Who Can Speak on Palestine?
The first episode in a new series, Learning and Unlearning Palestine, hosted jointly by Al Shabaka and FMEP.
featuring Nour Joudah (UC Berkeley), Dina Matar (SOAS, University of London), in conversation with Maha Nassar (University of Arizona)
January 30th, 2023
This conversation examines the history and current reality of the erasure of the Palestinian narrative, the delegitimization of Palestinian voices in mainstream spaces, and possibilities for change. See below for a list of resources discussed in the webinar.
Listen to this conversation as a podcast here.
See this page for links to the additional webinars in the series.
Speakers:
Nour Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA. She is currently the UC Presidential Postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley. Nour’s work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis.
Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication at SOAS, University of London, where she is also chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies. Her teaching and research are informed by a non-Western centric approach to addressing communication and politics, with a particular focus on the marginal and the periphery. She is the author of What it Means to be Palestinian (2010), and co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (2014). She is co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013) and Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and is currently co-editing a volume titled Producing Palestine with Helga Tawil-Souri.
Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, where she specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of the modern Arab world. Her award-winning book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), examines how Palestinian intellectuals connected to global decolonization movements during the mid-twentieth century. She is working on her next book, a global history of Palestine’s people.
for the second episode in this series: Limited Paradigms, on February 8th, with Dr. Muhannad Ayyash, Dr. Lana Tatour, and Dr. Yara Hawari.
Resources discussed in the webinar:
Follow our speakers on Twitter:
- Dr. Maha Nassar: https://twitter.com/mtnassar
- Dr. Nour Joudah: https://twitter.com/nsdoud
- Al Shabaka: https://twitter.com/AlShabaka
- FMEP: https://twitter.com/FMEP
Resources from Dr. Maha Nassar:
- “US media talks a lot about Palestinians — just without Palestinians” (2020): https://www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians/
- Why the New York Times is behind the times on Israel-Palestine (December 2022): https://www.972mag.com/new-york-times-israel-palestine/
From Nour Joudah: Palestine as Praxis: Scholarship for Freedom: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1652231 (co-authored with Randa M. Wahbe, Tareq Radi, Dina Omar)
For more on Dr. Matar, including a list of her publications:
For resources on accusations of antisemitism and the IHRA, see:
- “A colonized Palestine isn’t the answer to the world’s guilt,” a speech given in June 2022 by Tareq Baconi: https://al-shabaka.org/op-eds/a-colonized-palestine-isnt-the-answer-to-the-worlds-guilt/
- For FMEP’s many public conversations on the conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel and the IHRA, see: https://fmep.org/resources/?rsearch=&rcat%5B%5D=626
- See Lara Friedman’s constantly updated databases:
- Challenging the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism – Expert Views & Resources: https://fmep.org/resource/challenging-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-expert-views-resources/
- Using “Anti-Semitism” to Quash Israel Criticism – in Congress & States: https://fmep.org/resource/abusing-anti-semitism-quash-israel-criticism-congress-states/
- On the American Bar Association’s consideration of the IHRA, see this response from the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Palestine Legal, the Foundation for Middle East Peace and many more: https://www.aclu.org/letter/letter-co-sponsors-proposed-american-bar-association-resolution-514-antisemitism
- For more on the ways in which the IHRA definition is used to silence and stifle Palestinians and advocates for Palestinian rights, please see this analysis from Palestinian intellectuals: “Palestinian rights and the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (the Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/nov/29/palestinian-rights-and-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism?fbclid=IwAR1j_NOutmYAC6sduOE4GP4DgUp1M037x-3sO4cO0Hk4HhvQrrdOhkgkMok
Additional resources:
- Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n03/edward-said/permission-to-narrate
- The IMEU (Institute for Middle East Understanding), which has many many resources for media and social media: https://imeu.org/
- ‘Footnotes in Gaza’ by Joe Sacco, on the 1956 Israeli massacre in Gaza: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805092776/footnotesingaza