The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Anna Zeemont, SUNY Buffalo 

 

Introduction

We know, but why are we still talking about it? We know, but what does it have to do with us? We know, but that is what happens in war . . .
We know well, but all the same . . .

–Nadia Abu El-Haj, 2023 (p. 257, 260)

I first began to learn in earnest about the global struggle for Palestinian liberation when I was in college over a decade ago, not from a professor, but from other students: lessons that they themselves had learned from Palestinian organizers in Palestine. Although Palestinians have been saying this forever, I began to learn that Israeli settler-colonialism was neither a “conflict” nor “debate” within the depoliticized terms that I’d been exposed to growing up as a “progressive” white Jewish person in the US. I was taught by campus organizers inspired by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement (BDS) to recognize institutional complicity and repression, to read rhetorically how accusations of antisemitism on campus—especially those espoused by wealthy donors and/or individuals adjacent to powerful bodies on campus—were used to suppress anti-Zionist activists and calls for divestment (multiple referendums of which were passed by the study body over the decades, yet, rather typically, never approved the college). Given my own identity, I was personally moved to learn of the existence of anti-Zionist Jewish activists, who embodied a unique commitment to Palestinian liberation because of how their identity is constantly invoked as a justification for Israel’s genocidal regime (a stance that I came to understand more deeply later through the work of organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace). My political education continued while I was a PhD student, where I started to learn how the university’s complicity in Palestine relates to all liberation struggles—Black freedom movements, prison abolition, queer and feminist liberation, disability justice, indigenous survivance, anticolonial resistance across the globe. Again, I largely learned these lessons in contexts “in but not of” the university, such as through the undergraduate/graduate student coalition Free CUNY (City University of New York), a political education that wouldn’t have existed for us without the ceaseless work of Palestinian organizers on the frontlines of anti-colonial theory-praxis (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 26).

Some time during my grad school years, I learned about Audre Lorde’s famous 1989 graduation speech that she’d actually given at my undergraduate alma mater. In the earlier decades of her career, Lorde did not call out Israeli imperialism, though some of her contemporaries had done so and faced severe backlash—June Jordan, for instance, was blacklisted by major publications and received death threats for her public writing on Palestinian solidarity (Gumbs, 2024, p. 317; Magloire). But by the end of the decade, Lorde implored her college audience that when we “sit back silent, refusing to use [our] power, terrible things are being done in our name,” namely, the tacit endorsement of the ongoing Palestinian genocide and “military occupation of their homeland” given the massive US financial contributions “in military and economic aid to Israel” (Lorde, 1989, p. 216). Needless to say, her call still resonates. As I’m writing, Israel—bankrolled by the United States—has now murdered at the very minimum 42,800 Palestinians, as well as wounded well over 100,000 since October 2023—figures that are likely massive undercounts (Syed, 2024). Schools have specifically been targeted by bombings and attacks: military and paramilitary forces have killed over 9,000 and injured over 14,000 Palestinian students in Gaza in less than a year (Motamedi & Adler, 2024). Israel has now effectively obliterated every single university in Gaza.

I don’t want to pretend that I invented any of the frameworks and theories I use to explore these ideas. The university’s deep complicity in racism, empire, and militarism has been articulated, over and over, by thinkers and organizers in the long struggle against colonialism and racialized dispossession, like the Palestinian leaders of BDS, student activists, and theorists in Black studies, Indigenous studies, and settler-colonial studies—from whom my analysis takes its theoretical inspiration. The latter three fields are obviously distinct areas of study and I do not want to collapse them, but as a Noura Erakat puts it, Zionism, anti-Blackness, and US settler colonialism “political and ideological bellows both in their inception as well as their strategic alliance” (see also Gumbs, 2014; Jordan, 2021). More specifically, I see these strands of theory/praxis as sharing an approach that intentionally refuses the normative western progress narratives that render institutionally sanctioned violence invisible (Grande, 2018). I hope to lift up some of these praxes while also trying to locate them in various campus, disciplinary, and rhetorical contexts in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

 

Dysconciousness in the Anti-Human University

Schooling and institutionalized academic contexts are often perceived as the vital spaces that cultivate morality, criticality, and openness, the discursive and ideological values necessary for successful engagement in a participatory democracy. However, writing in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, Sylvia Wynter (1994) argued in a letter to fellow faculty members—published in a collection spearheaded by race-radical students aiming to place “knowledge on trial” (Institute N. H. I., 1994)—that such faith in schooling may be misplaced. Indeed, Wynter posits that it is the most lauded universities, whose faculty have reached the highest possible professional success, that train and enculturate an astounding number of state/corporate actors on the frontlines of environmental destruction, racial-capitalist dispossession, incarceration/so-called criminal justice, militarism, and empire. It is thus not failing students nor errant faculty but those deemed the so-called “best and brightest” by their institution—reaching their “highest levels of learning”—who come to embody schooling’s racist/colonial underpinnings (p. 59). In short, she asks, “What is wrong with our education?” (p. 59)—an education that is not antithetical to but in fact directly supports imperial and white-supremacist order (Rodríguez, 2012; la paperson, 2017; Grande 2018)—including the genocide in Palestine.

The university specifically, as Sandy Grande (2018) writes, is a key “site where the logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted”—and, I’d argue, rearticulated (p. 47). This reconstitution/articulation is upheld by epistemic obedience—to borrow from Walter Mignolo (2009)—which in turn functions not on “implicit bias” but an active psychological repression. One thing that academia does remarkably well is compartmentalization. As Omar Barghouti (2011), a founder of the BDS movement, puts it, mass dispossession necessarily “touches everyone within its reach, irrespective of one’s actual involvement in it or will to get involved in it” (p. 102). Every single person on a college campus has been shaped by Western militarism and empire; our buildings lie on occupied territories, our paychecks sponsored by anti-Black, anti-Palestinian corporations and technologies. Yet for white settlers, it is possible to somehow manage to get through the day paying little mind to these things. Wynter (1994) points to the “organizationally and cognitively closed self-regulating” nature of hegemonic and colonial epistemologies—which are “rigorously elaborated by the present disciplinary paradigms of the Humanities and the Social Sciences”—because they are premised on the “optimal middle-class mode of the subject”: a white settler (p. 67, p. 48). The university thus replicates the logics by which individuals who do not align with this normative Western conception of humanity are rendered as entirely “not perceivable” (Wynter, 1994, p. 65).

Crucially, this issue is not simply a matter of mere ignorance. In fact, academics often “feel and express their pity” for those on the receiving end of racist-colonial domination (Wynter, 1994, p. 65). Nonetheless, they often “refrain from proposing to marry their thought with [the] particular variety of human suffering” in which those affected, such as Palestinians in Gaza, exceed normative definitions of humanity (Wynter, p. 65). In other words, as Nadia Abu El-Haj (2023) writes in the context of the Nakba, “we know well, but all the same” (p. 260). Joyce King’s (1991) notion of “dysconciousness” echoes a similar idea: in her groundbreaking piece on teacher training and racism, she defines it as “an uncritical habit of mind . . . that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given”—or acquiescing to them with a criticality that never exceeds the theoretical or performative (p. 135). This in turn requires a “a subjective identification with an ideological viewpoint that admits no fundamentally alternative vision of society” (King, 1994, p. 135). Meanwhile, academic capitalism helps to reify these ideologies. Cultures of manufactured urgency, competition, atomization, and overwork reward disengagement with genocide and settler colonialism—beyond the level of theory. Of course, this kind of disengagement is only possible for those who are not the targets of said genocide.

The paradoxical notion that the university is the nexus of critical thought, learning, and so-called free speech when these things are always-already deeply compromised has long existed but the intense policing around those expressing pro-Palestinian viewpoints makes it especially stark (Salaita, 2014). Consider Steven Salaita’s abruptly pulled job offer when administrators dug up old anti-Zionists tweets. Ironically, their decision was publicly sanctioned by an English professor at their campus, Cary Nelson: a close affiliate of the American Association of University Professors who has written at length about the importance of “free speech” while simultaneously arguing that anti-Zionist discourse uniquely does not fall under this principle (Flaherty, 2014; see also Trimbur, 2018). Or, the violent threats lodged at Marc Lamont Hill by Zionist agitators upon giving speech at his university in which he expressed solidarity with Palestine: the campus administration did not censure but legitimize demands to punish Hill and considered firing him too (Jaschik, 2018). (CNN, where Hill had been a correspondent, had just done so, with the university offering no real support). Or, a disciplinary organization’s espoused avowal to dialogue in light of their composing an explicit anti-riot policy in the wake of anti-Zionist campus movements and their inclusion of this policy language in disciplinary conference programs. This may not be a paradox after all. This is simply how the academy and disciplines within them function by default: they reproduce colonial, ableist, xenophobic, white-supremacist and carceral violence (la paperson, 2017; Kannan et al., 2016; Rodríguez, 2012).

Faculty and administrators make active decisions to maintain this logic through a discursive, epistemological, and “behaviour-regulating ethic” (Wynter, 1992, p. 64). As a white, non-visibly disabled, Jewish person with a tenure-track job, I have felt a degree of protection in articulating support for student activists and their demands for divestment and Palestinian liberation. However, I have often been the lone or one of just a few voices to even name Palestine at meetings, conference panels/workshops and other spaces in the company of other educators with more job security. I have been present during campus conversations in which the recent mass wave of student organizing did not even come up, even when there were currently protests and encampments at that very institution or ones in geographic proximity. I have been to campus actions where I have been one of just two staff members who participated alongside students. As was the case at countless universities, one encampment I visited was abruptly infiltrated by an astounding number of cops—there were police cars lined up for blocks and more and more officers arrived until they were fully surrounding and outnumbering us. Subsequently, cops arrested at least fifteen activists—just a few among the 3,200 arrested across the country this spring. How could it be possible, I wondered, to not even name perhaps the largest movement happening in the education world in defiance of settler-colonial order, particularly at institutions serving largely Black and brown students?

In fact, academia rewards this kind of compromised thinking because one evades the risk of being labeled what Sara Ahmed calls a “killjoy”—with Black and brown scholars most acutely vulnerable (2012). “Killjoys” are targeted because they disrupt a culture of “niceness”: that is, compliance and silence. The pressure of “aligning with a corporeal”—and discursive—“notion of decency,” especially in the context of discourse around Palestine, are manifestations of an implicit commitment to maintaining a “respectability supposedly inherent in liberal nationalism” (Salaita, 2014, p. 227). Ultimately, Salaita (2014) argues, this culture of discursive, epistemological, and material [self-]policing reflects the “interrelation of state power and academic ethos” that upholds the kind of “hypernationalization” necessary to make certain forms of imperial violence “permissible” (p. 227–228). The idea of critical thought and discourse is all well and good until that critique turns self-reflexive, toward the institutions we inhabit every day and their maintenance of imperial and white supremacist order, no matter the severity or overtness of this violence, as is the case in Gaza.

 

Disciplinary Complicity: Rhetoric, Literacy, and Colonial Genocide After the Nakba

The first time the bulldozers came

I was at school . . .

The second time . . .

My brother Hasan jumped

Without thinking

Ran for his books

It was his final year

3 more weeks he would take his matriculation exams and

Graduate to university . . .

But one Israeli soldier kicked his

Hands with a Sharp black boot

So hard

His books flew into suffocating mud

Sealed their pages silent

–Noura Erakat, excerpt from Three Home Demolitions and One Pending Order: For the al-Atrash Family in Hebron, Occupied Palestine (as cited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2007, p. 171–72)

The notion that Israel’s apartheid regime, the US’s militaristic complicity and struggles for Palestinian liberation are tangential or irrelevant to the scholarly, disciplinary, and pedagogical work of composition-rhetoric is simply another example of this toxic compartmentalization. In my own experience over the years as an interdisciplinary scholar, I have found conversations around Palestine in our field to be comparatively scant. At conferences like the National Women’s Studies Association and the American Studies Association[2]—among the biggest in gender and ethnic studies—I have attended featured, widely publicized panels explicitly around Palestinian solidarity and/or BDS and/or anti-Zionism and/or featuring Palestinian speakers. I haven’t seen any such events in rhetoric and composition, nor have any professional associations in the field unequivocally condemned the genocide, as the 2024 open letter “Rhetoric and Composition Scholars/Teachers/Administrators/Students for Palestine” makes plain. Our disciplinary organizations’ current reticence is perhaps predictable given that as John Trimbur (2018) details, neither the Conference on College Composition and Communication nor the National Council of Teachers of English wrote any kind of statements or said anything regarding the unethical treatment of Salaita a decade ago, even when countless other professional organizations in the humanities did so (including the Modern Language Association) (184–187).

The inaction and complacency of composition and rhetoric is especially ironic in light of disciplinary organizations and leaders’ espoused commitments to equity in campus-based and community writing/rhetoric spaces. As Carmen Kynard (2023) stated at a recent disciplinary conference, many scholars—notably those in our field—have in recent years realized that in some cases it can be “lucrative to present themselves as anti-racist,” even “claiming abolition,” yet these same academics “won’t even say and think FREE PALESTINE right now.” Compare the current moment with that of summer 2020, when departmental and disciplinary statements invoking Black Lives Matter proliferated, though often with no action attached to them (Baker-Bell et al.). Even still, where are these sentiments now with regards to Palestinian lives—and for that matter, Black lives? This is not to say that I believe conferences or departments are themselves a central vehicle for radical political change (see Kelley, 2016), but that the culture of such disciplinary spaces reveals the degree of colonial, white supremacist suppression that seems to go unchecked in our fields.

Yet the dynamics of Israel’s genocide settler colonialism directly intersect with some of our discipline’s hallmark concepts in very clear ways. Take the politics of hegemonic monolingualism, language diversity, and what Paul Kei Matsuda (2006) has coined the “myth of linguistic homogeneity.” In the region’s education system, Palestinian have long been forced to “spend many class hours in the study of . . . the Hebrew language, whereas Jewish pupils have little exposure to Arab[ic] language” (Said et al., 1988, p. 287). Or, consider our field’s conversations around subjectivity, power and language, particularly for those for whom, in the powerful words of Jaqueline Jones Royster (1996), “the first voice [they] hear is not [their] own.” The leading storytellers reporting live since October 2023 include people like Palestinian mixed-media journalists/writers Bisan Owda and Plestia Alaqad, who actively locate their dispatches from Gaza in their own lived experience and positionality (ElGendy, 2023; Owda, n.d.; Alaqad, n.d.). Or with regards to our field’s central concerns with acknowledging and integrating students’ linguistic lives and “out-of-school” literacies in our classrooms, we might look to the kinds of insurgent discursive practices in students’ self-fashioned communities working in solidarity in pursuit of divestment and Palestinian liberation (Hull & Schultz, 2001).

Beyond mere relevance, I would also argue that compositionists/rhetoricians are in fact especially complicit in reinforcing the epistemic obedience endemic to colonialism and militarism because of the centrality of language in this process. In fact, our very definitions of humanity under white supremacist settler colonialism materialize in part through “narratively-discursive” means (Wynter, 1994, p. 50). Edward Said (1984) describes “the permission to narrate” wielded by Israel to create a world in which the Nakba could be erased or neutralized to portray mass dispossession and death as simply steps in Israel’s linear progress toward sovereignty. In doing so, he sees the organized dispossession of Palestinians as inherently interconnected with language and thus suggests that the widespread legibility of the Palestinian-narrated histories and testimonies is crucial anti-imperial praxis (see also El-Kurd, 2023). Abu El-Haj (2023) complicates this argument: speaking from a contemporary context, she notes that these narrations have long existed exist, with those complicit in Israeli militarism in fact quite well-aware of stories of historical and continued violence of the Israeli settler state—through biopolitical, necropolitical, and/or spatial/landed means (Puar, 2017)—yet they are not actually “acknowledged” (p. 257). Our discipline is thus especially implicated because of its explicit dedication to the interpretation and composition of rhetoric, which itself dictates, as Ira Shor (2013) has said, “how we know what is good, what is possible, and what exists” (p. 57).

Writing and/or rhetoric instructors are critical figures here, as figureheads of institutional discourses that are central to the maintenance of imperial order. Within a network of other institutional spaces, the writing/rhetoric course is a crucial site in developing ideals of “proper” discourse and “commonplace” rhetorical sensibilities and ideologies. In particular, the first-year composition classroom, with its often-unstated investment in cultivating proper, legitimate, democratic US citizens (Wan), is still often described or put into practice—whether in classroom or writing-program administration contexts—within the terms of assimilation, and what I would argue are the nationalist, supremacist ideologies attached to it. Some of this fields’ most foundational essays, still frequently taught and referenced, conceive of the introductory writing course as an “initiation into the academic discourse community” (Bizzell, 1992), which  authorizes students as university “insiders” who are “granted a special right to speak” because they have “practice[d] the kinds of conversation valued by college teachers” (Bruffee, 1984, p. 642) and learned to mimic “our language, to speak as we do” (Bartholomae, 1986). In fact, one of the most well-known pieces ever written in the field argues that successful writers are those who “can both imagine and write from a position of privilege,” who “see themselves within a privileged discourse” that by definition “already includes and excludes groups of readers”—thus, successful writers “must be either equal to or more powerful than those they would address” (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 407). It is interesting to consider this argument in parallel to Said’s (1984) theories about narrative and Israeli settler colonialism. The argument about first-year writing seems to be that students should try to seize the “permission to narrate” by aligning themselves with the discursive and cultural norms of those in power. Both Said and Abu El-Haj (2023) find the narratological dominance of powerful figures—from state leaders to Israeli historians—as facilitating epistemological erasure and replicating settler colonialism.

Interestingly, the strain of foundational composition-rhetorical scholarship referenced above is well aware of how the linguistic norms of higher education make it a highly inequitable space, expressing a sincere attention to or concern with power dynamics, yet nonetheless still ask students to “master” these discourses them and thus continue to uphold ideals of a “white listening subject” and “white speaking subject” (Flores & Rosa, 2015). I have heard similar sentiments from even the most “anti-racist” of educators, especially when distinguishing between theory and what they actually do in their classrooms due to various constraints. Ultimately, a colonial framework that understands student progress along axes of progress toward a white settler subjectivity and voice risks enforcing what Keith Gilyard has called “genopsycholinguisticide.” In this sense, writing classrooms may be complicit in regulating the kinds of literate practices weaponized by Israel and the Global North to effectively wiping out critiques of state-sanctioned genocide.

Beyond the classroom, the regulation of literacy has been central to schooling’s maintenance of settler-colonial logics. For instance, as Maya Wind (2024) has traced, there is a long tradition of Israeli universities operating as a wing of colonial hegemony, including through anti-Palestinian book banning and theft. During and in the aftermath of the Nakba, Israel’s National Library at Hebrew University in west Jerusalem amassed a collection of 30,000 stolen books, as they had been endowed with the “authority to appropriate” texts “from Palestinian homes, libraries, and educational and religious institutions left behind by Palestinian war refugees” (Wind, p. 164–165). In fact, the university “granted funds and official status to this enterprise, and organized teams of librarians to trail Israeli soldiers and collect books from Palestinian buildings”; staff and students also assisted in this process (Wind, p. 164). Meanwhile, an Israeli government entity called the Custodian of Absentee Property stole 26,000 books from Palestinian schools and adjacent settings, designating over 4,000 of them to be destroyed because they were supposedly “inappropriate” because they contained so-called “material against the state”; they then resold some of the cleansed texts back to the Palestinian schools they stole from (Wind, p. 65).

Palestinian suppression via discursive regulation has continued throughout the decades. In the late 1970s, a UN report noted that students at secondary and higher education institutions in occupied territories by and large could only access books with Arab authors that were apolitical enough to pass the Israeli censors, such as crime novels and science writing (Said et al., 1988, p. 289–290). Around the same time, Birzeit University in the West Banked sparked national controversy due to intensive book censorship in tandem with the “refusal of Zionist authorities to renew and/or grant work permits to Palestinian and foreign professors” (Said et al., 1988, p. 290). On the other hand, Israeli colleges like Haifa University have condoned and sponsored the “racist utterances and pronouncements” of faculty members “publish[ing] bigoted research papers” that openly “espouse racist ‘theories’” targeting “Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular” and “advocat[ing] ethnic cleansing” (Barghouti, p. 109-110; see also Wind, 2024). Again, the regulation of literacy by the schooling-state apparatus becomes another arm in the maintenance of dispossession, land theft, and genocide.

Nada Elia (2016) draws a throughline between Israeli book theft/censorship since the Nakba and how Palestinian and even vaguely pro-Palestinian texts and discourses have continually been a site of colonial repression in U.S. schooling. Elia traces how in 2016, a popular Zionist blogger posted images of a college political-science textbook published by McGraw Hill featuring a map that he deemed anti-Israel. His entry spread quickly across the internet, getting reposted by blogs with ties to extremely influential and wealthy pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC. Acquiescing to the ensuing Zionist pressure, McGraw Hill opted not just to edit or even cease production of the textbook but to actively destroy the entire stock, despite outcry from critical educators and significant public opposition, thus placing counter-insurgent pressure even over monetary concerns, not to mention the development of “critical thought” that the textbook had promised to offer (Elia, 2016; Khalek, 2016). Interestingly, McGraw Hill was one of just a few listed sponsors of that year’s composition-rhetoric’s flagship conference [Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2016]). More recently, in August 2023, a Princeton professor came under serious attack because she included Jasbir Puar’s book The Right to Maim—a landmark book on debility and empire, the second half of which focuses on Palestine—on her syllabus. The professor, a woman of color, faced severe attacks, as well as pressure on Princeton to fire her; the institution did little to step in to protect her (Weissman, 2023).

There are more insidious yet deeply material ways in which literacy intersects with the Palestinian genocide. For instance, the company Hewlett Packard (HP), which provides printers and other supplies to countless universities, remains at the top of BDS’s consumer targets (Palestinian BNC, 2024). Meanwhile, Israel has contracted HP as the “exclusive provider of personal computers” for the Israeli military—since 2009, it has been central in building up the military’s IT infrastructure (Palestinian BNC, 2024). HP also “provides services to the offices” of Israel’s state leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Palestinian BNC, 2024). In addition, the company has for years supplied “technology for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority”; HP was notably central in the development of “the biometric identification system installed on checkpoints” (known as the Basel System) that surveils Palestinians and inhibits their mobility (Palestinian BNC, n.d.). In a rhetorically and professionally savvy move, in 2015, the corporation split into two divisions, HP Inc. (direct sales) and HP Enterprises (other “business and government services” (Palestinian BNC, n.d.), using this to claim that the former “does not develop, sell or own technologies or provide any related services in our portfolio pertaining to data centers or servers” while failing to note whether the latter does (HP Newsroom, 2021).

Also on the Palestinian BDS National Committee's list of boycott targets is Intel, a company that many universities have invested in, and has also funded and co-launched countless higher education partnership programs (Palestinian BNC, 2024). These include new AI training programs that will soon reach universities across all 50 states (American Association of Community Colleges, 2021)— that will, among other things, help students cultivate such “soft skills” as “communication” (Pumariega, 2023). Meanwhile, like HP, Intel is also deeply complicit in the Palestinian genocide. The company is the largest private employer in Israel and has had an established presence in the occupied territories since 1974 (BDS North America, 2024). Especially alarmingly, they built one plant “within the boundaries of the Palestinian village of Iraq al Manshiya, which was ethnically cleansed and razed to the ground” to be “replaced by the Israeli settlement” and renamed Qiryat Gat (Palestinian BNC, 2024).

As BDS movement workers, including student activists have reiterated, many universities have also endorsed companies like Intel and HP by including them within their investment portfolios (Palestinian BNC). This, in tandem with universities directly purchasing their products to be used across campus, elevates these corporations—vehicles to the functioning of settler colonialism and apartheid—as “sponsors of literacy” (Brandt, 1998) for university students, faculty, and administrators. That is, they create the literal, material technologies that populate our office and libraries, which enable us to conduct our everyday literacy practices, from reading articles and papers, to composing scholarship, to conducting assessment. Literacy—its suppression and its sanctioning—thus crucially intersects with calls for divestment that have been at the center of student protests, as well as the larger struggle for Palestinian decolonization championed by activists, including those who have participated in the mass mobilization on college campuses in 2024.

 

Liberal-Humanist Suppression in the Anti-Zionist Campus Movement

On our campuses, it is ultimately radical students who face the worst consequences of discursive and material policing. I’ve heard (either myself or via friends) such faculty sentiments as the following: today’s anti-Zionist student protests are performative and opportunistic; their protests and encampments “get in the way” (physically and otherwise) of the day-to-day functioning of campus; they are not nuanced in their thinking; they are too extreme and emotional; they are not as sincere as those of earlier generations like the Civil Rights Movement; they have not gained enough life experience for their protests to be legitimate; their protests will do nothing. These notions echo far-right tropes in which students and faculty involved in the struggle for racial and anti-colonial justice on campus are frequently mobilized as punching bags, as evident through the popularity of sites like Campus Reform—and more recently, through mechanisms like participating in (Thorbecke, 2023) or funding (Schwartz, 2024) organizations doxing pro-Palestine students.

Yet all the sentiments I noted above were attributed to faculty and/or administrators who were far from right-wingers: indeed, it is the liberal-humanist university that has sanctioned and driven the mass arrests and violent suppression of students. This kind of suppression often functions through the policing of student discourse. In the context of the spring 2024 student encampments and linked movements, centrist and even progressive administrators and faculty canceled student commencement addresses and other speeches by claiming they could “escalate” to a dangerous level (Mahdawi, 2024). They have silenced and then harassed and (physically) pushed Palestinian students out of school-sponsored events for peacefully speaking out (Berkeley LSJP, 2024). They have participated in a “McCarthyite backlash” to stifle the voices of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with some campuses entirely banning chapters, intimidating them through such tactics as authoring public statements and tweets calling them out (Kane, 2023). Even some progressive, anti-Zionist scholars (perhaps especially those who’ve reached a certain level of professional notoriety and/or rarely teach undergraduates), have inadvertently endangered campus organizers in coalitions like SJP by chastised their writing and rhetoric (naming specific campus chapters in doing so) for their “corrupt[ed] form . . . of reasoning,” paternalistically informing them that they “have to learn some history” (Butler, 2023). In fact, some faculty and allied studies students across the political spectrum have inaccurately accused anti-Zionist campus organizers of intentionally threatening the security Jewish students, by, for instance, writing a statement that supposedly “celebrated” the death of Israelis after October 2023 (Cineas, 2024) or using so-called “offensive language” in a school newspaper parody—with the student authors of the latter facing criminal charges (Echols, 2024) Most obviously and most alarmingly, liberal universities have subjected all dissenting student and allied faculty voices to violent policing and mass arrests, with Palestinian, Black and/or Muslim students most vulnerable.

In justifying these kinds of action, campus actors tend to harness a common rhetorical trope to shut down insurgent voices: that student organizers are not sufficiently discussing or representing “both sides” of the story by embracing a more politically “neutral” rhetoric. However, these rhetorical norms are premised on a “false parity” or level playing field in a wildly asymmetrical power struggle between “a nuclear-powered state and a stateless people without a formal army” (Erakat, 2021). In many cases, the liberal university deems any kind of voices remotely related to Palestinian solidarity as offensive and violent through eliding it with antisemitism. (Of course, this has also been a talking point of the right; congress passed a bill establishing that anti-Zionism is equivalent to antisemitism). Students who disobey these norms are thus conceived of as illegitimate, disrespectful, and even racist by refusing to align with the compliant affect required to participate in “open dialogue,” even though this supposed “openness” is premised on white, Western discursive and affective norms.

Indeed, in the liberal-humanist university, faculty members and administrators—as well as journalists for mainstream liberal publications like the New York Times—often rely heavily on the rhetoric of respectability, inevitably intertwined with anti-Blackness, anti-Arab sentiments, xenophobia, ableism, sexism, queer and transphobia, imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and linguistic (especially raciolinguistic) ideologies. For instance, to justify cancelling USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech at the last minute, the vice provost and vice president of academic affairs claimed that the “disruption” it would cause would be inconsistent with what the university hopes “to present as an image” (Tabassum, 2024). In the words of one SJP member (who opted for anonymity out of fear of retribution), “There’s a respectability politics that we are forced to constantly hold ourselves to, not just as an organization, but also as students who are Arab American, or Muslim, or Palestinian on campus,” forced “play into this idea of a respectful Arab who uses demure language” and rhetorically posture as if “liberation is not at the forefront of our demands” (Cineas, 2024). Ultimately, these politics deem which students can “belong” on campus: that is, those who can and/or make the choice to assimilate into a “university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire” (Gumbs, 2014, p. 237; see also Luu, 2022 and Rodríguez, 2012). The colonial and carceral impulse to regulate and critique student discourse is not merely taking place within the realm of ideas but is fundamentally linked to the material violence inflicted upon them by their schools and counterinsurgent Zionist actors: their incarceration, their housing insecurity, their financial security, their mental and physical wellbeing.

 

Coda

Ultimately, though, as Robin D. G. Kelley (2016) argues, in a certain sense, radical work—and by extension, real criticality and linguistic freedom—may exceed the capacity of institutions like higher education. Indeed, Dylan Rodríguez has noted that while institutionally sanctioned spaces of learning—whether classrooms or museum exhibits—have a monopoly over conceptions of education in the public imaginary, critical education often happens beyond the classroom (Strike MoMa, 2021). At the same time, I do not think it is “naive” (a descriptor I’ve heard a scholar use verbatim in this context) to hold universities accountable and demand something better as some of today’s campus protests have done through fighting for things like BDS. As Derecka Purnell (2016)—then a student organizer in the Black Lives Matter movement—argued in a response to Kelley’s piece, rather than disavowing them wholescale, it may possible for “students to reject the ideology of inclusion” into an institution that was never built for them in the first place and try to imagine possibilities for an university divested from anti-Blackness and settler colonialism (2016). In the words of student organizers with SJP at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA)—a campus with a primarily Black and brown, working class student population that faced extremely violent police intervention—“complete and total divestment is a far cry from liberation, but it’s a start” in the long pursuit of decolonization in and beyond the university (CSULA Divest, 2024).

In attending and witnessing student-run encampments and protests, I have been especially moved by how principles of solidarity infuse their understanding of institutional violence and resistance to it. For instance, CSULA students in SJP maintained, “We strive to push back against US imperialism in all its forms both domestically and abroad,” as all forms of liberation “are link[ed], just as all of our oppressors are allies”; indeed, “no one is free until we are all free” (CSULA Divest, 2024). Student organizers and those allied with them are also doing important work to place their movement within broader spatial and temporal contexts. Indeed, at CUNY, student activists have interpolated the Five Demands of the open admissions movement—authored by campus organizers to advocate for education justice for Black and Puerto Rican students—into a new list of demands around the campus’ divestment from Palestine (Gaza Solidarity Encampment, 2024). In doing so, they point to the historical lineage of university suppression and campus movements, reminding us that student urgency has been a constant.

Meanwhile, at my undergraduate alma, current student organizers have harkened back to Lorde’s 1989 speech in their anti-Zionist organizing work, including public writing, to articulate their political commitment to “mak[ing] the difficult choice" to “speak out” by calling for the college’s divestment from the Israel’s apartheid regime and attacks on Gaza (Keating and Johnson, 2024). Speaking especially to the intertwined fates of Black and Palestinian liberation struggles, these students implore their community to commit to a vocal, visible, and material solidarity with the Palestinian people—even when “systems of oppression and violence reward us for passively standing by,” including on their own college campus (Keating and Johnson, 2024).

These students’ profound rhetorical, historical, and political work illuminates how these protests—and the discourses that have materialized from them—are not a hindrance or distraction from “real learning.” In fact, they embody them in every possible way—marking a kind of lived knowledge and rhetorical acumen that often exceeds that of most faculty. It is precisely because these student organizers—with allied employees and community members—have exceeded the capacity of the liberal-humanist institution that they have learned these powerful lessons. Their very refusal to align with the kind of assimilationist respectability politics complicit in the tacit endorsement of Israeli genocide embodies real criticality and the kinds of bold, innovative rhetorical praxes that move toward an education and world in which all people are liberated, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

 

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Anna Zeemont is a teacher-scholar of composition-rhetoric, American studies, education studies, and queer feminisms and Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Buffalo State. Broadly speaking, Anna’s research interrogates the politics of literacy across educational institutions and urban geographies, highlighting the pedagogical, intellectual, and rhetorical work of anti-colonial, abolitionist movements. Anna’s work has been published in Community Literacy, the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, Kairos, and elsewhere. Anna’s monograph in progress, “The Act of the Paper”: Literacy, Racial Capitalism, and Student Protest in the 1990s, is an archival project tracing visionary, radical, student literacies—zines, early blogs, DIY newspapers, and more—within the late 20ᵗʰ century’s shifting educational, disciplinary, and geopolitical contexts.