Oh Palestine, Palestine: Unchaining education

Why is every letter of the alphabet chained, indeed, as this poet asks. If I may attempt an answer to this question, I will want to raise it as an epistemological and pedagogic concern.

- BY SIVAMOHAN SUMATHY

And I do have to raise it as a question of Palestine as well, for our lives caught in the systems of knowledge production, and shaped by their parameters, have to reckon with one of the greatest political infamies of our shared global history: Palestine.

Many of us watch with horror the war on Gaza. We are anxious about the ongoing conflict, and the uptick on the war, with USA bombing Iran and the counter offensives. The war in Ukraine had already raised concerns about an impending World War III. Continuous wars, one leading to the other, had always been apart of our lives in recent times. We had always put it down to geopolitics and the West’s need to dominate and shape the world order in the way it wants to. Palestine had always been central to this. But this understanding, important as it is, has to be combined with a theoretical and semiotic understanding of what Palestine stands for, in very material terms; its peoples, the multiple dispossessions that the land has undergone, the horror of war and mayhem, the resistance of the Intifadas — in other words, in historical and political terms. We need to do this as our own act of solidarity and strategy, because our “books deceive.”

Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Neoliberalism