Naming Palestine: A Political Imperative in the Academy
by Mahdis Azarmandi & Sara Tolbert
In recent months, universities around the world have become both battlegrounds and barricades. Students, many of them racialized, many of them Palestinian, have been arrested, assaulted, and publicly vilified for refusing to stay silent in the face of genocide. Faculty have been suspended, contracts terminated, and entire departments censored for expressing solidarity with Palestine. In this context, the university is exposed not as a neutral space of inquiry, but as an active participant in the policing of dissent.
It is in this climate that we return to A Manifesto for a Transgressive Feminist Praxis, a document we first wrote as a survival manual, as an insurgent provocation, and as a refusal to play by the unspoken rules of the neoliberal, colonial academy (Azarmandi & Tolbert, 2024). In light of the ongoing repression of Palestine solidarity, this manifesto has taken on renewed urgency. It is not only a tool for surviving the university. It is a call to name what is happening, to name our responsibilities, and to refuse complicity.
The repression of Palestine solidarity through arrests, censorship, professional threats, and institutional silence is not incidental. It is not a failure of liberal democracy. It is liberal democracy, specifically in its entanglements with settler-colonialism, working as intended: protecting Empire, defending land theft, and criminalizing those who challenge it. What we are witnessing is not merely the erosion of academic freedom, but the tightening of fascist governance–a governance that frames anti-colonial resistance as terrorism, that brands solidarity as threat and violence, that punishes the naming of genocide. Liberal democracies are not impartial arbiters of rights; they are active participants in imperial violence through arms sales, diplomatic protection for war criminals, and other shady economic entanglements. The authoritarian tactics in response to growing Palestinian solidarity are not new, but they have intensified. They are calibrated to protect a political and economic order in which the university is deeply invested.
Problematizing the defense of free speech
At the center of this crackdown is the university itself. While often imagined as havens for free thought, universities have long been complicit in reproducing colonial knowledge systems. Today, they function as sites where dissent is not only policed but defanged. "Academic freedom" is invoked when it serves dominant interests and silenced when it threatens imperial or corporate alliances. Palestine solidarity movements make this contradiction plain and clear.
Appeals to free speech often rely on the same logics that defend platforms for fascists and climate denialists, ignoring the power relations that shape who is heard and who is punished for speaking. Speech is always structured by who holds power and who is punished for challenging it. Let us be clear: there are no "both sides" to apartheid. There is no neutrality in the face of annihilation. Attacks on Palestinian solidarity are attempts not just to silence speech but to discipline, punish, and dismantle resistance to settler colonialism and Empire.
Palestine solidarity demands not just the right to speak, but the dismantling of the logics and structures that make speaking so dangerous. Framing the suppression of Palestine solidarity merely as a matter of free expression risks depoliticizing the core struggle. It flattens histories of occupation, apartheid, and genocide into abstractions. It centers the discomfort of institutions and scholars rather than human beings being annihilated in real time.
On solidarity with Palestine as collective responsibility
As educators, researchers, and public intellectuals, our duty is not to position ourselves as objective observers but to intervene in structures of violence. A transgressive feminist praxis insists that we not only name violence but situate ourselves in relation to it. We are not disembodied thinkers. We are participants in the systems we study and we are accountable to those impacted by them. To name Palestine is not to enter a debate about speech but to refuse erasure. It is to reject the liberal impulse to depoliticize, to neutralize, or to center ourselves in moments of crisis.
The suppression of Palestine solidarity did not begin with the current genocide, nor with right-wing governments alone. It has been systematically enacted through “neutral” university policies, through diversity frameworks that exclude Palestinian liberation, and through liberal governance that criminalizes certain forms of resistance while celebrating others. This is not exceptional. This is the architecture of settler racial capitalism working as intended.
Furthermore, transgressive feminist praxis demands we resist the individualization of struggle – working against the cult of the individual, i.e., the activist intellectual whose brand is built on critique, or the celebrity scholar-activist celebrated for their individual acts of resistance. Liberation is not won through personal recognition. It is forged in collective refusal.
To stand in solidarity with Palestine is to embrace a radical praxis that rejects the pretense of both neutrality and individuality, and embraces the responsibility to align in solidarity with anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements. It is a call to imagine the university otherwise: not as a protected enclave of elite thought, but as a site of collective struggle, accountability, and transformation. Palestine is a living site of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist struggle that demands both our solidarity and our collective refusal to comply with the violence of Empire.