Recognition Is Solidarity

Eman Abdelhadi 

In the Muslim tradition, jinn (think genie) are beings made of fire who live in a parallel universe to our own. The jinn are shape shifters, who can appear to humans or retreat into their own dimension. Like us, they fall along a moral spectrum and are neither inherently good nor inherently evil.  Being shape shifters, they have us at a disadvantage. They can see us, but we cannot see them. The evil among them can use this advantage to wreak havoc on human lives, and so the Jinn are the objects of both intense curiosity and fear.

Having grown up Muslim and Arab in the American Midwest, I think I know how the jinn must feel. I was nine when I put on the hijab in my hometown in mid-Missouri, and I was about twelve when 9/11 happened. I spent my entire life explaining Islam to people. Falafel is a food, not a religious belief. No, I do not speak Islamic; the language is Arabic. I was born here, not in “Arabia.”  Thank you for asking; I do not expect I will have to marry Osama when I grow up.  At school, I did every school project on Palestinian history, filling PowerPoint after PowerPoint with UN Statistics and elaborate maps. Please see me, I asked of my bewildered suburban classmates.

Life had gotten better though. I live in a large city that is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. I work at an academic institution where staff, faculty and students boast a certain degree of cosmopolitanism. Still, I have kept—out of necessity—my immigrant skill of compartmentalizing my life, of only doling out bits of information about my background in manageable bites. I learned quickly which colleagues never to say the word Palestine around. I kept my life as an activist after hours and tucked away from my place of employment. I emphasized my Muslimness just enough to convey my unique access to the community I study while carefully presenting a neutral front. My workplace has long been a symbol, in my mind, of my success at managing visible invisibility.

In October that all changed. My phone screen started to fill with devastation: parents screaming over the bodies of their dead children, entire neighborhoods razed to the ground, human flesh ground into pulp. But my window screen was telling a different story—my home was warm and safe. No bombs threatened to fall from the sky.  I walked around my neighborhood and my grocery store surrounded by the blissfully unaware and the strangely unperturbed. Can they see me? Between the phone and the window, which of the screens should I believe? I could not function as the polished version of myself that has been honed for polite, secular, white, upper middle-class society. I wept when asked a casual “How are you?” by the water cooler. It was becoming impossible to be a jinn in the land of the humans.

Between 29 April  and 7 May, 2024, a few feet from my office, at the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, I did not have to compartmentalize. I did not have to pretend to be okay, to pretend I was not always thinking of Gaza and counting the dead. I did not have to pretend these extraordinary times were ordinary or attempt to separate Gaza from the rest of my life.

While the rest of the world has been hell bent on Palestinian erasure, the Popular University insisted on Palestinian recognition. Since October, those of us with public profiles have been fighting the war of narrative about Palestine. After every atrocity committed against Palestinians—troops of Israeli propogandists cast doubt on every dimension of the events we were witnessing with our own eyes. Recall, for example, that after Israel first bombed Al-Shifa hospital in November, killing hundreds of patients and people seeking refuge, it successfully convinced Western media to parrot the plain lie that Palestinians might have bombed themselves. Months later, Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is indisputable fact. It has been maddening to scream into the void about atrocities, to provide links and videos and images, only to be told that they were all figments of our imaginations.

Gaslighting is not a new tactic. Read the replies to any pro-Palestinian X/Twitter account on any given day, and you will find people questioning the very existence of Palestine and Palestinians. “What is Palestine?” a troll recently asked in a reply to a X/Twitter thread I posted. “There has never been any such thing.”  Unfortunately, erasing Palestine has not been limited to trolls on the internet. President Biden and his administration have regularly repeated Israeli propaganda, including outright lies.

Here at UChicago, the administration has doggedly refused to acknowledge the existence of Palestinian life, much less the enormous pain and suffering Palestinians are facing. President Paul Alivisatos attended a vigil for victims of the 7 October attack held by Zionist organizations on campus, but he did not attend a single vigil or commemoration of Palestinian death, even the many events that were registered and approved by the university.

After months of claiming political neutrality, he met with the Israeli Consul general and Hillel to discuss the safety of Jewish students on campus. We reside thirty miles away from where a six-year-old Palestinian child, Wadea Al Fayoume, was stabbed to death. Three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont, another was run over in California. Visibly Muslim or Arab students have felt unsafe across the country including at UChicago. Nary a word about their safety. Anti-Zionist Jewish students have faced anti-Semitic harassment and profiling as well as repression for their activism. Nary a word about their safety.

Negotiations between UChicago administration and the Popular University fell apart, in large part, over the question of recognition. I was in the room during the final session of negotiations on Sunday, 5 May. Students continued to demand that the scholarships and programs the university was offering go to Palestinians; administrators suspended negotiations instead. In the final deal on offer, the word Palestine does not appear once.

“Existence is resistance,” is a popular refrain in the Palestine liberation movement. At the Popular University, I learned that recognition is solidarity. In sharp contrast to the administration’s stance, students had built a minisociety on the premise of recognizing Palestinian life, and the impact of that work was enormous. I teared up every time I approached the encampment. Palestinian flags were everywhere and handmade art across the quad told the stories of my people. Songs from my childhood filled the speakers. It was not just that I was surrounded by my people, it was that I was surrounded by my people openly and unapologetically being ourselves among everyone else.

Forget compartmentalization, friends, colleagues and comrades from every nook and cranny of my life found their way to the quad. One evening it took me an hour to cross from one end of the camp to another, because I kept colliding with folks I knew: colleagues from UIC and Northwestern, acquaintances from my mosque, Hyde Park neighbors unaffiliated with the university, Chicagoans from all ends of the city. Everyone was part of the camp. “We’re on your turf,” one longtime friend joked when I ran into her. “My worlds are colliding,” I retorted!

Miraculously, there was nothing for me to explain to any of them. I did not have to be the Palestinian voice in the room. There were so many of us. I did not have to have the long debates about history, terms, or definitions with the many Zionists who approached the camp. Anti-Zionist Jewish organizers took that work on. I did not have to scurry to my office to pray. A few times a day, a student would call the adhaan on the quad and Muslims would gather to pray unproblematically. Islam was neither normative nor abnormal, it just was.

I have argued elsewhere that the encampments were glimpses into a different kind of life, one organized around care rather than profit. But for me—and I suspect for many Arabs and/or Muslims there—the encampment was also a glimpse into a different kind of self. My research on Muslim life in the United States shows the complexity and toll of living the compartmentalized lives that a hostile world necessitates. In bringing our worlds together, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza gifted many of us a new experience of wholeness. It helped heal some of the wounds of the past seven months and reenergized us for the fight ahead.

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Eman Abdelhadi is an assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.