Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses Mahmoud Khalil Arrest and Trump's Abuses on Democracy Now!

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses Mahmoud Khalil Arrest and Trump's Abuses on Democracy Now!

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses Mahmoud Khalil Arrest and Trump's Abuses on Democracy Now!

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Jadaliyya co-editor Noura Erakat joined Democracy Now! to discuss the unjust arrest and detainment of Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, as well as the bipartisan complicity in perpetuating anti-Palestinian rhetoric responsible for the suppression of free speech among activists historically. In this interview, Erakat emphasizes on the importance of continuing to resist the tyranny of American imperialism and Zionism in the wake of neocolonial racism. 

 

Featuring

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, "Gaza In Context," that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
 

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the criminalization of dissent and repression of pro-Palestinian activism, we’re joined now from Philadelphia by Palestinian human rights lawyer, Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Her most recent article for the Boston Review is called “The Boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-backed war on Palestine is expanding authoritarianism at home.”

If you can respond, Professor Erakat, to these latest developments with Mahmoud and talk about what you mean by the boomerang effect?

NOURA ERAKAT: Thank you, Amy.

By the boomerang effect, I am invoking Aimé Césaire, Martiniquan essayist, author, poet, who in 1950 wrote a searing polemic on the discourse on colonialism, where he pointed a finger at European and Western leaders who were condemning Hitler for the execution of genocide within Europe’s shores, and telling them very blatantly that they are not different from Hitler, but have little Hitlers inside of them that they have failed to condemn because their violence has been meted out against Brown and Black and Indigenous peoples in their colonial periphery. And in that critique, he was emphasizing that the Holocaust that — the Jewish Holocaust that happens at the hands of the Nazis was rehearsed on other Indigenous, Black, Brown, colonized peoples and emphasizing that there is no violence in a colonial periphery that does not boomerang back home into the domestic sphere. And my emphasis here by invoking that was to show that there is no way to defeat fascism at home without combating empire abroad. In order to defeat U.S. state violence at home, it has to be confronted on both fronts of its domestic and its foreign image.

In this instance, we have seen that boomerang come home especially quickly as the United States, under the Biden administration, continued, fomented, supplied, made possible a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza for 16 months straight; in order to do that, repressed speech at home, fomented the attack on students, expanded presidential authority, refused to apply U.S. law, denigrated international law, and basically created, spread a red carpet for the Trump administration to come now and expand that repression to all other vulnerable communities. And I want to emphasize that this was possible because of the thorough dehumanization of Palestinians, because of the desensitization to their suffering, because of the racialization as violent and dangerous. There was not a blink amongst the Democratic establishment that children were being slaughtered and asking for Americans not to slaughter them. Somehow, “do not kill children” became an exception when it came to Palestinians.

There was actually supporting the repression of universities of their students because they were described as violent and dangerous, rather than celebrated as antiwar protesters in the tradition of university protest in this country. I have quotes from the Biden administration — from Biden himself, excuse me, where he says, “Let me be clear: Violent protests will not be tolerated, but peaceful protest is,” suggesting that the student protests were violent, when 98% of them were nonviolent, and the violent ones were violent specifically because of mob violence and because of police violence, because of drones, because of law enforcement that was sent out to the universities. It was Biden who said, “This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous. It has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country.”

It was the Biden administration, it was the Democratic establishment, that has created the conditions that we are now seeing taken advantage of. The Trump administration before has tried to gut women and gender studies, DEI, critical race theory, but could not do it, but in this moment has been able to do it because all of the guards have been let down as the supposed liberal establishment allowed for these repressive regimes to be mobilized against Palestinians once again, understanding us as the lowest hanging fruit to sacrifice rather than as the canary in the coal mine that has been telling you danger is here. Those Palestinians and their allies here on university campuses, heroically at points, struggled to save some sort of core humanitarian principles in the United States, and instead were expelled , were suspended, were doxxed, were denied graduation. And now there can be no surprise that the Trump administration is mobilizing with ease as they continue to use Palestinians as their Trojan horse in order to gut the welfare state, in order to defund universities, in order to go after minority communities.

And so, this message is not to point fingers, but this message is to mobilize us and to stand in line that in order to defeat this fascist rollout, Palestinians have to be centered. Palestinian humanity has to be recognized. Palestine has to be central to an agenda, not because it is exceptional, but specifically because it is not exceptional and it is central to this agenda that is being rolled out, and it can stand at the gate against further repression.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Noura Erakat, I wanted to ask you — the warnings to more than 60 universities now that they’re under investigation, even though most of those universities did exactly what they were told last year in terms of repressing the pro-Palestinian protests. The issue of how many of these universities over the last decades have increasingly relied on federal funds, on donor, private donor, money to keep themselves afloat. Now they are having to buckle even further under, even though they did what they were told.

NOURA ERAKAT: Look, the universities have been suffering from a crisis and a neoliberal crisis in their funding and in their structure for a long time, as public funding for them and subsidy has been declining and they become increasingly reliant on private capital, including from weapons manufacturers, who are more subsidized by the federal government than, in fact, the DOE is subsidized by them. They have become beholden to this holding pattern.

But what we get in this lesson is that this kind of anticipatory obedience to do what the administration does will not make you safe, not at the university level and not at the individual level. The only way to protect yourself is to protest in this moment. Your silence will be a target, not a shield. There is no way to put your head down and to survive this moment.

And again, I want to emphasize that paying attention to Palestinians will allow you to understand what is coming. They have long been the canary in the coal mine, the Trojan horse for conservative agendas. They have been the experiment, the guinea pig for state repression. Steven Salaita was the first professor whose tenure was not denied, but revoked. Rasmea Odeh had her citizenship revoked — not her green card, her citizenship revoked. The Holy Land Foundation were subject to trials where they had secret evidence marshaled against them, a blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment. All of them, Palestinians. The Los Angeles Eight, Amy, you reported on this. I love your reporting on this. And people seem to forget, from 1987 to 2007, a 20-year witch hunt against seven Palestinians and one Kenyan for pamphleting, for passing out pamphlets for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, first prosecuted under the McCarran-Walter Act, and when that was deemed unconstitutional for its anti-communist provisions, then prosecuted under material support until it, too, was dropped.

People need to understand that what happens to Palestinians is not because we are a national security threat, but because we have been so thoroughly dehumanized, you cannot recognize our suffering, and think that it’s somehow justified. And that is a Zionist narrative that has fomented anti-Palestinian racism. And organizations that deem themselves to be civil rights organizations, like the ADL, rather than condemn the trampling — if they were civil rights organizations — rather than condemn the trampling of civil rights violations in this moment, came out and expressed appreciation for the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, as have several other Zionist organizations.

And so, this is the moment to develop a critical analysis of Zionism and understand where you stand on it. It is certainly a responsibility of Americans to study this, because it is part of our politics. At Hunter College, the search for Palestine studies professors was canceled. This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine, in order to understand ourselves and what’s coming and our responsibility in the world as an imperial power. And instead, it is being shut down under these precepts because of our failure to grapple with Zionism, our failure to grapple with American empire, our failure to understand Palestine, and, frankly, our failure to listen to Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Noura Erakat, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian American human rights attorney, professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Her most recent article for the Boston Review is “The Boomerang Comes Back.”

Coming up, we look at Syria, where over 1,300 people have been killed in recent days. Back in 30 seconds.

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412