How to prevent the erasure of Palestinians with Tamara El-Halawani & Dr Zahira Jaser

2nd October 2024

Tamara El-Halawani is a research assistant at the SOAS ICOP project and a recent MSc graduate in International Politics from SOAS University, London. She is currently completing a dissertation on ‘The Erasure of Palestinians on social media.’ Prior to joining ICOP, she worked as a reporter for The Conduit in London and served as a parliamentary staffer for her local constituency in the House of Commons. Tamara also holds a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Genetics from the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Zahira Jaser is an Italian-Palestinian Associate Professor at the University of Sussex Business School. She is the Director of the MBA programme. She has been researching the impact of anti-Palestinian racism in organisations and society. Her research and writings have been featured in Science, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Wired, the Harvard Business Review and many academic journals. She holds a PhD in Management from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) and a MSc in Organisational Behaviour from the London School of Economics, and received her BA with honours in Political Science and Economics from Università Di Padova, Italy.

TRANSCRIPT 

Tamara El-Halawani:

I’m Tamara and I’m going to be facilitating the discussion between me and Zahirah, covering mainly three broad themes or contours. First about what we mean by the term erasure, then bridging this with anti-Palestinian racism and how this manifests within academia and also the corporate sphere, and then what the main theme of this discussion is on how this can be prevented. Each section will be broadly premised by a little introduction as to why the question’s being asked and then it’ll bridge into how the conversation flows. So really excited and thank you again for joining us.

First, I just want us to consider what we mean by the term erasure; since the launch of Operation Swords of Iron in October 2023 following the Hamas militant attacks on October 7th, more than 1.9 million Palestinians, which represents 80% of Gaza’s population, have been displaced and over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. This campaign has been described by local media outlets as one of the deadliest military assaults on Palestinians since the Nakba, with many Palestinians referring to it as a new Nakba or second Nakba, which evokes memories of the 1948 catastrophe in which approximately 725,000 Palestinians were subjected to forced displacement and ethnic cleansing between November 1947 and May 1948. This dismantled the existing ways of life and imposed new structures, which as Raef Zreik, who’s a Palestinian author, scholar and incredible person I would thoroughly recommend to look up, was describing it as the ways in which old forms of life are disabled by breaking down their conditions and in their place constructing new forms of life or obliging them to come into being. So this physical erasure isn’t something that permeates just within the territorial domain, but across the cultural, political and social landscapes. Gaza’s intellectual and cultural infrastructure has been obliterated; this includes libraries, archives and cultural institutions, and that’s been through bombardment, fire bombing and looting. By January 2024, 200 sites of historical significance lay in ruins, including the great Omari Mosque, which was home to the Islamic Manuscript Library, which is one of Palestine’s most treasured repositories and that housed artefacts dating back to the 14th century, and all of Gaza’s 19 universities have been severely damaged or lay in complete ruin as at the beginning of this year.

In merging the tangible and intangible loss, Palestinian writer, actress and academic Suna Rasul in a recent interview encapsulated this through the African proverb of when an elder dies, a library burns to the ground. So that is speaking to the cultural heritage, memory and intellectual legacy between those physical and then the more existential realms. Zahira’s article delves more into the personal and psychological dimensions of this erasure, particularly the encounters of assertions that Palestinians do not exist at all. One particularly striking example that I found was the confrontation that she faced during her first year of university in Italy, when a politically active student who was already engaged as a local government councillor remarked that Palestinians do not exist; they’re an invention to prevent Jews from claiming their land. Such a statement not only denied your existence, Zahira, but framed it as a threat cultivating and what you described, reminiscent of Mahmoud Darwish’s reflections as a profound sense of internal exile, which, you know, what an exile there is within the self, but also stripped of freedoms of thought and speech by both an oppressive regime and society more broadly writ large, and that feeling of alienation and being exiled even within one’s own community.

Beginning on that premise, if you could please elaborate on this notion of the personal erasure and that psychological exile, one of a state of permanent liminality that you describe, retracing the steps leading up to the FT article, and what prompted you in a sense to come out; to quote from your article as a Palestinian and this ongoing Nakba Nakbaisation, which is something that Helga Tawil-Souri, also a Palestinian academic, describes, where the Nakba was not only a singular historical rupture, but an earthquake, as you said in previous discussions we’ve had who’s rippling effects persist in the present.

Dr Zahira Jaser:

Okay, thank you so much Tamara for such an eloquent introduction and hello everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. I’m going to start from my personal experience, not because it’s singular in any way, it’s precisely because it’s absolutely a normal experience of a Palestinian, and I’m going to start from a quite autobiographical account to mirror the FT article with.

So I’m Italian Palestinian, I am quite white in skin, I’ve got blue eyes, I have a European accent and to some respect these could also be seen as privileges; privileges that allowed me to camouflage, not in a sinister way, but in a way that allowed me not to look ostentatiously Arabic throughout my life. I grew up with an Arabic name, an Arabic father, incredibly proud of my Palestinian heritage. But very soon I started to think that there was some kind of problem and it potentially was a little bit better to hide it. This came naturally, I didn’t even realise it, I was in investment banking in my career, the beginning of my career from my graduation for 15 years and in the corporate environment particularly the word Palestine and Palestinian can really be seen as problematic, or as triggering sorts of revolution; I will speak a little bit more about how anti-Palestinian racism is at the root of all this.

For many years, both from university to marriage I had some students telling me Palestinians don’t exist and me thinking: what are you talking about? What about my songs? What about the food that I eat every day that my dad is teaching us to cook? What about the clothes of my grandmother? I was thinking: how is it possible? Where does this idea come, that Palestine doesn’t exist? Of course, I had been a little bit sheltered from overly Zionistic beliefs that Palestine is a land without a people, for a people without a land, and so I really could not understand this. Then I graduated, moved on to a corporate career and when you are in a corporation, your voice is very controlled because we are trying to comply with the rules of the system and the system does not allow Palestinians to speak up because of the stigmatization which comes with this concept, with this identity. So I didn’t speak up and that was bearing a weight on me because we know that people are often suggested they need to be authentic in order to have to work well.

Organizations need to support Palestinians; this rule does not exist, the Palestinian exception works also in terms of identity and so I did not speak about my Palestinian identity. I’m saying an Arabic name and maybe some people, some close colleagues would actually know that I’m Palestinian, but I was not really being vocal about it. Then as I started to change career, become an academic, and we know that academia is a place where free speech is cherished to some extent, I started to become a little bit much more aligned with my identity and I started to write. I started to write from a Palestinian perspective and I started to write from a Palestinian epistemology. So what is reality experienced like? What is the experience of being Palestinian in our society? This is where I really focus my research and my talking, and I think that Financial Times article is the culmination of this internal process of freeing myself from the stigma that was associated to me, when I was accused of anti-Semitism. It was freeing myself and really starting to question how did it come in my identity and identity of my father was so politicized, and so I speak about the politicized Palestinian identity. What is the politicized Palestinian identity, is effectively a way of being in which Palestinians are always seen as existing in antithesis to someone else. Palestinians cannot exist in their own self-determination, in their own accord or for their own just way of being, but Palestinians always exist in the West, in the UK, in the US, in antithesis to someone else. What is this someone else? This someone else is the state of Israel in premise and by extension, and this is even more awful, the Jews, the Jewish people. Announcing that you are Palestinian is unconsciously seen as a threat; a threat to a group of people which we are taught in our culture and history and in which actually they were subjected to the most awful persecution, and so just announcing that one is Palestinian is immediately seen as anti-Semitic.

Tamara, I don’t know if you want me to speak now about the anti-Palestinian concept of anti-Palestinian racism or if you want to go further down or if you want to ask me another question.

Tamara:

Everything you’ve just said fits really well in what I was about to ask because Judith Butler, in an article that Lana Tatour recently wrote back in April, was describing how academic freedom implies the right to free inquiry within the academic institution, but also an obligation to preserving the institution as a site where freedom of inquiry can and does take place through the intervention and censorship. Just now and in our prior discussions, you highlighted that apprehension around the release of the article, but also just this being Palestinian was seen as an affront or a reason to be censored or cancelled so troublingly. You also observe how that escalating trend then went into silencing critical discourses or activism or anything to do with the engagement or relation to Palestine, and even then conflating criticism of the Israeli Government with antisemitism. In another way, it’s quite perturbing then an assumption that everyone who was within Israel or is Jewish, is then circumscribed to the actions of their government.

Going from this, what is raising alarm is this idea that when we are talking about decolonial, anti-colonial approaches, this sense of a framework that is adopted whether this be around settler colonialism or just even critique as described, then that is then an automatic implication of the person being imbued into supporting terrorism or being anti-Semitic.

I’d wanted to touch on perhaps the ‘Permission to Narrate’ article that we discussed yesterday a little bit.

I think one very contemporary example that came to light was this algorithmic conflation when a bio was translated on Instagram, from an Arabic saying that had the Palestinian flag emoji alongside Palestinians, as being translated to ‘Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom’.  That is really the embodiment of one of the specific forms of discrimination you described within anti-Palestinian racism, as this sense of every Palestinian is a terrorist. So I’ve been building on that work that you described with Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan, the broader implications of this terms the institutionalisation of anti-Palestinian racism. Also we spoke before; that story you told of being in a taxi with a Bush colleague.

Zahira:

Let me just thank you so much, super, super helpful and really helping me find the direction. Super interestingly then connecting to all the things that you’re saying, I just want to say ‘What is anti-Palestinian racism effectively?’ It’s very helpful to go into the article of Professor Yasmeen Abu-Laban, and Professor Abi Bakan from the University of Alberta and University of Toronto, who in an article in 2022 have articulated the historical roots of anti-Palestinian racism, and they called it a form of gaslighting because Palestinians are gaslighted not just in their suffering, but very much in their existence.  I’m going to be a little bit prescriptive here because I would like the listeners to really absorb very clearly the language of anti- Palestinian racism because, and I’ve written a report on this and will be circulated soon. What is anti-Palestinian racism? How can we summarise it and how can we find a way to speak about it and to identify it very, very quickly?

It has three tenets, the first tenet of anti-Palestinian racism is the denial of a Palestinian existence, and I just mentioned it as it happens to me, but it happens to any Palestinian. You don’t exist and it just doesn’t have to be that black and white. You don’t exist. It can also be and manifest itself in the omission of the word Palestine and Palestinians, which happens all the time. We know it happens because we know that both the Reuters guideline, the New York Times guidelines and many other press organisation guidelines have very strict prescription when to use the word Palestine or Palestinians. The Israeli war is against Palestinians, yet we see described everywhere as the war against Gazans, against Gaza and against Hamas. It’s very interesting how in language, we are erasing Palestinians by not admitting their existence, by removing the word itself. That’s number one.

Number two is the denial of Palestinian suffering. This is exactly what we started this conversation from. How is it possible that given the sheer destruction in Gaza, which is one of the biggest destructions caused by human beings on infrastructure, where we now have 42 million tonnes or 32 million tonnes depending on the source. Bloomberg says 42 million tonnes and my colleagues Dr Samia Al-Botmeh  in his paper from the University of Edinburgh says 32 million tonnes, which will take five to ten million years to remove? How is it possible that in this situation where all the universities have been destroyed, the repositories have been destroyed, the schools are bombed daily as well as hospitals? How is it possible that we are not really speaking much more, hearing much more in the headlines about this, or even stopping it or stopping the financing of Israel or stopping us calling the word genocide? If we say the word genocide, we are seen as anti-Israel. How is it possible in this blatant situation in which the ICJ, the ICC? It’s because there is a denial of Palestinian suffering. The suffering of the Palestinians is less, always less or even inexistent compared to the suffering of someone else. This is very much again in the logic of the Palestinians exist to obscurate the suffering of others; in this case of the Israeli or the Jewish people.

That’s the two things; denial of Palestinian existence, denial of Palestinian suffering. The third one is the denigration of Palestinians through the accusation of terrorism and antisemitism, which I already spoke about. These last two are especially difficult in our society right now. Why? Because both terrorists and antisemites rightly so, are described as hate crimes. Being accused of these in organisations triggers immediately some form of grievance procedure. There is also the Prevent law, by which if you’re accused of antisemitism, all sorts of procedures with the police are triggered and you get isolated and it’s basically impossible to recover from that kind of accusation, whether it is true or not. These accusations are so frightening for people that they will refrain from speaking for Palestine, even from saying that they’re Palestinian; people are really scared of being Palestinian, and all this gas lighting is then connected to what Tamara was speaking before, which is something that I have borrowed from Mahmoud Darwish, which is a psychological exile. Palestinians are not just exiled in person like my father was exiled after 1967, he was cut out from the possibility of returning and living in Palestine; they are exiled psychologically. They cannot speak and talk about Palestine and they cannot speak and talk about the beauty, the good things about Palestine. Palestine is only relegated to terrorists, to antisemitism, to squalor, to bombs and the beauty of the Palestinian people, the culture of the Palestinian people, the incredible history of this Palestinian people is relegated to nothingness. This is incredibly violent, and this is also a cause of suffering, this is in a nutshell what anti-Palestinian racism is.

Another thing that I speak about, and Tamara, I don’t want to take too much time, so tell me if you want to come in, in any way. I’m very, very mindful.

How did we get here? We didn’t get here by chance, we got here by design. What is the name of this design?  In the beginning of this year, the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah published in the Colombia Law Review, an article entitled Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept. What does it mean toward the Nakba as a legal concept? As a lawyer working in Israeli tribunals to try to protect Palestinians, he found it extremely difficult because the Palestinian population is fragmented, the Palestinian population is fragmented by the original Nakba. When the Palestinian people were expelled from easily in three quarters of a million and then all the various borders were created, the Palestinians started to exist in various forms in different territories under different laws, and then the Nakba continued in time; this is what he says. The Nakba is a legal form itself of fragmentation, of destitution, of apartheid. Apartheid is part of the Nakba, the apartheid that we see in Palestine is different from the apartheid we see in South Africa, for example. What I’m conceptualizing is the Nakba, like an earthquake with its epicentre in the Israel Palestine territory, but with its ripple effect throughout society until it gets to us and it gets into our society, into organisations and at an individual level it gets into our minds. The Palestinian exception is part of the Nakba and the psychological exile is part of the Nakba because the Nakba, the catastrophe is the erasure and is designed to erase the Palestinian people. The lack of voice and erasure happens is engineered and it does really come and its ripple effect from there.

One last concept that I would like to touch, and then perhaps we can go back and see if we want to change direction, is that many organisations and many places like universities are claiming neutrality at the period of genocide. They’re claiming neutrality differently from what they did when the Ukraine, for example, was attacked and Ukrainian people were killed by the Russian army; this claim of neutrality is also a political activity. Staying neutral in front of these incredible human rights and International Law breaches is incredibly political because it’s effectively dehumanising, or denies the suffering of a huge part of the people, of the Palestinian people and also of other Arabs and is very much rooted in the orientalism of adversity, which we talked about at the beginning. Therefore, the erasure really comes also towards neutrality, the status quo for Palestinians is a status quo for in which they are erased. So maintaining the status quo signifies perpetuating the erasure. Maintaining the status quo signifies engaging in a corporate political activity, or in a political activity which is designed to erase the Palestinian people.

So Tamara, we were speaking about connecting back to what we were saying. How do we move from here? What do we do from here?

Tamara:

I think everything you encapsulated as we’ve touched on is something that is not even just a more ongoing feature that’s continuous as you described, not a single rupture, but is far more pernicious. I’m sure a lot of people have read Edward Said’s 1984 article ‘Permission to Narrate’ which in it he was critiquing this these all-encompassing cliches that he was dissecting within Western media and it was in the distorted coverage of the Israeli, Lebanese June 1982 war. It was because of these all enveloping clouds,  justifying things under like giving Israel carte blanche to do what it wanted, like terrorism, and we’ve just come to the anniversary again in Sabra, Shatila with the Palestinian refugee camps when people were massacred with the Phalange militia. So I think now even then the Palestinian perspective has been conspicuously effaced time and time again, and whether this has been in New York Times articles or in Washington Post articles, there’s some really interesting research by Fatafa where she goes into a very objective statistical inquiry into how many times Palestinians have been included. We’re still seeing that even though there’s been an outpouring of commentary and critical analysis from all sorts of people, that actual Palestinian perspective itself is just not withstanding. I think moving on from there as you went into what can we do about it?

Again, Edward Said near to his death in an interview with David Barsamian, said that one has to keep telling Palestine stories in as many ways as possible, as insistently as possible and as compelling way as possible to keep attention to it just because there is always that fear that it might just disappear, again, going back to erasure. One thing that was particularly moving within Zahira’s article was that her father’s counsel was she should always hold her head up high, and it became the guiding maxim in life as a true Jerusalemite. He said that all faiths could live in peace together, and you thought this was a nice moral upbringing, but really it was to prepare you for the discrimination you might then, well, you were going to witness as a Palestinian woman later in life. We’ve seen this kind of sentiment embodied in everyone, I’m sure, as people have seen on social media, from Paleste al Akad to Motaz Azaiza, Sohal Nasser, Renad Attalah who’s a 10 year old chef, Bassam Alda and the filmmaker loggers like Mohamed Al Khalidi, Omar Shareed and Mohammed Herzallah. They’re civilians who since 7th October have become not just camera witnesses, they’re documenting and they’re trying to live under occupation as Embe says the state of living or normality is just not possible because it’s a permanent psychological bombardment. We have seen people manage to document Gaza’s simultaneous beauty and destruction and like Zahira pointed to with her grandma, her traditions like the tatreez and her dir’ah she’s wearing today and wearing the veils Christian women did, and Palestinian food songs zaatar whatever. This has compelled viewers to bear witness to Gazans and Palestinians radical and painful identification with our environment, which is something that scholars have gone into in less detail than should be given the fact that it’s often as soon as people show these things, the claim lays bare of Pallywood, which is essentially this idea that Palestinians; it’s refuted this suffering as though they’re not starving or living in horrible conditions. Mohammed El-Kurd wrote recently about how Palestinians are expected to be miserable and polite in their suffering, this politics of appeal, as where sympathy is only extended to those of perfect victimhood, but because this state of being, insisting on living, as Nurida has said, one can experience, Palestinians can experience travesty, tragedy, profound loss, and still make a joke about it because it reminds them that they’re human and it is just an example of the human condition, it’s always seen as Palestine has been an exception, as though there’s this subhuman discourse that is just wielded against them. If we are to imagine Palestine, Palestinian history as layers of stories and identities that have been erased and had to be rewritten over and over and over again, how can we then rerecover and amplify those voices? Would you suggest we are here to ensure that we do tell them, as Said says, as insistently as possible in compelling ways as possible given the climate of restricted academic freedom of speech and censorship, both also within the corporate sector, to evolve into those copartisary networks of witnessing solidarity in international alliances? I think if we conclude on this before we open up to questions, it would hopefully offer us just a moment of reflection, profound poesis and some hope.

Zahira:

Thank you so much, and thank you for speaking so nicely about the essay that I wrote. Because I wrote it and it has been published and I’ve been speaking so much about it, I don’t really understand anymore what it’s real value is. Thank you so much for reminding me how impactful that piece of writing is, and let me spend one second on that. When I wrote that essay, I really came out as Palestinian publicly, and that essay has changed my life because by speaking as Palestinian, I was encountered and I received messages by hundreds of Palestinians who told me, ‘I feel exactly like you; I cannot speak up, I’m hiding the fact that I’m Palestinian’, one person from Canada said ‘You know, you’re speaking my voice. It’s like you’re crawling into my skin and writing with my hands, my story, the story of someone who has witnessed the suffering, the exile of their father and their mother and someone that cannot speak about this exile because speaking about the suffering is not recognised as socially accepted’. It’s really important that we understand that there are a lot of Palestinians amongst us. I recently attended the biggest conference for organisational scholars. I study organisations and the biggest conference for organisational scholars in Milan. I was not allowed to have a slot speaking about Palestine within the conference, and so we did a fringe event in a cafe near Piazza in Milan and we sent around some WhatsApp messages. We had more than 100 people attending and amongst these people there were some editors of some really important academic journals and the organisers of the conference. People want to hear from Palestinians, about Palestinians and about their suffering. There is not enough spoken around. The erasure is becoming palpable, is becoming clear, and so my first really thing to say is if you are Palestinian and you are on the fence, come out. You’ll be surprised. In general, I’ve received much more support than anything else by really explaining the deep roots of my suffering as a Palestinian woman, and I think that doing that, I’m also honouring the memory of my father, who died in exile effectively. So it’s very, very important that we speak up, and it’s very important that whoever has the power allows Palestinian voices to come out. So what does that mean? Does that mean that in our organisations we need to raise awareness that obscuring or meeting or denouncing the existence of Palestinians is discriminating? It’s a discriminating practice. We need to be reflexive. If we are member of Parliament, vice chancellors of universities, professors, we need to be reflective on the fact that not using the word Palestine is discriminating, sitting on the fence and not using it rather than using it is actually perpetuating the erasure of the Palestinians.

We also, if we are in position of power in organisations, it’s really, really important to create sensitivity so far towards the suffering of Palestinians. After October 7th I saw incredible number of Linkedin posts, for example, speaking about the suffering of the Israelis that lost their lives in the Hamas attacks of October the 7th, they killed civilians, they went through houses; there’s also a lot of confusion on the role of the Israeli army, but it was really an awful event, despicable, and there was a lot of support for it. When the genocide started the day after there was zero support for the Palestinians. It’s really, really important to start understanding how deep the suffering is and to create a safe space for that suffering to be expressed. Then thirdly, and I think this is really, really important, it’s very important for anyone that is in a position of power,  I’m thinking about teachers, professors, managers, member of Parliament, vice chancellors, doctors, anyone that is in a position of some sort of power.

It’s very, very important to define a safe territory for the Palestinians and their advocates by helping them identify the defamatory claims of antisemitism and terrorists are a form of racism. They cannot coexist in our civil society. Also, what I forgot to say perhaps at the beginning is how did I come even to conceptualize this concept of erasure, and intergenerational trauma given by the sense of erasure, we are going to disappear. We will not exist anymore. Well, I actually came to conceptualise it, you know, in conversation with some Jewish friends that were telling me about how their grandmother and their mothers and their fathers were talking about the histories of erasure that came down from the family history. They were carrying their intergenerational trauma of erasure, and so the suffering, this suffering of being eliminated and being the last one to exist or not existing anymore is very much something the Palestinian and the Jewish people have in common. I think that accusing people of antisemitism just because they’re Palestinians, it’s the negatory because it’s politicising the existence of people in an unfair way, also it is really dangerous because it dilutes the really important concept of antisemitism, which is the real threat to the Jewish population that we should really keep on being watchful about. Again, for vice chancellors and people in organisations, I think it’s important to start drawing policies to protect Palestinian voices, and so I will come out very soon in the next couple of days with a report that I’ve written, which taps into a lot of resources that can really be useful. But we are starting to move hopefully towards a much more formal idea of what anti-Palestinian racism is and how important it is to protect Palestinians, because otherwise they will disappear and they will erase from our society because of self-censorship.

Tamara:

Well, I think on that note, thank you Zahira for finishing with a very profound moment, and I think the take away which warrants further research as ever, and is some really actually tangible and productive means by which we can ensure this kind of erasure does not we continue with our own individual personal lives and something that can be shared and spread more broadly.

Zahira:

Thank you, so much, Tamara, for your very gracious conversation and for bringing on so much interesting content as well. I’m learning so much from you.

Diana Safieh:

I would like to thank both of you, first of all, we’ve had lots of requests for the different articles that were mentioned throughout Zahira’s article and some of the ones that you mentioned Tamara. So hopefully, if you wouldn’t mind Tamara sharing them with me and I will include them in the e-mail where I share the recording. So I’ll put links to all of the mentioned articles in that e-mail, so you’ll find them all together, and also Zahira, we’ve got a couple of questions about where this report that you just mentioned will be shared.

Zahira:

I will certainly circulate it by my LinkedIn, so whoever wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I think this is a good idea because I will become much more active when the report goes out, speak about this and to point about research on this. So that’s a really good place. Diana, I don’t know if you want to circulate to the audience. I’m very happy to pass it on to you and to circulate to this audience, and then I will circulate the link for sure.

Diana:

all of those things will get shared on the Balfour Project mailing list and we will put links to them all on the page about this webinar where you’ll be able to see the recordings and the audio and video recordings of this podcast. We’ve got lots of comments, people saying that they found this talk very interesting. But I’m going to ask you a question from Tim Mattar, our one of our newest trustees at the Balfour Project. He would like to know how do we best raise the profile of Palestinian culture here in the UK as both of you are UK based, as is most of our audience.

Zahira:

Well, as far as I’m concerned, I think that we just need to speak about Palestine is if Palestine was a completely normal place on earth where people live normal lives. I have cousins in the West Bank who have completely normal lives, with my cousins that are getting married, that are going to universities and into school until life is upended by military action. Palestinians are just normal people that conduct normal life. It’s the normalisation of Palestinians, not as an exception, but as a people with own tradition and own right to exist. I personally feel that I am raising the profile just by speaking up. I would encourage anyone that is Palestinian occupies position of responsibility to speak up. Perhaps we could think about ways in which the Palestinian diaspora can meet and can reinforce this kind of narrative. But it’s a very good question.

Diana:

I’d like to buy everyone Zaytoun olive oil as a way of spreading the word. The best way is through someone’s stomach, right?

Zahira:

Can I actually say, that I’m so sorry, I saw a question by one of the speakers, Ronald Mendel, which has something very interesting which I wanted to address directly. He says, ‘Is it possible that the anti-Palestinian racism touches also people that are supporters of Palestinians, regardless if they’re Palestinians or not? I think that’s an absolutely right comment. It has actually been theorised like that by the original theorist, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abi Bakan. It’s one of the very few forms of racism that does not just stop at the people that belong to that group, but also to people that support that group. So that’s a very, very good question.

Diana:

I’ve got a question maybe for you Tamara, I think you spoke on this, but Zahira as well if you want, it’s from Andreas Katsaros. Sorry, I do try with everyone’s names. ‘Is there evidence for social media platforms having hard coded certain algorithms and so forth in terms of lowering the spread and the views of specific content, namely Palestinian or pro-Palestinian. Do we have any evidence of this?

Tamara:

I could speak about this for hours because this is the inquiry into my dissertation which was ‘Narrating Gaza Through the Glitch’. In 2021 during the Sheikh Jarrah evictions of occupied East Jerusalem, there was a lot of evidence when it was the Al-Aqsa Mosque during so-called Jerusalem Day, that anyone who tried to write on the hashtag to spread awareness about what was happening or the fact that the mosque was coming under complete fire from the IDF; anyone documenting things on the ground were prevented from sharing it; the hashtag was censored. There was also things like shadow banning, which people might be familiar with. It’s quite difficult to prove, as the Human Rights Watch report from last year has said. But there’s compelling evidence which shows anything that goes up about Palestine, versus let’s say a selfie of someone done up and or sharing a part of their day immediately gets such a reduction in views, and then also even being able to spread anything to do with political content; we’ve all actually been opted out of political exposure automatically by Instagram; you have to opt back in and there was no kind of ramifications as to how this would happen, how this would affect content from Gaza.

So what happened from 2021, there was the Business for Social Responsibility report which went into a lot of detail behind the algorithmic classifieds which essentially determine or moderate content that we see online, and there were recommendations which showed the fact that just before the evictions in the May, if I’m not mistaken, there was a reduction in full time employees who spoke in Hebrew. There was also a pattern of what is called inconsistent moderation by Monad elsewhere where Arabic is very much over moderated and it’s algorithmically trained to be over moderated because there are these things called reinforcement optimisation; ROI algorithms which reproductively encode certain biases perpetually. So if a person, let’s say at the time Al-Aqsa Mosque had been conflated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is designated a terrorist organisation under the dangerous organisations and individuals list, but then it was seen that conflation again of Palestinians and terrorism and then prevention from being able to speak online, and during 2023 to now, we’ve seen the rarification of these algorithmic classifiers over moderating, perceived as hostile Arabic content, which actually often evidences to the contrary. I’d encourage people to look into 7amleh, they’ve done a lot of reports on this as have Human Rights Watch to show Meta’s systemic censorship of Palestinian content.

It is worth bearing in mind that within the first few days after October 7th, there were nearly 800,000 hostile speech comments that came out, and to be able to moderate this is incredibly difficult. But where Facebook and Meta have said that there isn’t anything wrong with that, they’re hostile speech classifiers now. There’s been so much evidence to the contrary that because the Hebrew one in particular has been found to be inadequately trained, yet it was still deployed on Meta’s platforms to moderate content, and then simultaneously, as of August, there was a report that came out from internal documents, there was a whistle blower within Facebook who was saying, and also a letter by MetaMates for Ceasefire, where any time there’s been a bug like I spoke about where there was the automatic translation of Palestinians to Palestinians with terrorism or Meta’s own data, showing the content of children lying on hospital floors has been censored under the guidelines of sexual activity nudity, and I could go on like the number of examples that are there, but anyone who’s tried to raise these issues internally on forums describe themselves as being censored, penalised or rebuffed. So there is clearly a problem where when these biases, or Michel Foucault calls these types of things dispositives; it’s like an ensemble of heterogeneous elements within the guidelines, that are constructed within society, if they’re transcribed digitally what we’re then seeing is, Helga Tawil-Souri describes the digital occupation which transposes the physical checkpoints and barriers into the digital domain, then my main argument of the thesis was the fact that Meta through its algorithmic classifiers broadens this buffer zone, so it makes it even harder where certain end voices are privileged being that mainly of hostile Hebrew speech because it’s under enforced versus Arabic content. What we’re seeing is regardless of the language, these hostile speech classifiers being completely inadequate, and so they’re not protecting anybody. The fact that they’re being deployed and they’re continuously learning and adapting on training data means that when we’re seeing, I don’t really want to repeat some of the comments that I saw, people can read them for themselves in the Human Rights Watch report, but some of those that are coming up are then once they’ve been reviewed, supposedly still saying that they’re not going against any community guidelines. So yeah, there is a real online platform, censorship and discrimination, and the results from those reports and any kind of investigative journalism account you read are very profound and so troubling that, yeah, just very worrying.

Diana:

I’ve got an adorable comment from Johnny Byrne who says ‘this isn’t a question, it’s a comment, I wear a free Palestine badge most of the time and try to carry spares; it attracts plenty of positive comments, very few adverse ones, and often leads to the conversation about Palestine. When people seem really interested, I offer them a free badge. I always correct people who talk about Israel when they mean Palestine’. So yes, keep talking about us

Then I’ve got a question from Claire Wolford ‘I’m a refugee from Hungary, I have three children and eight grandchildren. None of them are recognized as refugees anywhere in the world. Why are Palestinians inheriting refugee status, and why do Arab countries in the Middle East not allow Palestinians in their countries to become citizens?

Zahira:

Thank you very much Diana, I can take this one. First of all, there is no Palestinian state and we are still awaiting for the creation of a Palestinian state. The great majority of countries in the World have recognised the Palestinian state; the State of Palestine has recently taken a seat in the UN, but it doesn’t yet exist as a state. Therefore the occupation is still very much a reality and is still very active, and it is illegal under International Law. There is a direct connection with the fact that the state of refugee is effectively people that are awaiting to go back to their land, as soon as the State is created or they are refugees because they are connected to their land. They were expelled and they are waiting for the legal status that will come, when the State of Palestine will be created. That’s number one, and number two is because if the Arab states were starting to give them their own citizenship, that would be also seen by some Arab states as participating to the process of ethnic cleansing, where they would actually then remove these people perpetually from the possibility of any return.

Tamara:

I’d also just briefly add as well that I’d read this other article, sorry, I keep referring to articles because I will give a list to share, but it was basically saying how UNHCR was created in 1950 and the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees; it didn’t actually address Palestinian displacement. It was limited to European refugees displaced before 1951, and then the 1967 protocol expanded this scope globally, but the UN assigned UNRWA specifically to have separate responsibility for Palestinian refugees and a year before the UNHCR. So again what we’re seeing is this separation and a state of exception that’s applied just to Palestine, it wasn’t until much later adopted into this Global framework; it was considered under UNRWA. I would encourage people to look at the ArabLit Quarterly as to the most recent edition, Gaza Gaza Gaza, on how that manifested on the ground because UNRWA used to also have its own problems with the treatment of Palestinians back in those times; that was just the only comment I’d like to add.

Diana:

Thank you both, we’ve got another question from Bart Mcgetrick, ‘Do you see a distinctive role for Palestinian universities? Bethlehem University exists to be a beacon of peace in Palestine; Palestinian society’.

Zahira:

Well, the unfortunate thing is that the majority of universities have now been destroyed completely. The history of the Palestinian university is very interesting; they started to be founded in 1960. The first one to be found was Birzeit University, which is also as now the main university in the West Bank. Then there were universities in Gaza that really started from tents, and they developed into beautiful, beautiful big universities; there were twelve of them. They have now all been completely destroyed or occupied and used for ammunition and then exploded, they do not exist anymore. However, the buildings do not exist, the university exists, so what we are doing in many universities, we are providing online learning for students in Gaza as the academic year has started and some of them have enrolled; the universities do not exist physically right now, and I find it very difficult. Of course the universities in Palestine provide a role like they do in every single country; it’s not the University of Palestine are different from other universities; they’re there to educate the young generations, the know how in preparation for the State of Palestine, and I think that’s why precisely they were targeted by Israel and destroyed because the future generation of Palestine and Palestinians are formed in the universities. That’s what I wanted to say, it’s very, very painful for me as a university professor to speak about the destruction of the universities in Gaza.

Diana:

Yeah, that has long reaching effects like you say, that’s the future generations.

Zahira:

The intention here is explicit, scholasticide is to destroy future, not even present knowledge, but also the future possibility of creating knowledge.

Diana:

I gathered from what you were saying that your father was also a 1967 refugee, outside of Palestine during the Six-Day War, my dad was studying at the same time and that was another very clear intention of removing students that were studying abroad.

 

Zahira:

Yeah, absolutely, and he was not allowed to go back to participate to the census, and therefore he remained exiled.

Diana:

Absolutely. As I mentioned, I will be sharing all the links of the articles that were mentioned that will go out in the e-mail with the recordings of this webinar, and as you also know these webinars, we host them now twice a month and they are free, but if you do want to support us, that would be very, very helpful. I’ve posted a link on how to make a donation to the Balfour Project; we try to keep them free so that we can reach as wide a number of people as possible. We also ask that you share this webinar with anyone you think that might be interested. We tried to have these webinars covering a whole range of different topics, all to do with Israel, Palestine, obviously, but the idea is hopefully there will be something in there of interest to everyone, whether it’s the arts or history or politics or the environment. There are different hooks for each of the webinars, so please do have a look at our past webinars, all of them are recorded and put on the website as well, and if you think any of them might be interesting for any of your friends, help us spread the word. That’s another way to reduce the erasure of our culture. Then if you want to support us more regularly and become a friend of the Balfour Project, that’s by donating a monthly amount to us; I’ve posted the link for that. That will help us plan our future, keep our admin costs down and just give us a bit more security so that we can go forward with the work that we’re trying to do.

It also means that you have access to roughly quarterly friends events, where you can have information meetings with different key people in the Balfour Project. Sometimes we get a special guest speaker and also free or discounted tickets to our paid events like our film screenings, and our film screenings quite often, well, most of the time, I think every time we’ve had a Q and A with the director after the film screening, which has been really, really special. So do keep an eye out for that and do think about becoming a friend of the Balfour Project, that is signing up for a regular donation of any amount per month. That was my little appeal to our supporters.

I’m going to end on one last question because we were actually talking about this before we clicked ‘Go Live’, it’s from Christabel Amos Lewis. ‘Day-to-day on the news from the BBC to which I listen, it is striking that as soon as some other attack or warfare happens elsewhere from Gaza and the West Bank, there’s suddenly no more reporting about what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank anymore. This is the case with so many conflicts, we hear about them on day one, but the focus shifts swiftly to somewhere else, and the continuing suffering in conflicts is not touched upon. Who has told us anything today about what’s happening in Gaza? Perhaps where should we be getting our news? How can we carry on following what is going on when there’s so much other horrendous activities going on in Lebanon and so forth?’

Tamara:

Want to go super super briefly; I think that the most important thing one can do is to follow the content creators themselves from Gaza on Instagram, as much as these algorithms have been shown to spread hate seven times faster than fact, it might sound like a cliche, but they also spread inspiration just as fast as hate. For example, Omar Shareed and Muhammad Hazallah; if anyone wants to see what the day-to-day life existence is like in Gaza at the moment, how people are living despite the immense, immense oppression, then you’ll get a very intimate close insight to the embodiment of what we see in the news beyond the headlines, and that real lived experience. Even when before you’re touching on education, what in microcosm like all of people’s college bags that generation, they describe it as an entire generation start moving forward because their college bags have been repurposed as evacuation bags. I think that actually listening to those voices, following them, putting in the due time to seek these civilians, like Palestinians within Gaza is the most one can do because I don’t think, as time and time again we’ve seen mainstream media can be wholly relied on to give us that insight.

Zahira:

So seek the Palestinian voice exactly as Tamara says; seek the Palestinian voice, follow Palestinian voices, trust the Palestinian voice, trust that what people are saying is happening on the ground is actually happening. There is such a mistrust of Palestinian voices precisely because there is this confounding with terrorism while actually we have seen incredibly huge institutional lies, you know, from Israel which have been dismantled again and again. So trust Palestinians, trust the Palestinian voices, follow Palestinian voices. Also do not just follow the usual suspects, follow a number of different, Al Jazeera, for example, is doing a fantastic job in speaking about what is happening on the ground in Gaza and in Palestine. So it’s actually not that complicated, it requires a little bit to get out of the bubble. It’s quite interesting, but when Asian Middle Eastern students come to Sussex or come to the UK, to the University of UK, they say, ‘my gosh, you say you have freedom of speech here, you don’t.’  So that’s super interesting because we think that these people that live in countries, when there is restricted freedom of speech, come here and they say, actually you do not have freedom of speech. We really need to get out of these bubbles and really start listening to reputable sources, Palestinian people on the ground, but also reputable sources like Al Jazeera, who bring the Arab voice to the front.

Diana:

Thank you so much ladies, I actually have a couple of people asking for content creators, I have an article that is already out, but I think you have to wait a few more weeks for it to be free in the Washington report on Middle East affairs about Instagram accounts to follow, to get a better idea of what’s going on in Gaza. It is mainly people from within Gaza, but also some other International organisations or West Bank and Israeli organisations. There’s a whole range, so perhaps I will see if the Balfour Project will share that on the mailing list as well, because we’ve had a couple of requests for content creators on Instagram that would be a good idea to follow; loads of photojournalists who their only outlet now is social media and their only way of sharing stories is through social media, because everything else has just been closed down as an option for them. So on that note ladies, I want to say thank you so much, it has been so fascinating, they’ve had loads of positive comments about how insightful that was. Everyone in the audience, I will be sharing the chat box with the speakers, so please do take this last final moment to post anything in there if you want them to read it. We’ve had a few requests for contact because some people working on similar things as you, so I will share that with you ladies. I just want to thank everyone who’s come along today. Like I said, please do share with anyone you think might be interested and I want to thank our two speakers on behalf of everyone who came along because you have been so amazing, your work is amazing and I’ll be sharing what you get up to in the future with our supporters as well. Thank you very much everyone.

 

References mentioned by the speakers during this webinar:

Tamara El-Halawani’s references

• 7amleh (2021) The Attacks on Palestinian Digital Rights Progress Report, May 6-19, 2021. issue brief. 7amleh, pp. 1–16.
• 7amleh (2023a) The Palestinian Digital Rights Situation since October 7th 2023. rep. 7amleh, pp. 1–13.
• 7amleh (2023b) Meta should stop profiting from hate 7amleh – The Arab Center For the Advancement of Social Media. Available at: https://7amleh.org/2023/11/21/meta-should-stop-profiting-from-hate (Accessed: 24 August 2024).
• Abraham, Y. (2023) ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza, +972 Magazine. Available at: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ (Accessed: 18 September 2024).
• Bakan, A. B. and Abu-Laban, Y. (2024) ‘Anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, and solidarity: considerations towards an analytic of praxis’, Studies in Political Economy, 105(1), pp. 107–122. doi: 10.1080/07078552.2024.2325300.
• BSR (2022) Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine in May 2021 Insights and Recommendations. rep. Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), pp. 1–10.
• El-Kurd, M. (2023) The Right to Speak for Ourselves, The Nation. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestinians-claim-the-right-to-narrate/ (Accessed: 18 September 2024).
• Elswah, M. (2023) Does AI Understand Arabic? Evaluating The Politics Behind the Algorithmic Arabic Content Moderation. Publication. Harvard University – Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; University of Oxford – Oxford Internet Institute, pp. 1–17.
• HRW (2023) Meta’s Broken Promises Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook. rep. Human Rights Watch, pp. 1–74.
• Lewis, K. (2023b) ‘Platform necropolitics: Content moderation and censorship of pro-Palestinian voices on social media’, in N. Miladi (ed.) Global Media Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Reporting the Sheikh Jarrah Evictions. London: I.B. Tauris & Company (Bloomsbury Publishing), pp. 219–236.
• Lubin, A. (2014) In Geographies of Liberation: The Making of the Afro-Arab Political Imaginary. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Paul, K. (2024) Meta struggles with moderation in Hebrew, according to ex-employee and internal documents, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/15/meta-content-moderation-hebrew#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhen%20Palestinian%20voices%20are%20silenced,hear%20propaganda%20that%20dehumanizes%20Palestinians. (Accessed: 20 August 2024).
• Said, E. (1984) ‘Permission to Narrate’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 13(3), pp. 27–48. doi:10.2307/2536688.
• Said, E. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books: Random House Inc.
• Said, E. (2000) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. New York City: Granta.
• Said, E. (2019 [1978]) Orientalism. VII. London: Pantheon Books, Penguin Random House UK.
• Said, E. W., and Barsamian, D. (2003). Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press.
• Stein, R.L. (2021) ‘“The Boy Who Wasn’t Really Killed”: Israeli State Violence in the Age of the Smartphone Witness’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 53(4), pp. 620–638. doi:10.1017/S0020743821000453.
• Tatour, L. (2024) ‘Censoring Palestine: human rights, academic freedom and the IHRA’, Australian Journal of Human Rights, pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1080/1323238X.2024.2385504.
• Tawil-Souri, H. (2012) ‘Digital Occupation: Gaza’s High-Tech Enclosure’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 41(2), pp. 27–43. doi:10.1525/jps.2012.xli.2.27.
• Tawil-Souri, H. (2015a) ‘Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine’, in L. Parkes and N. Starosielski (eds.) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 157–180.
• Tawil-Souri, H. (2015b) ‘The Digital Occupation of Gaza: An Interview with Helga Tawil-Souri’, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network. Edited by S. Dawes, 8(2), pp. 1–18. doi:10.31165/nk.2015.82.374.
• Tawil-Souri, H. (2016) Gaza as Larger than Life in Gaza as Metaphor, Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (eds.) London: Hurst and New York: Oxford University Press: pp.15-27

Dr Zahira Jaser’s references:

• Abu-Laban, Y., & Bakan, A. B. (2021). Anti-Palestinian racism: Analyzing the unnamed and suppressed reality. POMEPS Studies, 44, 143–149.
• Abu-Laban, Y., & Bakan, A. B. (2022). Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting. The Political Quarterly, 93(3), 508–516.
• Ayyash, M. M. (2023). The toxic other: The Palestinian critique and debates about race and racism. Critical Sociology, 49(6), 953–966.
• Bakan, A. B., & Abu-Laban, Y. (2022). The Israel/Palestine racial contract and the challenge of anti-racism: A case study of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism. In The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East (pp. 13–35). Routledge.
• Bazian, H. (2015). The islamophobia industry and the demonization of Palestine: Implications for American studies. American Quarterly, 67(4), 1057–1066.
• Eghbariah, R. (2024). TOWARD NAKBA AS A LEGAL CONCEPT. Columbia Law Review, 124(4).
• Gould, R. (2020). The IHRA definition of antisemitism: defining antisemitism by erasing Palestinians. The Political Quarterly, 91(4), 825-831
• Gould, R. (2023). Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. Verso Books.
• Herzog, H., Sharon, S., & Leykin, I. (2008). Racism and the politics of signification: Israeli public discourse on racism towards Palestinian citizens. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(6), 1091–1109.