapons proliferate as if no one were watching. The state, which can follow and track down weapons in far corners of the Earth, appears to be forfeiting both its monopoly over the legitimacy to kill and its duty to secure the safety of citizens subject to its dominion (as classical theory of the modern state defines it).
Whoever is not thereby murdered may be arrested, to which vast campaigns of arrest and kidnapping of students at universities on the lands occupied in 1967 attest. So too attest the intelligence investigations of youth from within the 1948 occupation, as do university disciplinary committees whose conduct has the effect of terrorizing students and thwarting their political activism. Whomever is neither killed nor arrested may meet their fate in the realm of thinking. Whomever was neither interred in the ground nor made captive behind bars and made it to the university must try to find refuge in the act of thinking.
And so, the Palestinian student, who succeeds in existing these choreographed jungles where murder and assault are rampant throughout the multiple and varied arms of a state that continuously erodes life’s sanctity and yet somehow makes it to the sanctuary of a university campus, is thrown into the throes of thinking and its quandaries in our current age. This student exudes a remaining hope and wrestles with pain towards forging a new generation among the peoples of this land: a generation that might bring about a renewed presence and invent a new future, as though a sage-bush that, along with its aroma, pushes its way through stone for the sake of this land and the world. From the vigor of this generation that lives hope and pain at once this volume was born.
Throughout its duration, the Critical Greenhouse Project (that generated this book) has been compelled by the search for authenticity existing somewhere and somehow in the world of knowledge. By “authenticity” of knowledge, we first mean that which forestalls a scholar from the “dominated” falling for the logic of “the dominant,” as Ibn Khaldun would have it. Second, we mean a search for that which enables a scholar to practice what is widely known as “critical thinking” (but to what extent is “non-critical thinking” actually thinking in the first place?).
What we mean specifically here is the kind of thinking that is constantly searching to discover its limits and its conditions, continuously seeking an authenticity in the beginnings and ends of its horizons, perhaps even an authenticity that lies before and after thinking. Any student who takes Palestine as a compass for orienting the founding of their knowledge and ethics will find a task riddled with staggering challenges. The premise here is that Palestine is a homeland for an alert form of thinking, even alert to its prophetic dimensions along the edges, those about which our poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke as opening to “pain’s eternal march.”
If students go on therefore to study at an Israeli university today, they could listen to their own Other (of a lost homeland), not merely to the Others that the University typically anoints. Thus, students may face the tensions wrought by that Other on their own, not only the tensions typically conferred by the University. Students may also learn to discern dualities of their own life, not only those affirmed by the university. In short, these students would learn to dance their own thoughts to their own rhythm, not to that of the university (to the extent that it is a coercive institution as well as it is, in a certain sense, coerced by powers greater than it, such as the market).
When Palestinian students make it all the way to the Israeli university as graduates of Israel’s schools, they often arrive meagerly equipped to sharpen their thinking. They find it difficult to find resources and incentives at the university to disabuse themselves from the taming that was largely their lot in these schools. Whether public or church-based, Arab high schools rarely teach students to listen to what is written, and teach even less to write to discover who they are or could still become. State-tolerated schools aim to produce “Israeli Arabs,” packaged for contentment with Zionism and its state. Their curricula by and large negate both roots and vision, in the present and toward a future called Palestine.
Consequently, these schools disfigure students’ relations with possibilities of the past and for the future. Their curricula sever students from an ability to relate to the universal expanse of an Arab and Muslim civilization (one that has assembled Christian, Jewish, and other traditions). Students arrive therefore at the sanctuary that is a university campus deprived of wholesome relations with roots and horizons, with native soil and with stars. Deprivation of thought besieges them as they look back and look ahead. They may never read, say, someone like Foucault. Or conversely, their writings may rattle with Foucault and his French peers in post-structuralist theory or his homologs championing a “settler-colonialism” perspective. Clamouring for refuge in this perspective becomes a talisman of sorts. Its purpose would appear to ward off military occupation’s defilement of a purity sought in prose. This devolution happens at the cost of judiciously mobilizing such understandings in an analytical, piercing, daring, and far-reaching way to see through the occupation and its conditions.
When the Israeli university, like others around the world, became dependent on a liberal order, it enfolded multiple challenges and dangers ready to pounce on thought to which the Palestinian student must remain alert. First, there lies the dependency of the university on the society from which it emanates. No matter how “far” or “near” the university, how oriented or non-oriented to its society it may be, so long as it is a “Universe-ity,” then it likely assembles “seas” of knowledge that oppose domination and enrich the critical repertoire available to Palestinian students, as well as to the wider public of students, alongside other bodies of knowledge that are complicit with domination. The dependency of the Israeli university, in this case, would be on a Zionist society constituted as negating (among a plethora of negations) the Palestinian. Indeed, negation has long been manifest in the founding fable of the Zionist enterprise (a people-less land for a landless people), a fable that remains clearly quite alive as evident in one of its contemporary ripples, namely, the Basic Nationality Law. We find therefore the Palestinian student in an impossible position: they are allowed and not allowed to be at once.
The second danger lies in the fact that the university besieging the students is itself besieged by the logic of a global order whose dominion is increasingly entrenched. We refer here to the order currently recognized through a “neoliberal” era of market and capital domination along with the advance of the “inner pharaoh” (“I am your lord most high”) within the modern self of societies languishing under the duress of “individuality.” One of the enormous challenges that a given university faces in making education a commodity is the “clientification” of the student, thereby also turning the faculty into “service-providers” and even fund-raisers (through “research grants”) under the ascending influence of corporate bureaucrats in the university’s management.
As to the third lurking danger to the activity of thinking at the university, it lies within thinking itself. By this I mean the tyranny of thinking through its “sterilization,” that is its severance—on its quest for sovereignty—from life’s infinitely diverse and ineluctably mysterious ways. Here is when Reason becomes a despotic ruler, forgetting fragility in ruling, caring for neither intuition nor desire nor revelation inhabiting the beginnings (principium) of its rule and the principle of its work. Forgetful of its own fragility, Reason ends up exposing university faculty to the danger of slipping into a “priesthood” of Truth whose secular “synagein” is generally severed from the pulse of life. The power of these dangers becomes manifest in their ability to appear as “the normal,” which in turn preempts diagnosing them as dangers.
There was a type of care for thinking that accompanied the work of the Critical Greenhouse throughout: the care for thinking that searches for its conditions of authenticity in our current moment, one alert to avoiding these dangers that take on the name “normal” and emanate, as it were, from “ordinary circumstances.” Members of the group found it appropriate and necessary as a result to launch this experiment that is this book. It is a mere attempt to give an account of the conditions that may one day be available for a thinking that pursues its emancipation. So, one primary question that we initially posed, just by way of example was: what encourages or restricts founding a school of thought, or at least the grounds for a school of thinking that is critically Palestinian, as we have seen elsewhere in Africa and the Subcontinent that has resisted coloniality?
This question appears especially pertinent to us since among the pillars of thinking beyond the colonial are two prominent Palestinian thinkers, namely, the author of Orientalism (1979), Edward Said, and one of his most important inspirers, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, author of The Transformation of Palestine (1972). We aimed for “grounds of thought” that do not merely affirm our existence. Rather we are seeking to affirm that we are beyond just existing; we are also capable of preserving existence in multiplicity. We are capable, inshallah, of containing the different and preserving the multiple.
This guidance is exactly what our name, that is, the name of the land in us, Palestine, gives. It is also what our past shows before the onset of “sterilization” and “immunization” projects required by modern sovereignty’s undertaking, especially evident in the refuge, named by Hobbes “the Leviathan,” on which the modern nation-state subsides. We do not claim that in this volume we have discovered sure signposts on the road to this putative school of critical thinking. Rather, all that we have found is to question what it means to vitally activate the muscles of thinking on a search for conditions for its alertness.
Undoubtedly, this book can amount to no more than a beginning, or simply a call for a beginning. It calls for posing the question: how can we foster thinking’s alertness among students as befitting peoples of the land here and now?
If wishing to answer this call to alertness, then hasten to thinking, avoid anathemizing, whether through secular or religious idioms. Perhaps then thinking will live, verdant and daring, through hope and pain, a service to justice (ḥaq) and truth (ḥaqiqa) at once.