Editor’s Note: As someone of both Middle-Eastern and Ashkenazi descent, the conflict between Palestine and Israel has long felt like a personal one. At extended family gatherings discussion of the conflict is absent, an ideological ceasefire of sorts. Yet more private conversations with my maternal cousin who lived in Gaza and with my paternal cousins who are practicing Jews have helped formulate my understanding of the conflict.
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April 13th marks the beginning of Vassar’s Israeli Apartheid Week, a series of workshops, lectures and moderated dialogue spaces, organized by Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). SJP and JVP assert that these events will “bring Palestine solidarity back to Vassar,” yet what will not be brought to campus are Palestinian and Middle-Eastern voices. More accurately, 4 of the 5 speakers coming to campus have no ancestral connection to the Palestinian region. One of these 4 guests is Stephanie Skora, a white-American activist who has been offered a residency for the week hosting over three workshops on topics ranging from divestment to leftist theology. The only Palestinian speaker, Islam Maraqa, will share one event with American activist Joe Catron about their work with the International Solidarity Movement.
If this series of events is intended to “bring Palestine solidarity back to Vassar,” then the question becomes: how do we define solidarity and who defines it? Solidarity, in the most traditional sense, can be understood as unity among individuals with a common interest. The groups organizing this event suggest the common interest here is “peace” and “justice” for Palestinian people; to realize this goal it is essential that we locate ourselves within the very systems of oppression and injustice we claim to fight— specifically, we must examine how these systems of oppression and injustice replicate themselves within our own activism, within Vassar’s Israeli Apartheid Week.
Apartheid states function only so long as their mythological foundations persist, warped visions of reality which denote some population human and some other(s) non-human. Notions of “deserving” are wed to ideas of merit, in the case of Israel some Zionists assert that Jewish people are “deserving” of the land because their religious heritage merits it as such. Oftentimes this leaves the Middle-Eastern people who existed in the region before as the “others,” those lacking merit to claim the land as their own. This dichotomy of the deserving/undeserving is perpetuated by the policing of thought through censorship, both state-endorsed and self-inflicted. There are countless examples of cases where the Israeli government has or has attempted to censor Palestinian voices, but examples of self-inflicted censorship are oftentimes less overt.
Yet, Vassar’s Israeli Apartheid week does, as the silencing of Palestinians is explicitly perpetuated through the exclusion of their voices in the upcoming events. Every event, except for the aforementioned Voices of Palestinian Resistance which features Islam Maraqa, is concerned with either judaism or Zionism/anti-Zionism. The word “Palestine” doesn’t show up in the descriptions for 4 out of the 7 events. The search for justice asks that we examine this issue not from the perspective of the oppressors, but from the perspective of the oppressed, the Palestinian people.
While discussions and worshops on topics ranging from leftist theology to activist burlesque are certainly illuminating, they are not unapologetically Palestinian for in order to be such, they would have to have Palestinians speak for and of themselves. This cast of non-Palestinian speakers supposedly calling for justice in Palestine creates an illusion that Palestinian people cannot fight for their own justice, that they need “anti-Zionist burlesque performers” and “scholar-activists” to fight on their behalf.
This erasure of Palestinians and especially of Palestinian peoples’ agency furthers the mythological foundation of deserving/undeserving that Apartheid states are built-upon. Just as the Israeli government strips Palestinians of their land on a false notion of inheritance, Vassar’s Israeli Apartheid week strips Palestinians of their voice on a false-notion of solidarity. JVP and SJP have contoured solidarity in such a way to collapse every struggle into one; consequently by stretching solidarity so far, focusing on topics ranging from queer liberation to theological transformation, this series dilutes the crux of the matter: the lived experiences and political realities of Palestinian people.
Finally, we must ask ourselves if these events don’t serve the purpose of liberating the Palestinian voice then what purpose do they serve? Given that the majority of speakers are Jewish and a heavy focus has been placed on Judaism and Zionism, these events seem to reveal that Israeli Apartheid week serves Jewish students, particularly those racked with guilt about the Apartheid state.
BP
