A Collection of Thoughts on This Moment
Dear Readers,
I have not written a newsletter in months because I have found myself without words. I have been experiencing what Hala Alyan calls “wordlessness.” (By the way, Hala Alyan’s own substack, moonseed, is amazing. Please subscribe!). I haven’t even been able to journal, to write essays, or anything. I just stare at the blank page and nothing comes out.
My wordlessness comes from bearing witness to things that simply defy comprehension, let alone finding words to describe what I am seeing, or how I feel about it. All I know is that I have repeatedly felt like the air has been knocked out of me, as if punched in the stomach. Rendered breathless, gasping for air. Like my heart aches and breaks so fully that I wonder how I still have one at all. Like my throat is so tight, I can barely swallow. Certainly I am not alone, nor should my own experience be what’s centered here.
Over the last months, we have witnessed ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, while our mainstream media either ignores these horrors altogether, or distorts the reality into something unrecognizable to anyone paying attention.
We are watching fascist ideas be presented as mainstream, and those who speak against fascism and genocide treated and talked about as radicals, zealots, and dangers to our society.
We are being pressured to vote as if democracy depends on it, but without any regard to the sanctity of life, liberation, or even care that the status quo inflicts on millions of people.
Our caseload grows. I continue to listen as clients report out the horrors and profound indignities they are experiencing while incarcerated. The government attorneys are still arguing that incarceration is the only answer, and the judges, in large part, agree.
And universities continue to punish students and activists for being our collective voices of consciousness. Yet the students and activists remain steadfast.
For all of us — somehow, we are expected to keep producing, going to work, moving forward while clutching our stomachs and our hearts, while trying to catch our breath. Somehow the wheels of injustice continue to turn.
These are months pregnant with feelings — be they rage, anxiety, hope, love — and sometimes we have to believe our eyes, our hearts, and our guts. We have to trust ourselves that something is wrong and something must change, something else must be built in its stead.
To that end — I am a good researcher and writer. I can draft a newsletter with lots of citations to data, research, historical context, etc. about a topic in the hopes you will feel more informed after reading it. But I wonder, how helpful is it really to keep presenting facts without connecting to our humanity and our responsibility to each other and what that responsibility might look like?
Today’s newsletter is a bit disjointed. I share the only two things I have been able to write in these last months, with the hope that these words will help call others forward to take action.
Below is the missive I sent to family and friends in this year’s Christmas card1:
From Zero (my dog) and me to you and yours: we wish you joy, hope, love, and light during this season of darkness.
May we remember that we belong to each other and need each other.
May each of us be a light in the lives of others.
May we live lives rooted in love and care, not hate or fear.
May we continue to stand against genocide at home and abroad.
May each of us be courageous in word and deed in order that a new society based on liberation, love, and care is born.
May we remain forever creatively maladjusted.2
Recently, I co-facilitated a workshop for attorneys who want to help defend student activists in disciplinary hearings. These were my opening remarks, edited for this format:
I am an archivist and librarian turned criminal defense attorney. I am also an attorney proud to use my skills to support and defend the brave students struggling for a free Palestine and a liberated global society.
We are here today because students across the country continue push hard for colleges and universities to divest from corporations, weapons manufacturers, and higher education institutions that facilitate and effectuate apartheid and genocide in Palestine, and they are endeavoring to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.3
Higher education institutions have chosen to meet their students’ activism with repression, harassment, surveillance, infiltration, law-enforcement raids, arrests and criminal charges, and disciplinary sanctions, where students are facing anything from minor sanctions to long-term suspensions to expulsions. Their transcripts are being held, or marked with notations that stay they are under investigation or have been found responsible for conduct violations. Graduating students are having their diplomas held, and have been threatened to have their degrees rescinded altogether. Graduating students have also had job opportunities rescinded, and are being questioned about their activism by licensing entities. And numerous other collateral consequences that stem from this institutional response. In other words, for many students, the stakes are high.
Additionally, student activists are being doxxed, receiving death threats, and being threatened by members of Congress.
Importantly, it bears noting as well that many of the students who are being targeted and punished most harshly are themselves Palestinian. They are Jewish. They are BIPOC students. They are first generation students.
The goal of this workshop is to help you increase your knowledge and skills to effectively defend and support students brought before their institution’s disciplinary boards, as well as to better understand how you might collaborate with each other, with the students, with the faculty, and with other organizations seeking to defend and support our students.
However, as I have been humbly reminded, over and over again, as I have been listening to students give personal statements in front of the disciplinary panels that very well could take away their opportunity to ascertain an academic degree and harm their ability to find work, to name but a few consequences, we need to remember and center why we are here today.
It has been 15 months since the genocide being exacted upon the Palestinian people of Gaza began. Fifteen months of watching families gather, what Nadera Shalhoub Kavorkian calls the ashla’a4 — the scattered pieces of their loved ones in order to honor their humanity in death by burying them whole.
We have seen Palestinian scholars, intellectuals, and students be assassinated, as well as their universities intentionally and completely destroyed through Israel’s perpetration of scholasticide — without recognition or acknowledgement from many of the US higher educational institutions, even those that collaborate or run programs with the very same scholars, students, and universities being destroyed.
Indeed, the American Historical Association just this month overwhelmingly voted in a resolution condemning the scholasticide that has occurred and is ongoing in Gaza. [Though only a few days later, a sixteen-person AHA council vetoed the resolution.5]
But Israel’s colonial violence, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians have been ongoing processes for more than 77 years and counting.
None of this is new, even as the technologies, surveillance tools, and weaponry have advanced and changed.
What is also long standing is the U.S. Government's support for and effectuation of Israel’s brutal policies and actions, as well as the Global North’s choice to allow Israel not only to act with impunity, but with their continued and seemingly unshakeable support.
And lest we think that the things I just described are only happening "over there." We must remember that those same tools of surveillance, repression, and violence are already at work here,6 we only need travel to see the beginning of the wall on the U.S. Southern border designed by one of the companies that built the wall dividing 1948 Israel from the Occupied West Bank,7 or as another example familiar to criminal defense attorneys, law enforcement’s use of the Israeli company Cellebrite’s technology to scrape data and information from smart phones.8
Indeed, as the Palestinian people have been warning for nearly a century, and as Antony Loewenstein exhaustively outlined in his new book and podcast, The Palestine Laboratory — Palestine is a laboratory where Israel and the United States test weapons and other technologies that surveil, harm, and unalive Palestinians every day.
Those weapons and tools are then being sold to American federal and state law enforcement agencies, our military, and other private entities, advertised as “battle-tested” or “field-proven.” Of course, and disgustingly, it is the Palestinian people, along with the Lebanese and Syrian people (to name but a few) who are Israel’s test subjects.
These Israeli-developed surveillance tools and weapons have been used to violently suppress Black Lives Matter protests and organizations, and as many of us know, such tactics, even as they have evolved since, were used surveil and suppress Black and Indigenous Peoples liberation movements in the 60s and 70s.
Those same tools are now being used and will be used more frequently against students lifting their voices and putting their bodies on the line for a free Palestine, and for a liberated world.
As is the pattern in this country, communities of color, poor communities, and Indigenous nations are those being harmed most gravely by the importation of all of these tools and weapons of war that have been and are being used against Palestinians every day for over 77 years.
And finally, as many of us here likely know, lawfare is also being used to distract, suppress, and harm student activists and their allies. Disciplinary hearings. Civil suits. Criminal charges. Threats of deportation. And much more. All to silence these voices who have been slowly but surely changing American hearts and minds, and igniting protest and action all over the world.
There is much work for us attorneys to do to honor, protect, and support the brilliant people, young and old alike, putting their bodies, their futures, their careers on the line to speak truth to the people, to hold the wealthy and the powerful to account, and to imagine and generate a liberated society for us all. Let’s follow their lead and get to work.
That’s all for now. I hope words find me again soon. In the meantime, remain creatively maladjusted, and keep lifting your voice.
With love,
Amy
Formulated in the style of the beloved John O’Donohue, whose words and work guide so much of my thinking and feeling.
A phrase coined by Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr..:
Also check out: https://newyorktheater.me/2023/01/16/martin-luther-king-jr-i-am-proud-to-be-maladjusted/;
https://progressive.org/latest/martin-luther-kings-creative-maladjustment-resonates-today/
Check out Professor Shalhoub Kavorkian’s conversation with the Makdisi brothers here:
Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams reported:
AHA members voted 428-88 earlier this month in favor of a resolution opposing Israeli scholasticide—defined by United Nations experts as the "systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure"—during the 15-month assault on the Gaza Strip.
However, the AHA's 16-member elected council voted 11-4 with one abstention to reject the measure, according to Inside Higher Ed, which noted that the panel "could have accepted the resolution or sent it to the organization's roughly 10,450 members for a vote."
Angela Y. Davis’s book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle weaves these threads together. You can also check out her article in Hammer & Hope.
Indeed, this was reported on by The Times of Israel back in 2017. More recently, Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, has built a technological wall of surveillance that was put into place by the Biden administration. Moreover, the ongoing genocide and disregard for the autonomy of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. is highlighted by the fact that these invasive surveillance technologies have been placed on Tohono O’odham Nation’s land.
The American Friends Service Committee did an extensive report on Cellebrite: https://investigate.afsc.org/company/cellebrite-di. Additionally, Democracy Now just covered the new documentary, Surveilled, discussing Pegasus, another Israeli surveillance company.