It has been a slow start to the semester as I have been down with Covid. Workplaces are noxious when it comes to the spread of the virus which I caught a particularity nasty bout of at a meeting held in an airless and overcrowded room. The mantra of personal responsibility was on repeat in response. As M.I. Asma argue in their collective publication, ‘the current historical conjuncture’ is a moment of ‘necrocapitalism.’ Their book, On Necrocapitalism: A plague journal asks in the Introduction whether ‘many of us will accept this exposure, laugh it off, and keep living right through it because of its nightmare.’ It appears that, despite the extensive lock-downs and punitive measures taken against anyone deemed ‘matter out of place’ during what is now being referred to as ‘Covid,’ an era, rather than a still-circulating disease, that institutions too are moving on.
Download the Politics, Power and Resistance Open Syllabus
This year the genocide in Palestine is very much front and centre of Politics, Power and Resistance. In addition to topics that can be found on these pages, several new perspectives have been added with Palestine at the heart. It is imperative to do this, not only because it is ethical and because students want to know more about the history and sociology of what is brushed off as a ‘conflict’, but because universities are participating in the silencing of dissent. Universities are on the frontline of ideology production for Zionist settler colonialism. This takes form in many ways, including through the repression of academics and students for speaking out on Palestine, either through suspending them as happened to my Decolonization and Social Worlds book series co-editor, Jairo Fúnez at Texas Tech University, or through shutting down protests, calling police on students wearing flags or keffiyehs and much more.
Universities have also used the IHRA Definition of antisemitism to repress speech on Palestine via the dangerous and erroneous argument that anti-Zionist views are antisemitic. For example, Macquarie University in Sydney has included the IHRA definition in its Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policy despite no other form of racism being singled out within it. Another major reason why universities are repressive when it comes to Palestine is because of the extent of their material investment in one way or another in Israel, fore example through research contracts with weapons manufacturers or research partnerships with Israeli universities.
Palestine is an academic issue as all universities as well as libraries and archives in Gaza have been destroyed during this genocide. The organisation, Scholars Against the War on Palestine have produced an excellent guide on scholasticide:
During the latest Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, Palestine in 2023/2024, scholasticide has intensified on an unprecedented scale. Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has now shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education. There is, indeed, an intimate relationship between genocide and scholasticide. Raphael Lamkin, the pioneering Polish Jewish legal scholar who first defined genocide and played a key role in inserting the concept into international law, saw genocide as an effort to “undermine the fundamental basis of the social order.” Key to this effort, in Lamkin’s conception, was the assault on the cultures of national, ethnic, racial, or religious collectivities.
Scholars Against the War on Palestine
This useful podcast from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism exposes some of the main reasons why it is important for scholars and students to study Zionism.
As a Jewish university worker, teacher and writer, I am using my classroom to bring Palestine in when those in power are doing their best to hide a genocide in plain sight and refer to jewish people as a reason for doing so. In reality there are more Christian Zionists in the world than there are Jews. Zionism is a colonial problem, it is a racial problem, a climate problem, a disability problem and a gender problem. Politics, Power and Resistance looks at the intersections between such structural conditions.