The Academic Action Network for Palestine (ActforPal) held a highly successful inaugural event on November 11, 2024. The event, co-chaired by Tahrir Hamdi (Arab Open University/Jordan) and Dina Matar (SOAS) (two of ActforPal’s founding members) featured inspiring presentations by Robin DG Kelley of UCLA, Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, Salim Vally of the University of Johannesburg, and two of ActforPal’s founding members: Afaf Jabiri (East London University), who discussed the vision and goals of the collective, and  Rami Morjan (Islamic University of Gaza), who spoke from Gaza, detailing the horrific situation that Palestinians in Gaza have been enduring for over 400 days due to the brutal assault on civilians, hospitals, educational institutions and everything that enables life by the Zionist entity and the complete impunity granted to it by the US, UK, and EU.

The event opened with Afaf Jabiri explaining the vision and goals of our collective— a vision rooted in the belief in a free and resilient, anti-colonial Palestinian academia and a liberated Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Jabiri emphasized the importance of our collective’s role in countering scholasticide, a theme that all of our panelists addressed in their presentations. She underscored ActforPal’s mission and vision, highlighting education as our vehicle for resistance, survival, and defiance. Jabiri also pointed out that ActforPal aims to cultivate a mass, borderless academic movement based on voluntarism and membership fees, with the goal of helping to rebuild higher education in Gaza without interference from neoliberal funders or institutions.

Our next speaker was Robin DG Kelley, who emphasized that ActforPal is a crucial intervention against militarism. Kelley discussed the challenging struggle ahead for both students and faculty in the US who are standing up for Palestine and against genocide. He underscored the critical importance of resistance against scholasticide, particularly as the Zionist entity targets Gaza’s educational institutions, staff, students, and libraries, as much as it targets the armed resistance. Despite this assault on Palestine’s education system and intellectual life, Palestinian culture has managed to sustain itself and continues to resist both scholasticide and genocide.  ActforPal is a vital intervention in this resistance. An important question to consider is what American and other educational institutions can do, at the level of pedagogy, to stand in solidarity with Palestine. How, for example, does the struggle for a free Palestine shape American curricula? Kelley also highlighted Rabab Abdulhadi as a pioneer in this field in the US, particularly for her initiative, “Teaching Palestine.” He emphasized the essential role of the intellectual in speaking truth to power and noted that ActforPal plays a key role in this struggle.

Our third speaker, Rabab Abdulhadi, spoke out against the criminalization of Palestine in American curricula, emphasizing that the Zionist movement’s objective is the erasure of both Palestine and the Palestinians—specifically, those who produce the knowledge that sustains Palestinian culture and life Abdulhadi underscored that the donor-driven neoliberal agenda seeks to control knowledge production, which is why it is crucial to decolonize the curriculum from Eurocentric frameworks. She discussed how the initiatives she began at San Francisco State University—the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program and her “Teaching Palestine” initiative—are important steps in that direction. The production of knowledge should not be confined to the walls of universities. The emphasis should be on an “open classroom” where there would be no barriers between the university and the community, allowing community activists, political prisoners, revolutionaries, and others to participate in the production of knowledge.

Our next speaker, Salim Vally, began with the resonant poetic line from Palestinian-Canadian poet Rafeef Ziadah: “We Palestinians teach life…”Vally pointed out that Israel’s crimes are so heinous that people around the world are rising in outrage. The Zionist entity is attempting to obliterate the very means that enable the existence of the Palestinian people—the annihilation of Palestinian education and intellectual life, which must be countered by education for liberation.

Vally called the Palestinian cause the defining issue of our time—the cause that has united revolutionary activists around the world. Despite the Zionist entity’s continuous attacks and colonial plunder of Palestinian education, scholars, archives, libraries, books, and museums (historically in 1947-1948, 1967, 1982, and through the ongoing scholasticide and epistemicide), the Palestinian population remains among the most literate in the world, with a 97.8% literacy rate. This is resistance and sumud. Vally emphasized that the South African apartheid regime was Israel’s greatest supporter and ally as early as 1948, when both apartheid regimes were established. In fact, he pointed out, their alliance was strong even before their official establishment. However, Vally believes that the official end of apartheid in South Africa (though it continues in other ways to this day) should offer hope to those standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, as the liberation of Palestine is near.

Our final speaker, Rami Morjan, spoke from genocide-ravaged Gaza, which, despite the utter destruction of life, remains defiant and resistant. Morjan began by telling his audience that he is one of the survivors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He pointed out that the destruction of Gaza was planned even before October 7, and that the erasure of Palestine and its people has always been a central goal of the Zionist project. He went on to emphasize that education is the lifeblood of the Palestinian people, their hope for freedom and independence. ‘We do not possess oil or gold, but we possess a love for education,’ Morjan said. He then shared some troubling statistics: as of now, 11,000 students and 700 teachers (including 110 university professors) have been martyred, though he noted that these numbers could be an undercount. He also mentioned that in one university alone, the Islamic University of Gaza, to which he is affiliated, over 1,100 students have been martyred. Still Gazans resist, with both students and teachers seeking every possible means to continue their education—sometimes raising their mobile phones to catch internet signals in order to listen to lectures. Morjan ended his presentation by calling on people from around the world to join the ActforPal initiative and support the people of Gaza in their sumud.