“Surviving settler colonialism isn’t just about surviving its material realities, it’s also about surviving how settler colonialism requires destroying cultures, and languages, and sensibilities, and values, and ways of being in the world,” says scholar and activist Nadine Naber. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Naber and host Kelly Hayes discuss the connections between the struggle for Palestinian liberation and U.S. movements against police and prisons, the history of Palestinian and Arab organizing in the U.S., and why attacks on the analytical framework of settler colonialism are about undermining solidarity.
Music by Son Monarcas & Isobel O’Connor
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we will be hearing from scholar and activist Nadine Naber. Nadine organizes with INCITE! Palestine Force, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition & Solidarity, and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She is a board member of the Arab American Action Network; Al-Shabaka; the National Council of Arab Americans; and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Nadine is the founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops, and a professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She has authored and co-edited multiple books, including Arab America; Arab and Arab American Feminisms; and Color of Violence. Nadine is also a Truthout contributor, and her most recent piece, When Abolitionists Say “Free Them All,” We Mean Palestine Too is an essential intervention that I hope everyone will check out.
During the last few months, as many of us have done our best to take action where we can in opposition to Israel’s genocidal assaults on Gaza, Nadine has been an inspiration to me on a personal level. She is a caring co-struggler, a tenacious organizer and a generous educator. Her experience and analysis are invaluable to our movements, and I am so grateful that she was able to join me for this conversation. I hope that Nadine’s insights about the history of Palestinian and Arab organizing in the U.S., the intersections between policing and militarism, and the connections between Palestine and prison and police abolition will help fuel your organizing work. We will also discuss some of the obnoxious arguments we have been hearing of late regarding settler colonialism, given that some critics have decided that the most effective way to undermine movements against settler colonialism and genocide is to attack the very existence of those concepts, or to treat them as the stuff of trendy discourse. We are going to explain why those takes are trash, but first, we are going to delve into some histories and connections that are often missed in popular conversations about Palestine.
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KH: Nadine Naber, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Nadine Naber: It’s great to be on the show. Thank you for having me.
KH: I want to thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. We’re in some of the same organizing group chats, so I know how busy you are right now and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to learn from you and think alongside you a bit today.
NN: Thank you so much. I’m so grateful for all your great work.
KH: Well, the feeling is mutual. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work?
NN: Yeah, sure. Well, I’m affiliated with the organization Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition & Solidarity in Chicago, and we primarily work with mothers and caregivers of Chicago’s police torture survivors. We strive to connect these struggles to struggles of Palestinian mothers and caregivers, undocumented mothers and caregivers, and Indigenous folks in Chicago who are striving to mother and care give in the face of state violence.
I also work with the Arab American Action Network and the national INCITE! Palestine Force, and I’m a professor at UIC. And I wanted to share about myself that my parents are migrants from the city of Salt, which is in Jordan, and some of our extended family members live in Palestine and Jordan. I wanted to share that it’s rare to hear people who are originally from Jordan speak in the United States because we are quite small in number, the people who are Indigenous to Jordan. Many people in the U.S. don’t realize that historically Palestinians and Jordanians are one people and that Europeans carved up the Arab region and, when they did so, they divided Palestine from Jordan — that was in the early 1900s.
But my ancestors and my anti-imperialist Arab community, we all consider Palestinians and Jordanians to be one people, even though now and all along the Jordanian regime that was put in place by Europeans and all of their corrupt and violent collaboration with Europe and the U.S. and all of their betrayals of our Palestinian siblings have divided us and also allowed Jordanians to live with many privileges that Palestinians don’t have, like living free from the threat, at least until now, of a genocide and colonization.
I began organizing with my Arab community in the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, and I was really fortunate because I was mentored by leftist Palestinian and Arab activists who are just a bit older than me. I was born in 1969. These were folks who were active in the Bay Area during the first Palestinian Intifada or the uprising of the late 1980s in the Bay Area.
It’s helpful historically to reflect on how when Palestinian organizing was underway in the ’80s in the U.S., it was really different than what we see now, and that’s because it was connected to Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine, unlike today. The reason for that is because of the U.S.-backed so-called peace process that happened in the ’90s or what many of us call the normalization of Israeli colonization.
So what I’m talking about is that during the period that dominant world language calls “the peace process,” it was actually a process that had the goal of … That was in the ’90s. It had the goal of quelling and destroying Palestinian resistance, which was the Palestinian uprising of the late ’80s. What happened then is that it was called the peace process, but it was really about forcing Palestinians into ending their uprising with all these false promises.
But what it did was it enabled more and more Israeli land confiscation and Israeli expansion under the guise of peace. The reason I’m saying this in introducing myself is that I came up as an organizer right in the context of that moment. So later in the ’90s, the U.S. created this list of foreign terrorist organizations, and they put many Palestinian resistance movements on that list.
So what that meant is that the U.S. and Israel were trying to cut off Palestinian homeland resistance movements from Palestinian and Arab resistance movements that were in the diaspora, like the movement that I was part of in the Bay Area. So what that meant is that the U.S. was criminalizing movements in the U.S. for being connected to movements on the ground in Palestine, even if those movements were nonviolent and even if those movements were calling for a democratic state in Palestine.
So that was basically the Bay Area in the ’90s, and I was part of this leftist Arab movement that, in many ways, you could say was the precursor to what some of your listeners might know of as AROC, the Arab Resource & Organizing Center. We were trying in the ’90s to expose that Israel is a settler-colonialist state at a time when many progressive and people of color movements hadn’t really integrated this analysis or understanding into their work.
Even when people were talking about Palestine on Democracy Now! or KPFA, the progressive public radio there, it was mostly anti-Zionist white Jewish voices. So there wasn’t really an Arab narrative or a Palestinian narrative that had a place or position in U.S. leftist spaces, you could say, or people of color movement spaces in the ’90s. So we were trying to integrate more Palestinian Arab narratives and, you could say, leadership analysis strategies into those spaces.
We were also part of launching divestment, divest from Israel, which was launched in 2000 and 2001. A lot of us were part of that 2001 moment in Durban, South Africa, when an international movement came together to launch international divestment from Israel in connection to the World Conference Against Racism [World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance] in Durban at that time.
Also, about my organizing history, a bit central was connecting Palestinian liberation to ending the U.S. war on Iraq. So we were working to end the U.S. sanctions on Iraq and working to grow a boycott movement in the U.S., and it was also connected to a feminist counterpart to this leftist Arab movement called the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. We were just growing feminist and queer perspectives on all of this, and we were connected. And I was part of the Women of Color Resource Center that worked with the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. We put together a paper that some of your listeners might have read before that’s been published in a few different books, like the INCITE! book, the Color of Violence, called “The Forgotten ‘-Ism’,” and it was about Zionism and Arab American feminism.
And that was 20 years ago, and it also was part of the INCITE! movement and feminists of color movement against state violence. And then throughout all these years, I’m now in Chicago working on similar fronts with local Palestinian and Arab organizing and feminists of color organizing, at a different moment here in Chicago, with USPCN, AAAN, MAMAS, and INCITE! again with INCITE!’s Palestine Force. So that’s a bit about me and how it relates to our conversation.
KH: Thank you so much for that history and background. You recently wrote a piece called, “When Abolitionists Say ‘Free Them All,’ We Mean Palestine Too.” I would love to talk about some of the themes in that piece. You wrote that, “It would be a mistake to forge solidarity from Ferguson to Gaza based only upon the idea that our struggles are ‘similar’ … because our struggles are also interconnected.” Can you say more about the distinction between similarity and interconnection? How are our struggles here in the U.S. interconnected with the struggle in Palestine?
NN: Thank you so much for that, Kelly. Well, I first started thinking about this idea of forging solidarity based on interconnection with the INCITE! movement. Before September 11, you could say, INCITE! had been doing a lot of crucial feminist abolitionist work, growing in connection with Critical Resistance and forging alternatives to calling the police in cases of gender violence and forging these ideas of community accountability as alternatives to policing, especially when it came to understanding that cops could enact sexual violence on the bodies of people of color if they were to show up.
So when we started working to end the War on Terror, we understood that we needed alternatives to militarism to keep our communities safe, especially since militarism by nature is based in hetero-patriarchy and always entails sexualized violence and rape. But we kept bumping up against a limitation in our own organizing where we started building these anti-militarist campaigns around the war on Iraq and........