Thread by @debcowen

A 🧵: As @Columbia President succumbed to relentless Republican pressure at the House Education Committee hearing, sacrificing academic freedom to spurious but politically powerful claims of antisemitism, I gave a talk at @nyuniversity's Palestinian solidarity occupation.

I spoke as the LeBoff Distinguished Visitor, as a Jewish scholar @UofT and member of @FacultyJewish whose family arrived in NYC, just in time to escape the horrors of the Shoah. I discussed the generative, aspirational politics of the rallying cry, “From the River to the Sea.”

I almost missed my appearance because campus security was reluctant to let me into the ‘Privately Owned Public Space’ of the Paulson building. With irony, the students remarked that security was trying to protect campus from the "antisemitism" of NYU’s distinguished Jewish guest.

NYC universities have self-imposed surreal lockdowns. At @nyuniversity, security is so tight that an internationally celebrated Indigenous colleague was denied entrance to the building where I gave a ‘public’ lecture titled “Beyond Colonial Infrastructure.” Bitter ironies abound.

A key theme of my lecture was the entanglement of atrocities. The ‘movement westward’ that devastated Turtle Island inspired other genocidal visions and practices of replacing peoples, practices that connect the Shoah and the Nakba.

I considered the infrastructural threads that weave these catastrophes together, refusing the exceptionalism that characterizes their segregation.

In 1928, Hitler spoke admiringly about the way Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

It was less than a decade later that my grandparents – Alfred Siegfried Oppenheimer and Gertrude Rosenbaum - stepped foot on this continent, young people on the run to escape the murderous Nazi regime.

Today, with right-wing Christian Zionists and white supremacists, a people who were subject to a campaign of extinguishment with ties to a campaign of extinguishment of Indigenous people here, rally in large numbers for a state undertaking a campaign of Palestinian extinguishment

In refusing to weaponize antisemitism we can trace the connections between catastrophes and learn long histories of shared cultures and lands. Before the State of Israel was Palestine, a land of many peoples: Arab Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

It was not the arrival of Jewish people post WW2 that created the mess we find ourselves in today, but the violent imposition of an ethnonationalist state. In all of these contexts, it was not the movement of peoples or the need to share space that created conflict.

What connects these catastrophes are infrastructures of extermination grounded in notions of racial, ethnic and religious supremacy, which refuse reciprocity and multiplicity.

During the Bosnian crisis, scholars coined the term ‘urbicide’ to describe the targeting of pluralist urban spaces for annihilation. The concept is mobilized to analyze the Israeli State’s destruction of Palestinian life and infrastructure.

Urbicide is not only about the destruction of urban life, but the destruction of physical and affective infrastructures that allow spaces of dense and vital heterogeneity to flourish.

I left New York - where my grandparents arrived 8 decades ago- for my home in Tkaronto with a head and heart full of these entanglements and ironies. I think about traditions of Jewish ethics that predate the State of Israel and that encourage the diasporic demand for justice.

I think about the Indigenous Treaties that I am bound to by virtue of living on these lands, which invite us to share space, care for ecologies, and commit to collaborate in healing this place.

I return to the aspirational cry, ‘From the River to the Sea,’ as an enactment of this promise. I see a commitment to practice precisely this beautiful ethos of cohabitation and collaboration at the student actions at Columbia and NYU.

These traditions stand in stark contrast to the supremacy that underpin the congressional hearings, the crackdowns on our campuses, and the devastation of Gaza. I reflect on how far we have to go, but also the rich inheritances that create infrastructures to help take us there.

#FreePalestine ❤️🖤💚