Watch | Systemic Racism in the US and Israel: Analogies and Disanalogies

The Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Palestine Studies co-presented, “Systemic Racism in the US and Israel: Analogies and Disanalogies” on July 14.

Recent police violence in the US has sparked anti-racism protests around the world and ignited a discussion of systemic racism within many societies and political systems. Despite major differences in the regimes of oppression and discrimination in the US and Israel, certain parallels exist and serve to shed light on both systems. In the case of the US and Israel, the connections go beyond analogies and extend to material links between the respective security states and policing practices, including what has been called the "Israelization" of policing.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is the Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chair of the BoD, SOF/Heyman Center for the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of two books and several journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today.

Johanna Fernández teaches at the Department of History at Baruch College (CUNY). She is the writer, producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Her Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country.

Maha Nassar is an Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and the author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Nahla Abdo is a Palestinian-Canadian political activist and Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. She is the author of several publications, most recently Captive Revolution: Palestinian women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System.

Filming Revolution, Building Solidarities · Palestine Film Institute @ Cannes Film Festival 2020

“These round table conversations at a distance focus on the backup plan: a concept that Palestinian filmmakers are all too familiar with. These panels aim to connect these familiar experiences to one another, toward a greater understanding of how the Palestinian film scene will adapt - on the fly - to the latest developments in the international industry.”

Plan B, part of the virtual pavilion of the Palestine Film Institute at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival.

Filming Revolution, Building Solidarities · Palestine Film Institute @ Cannes Film Festival 2020

Omar Jabary Salamanca conceived of and moderated the panel "Filming Revolution, Building Solidarities" for the virtual pavilion of the Palestine Film Institute at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. For more information and to see all of the Palestine Film Institute’s virtual pavilion, visit the Cannes 2020 section of the PFI website.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is a research fellow and lecturer based at Ghent University. He is also the leading programmer for Eye On Palestine Arts and Film Festival. Omar was previously a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University (2014-16).

Statement by CPS Directors Nadia Abu El-Haj and Brian Boyd

3 June 2020

Monday evening, President Trump announced he would mobilize the U.S. military on domestic soil in order to bring “law and order” to American cities, harkening back to the 1968 campaign for the presidency during which both Richard Nixon and George Wallace invoked the language of law and order to mobilize white citizens against the gains of the Civil Rights movement.  By the close of Trump's address to the nation, that “promise” had been realized in Washington, D.C., a predominantly African-American city (that should rightfully be a state) over which the federal government has jurisdiction.  Not only did military personnel clear the area around the White House with flash bangs and tear gas in order to facilitate a photo-op for the President, by nightfall Blackhawk helicopters flew low, as if to strafe the crowds, to get peaceful demonstrators to disperse.  War-zone tactics have come, squarely, “home.”

War as the framework of contemporary crises is all over American public discourse today: The pandemic is an “invisible enemy,” for some of Chinese extraction; medical workers and other “essential personnel” have come to be referred to as workers “on the front lines.” Demonstrations in protest of the execution of George Floyd are referred to as “urban warfare,” as police departments, the national guard, and now the military police resort to tear gas, pepper spray, flash bangs and rubber bullets.  

This just cannot become the new normal.  War is a poor metaphor—and certainly a disastrous tactic—for addressing the long-term, structural violence of racism in U.S. society, which manifests as much in the disproportionate rates at which African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and impoverished immigrants are dying in the pandemic as in the seemingly endless summary executions of black citizens.  Whether in the U.S. or in Iraq, in Palestine or in Afghanistan, turning streets into war zones and training military firepower on populations is not the answer. As marches and sit-ins spread across the country, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens are expressing not just anger and disgust, but more important, they are demonstrating a capacity for solidarity that crosses race and class lines. We can only hope we are witnessing the birth of a radically different political movement and imaginary that will effect real change not just in how the U.S. governs itself, but also in how it enacts its power across the globe.

Professors Nadia Abu El-Haj & Brian Boyd

Co-Directors
Center for Palestine Studies
Columbia University

Nadia Abu El-Haj and Lana Tatour win a 2020-21 Joint Projects Award from IRCPL

The Center congratulates Nadia Abu El-Haj and Lana Tatour on winning a 2020-21 Joint Projects Award from the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia!

The project, which will lead to a publication, will explore the intertwining of racial and religious difference in the context of Israel-Palestine. By pulling race and religion into a single analytic frame, it seeks to expand the existing conversation on the different practices and projects of racialization that govern Palestinians (citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and refugees), the “Other” Jews (Mizrachim and Ethiopian), and African refugees and asylum seekers. The papers will address the historical genealogies and contemporary linkages among race, religion, and settler-nationhood and examine how race politics in Israel-Palestine is tied to religious difference, citizenship status, and political and civil rights.

We extend our congratulations to the other winners of the 2020-21 Joint Projects Award. Read more here.