Photographed by Carole Woodall BY G. Carole Woodall
It was fifteen minutes before the first scheduled Palestine/Israel Teach-In. Chairs quickly began to fill up — to my surprise. The five-person panel consisted of faculty, community activists from our local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, and activists from the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization. Together, they were to interweave statements centered on the themes of “Contexts, Voices, and Affects.” I teach at a 4-year, R2 public university in the Mountain West, where the university predominantly serves a first-generation, military-affiliated, and faith-centered student population of roughly 12,000 people. I have been teaching courses related to the histories of the Modern Middle East for over a decade and remain the only faculty dedicated to teaching the region. During that time, curating town and gown projects, such as themed film festivals and a three-day series on “The U.S. and Islamophobia,” garnered community interest, reifying the need for critical dialogues. Yet, engaging the histories of Palestine and Israel at the university was not something I thought of doing until after tenure. I had attempted to teach a course twice, and only a few students enrolled each time. The courses were canceled. In today’s climate, tenure does not guarantee protection; tenure does not guarantee that a university will uphold a mission to support various views.
I knew some of the faces: current and former students, colleagues, and the chair of my department. My eyes glanced to the back of the theater-styled room where a handful of administrators had taken seats, including the provost. For weeks prior to the teach-in, I received early morning emails from administrators anxiously asking me to explain what I meant in the project proposal when I described that the teach-in would have the backing of event supporters and sponsors. They asked, as well, about the intent of a teach-in. My response was to calmly state that the teach-in was an educational platform for campus and community dialogue. The labels “supporter” and “sponsor” acknowledged commitment, or support of, the project to engage in civic discussion. I was not oblivious to the nervousness facing university administrators. The President of the university system, with support from the campus chancellors, issued a letter a few days after October 7, 2023. The intent was to recognize the Hamas attacks, to express the resonances of the event on the university community at large, and to provide campus resources. However, the impact, it could be argued, was an acknowledgment of one group of grievable bodies. I am a proponent of the ethos behind The Kalven Report, a 1967 document generated by a University of Chicago committee charged with writing a statement on the university’s role in “political and social action.” There is one phrase that stands out to me. It states that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics, it is not itself the critic. […] A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.” This statement captures the challenge facing administrative decision-makers.
“Do you have this?” “Do you know what you are doing?” asked a panelist. “People keep coming,” said a colleague. I glanced out the door and saw the line of tables reserved for the catering trays of falafel, tabouleh, and stuffed grape leaves. We had partnered with a local, Palestinian family-owned business. What seemed like waves of students, faculty, and community members kept moving steadily around the corner to what had been the designated reflection room. Partnering with the campus Wellness Center, counselors were ready in case someone became triggered. “The designated reflection room is nearly full,” someone said. “Raise your hand if there are empty seats in your row,” I asked from the podium. A few minutes later, there was another announcement that we would start 15 minutes late to set up streaming in the reflection room, which had become the overflow room to accommodate the crowd size. In all, two hundred and twenty people showed up for the first teach-in on November 14, 2023.
The energy was palpable – still, thick, raw, pensive, layered – an unbreathing space. A dropped pen would not have rippled the air. The room was not at rest. I stood ten feet from the first row of seats, and the energy was like a whir of particles colliding against walls where shoulders seemed to be nestled right under earlobes. I describe the feeling of the room because a takeaway from organizing and moderating two teach-ins is that this work has involved emotional labor and support not only for students and faculty but also for administrators, some of whom are navigating the political climate of Palestine and Israel for the first time. (The first teach-in came prior to the student encampments and right before the testimonies of the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT in front of Congress.)
A lexicon of care has structured my teaching and scholarship of engagement and was at play in both teach-ins. My intention is to foster a place that can sustain dialogue, which means a lot of things. It means cultivating a space for disagreement and listening actively while recognizing that a position might shift. The space of a teach-in supports the idea that emotional work is a part of intellectual work. That emotional work acknowledges that microaggressions might become visible and tangible in the process. This is where compassionate facilitation, for me, plays a role in establishing the guidelines for dialogue. Before the panelists presented their positions, I took time, roughly 15 minutes to frame the work that everyone would be doing in both rooms. After the initial welcome, I acknowledged the students in the room and said the following: “I want to highlight the importance of having students as part of this community dialogue. The space is meant to encourage questions and not to feel silenced or judged. Other members of this community, your teacher-guides, are here to offer support and guidance for doing collective work.” These comments laid the groundwork for emphasizing the Just Talk ground rules for civil engagements, such as “listen actively,” “speak from your own experience instead of generalizing,” “do not be afraid to respectfully challenge someone,” “participate to the fullest of your ability,” “the goal is not to agree, but to gain a deeper understanding,” and “be conscious of body language.” The goal was not to avoid the possibility of contention, as spaces on campus can be contentious, but to establish a framework for shifting contention to dialogue.
There was still palpable silence in the room, even after laying out the rules for discussion. Then, I pivoted. I asked everyone to consider what it means to be engaging in and centering community dialogue about Palestine, Israel, and Gaza with the people in the room. I asked everyone to write down a word on a piece of paper that captured their emotion, and then there was a pause. I started with my answer and said “My word is weighted. I feel a sense of heaviness.” I asked if anyone else would want to share their word. Students’ voices started punctuating the silence with the following words. One student alum said, “visceral.” Another student offered the word “distraught.” The words “unmoored” and “anxious” closed out the communal emotional work. The bubble had burst, and people started to breathe. Then, the panelists offered their positions and ways of thinking about genocide, apartheid, occupation, ceasefire, and just war. The event was intended to be more than the acknowledgement of discomfort, but hopefully to encourage people to consider different perspectives. After a 2.5-hour teach-in, and as people were slowly filing out of the room, the administrators, who had been in the back of the space, were debriefing. After what seemed to be 30 minutes, while I was talking to students and colleagues, the group of five walked down the stairs. They were very complementary and supportive of the event with the Provost saying that a copy of the Freedom of Expression policy had been on the ready just in case.
After the teach-in, I continued to have conversations with university leadership and provided packets of reading materials, including the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, anti-Palestinian resources from Palestine Legal, and statements issued by leading professional associations, namely the Association for Jewish Studies and the Middle East Studies Association. This work was in preparation for the second teach-in which took place in February 2024. The unraveling humanitarian and political crisis, the reality of the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, and the International Court of Justice’s ruling on Israel to take steps to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza might have contributed to an even larger community audience. The political landscape of the region as being a national center of far-right conservatism and evangelical Christianity in a state that has shifted from purple to blue is even more reason to focus on initiating and sustaining dialogue. In addition to campus community members, there were faculty and students in the audience from other regional institutions. Students had brought parents and friends. Thirty circular tables were set up with catering from the same Palestinian, family-owned business. There was plenty of food prepared for an audience of over three hundred and forty people and a line wrapped around the interior periphery of the auditorium. The February teach-in was the most well-attended event of the entire academic year. Each circular table was a microcosm for the larger community. A copy of the ground rules was placed in the center of each table. The dynamics were different from the first teach-in. There was a student who held up a Palestinian flag visible to all, and a community member circulated literature critical of the event and the speakers. Campus leadership was involved. The university chancellor had recorded a welcome message, being unable to attend the event, which reinforced the role of the university to encourage and support critical dialogue, and the provost read a statement reinforcing a commitment to freedom of expression. After the teach-in, the police chief on campus, who had been dressed in civilian clothes, shared his observation of how interactions at one table evolved over the evening from not talking or acknowledging each other to being in dialogue.
After the February teach-in, the pulse has continued to escalate, with student encampments challenging administrative leadership, whose responses, including those in the Mountain West, follow repressive measures. Even on my campus, there was a shift in the administration’s tone after the teach-ins when students were considering setting up an encampment. This underlines the need to continue to foster dialogue in support of all students, including students who want to exercise support for Palestinians and students who are engaged in collective grief work. I still hold to my statement at the teach-ins: “It is possible to hold space with people who one might not agree with, and holding that space does not detract from one’s commitments.” As the semester is underway amid an election cycle and the potential for regional escalation extending beyond the continuing genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, I continue to advocate for a space for sustaining dialogue.
All comments expressed are those of the writer and not of the university.
AUTHOR BIO
G. Carole Woodall is an associate professor of modern Middle East history in the Department of History and Women’s and Ethnic Studies Department affiliate faculty at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her research, which has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the International Journal for Middle East Studies, for several ABC-CLIO reference work and edited book projects, such as Mediterranean Encounters in the City (Lexington Books, 2015), and Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment (Routledge, 2023), focuses on transnational jazz culture, popular culture, and the urban environment in interwar Istanbul. She has published translations of primary sources on social dancing and the modern woman in 1920s Istanbul in The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook for History, and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950. Currently, she is finalizing her book Minor Studies: Early Jazz Culture in 1920s Istanbul. Her activist-intellectual work engages anti-oppression sentient advocacy as co-founder of Canada Geese Protection Colorado and involvement in community-centered, co-creative free classes on Palestine through the Middle East Justice group in Denver.