Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone. My name is Dana al Kurd and this is it could happen here. I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and a senior non resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. Today we're joined by Shadin Sakudie, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital, Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine explores economy, territory, the home, the body, and she's also editor in chief of the
Journal of Palestine Studies. Today I wanted to invite Shadin on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, etc. So, yeah, Shdein, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
So let's maybe start with a very basic question, what is the Journal of Palestine Studies? Could you give us kind of overview?
Sure?
So, the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian studies in the English language. It was established in nineteen seventy one, so that makes it fifty four years old.
First it was part.
Of the then be Rout based and still be Rout based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, which sponsored what was understood at the time as an international forum to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab Zientist conflict. And really the people who established it were looking for shaping a space that could discuss these
matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like cham Chobi, Walid Relidi, Bandosheni Fuatzauf, and con Stantine Zurich, who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the Nekba in his book Man and Nekba that he wrote in nineteen forty eight, in which he coined this term the catastrophe to think about nineteen forty eight, which
would you know, be our ongoing condition. And I think the way to think about these people in there, in the way that they began the journal is to think about them as really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial and urgency and occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nekba, you know, think about it in nineteen seventy one, it was not that long before a decade and a half, yeah, right, And I think what's important about you know, in the last
couple of years, people have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of you know, some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements, and I think it's really important for people to know that this comes from a much longer tradition of the production of knowledge as a real insistence on existence.
Absolutely, Palestinians have been producing knowledge about their state of affairs, you know, just like today academics and gaza are producing knowledge, right, And I'm always like struck by how just ahead of its time, you know, the general Palistine studies is like a lot of our understanding of the conflict that are now finally starting to seep into the mainstream. We're first discussed in these pages.
Some of the.
Research findings about the history were first articulated in these pages. And so that kind of knowledge production is just it is a form of resistance to.
Erasure, absolutely, and just you know, some of those would be for example, Plandalit, which was the you know, the plan which would lead to the destruction of four hundred and fifty to five hundred and thirty seven Palestinian villages, and this plan would come to be recognized through the work of Benny Morris as a Israeli historian who had access to Israeli documents, but it's actually was Wulid Rearidi who had been evidencing and showing the empirical foundations of
Plan Dalit, and it was in the Journal of Palestine Studies that he published those findings. In that case, I think that again, for people who are really engaging the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching the political economy of who gets to speak right and whose knowledge production is uplifted as legitimate
and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli voices, and I think we really have to in this moment it's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge production.
Yeah, there's just so many ways that we witness this all the time that it's not something worthy of discussion unless an Israeli a voice says it. And there's an inherent suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestidian knowledge producer of some kind. Now, of course, the last two years have been a true upheaval. The genocide and Gaza, a tragedy that we, honestly we haven't really
absorbed and possibly can't. And we've seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American Academy, but from also like scholarship generally speaking. But before I get into that, I wondered if you could kind of give your impression of what did doing Pawstenian studies look like before October seventh? How was it easy? Was it acceptable? I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say though, So.
I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe, and I would date this as happening around COVID when our colleagues and various disciplines started confronting the reality of their archives closing.
So I'm a historian, so I speak from that place.
You know, people who study Europe, people who study the United States kind of confronting that the reality that they might not access archives that they are accustomed to accessing, and in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production, and trying to explain to people this is what we've existed under all along.
Now.
I think there are similarities across communities of knowledge production.
So I think people who.
Work in black studies, who work in Indigenous studies, who work in queer studies, gender and sexuality have also been under the dress of surveillance and targeting. I think for those of us who have been doing Palestinian studies, what does it mean, especially if you're a Palestinian doing it, but whoever you are, It means you have to show up ten times more ready than anybody else. It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded.
Right.
It means that every single.
Word that you say you should be able to stand up for in a court of law, and all of those kinds of restrictions. Actually, you know, you give us lemons. We're going to make lemonade because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor.
That is the least that we can do.
It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included, right, I was just somebody was interviewing me yesterday about oh, have you have you faced harassment or censorship or something? And I think, at least in my case, I'm I'm constantly, you know, experiencing these things and just kind of swallowing it, do you know what I mean, just getting along with the business of
the every day. So, you know, there was this moment back in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen where for whatever reason, every couple of months, one of the bots of one of these surveillance websites would start highlighting me and insulting me on Twitter, you know, liable calling me names, going after how I look like really vulgar, misgendering me, that kind of thing.
And I'd come out.
Of my lecture, you know, and you know, I teach big classes, and I'd come out of a big you know, two hundred and fifty percon lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and you know, that adrenaline rush, and I'd look at my phone and I'd have fifty notifications and it would just be one insult after another.
And that's just.
Part of the job.
Yeah, And that's just how it's been, right, like you know, from the beginning at least of my graduate career, and I I started grad school. You know, September eleven happened when I was in grad school, and I was in
New York when it happened. And you know, we've been under surveillance, We've been named, we've been watched as part of what we do, as you said, And in fact, I got my masters at the Center for Contemporary Studies and they wrote a book back in the eighties about the surveillance and I think it's called they Dare to Speak well, right, right, yeah, these early accounts of the concerted attempt to silence us. And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know, you said, oh,
they're trying to erase Palestinian scholars. I mean, at least they're trying to erase the voices who are putting forward a critical take on Israeli sellar colonialism and genocide. And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's a been before. Yeah, good point, ten years ago, people like
you and me wouldn't have jobs in the academy. It may be in a couple of years we won't have jobs, but I don't know, Like I'm not I don't want to sit on our laurels and think, oh, okay, we've arrived. In any case, the whole concept of arrival and career
arrival at this moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, but the effect of the genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the rapid ways in which they are engaging with obedience and authoritarianism.
Yep.
Yeah, it's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, I don't think this makes sense, actually, do you know? So, I would say it's been like that all along, people even saying to you things like, oh there, what do you mean you study Palestine?
You know, like, what is that?
Yeah? So yeah, yeah, I mean I'm in a different discipline, but certainly it was I remember as a student hungry for information. I mean, it was rare to find something about the Middle East to be taught, let alone Palestine. The level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance to Palestinians and Arabs normatously speaking,
politically speaking, also theoretically speaking, I mean the amount. I mean, I can tell you so many stories, Like every person who's ever wanted to study Palasad, especially as you said, if you are Palestinian, is discouraged from it and is told not to, is told this doesn't fit, is told you know, I'm in political science. The theories don't account for Palestine. It's just outside of space and time and theory, and you can't account for it, you can't discuss it.
And the harassment, the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing, I mean, it's it takes such a mental and emotion toll, and yet we produce, and yet we get tenure, and yet we teach our classes and we're excellent in our teaching, and our students love us and want to learn. But you know, as you said, like it really has exposed the degree to which these universities because they have been well one like we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their
actual missions. Like how meaningless the space this has now become. But that's like on the harassment and like kind of these kinds of obstacle side. I also think like people don't recognize like the resources that are needed to teach and study and research Palestine that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily. And it's there is so little for people who study Palestine, and of course that impacts what kind of academics are able to do
this and how many people we even missing from this discussion. Right, I agree with you that has been the condition before October seventh. I think now after October seventh, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a culgel, Yeah, to attack the higher education generally, like not people are recognizing it, maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case. Oh. Also, I just wanted to remind listeners and bring it up, Like I remember Barry Weiss who
is now the head of CBS. I mean she made her claim to fame attacking Arab and Palestinian professors in Colombia as an undergrad. Yeah, and that's seen us totally valid. Yeah.
No, I mean I think you know, Palestine is culturl and also you know I've been saying this for a while, Palestine is paradigm, right, you know, if you look at them, mdenuine, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party have really no link to the popular realities on the ground, right, and that in effect, you know, part of the Trump base was really responding
to this disparity, right, this lack of investment and in the political system. And I think, you know, that for me was the I don't have hope in electoral politics. And you know, I don't want to be cynical or anything, but I think what the Memdenni wind shows us is that people are disgruntled and they're sick of the kind of extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think the media is really complicit in all of this,
so absolutely complicit in the genocide. It's been absolutely complicit since the you know, War on Iraq, since the Second War on Iraq, in rendering news as entertainment, you know. And and it's like you could see the freak out that people had the media had about Memdnni across the board.
It wasn't just the Fox News.
No New York Times, everybody.
Yeah, and all of the you know television media too. So it's just I think it's I think there's also a link to higher education in that way because I think there has been an investment in making people stupid.
Right, Yes, that's what I was gonna say. Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's exactly what I was going to say. Is the Palestinian issue and Palestine studies and research and knowledge production, the fact that there exists the few Palestinians in higher education has been used to attack higher education. But it's not really about Palestine. I mean, it is a little bit about palistinde of course, these peop Antipastinian, but it's about preventing social mobility. So you're saying, like,
there's all this disgruntlement in the public space. Our students are disgruntled, they want to learn, they've been promised something with this college education. And you know, even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. Yeah, it's too much for this right wing so house. That is a class issue. Absolutely, No, it absolutely is. You know, are as are all of the kind of struggles we
stand on solidarity with. You know, it's like, really it is intersectional and We didn't need Trump to teach us that. But that's the lesson that keeps being delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me, and this has been the case for the last ten years, eleven years, long before Trump, and I think one of the challenges we faced today is not to over determine the Trump administration as the site of all of the
catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've noted for the last fourteen years is I don't have to teach students that history isn't about things always getting better.
That's not a lesson. They need to know.
They understand that teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie. They understand that because they live it, as you say. You know, they're in debt, especially those of us who teach at public universities. You know, most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs. They're housing insecure, their food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future.
And if they protest genocide, they're labeled antisemitic. Yeah, their university's cracked down on them. They're docsed. I mean, it's so outrageous. Obviously, I don't need to tell.
You their identification with Palestine is also about their own experiences with Gregrescient of course.
So I think that's.
The that really is the momentum, you know that we're witnessing.
Is is that kind of identification?
Yeah? Absolutely. I think it's important for listeners to know some of the contours of what has happened after October seventh, And like you said, it's not a Trump thing. It started under Biden. About how Palestine has been used in the academy. I mean, as I said earlier, I have done an episode on this, so I will link that. But also you know, there is now evidence and data
around how this issue has been weaponized. So the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, alongside the MIDDLEA Studies Association, just put out a report on this exact question about how titles six investigations, so investigations of alleged discrimination specifically about anti Semitism and nothing else. First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been used to target these universities. The vast majority of these cases
has to do with faculty extra mural speech. So like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the classroom. I mean, honestly, I always remember I think Edward Side said, like being a Palestinian academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. That's how it feels.
Yeah, it's fugitive labor for sure. Yeah, definitely.
And I think one of the findings has been also I don't know if it's ninety five percent of the cases have been shown to be be fraudulent. Yeah, it'd be totally fraudulent. So yeah, it's a real policing of speech.
It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of anti Semitism, And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens too, is that students don't get the tools to actually recognize and understand actually existing anti semitism right as it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress, and these in the rhetoric of many of the you know, people affiliated with the administration, in the kinds of alliances that
even the Israeli state right has made with various right wing anti Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the things that it's kind of like watching a train wreck, just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is this absurdity? You know, I myself was accused of being anti Semitic, for having a history
of anti Semitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes are what it means to be a
Palestinian in this moment. You know, when you've been sitting watching for two years your people being shredded, and you're facing the reality of what the stakes are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians, your threshold for a shock becomes very high.
And so I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you.
I don't know if like what it's like a constant trauma response. You know, absolutely, my emotional reactions are shut down, and I'm in a state of being in the present. Okay,
we got through today, Hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't I kind of am prepared for the worst at all times, and you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people when they continue to feed this kind of right wing agenda of making people stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education, it's the kind of condition that will be much more general.
You know.
Yeah, and all these ice rays at the same time.
You know, it's I just saw. I haven't been able to listen to it.
But a scholar who powerfully is talking about the Mexico.
Palestine border.
And the and the links between ice and the idea and the and the ways to think about these two things together, and.
Please share that with me. I haven't seen it. I mean, yeah, as you said, when we take away Palestine from the academy, when we use Palestine to attack the academy, as imperfect as the Academy is, it is this larger attempt to take away people's analogical tools and frameworks to understanding their reality, to understanding how the reality and sex with these other things, because they don't want you to be able to solve it.
They don't want you to be able to mobilize. And then, of course there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy. Now we can't have that kind of social mobility. I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that is self evident. I don't need to explain it. But why is it so important that Palestinians are the
ones who do that? I mean, again, it feels self evident, but I'll say it like, Palestinians have agency, and they are full human beings, and they know best what questions are relevant, and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine as well as other issues. And so not only are you engaging in the rature of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but you are making scholarship poorer. You are limit saying what
you know about this issue? Yeah, so what do you think you know? Kind of broadly speaking, students, scholars, sympathizers, what do you think they should do in this moment.
I want to just go back to the point about why is it important to have to sure Palestinian voices? Because when we say that, we're not doing it in an identitarian way, right of course, Yeah, anybody who wants to study Palestine should study Palestine.
In doing so, you should be.
Centering the lessons that Palestinians have offered us first and foremost in this moment, the Palestinians of the Gaza strip and in my own practice at the Journal of Palestine Studies.
What I've tried to do in.
Each of the editor's notes is really lift up all of the testimonies that we've received from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media and all of these, but also lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself and many many people who are writing and giving us tools to understand and analyze. And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe, is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being
excluded from the category of the human. Once you exclude people from the category of the human, it's much easier to kill them and make them expendable. And I think our work really in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic, right rejects the logic of are we human or not? Are we going to evidence our humanity or not? No, we tell our stories, and I think that telling of
the story changes the angle of vision. If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza strip from the perspective of people who are living it, you will see different things than if you're looking at it from you know, a drone or you know, a geopolitical lens.
So that's one thing. I think.
Another thing that's really important is you know, I mean Mahma Dwish said this actually in an interview in journal Palstine Studies said, you know, the Palestinians are talked about because they're facing Israeli Jews, because the Jewish question is.
The question of Europe.
Oh that's right, yeah.
And I find that one of the things that continues to be an issue until now is that what scholars and thinkers and analysts are a judicating is the question of Europe and the question of the sustainability of European values and European notions and all of these things. And I'm not interested in that. I want to center the question of Palestine and that what kind of other tools that might offer us. So I think, in a way link to what the earlier conversation about a political economy
of value of scholars. Right, there's a kind of also here, a political economy of concepts, and I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe. We have to provincialize Europe as the means and the ends of all things. It is not generalizable. No, just ask different questions and look at you from a different perspective in terms of what do I think students and scholars and all of us should do. Is it's going to sound strange, but first and foremost, study.
Study, read, learn. Those are the critical.
Tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent.
On making you stupid.
We all have to reject that. I think there it's a moment where there's a temptation to slide into sensationalism or to slide into circulating, especially on social media and that whole economy. Right, So I think we have to be vigilant. I think we have to be rigorous, and I think we have to study. And I think more than anything else, the lesson I keep coming back to is we have to take care of each other in the communities that we build.
Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I think you begin arming yourself with the tools to understand this moment and think of ways to defend yourself in your community. And you can't do that without being grounded in this knowledge that came before you. So listeners, please crack up on a journal of Palestine Studies, and of course I'll link to all of this in the show notes sitday and I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for your time. This has been really interesting.
Thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do.
No, thank you so much, listeners. I'm going to also put in the show notes a fundraising campaign for the journal File Sense Studies. So if you can, you have the capacity, it's a sure fire away to help resist these dynamics. All right, thanks so much, Take care.
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