Palestine, Third World Solidarities, and Projects of Educational Justice

• In Event: Recovering the Third World Studies Project: Towards New Visions of Anti-Imperial Pedagogies & Global Solidarities

Abstract

International organizations, legal institutions, scholars, global publics, and of course, Palestinians, have named Israel’s genocide for what it is; and yet, even the word ‘genocide’ seemingly fails to capture the heartbreaking enormity of the dis-invention of Gaza (Agha, 2024). Palestine embodies the specificity of an Indigenous sovereignty struggle alongside a transnational vision connected to Third World, decolonial, anti-imperialist liberation movements (Tabar & Desai, 2017). Speaking at an emergency meeting of the Hague Group to hold Israel accountable for genocide in 2025, Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s leftist president, offered his analysis: “Gaza is simply an experiment by the ultra-rich, trying to show all the people of the world how they will respond to humanity’s rebellion.”
The escalation in genocidal violence in Palestine has spurred historic levels of protest over the past two years. In the United States, this mobilization - much of which has been led by students - has been met with unprecedented levels of repression, whereby Palestine is being used as the tip of the spear to advance long-term attacks on broader movements for racial, environmental, and social justice. Importantly, this repression is not only coming from the far right: liberal institutions, academics, and lawmakers are actively repurposing frameworks of diversity, equity, and inclusion in service of ‘safety’ for some to criminalize and make taboo the mere mention of Palestine in educational settings (e.g. AB 715 in California and the establishment of mechanisms that will punish K-12 educators for teaching about Palestine, Northwestern University’s partnership with the Jewish United Fund to mandate a training that equates pro-Palestinian advocacy with the KKK). These moves on the part of power only read logical when one understands Palestinian presence as a foundational, unsettling threat to global empire. These modes of repression have been levied against Palestinians and their allies for decades but have gone largely uncontested in mainstream liberal and progressive circles (Hill & Plitnick, 2021), laying the foundation for the full-front assault of fascist violence that we see playing out in the United States today.
We take the deeper dynamics and contradictions that Palestine illuminates as a starting point to think through key questions consequential to projects of educational justice: What are the consequences of business-as-usual teaching and learning for students and educators bearing witness to the live-streamed devastation of a people and their land? How can we help learners draw meaningful connections between U.S. support for settler colonialism in Palestine, its own ongoing settler-colonial project, and its entanglements with global empire? How can we recognize Palestine as the canary in the coalmine without reducing pedagogies of solidarity to a politics of interest-convergence? How can we contest the public pedagogies of cruelty that have taken on new life with the genocide? How do we understand the extensive forms of repression we are witnessing as tied to foundational questions and confrontations around the politics and ethics of knowledge production across disciplinary fields (K-12 and higher education)? And ultimately, what are our ethical responsibilities to Palestinians as educators and researchers, now and going forward?

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles