“You can’t hide the smoking gun of this genocide” w/ Sherene Seikaly and Tony Alessandrini

Note: we recorded this before the appalling AHA leadership veto on Jan. 17 of the democratic vote of its membership to condemn Israeli scholasticide

The brothers welcome Professor Sherene Seikaly, historian at University of California at Santa Barbara and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and Anthony Alessandrini, Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and of Middle Eastern Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to discuss the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) engagement with the question of Palestine. We discuss the historic vote by the AHA membership on January 5, 2025 to condemn Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza despite the deeply anti-Palestinian stance of the leadership of the AHA.

We discuss how this leadership mobilized fear, "anticipatory obedience" to avoid taking an ethical position against the obliteration of every Palestinian university in Gaza, despite explicitly condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We also discuss how the MLA leadership has systematically undermined discussions and resolutions about Palestinian liberation. They also discussed how ethical scholars have confronted the extraordinary silence and complicity of the two major scholarly associations about the Gaza genocide.

Watch the episode on our YouTube channel

Date of recording: January 13, 2025.

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