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Don’t Stop Talking About Palestine

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Organizer: Michiel Bot

Co-Organizer: Dina Zbeidy

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People protesting the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians have been confronted with an enormous amount of censorship, ranging from the systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, university professors, teachers, and students and the destruction of the infrastructure of knowledge in Gaza, via protest bans, cancellations, firings, travel bans, smear campaigns, surveillance, and police violence in countries that support Israel, to the repressive tolerance of media, public intellectuals, politicians, and university administrations that have sought to reframe the terms of the discussion, such as the leaked New York Times editorial guidelines mandating the avoidance of words like “refugee,” “camp,” and “genocide,” or Jürgen Habermas’s Stellungnahme that “the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.”


Offense has been taken to words such as genocide, Nakba, settler colonialism, apartheid, and Zionism; calls for the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea”; and comparisons with Nazi Germany. However, the slogan, “Don’t stop talking about Palestine” suggests that publicly speaking the fundamental truth that Palestinians exist, that they are people, and that their lives matter may have been perceived as equally undermining of the ongoing genocide and of the ideological, military, diplomatic, and financial support by Israel’s allies for Israel while it is carrying out a genocide.


This seminar aims to explore censorship of critiques of, and protests against the genocide in a comparative perspective. Topics for discussion might include:


-Censorship and colonial warfare, comparisons with protest and censorship in other (colonial) contexts


-Epistemicide and scholasticide (Open letter by Gaza academics and university administrators to the world)


-“The coloniality of academic freedom” (Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores); international collaborations and the “global university”


-Critical and anticritical transnational solidarities: Habermas’s “Principles of Solidarity”; “Global Palestine” (John Collins)


-Transnational censorship mechanisms, transnational lawfare, and transnational legal support


-Self-censorship and repressive tolerance; discourses of safety and civility (Steven Salaita)

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