Reading Group Week 14
We're continuing to read Perfect Victims by Mohammed el-Kurd
Readings
This week, let's read just chapter 6 ("miraculous epiphanies").
This is longer than the others and totals about as many pages as other weeks, so don't put it off too long.
Reflections
Such revelations are occasionally propelled by a sense of moral urgency: an Auschwitz survivor will say, Never again for anyone; a young refusenik will publicly oppose occupation. Or it is moral superiority: a settler in Palestine will make a film about other, worse settlers, who laugh as they testify about Tantura, where they buried our ancestors in mass graves, a massacre we have narrated for decades, with visceral recollection, in our movies, in our novels and songs, in our oral histories. On other occasions, it is remorse that takes them to the confession booth: a soldier suffers a pang of conscience and decides to break his silence, after a long career of maiming children or hunting protesters for sport. He comes clean, under legal immunity, of course, about all the heinous acts he has committed in our towns and refugee camps. He cannot sleep, he has PTSD, so, naturally, he embarks on a speaking tour across universities, where he is met with applause and platitudes. He professes his sins in the confessional of a brightly lit stage, and the audience, unscathed, entertained, grants him a plenary indulgence. What courage.
But in reality, we are simply reliable narrators. I say we are reliable narrators not because we are Palestinians. It is not on an identitarian basis that we must claim the authority to narrate. Rather it is because history tells us that those who have oppressed, who have monopolized and institutionalized violence, will not tell the truth, let alone hold themselves accountable.
The analysis in these projects is habitually sourced from liberal Israeli correspondents and Western commentators, and the history cited in them is penned by Israeli scholars. They confirm, corroborate, and verify, whereas we allege and claim. We provide the raw material from which they extract their authenticated reports.
Where do Palestinians fit in this work? Do they have any agency, or are they a tool to drive the point across? Are my filmmaking practices extractive? How can I practice responsible authorship? Have I instilled in my project enough cues to incentivize my audience to consume it critically, or am I patting myself on the back? Am I doing the challenging chore of speaking to my bigoted, acrimonious community, accosting my Zionist aunt at the dinner table, or am I preaching—pandering, really—to the choir? Did I really have to go and "see for myself," or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature? Am I cognizant of how that refusal to engage local and grassroots knowledge production continues to undermine its value on the world stage, undermining also the value and authority of Palestinian narration? Do I have a class analysis in my work? Do I acknowledge that I get awards for saying similar things to what the student movement has been criminalized, suspended, and censured for saying? Do I name my institutional backing? What are the material and monetary conditions of those whose voices I amplify? Am I only referencing dead guys? What does my works cited page look like?
I've probably written elsewhere about my hesitancy about citing +972, Haaretz, and other Israeli (even "liberal" Israeli) sources, and part of that is because I'm not sure I'm good at articulating my discomfort, but this chapter helped me pinpoint some of my apprehension and reticence about it. It's not (just) the self-congratulatory tone of colonizers patting themselves on the backs for giving some of their power, status, and voice to the people they've historically oppressed - although it's that too - but it's the epistemological crisis I find myself in when I'm privileging knowledge from the people participating in violence in the first place. In some cases, using data from the Israeli government itself.
On the video chat I briefly talked about some of the issues around BDS recently - PACBI spoke out against the film No Other Land because it normalized the state of Israel and created the exact dynamic that El-Kurd writes about in this chapter: Palestinians allege and claim; Israelis and other Westerners confirm, corroborate, and verify. Do Palestinians need to be chaperoned at the Oscars? Do Palestinians need to be validated everywhere they go? Without getting into the substantive critiques of the film (namely, settlers making a documentary film identifying "worse settlers" and critiquing the Israeli government, but thus accepting the premise of the government in the first place), what is this dynamic that we're endorsing and normalizing between Palestinian voices and those that accompany and therefore validate and confirm them?
I spent some time thinking about how or whether to include El-Kurd's stories from his childhood, when journalists and politicians met with him and his family because he was a child, and because he was more articulate and able to speak than so many other Palestinians. I thought a lot about what felt, disturbingly, like some kind of child abuse committed by the world on Palestinian children and specifically El-Kurd. I don't know if that's a hyperbolic way to describe it, but I can't shake the feeling that Westerners wanted to exploit him as a child in ways that they don't want to now, and that's... obscenely gross.
I also thought about whether I wanted to extract anecdotes in exactly the way that he exhorts us to rise above at the end of this chapter. I think he has plenty of analysis of what the international community did to him, and to other Palestinian children, that needs to be read in situ. He has thoughts about this; I want us all to discuss them in whole, and not take little snippets.
I want to encourage us to think really carefully about whose accounts we need in order to present them to others. I want to think more carefully about how I add my analysis to conversations; when (and why) do I add ellipses to Palestinians' quotations and turn their account into "raw material" for my analyses?
Share your reflections
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Otherwise, let's chat on Saturday at 12pm ET, during the weekly video call.
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Other news
Police violence against Palestinians and activists against the genocide of Palestine
Dutch police violently beat protesters at the University of Amsterdam for demanding that the university cut ties with Israeli institutions (Al Jazeera). Other universities in Europe (Ghent University, the University of Antwerp, and the Université Libre de Bruxelles) have all either cut dies or declined to initiate new projects with Israeli partners (Reuters).
Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested last week during a naturalization interview (Gothamist). In the report on his past activism, it points out that he condemned the anonymous individual who shouted antisemitic epithets during a rally on campus; I'm reminded of the quote from last week's email:
Our capacity to produce such distinctions [between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism] is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction is not our responsibility, and personally, it is not my priority.
On grassroots movements and activism in and around academia
The student senate leadership at Columbia University has published an open letter to Columbia's latest president (Claire Shipman, formerly a Columbia trustee but otherwise no experience in academia) (Twitter). Students and alumni today are chaining themselves to the University's gates, demanding the university make some effort toward the release of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi (Twitter).
(US) court support safety considerations
If you're going to court dates to support defendants who have protested against universities investing in genocide and apartheid, please be advised that ICE is monitoring and may attempt to abduct people in the US on green cards or visas (or, really, anyone who can't immediately prove citizenship). One of the defendants from the encampment in Ann Arbor posted this last week (Instagram).
On the subject of holding prisoners
On April 16, Adam Boehler said the US "can't deal" with people who hold captives (Al Jazeera). This comment happened to coincide closely with Palestinian Prisoner's Day (April 17), recognizing the approximately 10,000 Palestinians currently held captive by Israel mostly for torture and to trade when desirable.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis passed away this morning. In his last public appearance on Easter shortly before his death, he urged for a ceasefire and an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, Reuters)
Support people in need
If you have extra funds, please donate directly to the Sameer Project. The Sameer Project very recently posted that they're critically low on funds:
If you have extra capacity to donate, you can also donate to Sudan Funds, a project to get money to Sudanese people surviving genocide.
Support the reading group
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Thanks
Thank you for reading to the end. Please reach out if you have comments, or consider joining the Saturday call this weekend.
Regardless, thanks for reading along with me.