How We Change Our Minds

Reflections on Resistance and Representation

I’m obsessed with questions of memory. I’m a nonfiction writer and have spent most of my life trying to write stories from the position of partial memory, in conversation with folks who also are drawing on partial memory. As an anthropologist, I used to take obsessive field notes. As a person who is now writing more from a personal and less from an analytical perspective, I’ve found that sometimes the incompleteness of memory is just as much the story as what actually happened. Here’s a story about memory.

Last week (as you all probably know), the NYTimes Magazine published an article about academic freedom, featuring my story. As a writer, I hate being written about (and for folks who think I wrote the article - I didn’t! It was written by Sarah Viren, I was just the subject). Writing is about control, it’s about making a dictatorial choice around language, narrative, and structure (to name just a few devices). I don’t like relinquishing control over those things, I don’t like letting someone else tell my story. I also hate being photographed for similar reasons. Control, frame, angle. I don’t like being the subject of someone else’s story. In any case, that has made the past year very weird for me.

While I was going through the fact checking process (which was pretty extensive), I was alerted to a quote from a former student, who was in class with me during the Fall 2023 semester. Remembering the infamous class meeting of October 12th, the student said of me,

“She actively said: “I do not condone Hamas or its actions. I think that violence is horrible….” But her caveat to that was, “but it’s not unexpected.”

Now, maybe I said that (this is a good student, with a great memory, who I have known for a long time). But it didn’t sound like me (or, it sounded like an extracted sentence from a longer something I said). When I went back to back to my notes, which I agonized over for days, this is what I actually wrote down to say to my class:

“Hamas is categorized as a terrorist organization in the west but it is actually an activist organization, liberation group, and elected political party that also contains a wing involved in arms resistance. While I’m not condoning the events of October 7th, I do want to stress that we should not be at all surprised, given 75 years of Israeli occupation and genocide, in addition to the ongoing blockade of Gaza. If we are going to talk about Hamas, we have to actually understand what the group is and does.”

As context, in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, as the dust was settling and various forms of Zionist atrocity propaganda was being circulated (in large part by the NYTimes), I told my students I would dedicate October 12th to answering their questions and asked them to send me those questions beforehand if they wanted to ask something but felt scared or intimidated to do so in front of the class. All the questions (or at least almost all the questions) were about Hamas.

So, what I remember about that week was knowing that I had to go into my classroom and talk about Hamas, Al Aqsa Flood, and the genocidal aftermath of October 7th, perpetuated by the Zionist State. I knew that some of my students might be Zionists, whether actively or passively, and so I wanted to strategically speak to them in ways that didn’t immediately lose them. I wanted them to understand the context, engage history, and take seriously the violence of a Jewish supremacist state. I also knew, despite my Zionist detractors online, that my job was not to give my personal political take but instead give my students the information they needed in order to have an informed understanding of ongoing genocidal events. Writing out what I said to my class that day resulted in an essay I wrote, called Reframing Hamas, published by Allegra Lab in December 2023.

I’m not saying I got it right that day (or in that essay). But I did try (while most of my colleagues, across campus and throughout the country, said nothing). And that day set off a serious of events that eventually led to me being investigated and fired by my college.

In any case, I was upset that there was no room in the article for me to contribute a more nuanced quote of what I said that day in class, considering the time I spent choosing my words. But I didn’t think much of it when the article came out, as the quote was a memory from a student, recalled more than a year after the event. We all remember the past differently and my own political investments have developed extensively over the past twenty months. Anything I would have said two years ago is likely different from what I would say today.

I was reminded of that passage later in the day, however, when someone who follows me on Twitter reposted a screenshot of the student’s memory from the article, as evidence that I am actually a Zionist and don’t support resistance. I don’t write any of this from a defensive position (I hope). And it’s none of my business what other people post about me online, unless they want to engage me, which - as long as you’re not a Zionist - I welcome (note - I dm’d this person and never heard back. For the record, I do not think they owe me anything, including engagement, but I would have liked to talk with them). Instead, I’m thinking about how many of us have approached the past twenty months - as a necessary education, given to us by many Palestinians, who are telling us about their experience living and dying through genocide (as well as apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the absolutely dehumanizing rhetoric of Israel, the US, and their Western allies). It is a gift to be able to change one’s mind. My own thinking has developed exponentially over the past twenty months, mostly due to:

1. Being in conversation with my Palestinian friends

2. Reading writing by Palestinian thinkers and artists

3. Following Palestinians (both in occupied Palestine and the diaspora) on social media.

This has been a great education and my thinking has developed in two major ways:

First, I have more publicly and clearly spoken out in support of resistance, by any means possible, including violent resistance. This is partially a moral and ethical stance - colonized and oppressed people have a moral and ethical right to resist their occupiers and people experiencing genocide and ethnic cleansing have a moral and ethical right to resist those who are annihilating them. I support this resistance by any means necessary. I also have no interest in glorifying nonviolent resistance (and I think the division between violent and nonviolent is not as clear as some of us would like to imagine it is). If we look at the BDS movement, the Great March of Return, or the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, “nonviolent” resistance is treated the same as violent resistance (BDS has been criminalized, protestors at Gaza’s Great March of Return actions were shot, maimed, and murdered by the thousands, and the 2010 Freedom Flotilla ended with Israel murdering 9 activists). As Israel’s interception of the Madleen and abduction of 12 activists in International waters has revealed, non-violent resistance cannot and will not end state violence. In fact, it never has, and, as we have seen, from Palestine to Los Angeles, condemnation of violent resistance merely legitimizes and supports state violence.

This argument is also a legal one - the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has explicitly acknowledged the right of Palestinians to resist Israel’s military occupation, including through armed struggle. This right is clearly stated in UNGA Resolution 3314 (1974) and UNGA Resolution 37/43 (1982). After watching the worst things imaginable, being done to Palestinian people in Gaza every day for the past 20 months, how can we work towards dismantling this genocidal imperial structure, both materially and intellectually? Almost a million people have been murdered, millions more are on the brink of starvation. Palestinians are being bombed, sniped, burned alive by Israel and its allies. Palestinians are being crushed under buildings, raped, beaten, attacked by dogs. Left to die in incubators. Frozen to death. Denied water & healthcare. Starved to death. All resistance against this horror is justified.

The lesson here is that our job is to resist empire and domination, whether this violence is occurring in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, or here in the United States.

Here’s a second way I have changed my mind - I have shifted the way I want to show up in the world as a Jewish person. As a caveat, I have always had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with Judaism. I’m not religious and I have never found joy or a sense of belonging in predominantly Jewish spaces. This may be for many reasons but mainly it’s because of Zionism. Most of the Jewish spaces I encountered as a young person were also explicitly Zionist and I wanted nothing to do with this ideology. However, for years, beginning in 2004 and stretching until last year, I would identify as an anti-Zionist Jewish person in order to counter the idea that Judaism and Zionism are inextricably linked. I would argue that Judaism and Zionism are not the same, I would argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. The first thing I wrote and published after Al Aqsa Flood was an essay called “Never Again Means Never Again for Anyone.” I thought being Jewish protected me from these accusations of antisemitism (it didn’t) and I felt a moral obligation to resist a Jewish supremacist project of settler colonial genocide. When the opportunity arose, I would draw on “Jewish values” as a reason to decry genocide.

I have stopped doing this. In large part because I have learned, mostly from Palestinian friends and folks I read or follow on social media, that doing so actually reproduces the Jewish supremacy anti-Zionist Jews claim to resist. There is actually nothing inherently anti-genocide about Judaism and drawing on Jewish values (which I have been guilty of doing in the past) frames Jewish people as somehow morally superior in this struggle. We are not. As I wrote on Twitter on Saturday, Jewish people have a moral obligation to engage the work of dismantling Zionism (as Zionism/Jewish supremacy is genocidal) but we are not more moral because we do this work. This distinction isn’t complicated - this work is the bare minimum for being a person right now.

So these are two major ways my thinking has changed over the past 20 months. As a teacher and lifelong learner, I know it is both scary and necessary to change our minds. I hope I keep learning and growing and developing my thinking around Palestine, liberation, resistance, and a more just future. This is part of the work.

Lastly, in the thread posted about me last week, one of the commenters wrote that my comments on resistance was “disappointing” and wondered “did we ever ask what Maura’s politics was?” So here is an inexhaustive list of some of my political commitments, in case you are curious:

Things I am working to dismantle:

Capitalism; Imperialism; Supremacist ideology, including Zionism, a Jewish supremacist project; The Nation State/borders; The police (ACAB ACAB ACAB); TERFism

Things I support:

Liberation struggles; All forms of resistance against occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other settler colonial violence; The fall of white supremacist hetero-patriarchy; The end of “Western Civilization;” Socialism (including universal health care, free education, and access to housing/food/water for all); Disability justice; Not eating animals; Mutual Aid

On that last note, right now, 90% of the conversations I am having with folks are some version of “what can we do?” One thing we can all do, regardless of financial situation, is support mutual aid projects to get food and aid into Gaza (and Sudan). This might be by donating, it might be by sharing campaigns. My friend Ammiel is currently supporting the campaign of a talented artist in Gaza named Kholoud Hammad and I want to highlight her here:

“Kholoud is one of many incredibly talented & truly great artists still working in Gaza, documenting the genocide & ongoing life in the midst of it. Follow this link to donate. In addition to the fundraising campaign, this page has an excellent interview with her from a few months ago (you can also read it here). You can also see some of her work, along with links on how to contribute to her & her family’s needs & how to purchase prints through Gerard Dalbon, an extraordinary artist himself, who curated a recent exhibit & auction of work by Palestinian artists in Gaza at Mayday in Brooklyn. If you are on Instagram, you can see more of Kholoud’s work & follow her here.”

I know some folks are stretched very thin financially. I get it. But for all of us, the bare minimum we can do right now is pay attention, learn, and be willing to change our mind. I have changed my mind a lot. I will continue to change my mind. I’m grateful for this opportunity. I take responsibility for past harms I have caused. This is something we all owe to each other - accountability and growth. I’m grateful to have an outlet for this with you all, here.

In the next week or two, I will share a list of resources (books, articles, etc) that have really helped me these past two years. For now, I’ll say that I have been spending time with Ghassan Kanafani’s Selected Political Writings, Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims (buy both these books here and the proceeds got to The Sameer Project), and publications that emerged from The Palestine Research Center (including Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965). Stay tuned for more.

In the meantime, don’t stop talking about Palestine.