Education as Liberatory Practice: Behind the Scenes with Makan’s Educational Programmes

March brought with it an indication of what is to come: the systematic gutting of higher educational institutions through the restructuring of departments focusing on ‘Middle East Studies’ or ‘Palestine/Israel’, amidst the heightening of repression globally against educators and students.  What we’re witnessing across the USA and Europe – kidnapping, detainment, criminalisation, deportation of people who advocate for dignity, justice and freedom –  is not new. The tactics by Israel and its allies, criminalizing educators and students, follows a long colonial legacy. Colonisers have always recognised the power of ideas and of critical thinking. Education helps maintain hope and enables us to think beyond the conditions of oppression. That’s why since the establishment of Israel, Palestinian educators across historic Palestine have been subjected to repressive measures. Today, the wider attacks on our ability to learn about and to educate on Palestine show us that this repression is becoming a globalised condition. 

This shifting landscape forces us as educators to reckon with a vital question: how can we continue the critical work of transformative education within institutions that capitulate to state violence, push their faculty and students out, and collaborate with border agents? 

For those of us outside of Palestine, the expanding attacks on education have raised another urgent question: how can we as educators, working within formal and informal organisations create an infrastructure through which education can be a liberatory process and support material change?

This has been the focus of our team over the past month, as we traveled to the USA to connect with partners and think through ways we can work together more effectively against the systematic normalisation of settler colonialism and oppression. Our face to face conversations provided a space where we could take stock of the current moment and to plan our future work together. We will check in more about this in the coming months. 

In addition to delivering trainings throughout March, behind the scenes our team began building three new workshops: ‘Zionism, Gender & Sexuality’, ‘How Israel weaponises gender to subordinate Palestinians’, and ‘Palestinian resistance against gendered, sexual and colonial oppression’. These trainings are extensions of themes covered in our ‘Gender, Sexuality & Anti-Colonialism in Palestine’ training, and employ different learning approaches for participants to deepen their knowledge on various themes. They include: colonialism’s long history of weaponising gender and sexuality in its domination of Indigenous people; the role of gender and labour in building and maintaining the state of Israel; Palestinian resistance to these methods of subjugation; and how can Palestine can teach us queer, feminist and anti-colonial practices. We are indebted to the works of Walaa Alqaisiya, KOHL, and so many other partners who not only have produced scholarship that has informed our thinking, but also took the time to hop on calls and speak with us to think through the material. 

We engaged with a wide range of research to build and expand our educational materials, including:

• Andreas Malm’s ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’
• Rachel H. Brown’s ‘Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel’
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s ‘Abolition Geography’ 
• Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi
• Addameer, Prison Violence 
• Jadaliyya, Long Form Podcast: Episode 3 — Dismantling International Law Featuring Francesca Albanese
• Mahmoud Khalil’s ‘Letter to Columbia’ from jail
• Culture Workers for Palestine Need You

In the coming weeks, we will hold our new trainings focusing on gender, sexuality and Palestine  as a four part instalment every Wednesday in London with our partners at Queercircle, a two part training session, ‘Between The Local & The Global: Palestine As An Indigenous & Anti-Imperialist Struggle’ and ‘How To Talk About Palestine’, with our friends at Wahda, and commemorate Palestinian Political Prisoners Day on 17th April with our online mini lecture ‘The cage and the spoon: Imprisonment and prisoners’ resistance in Palestine’. 

We’ll check back in at our next roundup with further updates on our work behind the scenes, our upcoming public events, the lessons learned by our Programmes team, and resources produced by the wider liberation movement that inspire our work.

Until liberation,

The Programmes team