Students bring UNB and STU professors together to understand the war on Gaza

 

To understand the horrific war on Gaza requires going back in history before October 7, 2023.

Laila Soliman, a Palestinian member of Students for Palestine, organized a panel discussion on Palestine with professors on April 3 at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). For Soliman, “understanding humanitarian issues is not just about awareness.” She hoped this discussion would help “better understand the complexity of the situation” being lived in Gaza.

Gül Çalışkan, a sociology professor from St. Thomas University, spoke first. Her intervention was a return to Edward Saïd’s Question of Palestine (1979), a book that, because of the current circumstances in Gaza, feels like it “was written right now.”  In the book, Saïd makes it clear that “exclusion makes up the negative portrayal of Palestinian identity,” but “a positive political consciousness has developed” from this portrayal.

As Çalışkan reminded the crowd, the invading position is not the same as that of the displaced. Zionist ideas have come to trouble the two “inexorably linked” groups but, as Saïd noted, the solution is a long-awaited discussion by the two groups. However, Saïd, even over forty years ago, criticized the Israeli state for not apologizing for its actions and connected the Palestinian struggle to that of other colonized nations.

Ten years after this book, Saïd wrote a letter to U.S.-based Jewish intellectuals denouncing the Israeli state’s “horrific acts” of 1989. Çalışkan emotionally read quotes from this letter because of its resonance with the events of the last few months.  (more...)

Students bring UNB and STU professors together to understand the war on Gaza

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