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Professor Jodi Dean Has Been Placed on Leave Over a Pro-Palestine Essay

For this a leading American professor has been placed in leave.

  • “Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air?
  • Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it.
  • Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution.
  • More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.
  • Oppressed people fight back against their oppressors by every means necessary. They choose — and are forced to choose by the settings in which their liberation struggles take place — the strategies and tactics they need to win.
  • Unable to constitute ourselves as a coherent side in the struggle against imperialism, we have trouble taking a side, failing to see or ask which side are we on? Even recognizing sides is dismissed as binary thinking or a childish inability to accept complexity and ambiguity.
  • Defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance, responding to a revolutionary subject — the subject fighting against occupation and oppression — and recognizing this subject as an effect of a contested and open process.
  • Colonial occupation and imperialist exploitation produce enmity; enmity isn’t the affective setting of equals in conflict. It’s not a war of all against all. It’s a war of oppressed against their oppressor, the rebellion of those whose right to self-determination is denied against those who deny it. 

Related

A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

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