Dispatch from Palestine (Studies)

The 1938 Eastern Women’s Congress (for the Defense of Palestine), Cairo.

Last week I participated in a moving and historic meeting of Palestinian academics at the University of California, Berkeley convened by Ussama Makdisi. The conference was organized to inaugurate a newly endowed Program in Palestinian and Arab Studies and associated May Ziadeh Chair, but far more than that it represented an opportunity to pause and reflect on the limits and possibilities of our scholarly efforts, amidst genocide.  

Ilan Pappé reported on the sorry state of the European scene and alerted us to the founding of the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Malaya in 2022. Jehad Abusalim powerfully critiqued Palestine Studies’ “Gaza problem,” on material and epistemological grounds. Fida Adely drew attention to the anti-colonial heritage of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Maha Nassar appraised the state of Palestinian historiography, forty years after Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s “The Pitfalls of Palestiniology.” A panel of California-based scholars described Palestine’s place in Ethnic Studies, an embattled site of political organizing and knowledge production. Overall, Palestine Studies emerged as a formidable force, at least in its war of position on North American university campuses bombarded by the sovereign power of Israel Studies. I offered some historical reflections on the activities of Palestinian and Israeli academics in the second half of the twentieth century and their relationship to the Third World (more of that in my book, forthcoming). I prefaced my remarks with the following warning:

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As National Security Advisor for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McGeorge Bundy was one of the key architects of the American genocidal war against the Vietnamese people. Even after he left the White House in 1966 to become the president of the Ford Foundation, he remained a steadfast public supporter of the imperialist war. But Bundy was also closely involved in the war at home, so to speak. The Ford Foundation wielded its billions to accommodate the war being waged within and against universities, and suppress the black insurgency against internal colonialism and apartheid sweeping across American cities. The late Robert Allen, long time professor here at Berkeley who passed away last July, appraised Bundy’s methods of counterinsurgency in his 1968 pamphlet “The Ford Foundation and Black Power”: “Bundy learned that it is necessary to work both sides of the street in order to secure and expand the American empire. Thus he was a staunch supporter of Kennedy's and Johnson's war policies in Vietnam while at the same time stressing the necessity of keeping channels open to the Soviet Union. Such a man was ideally suited to work with and aid civil rights groups, including black power advocates, while at the same time the government is arming and preparing to use force to suppress the black communities.”  

The tradition of Black Studies was not of course wholly made in the Ford Foundation’s image or totally co-opted by American imperial forms of knowledge. The efforts of Allen, Vincent Harding and others at the Institute of the Black World, which affiliated directly with movements for liberation across the Third World, is just one example. But we cannot deny the soporific effect institutes, departments, and chairs can have on a popular struggle waged from below. I offer this example, not to cast aspersions on our efforts here but to respond to Ussama’s first question. What do we want from Palestine Studies at Berkeley? We may simply make one demand, of the field in general, that in this moment of institutional enthusiasm for Palestine—an enthusiasm mixed no doubt with pity and contempt—we prepare ourselves for disaster: that Palestine studies may increase in such a size as to replace Palestine itself.  That Palestine Studies will increase in size in proportion to the increase in Palestinian death and the disappearance of Palestinian land. We have, in fact, long contended with a problem of abundance, despite our colonized condition, our struggles and setbacks. Edward Said put it this way in 1979, when he tried to appraise the differences between the Palestinian case and other Third World liberation movements: “there is the problematic fact that the Arab liberation struggle, unlike most other such struggles, is relatively well financed; the sheer presence and availability of almost unlimited capital bears very oddly on even the idea of liberation.”