What is it to make a life under humanitarian law? Where humanitarian law is a governing force, certain possibilities are, at least momentarily, foreclosed. Humanitarian law operates in the context of war—in the case of International Humanitarian Law/Law of Armed Conflict—and of displacement—in the case of refugee law. So the circumstances where it operates are unstable. The Israeli war on Gaza that began after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, has made humanitarian law a subject of intense debate around the world. Efforts to use international law instruments and institutions (notably at the International Court of Justice) to alter the course and character of the war have had little immediate impact, but they may reshape international law. Palestine’s place as a crucial cauldron for understanding how humanitarian law operates and what sorts of life-making happen under this law predates this war and will extend beyond it. This talk will explore how humanitarian law shapes and directs violence, in Gaza and beyond.

Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research focuses on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67; Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule; Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics; and co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Dr. Feldman has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Palestine (Gaza & the West Bank), Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.

From 1919 through the early 1950s, agricultural scientists affiliated with the University of California, and agricultural scientists setting up settlements in Mandatory Palestine traveled between California and Palestine on a series of research trips. I argue that these scientists naturalized and made universal racial hierarchies through transnational technoscientific collaboration. US and Zionist scientists engaged in exchange and debate over the proper physical organization and location of farms, and the concept of carrying capacity of the land in historic Palestine. In both, agricultural science became an objective reason to elevate Western ideologies of proper cultivation and capitalist yield, thereby justifying the dispossession of Palestinians from their land because they were deemed “poor stewards.” This historical case study holds implications for contemporary issues around land and population in Palestine-Israel today, and related debates in global sustainable development at large.

Dr. Gabi Kirk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California (Wiyot land). She received her Ph.D. in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis. Working between political ecology, feminist geographies, and geographies of colonialism, she has examined how Palestinian farmers and sustainable development institutions in the northern West Bank use agro-ecological practices in order to challenge normative notions of sovereignty. She is also interested in interrogating Zionist claims to “Jewish indigeneity” through environmentalism. Dr. Kirk is a founding member of the Environment page on Jadaliyya and a long time member of Jewish Voice for Peace. Learn more about Dr. Kirk’s work here: https://www.gabikirk.com/

“The research for my book, Memories of Revolt: the 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, is based on interviews conducted with fighters in that insurgency, conducted in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and historic Palestine. My talk will situate the current struggles in Gaza and the West Bank within the long history of Palestinian struggles against colonial occupation, in which the 1936-39 is one of the key moments, and attempt to draw some lessons and parallels between the struggles of today and the past.”

Ted Swedenburg is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Memories of Revolt: the 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (1995/2003), and co-editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke, 2005) and Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Duke, 1996). His most recent publication on Palestine is “Songs of Resistance,” in Diana Allan, ed. Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine (2021).

This lecture, formed through heartbreak and outrage, details what it means to teach life in Gaza amidst cyclical genocidal bombardment. I draw from the sixth chapter in my first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, which follows myriad virtual tours in Gaza and details the labor of Palestinian guides and organizers in the moments between the past several Israeli military incursions into the Strip. I argue that, through these virtual tours, Palestinian guides, organizers, and activists in Gaza resist the severing of Gaza from the rest of Palestine and from the rest of the world, disrupting the circumscription of Palestine to the geographical borders of the West Bank, and intervening in narratives that position Gaza as solely a site of suffering, where tourism could never flourish. They ask instead, what it would mean if Palestinians in Gaza could invite tourists, host their own tours, control their own borders, live freely. I will speak about what this chapter means now, in a time of genocide, and the role of Palestinian journalists on the ground to similarly bring Gaza to the rest of the world as Israel attempts—via orchestrated blackouts—to render that connection impossible. In total, I will reflect on what is incumbent upon all of us as witnesses to this genocide.

Dr. Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, the next volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press. Dr. Kelly is a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

The streets of Iran have been filled with chants of “Women! Life! Freedom!” as the nation experiences a vast social uprising against its political leadership led by women and girls.

Sparked by the September 16th killing of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” for failing to comply with Islamic dress codes, the movement has at its heart an insistence that there is no such thing as political freedom without bodily autonomy. It has spread throughout Iran—prompting a government crackdown that has killed hundreds—and given rise to new visions for political futures both in Iran and globally.

Dr. Narges Bajoghli, an award-winning political anthropologist, writer, and professor whose past research on Iran has given her unprecedented access to those in power as well as to the social movements struggling against the state, shares her insights into what these uprisings mean for Iran and the rest of the world.

Dr. Bajoghli discusses the women and girls at the forefront of this movement, their refusal to comply with laws and systems that oppress them, and the prospects of these struggles to bring about substantive change despite government efforts to squelch dissent.

Dr. Narges Bajoghli is a political anthropologist, media anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker, whose research lies at the intersections of media, power, and resistance in Iran and the United States. http://www.nargesbajoghli.com/