How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other anti-colonial movements? How do we tune our minds and imaginations toward just futures--even and especially when facing retaliation for liberationist stances?

In light of the reinvigorated global struggle for a free Palestine, and as we witness the state of Israel's ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, we are re-releasing our January 2021 interview with poet, scholar, teacher, and organizer Dina Omar.

Dina, received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University and who was one of the founders of the national network of Students for Justice in Palestine, speaks to us about the intersection of Palestine liberation and our pedagogical frameworks -- from our decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence.

A thesis of this episode is that, whether or not our teaching is “about” Palestine, it cannot be separated from its struggle. This of course in part because of the alignment of many of our institutions of higher education with the Israeli state. But, as Dina explains, it is also because of how a colonial project mediates the language we use to think about, much less talk about, what is happening in Palestine and Israel. This means that, whether or not the history and politics of Palestine comes up explicitly in a lesson plan, the practice of learning to read and learning to identify narrative obfuscation, takes on higher stakes.

A list of resources for further learning + organizing:

-Palestine and Praxis Statement, referenced in the episode, written in 2021 and co-authored by Dina Omar.

-The Palestinian Feminist Collective, a collective of Palestinian/Arab feminists working toward Palestinian liberation. See their site for resources + action toolkits.

-Writers Against the War on Gaza, a coalition of culture workers organizing against the war and compiling resources for resistance.

-The Dig, a podcast of Jacobin, has published a number of illuminating episodes on the Palestine, Zionism and anti-Zionism, and the larger contexts around the current catastrophe.

-The Electronic Intifada is an independent news organization focusing primarily on Palestine.

-Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr, recommended by Dina Omar

Show Credits:

Outro music is "Hemlock" by Akrasis. Find their amazing catalog here. Episode photo by Corleone Brown on Unsplash. Editing and audio production by Aliyah Harris. Production by Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin.

Re-Release: The Question of Palestine is a Question of Pedagogy

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Welcome to Nothing Never Happens: A Radical Pedagogy Podcast. I'm Lucia Hulsether and my co-host is Tina Pippin. We've been posting a bit intermittently this last few months as we work to streamline our production processes and create new content for our listeners. But we're tapping back in now to rerelease what to us is one of the most important and urgent interviews in our catalog: a conversation on the relationship between Palestine and pedagogy, featuring Dina Omar.

She is one of the founding members of Students for Justice in Palestine. And of the national network of Students for Justice in Palestine. She also spent several years as a writer and teacher and poet with June Jordan's Poetry for the People Project in the bay area.

And now let's go to the interview itself. Tina asks the first question.

Tina: Thank you, Dina for being with uson Nothing Never Happens. The first question is about the National Students for Justice in Palestine group. Could you tell us about your involvement in it? You know how you came to be in that role, how you got involved in it, how the organization has come together at this point?

Dina: Yeah. Just first off, I want to say that I really very much appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to be in conversation with both of you. As Lucia said, her and I met in a seminar with Jafari Allen who definitely set the tone for the discussion and she was telling me that Tina, you are her mentor or were her mentor as an undergrad.

just based based in relationships of trust, very similar to for example, I don't typically accept invitations to speak on Palestine, mostly because there is so much sort of intimidation and repression and so on and so forth. And that's why when Lucia asked it felt like a very, it felt I don't necessarily think that there are safe spaces, but it felt like a safer space.

And I guess also who's also being gaslit in the same way as you are. And then there's a kind of natural alliance that happens. So I would say the idea for NSJP really started to generate or become really popular. When I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley it was actually quite astounding.

I didn't start my undergrad thinking that I wanted to be a Palestinian activist. I thought I wanted to go into law or something. But I was really taken aback and quite surprised about how disconnected the language and the representation of Palestine and like news coverage of Palestine, not just news, because you anticipate the news coverage being skewed or biased or so on and so forth.

There were also a bunch of cases where the Department of Education was investigating various university campuses for supposed or alleged cultivating atmospheres of anti Semitism and so on and so forth, and you saw a lot of student organizers who were either Students for Justice in Palestine, but also Muslim Students Association and other sort of student organizations really being targeted in a very scary way.

crazy connection between those students and terrorist organizations in the Middle East saying that we were connected to Hamas and Hezbollah and all of these things. And a, not only are these things completely fabricated lies but they had like devastating effects on people's you know, lives, their futures, their perceptions of themselves.

I just remember, for example, one close friend who was cited in the title six investigation case. If you ever talk to him, you'll, it becomes very clear that he's like a staunch atheist, very anti religion. Very interesting to talk to, right? But then in the title six investigation case it cites him as being the Muslim extremist who has ties to Muslim extremist organizations in the Middle East.

Yeah, in terms of my involvement with National Students for Justice in Palestine. I thought when we started it, it was going to be a kind of small endeavor kind of small grassroots student based organizing thing. And the interest was massive. The interest is still massive. People are incredibly interested.

And I think there, it's like one of these things where it's the silent majority, you just have so much interest, so many people like reaching out and wanting to help, but you just didn't have the sort of infrastructure or the organizational sort of I don't know direction.

And the other thing I was going to say about all of this too is around that time, when I was at UC Berkeley, a lot of What was in vogue or trendy was reading historiographies from the new historians in Israel. This is like in quotes, the new historians. And so at UC Berkeley, the first class I took about Palestine was with this historian named Tom Tom Segev.

And this is a kind of paradigm or historical paradigm, which very much focuses on Israeli.

Yeah.

Lucia: One of the things, I have another question for you, but like one of, since this is a conversation, just like one of the things I was thinking about is like this historical moment. And this is partly what I think, Tina, you were there when I was going through this and experience learning these critiques in college.

But that kind of historical moment was a sort of new wave of Interfaith organizing on college campuses, which was often talk talking in this sort of like liberal neoliberal multicultural language of religious conflict and like, why can't Jews and Muslims and Christians get along and a one of the main organizations.

I don't know if that would, that sounds right to you, Dina, but it occurred to me.

Dina: Yeah, absolutely. When your faith based sort of organizing was definitely I think something that NS should, I could at least speak for SJP at UC Berkeley is something a lot of the student organizers were very annoyed with because essentially a lot of us felt like we were being tokenized when being asked to represent their faith.

I think a lot of Palestinian Christians actually mostly feel tokenized in those kinds of settings because they have, they have to represent a kind of religious. There's also a lot of money that's involved in sort of religious faith based organizing around Palestine from like seeds of peace to there, there's just a lot.

It tries to measure the wrong thing where it's pointing to in general, and maybe we can talk about this more later, but it's very difficult to have conversation, frank conversations about Palestine because it feels like so much is overdetermined from the outside, and so much of these, what is overdetermined is at the service of Israeli colonization.

Yeah,

Lucia: Absolutely. It not confuses, but then like creates this sort of material artifices of that confusion where all of a sudden Christian groups are like, we need to go to Palestine to understand this religious conflict. And it's No, you don't actually you don't actually there's some books you read.

Anyway what kind of gaslighting? Yeah, gaslighting. Okay. I'm gonna ask you another question. I'm sure we will circle back around to all of this. So tell us about June Jordan's poetry for the people. I know it's for those who don't know Dina it's really hard to have a conversation.

Dina: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking that question. Because you're absolutely right. I think it was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. And when I think about it, June Jordan's Poetry for the People program, that is when I think about it, it very much informed the way NSJP ended up being organized.

So June Jordan's Poetry for the People program is a, I don't know how it's organized now, but when I was involved in it it was a class of a hundred people where you would explore the historical experiences of immigrant and marginalized communities in the United States through the rigorous study of their poetic traditions.

Or former students. And so it was much more horizontal. And I think the biggest sort of contribution of June Jordan's Poetry for the People program in terms of changing me or affecting my life is just teaching me how to be a close reader and teaching me how what is a euphemism?

Why is a euphemism Use in a particular context, you know how, what language is used to obscure versus what language is used to clarify and having it be a class about poetics and poetry it, it encourages you to think about everything that way from like news to scholarly articles to maps it's just a lesson in Close reading and paying attention.

Why is there such a disconnect between the sort of representational facts about Israel and Palestine or Palestine in the United States? And then what I know to be true from Arabic news outlets or from family members or from the news that I'm getting from close from family connected community there.

The only other thing that I would say is that in the mid 90s June Jordan was very forthright about saying that she thinks that the, that there are two sort of moral litmus tests in the world. In terms of thinking about questions of power and inequality in the world. And that's the question of.

Tina: Yeah, I want to go a little bit further with that. And I take notes while we do this. That's what I'm doing so that I mark it when I listen to it again. So in the Palestine and Praxis document, there's some great statements in there about how we can as As teachers, not just in higher ed, but, particularly there.

Think about these things that you're talking about. And there was two axes. How June Jordan, connects the dots. One of them is one of the commitments is highlighting Palestinian scholarship on Palestine. And syllabi are writing and through invitation of Palestinian scholars. And

Not only as a case in a list of colonial examples. Oh, so I would like to talk about how do you in your classroom. Engage Palestine elevate these voices. Stop the colonizers. in their tracks. What kind of concrete examples do you have for ways that are exemplary for us to really be doing justice with Palestinians?

And instead I point people in to the what I view as the right direction. Because it's a completely It's a completely different experience speaking to a Palestinian who, or just a scholar or a person who is physically present and materially affected and grappling with and dealing with the details of of something of something is an abstraction of, The eliminatory violence of the psychological warfare of the ongoing colonization and ongoing neck of the ongoing sort of generational trauma.

Who they talk to on a regular basis whom they know, you know what they have for dinner every once in a while whom they walk down the street with every once in a while who they can go and get a, cup of sugar from next door. I don't know. It, it's a very different orientation and perspective is all I'm trying to say and so I think.

And the other thing about the praxis letter that I think is very important is that I think. Up until very recently, and this isn't just about the Palestine Praxis letter, this is like about what that letter is doing in a whole cosmology of things, right? So when that letter was released you had families in Sheikh Jarrah, right?

So just giving you a kind of example. So that's just north of the old city of Jerusalem, just south of the old city of Jerusalem is Silwan, which is another Palestinian neighborhood where they've where they're Military orders to demolish over a hundred homes and businesses. And a friend of mine di Chama did a talk with the Palestine studies center at Columbia University where she interviewed many of the families that in Siwan and these families have to pay for their the demolition of their own home, for example.

Then, also when Palestinian praxis was released, you had Israel literally drop from the air bowing bombs onto

Palestinian homes. So that's just to give you an idea of how dynamic the map is in terms of Palestinian territory and what's going on there. And that's just the beginning of it, right? We haven't even talked about the checkpoints. We haven't even talked about the sort of apartheid road system, the huge wall, all of these things.

And so what we're trying to say, I think, with the Palestine Praxis letter is And I just saying we just because I, was somewhat a part of editing it is that, calling this natural or calling this just like an ethnic dispute or calling this a religious conflict is not just.

Lucia: Yeah, I think that's really well said. And I feel torn about two different, two different routes to take this. Maybe that you can think that you probably can think of many others, but I'll just throw out the two questions that I think might be good to ask now.

Dina: Yeah, those are very good questions. And I'm also really interested to hear how. You both having Tina's been to Palestine, but having Palestinian colleagues and also being just like it seems like critical thinkers and very invested in critical pedagogy in general, I'd be very interested to see how you all are navigating this as well.

I, in the classroom, I don't say those kinds of things right. But. You have to point to examples. I think also literature is very helpful. Again, this is going back to poetry for the people mediated forms of expression mediated forms of of expression from people who've actually experienced it, I think is very.

Has been very helpful for me in terms of teaching, but I also feel like it's a way for to amplify and uplift Palestinian voices outside of a kind of paradigm that assumes that you're helping them. Because if anything, I think that the power disparity is so vast and so great that even in.

Thankfully for me, but just encountering Palestinian art, encountering Palestinian literature and poetry being invested in it, being invested in assigning it I think has been, it's not just relevant to Palestine, but it's relevant to so many questions of power at stake in the world.

Yeah, whether it's and there are also so many ways in which teaching Palestine Is about these larger thresholds of inequality and power disparities. For example, the and this is also another way that BDS comes in. The bombs that were dropped in Gaza during the 11 day attack just two months ago were, for example, Boeing bombs.

And that's not just a question about Palestine, right? But that's a global question. And it's also a question about our own self awareness. So I think that answers your question. Oh, and then about the manuscript. Sorry, the manuscript. All I'll say, I don't have too much to say about my manuscript because I'm still working it out.

You will not, read a kind, you will not read a book that says Palestine. That's, peer reviewed and stuff like that. That doesn't. That falls outside of a particular like niche. So making certain decisions like do I call this Israel slash Palestine? Do I call it Israel and the Palestinian territories?

Do I call it Israel and the Arab territories? And so on and so forth. The sort of knowing all of those options and deliberating what the value is of each one of them and then making those decisions yourself, I think has been an incredibly empowering, empowering experience. I don't know whether or not that means that I'm never going to get published or I'm never going to get a job or anything like that, but it does mean that I've been very it's been a very instructive process to think about the sovereignty of writing or to think about your own power in terms of.

Lucia: Yeah, I think that and also also the decisions about what am I what language am I refusing?

That sometimes it's what you don't say, or, like, how you're not saying something that is creating a, Absolutely. That's like breaking some consensus that maybe a reader didn't even know was there until.

Dina: Absolutely. So I think maybe one of the things that your question evokes for me is I think a lot of what I was trying to do in the manuscript was suggest that things are much more terrible than you could ever imagine for, what, in terms of what Palestinians are experiencing.

Lucia: Yeah, I think the reason I put the question, those two questions together about pedagogical praxis plus like narratives is that I think, in case this wasn't clear to listeners already, the answer to eliminatory violence and Palestine as a field of knowledge being put under erasure is not tokenistic.

representation for liberal vampires who want to bear witness to another's suffering. Is that correct? You're like, yeah, okay great, correct. And so I'm thinking about the sort of commitments in the Praxis letter and everything around it. What the signatory like what is being asked of signatories is not to, show some pictures of Palestinian children who have been psychologized.

What is occupation? And to be able to have a kind of almost scaffolding available to bring to bear on any number of examples or questions or experiences so that this isn't a kind of like sort of Palestine exceptionalism. So what I was going to say is that I teach this class called American gods, which is a sort of intro to religions of the Americas.

Who has the kind of ideology that they're able to install? And what are the breaks in that we can see and find and try to stretch out? So this is a question about Palestine and indigenous knowledge is in theories as framework. , so that a student, even if, especially as a teacher who has direct experience and stakes in and connection to the just.

Violence isn't being asked to tokenize themselves, but rather that there's a, yeah, there's a foundation to be able to ask those questions. Is that, I'm now rambling, but does that sound right?

It is about quite frankly, power and in certain ways. So much power and violence. And this is again in terms of pedagogy. Questioning the category of violence as a standalone analytical category is violence, just brute violence that Israeli police or Israeli military are exercising against people in Sheikh Jarrah.

A. Was violent, like people who are protesting the P. A. They were violently manhandled. One person on the side, but not was killed next to the hallways of Yale University to say that all of this, Is a limitatory violence against Palestinians and Palestine is one place and we're all one people.

And that's a response. That's a kind of political response to the kind of ongoing fragmentation, the kind of ongoing violence. Yeah, and those small decisions that you make are all very consequential and I think students who are paying attention or anybody who's paying attention will pick up on those things.

You said a bit, but if you could go Some further.

Dina: That's actually a really good question. Mostly because like I've never actually taught a class on Palestine. I've been to three different university campuses. I did actually at Berkeley. I taught a class called the psychological effects of military occupation, but it wasn't specific to Palestine.

So I don't know the answer to that question yet, but I do know that whatever it would be to

How is embodied knowledge acquired and taught Those kinds of questions I think are not just in the context of Palestinian studies, although Palestinian studies, I feel like it's this amazing repository and resource of just in terms of like grassroots mobilizing efforts in terms of clarity of language and stuff like that, such as it's this rich archive and place that I feel like People aren't paying enough attention to but that's all I would say in terms of, how, and then another thing I would say, sorry, just one last thing is aside from my direct relationship with students, it's also just my direct relationship with everybody.

So it's more like a disposition, I think, as much as it is a kind of classroom ethos or classroom thing.

Tina: If I can give just a quick example four miles from my house. Is a program at Georgia State University, where the connection between the Israeli defense forces, Israeli military, and Black Lives Matter come together because the Israeli military is training Georgia police officers in surveillance.

Dina: I think that, absolutely, that's a great point. And I think that's where a lot of questions about and criticisms against BDS come in. When I think about BDS, I think about just opening up the debate to dimensions that people don't want you to notice. For example when I was at UC Berkeley and in the Drew Jordan Poetry for the People program when Gaza was being bombed, it was also when Oscar Grant was shot at the Fruitvale station in in Oakland.

It's not just that they're that they're experimenting on Palestinians or, refining these tactics on Palestinian in quotes mobs and stuff like that. It's that it's a, it's an industry like so you're right, the Israeli. I'm not exactly sure what the connection is, but there is some sort of connection between the Israeli police force and police forces in the United States in terms of training.

And then there are also all of these private security firms like Black Cube, for example, or a site group, which are Private security firms that ex Mossad agents or ex Shinbid agents or something like that come to the United States and think it's a good idea to provide these kinds of services and stuff like that.

So that, so these kinds of things have implications far beyond just Palestinians. And when you were I get the sense that sometimes the paradigm of solidarity is a little tired because I think reframing things along the lines of mutual aid reciprocity, protection, and safety of one another is probably More accurate.

So we could come, there's, there, there are a lot of examples that people have marshaled that we can marshal. And in some ways, what one of the, one of the, one of the pedagogical concerns is that for A lot of reasons that have to do with ideology no matter how many examples one brings up they be, they have been made unseeable or un unsayable.

And what I hear your answer being to the, some of the how do you organize the syllabus questions not about examples, but about what, what lenses. What lenses what lens correction does a student need when they are looking at the front page of the New York Times and see in an FAQ about, is BDS anti Semitic how do you how does someone learn to read?

Dina: Yeah, absolutely. And I also get the sense that I mean, it's really difficult to not be cynical especially considering the kind of heightened amplified intense violence that we're seeing right now. But I think the one thing that really gives me a great deal of encouragement is that there's no reversing that, Whatever students you have they're going to go off and they're going to be in their respective fields.

8 billion while bombs are falling on Gaza? Why does this, common tater in on the sort of on primetime television ask this person who is talking about some random thing related to Palestine, whether or not they love support Hamas. That once you start seeing the extent of all of these controlling processes, there's no unseeing them.

Lucia: I think that's a really important as we think with you and try to think with many of our of guests and listeners about what it would, what would it mean to be a teacher who affirms and lives out the commitments in the praxis letter as just as one of many examples of movement building and world making and campaigns that are ongoing.

I think that keeping that in mind, that not an exception. And as soon as a teacher, no matter how aligned in their own head. that they think they are with the sort of Palestinian freedom struggle start, like doing a sort of fetishized suffering narratives or exceptional examples.

That is actually not, that is going against the grain of the kind of statement and praxis that that. that I think you and many others have invited us into.

Okay

Anything else we haven't asked that you want to say or that we haven't That we haven't covered that you wish we would ask not particularly

Dina: want to ask us. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't say that there's anything in particular other than maybe there's one question that I would like to ask you guys and this is going to be a kind of roundabout way of saying it, but One thing that I'm concerned with recently is institution building and making space.

Tina, you go first.

Lucia: Cause

Dina: I'm so

Tina: that's a, that's an amazing question. I think it is, it's in the classroom. But taking students out of the classroom. I'm part of a living wage campaign that Lucia was also part of. And building coalitions with local human rights groups, but especially with our hourly staff who are paid poverty wages and hearing those stories.

The same, as you're talking about teaching about Palestine and I read the Palestinian practice statement, I think, Oh, how do I not do fall into the. the liberal vampirism trap. And the way to do that is to be places and put myself out there where I can get called on it and corrected.

Dina: work.

Helpful to hear. Yeah. Yeah. I think,

Lucia: Part of me is stumbling on this question. I think because I feel like I just know what I think about a lot. I think we've been through a year where there hasn't been a lot of in person connections and I just moved to a new place. So I feel like I you're asking me that question a moment where I'm searching for, what I imagine to be or I feel to be most helpful to me as a really embodied space. I think what, the thing that I, that comes to mind, and now I'm just going to talk out loud for a minute, is that my friend Amoria, sometimes said I didn't know we were talking about something. Somebody had done something fucked up, excuse my language.

And to, I think to constantly be checking my own forms of retreat and to be in spaces that do that for me. And I didn't think like the most concrete example that I actually, I've been writing a lot about this. I haven't been like in it for a while, but I think about some of the like kind of lefty organizations, the union coalition in New Haven as a kind of leftist coalition that was constantly messing up within itself where there were power struggles with.

In it within the communities, but how do we be a democratic organization? How do we model the world we wish to see? How do we like enact a kind of liberating pedagogy among ourselves in our organizing relationships in our classrooms that doesn't reproduce the very power, i. e. Yale's kind of billionaire corporation that we are trying to contest.

Especially when you are with a group of people, or for me, it's been when I'm with a group of people who are constantly aware of our own perpetual falling short, or perpetual embeddedness within structures that are going to, cause us to be morehte All kinds of violence to one another.

Anyway, so when I thought about the fail it, being willing to fail more often, I think that's another way of saying that being in organizations that are really broken and trying to figure out, like, how do we become aware of that and then try to correct it and then fail again and then and for me union organizing has been one of those things, but then I think, there are any number of places, there are churches, there are, community gardens, there are classrooms.

Yeah, does that, I know that was a random answer. Yeah, that's amazing

So I think holding your ground and trying to hold on to reality while also being open to. growth and failure and change has been the only way I think I've gotten this far. And I, yeah I sense that's what both of you were also saying. So I appreciate your answers.

Tina: Okay. The time is nigh. We could talk a very long time this is wonderful, but we often end our episodes by inviting our guests to share what you are watching, ingesting, listening to, consuming that you are inspired by that you'd like to tell others about.

But it's also just a Sweet, easy read. So it's been keeping me afloat over the last few weeks.

Tina: Thank you.

Tina: Thank you for listening to Nothing Never Happens, the Radical Pedagogy podcast. And our interview with Dina Omar of Yale University on teaching Palestine in higher education. My co producer and co host, Lucia Hulsether, and I would like to acknowledge our audio editor and engineer, Aaliyah Harris.

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