The ongoing devastation in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, alongside the systematic destruction of Palestinian universities, has coincided with intensified censorship and repression within Western academic institutions. These developments reveal the distinctive position that Zionism and its defense has held for decades within Western imperial structures, creating patterns of epistemic injustice.
Palestine and the Western Academe emerges from a collective sense of political and intellectual urgency in response to mounting repression against scholars and students working on and studying Palestine. While attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Western academia have intensified, they have been met with new forms of resistance and disobedience, bolstered by coalitional anti- racist and anti- capitalist solidarities extending from Palestine globally.
This edited volume brings together significant contributions from scholars and students offering fresh approaches to the epistemic and political struggles surrounding Palestine. It demonstrates the timely and enduring relevance of the Palestinian question to international academic spaces and is essential reading for academics, researchers, and students interested in Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, International Relations, Critical Theory, Decolonial Studies, and Academic Freedom discourse.
Most of the chapters in this book were originally published in Middle East Critique. This edition comes with several new chapters and an updated introduction, offering fresh perspectives and expanded analysis on these urgent and evolving issues.
Palestine and the Western Academe emerges from a collective sense of political and intellectual urgency in response to mounting repression against scholars and students working on and studying Palestine.
Introduction: Palestine and the Global Struggle for Epistemic Justice
1.
Resistance to Repression and Back Again: The Movement for Palestinian
Liberation in US Academia
2. Axis of Evil and the Academic Repression of
Palestine Solidarity
3. Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of
the IHRA Definition
4. The Free Speech Exception to Palestine
5. Witnessing
the Architecture of a Cancellation: The Silencing of Voices on Palestine in
Austrian Academia
6. Erasing Palestine in Germanys Educational System: The
Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom
7. Intent to Harm: Settler Colonial
Outposts in Psychoanalysis
8. Palestine Solidarity and Zionist Backlash in
Australian Universities
9. Australian Universities in the Gaza Genocide:
Managerial Capitulation, Staff and Student Resistance
10. A Land
Acknowledgment in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption
of the Liberal Script
11. The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the
Palestine Exception
12. Do Not Cower to Zionists: How Hillel International is
Targeting Anti-Zionist Work on North American College Campuses
13.
Scholasticidal Tendencies: Notes on Academia During Genocide
14. Palestine
and the Ends of Theory
15. Palestine is the Vanguard for Our Liberation:
Insights from the Students Intifada at Columbia University
16. Becoming
Combat Intellectuals: The Student Intifada at CUNY
17. Forging Anticolonial
Solidarity in the Hour of Genocide Haki/Pláticas on Complicity, Dissent and
Protest in a Belgian University
18. Still Balfours University: Upholding
Al-Thawabet in the Face of Necro-Bureaucracy
18. Balfours Imperial Legacy:
Genocide and the Incommensurable Politics of Decolonial Redress
Walaa Alqaisiya is a Scholar of Middle East Studies based at Northwest University in the Peoples Republic of China. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University (UK), and taught at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE, UK). Her research spans Indigenous ecologies, gender and sexuality studies, and decolonial theories. Her book Decolonial Queering in Palestine (Routledge 2022) examines how Palestinian queer politics challenge Zionist settler-colonialism while imagining a free Palestine beyond the Oslo impasse. Alqaisiyas work appears in prestigious journals including Social and Cultural Geography, Political Geography, Radical Philosophy, and Palestine Studies. Building on research from her Global Marie Curie Fellowship across Ca Foscari University (Italy), Columbia University (USA), and LSE, she currently studies colonial ecocidal violence and Indigenous womens ecologies from Palestine to Turtle Island. She serves on the editorial boards of Middle East Critique and Gender Place and Culture.
Nicola Perugini teaches International Politics at the University of Edinburgh (UK), focusing on international law, human rights, and violence. He co-authored The Human Right to Dominate (2015), Morbid Symptoms (2017), and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (2020). His research spans war ethics, human rights politics, humanitarianism, refugee studies, and settler-colonialism. His current project, Decolonising the Civilian, examines decolonization, international law, and civilian status in armed conflicts. Perugini has held prestigious positions at Princetons Institute for Advanced Study, Brown University (Mellon Fellow), and as a Marie Skodowska-Curie and Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He previously taught at the American University of Rome, Al Quds Bard College (where he directed the Human Rights Program), and University of Bologna. He has served as a consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in several publications including Al Jazeera, London Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and The Nation.
