It Could Happen Here - Producing Knowledge on Palestine feat. Dana El Kurd
Episode Date: November 20, 2025Dana El Kurd speaks with professor, author, historian, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies Sherene Seikaly. They discuss the importance of producing knowledge and learning about Pa...lestine, the intersectionality of the Palestinian cause, and how to combat a system trying to make you stupid. Sources: Journal of Palestine Studies – https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/jps/about Donate to the Journal of Palestine Studies – https://palestine-studies.networkforgood.com/projects/18346-donate-to-support-palestinian-knowledge-production Mahmoud Darwish interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrvzKOYeQZY&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Feliaayoub.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE AAUP & MESA report on Title 6 investigations - https://www.aaup.org/news/new-aaup-report-analyzes-weaponization-title-vi-doe-investigationsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hello, everyone. My name is Donna El-Kurd. And this is It Could Happen here.
I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and a senior non-resident
fellow at the Arab Center, Washington.
Today we're joined by Shedin Seikari, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Her book, Men of Capital, Scarcity, and Economy in Mandate Palestine, explores economy, territory, the home, the body.
And she's also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Today, I wanted to invite Shadine on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, etc.
So, yeah, Shudin, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
So let's maybe start with a very basic question.
What is the Journal of Palestine Studies?
Could you give us kind of an overview?
Sure.
So the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian Studies in the English language.
It was established in 1971.
So that makes it 54 years old.
First, it was part of the then-Berut-based and still Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, which sponsored what was understood at the time as an international forum to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab-Zainist conflict.
And really, the people who established it were looking for shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely.
And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like
Hisham Sharabi, Walid Khalidi, Burhan Dushani, Fuad Zarruf, and Konstantin Zerak, who actually was
the person who coined the way that we name the Nekba in his book Manal Nekba that he wrote in
1948 in which he coined this term the catastrophe to think about
1948 which would be our ongoing condition and I think the way to think about
these people in the way that they began the journal is to think about them as
really confronting a landscape of erasure denial and urgency and occupying this
kind of steady incessant pain of the original inception of the Nekba.
You know, if you think about it in 1971, it was not that long before, a decade and a half.
Yeah, right.
And I think what's important about, you know, in the last couple of years, people have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of, you know, some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements.
and I think it's really important for people to know
that this comes from a much longer tradition
of the production of knowledge
as a real insistence on existence.
Absolutely.
Palestinians have been producing knowledge
about their state of affairs,
you know, just like today,
academics in Gaza are producing knowledge, right?
And I'm always, like, struck by how,
just ahead of its time,
the General of Palestine Studies is like a lot of our
understanding of the conflict
that are now finally
starting to seep into the mainstream
were first discussed in these pages.
Some of the research findings
about the history were first articulated
in these pages. And so
that kind of knowledge production is just
it is a form of
resistance to erasure.
Absolutely. And just, you know,
some of those would be, for example,
plan delet, which was the, you know, the plan, which would lead to the destruction of 450 to
537 Palestinian villages. And this plan would come to be recognized through the work
of Benny Morris as an Israeli historian who had access to Israeli documents. But it's
actually was Walid Khalidi, who had been evidencing and
showing the empirical foundations of planned out. And it was in the Journal of Palestine studies that he
published those findings. Right. In that case, I think that again, for people who are really
engaging the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching
the political economy of who gets to speak. Right. And whose knowledge production is uplifted
as legitimate and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli
voices. And I think we really have to, in this moment, it's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge
production. Yeah, there's just so many ways that we witness this all the time, that it's not
something worthy of discussion unless an Israeli voice says it. And there's an inherent
suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestinian knowledge
producer of some kind. Now, of course, the last two years have been a true upheaval, the genocide
in Gaza, a tragedy that we, honestly, we haven't really absorbed and possibly can't. And we've
seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American Academy,
but from also like scholarship, generally speaking.
But before I get into that,
I wondered if you could kind of give your impression of
what did doing Palestinian studies look like before October 7th?
How was it easy?
Was it acceptable?
I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say them.
So I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe,
and I would date this as happening around COVID,
when our colleagues in various disciplines started confronting the reality of their archives closing.
So I'm a historian.
So I speak from that place.
You know, people who study Europe, people who study the United States kind of confronting the reality that they might not access archives that they're accustomed to accessing.
And in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and, you know,
surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production
and trying to explain to people, this is what we've existed under all along.
Now, I think there are similarities across communities of knowledge production, so I think
people who work in black studies, who work in indigenous studies, who work in queer
studies, gender and sexuality, have also been under the duress of surveillance and targeting.
I think for those of us who have been doing Palestinian studies, what does it mean?
Especially if you're a Palestinian doing it, but whoever you are, it means you have to show up 10 times more ready than anybody else.
It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded.
Right. It means that every single word that you say, you should be able to stand up for in a court of law. And all of those kinds of restrictions, actually, you know, you give us lemons, we're going to make lemonade. Because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor that is the least that we can do.
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It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included, right?
I was just, somebody was interviewing me yesterday about, oh, have you faced harassment or censorship?
And I think, at least in my case, I'm constantly.
you know, experiencing these things and just kind of swallowing it.
Right.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Just like getting along with the business of the every day.
So, you know, there was this moment back in 2015, 2016, where for whatever reason, every
month, one of the bots of one of these surveillance websites would start highlighting me
and insulting me on Twitter, you know, liable,
calling me names, going after how I look, like really vulgar, misgendering me, that kind of thing.
And I'd come out of my lecture, you know, and, you know, I teach big classes, and I'd come out of a big, you know, 250-person lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and, you know, that adrenaline rush.
And I'd look at my phone and I'd have 50 notifications and it would just be one insult after
another.
And that's just part of the job.
Yeah.
And that's just how it's been, right?
Like, you know, from the beginning at least of my graduate career and I started grad school,
you know, September 11 happened when I was in grad school and I was in New York when it happened.
And, you know, we've been under surveillance.
we've been named.
We've been watched as part of what we do, as you said.
And in fact, I got my master's at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies,
and they wrote a book back in the 80s about the surveillance,
and I think it's called They Dare to Speak.
Oh, right, right, yeah.
These early accounts of the concerted attempt to silence us.
And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know,
you said, oh, they're trying to erase Palestinian scholars.
I mean, at least they're trying to erase the voices who are putting forward a critical take
on Israeli settler colonialism and genocide.
And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's ever been before.
Yeah, good point.
Ten years ago, people like you and me wouldn't have jobs in the academy.
It may be in a couple years we won't have jobs, but.
I don't know. Like, I'm not, I don't want to sit on our laurels and think, oh, okay, we arrived. In any case, the whole concept of arrival and career arrival at this moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, but the effect of the genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the rapid ways in which they are engaging with obedience and authoritarianism.
Yeah. It's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, I don't think this makes
sense actually, do you know? Right. So I would say it's been like that all along. People even
saying to you things like, oh, what do you mean you study Palestine? You know, like what is that?
Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a different discipline, but certainly it was, I remember,
as a student, hungry for information.
I mean, it was rare to find something about the Middle East to be taught, let alone Palestine.
The level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance
to Palestinians and Arabs, normatively speaking, politically speaking, also theoretically speaking.
I mean, I can tell you so many stories.
Like, every person who has ever wanted to study Palestine, especially as you said, if you are
Palestinian is discouraged from it. And it's told not to. It's told this doesn't fit.
It's told, you know, I'm in political science. The theories don't account for Palestine.
It's just outside of space and time and theory. And you can't account for it. You can't
discuss it. And the harassment, the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing.
I mean, it takes such a mental and emotional toll. And yet we produce. And yet we get tenure.
And yet we teach our classes. And we're excellent.
in our teaching and our students love us and want to learn. But, you know, as you said,
like, it really has exposed the degree to which these universities, because they have been,
well, one, like, we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their
actual missions. Like, how meaningless a space this has now become. But that's, like,
on the harassment and, like, kind of these kinds of obstacle side, I also think, like,
people don't recognize, like, the resources that are needed to teach and study and research
Palestine, that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily.
And it's, there is so little for people who study Palestine.
And of course, that impacts what kind of academics are able to do this and, and how many people
we even missing from this discussion, right?
I agree with you.
That has been the condition before October 7th.
I think now after October 7th, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a cudgel to attack the higher, you know, higher education generally.
Like now people are recognizing it maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case.
Oh, also, I just wanted to remind listeners and bring it up.
Like, I remember Barry Weiss, who is now the head of CBS.
I mean, she made her claim to fame attacking Arab and Palestinian professors in Colombia as an undergrad.
Yeah.
And that's seen as totally valid.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think, you know, Palestine is cultural and also, you know, I've been saying this for a while.
Palestine is paradigm, right?
You know, if you look at the Memdanian, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is,
the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party have really no link to the popular
realities on the ground.
Right.
And that in effect, you know, part of the Trump base was really responding to this disparity,
right?
This lack of investment in the political system.
And I think, you know, that for me was the, I don't have.
hope in electoral politics and, you know, I don't want to be cynical or anything, but I think what
the Mim Denny win shows us is that people are disgruntled and they're sick of the kind of
extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think
the media is really complicit in all of this. Absolutely. Absolutely complicit in the genocide.
absolutely complicit since the you know war on iraq since the second war on iraq in rendering
news as entertainment you know and and it's like you could see the freak out that people had
the media had about memdenny right across the board it wasn't just the fox news no new york
times everybody yeah and and all of the you know television media too so it's just
I think there's also a link to higher education in that way because I think there has been an
investment in making people stupid. Right. Yes, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's exactly what I was going to say is the Palestinian issue and Palestine studies
and research and knowledge production. The fact that there exists the few Palestinians in higher
education has been used to attack higher education, but it's not really about Palestine. I mean,
it is a little bit about Palestine. Of course, these people are anti-Palestinian, but it's about
preventing social mobility. So you're saying, like, there's all this disgruntlement in the public
space. Our students are disgruntled. They want to learn. They've been promised something with
this college education. And, you know, even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a
result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. Yeah. It's too much for
for this right wing. So how is that is a class issue? Absolutely. No, it absolutely is,
you know, as are all of the kind of struggles we stand in solidarity with, you know, it's like,
really, it is intersectional. And we didn't need Trump to teach us that, but that's the lesson
that keeps being delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me,
and this has been the case for the last 10 years, 11 years, long before.
for Trump. And I think one of the challenges we face today is not to over-determine the Trump
administration as the site of all of the catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've
noted for the last 14 years is, I don't have to teach students that history isn't about
things always getting better. That's not a lesson they need to know. They understand that
teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie.
They understand that because they live it. As you say, they're in debt, especially those of us who
teach at public universities. Most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs.
They are housing insecure. They're food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future.
And if they protest genocide, they're labeled anti-Semitic. Their universities crack down on them.
They're doxxed. I mean, it's so outrageous. Obviously, I don't need to tell you.
Their identification with Palestine is also about their own experiences with Greece.
Of course.
So I think that's the, that really is the momentum, you know, that we're witnessing is that kind of identification.
Yeah, absolutely.
A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.
But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally.
caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch
him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation
into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free
on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith,
and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back
making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history
and some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business.
Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.
It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want.
First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to Fight Its Way Into the Airline.
business. The most Texas story
ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story.
We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to
plenty of robber barons. So many robber
barons. And you know what? They're not all bad.
And we'll talk about some of the classic
great moments of famous business geniuses
along with some of the darker moments that often
get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison
and the electric chair.
Listen to business history on the IHeartRadio
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podcasts.
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the best lesson you ever learned and not get distracted by the noise. This is a lot of noise.
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then love is love. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you
get your podcast.
I think it's important for listeners to know some of the contours of what has happened
after October 7th.
And like you said, it's not a Trump thing.
It started under Biden about how Palestine has been used in the academy.
I mean, as I said earlier, I have done an episode on this.
So I will link that.
But also, you know, there is now evidence and data around how this issue has been weaponized.
So the AAPUP, the American Association of University Professors alongside the Middle East Studies Association, just put out a report on this exact question about how Title VI investigations.
So investigations of alleged discrimination, specifically about anti-Semitism and nothing else.
First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been used to target these universities.
The vast majority of these cases has to do with faculty extramural speech.
So like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the class.
I mean, honestly, I always remember, I think Edward Said said, like, being a Palestinian
in the academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. Yeah, it's fugitive labor,
for sure. Yeah. Definitely. And I think one of the findings has been also, I don't know if it's 95%
of the cases have been shown to be fraudulent, yeah, to be totally fraudulent. So, yeah,
it's a real policing of speech. It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of
anti-Semitism. And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens, too,
is that students don't get the tools to actually recognize and understand actually existing
anti-Semitism. Right. As it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress and
in the rhetoric of many of the, you know, people affiliated with the administration in the
kinds of alliances that even the Israeli state, right, has made with various right-wing
anti-Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the things that it's kind of like watching a
train wreck, just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is the
absurdity, you know, I myself was accused of being anti-Semitic for having a history of
anti-Semitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating
this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes
are, what it means to be Palestinian in this moment, you know, when you've been sitting
watching for two years, your people being shredded, and you're facing the reality of what the stakes
are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians,
your threshold for shock becomes very high.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you.
I don't know if, like, what, it's like a constant trauma response, you know?
Absolutely.
Yeah, my emotional reactions are shut down, and I'm in a state of being in the present,
okay, we got through today, hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't, I kind of am prepared for
the worst at all times. And, you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people,
when they continue to feed this kind of right-wing agenda of making people,
stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education, it's the kind of condition that
will be much more general, you know? Yeah. And all these ice rates at the same time, you know,
it's, I just saw, I haven't been able to listen to it, but a scholar who powerfully is talking
about the Mexico-Palestine border and the links between ICE and the IDF and the ways to
think about these two things together and please share that with me i i haven't seen it i mean yeah as you
said when we take away Palestine from the academy when we use palestine to attack the academy as
imperfect as the academy is it is this larger attempt to take away people's analytical tools and
frameworks to understanding their reality to understanding how the reality intersects with these other
things because they don't want you to be able to solve it. They don't want you to be able to mobilize.
And then, of course, there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in
their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy now. We can't have that
kind of social mobility. I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important
for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that is self-evident. I don't need to
explain it. But why is it so important that Palestinians are the ones who do that?
I mean, again, it feels self-evident, but I'll say it.
Like, Palestinians have agency, and they are full human beings, and they know best what questions are relevant, and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine, as well as other issues.
And so not only are you engaging in the ratio of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but you are making scholarship poorer.
You are limiting what you know.
know about this issue. Yeah. So what do you think, you know, kind of broadly speaking, students,
scholars, sympathizers, what do you think they should do in this moment? I want to just go back to
the point about why is it important to have Palestinian voices? Because when we say that,
we're not doing it in an identitarian way, right? Of course. Yeah. Anybody who wants to study Palestine
should study Palestine. In doing so, you should be centering the lessons that Palestinians have offered
us. First and foremost, in this moment, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And in my own practice
at the Journal of Palestine Studies, what I've tried to do in each of the editor's notes, is really
lift up all of the testimonies that we've received from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media
and all of these, but also lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself,
and the many, many, many people who are writing and giving us tools to understand and analyze.
And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe,
is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being excluded from the category of the human.
Once you exclude people from the category of the human,
it's much easier to kill them and make them expendable.
And I think our work really in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic, right?
Rejects the logic of are we human or not?
Are we going to evidence our humanity or not?
No, we can tell our stories.
And I think that telling of the story changes the angle of vision.
If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza Strip from the perspective,
of people who are living it, you will see different things
than if you're looking at it from, you know, a drone
or, you know, a geopolitical lens.
So that's one thing.
I think another thing that's really important is, you know,
I mean, Mahmoud Darwish said this,
actually in an interview in Journal of Palestine Studies,
he said, you know, the Palestinians are talked about
because they're facing Israeli Jews,
because the Jewish question is the question of Europe.
Oh, that's right, yeah.
And I find that one of the things that continues to be an issue until now
is that what scholars and thinkers and analysts are adjudicating
is the question of Europe.
And the question of the sustainability of European values
and European notions and all of these things,
And I'm not interested in that.
I want to center the question of Palestine and what that, what kind of other tools that
might offer us.
So I think in a way, linked to what the earlier conversation about a political economy of value
of scholars, right?
There's a kind of also here, a political economy of concepts.
And I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe.
We have to provincialize Europe.
as the means and the ends of all things.
Yeah.
It is not generalizable, no.
Just ask different questions and look at it from a different perspective.
Yeah.
In terms of what do I think students and scholars and all of us should do is, it's going to sound strange, but first and foremost, study, study, read, learn.
Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to define.
that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent on making you stupid.
We all have to reject that.
I think it's a moment where there's a temptation to slide into sensationalism or to slide into circulating,
especially on social media and that whole economy, right?
So I think we have to be vigilant.
I think we have to be rigorous.
And I think we have to study.
And I think more than anything else, the lesson I keep coming back to is we have to take care of each other in the communities that we build.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I think you begin arming yourself with the tools to understand this moment and think of ways to defend yourself in your community.
And you can't do that without being grounded in this knowledge that came before you.
Yeah. So listeners, please crack open a Journal of Palestine Studies. And of course, I'll link to all of this in the show notes. Shadyin, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for your time. This has been really enriching.
Thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do. Thank you so much. Listeners, I'm going to also put in the show notes a fundraising campaign for the Journal of Palestine Studies. So if you can, you have the capacity. That's,
a surefire way to help resist these dynamics.
All right.
Thanks so much.
Take care.
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