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The Palestine question and performative academic-activism

Beloved Palestinian academic, poet and author Refaat Alareer who was murdered by Israel.

The liberal academy loves its activists. It celebrates the scholar who writes fiery critiques of authoritarian regimes, who pens eloquent op-eds on human rights abuses in distant lands, and who performs dissent in air-conditioned conference halls. These academics are lauded as champions of justice, their CVs gleaming with grants, keynotes, and citations. Academic-activism is a neoliberal cache. You see entire sub-disciplines, divisions, and majors evolve around this performative market of academic activism.

Yet, when it comes to Palestine—when it comes to the brutal machinery of empire grinding through Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond—these same voices often fall silent. This silence is not neutral. It is complicity. It is hypocrisy. It is the liberal establishment’s role as a cog in the genocidal structure of empire.

 The academic activist thrives on selective outrage. They will dissect the authoritarianism of a far-off regime with surgical precision, publishing articles in high-impact journals while sipping ethically sourced coffee. They will theorize resistance, fetishize subaltern voices, and claim solidarity with the oppressed—all while sidestepping the genocide unfolding in Palestine. 

Why? Because speaking on Palestine demands confronting the empire they serve. It demands naming the United States, Israel, and their allies as architects of a colonial project that obliterates Palestinian lives, homes, and futures. It demands risking their cozy positions within the liberal academy, where empire is not just tolerated but funded, celebrated, and reproduced.

 The liberal establishment is not a bystander in this genocide—it is an active participant. Universities invest in arms manufacturers that supply Israel’s war machine. They host partnerships with institutions complicit in occupation. They discipline scholars who dare to speak out, branding their critiques as “uncollegial” or “divisive.” The academic activist who rails against authoritarianism elsewhere but remains silent on Palestine is not just inconsistent—they are upholding empire. Their silence is a choice, a calculated one, to preserve their privilege within a system that rewards selective dissent while punishing real disruption.

This hypocrisy is rooted in the liberal academy’s entanglement with empire. The same institutions that produce knowledge about “global justice” are funded by endowments tied to imperialist wars. The same scholars who theorize freedom rely on grants from foundations embedded in capitalist and colonial structures. Palestine exposes this contradiction because it demands more than words—it demands action. It demands boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS), which challenge the very systems that sustain the academy. To speak on Palestine is to risk alienating funders, colleagues, and the liberal gatekeepers who police acceptable activism.

The Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) teaches us that authenticity and true resistance begin with the voices of the margins. Palestinian voices—those of mothers mourning in Gaza, students under rubble, farmers denied their land—are not abstractions for academic papers. They are the heart of the struggle. Yet, the liberal academic activist often reduces these voices to footnotes, if they engage them at all. They prefer the safety of theorizing distant oppressions over amplifying the urgent calls for justice from Palestine. This is not activism; it is performance. It is the choreography of dissent that never threatens the stage it dances on.

The genocide in Palestine is not a singular event—it is the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism, enabled by the empire’s military, economic, and ideological might. To critique authoritarianism while ignoring this is to perpetuate a lie: that the liberal West is a beacon of freedom rather than a perpetrator of violence. The academic activist who avoids Palestine is not just silent—they are complicit in this lie. They are complicit in the erasure of Palestinian lives, in the normalization of occupation, and in the sanitization of empire’s brutality.

We must ask: Whose voices are amplified in the academy? Whose are silenced? And what does it mean when the loudest critiques of power come from those who benefit from it? The liberal establishment’s hypocrisy is not an accident—it is structural. It is designed to maintain the status quo, to keep empire’s wheels turning while cloaking itself in the language of justice. To dismantle this, we must center Palestinian voices, commit to BDS, and reject the comfortable hypocrisy of academic activism that picks its battles to avoid the empire’s wrath.

The time for silence is over. 

Palestine demands our voices, our actions, our solidarity—not as performance, but as accountability. Anything less is complicity in genocide.

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