This essay examines the Palestine exception to academic freedom and free speech through the lenses of language, linguistics, history, and knowledge production in a time of rising fascism. The author recounts his personal experiences as a Haitian linguist at MIT who faced administrative, legal, and governmental retaliation in the context of his scholarship on language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel. He posits that the locking of knowledge and the closing of learning about Palestine reflect a broader struggle over the "capture of language" itself, one that echoes earlier colonial efforts to use language as the "consort of Empire" and to stigmatize his mother tongue, Haitian Creole (Krey & ograve;l). These intertwined narratives, he argues further, illuminate how language and linguistics can be mobilized for or against fascism. He concludes by proposing "liberatory linguistics" as a scholarly and ethical practice for demystifying the weaponization of language, resisting epistemic injustice, and defending the university as a site of critical inquiry in support of democracy.
This article examines how international humanitarianism facilitated the expansion of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine throughout the mid-twentieth century. By reading historical materials both along and against the archival grain, the author traces a contentious debate between Zionist settlers and Arab nationalists in a range of international arenas over whether the humanitarian plight of the Jews of Europe should justify the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands. The author shows that despite initial British resistance to adopting the humanitarian framework to populate Palestine with Jewish settlers, the internationalization of humanitarianism during and after World War II allowed imperial institutions, including the League of Nations and International Refugee Organization, to create a hierarchy of victimhood where the persecuted Jew superseded the unfortunate Palestinian. He concludes that this nascent global humanitarian regime helped constitute the demographic project of Zionist settler-colonial replacement in Palestine.
This article examines how Israel's invocation of self-defense operates as a settler-colonial security lexicon that legitimizes conquest, displacement, and the genocide of the Palestinians. Tracing this lexicon from the Yishuv through the Nakba, 1967, the invasion of Lebanon, the long arc of occupation, and the ongoing Gaza genocide, it shows how the Israeli triad of deterrence (harta'ah), early warning (hatra'ah), and strategic decision (hachra'ah) transformed defense into a doctrine of frontier advance and elimination. The author argues that when decisive victory over the Palestinians proved unattainable, Israel shifted its strategy to conflict management, stabilizing domination through siege, permits and closures, spatial fragmentation, targeted killing, and cyclical punitive campaigns. After October 7, 2023, this managerial mode gave way to renewed frontier hachra'ah in Gaza, where mass displacement and systematic destruction have been rebranded as self-defense. Biblical and Holocaust analogies, "human shields," and humanitarian rescue scripts furnish a permission structure that normalizes elimination at scale.
This essay is part of a collection of eight essays that emerged from a 2025 workshop that brought together scholars and writers from across Bilad al-Sham to share future visions of their region liberated from Zionism. Read together, several themes emerge, including the specter of the present in the future, the breakdown of borders and the restoration of mobility, questions around resistance to colonial violence, and the imperfections of utopias. The authors offer readers a code for collective Shami liberation, as well as lessons to imagine the way out of the darkness of Zionist genocide in Palestine and settler-colonial violence and expansion in Bilad al-Sham. Four of the essays appear in this issue and the rest in the next issue.
