15.01.26
Editorial Note
The American Jewish Congress, a long-established American Jewish organization founded over a century ago to advance Jewish values, rights, and interests, recently published a petition calling on Princeton University to cancel a seminar taught by former Hebrew University Law Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) has documented Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s academic and public activities on numerous occasions over the past two decades.
The petition, titled “Sign the Letter to Princeton University,” was published on December 25, 2025, and objects to Princeton’s decision to offer a course titled “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide,” which characterizes events in Gaza as an “ongoing genocide” and places them in comparative discussion alongside the Holocaust. According to the petition, this framing constitutes a false equivalence that instrumentalizes genocide studies in order to portray Israel as comparable to the gravest crimes in modern history.
The petition further cites a series of public statements attributed to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, including remarks questioning the validity of Hamas atrocities against Israelis and assertions that Israeli claims regarding violence against civilians, including children and sexual assault, are fabrications. It also references her published calls to “abolish Zionism,” which she has described as a criminal project that “cannot continue.” The petition argues that such positions go beyond legitimate scholarly critique and contribute to an environment that is hostile to Jewish students.
On this basis, the petition urges Princeton University not to confer academic legitimacy on such views under the banner of scholarship, particularly at a time when documented incidents of antisemitism on university campuses are at historic highs. It calls for the course to be cancelled, asserting that antisemitism has no place in Princeton’s classrooms.
Princeton University’s own description of the seminar states that it “explores genocide through the analytic of gender, with a central focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist theoretical frameworks. The course description explains that students will situate Gaza within comparative histories, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocides of black and indigenous populations, while engaging Palestinian feminist critiques of colonial violence.
Beyond her teaching, Shalhoub-Kevorkian has recently served as a guest co-editor of a journal, Critical and Radical Social Work, special issue titled Social Work in a Time of Genocide. In the issue, she co-authored a paper titled “‘Oxygen is not for the dead’: Critical and radical social work in Palestine.” The article describes what the authors term “Zionist violence” as shaping virtually all aspects of Palestinian social and familial life, including reproduction, marriage, housing, mobility, education, and mourning practices. It presents Palestinian social work as inherently embedded in anticolonial struggle and resistance to what it characterizes as settler-colonial structures and “machineries of death.”
The article further argues that Palestinian social work is inseparable from the political struggle for liberation, rejecting a distinction between professional service provision and political activism. According to the authors, social work is framed as a vehicle for collective resistance and refusal rather than as a politically neutral profession.
These positions reflect a broader pattern in Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s academic output, in which normative political commitments are explicitly integrated into scholarly analysis. This approach is not limited to her more recent work. In 2009, IAM reported on the Annual International Al-Awda Convention in California, organized by the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which urged “to bring the days of RETURN closer.” They discussed campaigns of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions, refugee support, student/youth activism,” etc. The panels featured law professor and Mada al-Carmel researcher (Haifa) Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, among others.
In 2014, in an article co-authored with Professor Daphna Golan Agnon and published in the Journal of Peace Education, Shalhoub-Kevorkian advanced a critique of Israeli academia for what the authors described as the “depoliticization” of the classroom.
The article examined community-engaged courses involving Israeli and Palestinian students and reported that many students viewed overt political activity in the classroom as inappropriate. The authors, by contrast, argued that such reluctance reflected problematic boundaries imposed on academic discourse. They wrote that issues such as military occupation, war, and the situation in Gaza were considered “out of bounds” on campus, because they were perceived as political, while other topics labeled as social justice or civic engagement were deemed acceptable. The authors criticized this distinction, characterizing it as evidence of an academic environment that discourages engagement with what they considered the most urgent political realities.
Taken together, these publications and teaching initiatives illustrate an approach to scholarship that explicitly collapses the distinction between academic inquiry and political advocacy. While political critique and normative argumentation have a place within academic discourse, the case of Shalhoub-Kevorkian raises broader questions about the limits of academic freedom, the politicization of professional disciplines, and universities’ responsibilities when offering courses that advance highly contested and polarizing claims under the authority of scholarly expertise.
Since its founding in 2004, Israel Academia Monitor has repeatedly documented cases in which academic platforms have been used to advance political agendas while presenting them as neutral.
Ironically, the representation of Israel through contemporary narratives is shaped by structural biases embedded in the knowledge ecosystems. A key source of this distortion lies in the politicization of large segments of the social sciences, particularly in fields such as postcolonial studies, Middle East studies, anthropology, political sociology, and others. Terms such as “settler colonialism” and various apartheid analogies, when applied to Zionism, tend to erase references to the Jewish people’s legitimate historical and legal claims to their ancestral homeland.
The controversy surrounding Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work and teaching exemplifies this ongoing tension and underscores the need for sustained scrutiny of how academic institutions balance intellectual freedom with scholarly rigor and responsibility.
REFERENCES:
Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide
Basic Details:
2025-2026 Spring
GSS 245
ANT 255
Enrollment by application or interview. Departmental permission required.
Grading basis:Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit
Instructors:
Links:
Description:
This seminar explores genocide through the analytic of gender, with a central focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought, we examine how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival. Students will engage reproductive justice frameworks, survivor testimony, and Palestinian feminist critiques of colonial violence, while situating Gaza within comparative histories of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide against Black and Indigenous populations. Colloquium sessions feature leading feminist scholars.
Sample Reading List:
- Ihmoud, S., Countering Reproductive Genocide in Gaza:
- Shoman, H, Reprocide in Gaza
- Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N., The Politics of Birth and the Intimacies of Violence Against
- Card, C, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil
- von Joeden-Forgey, E., Gender and Genocide
Reading/Writing Assignments:
Reading averages ~100 pages per week. Assignments include 10 reading responses (25%), an oral presentation (25%), class participation (10%), and a final position paper (40%).
Requirements/Grading:
Term Assessments:
- Presentation or performance – 25%
- Papers/writing assignments – 25%
- Participation – 10%
Final Assessments:
- Final paper, problem set, or project – 40%
Prerequisites and Restrictions:
Application: https://forms.gle/Cp2o2qDHH2b11aQp6
Other Information:
Waitlist URL: https://forms.gle/5bzfaDTgHs6K8vKp7
Schedule/Classroom Assignment:
| Class number | Section | Meetings | Seats Open | Seats Enrolled | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 42856 | S01 | Th,1:30 pm – 4:20 pm,Room assignment TBD | 14 | 1 | Booksfor section S01 |
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Princeton Course on Gaza Faces Criticism Over ‘Genocide’ Framing
December 29, 2025 6:22 pm
PRINCETON, N.J. — A spring semester course at Princeton University has drawn criticism from a Republican lawmaker and Jewish advocacy groups over its description of Israel’s war in Gaza and comparisons to the Holocaust.
The course, titled “Gender, Reproduction and Genocide,” states in its online description that it will center on what it calls an “ongoing genocide in Gaza” and will examine the experiences of Palestinians alongside those of Jews during the Holocaust and other historical atrocities.
Rep. Tom Kean said the language misrepresents Israel’s military actions following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
“Israel was the victim of a brutal terrorist assault, and any serious discussion must begin with that reality,” Kean said in a statement. While supporting academic freedom, he said the use of the term “genocide” was misleading and risked distorting the context of the conflict.
According to Princeton’s course listing, enrollment is capped at 14 students, with only one student currently registered. The syllabus references academic materials discussing concepts such as “reproductive genocide” and situates Gaza within broader comparative studies of genocide, including the Armenian genocide and violence against Indigenous and Black populations.
The listed instructor, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, is a visiting professor of gender and sexuality studies. Princeton notes she is chair in law emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and specializes in the study of political violence and its effects on women and children, with a focus on Palestinian society.
Hebrew University suspended Shalhoub-Kevorkian in early 2024 and later reinstated her after remarks in which she questioned reports of atrocities committed by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack. She was also detained in Israel on suspicion of incitement.
The American Jewish Congress criticized the course, calling it inappropriate at a time of heightened antisemitism on college campuses. The group warned that such framing could contribute to a more hostile environment for Jewish students.
Princeton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the criticism.
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SIGN THE LETTER TO PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
We write in outrage at Princeton University’s decision to offer a course titled “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide” that calls Gaza an “ongoing genocide” and places it alongside the Holocaust. By doing so, it falsely equates Israel with history’s worst crimes and weaponizes genocide studies to demonize Israel and the Jewish people.
The course is taught by a professor who has denied Hamas atrocities, stating that “we stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them,” and claiming that Israelis “started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies.”
She has also openly called to “abolish Zionism,” expressing disturbing views that Zionism, the self-determination movement of the Jewish people, “can’t continue, it’s criminal. Only by abolishing Zionism can we continue.”
These are extremist positions that falsify history, fuel antisemitism, and create a hostile environment for Jewish students. Princeton should not legitimize such views under the banner of scholarship, especially at a time when antisemitism on college campuses is at record levels.
We call on Princeton University to cancel this disturbing and problematic course immediately. Antisemitism must have no place in Princeton’s classrooms.
[The Undersigned]
P.S. Please share this petition with friends and colleagues to amplify this call and show Princeton that this course, and the bigotry it represents, will not be tolerated.
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@AJCongressThousands have already joined our call to action. Princeton University is offering a course that calls Gaza an “ongoing genocide” and places it alongside the Holocaust, falsely equating Israel with history’s worst crimes. At a time of record levels of antisemitism, this course risks fueling further hostility and making campus even more unsafe for Jewish students. This is unacceptable. Join us in calling on Princeton to cancel this course. Sign the letter here: https://ajcongress.nationbuilder.com/princeton_peti
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Volume 13 (2025): Issue 4 (Dec 2025): Special issue: Social work in a time of genocide. Guest edited by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Abeer Musleh and Stéphanie Wahab
in Critical and Radical Social Work
“Oxygen is not for the dead”: critical and radical social work in Palestine
Authors: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Stéphanie Wahab, and Abeer Musleh
Introduction
Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on October 20, 2023, at the age of 32, taught us that “Oxygen is not for the dead.” Hiba Abu Nada’s (2017) poem, entitled “Our Loneliness,”1 recognizes survivance (Vizenor, 2010)—that is, the active sense of presence and presencing as an endeavor of creating the future (Simpson, 2017)—and asserts Palestinian embodied connections (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024) to land/life (Khoury, 2019 [2016]):
يا وحدنا
يا وحدنا
ربح الجميع حروبهم
وتُركت أنت أمام وحدك عاريًا
لا شعر يا درويش
سوف يعيد ما خسر الوحيد وما فقد
يا وحدنا
هذا زمان جاهلي آخر
لُعن الذي في الحرب فرقنا به
وعلى جنازتك اتحد
يا وحدنا
الأرض سوق حرة
وبلادك الكبرى مزاد معتمد
يا وحدنا
هذا زمان جاهلي
لن يساندنا أحد
يا وحدنا
فامسح
قصائدك القديمة والجديدة
والبكاء
وشدي حيلك يا بلد
[Our Loneliness
How alone it was,
our loneliness,
when they won their wars.
Only you were left behind,
naked,
before this loneliness.
Darwish,
no poetry could ever bring it back:
what the lonely one has lost.
It’s another age of ignorance,
our loneliness.
Damned be that which divided us
then stands united
at your funeral.
Now your land is auctioned
and the world’s
a free market.
It’s a barbaric era,
our loneliness,
one when none will stand up for us.
So, my country, wipe away your poems,
the old and the new,
and your tears,
and pull yourself together.] (Abu Nada, 2017: translated from Arabic by Salma Harland)
Hiba’s poem resists being left behind, alone, and naked and calls for acts of togetherness to disrupt the settler-colonial ideology (Sheehi and Sheehi, 2022), which centers “unity” only during the natives’ funerals or following their erasure. Her words push us toward embracing life, not leaving anyone behind, fetching oxygen for the living, and working hand in hand against the turning of body, land, and life into what she framed as a “free market.”
Hiba’s insights against this barbaric era of the Gaza genocide move us to historicize and politicize the Palestinian reality as a narration of life. This narration of life is the core of Palestinian epistemic freedom, activism, theorizing, and intervention. As Palestinian life in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and areas colonized in 1948 are increasingly shaped by displacement, dispossession, and genocide, critical and radical social work must find modes of intervention rooted in Palestinian knowledge and meaning making. Hiba’s call brings us to the urgency for action, which includes liberatory knowledge production, because “oxygen is not for the dead.”
At this moment, when the world has failed to stop the over 77 years of continuous Nakba (Khoury, 2012; Khalidi, 2020; Masalha, 2023), as well as an ongoing genocide, social work everywhere must heed the calls to action. As Palestinian society, land, body, and mind are engineered toward death (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019; 2024), the economies of aid are leading Palestinians into death traps (Lazzarini, 2025). Social work must fiercely think and write against this continuity of terror, debilitation, and maiming (Puar, 2017), against the invasion of the intimate, and against militarism, occupation, settler colonialism, and genocidal racism. Critical and radical social work has a duty to expose embodied and spatial entrapments.
Palestinian social work
Social work theory, methodology, and practice in Palestine are intertwined with settler-colonial dispossession, unending debilitation, death, restrictions of movement, policing, surveillance, incarceration, targeted killing, and violent militarized attacks. The totality of occupation and its اهالة (“swarming”) (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2023) impacts every element of Palestinian life, including the mundane; the significance of these impacts is breathtaking. For example, the Zionist violence influences how people maintain and manage their homes, decisions around who to marry or partner with, how, when, and where to live as a family, and how to give birth and grieve, and choices around communal life, education, employment, travel, transportation, and health.
Palestinian social work is deeply intertwined with settler-colonial and anticolonial realities, forcing creative social work practice with communities and individuals. Since Palestinian social workers are living and working amid occupation and genocide, survival, resistance, social change, sorrow, and love are central to social work practice. Palestinian critical and anticolonial social work challenges settler-colonial structures and technologies of elimination by relying on indigenous community-based knowledge, interventions, and methodologies to expose the ongoing socioeconomics of uprooting, militarized realities, and the sense of orphanism that Palestinians feel. Consequently, social work in Palestine is inseparable from the Palestinian people’s struggles for liberation and a dignified life amid settler-colonial dispossession and the machineries of death. Rather than being limited to the provision of services, Palestinian social work is embedded in the community, drawing on its knowledge, practices of life, and traditions of refusal. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) argues in the context of Indigenous research, knowledge production and professional practice must begin from the lived realities and epistemologies of the colonized. In Palestine, this means that social work develops through reciprocal processes of learning from and with the community, enacting what Atallah et al (2021) describe as a decolonial praxis of healing and resistance. Building on these foundations, Palestinian social work contributes to the creation of institutions and organizations that are socially, culturally, and politically grounded. Such rooted practice not only sustains community steadfastness but also enacts collective survival and refusal within an ever-changing necropolitics weaponized by a settler-colonial state committed to Palestinian erasure.
These social work aims and practices are made possible because Palestinians reject the ontological violence that produces us as “nonhumans.” The colonizers constantly aim to strip Palestinians of their agency, dignity, and humanity, turning our bodies and land into اشلاء ashlaa’ (“shredded body parts”) (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024). Rejecting Palestinian dismemberment and the ontological violence that allows such fragmentation and shredding includes insisting on an embodied Palestinian life and futurity. The contributors to this special issue speak to and demonstrate Palestinian embodied and rooted livability. They write against disposability and fragmentation through resistance to the machineries of erasure and accumulation.
Reading critical social work from Palestine
Given the historical and contemporary conditions of Palestinian social work, how might critical social work, both within Palestine and in the global context, read, engage with, and actively support a liberatory Palestinian praxis? To answer this question, we offer seven tenets in service of such a reading. These tenets are the seeds of future work and development for us, and we offer them here as the beginning stages of our best attempts at helping social work understand, analyze, and hopefully support social work in Palestine.
Tenet 1: Refuse ontological violence
Critical social work should stand against the production of “nonhumans” always. In the Palestinian case, the colonizers strip Palestinians of their agency, dignity, and humanity, with the aim of turning their bodies, land, and societies into اشلاء ashlaa’ (“shredded body parts”) (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024), that is, nonhumans. Refusing ontological violence requires leaning on knowledge, imagination, and interventions that decenter Western, white, and Zionist analyses. Refusing any colonial logic of elimination supports this tenet, as does a refusal to accept domination, erasure, and destruction of the subaltern (Spivak, 1988). The rejection of ontological violence includes affirming Being, affirming life against the racialized structure of erasure and precarity (see, for example, Ferreira da Silva, 2007; 2016).
Tenet 2: Expose contemporary power politics and structures
When we expose the structures and architectures of genocidal violence, we create the knowledge base for understanding the intentionality of settler-colonial violence. This type of knowledge and moral exposure can facilitate social work’s better understanding of its role in such structures, with an aim to disrupt colonial brutality and the ways it marks the colonized’s socialities (El-Sarraj, 1997; 2009; Giacaman et al, 2010; Hammami, 2010).
Settler-colonial brutality, anchored in racial-capitalist accumulation (Robinson, 1983) and the political-economic imperatives of land appropriation and resource extraction (Harvey, 2003), profoundly restructures childhood (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019; Tanous, 2021), parenting (Kankaanpää et al, 2020; Otman, 2020), adolescence (Giacaman et al, 2007), and community life. Hence, exposing contemporary power politics and structures entails revealing their brutalist, embodied, and spatial psychosocial architectures and modes of engineering, as well as the political-economic logics that sustain them (Davis, 2003; Fanon, 2004 [1961]; Abu-Lughod, 2013; Simpson, 2014). Uncovering the structural, architectural, and economic infrastructures of genocidal violence establishes the epistemic groundwork for understanding the intentionality and material interests underlying settler-colonial domination. Such knowledge production and moral disclosure can enable critical and radical social work to interrogate its own position within these political-economic configurations and to work toward dismantling both the material and symbolic dimensions of colonial brutality and its inscription on the socialities of the colonized (El-Sarraj, 1997; 2009; Giacaman et al, 2010; Hammami, 2010).
Tenet 3: Critical social work values
Engagement with systems of racialized domination and their associated mechanisms of control and technological integration that shape knowledge production (Spivak, 1988; Wynter, 2003) is foundational to critical social work practice. Grounded in the values of social justice, human dignity, anti-oppression, and solidarity, critical social work must address these dynamics both within and beyond the context of Palestine, particularly amid ongoing genocidal violence. At local, regional, and global levels, critical social work holds a vital responsibility to resist processes of dehumanization and structural violence by advocating for the protection of vulnerable populations, ensuring the delivery of humanitarian aid, and amplifying marginalized voices. Incorporating the scholarship of Palestinian academics (among others cited herein, see, for example, Barakat, 2014; Hammami, 2023; Wahab and Bhuyan, 2025) strengthens critical social work’s capacity to respond to such violations as forced starvation, the prevention of aid, نزع الطفولة (“unchilding”) (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), and ethnic cleansing. Such engagement requires a sustained commitment to decolonial praxis, which challenges oppressive systems and fosters transformative justice on a global scale.
Tenet 4: Center resistance and صمود sumud
مقاومة (“resistance”) and صمود sumud (Meari, 2014; Ajour, 2021) constitute values and practices that express reclamations of Palestinian humanity and the preservation of collective memory. They enact an ethic of fidelity to Palestinian cultural heritage and a clear refusal to reduce people, sociality, and land to أشلاء ashlaa’ (“shredded body parts”) (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024). مقاومة (“resistance”) and صمود sumud are also political-emotional values that emphasize the importance of collective actions and moral solidarity (Jabr, 2015; Meari, 2022). Centering مقاومة (“resistance”) and صمود sumud maintains that Palestinians have the right to speak and act against our own disposability.
Tenet 5: Center love and togetherness
Centering love and togetherness is a response to fragmentation. Many Palestinian scholars have documented the psychosocial impacts of militarism, settler colonialism, and genocide (Abu-Jamei et al, 2023; Ihmoud, 2023; Giacaman et al, 2024; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024). A common theme present across these forms of archiving is that of the fragmentation of Palestinian land, bodies, culture, society, and psyches. Amid these forms of fragmentation, Palestinians choose to anchor survival and living in Palestinian love (Ihmoud, 2024) and togetherness (Kanafani, 1967 [1963]). Hence, prioritizing family, community, and being together is a response to colonial uprooting and the demolitions of homes, what one of the authors in this special issue, Yoad Ghanadry-Hakim (2025), terms محو البيت (“unhomeness”).
Tenet 6: Strive for rootedness of place, collectivity, and relationality (Barakat, 2025)
Palestinian critical social work extends beyond attending to the realities of death and destruction; it actively nurtures kinship, futurity, and life in defiance of the settler colony’s death-worlds. Rootedness emerges through sustained connections to land, home, and community, as well as through solidarity with political prisoners held hostage in Israeli prisons. These practices of relationality cultivate purpose, hope, and the Palestinian praxis of love, which is an ethic of life that resists erasure and affirms collective continuity. In this sense, Palestinian critical social work resonates with Indigenous articulations of relational ontologies (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2017), where land, kinship, and collective care are not symbolic but lived foundations for knowledge, صمود (“steadfastness”), and مقاومه (“resistance”).
Tenet 7: Inhabit تمرد (“disobedience”)
Palestinian critical social work asserts the necessity of disobedience in the face of genocidal settler-colonial regimes that aim not only to disappear the people and eliminate them but also to annihilate Palestinian knowledge and knowledge systems (scholasticide), art, archives, museums, and libraries. تمرد (“disobedience”) becomes رفض (“refusal”) and affirmation: refusal of settler-colonial structures of destruction and dispossession; and affirmation of Palestinian modes of life, creativity, and futurity. This entails learning from the peasant and the poet alike; both embody and enact disobedience through their practices of persistence, storytelling, and survival (Odatallah, 2024). To cultivate disobedience, social work must engage with the voices of young scholars, poets, activists, and nonhegemonic knowledge producers who transcend disciplinary boundaries and speak back to colonial power (Abulhawa, 2010; Makkawi, 2017; Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Seedat and Suffla, 2017; Stevens et al, 2017).
Social work is uniquely positioned to map, analyze, and interrogate modes of societal coping with the effects of social dismemberment. The brutalist psychosocial configuration of this violence requires social workers not only to address the ongoing and continuous trauma it engenders (Atallah, 2023; 2025) but also to contest the structural and economic architectures that sustain it. Centering Indigenous modes of disobedience entails resisting the settler colony’s processes of accumulation by dispossession, economic marginalization, spatial control, and politics of genocidal brutality. Palestinian social work, grounded in critical and radical praxis, thus foregrounds disobedience as a pathway to collective life making, liberation, and decolonial social and economic justice.
We refuse our fragmentation
The production of this special issue occurs during a time and space where our own experiences of grief, witnessing, rage, and love for our people and land exist in spaces beyond words. For close to two years, we have witnessed a highly militarized and technologized military dispossessing and killing of Palestinians on a daily basis. We see with our own eyes and feel with our own hearts the intentional fragmentation, wounding, and slaying of Palestinian bodies. We have screamed over the assassinations by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) and Gaza Humanitarian Foundation of starving Gazans making their way to the “killing fields” (Barrows-Friedman, 2025). We understand famine as a weapon of genocide. We think, talk, and write while watching the systematic educide and scholasticide, with the targeting of doctors, scholars, teachers, journalists, and cultural leaders in Gaza. The violence is intent on destroying Palestinians’ capacity to heal, educate, inform, remember, rebuild, and enliven. Our work for this special issue is thus a refusal of the unending uprooting, dismemberment, dehumanization, and erasure that has been ongoing since the Nakba of 1948. Our responsibilities and praxis as Palestinian social workers, scholars, and activists are to write and act to create hope and futurity, produce containment, and maintain our صمود sumud as Gaza is razed to the ground. We are compelled to act daily to pressure powerholders, including states, elites, multinational corporations, and social, cultural, and academic institutions, to take direct actions to stop the genocide, boycott, divest, and sanction genocidaires.
About this special issue
The production of knowledge that speaks against epistemic violence and its engineering of society’s necro-unlivability (Simpson, 2014; Razack, 2015) is foundational to critical and radical social work in a settler-colonial context, such as Palestine. This special issue is intended to provoke reflections and engagement across various fragmented geographies of Palestine. With a grounding in decolonial feminist epistemologies (Qutami, 2024), this special issue will strive to challenge epistemic power hierarchies by centering relationality (Joseph, 1993) and predominantly Palestinian voices situated at the nexus of white supremacy, settler colonialism, Zionism, sexism, and classism. Through analyses of the personal and lived experiences of Palestinians as sites of knowledge production, the authors themselves draw from critical-pedagogical work geared toward transforming oppressive structures (see, for example, Lorde, 1984; hooks, 1994; Freire, 2000 [1970]; Mohanty, 2003; Ahmed, 2017). While the call for this special issue was conceived and circulated before the genocide accelerated in 2023, all the contributions to this special issue were written from a shared position of unequivocal opposition to such brutality. Each contribution engages in different registers with the atrocities and epic violence of the past two years or the colonial violence of the past 77 years prior to the response to Al-Aqsa Flood. As editors and contributors, we recognize that scholarship cannot be detached from the urgency of the present; our work is committed to confronting genocide and to engaging its affective, social, and political ramifications by acting in solidarity, supporting our communities, and amplifying Palestinian refusal and survival. Palestinian social work, as the contributions in this issue attest, has always been a praxis of navigating, resisting, and transforming the genocidal violence that is integral to the settler-colonial Zionist project.
This special issue asks social work to offer alternative imaginations and interventions that decenter Western, Zionist, and white analyses. Contributors to this issue offer paths of thinking and living that go beyond the colonial logic of elimination, rejecting the ontological violence of racialized setter colonialism, and writing as a refusal to accept the domination and destruction of the subaltern (Spivak, 1988). Rejecting ontological violence requires claiming Being, that is, claiming life against the racialized structure of erasure and precarity (see, for example, Ferreira da Silva, 2007; 2016).
The authors in this special issue engage with the way Palestinian society has been subjected to Zionist settler-colonial logics and acts of elimination. The colonizers have used genocidal attacks, ethnic cleansing, uprooting, displacement, mobility restrictions, collective punishments, restrictions on civil society organizations, and restricted economic livability for close to a hundred years (Khalidi, 2020). Rooted in critical, anticolonial, and/or decolonial perspectives, contributors engage with anticolonial and decolonial theories and questions to ask: how do we read families, community, and youth reactions to trauma and dispossession? Abeer Musleh (2025) proposes the conceptualization of لملمة lamlameh, as the process of weaving together, picking up the shards and fragments, and insisting on persisting. In their article, “Together torn apart,” Devin Atallah and Nihaya Abu-Rayyan (2025) similarly engage Palestinian togetherness as a practice that can “drive the colonizers mad” and propose that resisting erasure comes through “weaving togetherness.” Tending to both epistemology and practice, Rawan Nasser’s (2025) article discusses Palestinian refugees’ experiences of trauma resulting from the Nakba. Her research, rooted in the assumption that Western colonial conceptualizations of trauma offer limited guidance to Palestinian social workers, leans on indigenous practices of remembering as praxis for Palestinian meaning making about trauma.
Multiple authors engage with صمود sumud, including Stéphanie Wahab (2025), who engages sumud as one element of a Palestinian feminist praxis of social work. Wahab’s contribution extends theorizing on صمود sumud by placing it in conversation with remembering, Palestinian narrations, refusal, and Palestinian love. Jessica Saba, Manar Qaraqe, Manal Odeh, and Lucas Al-Zoughbi (2025) also engage with صمود sumud when working with female youth in Aida Camp in the West Bank. Both of the articles center صمود sumud as an anticolonial mode of resistance, and Saba, Qaraqe, Oden, and Al-Zoughbi stage صمود sumud as connection, self-expression, belonging, joy, an exercise of agency, and gender justice.
The special issue also offers innovative modes of social and community work practice in the Palestinian settler-colonial context. Wahab (2025) engages a feminist approach to Palestinian agency and defiance, as she points to the reality that the social work profession has always been complicit with settler-colonial violence, including the ongoing genocide. Shahana Rassool (2025) unpacks in significant depth the responses of international social work organizations to the Palestinian question through a document analysis of their publicized statements relating to Palestine. Yoa’d Ghanadry-Hakim (2025) extends the theorizing of home demolitions and uprooting through conceptualizing البيتي (“homenessness”) as transcending the trauma of homelessness to create life and livability, and تسامي tasami as “a psychological mechanism that transcends trauma.” Abeer Otman (2025) stages ثبات thabat (“standing firm”), صمود sumud (“steadfastness”), and ترابط taraabot (“connectivity”) to illuminate the multiple ways Palestinian fathers create connectivity and bonds of love, faith, and livability amid the viciousness of the settler-colonial violence.
Haneen Mgadlah’s (2025) contribution demonstrates how Palestinian social workers holding Israeli citizenship challenge the settler-colonial Israeli welfare system through out-of-system initiatives that focus on building community solidarity and connectivity, volunteering, activism, and research. By looking into the daily lives of Palestinian social workers and their modes of mapping, reading, and intervening to build life and futurity in Palestine, Khawla Al-Azraq’s (2025) voices from the front line2 article in this special issue intervenes against structural and cultural oppression. She critically examines the way social workers maneuver among the hegemonic structures to build a resilient community amid all the wounding. Hala Ali (2025) offers another voice from the front line, as she highlights how social work with people with disabilities amid genocide becomes an act of صمود sumud for both community members and social workers alike. Shared suffering can foster trust and solidarity, as social workers and the people they serve endure displacement, bombings, and atrocities. Despite Gaza’s spaciocide and the absence of resources, social workers persist in their ethical duty, turning collective pain into motivation to serve, even under the threat of death or injury.
Concluding remarks
The authors of this special issue assume a liberatory epistemology that centers the voices of those affected by the brutality of the settler-colonial system while engaging with critical antihegemonic scholarship. Returning to Hiba’s poetry, which articulates the sentiments and sense of loneliness, orphanism, and despair of people in Gaza, the contributors to this special issue illuminate the ways settler colonialism stamps itself onto the colonized psyche, body, mind, and land. The contributors offer piercing framings and analyses through Palestinian constructs of تسامي tasami, صمود sumud, لملمة lamlameh, ترابط tarabout, and ثبات thabat. Their discussions around Palestinian anticolonial resistance engage youth in Gaza and the West Bank, in addition to fathers in occupied Jerusalem, and social workers in the dismembered geography of Palestine. The contributions help us glimpse that Palestinians register colonial trauma, face erasure, intrusion, and subjugation, and yet maintain their ثبات، thabat, ترابط tarabout, and تسامي tasami. To think through critical and radical social work at this point in time, social workers should listen carefully to Palestinian voices and investigate their own collaboration with Zionism, as Wahab implores. Social workers must wonder not how we got here but why. Why has social work allowed the ongoing genocide to be maintained by local and global powers without screaming back? How can a profession governed by ethical commitments to human life, freedom, and dignity come to be so nakedly defined by complicity, carcerality, oppression, and capture? Is this moment a crisis for the social work profession, or is it business as usual?
We are not romanticizing social work in Palestine, nor are we celebrating the unending dismemberment of land and life, one that we stage as a critique of the racial formation of the settler colony. The question we ask social work is: what is at stake in reading social work from Palestine when Palestinians are holding ground, with لملمة lamlameh, ثبات thabat, and تسامي tasami, insisting with tenacity on living, protecting, helping, showing love, moving, and assembling. As South African scholar Hugo Canham (2023: 28) explained: “The histories of colonization, enslavement and genocide mean that there are spaces where race has determined the course of life … however … race never operates alone and that to invisibilize other identity categories is to misrecognize the constitutive nature of being and the complexity with which we live.” Borrowing from Canham’s analyses, we ask: what does it mean “to be constituted of multiplicity”? Multiplicity does not mean we only focus on brutality, maiming, and debilitation. Palestinian social work also focuses on collective agency and the infinite possibilities for creating life; therein, we see the role of the social work profession in Palestine. It would be a mistake to think about the colonial and racialized other, the Palestinians in this issue, as simply objects to be managed for the colonial world. The articles in the special issue indicate that the history and the present of Palestinians attest to the fact that Palestine and Palestinians are sites of continuity, belonging, and transformative liberation. They are sites of transformation that shape world forces, and we hope that they can reshape the social work profession against the colonial and global modes of governance and criminal complicity. Accumulated killing and the dispossession of land and life for over 77 years in Palestine cannot continue to be mundane, acceptable, unexceptional, and routine. Despite the ongoing Nakba and genocide, Palestinian scholars continue to engage, act, think, and write back. The writing back in this special issue facilitates affective spaces for the production of knowledge, generating spaces of breathing, loving, and gathering. Through writing, talking, and being together, we create “اكسجين للأحياء” (“oxygen for the living”), and Hiba Abu Nada speaks through all of us against the unending asphyxiation.
Notes
See: https://arablit.org/2023/12/04/our-loneliness-a-poem-by-hiba-abu-nada/.
The voices from the front line articles cover important issues of practice taking place under conditions of genocide. Normally, this section includes pieces of no more than 1,000 words, but we asked Critical and Radical Social Work for special permission to make them longer than usual, given the circumstances Palestinian social workers face in the field. We are grateful to Critical and Radical Social Work for agreeing to this exception.
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FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE!
Seventh Annual International Al-Awda Convention
Embassy Suites Hotel
Anaheim South
11767 Harbor Boulevard
Garden Grove, California 92840
May 22-24, 2009
JOIN US to work together to bring the days of RETURN closer!
Featured Speakers:
Strategy & tactics discussions: Expert panel discussions will include activists accomplished in the following campaigns: boycotts, divestment and sanctions, refugee support, student/youth activism, Al-Awda educational resources, and chapter building and registration.Exiled Archbishop of Jerusalem Hilarion Cappucci, Al-Jazeera commentators/correspondents Ghassan Ben Jeddo and Khaled Dawoud, Ittijah founder Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, Law professor and Mada al-Carmel researcher (Haifa) Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, and American anti-war activists Cindy Sheehan, Fernando Suarez del Solar and Ron Kovic (author of Born on the Fourth of July), among others.
Film screenings to include: The widely-acclaimed award-winning “Salt of This Sea” by Annemarie Jacir, starring Suheir Hammad
Fundraising Dinner Banquet Plus Dabke Contest!
Please email office@al-awda.org to enter your dabke group in the contest
For pricing, reservation, sponsorship, advertising, exhibitor table, hotel accommodation, host committee and other info, please visit: http://al-awda.org/convention7/index.html
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352, Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-918-9441
Fax: 760-918-9442
E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC), is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to advocacy for the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and lands of origin. PRRC is a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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This animation tracks the damage to tree cropland in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2025. Undamaged croplands are colored green and turn purple in the month in which they sustained damage. Credit: Maps: He Yin, with data from Yin et al., 2025, 
Publicly condemn the genocide in Gaza
israel-academia-monitor.com 