A Note on Palestine and the New New Imperial History

Students in Jerusalem demonstrating against the partition of Palestine (January 1948).

I offer this brief note regarding two recent books, Caroline Elkins' Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022) and Martin Thomas’ The End of Empires: A Global History of Decolonization (2024), on the occasion of Adom Getachew’s historiographically attuned review of Thomas’ book in the latest New Left Review.

Both Thomas and Elkins’ books are good and useful, exposing plainly the mendacity and ferocity of European imperial violence at its acme, and its close. They offer up important evidence and weave a compelling narrative. But it is ironic, at least, that the most plain and concentrated example of colonial violence in our time, the case of Palestine, is obfuscated in these historical accounts. Elkins, and Thomas after her, stage a drama of British officialdom’s fight against fiery Zionist militias. So what is in fact a European settler-colonial project on the edge of Asia supported by the greatest imperial power of its day, is transmogrified, in central parts of Elkins and Thomas’ books, into a contest between the British and the Zionist settlers.

Why is this a problem? First, it mimics many of Zionism’s own self-representations, cultivated by generations of Zionists and their camp followers in the historical profession between Israel and North America. This is epitomized, as is well known, in Israel’s popular representations in America (Cf. Amy Kaplan’s 2018 Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance). What does that do? It buries from view the Palestinians themselves, fundamental to this history, who were conscious and critical of the Zionist colonial project and Britain's imperial designs from the outset.

How does this happen? Both books are products of an enormous amount of reading in the relevant secondary and primary sources. For Thomas, the imperial records of Brussels, London, Aix-en-Provence, and College Park round out his prodigious reading of the latest scholarship. Elkins' effort is heavily skewed towards the old colonial circuit of Kew-London-Oxford, for obvious reasons, though she makes brief sojourns in Nairobi and those former British colonies along the Malacca Strait. I mention this source base not to plead for a more elaborate voyage across time-zones for these historians. At this point we need considerable skepticism over the idea that good history amounts to the accumulation of archives across continents. Historiography’s strength is not measured by jet fuel.

But imperial history still struggles to abandon the imperial view. What is called today global or transnational history remains methodologically imperial. And Palestinains—still subjected to imperialism daily—remain outside of their frame of reference. This is despite the fact the Palestinian tracks in the British imperial archive are deep and well-trodden. And it was anti-colonial Palestinian historians who first dutifully examined the once secret documents which detailed their place in an imperial system and as subjects of colonial rule. These include Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 (1971), Abdul Latif Tibawi’s Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914-1921 (1978), Abdul-Wahhab Kayyali’s Palestine: A Modern History, and Rashid Khalidi’s British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914 (1980), just to give a sense of those texts widely available in English and which follow this history to the period before the British Mandate (Elkin’s cites Kayyali, at least).

Elkins and Thomas are not sympathetic to the Zionists, per se, but it is the Zionists whose story we are mostly offered. The shared emphasis is not merely coincidental. Both Elkins and Thomas recount a minor episode in the war on Palestine, made minor still by its happening far from Palestine itself: the French Zionist militant Betty Knout’s attempt to bomb the Colonial Office in 1947.

Consider for example the following passages: “Had it not been for the bomb’s detonation wire failing, the Colonial Office would have gone the way of the King David Hotel” (Elkins). “The detonator failed. Had it not, the British Empire’s administrative center would have gone the same way as the King David” (Thomas).  The anecdote is drawn (as cited in Elkins) from Calder Walton’s Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (2014):

The bomb left in the Colonial Office was only detected after, by sheer luck, it had failed to go off because its timer broke. If it had successfully detonated, it would have caused carnage and chaos at the centre of Whitehall, probably on a similar scale to an attack that the other main militant group fighting the British in Palestine, the Irgun, had carried out in Jerusalem in July 1946, blowing up the King David hotel and killing ninety-one people.

The comparison, in the end, is neither Elkins’ or Thomas’ or even Walton’s creation, it is born directly from the memory of imperial officialdom. Leonard Burt wrote in his memoirs, Commander Burt of Scotland Yard (1959): “The reason it did not explode was that one of the hands of the watch was pressed too close against the face—and the watch stopped before it reached zero hour. Otherwise it would have blown the sort of hole in the Colonial Office that was blown in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem less than a year earlier, causing nearly a hundred casualties.” This is quite literally “the view from the top, from Whitehall,” not Christopher Hill’s “worm’s eye view.” 

What will it take to abandon the imperial way of doing things? I often think of the sharpness and humility of the historian S. Ani Mukherji’s observation in his important dissertation “The Anticolonial Imagination: The Exilic Productions of American Radicalism in Interwar Moscow” (2011): “Though academic historians may have come to transnational history recently, diasporic intellectuals have their own tradition of histories across polities. Two of the subjects of this dissertation produced innovative histories of the black Atlantic and trans-Pacific—George Padmore’s The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) and Sen Katayama’s Japan and America (Iaponiia i Amerika) (1925).”

Palestinians fit awkwardly in our new historiography of decolonization, as they did in our old theories of postcolonialism. Part of this is to do with colonialism’s obvious contemporaneity in Palestine. Our present therefore necessitates the continuous reproduction of Zionism’s narratives of justification, whether narrated by Zionists themselves or ventriloquized obliquely through the British imperial record. Historians of imperialism and anti-imperialism write today under conditions of imperialist war and anti-imperialist resistance. This struggle is uneven, and obfuscated by the rhetorical chicanery of one regime or another and the resilient sovereignty of the multinational corporation. But if we write from North America, we write as inevitable accomplices in an American imperialism which takes the world as its target. Palestine’s key place in this international situation, it seems to me, is undeniable. But even Getachew’s otherwise powerful and wide-ranging essay mentions neither Palestine’s current circumstances nor Palestinians' absence from the historiography under review.

So we still face a significant challenge, Palestinians and historians of decolonization. As Edward Said wrote in a 1997 essay:

...we are very far from that stage. Our history is written by outsiders, and we have conceded the battle in advance. Our leaders negotiate as if from a tabula rasa. The agenda is America's and Israel's. And we continue to concede, and concede more and concede again, not only in the present, but also in the past and in the future. Collective memory is a people's heritage, but also its energy: it does not merely sit there inertly, but it must be activated as part of a people's identity and sense of its own prerogative. To recall Deir Yassin is not just to dwell on past disasters, but to understand who we are and where we are going. Without it we are simply lost, as indeed it seems we really are.

In the Battlefield

Ruba Salameh, B.L Pal3 (2025) 135.5 x 198 cm.

Hanna Mikhail was born in British Palestine in 1935. Walter Rodney in British Guiana in 1942. Both were extraordinary scholars. Once anti-imperialist students at the great imperial schools of Harvard and SOAS, they were destined to take their talents far beyond the campus and the page. If Mikhail and Rodney entered the library to understand origins (of Islamic political theory and the Atlantic slave trade, respectively), their subsequent political activity was motivated by endings: ending colonial rule, political domination, and capitalist exploitation. Capacious and erudite in their scholarship and humane and committed in their sensibility, they eventually arrived upon the battlefield, and not the metaphorical one we delimit for ideas. Their deaths, untimely in the extreme, great tragedies for their kin and their movements, precipitated profound reflections from their comrades distant from the battlefield. C.L.R. James and Edward Said below. 

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That is why Walter found himself in a car with a member of Burnham’s army making some arrangement about some gadget that turned out to be an explosive. He should never have been there. No political leader had any right to be there. Not only should he have never been there, the people around him should have seen to it that he was not in any such position. That was a fundamental mistake, and it was a political mistake. IT was not a mistake in personal judgment. It was because he was doing all sorts of things to show them that a revolutionary is prepared to do anything. And that was not the way. In the middle of the Russian Revolution, they were locking up leaders and their followers to tell them, “Go to Finland, get out of here, or you will be arrested. They will have a trial and the judge will condemn you to death. Or even before you are brought out, they will shoot you in the jail.” They had to chase Lenin out. Walter should never have been in that situation. Never, I hope you agree with me, and I hope you realize that that was a fundamental mistake, a political mistake. It is the business of a political organization to protect its leaders and its important people. So the whole tendency was as if he was already ready for a civil war. And even if he was ready for civil war, no leader should have been in that situation at all.

— C.L.R. James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power” (1981) 

In the months before his death, I was impressed with how his dissenting ideas had spread within Fateh in Beirut. He told me of a trip he took to North Vietnam and how that had strengthened his conviction on selfless dedication and careful organization and discipline. I had also begun to surmise-I have no hard information on which to rely, except that somewhat precarious evidence I deduced from friends of his –that he had begun to trouble the leadership with his earnest dissent and the growing influence that he exerted on those who worked with him. I must say in all honesty and sadness that his untoward disappearance and subsequence death in 1976 seemed to me not to have been so inconvenient for those in Fateh who found his opposition to political maneuvering, cronyism and the bending of principles so irritatingly well-represented by Hanna’s practice and theory. His disappearance while on what appeared to be a foolishly contrived mission to go by a small and unprotected boat from Beirut to Tripoli in waters that were constantly patrolled by Israeli and Phalanges forces seemed like the result of incredibly poor planning and a great deal of unacceptable carelessness. For year after this tragic cadence to his life, I often thought that that ill-fated voyage had robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its most principled and humanely inspired cadres. No wonder then that so many of his friends and especially his brave widow Jehan refused to accept that fact of his capture as final, and no wonder that so many of us had a strong stake in keeping hope alive for his release and return.

— Edward Said, “Preface,” in Hanna Mikhail, Politics and Revelation: Mawardi and After (1995) 

Call For Papers: On Palestinians' Terms

Kamal Boulatta, Thawra/Tharwa, 1978, 73.5 × 56.2 cm.

CFP: On Palestinians’ Terms  

 

Special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2027

 

Edited by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (Concordia University) and Esmat Elhalaby (University of Toronto)

 

We aim to account for Palestine beyond the genocidal frame within which it has been condemned. Recently, genocide in Gaza has stimulated efforts to rectify a long-standing hostility to Palestine in North American culture. The “Palestine Special Issue” has decisively entered the scene. The content and form of such a genre—of which this issue of TOPIA will be a part—should be a potent site of contestation. Demanding how and why Palestine should be articulated remains necessary now, after the recalcitrant desire of Palestine’s enemies to censor such work no matter its method or tenor. “Palestine” as a scholarly keyword can not be made to offer disciplinary salvation or mere conceptual remedies. Our responsibility to the living and the dead in Gaza is significantly greater.

 

We seek to publish accounts of and from Palestine and its significant international connections. The terms of Palestinian life and liberation have been widely and deeply shared. And the legacy of the Palestinian Revolution in the Third and Fourth Worlds still demands a thorough accounting, beyond the mere circulation of artifacts or slogans. Submissions attuned to the travel of Palestinians, Palestinian images, and Palestinian theory in Indigenous, Black, Afro-Asian movements and struggles are especially welcome. We consider necessary: thorough engagements with texts, close attention to images, and honest confrontations with historical challenges, silences, and elisions.

 

In the century of their colonization, Palestinians have repeatedly sought to narrate Palestine on their own terms. These have not been monolithic representations, nor mere efforts to contest the colonial Palestine imagined and planned in nineteenth century Europe. Rather, Palestinians produced a corpus of work attesting both to the exceptional and ordinary in their collective life and worldly history. We may turn to the Spanish of Mahfud Masis, the French of Elias Sanbar, and the English of Soraya Antonius for substantial testament to these facts. But a considerable proportion Palestine’s own terms of art and wells of tradition—including those of exile and displaceament—are to be found only in the Arabic of Khalil al-Sakakini, Rashid Hussien, Fadwa Tawqan, Muin Bsieso, Hanna Abu Hanna, Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani, Walid Daqqa—in short—only in Arabic.

 

Contemporary narrations and representations of Palestine and Palestinians, including those made in the spirit of solidarity or animated by a humanitarian impulse, have either overlooked or caricatured this substantial tradition of Arabic poetry, film, folklore, history, philosophy, theology, geography, or philology, as the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah has often reminded us. Attention to its Arabic idioms links Palestine inexorably to its region and beyond, to the world of Syria, Sudan, or Iraq it has long inhabited. Zionism first and the “peace process” after have sought to sever Palestine from this Arab, Mediterranean, and Afro-Asian space. Narrow scholarly structures and expedient political arrangements have calcified this colonial situation in our thought, even in purportedly anti-colonial or decolonial modes.

 

Opportunism and parochialism have produced shelves of recent books on Palestine’s contemporary condition, exemplified, of course, by genocide in the Gaza Strip, that turn inevitably on tired analogies and cliches and rarely if ever to the work of Palestinians themselves. The present conditions of Palestine, however, demand we revise our frames of reference. “First,” the Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi has recently written,

 

the matter of names: it is no longer acceptable for our generation to use terms such as “the West Bank” “the Gaza Strip” (what a hideous word, qita’!), “the lands of ‘48” and even trivial descriptions like “the northern and southern parts of the West Bank” and the alphabet of classifications imposed on Palestinian regions. “Al-Aqsa Flood” shattered all these terms and brought us back to one unified Palestine. Let us speak from now on of northern Palestine, central Palestine, and southern Palestine, mentioning the names of their cities when necessary. Those other terms are the remnants of the Nakba and imposed upon us by tyranny and colonialism. We accepted them into our geographical lexicon without recalling that even the generation that directly preceded ours (say the generation of 1919 to 1948) would have been extremely surprised by these names.

 

This special issue of TOPIA invites essays, reflections, poetry, visual art, and translations that examine Palestinian frames of reference and forms of knowledge. From the continuous Nakba to the embodied resistance of Intifadas, knowledge made in Palestine and alongside it can offer insights into the relationship between destruction, survival, and liberation. 

 

We seek contributions to this special issue on the following, and related, topics:

 

●  Palestinian connections with the Arab world, the Third World, and the Fourth World

●  Palestinian art and media in context, including photography, film, painting, graphic design, and digital art

●  Translations from Arabic or other languages, especially less commonly known languages and authors

●  Studies of Palestinian thought in exile and diaspora

●  Interviews with Palestinian intellectuals and artists

●  Accounts of Palestinian institutions, past and present, including schools, libraries, archives, art groups, theatre troupes, literary circles, unions, and parties

 

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be submitted by March 1, 2026 on this form. By mid-March, authors will be informed whether to submit their work for further consideration. Complete contributions should be submitted for review by June 2026. Publication of the special issue is scheduled for Spring 2027.

 

Please direct any questions to the co-editors of this special issue: Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (nayrouz.abuhatoum@concordia.ca) or Esmat Elhalaby (esmat.elhalaby@utoronto.ca)

Colonial and Anti-Colonial Ideas at Columbia University (1970)

David Farhi and Edward Said. From The Spectator. 

Recently I shared my work during an event on "Partitions & Decolonization" at Columbia University's Heyman Center for the Humanities. I began my remarks with reference to the history of Columbia itself, to ground, as I am eager to do, our study of history in the conditions of the present. I recounted an event that took place in October 1970, and the discussion that surrounded it. I share those remarks below, which draw from the pages of Columbia's student paper, The Spectator, available online and Hebrew writings by and about David Farhi.  

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On October 7, 1970, David Farhi, an Israeli orientalist and colonial administrator in the West Bank, delivered a lecture at Columbia University’s Faculty Club, the men’s faculty club, as it was known then. Zvi Ankori, then the newly appointed director of Columbia’s Center of Israel and Jewish Studies, introduced Farhi as “one of the most prominent young intellectuals in Israel.” Farhi’s talk, according to the brief account we have, relayed the usual, colonial, common sense: highlighting the partitioned logic of Israel's colonial realm, the West bank apparently, had “achieved a much higher degree of political sophistication" than the Gaza Strip. And the Arab intelligentsia, again according to Farhi, offered a potential partner for Israel’s vision for pacification, if, that is, they “recognized the existence of the state of Israel." 

The talk caused considerable turmoil on campus. The preceding evening, the Students for a Democratic Society had organized a forum on the Middle East in response to Farhi’s invitation to this campus, wherein the great Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, then a representative of the PLO at the United Nations, addressed a sometimes hostile crowd. 

Rashid Hussein at Columbia University on October 6, 1970. From The Spectator.

During Farhi’s lecture on the 7th, at least a dozen hooligans from the Jewish Defense League armed with clubs, lead pipes, and belts, fought with student activists. The NYPD made some arrests. Inside the faculty club, “the crackling of loudspeakers and the chanting of both groups” could be heard. 

Columbia University on October 7, 1970. From The Spectator.

The following day, in a letter to The Spectator, Edward Said, a 35-year old professor at Columbia University whom you might have heard of, reflected on the events that transpired. He wrote:

David Farhi, regardless of his academic qualifications, is a colonial official. There are no two ways about that. By sponsoring his visit here and provoking the concern of students and faculty, the university (through the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies) acted a role similar to one it would have played had it sponsored the visit here of a white South African in charge of "black affairs." Farhi works for the Arab Affairs section of the Israeli "H.Q. on the West Bank," and it was because of his post that his presence here on October 7 was enabled, not because of his scholarly attainments. His visit, and everything he said or did, were therefore political, by no means academic.

“Colonialism is colonialism,” Said concluded. 

 

A few days later, again in The Spectator, John Badeau, the Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, and previously the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt (and President of the American University of Cairo), excoriated Said, proclaiming him an enemy of academic freedom. Badeau also denied Farhi’s political role, describing him as “a bona fide and full-time university professor in Israel.” 

John Badeau in The Spectator.

Said responded in turn: “I simply stated, in a letter of clarification, that the university, through one of its sections, had invited a colonial official to speak here, and that it concerned me and others as well.”

“[Badeau] dark hints about my views on free discussion,” Said continues, “ought properly to be directed at the Israeli government, at present holding over 200 Arab writers and intellectuals under house arrest and without trial. Let me remind him, finally, that words like "free" easily lend themselves to base uses. One such use is to accuse a colleague of advocating repression, another is politically to bludgeon the opposition (as in free enterprise, free world), and still another is to justify one's own carelessness”

The event, and its exchange, is interesting to me. Badeau goes to considerable length to “deny” the political nature of Farhi’s work, the political nature of Farhi’s visit, and even the political nature of the area studies enterprise in the United States as a whole. All the while, painting Said as irredeemably, even dangerously, political. 

From right to left: Prahim le-David: Yad le-David Farhi (Flowers to David: A memorial to David Farhi); Ma‘arakhot (the journal of IDF); Hamizrah Hehadash (the journal of the Israeli Oriental Society).

The irony in all this, of course, is that Farhi is uncontroversially, even heroically colonial, as far as the Israeli record is concerned. He was one of the founders of the military governing apparatus in Judea and Samaria, to use the Zionist locution. In fact, he was among those who marched through Jerusalem's gates on June 8th 1967. His diary from that day recounts simply: "I entered the old city with the interpreter to announce over the loudspeaker the imposition of the curfew and that the IDF controlled the city.” 

For all the claims of his purportedly innocent and legitimate academic role in those heady days here at Columbia, in Israel his legacy is uncontroversially extracurricular, so to speak. In a special issue of Hamizrah Hehadash dedicated to Farhi, his colleagues describe him as “a man of action.” Whatever brief appearances he made among the Orientalists on the Hebrew University campus in suit and tie, it was his tan military uniform that would have been most familiar to Palestinian observers, the subject population he was tasked with pacifying. In another of his diary entries, Farhi lists the actions left to do for the day: "Coordinate operational procedures within the service. Establish contact with the muslim community. Expose Fatah members, members of the liberation movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Communists.” 

These were the activities that Edward Said, mere professor of literature we could say, was keen to expose. So what does it mean for knowledge to be political? What knowledge is considered political, and what isn’t? One thing I try to deal with in my book is the way that the content and form of colonial knowledge—which surrounds us, which we are embedded in, which has served and continues to serve massive projects of violence the world over—is invariably described as academic or neutral or some other innocuous idiom. All the while anti-colonial knowledge, perhaps especially the work of nationalist intellectuals in the Third World, but not exclusively, is considered tainted, or derivative, or “activist,” or some other excuse for not taking it seriously as knowledge. All the while, colonial knowledge can claim innocence.   

Why do I begin with this story, well, first, to honor the occasion, to connect our past to our present here in New York, which I think is always necessary, that kind of social memory. We are, afterall, in the belly of the beast, we have certain privileges, so to speak. And we would do well to think seriously about what it means to study “areas”—so far off, so different—without thinking about what kind of fiction that division produces. But also because it is precisely these problems which animate this book I've just published, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization. 

October 29, 2025, Columbia University, New York City.

A Partial Bibliography from the Battle Over Middle East Studies That Might Be Useful

Reports yesterday revealed that a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was detained this week by the U.S. government with the aim of deportation. The arrest came in the wake of a concerted campaign orchestrated by the Middle East Forum (MEF)—who published a press release taking credit for the incident. MEF might require some introduction for the uninitiated. The think tank is the brainchild of one Daniel Pipes, son of the Sovietologist and Cold Warrior Richard Pipes. For Pipes, a Harvard trained orientalist, American imperialism is the order of the day, Israel and Zionism are friends, and Arabs and Islam are enemies. As a producer of propaganda, MEF directly serves the Israeli state. Middle East Forum, and similar outlets, like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP, home to Bernard Lewis acolyte, Martin Kramer), are cognates to better known, general interest outfits like the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. They also share patrons. For scholars working on the Middle East, MEF, Pipes and Karmer, attacks on academic freedom, intimidation, slander, the withdrawal of federal funding, censorship, arrest, and deportation, are familiar territory. Before Canary Mission and AI, we had Campus Watch and Operation Boulder.

Perhaps as one small effort to work against the collective amnesia of the Bush II regime—to say nothing of the conditions of American imperialism and compulsory Zionism in general—I offer below a select bibliography of some writing, primarily with regard to Middle East Studies, but with some attention to both general questions of academic freedom and the travails of related fields. The works below focus primarily on the U.S. imperialism’s historic role in university affairs and the challenges of doing work critical of U.S. foreign policy generally, and Israel and Zionism in particular. Some related work is also referenced for its quality and importance. The excellent essays and articles published on the subject over the last year and half are not included, for now. 

Given the frenzy around “gender ideology," we may also note that attacks on Middle East Studies—or mere mention of Palestinian history and solidarity with the Palestinian people—and attacks on Women and Gender Studies have been historically linked, as the experience of Sondra Hale, the feminist anthropologist of Sudan, attests. In 1982, Hale was unceremoniously removed from her position as the director of the Women’s Studies Program at Cal State Long Beach at the outset of the infamous and protracted fight against women’s studies there led by local conservative groups and their allies in Sacramento. After 9/11, Hale, now at UCLA, was one of the founders of California Scholars for Academic Freedom, a group which was and remains relentless in its defense of Palestinian educational institutions and its condemnation of the those efforts, still proliferating to stifle any critique of Israel and Zionism and demonize any mention of BDS.    

Finally, it bears repeating, that in every instance, the conditions of scholars in North America, no matter their identity or location, pales in comparison to the genocide being faced now by the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, our colleagues and kin. 

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History 

Diamond, Sigmund. Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955. New York: Oxford University Press. 1992.

Fischbach, Michael R. The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 

Joseph, Suad. “Cooking in the Cauldron: Middle East Studies 1966–2020.” Arab Studies Journal Online 15 February, 2015.

Khalil, Osamah F. America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State. Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 

Lanza, Fabio. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 

Lockman, Zachary. Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 

Mitchell, Timothy. “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton, 74-118. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.  

Price, David. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 

Sinclair, Upton. The Goose-step: A Study of American Education. Pasadena: the Author, 1923. 

Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1918.

Lineages of the Present 

Abdel-Malek, Anour. “Orientalism in Crisis.” Diogenes 11:4 (1963): 103-140.  

Aruri, Naseer. “Israel’s Strategy for the American Campus: A Threat to Academic Freedom?” The Search: Journal for Arab and Islamic Studies 6 (1985): 102–39.

Barlow, Tani. “Colonialism's Career in Postwar China Studies." positions 1:1 (1993): 224–267.

Cumings, Bruce. “Boundary Displacement: Area studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29 (1997): 6-26. 

Gendzier, Irene. Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985. 

Harlow, Barbara. “The Intellectuals and the War: An Interview with Edward Said." Middle East Report 171 (1991): 15-18, 20. 

Johnson, Peter and Judith Tucker. “Middle East Studies Network in the United States.” Middle East Report 38 (1975): 3-20, 26. 

Rafael, Vicente L. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States.” Social Text 41 (1994): 91-111.

Sharabi, Hisham ed., Theory, Politics and the Arab World. New York: Routledge, 1990. 

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. 

Said, Edward. “American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward W. Said,” Social Text 19:20 (1988): 37-53. 

Said, Edward and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1984

“The MESA Debate: The Scholars, the Media, and the Middle East,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16:2 (1987): 85-10.

The Second Intifada, the Second Bush, and After

"Academic Freedom Under Attack." Special Issue, ACAS Bulletin 69 (2004).

Allen, Lori A., Lara Z. Deeb, and Jessica Winegar, “Academics and the Government in the New American Century: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi.” Radical History Review 93 (2005): 240-259. 

Anidjar, Gil. "Campus Watch, Israel Studies, and the Demise of Dissent at Columbia." Tikkun 20:4 (2005): 27-29.

Beinin, Joel. "The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse." Social Text 21: 2 (2003): 125-139.

Brand, Laurie. “Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire.” Review of Middle East Studies 39:1 (2005): 3-18.

Butler, Judith. “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom.” Radical Philosophy 135 (2006): 8-17.  

Carvalho, Edward J. and David B. Downing, eds. Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 

Dajani, Omar, ed. "Israel, Palestine, and the First Amendment." Special Issue, University of the Pacific Law Review 54:4 (2022-2023).

Davidson, Lawrence. “The Attack on Middle East Studies: A Historical Perspective.” 15:1 (2008): 149-

Dawson, Ashley. “The Crisis at Columbia Academic Freedom, Area Studies and Contingent Labor in the Contemporary Academy.” Social Text 90:25 (2007): 63-84. 

Deeb, Lara and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 

Doumani, Beshara, ed. Academic Freedom After September 11. New York: Zone Books, 2006. 

Finkelstein, Norman G. “Civility and Academic Life.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108:4 (2009(: 723–740. 

Giroux, Henry A. “The Politics of Higher Education and the Militirization of the Academy after 9/11.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 29 2009: 104-126. 

Goldberg, David Theo and Saree Makdisi. “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics.” Tikkun 24:5 (2009): 39–41.

Hagopian, Elaine. Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims. Chicago and London: Haymarket and Pluto Press, 2004. 

Hermez, Sami and Mayssoun Soukarieh. "Boycotts against Israel and the Question of Academic Freedom in American Universities in the Arab World." Journal of Academic Freedom 4 (2013): 1-10.

Knopf-Newman, Marcy Jane. “The Fallacy of Academic Freedom and the Academic Boycott of Israel,” CR: The New Centennial Review 8.2 (2008): 87–110.

Landy, David, Ronit Lentin, Conor McCarthy, eds. Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel. London: Zed, 2020.

Lockman, Zachary. “Critique from the Right: The Neo-conservative Assault on Middle East Studies.” CR: The New Centennial Review 5:1 (2005): 63-110. 

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