The Palestinian liberation struggle has been a lightning rod for the Iranian left since at least the 1960s. In my book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), I wrote about the regional and … Continue reading “Iranian Feminist Solidarity with Palestine”
Let me start by saying a few words about where I am coming from, and why we at Critical Studies of Iraq initiated this conversation among feminists reflecting and organizing from the standpoints of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and … Continue reading “Transnational Feminism from Iraq to Palestine”
Introduction We feminists are bearing witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a continuation of more than seventy-five years of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians. More than two decades into the “War on Terror,” we want to cut against the … Continue reading “Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond”
This essay was my contribution to the panel Global and Transnational Approaches to Race and Racism at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference, 15-16 April 2024 at the London School of Economics. I am grateful to Ghada Majadli and … Continue reading “Social Theory after* Gaza? Witnessing the Transnational Circuits of Race-Making”
This text is adapted from the opening plenary of the 2023 conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Counterinsurgency: Beyond Weaponized Definitions The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s spreading institutionalized definition of antisemitism is not merely weaponized, it … Continue reading ““Antisemitism” as Asymmetric Warfare: The Casualties of a Definition”
Dear world, This letter is a reclamation. It is a prayer to the universe. It is a plea for you to bear witness. Often, writing demands to be lyrical, poetic, and beautiful. Even when we write about our struggles, there … Continue reading “Gridlocks of Death, Oceans of Life”
On Monday, April 29, thirteen undergraduate students and one professor occupied Clio Hall on the campus of Princeton University in an attempt to force the administration to meet their demands for a revision of university relations with the state of … Continue reading “Pedagogy Against Genocide”
I belong to the question of the victim. –Mahmoud Darwish What follows is a thread of perfunctory reflections on a course I offered in January 2024 titled Decolonizing the Study of Palestine. A course is a complex, emergent human (and … Continue reading “Pedagogy and Epistemics of Witness: Teaching Palestine in a Time of Genocide”
فَلَمْ تَقْتُلُوهُمْ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ قَتَلَهُمْ ۚ وَمَا رَمَيْتَ إِذْ رَمَيْتَ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ رَمَىٰ ۚ وَلِيُبْلِىَ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ مِنْهُ بَلَآءً حَسَنًا ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌۭ And you do not kill them, but it was Allah who killed them. And you … Continue reading “On Responsibility: Critique and Colonization After October 7th”
Will Eizlini, an American artist of French Jewish descent, tells me that he has been crying every day. When not crying, he is making a series of paintings interpreting the massacres in Gaza—crimson landscapes of sea, sky, dunes, with piles … Continue reading “The Burden of Witnessing”
In December 2003, Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, announced in a televised speech Israel’s plans to “disengage” from its control of Gaza through the complete withdrawal of Israeli soldiers and the removal of Israeli settlements from Gaza after … Continue reading “Trapped Between Spaces: Gaza’s Existential Struggle”
In Itamar Moses’s new play The Ally, the “trickiest question”—“whether the fight against anti-Semitism belongs as a coequal branch of the social justice movement”—is itself a kind of trick question. Articulated through Moses’s academic alter ego in the play, Asaf … Continue reading “Parsing the Jewish American Complex”
I haven’t watched the livestream of US Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli consulate in Washington, DC, on February 25, 2024, but many of us are familiar with reports and transcripts telling of a police officer, … Continue reading “To Extinguish: On Aaron Bushnell and the Casualties of Nonviolence”
Zionism’s Political Unconscious by Nadia Abu El-Haj Verso Blog A Feminism That Embraces Humanity by Lila Abu-Lughod Critical Inquiry Seeing Genocide: Israel’s Weaponization of Images Since October 7 Obfuscates Its Genocidal Campaign against Palestinians by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay Boston Review … Continue reading “Amplifier”
Not a single day goes by now in North America or Europe without an academic being disciplined or fired outright for expressing views critical of Israel. In mid-March 2024, when the University of California Regents meet at UCLA, they will … Continue reading “Genocide and Campus Bans on Speech Critical of Israel: Then and Now”
