Friday Mezze: Oppose Scholasticide / Palestinians Demand Permission to Narrate
Mezze - المزة - a wide selection of small dishes served as appetizers, including such delicacies as hummus, cheese, eggplant, brains, stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and much more
Good Afternoon Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
Overnight, as I was preparing the column below for publication, news broke that the government of Israel - having possibly received a green light from Washington - attacked, in several rounds, sites in Iran.
More attacks are expected.
The Jerusalem Post reported this morning that “The [unnamed] official added that the round of US-Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled for Sunday was part of a coordinated US-Israeli deception aimed at lowering Iran’s guard ahead of Friday’s attack.”
I am numb at the moment: I will be writing more about this in coming days.
Also, I will be posting three articles tomorrow that I think everyone should read - they may be accompanied by a snarky comment or two but if you can past that snarkiness the three pieces are really important.
Salamaat,
Robert
Oppose Scholasticide / Palestinians Demand Permission to Narrate
For some time now - in this season of graduations - I've been gathering notes and links, thinking about how to write about scholasticide* a term first coined by Professor Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford don and Palestinian expert on the laws of war to describe the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel to counter a tradition of Palestinian learning ...
The full evil of scholasticide came alive for me in 2023 when Israel - in response to Hamas' attacks of October 7th - launched increasingly disproportionate and lethal attacks on Gaza and its inhabitants that have become understood as crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Scholasticide, as I perceive it, is not only the attempt to physically destroy all elements of Palestinian history, culture and education - to eliminate every artifact and book, each shade and shadow, the memory of lovers and martyrs, it is to deny the very dignity and humanity of each Palestinian who refuses to submit.
Today, anti-Palestinian scholasticide is not confined to the borders of Israel or Palestine but has become globalized as Israel and its allies attempt to silence not only Palestinian demands for freedom and liberation but to delegitimize and erase - and if need be criminalize - supporters of Palestine, especially in America.
Today, scholasticide has become a politically weaponized, sophisticated and particularly pernicious form of settler-colonialism, specifically designed to target marginalized, indigenous, vulnerable and occupied Americans and their supporters, silence them, and occasionally physically suppress those standing in solidarity with Palestinian aspirations.
Silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth, Walter Brueggemann wrote in “Interrupting Silence: God’s Command to Speak Out.”
Whether or not one believes it is God’s command to speak out our very survival - as free people, as parents and lovers, priests and pundits, artists and journalists, students and teachers - our survival as a democracy is dependent upon our intellect and courage and upon our willingness to break the silence.
Silence denies the oppressed permission to narrate.
Dr. Brueggemann, one of the most widely respected Old Testament scholars of the past century passed away last week at age 92. I first discovered his work when I came across an essay he wrote referencing my friend Edward Said.
In that offering Brueggemann wrote ...so far as I know, the phrase [Permission to Narrate] was coined in 1984 by Edward Said ... More importantly, he was the most outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights in Western discourse as he readily embraced his own Palestinian identity.
[Edward Said] wrote his essay, 'Permission to Narrate' in The London Review of Books in 1984 in the wake of the war of Israel against Lebanon, Brueggemann continues. His commentary concerns the way in which that war was reported and championed in the West with unrestrained embrace of the Israeli cause. The phrase is Said’s courageous reference to the fact that Israel and its defenders were given the 'right to narrate' the war from Israel’s perspective and according to Israel’s interest. The Palestinians, by contrast, were denied such a right, had no advocates, and were not permitted to narrate their version of the crisis."
Scholasticide is a contagion of racism, suppression, and silence, a contagion we - not just the Palestinian people - must oppose in order to survive.
We must interrupt the silence.
As radicals and subversives confronting power and privilege and injustice we commanded to speak out against oligarchy, authoritarianism; against racist and religious nationalism.
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, said in 1964. "And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
We've got to make it stop.
Remember, too, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. - who, among others - spoke up and were persecuted by the American government because they opposed the Vietnam War, opposed institutional and government abuse, opposed the denial of protestors’ First Amendment rights.
Remember too the silencing of the students, the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Medgar, and Malcolm; the encampments; of four students at Kent State killed by the National Guard.
Remember them well.
To this day I am humbled by their resistance and sacrifice, by what they taught us.
To this day I have learned that no one resists alone.
I remember that the Free Speech Movement and student opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War grew into a broad political, cultural and social movement that challenged and defined America for well over a decade.
Today, I believe, the malign efforts of those who would deny Palestinians permission to narrate have resulted in a fortuitous and irrevocable intertwining and mobilization of Palestinian struggles with the struggles of all marginalized and disenfranchised communities, an international, multi-generational, interdisciplinary, interfaith alliance of peoples committed to issues of Justice and Liberation.
Scholasticide is everywhere: we must resist it on every front, not only because I believe the Palestinian cause is just, but because if we relent to the pressures of the oligarchs we fail to fully safeguard constitutionally protected speech - without which there is no America.
It's scholasticide when green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate-student activist at Columbia and a lead negotiator in pro-Palestinian protests and campus occupations was abducted by ICE agents acting without a warrant.
It's scholasticide when Harvard University keeps 13 students from graduating due to their participation in a pro-Palestinian encampment. Curiously, while the faculty voted to allow them to graduate, the school's ruling oligarchy, The Harvard Corporation,** denied the students permission to graduate.
It's scholasticide when New York University withholds the diploma of a student who used his graduation speech to criticize Israel's actions in Gaza and alleged American complicity in this genocide.
It's scholasticide when Virginia Commonwealth University denies Palestinian-American Sereen Haddad a diploma for protesting Israel's actions in Gaza.
It's scholasticide when MIT bans class president, Megha Vemuri, from attending graduation after she delivered a pro-Palestinian solidarity speech at a commencement event.
How does one confront this contagion that's racist and cultural - and most likely legal?
It's scholasticide when The Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University cancels Palestinian artist Samia Halaby's retrospective.***
It's scholasticide when RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, shuts down a pro-Palestine art show curated by the RISD Student's Pro-Palestine Justice Project entitled To Every Orange Tree.
It's scholasticide when the Whitney Museum cancels a performance about Palestinian mourning as part of the exhibition A Grammar of Attention. According to a statement from the artists: This event was to be grounded in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, while making space to mourn those who have been martyred in that struggle.
it's scholasticide when the Chappaqua [NY] Central School District bans Young Palestinians Speak, a nonfiction book sharing stories of the lives of Palestinian children.
It's scholasticide when Newark NJ school officials’ remove a YA fiction book, A Little Piece of Ground about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy living in the occupied West Bank.
How does one confront this contagion that's racist and cultural - and most likely legal?
It's scholasticide - and creepy - when the University of Michigan hires undercover investigators to follow and report on student Gaza protesters both on and off campus, recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations.****
It's scholasticide when, after teaching for 17 years at Emerson College, Anna Feder was fired because she supports Palestinian liberation.
It's scholasticide when Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College is fired for sharing a post by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi on her personal Instagram account.
It's scholasticide when, after a 25-year career, Professor Katherine Franke is fired from Columbia Law School for her pro-Palestine Advocacy.
Scholasticide may be even more personal and painful when it happens close to home to people one knows, as when New Hampshire local police, along with State Police and campus authorities - encouraged by Governor Sununu - arrested pro-Palestine protesters at Dartmouth College and at UNH.
Shame.
As Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, noted presciently in 2023 when his permission to narrate was canceled in NYC, “Even literature and the arts from Palestinians or sympathetic to them are being silenced. The weight of the West—that is, the still beating heart of colonial and global empire—is with Israel.”
It still is. Shame.
Today, I think Walter Brueggemann and Edward Said would chose to stand alongside Prophet Isaiah and oppose the beating heart of colonial and global empire.
Together, I believe, they would chose to stand … to loose the chains of injustice / and untie the cords of the yoke / to set the oppressed free ...
To set the oppressed free ...
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* https://scholarsagainstwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Scholasticide-Definition.pdf
** https://www.harvard.edu/about/leadership-and-governance/harvard-corporation/
*** https://news.artnet.com/art-world/palestinian-artist-samia-halaby-2535715
**** https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/michigan-university-gaza-surveillance
This is a day to draw your Keffiyehs close, your loved ones closer.
These are times when daily it becomes increasingly clear - from Sacramento to Washington - from Ann Arbor to Jabalia - from Beirut to Hebron to Tehran - that there are few safe havens from authoritarians and war-mongers.
One of those safe havens is The First Amendment.
Salamaat,
Robert
theother.azzi@gmail.com