Pro-Israel Groups Tried to Get Me Fired
Instead, they taught me the value of free speech
February 2017 marked a turning point in the history of Palestinian activism within the UK. During this tumultuous month, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists were overwhelmed by an unprecedented flurry of event cancellations and attacks on their right to protest against the occupation. February 2017 also marked a turning point in my own involvement with Palestine and free speech. I had arrived in the UK in the summer of 2015 to begin teaching at the University of Bristol.
My peripatetic academic career had carried me from Damascus to Berlin and finally to Palestine and Israel. From 2010 to 2011, I commuted between Palestine and Israel several times a week. I lived in Bethlehem in the West Bank, across from the apartheid wall, along which I walked on my way to the Van Leer Institute, where I was a postdoctoral fellow.
The Van Leer Institute is centrally located in the historic Talbiyya district of West Jerusalem. In another era, thirteen years before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian American critic Edward Said was born in this neighborhood. His cousin abandoned the family home in 1948, just after it fell to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah, cutting Said’s ties to his homeland forever.
