A few days before the ceasefire was announced in Gaza, about 150 members of the Modern Language Association, one of the largest scholarly organizations for the humanities in the US, walked out of the organization’s Delegate Assembly in protest of the leadership’s suppression of a resolution in support of boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel. A group of MLA members had drafted and submitted the resolution in September, a resolution attesting to Israel’s scholasticide and genocide in Gaza, and resolving that “we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call.”
Rather than allow this resolution to come up for discussion and a vote at the Delegate Assembly, the MLA’s Executive Council and Executive Director opted to reject the resolution, citing “legal and fiduciary” concerns. In their statement justifying their decision, the Executive Council cited the anti-BDS laws across the country, and argued that because a large portion of the MLA’s “operating budget comes from sales of products to universities and libraries,” that if states with anti-BDS laws refused to allow educational institutions to buy MLA products, the MLA (which in 2023 reported $17 million in revenue and $38.9 million in total assets) could become financially precarious. In other words, they tried to shield themselves with the hypothetical threat posed by already repressive laws. Which is to say, they leaned on technicality, conjuring the mythic force of law to avoid taking a stand.
Their particular technical argument was quickly debunked. Zoha Khalili, a Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, called it a “flawed legal analysis.” “A purely expressive resolution like this one is protected speech that is beyond the reach of any anti-BDS law,” she said, “even under the most repressive interpretation of our constitutional rights.”
Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) reminds us that in a Congressional resolution, “whatever comes after the word ‘Whereas’ and before the semicolon…falls short of legal grounds.” What follows “whereas” and precedes the semicolon is meant to be agreed upon facts, to state something that is already known to be true: Whereas, in April 2024 the United Nations documented that Israel’s campaign of scholasticide has destroyed every university in Gaza and killed at least 5,479 students and 356 educators;
We wrote open letters and statements for people to read out before their panels. No business as usual during genocide, we said.Following the Executive Council’s suppression of our resolution, those of us in the organizing collective changed our strategy. Up until that point, we had been working within the confines of MLA bureaucracy. We had tried to speak to them in the language of the whereas. We laid out the facts. We consulted lawyers. The resolution, we ensured, was non-binding; it was merely an expression of the members’ sentiment. Organizer Tony Alessandrini had exchanged countless emails with MLA staff, confirming that the resolution was in compliance with the organization’s rules; we had gathered over 100 signatures from members, posted comments on the MLA’s official online forums. But despite our adherence to their requirements and procedures, our attempts to work not only within the letter of MLA law but according to its spirit, MLA leadership refused to let our resolution go forward.
Whereas, the MLA’s commitment to “justice throughout the humanities ecosystem” requires ending institutional complicity with genocide and supporting Palestinian colleagues;
But I want to talk here not about the Executive Council’s equivocating, nor about the institutional politics of scholarly organizations. I want to talk about the feeling of what happened, about solidarity and community, about what got built not on account of the MLA and its bureaucracies, but despite it. “I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the red dirt,” writes June Jordan in “Moving Towards Home” (1982), one of her poems of Black and Palestinian solidarity; “I need to talk about living room… I need to talk about home.”
Most of us in the organizing collective didn’t know each other before embarking on this project. Spread across universities from New York to Georgia to Hawaiʻi, we came together over hours of zoom meetings and thousands of words in Signal chats, we came together to plan, to organize, to build community, and to speak out for Palestine. Together, we planned actions: a pop up poetry reading, a die in, a walk out. We wrote open letters and statements for people to read out before their panels. No business as usual during genocide, we said. We weren’t here to fight with MLA leadership or to win small concessions from corrupt institutions. We were here for Palestine. We were here for each other. We were here to build a world.
A halt to military and reconnaissance air operations in the Gaza Strip for ten hours a day, and for 12 hours on the days of the release of detainees and prisoners.
As I write this, we are in the intermediate period between the announcement of the ceasefire, on Wednesday, and its enactment, on Sunday. By Friday, Israel had already killed more than 100 Palestinians. What good has their word ever been? Four days from announcement to enactment is hardly even a loophole, it’s just permission, the status quo. I don’t mean to minimize the actual relief, the joy people in Gaza are expressing, but a halt to military air operations for ten hours a day still leaves fourteen open for bombing.
Palestinians already know all too well about the limits of legal language, about the extent of what can be disclaimed.One morning during the conference, my partner and I were walking through the crowded lobby of the Hilton in downtown New Orleans looking for coffee, when we heard someone call out “Free Palestine!” I was feeling paranoid, worried that our activism might lead to harassment. We looked around and saw a man in his mid-30s wearing a gray hoodie gesturing to us. “Your keffiyehs!” he said, “free Palestine, I’m from Palestine!” He was from Nablus, he told us, had just moved to New Orleans in the last year. He wasn’t there for MLA, he just happened to be in the hotel. He asked us to pose for a selfie with him, and I gave him one of the “I Stand with Palestine #BDS” stickers I had made for conference attendees to put on their badges.
*Exceptions Rules and Limitations May Apply…list does not represent the opinions, rights, or commitments of distributor and cannot be used as the basis for…academic research, or as evidence in a court of law in this or any other nation, including nations that are no longer recognized and nations that may be recognized in the future, no warranty is implied by this or any other statements.
–Rasha Abdulhadi, “Two Litanies for Palestine”
A litany is a petition, but it is also a prayer. Petitions have long been tools of the oppressed, ways to ask for thing—small things, like soap, or big things, like freedom—things that might not be granted by law. On the Friday of the conference, we gathered, 80 or so of us, in an alcove outside some hotel meeting rooms, to read Palestinian poetry together. We selected the time and location to coincide with the open hearing meeting for the Delegate Assembly, knowing that the Executive Director and members of the Executive Council who had suppressed our resolution would be there. Knowing they would have to hear the words of Palestinian poets as they discussed their conference business, would have to walk past us as they entered and left the meeting. We were not asking for recognition, in any formal sense, not asking for representation or a vote. We simply made ourselves, and the voices of Palestinian poets, present. Like a whereas statement, we were declaring a fact.
We took turns stepping toward the center of the circle, reading poems off our phones. Raj Chetty, another core member of the organizing collective, read Rasha Abdulhadi’s “Two Litanies for Palestine.” “Each line of this poem starts with the word ‘Palestinian’ or ‘Palestinians,” he told us. “Say it with me. I’ll raise one finger for ‘Palestinian,’ two for ‘Palestinians.’” “palestinian pilots, flight attendants, & air traffic controllers,” he read, our voices joining in chorus for each repetition of “Palestinian.” “palestinian real estate agents & elementary school teachers/palestinian science fiction writers.” The poem begins with the heading “Incomplete List of Unauthorized Palestinians/Pending Review, Subject to Amendment*” and ends with the disclaimer I’ve excerpted as a kind of epigraph, above.
Which is to say, Palestinians already know all too well about the limits of legal language, about the extent of what can be disclaimed. And yet, in the space between the heading and the disclaimer, there is room still for so much life. Room for: “palestinians on every continent except antarctica/palestinians in antarctica/palestinians on the moon, on the sea/palestinian fishermen past the blockade line…” Perhaps this is what June Jordan meant by “living room.”
In the interim between the ceasefire’s declaration and its enactment, in the days Israel continued to bomb, killing over 100 Palestinians, there was room for joy. I watched a video of a young boy crying, so happy to dream of sleeping in his own bed. I saw a tweet from a journalist that said “The happiness is literally eternal. Gaza’s streets are erupting. The tears of everyone, the joy,” a video of celebrations, hours before a tweet announcing “Massive explosions in Deir al-Balah.” How is there space for it all? Between the asterisk and the disclaimer, how is there still room for dreaming?
I don’t mean to make a comparison between the government of Israel and the leadership of the MLA, but this too late ceasefire that leaves room for the murder of hundreds, this institutional paranoia that deems even a non-binding resolution a threat, both speak in the language of the asterisk. Both speak in the idiom of the disclaimer, the unsubtle subterfuge, the promise of something with fingers crossed behind the back. We will not supplicate to the MLA. Instead, we speak in poetry, use incantations to refuse their terms.
At the poetry pop up, Huda Fakhreddine, too, read a poem that was not not a prayer. As she read her own translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s “From the River to the Sea,” we held our collective breath. “You’re not supposed to breathe” during this poem, Huda instructed us. We tried. “every street, every house, every room, every window, every balcony, every wall, every stone, every sorrow,” the poem begins. “every name, every voice, every name, every house, every name, every face, every name, every cloud,” we grew more breathless, until the end, “every name, every name, every name, every name, all…” Huda read, pausing before each “every,” words growing louder. At the end, we inhaled together, feeling the stillness in the room, like we had conjured something with our listening, with our breath.
Whereas, the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in denying Palestinian human rights has been comprehensively documented;
On the second day, we held signs with the names of scholars martyred in Gaza and lay down together on the floor outside the hotel ballroom where the MLA’s elected delegates were walking in to hold their assembly. every name every name every name. Many delegates joined us. “MLA is Complicit in Genocide,” read a banner we had painted and brought with us, from occupied Hawaiʻi. A die in is symbolic, a mere fractional representation of the scope and the volume of loss. every name every name every name. We lay in silence as the complicit walked around us. It feels vulnerable to participate in a die in. It requires trust in your fellow organizers. From the ground, it’s hard to see. Just feet and ankles shuffling. Muffled murmurs. In a surreal twist, Gayatri Spivak happened to be giving a talk in the room next door. Snippets of her sentences filtered out into the hallway where we lay.
But unlike the tens or hundreds of thousands martyred in Gaza, we rose from the dead. We walked into the hotel ballroom. Just as the Delegate Assembly was called to order, we stood, at least 100 of us, and spoke together, calling out MLA leadership for their suppression, reading out the text of our resolution. “Sometimes this is what democracy looks like,” we chanted. “Free free Palestine,” we chanted, walking out of the meeting, together. Before and after pictures of the walk out show the room full, then emptied out. We left our placards with the names of martyred scholars on our empty seats. I learned later that of the 158 delegates who had signed in, 66 walked out with us. Those of us who left gathered in a circle around the hallway where we’ve previously been lying down. Outside of those meeting doors, we felt like the majority. We dispersed, off to listen to panels about scholasticide, about poetry after Gaza.
When I walked back through the hallway later in the afternoon, our signs were still there. Names of the martyred on a side table, “Refuse the MLA” and “759 teachers and educators have been killed” propped up for passersby to see. I heard that after we left the remaining delegates discussed writing a statement opposing scholasticide, a statement similar to one the members of the American Historical Association (AHA) approved in a landslide the week before.
A statement that after the conference, was vetoed by AHA leadership, who claimed that a resolution opposing scholasticide “lies outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose, defined in its Constitution as ‘the promotion of historical studies through the encouragement of research, teaching, and publication; the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts; the dissemination of historical records and information; the broadening of historical knowledge among the general public; and the pursuit of kindred activities in the interest of history.’” It would seem to me that opposing scholasticide falls in line with the above stated “mission and purpose.” It is difficult to promote historical studies from universities and archives that have been destroyed by bombs. But no matter, these associations reveal more through what they don’t say than through what they do.
The third stage (42 days):
Exchanging the bodies and remains of the dead from both sides after reaching them and identifying them.
The day the ceasefire was announced, videos and quotes started circulating on social media, from people in Gaza about the first thing they would do when there was a ceasefire. I saw one quote repeatedly, by Hasan Qatrawi, translated by Mosab Abu Toha, and accompanied by a drawing by Anu Paajanen: “When a ceasefire is announced, I will just run. No one ask me where. I myself don’t even know. I will just run and run. Maybe to a space in the city, maybe to my old solitude, maybe towards the sun. I don’t know, the important thing is to arrive at a quiet place; a place that allows me to weep for a long time.” A screenshot of a tweet from a user @Shoroq_Gaza reads, “Soon as the ceasefire is announced, I will go and search for my sons’ corpses under the rubble with my bare hands. I will find them, and I will make a proper grave for my beloveds.”
During the conference, at a panel on Indigenous solidarity from Turtle Island to Palestine, Rabab Abdulhadi gave a presentation about bones. She spoke about how one of Israel’s genocidal strategies is their refusal to allow Palestinians to bury their dead. Only when there is some form of liberation, she said, and I am paraphrasing, that is when the ghosts will be able to roam, when the bones will be able to go home, free. I hope that during this pause in bombing, Palestinians will be able to bury their dead. I hope that this pause in bombing will last and last, past the first stage, the second, and the third. Past 42 days, and 84 days, and 126 days, that the dead and the living will be free.
