2.0 Witnessing as decolonization

In a November 1, 2023 op-ed published in The Ubyssey, UBC History professor Hicham Saffiedine wrestled with this very issue: “If government policy is dictated by Machiavellian calculations of power, what is the excuse of academic institutions like UBC for failing to live up to their mandate of supporting efforts at decolonizing education? . . . Why are students rightly encouraged to speak out about decolonization and anti-racism in relation to other struggles but are faced with intimidation or silence in the case of Palestine? Why is it frowned upon to suggest a moral equivalence between oppressor and oppressed unless we are discussing Palestine? The answer lies in Palestinian exceptionalism. It is a sign of how entrenched the Zionist narrative remains in Canadian public perception and political power. The road to decolonize the discussion around Palestine is still rough and rugged.” 

In exploring what “witnessing” actually means through Indigenous knowledge systems, UBC Critical Indigenous Studies professor David Gaertner, in a blog post for Novel Alliances, begins to “unpack . . . the decolonizing potential of a witnessing that is contingent on community, rather than the possessive individualism of the Western ‘eye witness.’” When “witnessing” becomes intertwined with concepts such as communal reflection, it thereby troubles the usual linear understanding of “witnessing” in the Anglophone context: to witness then simultaneously becomes to see, to reflect, to share. In genocidal contexts, witnessing must necessarily take on expanded forms and “consider what witnessing might entail when no one is left to testify to the crime” (Gaertner).

Since October 2023, for a complexity of reasons borne out of our contemporary era of social media connectivity, the Palestinian movement has become reinvigorated and linked with a multitude of other political movements. Newly activated communities, experienced activists, and scholars alike have begun building out networks both virtually and in-person, connecting shared histories of oppression through public pedagogy and developing new collaborations towards decolonizing the classroom and university spaces. [ → 2.1 Anti-colonial inter/transdisciplinary networks]

When thinking about “witnessing” in the context of the academy, it is also imperative to then consider how scholars can better ethically engage with eyewitness accounts and testimony in a way that respects the authority of those who directly experienced an event (in this case, genocide). Colonialism and colonization necessarily facilitate the attempted or successful erasure of witnesses. To echo one of the driving questions of this section, how can we as scholars then do “real anticolonial, antiracist work” through the act of witnessing? How can we reflect on and activate the stories of those who have experienced trauma in a meaningful, giving way? [ → 2.2 Decolonizing methodologies within the academy]

The act of sharing stories as a part of witnessing often also needs to take forms outside of scholarly texts, legal language, or other institutional frameworks that rely on inflexible standards and infrastructures of meaning. We will end this toolkit by looking at art as a form of witnessing. [ → 4.0 Art as witnessing]

Similar to how most of the nation-states who supported South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel, other countries like Nicaragua who filed subsequent lawsuits against other imperial powers, and, of course, South Africa itself, are from the Global Majority [ → 1.1 Legal advocacy and political movements for justice]. On a community level, online and in-person, through webinars, teach-ins, and joint protests, the anti-genocide movement for Palestine has been informed by and linked to other anti-colonial struggles. 

The following examples of how this networking of movements, communities and histories have crystallized demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinary and collaborative work. These connections are historically informed and give precedence to Indigenous, Black, and POC voices. Making these connections also makes it reasonable and consistent to talk about “controversial” topics like Palestine or other genocides in the classroom. These are all efforts in preventing the “dismembering of collective memory” [ → 1.2 The role of the scholar and the academic institution].

Many of the activists drawing these connections and building awareness of a global anti-colonial effort are also doing so on social media, collaborating with other accounts, sharing information on teach-ins and webinars, and building infographics and videos. 

Anti-apartheid protest strategy

BDS is a non-violent, Palestinian-led campaign calling for boycotts, divestment and economic sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights. This movement pre-dates Oct 7, 2023 and is modeled after the Anti-Apartheid movement that opposed the South African apartheid system that started in Britain and later became international. Much of the justification in supporting the Palestinian BDS movement comes from this historical predecessor, and the success of the Anti-Apartheid movement in pushing national governments to also follow suit. However, in the U.S. there are anti-BDS laws in several states that prohibit organizations and people from boycotting Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities. Despite the July 2024 ruling that Israel is responsible for apartheid, it has not been banned from participating in international events such as the Paris 2024 Olympics, with media outlets such as Al Jazeera and The Nation calling out the hypocrisy, and athletes protesting Israel’s participation, as in Messaoud Dris of Algeria choosing to withdraw from the Paris Olympics judo competition in anticipation of his match against an athlete representing Israel. [ → see “Academic boycott” in 2.2 Decolonizing methodologies within the academy for more information on one component of this movement]

Shared histories of oppression

The shared history of Western imperialism can be mapped out across the world from Turtle Island to the Global South, including the Middle East. Many Indigenous people on Turtle Island see themselves reflected in the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s genocide in Occupied Palestine. Mohawk activist and artist Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel has said, “Short of bombs falling on our homes, Onkwehón:we (Indigenous peoples) on Turtle Island share parallel experiences at the hands of the occupier. Our history controlled through the lens of the settler who controls our lives through funding agreements. Not on the basis that we are equal or that our rights are human rights. We are both called ‘savages’, our peoples forced under colonial laws to keep us oppressed and struggling to keep our cultures alive. Our peoples’ families helpless to stop the kidnapping of their children – as we have seen in Palestine“ (“To Palestine with Love”). 

Asian American and Pacific Islander activist groups have also used their platforms to call for solidarity with Palestine, recognizing how Asian American activism and identity formation has been critically informed by the work of Palestinian scholar Edward Said and his formative text on Orientalism (1978). Black American activists such as Malcolm X, who called Zionism a “new kind of colonialism” (“Zionist Logic”), and June Jordan have also spoken on how the experiences of racial oppression of Black Americans and Palestinians are linked. There is a long history within the civil rights movement of linking the domestic movement for freedom and equal rights to a larger anti-colonial struggle abroad. The 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement brought these issues to the fore more recently and influenced public opinion by increasing awareness of systemic, structural violence. Scholars and activists have also explicitly tied domestic racialized violence in the U.S. and Canada to Israel through police exchange programs. Israeli tech and border patrol tactics are also used at the U.S. southern border against latino migrants.   

Networks

AAPI/Palestinian

• Jonathan Okamura, "A Palestinian In Hawaii Offers Ideas On How To Defuse The Crisis," Honolulu Civil Beat: https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/10/jonathan-okamura-a-palestinian-in-hawaii-offers-ideas-on-how-to-defuse-the-crisis/  

• “AAPI Anti-Imperialist Resistance & Solidarity with Palestine” webinar hosted by the Popular University for Palestine @ Stanford, co-hosted by Nodutdol, Korea Policy Institute, Nikkei Resisters, Malaya Movement-SF, BAYAN-Northern California, SF Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP), Gabriela Excelsior

• HAPA’s Statement in Solidarity with Palestine — HAPA: Hawai'i Alliance for Progressive Action 

• Bianca Mabute-Louie, "PERSPECTIVES: Why Asian Americans can’t afford silence on Palestine," https://www.reckon.news/justice/2024/05/perspectives-why-asian-americans-cant-afford-silence-on-palestine.html 

• Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Palestine Is In Asia: An Asian American Argument for Solidarity,"  https://vietnguyen.info/2024/the-nation-palestine-is-in-asia-an-asian-american-argument-for-solidarity. 

Black/Palestinian

• "As a Tigrayan, My Heart Bleeds for Palestine," Omna Tigray, https://omnatigray.org/my-heart-bleeds-for-palestine/ 

• Marina Magloire, “Moving Towards Life,” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/moving-towards-life/.   

Jewish/Palestinian

• Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine, https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343396/decolonizing-israel-liberating-palestine/.  

• Jewish Voice for Peace, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ 

• Independent Jewish Voices - Canada, https://www.ijvcanada.org/about-ijv/ 

• IfNotNow: https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/ 

• Rabbis for Ceasefire: https://rabbis4ceasefire.com/statement-2/ 

Queer/Palestinian

• "International Queer Solidarity with Palestine." The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives. 23 November 2023. https://arquives.ca/international-queer-solidarity-with-palestine/ 

• Hussain, Jahanzeb. "Queers in solidarity with Palestine." The Media Co-op. 14 November 2023. https://mediacoop.ca/node/119183 

• Queers in Palestine: https://queersinpalestine.noblogs.org/ 

• Queer Artists for Palestine: https://www.queerartistsforpalestine.org/ 

Turtle Island/Palestinian

• Salaita, Steven. Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1ggjkg0. 

• "From Palestine to Pipeline," US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7p_byWmoKs 

• Mohamed Abdou, "Palestine's and Turtle Island's liberation are entwined, " https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/13/palestines-and-turtle-islands-liberation-are-entwined. 

Scholar perspectives

• Jodi Dean: “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone  

• Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, https://www.dukeupress.edu/invited-to-witness.  

• Viet Thanh Nguyen. “Viet Thanh Nguyen: How do we remember war and conflict?”  Interview by Andrew Kelly, https://vietnguyen.info/2021/how-do-we-remember-war-and-conflictviet-thanh-nguyen.  

Building awareness of other “conflicts” and the need for transdisciplinarity

Activists and protestors for Palestine have also begun to use their platforms to bring awareness to other ongoing “conflicts.” For example, Congo has seen an escalation in violence since January 2024, when fighting between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and the M23 rebel group forced the displacement of thousands of civilians. Ironically, the smartphones that allow Palestinians to share their stories and spread awareness are powered by the same minerals that are mined by exploited laborers in Congo. In Sudan, the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) also reached a climax in April 2023, resulting in millions of refugees seeking humanitarian aid. Palestine, Congo, and Sudan are all resource rich lands, which drives global interference that ultimately perpetuates conflict and violence. 2023 saw an all-time high of 71 million people displaced globally, with 75% of those numbers from just 10 countries––Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan––regions where there continue to be “unresolved conflicts.” Aid groups and activists have also drawn connections between these mass displacements, often accelerated by the support of Western imperial powers in the form of arms deals, and the recent surge in far-right, anti-immigration protests in countries like Canada, U.S., and U.K. Such wicked problems require collaborative, transdisciplinary approaches and systems-based thinking.

While Palestine has become one of the more amplified sites of “conflict” in terms of protest and social media, these past many months have also drawn out other ways in which imperial and colonial powers have perpetuated violence throughout other areas in the world. As a large part of the anti-genocide protests have been conducted on university campuses, led by students, there has also been a strong sense of solidarity developed with the student protest in Bangladesh that began in July 2024. As students and the public continue to build out these connections, the scholarship being done within the academy must also evolve alongside this anti-colonial public discourse. The intersections between these different histories and realities of colonial violence, the mounting environmental/climate crisis, displacement, and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism can only be made visible when “moving in-between different sites, spaces, audiences and contexts [which] potentially enables us to refuse purity or expertise as starting points and instead prioritise improvisation and movement”–or what Stephens & Bagelman (2023) name “transversal relations” (331). To do this sort of transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, community-engaged work, it is imperative to develop networks both within and without the university that are built upon these encounters between academics, students, and different publics.

[ → see 3.3 Encampments as sites of learning and care for one example on how scholars from different disciplines are connecting to this movement]

Public scholarship, particularly in public humanities work, can be defined as “academic engagement that seeks to reimagine and collaboratively curate and in fact, redistribute, access to the capacity to create knowledge amongst a very broad set of publics, including most particularly, communities historically and persistently marginalized” (UBC Public Humanities, “About”). 

From this definition, we can extract two critical points of action when witnessing an ongoing genocide, particularly one that has been painted as controversial. 

1. Collaborate on the capacity to create knowledge alongside members of the community who have been historically excluded from sites of knowledge production.

2. Redistribute access to the capacity to create knowledge by critically reflecting on whose voices you are further propping up and enabling. 

Co-creating “the archive”

What is considered “the archive” for any particular research question is negotiated through inherent biases towards who has access, who decides what is worth preserving, what can (or should be) destroyed, and what ways of knowledge production are valued by institutions. Collaborating with community members can also allow academic scholars to expose and work outside of the politics of the academic institution, which have historically operated within the machinery of state propaganda and censorship. As history shows, and indeed as we're witnessing in Palestine, through mass atrocities archives associated with any group can be destroyed, and cultural destruction, which “yields the destruction of structures and practices that allow [a] group to keep living as a group,” is a recognized mark of genocide (“A Legal Analysis of Genocide,” 6). In the Canadian context, the 2015 TRC recognizes the Indian Residential School system as an act of cultural genocide (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada). Survivors may often be forced to learn about their own history through the eyes and language of their colonizers. For example, UNESCO considers all but one of 60 Indigenous language dialects spoken in Canada today as critically endangered (Assembly of First Nations). In this way, oral traditions, which have been devalued by academic institutions and Euro-American trained academics, can play a hugely important role in bringing new stories to light and thus advancing research when produced ethically in, with, and for community. What will remain of Palestinian archives, both physically and on the web, when this genocide comes to its inevitable end is yet unknown. There are ample possibilities for what co-creative archives may look in the Palestinian context and how those archives can ethically honor Palestinian history and culture, survivors, witnesses, and the dead.

Academic boycott

Perhaps seen as one of the more controversial activities on campus, academic boycott is fundamentally rooted in the ethics of one’s research, teaching, and learning communities. It allows scholars and students to make demands of their home university to make good on its statements about equity, diversity, and inclusion; its supposed commitments to decolonial practices; and its stated relationships to Indigenous people and the process of truth and reconciliation. One critical component of the BDS movement has been the academic boycott, which specifically recognizes Israeli universities and their complicity in the ongoing genocide, colonization, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. UBC scholar Maya Wind’s 2024 monograph Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom details how Israeli universities help perpetuate the continued oppression against Palestinians along multiple axes of denying access to education, censorship, and repressing student dissent. The academic boycott is institutional: the intent is not to boycott individual scholars, but rather institutional ties. 

Institutions across Canada have called for BDS. In Vancouver, Emily Carr and Simon Fraser University have already passed BDS motions. A similar BDS motion is also underway at UBC. Faculty Associations at U Montreal, U Windsor, and Wilfred Laurier have all passed BDS motions. Access to a list of universities who have divested from companies funding Israel or who have cut ties with Israeli universities as of May 2024 can be found here. Universities and academics can also heed the call of the Palestinian-Canadian Academics and Artists Network to “protect and support educators and the education system in the Gaza Strip,” to begin to imagine what that support looks like when it is time to rebuild and what it means to begin investing in meaningful partnerships with Palestinian academics and universities.

Example Existing Partnerships

Note: both universities in Gaza listed below, UCAS and Al Azhar U, have since been destroyed by Israeli forces.

• E-Pal Project | Equip Palestine with E-Learning: U Oslo, Oslo Metropolitan, Palestine Polytechnic (Hebron), and University College of Applied Sciences (Gaza), https://www.uio.no/link/english/e-pal/ 

• Teacher Education Without Walls | The Olive Project: U Helsinki, U Eastern Finland, Al Azhar U (Gaza), and Birzeit U (West Bank), https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/teacher-education-without-walls/about-the-olive-project. 

Learn more

• Journal of Academic Freedom Volume 4 | American Association of University Professors: https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom/volume-4 

• Academic Boycott FAQs | BDS movement : https://bdsmovement.net/academic-boycott#faqs 

• Over 400 Middle East scholars and librarians call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions (Updated) – Mondoweiss (2014) : https://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/scholars-librarians-institutions/