Is there a characteristically Gazan sentence? Could it be this one from Asmaa al-Ghul’s recent short story “You and I,” published in The Book of Gaza (Comma Press, 2014): “Drops of morning dew evaporate taking the pain with them, because … Continue reading “Gaza Fractures”
“No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.” A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government purportedly once confided to a UN official that this was Israel’s goal for Gaza. Supressing without starving the population has been a prevalent … Continue reading “Putting Palestinians on a Diet”
In 2012, Social Text published a Periscope dossier on Palestine by a delegation of American Studies scholars to Palestine organized by USACBI. The following year, the first academic boycott resolutions were passed by the Association of Asian American Studies and … Continue reading “Solidarity and Radical Change”
Because I am a Palestinian, born to a “goy mother,” I do not have the option of leaving the blockaded Gaza Strip where I live to attend a conference, or a give a talk at any international academic institution. Along … Continue reading “BDS: Decolonizing Palestine”
In 2005, indigenous Palestinians issued the most authoritative call for international solidarity to come out of Palestine in decades. A broad coalition of unions, popular organizations, and civil society institutions representing Palestinians within the 1967 occupied territories, Palestinian citizens inside … Continue reading “BDS and Third World Internationalism”
The summer of 2014 was a crucial historical conjuncture in which Palestinian-Black solidarity both deepened and became more complex, as Angela Davis’s latest book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2015) was absolutely right to identify. The killings of Eric Garner, … Continue reading “An Anti-Racist Movement”
Embedded within each of the three goals of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)–the right of return for refugees, full legal equality within Israel, and an end to occupation and colonization of Palestinian land—is an appeal to … Continue reading “Strengthening Anti-Racist Politics within BDS”
When the editors of this dossier asked me to contribute, they suggested I look toward the future of BDS and think about what might await, and what should await, the movement as it moves forward. Where might its activists most … Continue reading “BDS Beyond Palestine”
Rumor has it that the American Studies Association is going down in flames. Since our membership voted by a 2 to 1 margin last fall to join the academic boycott of Israeli universities, the mainstream and tabloid press have … Continue reading “Circuits of Influence”
The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie says, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want … Continue reading “Rethinking the Single Story: BDS, Transnational Cross Movement Building and the Palestine Analytic”
The following appears reprinted from Tidal Occupy Theory. We present this pamphlet at an historic moment in the United States, and by extension the broader geopolitical order over which the United States presides. In recent months, the shackles that … Continue reading “Palestine, Boycott, and Beyond: The Time is Now”
A boycott is a difficult and demanding political tactic. To understand the logic of boycott politics, especially in relation to the Palestinian campaign for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, one needs to locate it within a broader … Continue reading “Historicizing Palestinian Boycott Politics”
The archives of Howard University’s student newspaper The Hilltop might seem an unlikely place to find evidence of a revolutionary Iranian student movement in the U.S. Yet the rowdy bunch of Iranian foreign students enrolled in the 1960s and … Continue reading “New Directions in American Studies”
An important achievement of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement has been to help render the Question of Palestine more legible by releasing it from the framework of conflict resolution that has thus far dominated the peace process, the … Continue reading “Back to History and Judgment”
The U.S./Israel special relationship is at once affective, geopolitically strategic, and rooted in economics. In this essay I suggest that the neo-liberalization of the U.S. economy during the Reagan administration was tied to the formation of international free trade … Continue reading “Peace Dividends”
