Photo by Max Paster ‘25. Entrance to the Art Building and Gamble Auditorium where the “Teach-In: Palestine in a Global Context” event was held for attendees on Monday, Oct. 30.
By Emma Quirk ’26
Photos Editor & Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses state-sanctioned violence, colonial violence and mass death.
As attendees entered Gamble Auditorium for the “Teach-In: Palestine in a Global Context” event on Monday, Oct. 30, they were greeted by a warm and lively atmosphere with students and professors chatting amiably with one another.
The event lasted for two hours, ending with a Q&A session where written comments collected from the crowd were read aloud to panelists. Like the “Middle East Crisis” panel hosted in Hooker Auditorium on Oct. 24, signs were posted stating that no recording of any kind was allowed.
The teach-in was sponsored by the critical race and political economy and English departments and moderated by David Hernández and Vanessa Rosa, associate professors of Latinx studies and co-chairs of the critical race and political economy department. Hernández and Rosa collaborated with CRPE faculty, the panelists and professors in the religion and history departments to organize the event.
At the start of the teach-in, Rosa read the Mount Holyoke College Land Acknowledgment, noting that the frameworks of settler colonialism and land possession were relevant not just to this teach-in but to the United States and the globe more broadly.
Rosa and Hernández then shared the panel’s goals. In a joint email interview with the Mount Holyoke News, they reiterated that “the goals of the event were to provide context for students and other audience members to the events catalyzed by the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the multiple weeks of attacks by the Israeli state in Gaza as well as violence in the West Bank. These things did not happen in a vacuum but are related to 75 years of occupation and manufactured strife among the Palestinian people.”
Five panelists spoke at the teach-in, all different from the speakers at the previous “Middle East Crisis” event: Susanna Ferguson, Smith College assistant professor of Middle East studies; Iyko Day, professor and chair of English and affiliated faculty of critical race & political economy; Kevin Surprise, lecturer in environmental studies; Esra Kadair ’24 — their name has been changed for this story — politics and biology double major; and Elif Babül, associate professor of anthropology.
Ferguson presented first, speaking on Palestine’s historical background prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. She touched upon early Zionism and the British mandate, particularly the Balfour Declaration — a public British statement written in 1917 in support of “the establishment of Palestine [as] a nation for the Jewish people.”
Palestinians and Zionists protested British control, and Ferguson noted that resistance often includes violence. She concluded by telling the audience that she welcomed their questions and looked forward to the conversation at the end of the teach-in.
Day spoke on settler colonialism and identified parallels between the logic of settler colonies, including those of the United States and Israel. Calling on scholar Patrick Wolfe, she noted that colonial invasion is a structure, not an event. She asserted that the purpose of settler colonialism is to destroy and replace Indigenous people by dispossessing them of their land.
In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, Day reiterated that she “wanted students to know that settler colonialism is a ‘structure not [an] event’; that Indigenous peoples in North America and Palestine are in a colonial relation of dispossession rather than exploitation (to eliminate to replace), and finally, that settler forgetting (colonial unknowing) of Indigenous presence is a dominant feature of settler colonial power.”
During Surprise’s presentation, he spoke about the relationship between U.S. foreign policy goals and the country’s support for Israel. He explained that the United States coerces other nations through overt and covert violence, such as military presence, interventions and spending.
Surprise emphasized the correlation between oil profits and weapons sales for the United States during times of war and conflict in the Middle East. In his view, the support for Israel has to do with the United State’s own foreign interests, and he stressed that Palestine is “one of [the] worst examples of [a] sacrifice zone under capitalism and U.S. hegemony.”
“The central question I was trying to address in my brief comments was: why are essentially all facets of the U.S. government providing unwavering support — rhetorically, diplomatically, and militarily — for Israel, even in the face of what many are calling a genocide,” Surprise said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News.
In Surprise’s view, “any answer that does not include the role of Middle East oil in U.S. geopolitical strategy is missing the crux of [the] matter.” He elaborated on this, stating that “since the 1940’s, the U.S. has sought to manage the production, flow, and sale of oil from the Middle East by ensuring that no singular country becomes dominant in the region, and by preventing the formation of regional blocs hostile to US interests.”
Surprise said that U.S. aid to Israel has increased annually since the 1970s, especially as events such as the Iranian Revolution “contributed to a loss of power for the US and Western oil companies in the region.”
He quoted then-Senator Joe Biden, who said, “[Israel] is the best 3 billion dollar investment we make. [Were there not an Israel, the United States] would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region” in 1986. Surprise said that Biden’s statement “was true then and it remains true today.”
The fourth panelist, Kadair, is a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan after her grandparents were displaced in 1948. She spoke on the poverty, discrimination and hardships her family faced, including family members who had been murdered by Israeli forces. She repeatedly emphasized that despite the trauma she has faced, she is still one of the “lucky ones” because she is alive and not in a refugee camp.
When Kadair was 17, she began fighting for women’s rights in Jordan and protesting against honor killings. She was then forced to flee to the United States and applied for asylum in 2020. “I never got an interview, a closure [or] an opportunity to share my story,” Kadair stated. “Most importantly, I never got a decision on my future in the United States. I continue to live in uncertainty.”
“Thanks to imperialism, I was displaced not once but twice. I don't have a home country. I have actually never seen my home country, for that matter. I was born an immigrant, and I will die an immigrant,” Kadair said during the panel.
In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, she elaborated on how her experience with the U.S. immigration system has been extremely detrimental to her mental health. “I would describe it as trauma over trauma,” Kadair said in an email to Mount Holyoke News. “I continue to live in fear that I will be deported any day, and I find it incredibly hard to believe that I am safe … My asylum and my whole life are both pending.”
At the end of her presentation, Kadair urged the audience not to ignore what is happening in Palestine. “Raise your voice for the ones who lost theirs under the rubble. Raise your voice for the 3,000 killed children, and still counting. Please keep fighting for the truth and remember that your silence is support for the oppressor.”
The final panelist, Babül, structured her discussion around the ways atrocities and state violence are justified. In the case of Israel, this is done through their framing of the issue. Since the dominant narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is a ‘religious conflict,’ Babül stated that it “suggests it has been going on forever, erasing its actual history and politics.”
Additionally, Babül explained that this framing portrays “ the enemy … as the delusional, fanatic, irrational hater, [while] the Israeli and U.S. nation-states are portrayed as noble victims with a manifest destiny to defend civilization and freedom.”
Babül also explored the ways that “the license to grieve is racially distributed.” In mainstream news and media, “we learn their names and their stories [of Israeli citizens], enabling us to mourn for their lives. Palestinians, on the other hand … have no killers, no faces, no stories,” Babül said. “Just as they are denied proper political subjecthood when they are living, their lives are rendered ungrievable when they are dead.”
Attendee Molly DeLuca ’26 was pleased with the information presented during the event. “I feel as though the major news sources I am so used to getting my information from have been biased beyond belief regarding this conflict,” she shared. “The opportunity to hear from experts and people who have dedicated their entire life researching about colonialism and the Israeli-Palestinian itself was one that I could not pass out on.”
DeLuca added that she “thought the event overall went really well. The speakers were respectful and tried to answer the questions to the best of their ability, and didn't try and gloss over some of the more uncomfortable realities of the conflict itself.”
At the halfway mark, Rosa and Hernández began moderating the Q&A portion of the teach-in. With an hour remaining, the panelists answered questions pertaining to a variety of topics.
One question asked about social media’s role in complicating people's understanding and framing of the conflict. Babül noted that social media has the power to either act as an echo chamber or challenge dominant narratives.
She expanded on this in an email to Mount Holyoke News, stating that one of the powers of social media is that “it provides access to immediate truth in an unprecedented way … However, studies show that rather than making the users more confident about the truth of the information that they get, social media can instill in people a cynical disposition towards knowledge in general … social media, therefore, cannot be the panacea [solution] just by itself.”
The panelists were later asked how students, faculty and staff can support the Palestinian cause without fear of backlash. Ferguson said it is important “to call in people you know [and] have really challenging conversations.”
Kadair added, “You have to believe that you’re doing the right thing. Speak the truth.”
Other questions touched on the disconnect between large protests in support of Palestine versus the unequivocal government support for Israel, the idea of a two-state solution and how the lives of Arab men are devalued.
Panelists have a few lessons they hope attendees took away from the teach-in. First and foremost, “we should all demand in the loudest possible way an immediate ceasefire,” Babül said in an email to Mount Holyoke News.
“[I] wanted to emphasize the idea that critiquing the state of Israel or advocating for Palestinian liberation is not the same as antisemitism,” Day said. “The political conflation of all Jewish people with Israel's state policies ignores the longstanding, worldwide Jewish solidarity with Palestinians and functions to divert attention away from actual antisemitism on the rise.”
“I hope attendees came away with the sense that Hamas’ attack did not happen in a vacuum — the violence has been produced by [the] Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinian dignity, rights, and life for decades,” Surprise said. “This is not to justify killing civilians at all, only to push back against narratives that paint recent events as a two-sided ‘conflict.’ I also hope attendees came away with the sense that Israel is not an isolated bad actor, but part of a system of (settler) colonial capitalism.”
“Stand up, and speak up for justice,” Kadair said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “Learn more about your government's direct involvement in this, do not vote for those who refused to condemn genocide, or demanded a ceasefire. This is a crucial moment in history, it’s time we know who’s good and who’s bad. Be the generation that is skeptical, active and aware.”
Surprise was appreciative of the audience participation. Regarding questions asked during the Q&A, he said, “the genuine curiosity, concern, and humanity demonstrated by students’ questions was incredible,” in an email interview with Mount Holyoke News.
“We hope that the historical, economic and political frameworks provided will inform students in their conversations with others, in their courses and in their activism,” Hernandez and Rosa said in an email to Mount Holyoke News. “We also hope that the panelists dispelled any false equivalency about dual claims to land and indigeneity, as well as dual forms of violence. With proper context, one can see that the sides of the conflict are not equal.”
Melanie Duronio ‘26 contributed some writing and assisted with interviews for this article. Madeline Sharp ‘27 contributed notes from the event.
Editor’s note: On June 23, 2024, Esra Kadair’s pseudonym was altered slightly upon request.