Introduction by Dr. Loubna Qutami
When our semester began in January of 2024, a ceasefire in Gaza was still nowhere in sight. Brown University, where I am currently a visiting postdoctoral research associate, had become a battleground between students and the administration over the university’s complicity in the genocide, siege, and Occupation of Palestine. The question at the heart of the battle was: how would history remember this moment?
In the weeks leading up to the start of our class, I asked myself: how could I teach a course on Palestine in the context of accelerated genocide? How does one speak of Palestine, when empire continues to restrict and punish what is thinkable, speakable, and teachable? And how do I make use of the classroom space when students are immersed in a critical learning journey outside the classroom, which may hold more transformative power than what they might attain inside it?
Responsibility Toward Critical Study
I held a handful of values close as we began the semester.
I sought to center a historically grounded, regionally contextual and intellectually and politically rigorous study of Palestine and the Palestinians — a commitment that has only grown as the Palestinian struggle has gained ground within mainstream circuits and garnered interest among newcomers. Palestine/Palestinians could not merely be reduced to solidarity hashtags. I could not let Palestine be abstracted from its own historical and contextual specificity. I insisted that Palestine and the Palestinians are deserving of more.
Interest in the question of Palestine has notably increased as people have discovered that it is an important site for learning and teaching about the contradictions and cruelties of the so-called post-colonial and post-racial world order. However, the lessons the Palestinian struggle teaches can easily be obscured — or appropriated — if serious intellectual inquiry, historical grounding, and attention to a heterogeneity of Palestinian social and political experiences are absent from their instruction. I hoped to teach my students about the responsibility of critical study and engagement in contradictions, not only for Palestine, but all places, living histories, and causes where power holds a palpable say in restricting everyday people’s lives and futures.
I wanted my students to understand that the seriousness with which they approached the class readings and assignments was not about proving themselves in a professional meritocracy. Rather, it was — and is — about the responsibilities they must shoulder as people of conscience, with duties to one another, the world, and to advancing their own learning from a place of humility. There can be no true revolutionary change without revolutionary consciousness and the deep critical study it requires.
Palestinian Liberation and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy
As a scholar and teacher trained in ethnic studies — a field born of the relentless energy of the 1968 student movement that fought to advance anti-/de-colonial knowledge in education — I have always believed in the importance of the classroom as a pedagogical space that can facilitate revolutionary educational experiences, to serve liberatory aims in the outside world.
The challenge became understanding how to maintain that pedagogical space when I, alongside most of my students, was already engaged in a transformative learning journey outside the classroom, in collective movement, both on and off campus.
The genocide in Palestine–and the movements it spawned–forced upon me the political and intellectual clarity required for teaching, learning, and acting in the most authentic and relevant ways possible. I was not interested in reducing Palestine and the Palestinian people to objects of commodified institutional study. Nor was I concerned with defensively qualifying Palestinian narratives and experiences in reaction to mounting forms of repression of free speech and academic freedom that accompanied the genocide. I also could not ignore what was happening in real time outside the classroom which was coloring our learning journey every step of the way.
Instead, I aimed to teach what was relevant to the learning journey and transformative process my students were already engaged in. Sometimes, that meant shifting the focus of a lecture to discuss how past generations of student and youth movements organized to win. Other times, it involved engaging in discussions on the history of U.S. imperialism in other parts of the world to examine the current U.S. foreign policy stance on Palestine. It also meant having a deeper discussion on Palestinian prisoner hunger strikes while my own students were hunger striking. At times, I had to make space for students to explore how the genocide in Palestine evoked complex wounds in their own familial and national histories. Other times, it meant offering a moment for tired, hurting, and grieving students to breathe, or extending grace to those whose capacity to submit assignments on time was diminishing throughout the semester.
As difficult as it was to teach a class like this while genocide prevailed, it felt like the most important class I would ever teach. This was because the pedagogical imperative of ethnic studies has always been about developing a learning community inside a classroom that can better prepare itself to collectively dream, imagine, plan, and build futures that are free from structural oppression. Allowing the classroom to be a place where students already engaged in the freedom struggle could reflect deeply, theorize, and expand their understanding of revolutionary thought and liberatory methodologies was my way of maintaining fidelity to ethnic studies pedagogy and Palestinian liberation.
The Student Movement at Brown University
In the first two months of the genocide, the student movement for justice in Palestine at Brown had sustained over a dozen protests, rallies, teach-ins, and public forums demanding the university administration call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, protect the rights and freedoms of Palestinians and their allies on campus, and allow a vote on divestment to be brought forth to the Brown Corporation’s board of directors. Students insisted that they could not stand idly by as their university profited from the killing and subjugation of Palestinians.
On Nov. 8, 20 students affiliated with Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) at Brown University staged a sit-in at University Hall. The students made headlines when they were arrested and forcibly removed from the building, only to eventually have the charges against them dropped after a horrific incident shook the Brown community days later. On Nov. 25, 2023, a Palestinian student at Brown — Hisham Awartani — and his two friends, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed, were shot with live ammunition while visiting Hisham’s family in Vermont. News of the attack — which was driven by anti-Palestinian racism — sent shockwaves throughout the Brown community, prompting a second student sit-in of 41 students at University Hall, organized by the Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) on Dec. 8, 2023. Though charges for willful trespassing against the BDC 41, most of whom were Students of Color, were never dropped, the student movement at Brown relentlessly continued to organize.
By February of 2024, as the genocide entered its fifth month, 19 Brown University students went on hunger strike for eight days demanding the University divest. Protests, rallies, art-builds, singing circles, and teach-ins continued in its wake, but the University administration callously continued to ignore the demands of the student movement and pursued punitive and retaliatory measures against them.
On April 24, 2024, Brown University students joined their peers at Columbia, Yale, New York University, and across the world by launching their own encampment and Popular/Peoples University for Gaza public education program. While the initial university response mirrored the repressive measures other administrations had taken against campers, the students had negotiated and accepted an agreement one week into the encampment. Though it had refused to drop the charges against the BDC 41, the administration agreed to allow the students to make their case for divestment to the Brown Corporation — the entity responsible for the 6.6 billion dollar endowment and the university’s investment policies. Students were also promised that the Corporation would vote on divestment in their October 2024 meeting.
The Brown settlement was reached on the same day that Columbia University called in the NYPD to beat and arrest dozens of students. Later that evening, Zionist vigilante mobs attacked the student encampment at my home institution, UCLA, where the administration idly stood by for hours into the assault. The contrast in how these administrations handled the crisis on their campus did not go unnoticed. The New York Times ran a piece that hailed Brown's leadership for setting a “rare example” of de-escalation. Other press coverage demonized student activists across the nation — who were portrayed as troublemakers — while praising Brown students for practicing so-called “nonviolent” and “civil” protest methods. Critics of Brown’s encampment hurled damaging allegations against the campers for abandoning the demand to drop the charges against the BDC 41 and for accepting a settlement that included a vote on divestment rather than divestment itself. From being revered as the exemplars of good student protest to being accused of betraying Palestinians in Gaza and their student comrades worldwide, the vitriol that followed the closure of the Brown encampment weighed heavy on many of the students.
There are varying interpretations of the tactical and political challenges, mistakes, and successes of the student encampment at Brown. Many students were left with a sense of betrayal from their comrades. Some left remorseful or questioning the decisions they had made. Some felt that the outcome of the encampment stemmed from the broader organizing conflicts (both ideological and tactical) and tense dynamics between student activists that preceded the launch of the encampment. Others left with a profound sense of appreciation and gratitude for the experience and were proud of what it was able to achieve, even as a tactical win.
In one of our closing and most emotional class sessions, we discussed the importance of holding principles of humility, grace, and love for one another in movement-building, despite how challenging such a practice might be in harsh times and irrespective of our differences. One student validated this point when she shared, “I don’t know if what we did was wrong or right yet. But we are only 19/20 years old. We are still learning. And I think as long as we have good minds and hearts, and we try our best, it is okay to make mistakes. We have to forgive ourselves and each other.”
We also discussed the challenges of sustaining a collective political ethic that can achieve a strategic win, even if it falls short of what is desired and necessary and even if the narrative that surrounds it discredits our efforts. We also discussed the importance of understanding that we, as a learning community, were only one small part of a larger movement and history that has cumulatively worked to achieve Palestinian liberation and that we must continue to reference the learned lessons from revolutionary movements, past and present, in our intellectual and political practices.
While the class was a space to read, study, and learn about Palestine and the Palestinians in deeper and more meaningful ways, it was equally about creating a space where students could make sense of the personal and collective learning journeys as witnesses to the genocide and as student organizers protesting against it. The essays below reflect the most important — and often intimate — lessons the students have gleaned from the Palestinian liberation struggle, the genocide in Gaza, the classroom and its contents, and the Brown student movement for justice in Palestine.
What follows is a collection of select final essays written by undergraduate students who completed the Palestine in Comparative Ethnic Studies course at Brown University.
