Noor Harmoush
Since Israel escalated its military offensive against Gaza in October 2023, university students across the United States have grappled with their role amid this harrowing moment of genocide. The veil has been lifted, and we are painfully aware of the contradiction in our own position as university students. We pay to attend institutions that use our money to financially support the very systems of violence and oppression that we are fighting against. We devote hours to reading and writing about postcolonial theory and critical discourse, while our universities are materially invested in colonial projects and racist endorsements. And when we speak out about the moral and material inconsistencies we see in our faculty and administration, we are met with apathy–or worse, we are punished.
Historically, university campuses have served as sites of resistance, embodying both material and ideological forms of protest. Practices such as encampments, boycotts, and hunger strikes are part of a long-standing tradition of academic insurgency, situated within a legacy of reclaiming institutional space to demand social and political accountability. Scholars like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky played pivotal roles in the intellectual resistance against hegemonic narratives. Their work challenged colonial epistemologies, interrogated the ways in which institutional powers dominate our cultural and political spheres, and deconstructed the media’s role in manufacturing public consent. It is through their radical scholarship that the Humanities evolved not as a neutral field, but as a site of contestation–a space where we rigorously question and reclaim. It is in this historic spirit of radical resistance that I anchor myself as an “academic” during this time of genocide.
Yet, we are living in a moment of the devolution of the academic.
While academics of the past reimagined the world order and fueled political movements through their scholarship, today, academics have become ambivalent, or even disconnected from their radical origins. Today, academics make vague statements of solidarity with justice and freedom, but these statements rarely come with any real sacrifice. Quite the contrary–the academic remains comfortably embedded in institutional systems that perpetuate cycles of violence and oppression. The academic may engage in “dialogue” about said system, but will lean into “nuance” and “complexity” to appear more palatable or intellectually rigorous. The academic sidesteps accountability for their harmful role within these systems. In fact, the academic often benefits from upholding the status quo of these systems–say, by a very coveted bullet point on their CV.
What is the role of the academic during genocide if not to accurately identify it as such? What is the role of the academic during genocide if not to critique the distractions that obfuscate the reality of genocide? What is the purpose of research, publications, and conferences if we are merely regurgitating discourse, lacking any synthesis of our reality?
Conferences like the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) are a perfect example of the tragedy of the pontificating academic. A proposed “special panel” for the 2025 conference, titled “A Duel Between Memories: Israel and Palestine,” highlights this problem.
I wrote a letter to the panel’s presiding officers and the Executive Director of PAMLA (linked here) outlining my concerns about this panel. My main argument is that the panel’s description diverts attention from the genocide in Gaza, misconstrues the aggressive nature of the Israeli colonial project, and ultimately causes more harm to the Palestinian plight for liberation. At the time that I wrote the letter, Israel’s starvation campaign against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip was well underway. Since then, the situation has become even more inhumane and dystopian. I argue that the panel is not only ideologically dishonest but also incredibly inappropriate, insensitive, and irresponsible–that is, to encourage a sort of “dialogue” about “opposing memories” while Gaza’s extermination is being captured live, through videos, photographs, and testimonials.
One must ask: What academic merit, or moral value, is there in discussing “opposing memories” or “both sides” when hundreds of Palestinians are being murdered by Israeli forces each day? As Mohammed El-Kurd puts it, how can there be room for debate in the presence of burning flesh?
Moreover, how can an organization like PAMLA, whose statement on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity outlines their commitment to “anti-racist and anti-prejudicial” scholarship, host a panel that normalizes Zionism through an exploration of “Israeli memory” in juxtaposition to “Palestinian memory”? It is absolutely absurd to champion a “postcolonial” slogan and its associated buzzwords while also platforming discourse that obstructs the reality of modern-day colonialism. Israel is a settler-colonial regime that is built on an ethno-national ideology of extermination and land theft, which, by any contemporary standards, is very racist and very prejudiced.
How are we, academics, missing the mark this badly? The ideological framework of the Humanities has been corrupted, be it by neo-liberal agendas, a whitewashing of anticolonial theory, or covert (sometimes overt?) complicity in systems of racism and imperialism. PAMLA, like many other academic organizations across the country, is an example of how liberatory theory is strategically co-opted to advance the rhetoric–and often the agenda–of dominant and oppressive power structures. Academics have devolved into agents of the academic machine and its institutional powers. We’ve not only lost our moral compass, but we clearly lack an understanding of ideology and its connection to the material world.
I requested that the panel be removed from the 2025 conference, or at the very least, be reframed to critique Zionist media and narratives from the perspectives of Israelis and Palestinians.
After sending the letter and a petition with signatures of support from colleagues in the academic community, I received a response from the Executive Director, nearly three weeks after I had sent my initial letter:
“The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) has received your request to remove a panel from our PAMLA 2025 Conference schedule.
We have carefully reviewed your request and determined that, in consonance with our Code of Conduct, we will continue to host the panel at PAMLA 2025.”
This lack of thoughtful engagement from PAMLA’s leadership and the panel officers reflects a bad-faith approach to academic integrity. I did not merely request the removal of the panel; my letter sought to highlight a serious mistake we are making as academics–using our positions and resources to promote “both sides” rhetoric at a time of historic and monumental failure to distinguish right from wrong and humanity from insanity. PAMLA arrogantly missed an opportunity to foster “ongoing introspection and continual striving” that they proudly spout in their Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity statement, illustrating, yet again, the ways in which social justice jargon is thrown around for the sake of theatre.
Is this really all we can expect from the academic? A mere puppet, spouting empty rhetoric? The failure is a collective one. We’ve forfeited our credibility in the fight for liberation, made a mockery of our discipline and its predecessors, and, most importantly, we’ve let down those who are the most vulnerable among us.
