Moustafa Bayoumi - Edward Said Memorial Lecture - Role of Palestine in America (2025)

Amira: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here. It is my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's Edward Said Memorial Lecture, where we are privileged to feature Mustafa Bayoumi, an award-winning author, journalist, professor, and former student of Edward Said. We are especially honored to gather this evening to honor the legacy of Edward Said, a brilliant scholar, writer, and intellectual Whose work continues to resonate. Said's work reshaped our understanding of Western attitudes towards the East and brought attention to the discourse of colonialism, identity, and the struggle of the Palestinian people here in the United States. Though it has been 21 years since his passing, Said's influence remains ever-present. As Mustafa Bayoumi stated in one of his articles, What Edward Said wrote 35 years ago can sound like it was written yesterday. Adding, as war rages in Gaza, Said's words feel prescient. That's because so little has changed. We are also joined today by our very own Said El-Hajjat to moderate this lecture. Said is a member of the Palestine Center Committee. He's a Palestinian journalist, Washington bureau chief at Al-Quds daily newspaper, and a longtime attendee of press briefings at the US State Department. He previously served as spokesman and director of public information for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and currently teaches at American University in Washington, DC. Thank you once again for being here to honor Edward Said's legacy. Following this lecture, we will dedicate time for Q&A session. And if you're watching on Zoom, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And if we have time, we'll also address those questions. Please help yourself to coffee, tea, and snacks at the back of the lecture. And I will now hand it over to Said. Thank you.

Said El-Hajjat: Thank you, Amira. Thank you, everyone, for being here. I mean, congregate. There's strength in unity, you know. All right. Good evening. It is my distinct honor to welcome you to our 2024 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, focusing on the question of Palestine and America. As the genocide in Gaza continues, the dispossession of the Palestinians in the West Bank advances, and the American leadership transition from Biden to Trump administration, from bad to worse. The understanding of Palestine's past, present, and future is of utmost urgency, particularly how Palestine has historically operated both as an idea and as a political struggle in American culture. Today, we are privileged to welcome a former student of Edward Said, Mustafa Beyoumi. Mustafa is an award-winning author, journalist, professor, and tonight he brings a perspective shaped by his time learning directly from Edward Said. He is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America— it really is a tough call— which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for nonfiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, which was always awarded the Arab American Book Award for nonfiction. Bayoumi is also a columnist and feature writer for The Guardian and a regular contributor to The Nation. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Progressive, and other places. With Andrew Rubin, he co-edited the Selected Works of Edward Said. I think Andrew— where's Andrew? Yeah, there's Andrew Rubin. Give him a hand.

Mustafa Bayoumi: All right.

Said El-Hajjat: Okay. And he has been profiled in a wide array of national and international media and has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award. Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. And in this lecture, Mustafa Bayoumi will delve into how Palestine has historically functioned as both an idea and a political struggle in American culture, and why the question of Palestine remains profoundly Relevant today. Please join me in welcoming Mustafa.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Oh, and then we can sit.

Said El-Hajjat: That works for me.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Good evening. Thank you all for coming. And thank you to the Jerusalem Fund for all of their work, their important work. To Dunya, Tarek, and everyone for hosting me. For all of you for bearing with the traffic and coming here. And for Said, for that very kind introduction. You know, Said actually has front row seats to the greatest comedy show on earth, Right? Pretty sure. Pretty—

Speaker 4: Or tragedy.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Or tragedy. Yes, it is both. It is a tragic comedy, the State Department briefings. But he's relentless in his pursuit of truth, even though they're relentless in their obfuscations as well. There is obviously a great deal to talk about, especially insofar as the political situation is so fast-moving and changing. And at the same time, So disappointingly durable. The lecture that I'm going to give today is actually not so much about things like what is happening in Syria today and how that might impact Palestine. If we want to bring up that as a conversation, I'm happy to engage that during question and answer. But I wanted to take a slightly longer vision than just what is happening on the day-to-day level. And so I'll just begin. I was no longer the same person after 1967, Edward Said writes in his memoir, Out of Place. The shock of that war drove me to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. Said's political education was lightning fast, of course, in part because of his long friendship with the Palestinian-American academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, his oldest and dearest friend, as Said described Abu-Lughod in an obituary in the London Review of Books. It was Ibrahim, Said explains, who introduced Arabs in America to the world of national liberation struggles and postcolonial politics. Said certainly took these lessons to heart. By 1970, he had written and published an essay titled The Arab Portrayed, just 3 years after 1967. And this essay, of course, contains the germ of his later influential book Orientalism. And by 1970, he had also traveled to Jordan days before the fateful events of Black September, to meet with, quote, many of those directly involved in the liberation struggle, according to Mariam Said, his wife and confidante for over 30 years. And then later that fall in 1970, he also attended the 3rd annual convention of the Association for Arab University Graduates, the AAUG. And that was— that convention was held at Evanston, Illinois, near Northwestern, where Ibrahim Aboulughod was a professor. I feel like I just won a car or something. The president of AAUG in 1970 was the Egyptian legal scholar Sharif Bassiouni, who had known Said From his Cairo days. Quote, until 1967, Edward Said was basically an Anglophile professor of comparative literature whose intellectual and emotional connection with the Arab world appeared quite superficial, Bessouni writes. By the time the Evanston Convention of 1970 took place, Edward was virtually at the forefront of leftist revolutionary Palestinian thinking, he explains. In this essay that I'm quoting from, Bessie Younie, who died in 2017, described an incident at the 1970 AAUG convention that's worth recalling. The convention was being held at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston, and one afternoon the AAUG board had assembled on one of the hotel's upper floors for a meeting. Meanwhile, a group of PFLP aficionados by Sunni terms, of course, that's the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A group of PFLP aficionados had, in a sense, crashed the conference and were meeting in a room on the mezzanine level of the hotel. And Edward was one of the PFLP speakers. Quite coincidentally, a group of Israeli students was holding a meeting at a nearby hotel and had as their keynote speaker the former head of Israeli military intelligence, General Yahashofat Harcabi. Later, in Orientalism, Said would excoriate Harcabi's own Orientalist writings, describing his 1972 book Arab Attitudes to Israel as a text devoted to, quote, showing the Arab mind as depraved, antisemitic to the core, violent, and unbalanced. When the Israelis learned about the AAUG meeting, some 90 students and the general came completely unannounced to the Arab American Convention. Harcabi and the students entered the hotel and were walking up the circular stairs to reach the mezzanine where Said and the PFLP speakers were— supporters were. Meanwhile, according to Bessiouni, Edward was at the top of the stairs yelling at the top of his lungs, provocateurs! And leading the crowd behind him. Bassouni, rather self-aggrandizingly, writes that he stood, Bassouni, Christlike between the 2 groups, keeping them from each other. Eventually, the general and his group backed off and left the hotel. So proving, as I like to think, that Edward Said had for a very long time not only battled the Israeli lobby, but also battled Israelis in the lobby. I'm recalling the story now because I believe it tells us actually several things about where we are today. A moment where the prospects for a just and lasting resolution for what is called the Palestine question has never felt more elusive. In 1967, the Naksa, or setback, was widely considered the worst possible outcome for Palestinian aspirations for statehood and self-determination after the Nakba of 1948. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were now ruled by an iron-fisted Israeli military occupation, with the loss of Jerusalem an equally painful wound in the national soul of the Palestinian people. The neighboring Arab nations had also lost territory, Golan, Sinai, and had proven themselves completely ineffective and indeed an embarrassment to the cause of national liberation. The Israeli state had clear ideas from the beginning of how to settle and cantonize and colonize the West Bank. I'm thinking, of course, of the Allon Plan, among others. And the American administration had now fully and decisively come to the aid of Israel in their foreign policy, a position that would not change and would only deepen until today. It was in this context that Edward Said, became Palestinian, at least Palestinian in the political sense. Nor was he alone. The shock of war, to use Said's phrase, pushed many, and especially those in the diaspora, to discover the centrality of the Palestinian struggle to their own selves. The Palestinian activist and writer Ghada Karmi, for example, also describes how the defeats of 1967 had, quote, stirred changes in her, Growing her own Palestinian identity as well. Nor is it only about what's inside the person. Karmi writes— also writes about the growing importance of tatriz, Palestinian embroidery. Quote, after 1967, when the rest of Palestine came under Israeli rule, the embroidery trade increased, spurred on by the renewed feeling of loss among Palestinians, she writes in her memoir, In Search of Fatima. Specialists in Palestinian embroidery began to appear on the scene. Lectures were given, embroidery books were written, exhibitions were held, and antique or rare caftans were avidly collected. What had started out as a solely peasant custom was now transformed into a precious national heritage, she writes. The AAUG, also as an institution, was founded in the wake and as a response to the radical losses of 1967. And although formed in 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization became much more prominent after 1967 as well, especially as guerrilla warfare assumed a more central role in the Palestinian resistance, particularly after the Battle of Karameh in 1968. My point is that defeat does not bring surrender. Quite the contrary. The setbacks of 1967, as painful as they were— and I'm certainly not minimizing the losses, the dislocations, the dispossessions, and the disappearances of family and territory that accompanied 1967—

Speaker 4: Right.

Mustafa Bayoumi: But as painful as they were, they were also in a significant way the very impetus for the rise of not only the Palestinian national movement, but also of a particular kind of Palestinian diasporic identity. Palestinians in and around historic Palestine realized that their Arab regimes were not going to save them, and that they would have to take the lead. in their own liberation. The energy behind Palestinian liberation, especially in the 1970s and into the 1980s, was, I think it's appropriate to say, vanguardist. The widely circulated image of the Palestinian guerrilla was of someone who was ahead of her time, usually a leftist and a radical revolutionary willing to connect the dots between the struggles. Think Leila Khaled with her rifle and her Nicaraguan-American partner, Patrick Agello. Jean Le Carré would go on to write The Little Drummer Girl, published in 1983. Now, this novel and film could in no way be considered recruiting documents for Palestine, but with the depictions of refugee camps and the arc of the Palestinian narrative built into the plot, perhaps there was a small glimmer coming from the unofficial black hole of representing Palestine. Maybe it was slowly opening. That's why Edward Said was important, of course. At a time when almost no one could represent Palestine, Said was there. And he too cut an elegant figure. I remember him describing somewhere, maybe Andrew will recall where this is, but I remember him describing how a European journalist, I think she was Dutch, had wanted to interview him and insisted on meeting him in his home on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And she was— she had to come And she had heard that Said was a pianist because he was a concert-level pianist. She had to come and see the piano because she wasn't convinced that someone who was Palestinian could also have high culture attached to him. As if instead she would, if memory serves, Said said something to the effect of, as if she was expecting me to have Kalashnikovs on the wall or something to that effect. The First Intifada of 1987, which began, incidentally, in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, Dramatically changed American perceptions of Palestinians too. Palestinians were the unarmed stone throwers to the tanks of Israel, which in the American biblical imagination was rather confusing.

Said El-Hajjat: Right?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Here you had the Palestinian Davids to the Israeli Goliath. In fact, I also remember reading at the time how the Israeli Tourism Board had just rolled out a big push to try to get tourists to travel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And there, in— at the beginning of the First Intifada, With a big tagline, and that was, it's just a stone's throw away. They had to change that tagline. Everything changed with Oslo, right? But one underappreciated fallout from the Oslo Accords was how this Palestinian Versailles, as Said would describe them, the Oslo Accords, took all the energy of a global and— out of a global and growing Palestinian consciousness and instead turned it into something official. You can't be a vanguardist movement and work as, quote, Israel's enforcers, which was another way that Said described the Accords. By 1983, global culture had also changed, and the revolutionary vanguard was far less in vogue than it had been. The Soviet Union was no longer. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and history, we were told, had for all intents and purposes ended. But the occupation didn't end, and the authoritarianism and corruption of the Palestinian Authority was also only growing. Daily life for Palestinians, wherever they were, was always accompanied with an assertion of presence. To assert that was important. It also asserted that Palestinians exist and that no one should forever forget their existence. So the first part of my argument here today is that the Naksa of 1967 birthed a new kind of Palestinian consciousness, one where Palestinians became determined to take their own fate into their own hands. The second part of my argument is that the setbacks of today in these last 14 months, as severe as they are, are also now birthing a new kind of Palestinian consciousness. But this one is not limited to Palestinians.

Speaker 4: It's global.

Mustafa Bayoumi: More and more people are seeing their own political realities through and connected to the oppression of Palestinians. And understand that their own liberation is also intertwined with Palestinian liberation. As I'm sure everyone in this room feels, the pain of witnessing a genocide in real time can only be surpassed by experiencing a genocide. Israel's actions in Gaza, in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Syria, in Iran, and in Yemen are unsurpassed in their cruelty. And the American liberal establishment is still unprepared to confront or challenge Israel. When I wrote that essay earlier that was recalled here in The Guardian about Edward's continuing presence in the age of genocide, I made sure to include this quotation to illustrate the continuing horrors that Palestinians have faced and that American liberals in particular seem unwilling to admit. About 35 years ago, this is in 1989, Said wrote an open letter to American Jewish intellectuals in which he said, in part, I cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American intellectuals just because the security of Israel demands it, Said wrote. But it is overridden, he continues, or hidden, no matter how overpoweringly cruel, No matter how inhuman and barbaric, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it's doing, to bomb a hospital, to use napalm against civilians, to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl or bark or scream, Arafat is a whore's son, to break the arms and legs of children, to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space, sanitation, water, or legal charge, to use tear gas in schools, All these are horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against terrorism or the requirements of security. Not to note them, not to remember them, not to say, wait a moment, can such acts be necessary for the sake of the Jewish people, is inexplicable. But it is also to be complicit in these acts. The self-imposed silence of intellectuals who possess, in other cases and for other countries, supremely fine critical faculties is stunning, Said wrote. We continue to have this kind of silence and silencing from the American establishment, though it's currently being challenged and seen more and more, I think, as precisely what it is, an undemocratic expression of raw power to preserve Israel's privileges. Let's talk about the American context. For a minute in that regard. Consider what happened at the Democratic National Convention this past August. This moment actually began in February when a grassroots campaign that became the Uncommitted Movement garnered over 700,000 votes in state Democratic primaries around the country, sending 37 delegates to an uncontested convention that crowned Kamala Harris as the party's nominee for president. Horrified by this genocide Israel was conducting in Gaza, taking place before our eyes and performed largely with American weapons and diplomatic cover, the Uncommitted Movement wanted to see the Biden administration, and then later the Harris campaign, shift from a position offering basically unqualified support for Israel to one that argued first for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and later an arms embargo on Israel. Whatever you may think about the Uncommitted Movement, and I know it has its detractors, their initial success surpassed even their own expectations, and it looked like American politics was on the verge of change. The movement was visibly led by progressive Arab and Muslim Americans that would appeal to a broad array of voters, especially young voters and African American voters. And if they all voted as a bloc during the election, their influence could be Significant. At the convention, an Israeli-American couple spoke about their son who had been captured on October 7th, and the son tragically was later killed. The movement, which supported having the parents speak, also requested a chance at the podium. They offered the DNC a vetted script that endorsed Kamala Harris and also spoke to their concerns. As I think we all probably know the result. They were denied. This is hardly the only time that we, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, 3 different yet overlapping groups in this country, have been told to shut up, been talked down to, or have been required to prove our loyalty. And I'm only talking about the Democrats. During a rally in Detroit in early August, Harris broke from her script when demonstrators confronted her on Gaza.

Said El-Hajjat: You know what?

Mustafa Bayoumi: If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I'm speaking, she snapped back in what became a viral moment. Probably all remember that moment. In its infinite wisdom, the party later sent Bill Clinton to lecture Arab and Muslim voters, telling them that Israel was, quote unquote, forced to kill civilians in Gaza and that the country was the Holy Land first. This is the same Bill Clinton who at the 2016 Democratic National Convention said, if you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. Which is not too different from what New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in 2023. After she had issued multiple statements of support for Jewish New Yorkers, she was asked what her message was to Palestinian New Yorkers. Her answer? I call on law-abiding Palestinians to reject Hamas. For Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in this country, officially, it's all been loyalty tests, contingent citizenship, and second-class equality, which is no equality at all. At the same time, the Democrats love to exploit photogenic images of religious diversity. During Hillary Clinton's run for president in 2016, the campaign tweeted a photo of a Muslim woman weeping in celebration of Clinton's nomination, with the caption, we made history. The problem was that this woman, Nida Alem, was in fact a Bernie Sanders supporter and was crying at Bernie's concession speech. Clinton's campaign eventually apologized for the quote-unquote mix-up, but never removed the original tweet. Things haven't really changed either. Democratic cameras almost always linger on hijabs. Except when they don't. In 2008, the Obama campaign removed 2 Muslim women in hijab from sitting behind the podium during a rally because they would have been in the shot. Do you remember that? When 2 other women in hijab showed up for a campaign event with Kamala Harris in January 2024, they were summarily denied entry without explanation. Something similar happened in October to Dr. Ahmed Ghanem, a prominent Muslim leader and former Democratic candidate for Congress, when he sat in his invitation-only seat waiting for a Harris rally to begin when he was kicked out of the venue for reasons unknown. He's actually suing the venue and the party, proving that Arabs are good Americans because we can also sue. They cannot represent themselves. They must be represented, Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a quote made even more famous because Edward Said used it as an epigraph for his seminal 1980— 1978 work Orientalism. And it feels apt to revive the quote today as well as continue it. People don't read much beyond that quote, but that actually— the sentences beyond it are, their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power, Marx wrote. And indeed, it's a strange place to occupy when you live in a country where the more so-called more liberal party in a 2-party system constantly seeks your vote but never your opinions, celebrates your contribution to diversity but ignores your existence, says it believes in political organizing but dismisses your successful efforts at mobilizing voter energy, and claims it's fighting fascism while simultaneously demanding you subordinate your political demands to the needs of the nation. Which strikes me as, I don't know, kind of fash, as my students would say. And when in fact it was responsible, this party, for ushering in some of the worst policies leading this nation in an authoritarian direction, and also found aplenty in the other party. And the Biden administration, which Harris did nothing to separate herself from, in fact, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden in the previous 4 years, she said, There's not a thing that comes to mind. The Biden administration further continues to ignore American and international law and enables Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza. Israel ignores so many of the US government's red lines, like Rafah, like 30 days to let in more humanitarian aid, etc., that we really should conclude that this is the United States' campaign as much as it is Israel's. The rest is just advertising. It's in this context that I believe we are witnessing a new Palestinian movement rising. And the reason for its ascent has less to do with altruism or wokeness, tribalism, or white guilt. It has to do partly with the fact that the Palestinian narrative has finally broken through. Thank you. After all these years. And also that the kind of political repression required to maintain Israel's dominance over Palestine and Palestinians is now coming home to roost in profound and expansive ways. There has always been a kind of repression against Palestinians and Palestinian Americans in this country. In fact, much of the legal infrastructure was expanded and retooled in the War on Terror era to apply generally to Arabs and Muslims in this country. I wrote earlier about that as well. But what we are witnessing now has the very real potential, if it hasn't already landed, of limiting everyone's rights in this country. Our civil liberties and rights to free speech and assembly have been curtailed under the Biden administration. Demonstrations in support of merely a ceasefire in Gaza have been met with extraordinary violence by police forces and thugs around the country. In 1985, Columbia University anti-apartheid student activists occupied Hamilton Hall for 3 weeks, and that action led to the university divesting its holdings with companies having South African connections. This year, Columbia University's encampment— not occupation of the building, just the encampment— lasted 1 day before the administration called in the police. And they went back again after the administration called them. Congressional committees have been held with severe McCarthyite hearing overtones, severely distorting campus politics, seeking to punish professors for their speech, and also trying to fulfill an old right-wing demand to dismantle higher education and intellectual inquiry as we know it. Biden was useless during all of this, of course. He sounded very Nixonian. When he finally spoke about the campus protests and demanded that, quote unquote, order must prevail, not willing to recognize that the disorder was coming largely from those trying to shut down overwhelmingly peaceful protests. And the Biden administration is also responsible for expanding the use of Title VI proceedings in educational environments in a move that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University finds disturbing. If you don't know about Title VI, I'm happy to talk about it. But leave it here to say that universities are now instructed by the federal government to investigate the free speech of their students and faculty in a manner that the Knight Institute refers to as jawboning. And jawboning is when officials use the threat of legal sanctions or other informal tools to jawbone private actors into imposing sanctions on speech and association that those officials have no constitutional power to sanction themselves. So it's an intimidation tactic. The Harris campaign was also idiotic, if I may say so, and deaf on Palestine. The reasons for Kamala Harris's loss during this election can be divided a million different ways, and each in their own manner can be debated and with enough data, maybe even correct. What we do know is that Trump's victory is real, but not substantial in terms of numbers. As John DellaVolpe, director of polling at Harvard's Kennedy School Institute of Politics, wrote in the New York Times, Harris's campaign needed to shift about 1 percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and other blue places. Think about that, he says. Flipping just 1 in every 100 voters would have stopped the likelihood of mass deportation, tax cuts for the wealthy, rollbacks of LGBTQ protections, and the reversal of climate regulations. This was an eminently winnable race, he writes. So it was turnout, as we now know, which was the problem. And here's how DellaVolpe describes that. The campaign's struggles with young voters went far beyond tactical failures. When young American voters voiced deep moral concerns about Gaza and the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, they received carefully calibrated statements rather than genuine engagement with their pain. I believe this issue contributed to lower enthusiasm and turnout in battleground states in 2024 compared to 2020, de la Volpe says. And according to the Tufts Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the youth vote was down about 8% this year. Weak voter turnout in heavily Democratic cities was the overwhelming reason for Harris's loss. Across 6 key cities— Phoenix, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, and Atlanta— The number of votes declined 6.1% from 2020 to '24 in predominantly Black precincts, more than double the 2.7% fall-off seen across other cities, according to Politico. So Black voter participation was down in the key cities as well. Young people, Black voters, Arabs, Muslims. So here we are. The Democratic Party seems to have believed that it could ignore Arabs and Muslims from meaningful democratic participation, especially over power. Palestine. And the end result is a campaign that alienated enough voters, Arab Muslim, young and Black. And young voters and Black voters are 2 communities that have high levels of sympathy for Palestine, by the way. That, I would argue, was at least a major reason why they lost the election. Then there's HR 9495. You may have heard of this. The, quote, Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. I'm sure we have all heard about this bill, which has passed the House the second time around, and even if it doesn't make it to the Senate this time around, is likely to be introduced next year. The bill, written to target Palestinian-supporting nonprofit organizations, gives the executive branch unfettered authority to strip charitable organizations of their nonprofit status. The Secretary of Treasury will be empowered to designate charitable organizations as, quote, terrorist-supporting organizations without the sharing of any evidence to the public. And the bill places the burden of proof on the nonprofit to prove its innocence within 90 days before having its tax-exempt status revoked. We can be assured that this level of governmental overreach will also not remain at the level of Palestinian-supporting organizations. With Trump coming to power, we also have the threats of something called Project Esther. You may have heard of Project Esther. Yoav Litvin in Al Jazeera described it this way: Project Esther shamelessly states its aims to eliminate anti-colonial perspectives from the US education system, limit the dissemination of related information, and restrict advocates' access to American society, the economy, and Congress. It seeks to prosecute alleged legal and criminal violations by what they call HSOs, which are referred to in the writings as Hamas-supporting organizations. They seek to disrupt their communications, restrict demonstrations, and rally the Jewish community, allies, and American public against anti-colonial resistance movements. It's frankly a kooky document. Written by ideologues and slanderers, but so is the incoming administration. To some people, maybe even to most people, all of this sounds like tremendously bad news. And it certainly means that we who believe and work for Palestinian liberation will have our work cut out for us, with a primary goal of stopping the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians and the dispossession of Palestinian land. But the degree of repression is a sign. There is a way that the idea of Palestine has never been more popular, never, has never been more meaningful in the United States and around the world. The fear of speaking out for Palestine, which Edward Said never bound bowed down to. That fear is diminishing rapidly. The need for Palestinian liberation is growing everywhere. The right to think freely and to protest in this country, to be able to protest, is directly connected to the right to think freely about Palestine and to protest Israeli aggression against Palestinians. If 1967 spawned a new Palestinian consciousness about Palestinians, this moment is birthing a new Palestinian movement among peoples everywhere. But we have to hurry. Palestine may lead the path to our own liberation, but the worst result possible would be that Palestine saves us, but we're not able to save Palestine.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Mustafa Bayoumi: That's not an acceptable solution. Palestine can't wait. Thank you.

Said El-Hajjat: Thank you. Thank you, Mustafa, for this really profound lecture, you know, that is definitely befitting the memory of Edward Said, great Edward Said. And, you know, I, for one, you know, I think about Edward Said all the time, maybe daily, you know, because we, you know, we're almost the same generation. You know, I mean, we were behind, a few years behind. And I remember him telling us, a group of students, you know, I think it was at the second AAUG meeting. We were associate members as students, you know, second or third, something like this. And he had, you know, everybody wanted to ask Edward Said something, you know, and we're all clamoring. And he was telling, you know, people were saying, yeah, what are you studying? And they say, I'm an engineer, I'm this, I'm this. And I remember he said, it doesn't matter what you study because your primary profession is being a Palestinian. Everything else is like secondary. I mean, you could be a doctor, but— Yeah. Your primary profession is being a Palestinian or an engineer and so on. And it is true. I mean, it is with my generation, it is absolutely true. So I thank you for your lecture that basically gave us sort of a walkthrough, this history since 1967 until today. And the point that you raise, and especially with the last election and the shamelessness of the Democratic Party, I must admit, and I know my family, that have always been democratic in many ways and so on. And we see, you mentioned the bill that is really intended to suffocate any support for the Palestinians. I mean, what we have seen, what we see today is really a very stark anti-Palestinianism, and it's becoming normalized. Every day there's a new bill. It's crazy. These guys are nuts. They're obsessed with the Palestinians. Tom Cotton, just the other day, introduced a bill, the senator from Arkansas, introduced a bill That basically prohibits the use of the word West Bank. And they want to go to— and then other bills and so on. Only yesterday, I think on Monday or Tuesday, they introduced another bill that would prohibit the US government from using data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, for instance. Well, everybody says their figures are 100% accurate. In fact, Barbara Lee, who is Assistant Secretary of State, said the figures are actually lower than what they really are. So we know that the exercise, there's a great deal of exercising hypocrisy. There's anti-Palestinianism. It is rampant. But because the Palestine cause is really, in many ways, I mean, has become the litmus test for the cause for freedom and liberation almost everywhere. I mean, look at Israel today is the cause of the right wing. You mean you can't call it any other way? The Republicans have adopted it. They defend Israel today. I don't want to talk a great deal, but I wanted to thank you because I could probably talk. And what I'm going to do is because your lecture is so That was so profound and so rich. I'm going to turn it to the audience to ask you questions. We have our young volunteers here. They have the microphone. So please ask all the questions that you can. There is so much material out there. So go ahead. We'll start right there.

Anne Lyko: I have— my name is Anne Lyko. I have more a comment than a question, which is I want you to recognize that there are a lot of non-Palestinian, non-Muslim, non-Black, non-young Americans who are absolutely appalled at everything that has happened, who have protested to the Democratic Party, who have stopped voting for them, who have stopped giving them money, and have been weekly calling the White House and telling them that Genocide Joe is going to be his legacy unless he changes his mind. And I think you need to recognize that it's a much broader group of people than what the polls and all that kind of say, because they're not asking the right people who are out there who are just— I mean, I feel like it's Vietnam again. Thanks.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Okay.

Said El-Hajjat: Yeah. You know, I just want to make a comment on the I remember, I mean, the Democratic Party, the establishment Democratic Party has always been basically like Ralph Nader called them one time, Republicrats, in many ways. Because I remember during the convention in Philadelphia, and I was there, they threw Danny Glover, an actor, and Susan Sarandon, they threw them out because they were supporters of Sanders at the time. And they thought they have won. I mean, they were behaving like they have the presidency. I'm sorry.

Amira: Yeah.

Said El-Hajjat: Sorry, go ahead. Somebody's asking.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Yeah.

Speaker 4: I was a student of Edward Said at Columbia, by far my favorite professor. And I can tell you that in 1968, when he was teaching modern British literature, it was all about Lawrence of Arabia. And it was, in fact, Palestine was clearly there and talked about in terms of colonialism. And I think that the reason Harris lost was not only was she such a pathetic candidate, but Biden should have allowed primaries, had not run much, much earlier, and maybe would have had Gavin Newsom and AOC. Yeah.

Mustafa Bayoumi: I mean, I just would say that I think it's important. I wanted to raise the election question again, because it feels like there's almost a concerted move not to bring up Gaza as a reason for the election loss. And yet it seems, if you look at the data, if you look at the ways in which the election played out, clearly it played a role. So I want, you know, I don't want to think, I don't want us to think about it just as beating a dead horse or like that we, you know, we already know this material. I think it's important to put Gaza back in the American political sphere, and the election is an important place to do that.

Speaker 4: And that Slotkin won all 3 Arab counties, and she's a Jew, the one Democratic— new senator from Michigan.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Michigan, yeah.

Anne Lyko: And Democrat.

Speaker 4: And she maneuvered, she actually addressed issues much better than Harris ever did. And I mean, I guess I would have liked, you know, I was We couldn't even vote not committed in Virginia. I'm sorry, we couldn't even vote noncommitted in Virginia. I was a Sanders delegate in '16. Biden team asked me to be a Biden delegate in 2020, and this time I said no. And the most important election coming up is for vice president of the DNC, and we got to elect Zogby.

Said El-Hajjat: Uh-huh.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Also, maybe it's about not relying on these parties for our political futures. Right? Maybe it's about a new kind of— we need to develop a new kind of politics because I think we are learning that this two-party system is corrosive and it's fraudulent in so many ways. And it strikes me, too, that, you know, you know who's already figured this out? Frankly, is Donald Trump— because Donald Trump is going to rule mostly by decree, I imagine, and he's going to be totally avoiding Congress whenever he can. And just, these parties do not speak for us. They do not hold our voices to their ears. They do not hold their feet— they don't let us hold their feet to the fire. They are, they are—

Said El-Hajjat: Yeah.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Corrupted in all kinds of ways. And I think that they do not— that the American people and the Palestinian people deserve much better than we have from these 2 parties. We need another kind of politics that's actually more responsive to the will of the people, both domestically and internationally.

Anne Lyko: This is a short question. But during all this, chaos. The only thing I could think of when I saw Elizabeth Gabbard and all those other people in Congress vilifying university heads and forcing them to quit and forcing anybody from Palestine who was a professor to leave I thought, well, we must really need that Jewish vote, these 2 parties, and we must really need the Jewish billionaires' money like Ackman. So I'm just wondering how much that plays into the 2 parties' attitudes.

Mustafa Bayoumi: You know, I mean, I think that's a very common narrative. And there's no question that donors play a role in how the party's system is run. But I think that what we need to also appreciate is there's a larger American project at stake in the Middle East that is beyond these, these two parties. And we're seeing that play out with Biden, and we're seeing it, it'll continue with the next administration. And I think that that American project in the Middle East is about overwhelming dominance and restructuring the whole Middle East for American and its allies in their wishes at the expense of the people of the region. You know, this was an opportunity that was presented to them, and they've taken it, and they're going to destroy so much in order that they have no opposition whatsoever in the region and can reshape it for their own desires and their own power plays. And I don't— I think that's a much larger project than even just a donor-driven project. And I think that's what we actually should be focusing on. That's why I think we shouldn't see this only as Israel's campaign. This is an American campaign towards restructuring what the Middle East is going to look like.

Said El-Hajjat: I'd just like to just add very briefly, look, Israel is a client state. In the end, most of the states in the area are US client states. Israel is probably the most influential client state, but it's a client state nonetheless. It survives on the American umbilical cord. So don't kid yourself. I mean, they do what they're told to do. It is the American project, it's the American power, it's the American planning, it's probably American intelligence, American military. I remember one time at Brookings, one guy, a former CIA guy, we were just talking at the end of a lecture and he said, look, you guys don't understand. We are the same military, we are the same intelligence. So keep that in mind. America is the imperial, is the preeminent imperial power. It has always been. I mean, Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd president of the United States of America, right after the first thing he did as president, he assumed the presidency in March of 1801. And in fact, right then and there, he basically planned the invasion of North Africa. So this goes back so deep in history.

Anne Lyko: Okay. Well, I just want to say, I thought that this country was a client state of Israel.

Said El-Hajjat: No, I mean, it's— yeah, it is not. I can assure you it is not. I mean, there are many, many— there's a great deal of evidence that it is not. As a matter of fact, we know that in 1973, for instance, during the war, basically, Nixon and Henry Kissinger cut off all aid to Israel when they were surrounding the 3rd Egyptian army without even going back to Congress. So it's not, that's not true. I mean, and we know that Reagan picked up the phone and told Menachem Begin to stop and he stopped. We know that even Biden, you know, did that in May 2021. Please go ahead. Yeah.

Mustafa Bayoumi: I thank you for your lecture. I wonder, given your vantage point in the academic world and as an intellectual, you can comment a little bit around the role of direct action in this country. solidarity actions, given the experience we had on the college campuses, but also thinking about a place like the UK where you've seen kind of direct action against military manufacturing sites. Just wondering any lessons learned or observations you have going forward here. I think that direct action and all forms of protest are incredibly important and that they actually really do change the discourse, even if they seem— the powers that will try to portray it as meaningless, as useless, as a waste of time, as insidious outsiders. There's always the outsider allegation too. Oh, Iran must be funding the tents because all the tents look the same, but those are the cheapest tents that you found on Amazon. That kind of thing.

Anne Lyko: Right.

Mustafa Bayoumi: But the more that they have to rush for some kind of narrative that's going to make it seem like, oh, this is not really important, means that the narrative is being challenged every single time. And the more that there's actually creativity to all of the direct action, the harder it is for the system to accommodate those direct actions too. So at a certain point, you know, street protests are very important. They disrupt the flow of traffic, they disrupt the everyday, but in a way street protests have also been so co-opted into the system that there's very little that street protests do that are not— that the system can't survive with. So the more that there's a creative aspect, and I think in the UK, you see a lot of creativity in these different direct actions, and you see it happening in the United States too. Today, at least 3 different faculty members that I heard at NYU were arrested. At Harvard, they're doing a lot of silent protests in libraries, in university libraries, where they just have their laptops up and they're like, no genocide. They don't even say anything else.

Said El-Hajjat: It's just like—

Anne Lyko: Yeah.

Mustafa Bayoumi: No, I don't support genocide. And that's challenging to the system. That's extraordinary.

Amira: Yes.

Said El-Hajjat: Libraries were heavy then.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Exactly. But it's important to continue to do that for that reason. And luckily, you can still get a lot of stuff online, so you don't actually have to go to the library as much anymore. But the point is that the more direct action, the more creative direct action there is, the more the narrative is challenged. And I think that that's actually really putting a big fright in the system. And the way that they are dealing with it is mostly by ignoring it. That's why you see that the Gaza question around the election has kind of disappeared. And, but it can't be ignored. And I think that, you know, in New York City, you still see demonstrations, you know, every week there's a major demonstration somewhere in New York still to this day. And I live in New York, so I can speak for there. There's probably something similar happening here as well. So I— and I don't think we've seen this level of political mobilization at the grassroots level, at least since George Floyd. And this is much more over a much longer period of time. Right. And I think it's necessary. Yeah. Hi, I'm a member of the audience.

Said El-Hajjat: This wasn't completely part of your presentation, but I'm wondering what could the Palestinians do to rally the support of Arab governments? And did Edward Said have anything to say to influence Arab governments in support of Palestine?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Edward Said used to excoriate the Arab governments because they would use the Palestinian cause only to their advantage. And they can use it as a valve at times to— people will be upset, their local populations will be upset at Israel. So they'll let them, for example, demonstrate about Israel, but not about, say, Mubarak at the time, or take your pick, whoever it's going to be. Right. And so when, you know, in this most recent conflagration in the region, you had some demonstrations in Egypt, for example, and some of the protests were saying things like, you know, Palestine, we're not, we're not liberating Palestine, Palestine is liberating us. Right. Which is sort of also the subtext, if not the text of my talk itself. Right? And so I'm not sure that appeals to the regimes will ever be successful. They are by their nature deaf. Right? But there is— we have to have faith that the people, the regimes are not popular with the people, and that they will have to play some role of accommodation or Or the repression increases, right? And that's, I think, what we're seeing in this country too. The divide between the Arab regimes and this country is actually narrowing. And that's what's both interesting and frightening. And maybe it has a little bit of opportunity behind it, frankly. So there was an interesting piece today by Stephen Cook about—

Said El-Hajjat: did you see that piece?

Mustafa Bayoumi: No. Mohammed bin Salman is making some overtures towards Iran lately.

Amira: Right.

Mustafa Bayoumi: And he was suggesting these are the possible reasons why, this reason, that reason, this reason, that reason. And he ends up, his conclusion is, it's not really some grand political chess game. It's just that the people in Saudi Arabia are so upset by what's going on that he has to accommodate their anger to some degree. So he can't, he has to listen to the voices for Palestine, even in a place like Saudi Arabia. So I think the point is actually not to try to curry favor with the regimes, but it actually, it's actually to articulate the demand for freedom everywhere. And that means from the people in those countries, as well as the people in this country at the same time.

Amira: I'm just going to take a question from our Viewers from Zoom, because especially one of them is a follow-up to just this question right now. So Ajit, thanks you for a wonderful lecture. And she's asking, why do you think that none of the non-Western countries have not— or why do you think that none of them have not taken any substantive actions?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Is it because economic sanctions, for example, Saudi Arabia, India, Well, we have to look at each country and its reasons individually, right? So India will have its own internal reasons. And this, with this government in India, you're not going to see a lot of support for Palestine. You're going to see more support for Israel, for example. Saudi Arabia has deep connections with the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia, is deeply connected to the American ruling elite as well. So, but you do see it globally. Insofar as the Global South, as represented mostly by South Africa, right, but not only South Africa, you see it actually throughout much of South America. You've seen that they've launched, they've participated in the genocide case in the ICJ. We're seeing actually, I think we're seeing an emergence of the end of a West, the possible end of a Western hegemonic, at least the sort of the discourse of Western human rights discourse as being hegemonic in our world, because it's all hypocritical at this point. It doesn't stand for anything. And so the notion of we are here to preserve the greater good is actually emerging from the Global South, not from the Global North. And from some voices in the Global South, but it'll spread. I think it will spread because it has to spread. The other alternative is anarchy and more violence that'll spread around the world too. And it's not even about violence. It's about freedom and repression. And so the point is, do we want a future that's based on repression that has to be guaranteed with enormous amounts of violence, or do we want a freedom A future that's based on freedom, which is guaranteed by greater equality and participation. And I think those are the choices that are in front of us right now.

Anne Lyko: Okay.

Said El-Hajjat: We'll come to you next, and then after that—

Amira: Oh, sorry.

Said El-Hajjat: No, it's okay. Yeah, my question was just about MBS. He eventually called it a genocide.

Anne Lyko: Yeah.

Said El-Hajjat: Do you think he is doing for genuine reason that, as As an Arab leader, he has to do something about this issue, or he is using as a chip with Donald Trump to negotiate or be in a better position to negotiate with him by telling, okay, I have some power too, and I can still make Iran give a friendly gesture just for this purpose. Thanks.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Yeah, that was actually the argument that In the Stephen Cook piece, which is, I think, worth looking at. I forget where it was, maybe in Foreign Affairs. I think it was in Foreign Affairs. But according to Stephen Cook, he says that that sounds like a plausible argument, but then he argues that that's not really the case, that in fact he's being responsive to his population instead. He made a convincing case to me, though I think it could be a multiple combination of of different factors. So it could completely be— that could be playing a role without a doubt as well.

Said El-Hajjat: So. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your talk. Wonderful. Before I ask my question, just a quick comment on what Said said about Joe Biden picking up the phone and calling Benjamin Netanyahu in May. I think the reason for that call was the killing of the 7 people from the World Central Kitchen. That what? What was it? No, no, I'm talking about the ceasefire back in May of 2021.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Oh, okay.

Said El-Hajjat: Because there was, Israel was waging one of its serial wars on Gaza at that time. So that's what I was referring to, not the— Was it Netanyahu? It was Netanyahu. It was Netanyahu right before he changed, yes. And in fact, he told them the famous quote, you got to stop because He ran out of runway. That's what he told them. No one knew Edward Said the way you did, or still do, of course. And 21 years after his passing, what would you think he would say about the Palestinian situation today in Gaza, where things are going, and in the West Bank?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Yeah, I think he would be enormously Horrified. You know, Said actually was not a believer in the armed struggle. He was a believer in the negotiated political solution, not in armed struggle. So I think that the Palestinian resistance, even before October 7th, was moving in the direction of armed struggle. You know, we saw it in the West Bank as well with the different lines, you know, the Lion's Den and all the different sort of smaller movements that were organizing, whether it's Fatah or whether it's Hamas or whatever group, they saw the notion of that the situation was so bad that there was nothing left but armed struggle. And I think that would have depressed him extraordinarily. I think it would have horrified him as well. And then I think the response right now, you know, and observing a genocide from afar, as we are all doing, it would have also motivated him to, I think, to be one of the most eloquent, outspoken voices, as he always was, for the rights for Palestinians. Not— we don't have to talk about what happened on this day or that day or this day. That's where we get too lost about what we have to talk about. What is Palestine about? And he would be able to rephrase the discourse so that we're talking about that instead.

Said El-Hajjat: May I just add a couple of things? Edward Said was not a passive person. And if we recall, one of his last acts actually is to go to southern Lebanon and throw a stone at the Israelis in an act, just symbolic act and so on. This occupation is very violent and very brutal. It does not allow you the margin to basically resist passively. The Palestinians resisted passively. I mean, I remember as a journalist, I remember in 1999, the whole 1999, There was not a single violent action by the Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza. None. And in the meantime, during that same period, Israel waged more killings, more assassination, more land confiscation, and so on. So the occupation itself, Israel is a violent entity. It will continue to be a violent entity. It can only exist through violence. And because it also, serves the colonial West. I mean, somebody told me one time, and I like it, I don't know how to explain it, but he said, Israel is basically a laundering enterprise. He said, Israel, you launder money, you launder technology, you launder pharmaceuticals, you launder weapons, you do all these things, you try all these weapons and so on. So it serves the colonial West. I mean, in their essence, And their quintessence. It serves them. And that's why we saw them rise. And on October 7th, everybody, the Germans, the French, the British, everybody, everyone came to their aid because Israel is basically the last vestige of Western colonialism. Yeah, we have more. Yes, please, help us.

Speaker 4: I just would like to argue in regard to the idea of abandoning the two-party system.

Said El-Hajjat: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And try to play with a third party or an independent one. Because if we look at the experience of Jewish Americans themselves with the two parties, we have seen FDR, Roosevelt, sending back the votes of of Jewish people fleeing from Holocaust and terrible things. Yet had Jews did the same and abandoned the Democratic Party, they wouldn't have got Truman in few years to come back and recognize Israel. What I'm saying is that the Democratic Party, and I myself independent, is the natural tent for minorities, Arab Americans and others. And whenever We tried to get a third party. We got more problems than usual. By Ralph Nader, we lost Al Gore. Can you imagine 9/11, the tragic events of 9/11, while Al Gore is the president of the U.S.? It wouldn't have been used or abused the way the neocons and Cheney used it for. So what I'm saying is that it could be much easier. And look at Jill Stein. What did we get out of Jill Stein and losing it? To the contrary, Trump people and Trump lawyers were funding the law cases for Jill Stein in order to appeal on Wisconsin and the other states. So what I'm saying is that it could be easier. Not easier that— I mean, I know that we are all frustrated with the cowardness or the Islamophobic attitude of leadership of the Democratic Party. I myself have witnessed that. I'm sorry.

Amira: Right.

Speaker 4: In covering the DNC and RNC in 2004 presidential election for Al Jazeera. During that time, Al Jazeera was like the enemy and the spokesman of the enemy. And when we put the sign of Al Jazeera at the Sky studio for DNC, they removed it the night before. They were so scared that someone would say they are sponsoring Al Jazeera.

Said El-Hajjat: Right.

Speaker 4: A few days later, Republicans called us and say, make sure to bring the sign and put it. We'd like to show them how cowardly they are. And we at Jazeera put the sign for the RNC. And we have seen that with Trump in Detroit, although it was disastrous, but still they had the courage to do things that the Democratic Party cannot do it. So I'm just saying, why not keep working harder instead of wasting our time and our votes for decades to come?

Mustafa Bayoumi: So what I'm talking about is something I think that's just a different kind of appeal. So rather than focusing our energies, our political energies on the parties, I think that we can focus our energies on the people instead. And if we have enough of a mass of people's voices and wishes, that should be heard by the parties at a certain point. If you're only focusing on convincing the parties to change, I think it's a losing proposition. We have all kinds of people power for Palestine in this country. That, that's what we should be focusing on. Not on the politicians. The politicians will get the message eventually. We can grow the people power more quickly, more effectively than we can change the political position of a politician, I think. So that's kind of where I'm going with that.

Speaker 4: Building on, you had 37 delegates. Next time, get them 70, 80, 90. And once you have a significant one, It's worth it than starting from scratch.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Yeah.

Amira: Thank you.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Thank you for your lecture. So you mentioned, as the underline of the lecture is, Palestine is liberating us. Do you think that's valid across the globe, especially since your comments focused on the United States? Or do you think that connection between the need to liberate ourselves because of what we see in Palestine is probably stronger in the US because Israel is a US project. And therefore the system here needs to defend the genocide because any, I guess, because the need to defend Palestine Seems like an attack on the American project itself? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think that it's— there's a practical reason why it's true. And you've just elaborated it very well in the United States, that Israel, the liberation of Palestine is an American project that will liberate American politics at the same time. What happens, I think, globally is that in every other location, there's some relationship to The, you know, global order as it is that maintains Israel as a state. So there's some relationship to that. And it also has a symbolic value in every other place too, in the same way that, you know, in a similar fashion, I would say, to how South Africa was a cause that was about racial discrimination in a lot of different places in the world as well, even if they were not necessarily about South Africa. Like, They were talking about their racial politics in those places where they were arguing for South African liberation in South Africa too. So it has the potential to actually have a symbolic meaning in all kinds of places for all kinds of meaning too. I think Greta Thunberg, for example, is doing really important work challenging the consensus around Israel. From also from an environmental point of view, from a climate disaster point of view too, and from a general, like, you know, moral point of view at the same time. But like, what I'm arguing is that it can actually have symbolic and particular value in a lot of different locations, even though certainly within the United States, it's a very— it's like a lightning rod because the United States is part of the system that we're talking about. Yeah.

Anne Lyko: I just wanted to add a comment to follow what you just said. Climate, the Earth, there is major impacts that nobody's really thinking about. One is the oil and gas that's in the Mediterranean right off northern Gaza, where they shut down the wells, and Israel's become a major involved exporter of this stuff. And as soon as they They tried to kick everybody out of northern Gaza. They opened it back up. The same is true off of Lebanon. It's no surprise that they're attacking Lebanon. And the United States' interest, much like Great Britain and all the rest of the Europeans in the Middle East, goes back a century, because they wanted to have control over the oil and gas. This other thing that's related to this is war. The United States Army is the biggest polluter of anything in the world when they're not at peace. And when you're doing all these bombs and all this other stuff and you're poisoning the land, you're poisoning the water, you're doing stuff that's going to take hundreds of years to get out of there. You're doing a major change to the Earth and to our climate and to our livability. And I think there's a huge audience out there.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Anne Lyko: When they start thinking this through and understanding it, will put it together with what's happening in Palestine and say, this is horrible for everybody, not just for the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Syrians.

Said El-Hajjat: Yeah, I think that you raise a very good point. Follow the money. Yeah, follow the money. It is 100% true. I mean, all these wars, wars, have one purpose, and that is, for the imperialists, is to make more money. I mean, if you go to the Ukraine war, you'll probably find the same thing. I mean, the United States, Biden, for instance, when he talked about the Nord Stream and they said, we're not going to have it, and they bombed it. So we know it's all about the money. Syria, it's all about the money. It's all about the money because there was talk of Pipeline, and a pipeline that comes— there were 2 projects, one coming from Iran through Iraq to Syria and to the Mediterranean, and that would benefit Syria. The other is coming from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and so on to Israel and would benefit Israel. So it is about the money. And that context, I want to ask you about what's going on in Syria, because I know dispatches from the war on terror.

Anne Lyko: Yeah.

Amira: Right.

Said El-Hajjat: For instance, I mean, look, today the United States of America, they have Jelani, Muhammad Jelani, on the terror list and this organization. But they talk about maybe taking them off the terror list and so on. It's all about their interest and so on. The biggest hypocrites are the US, especially in terms of who it designates on the turtles or does not. So I want you to comment about what's happening today in Syria and in relation to Palestine. Not an easy question. I know.

Mustafa Bayoumi: I mean, I think that anybody who believes that they are going to tell you what's going to happen, is deluding themselves. There's no— we have no clue what's going to happen in Syria. Certainly, the problem with Syria post-2011 is not only the civil war, but the fact that everybody was involved in the Syrian war, right? Everybody came. Everybody has their own interests.

Amira: Yeah.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Whether it's Israel, whether it's Turkey, whether it's the UAE, whether it's America, whether it's, you know, what have you. The whole world came and fought in Syria. And, you know, personally, a very good friend of mine grew up in Yarmouk, you know, Palestinian in the refugee camps in Yarmouk, and has no love for Bashar al-Assad, you know, does not think that Assad was—

Amira: Right.

Mustafa Bayoumi: The paragon of Palestinian solidarity. That being said, you know, it's very important to, you know, disrupt the dominance of the region by Israel and by the United States. And we can't, I think, allow that. We have to work against that kind of dominance because that is an anti-human position to have. And it's one that sees people not as people either, but it will just see them as figures on a chessboard. So I don't know what's going to happen. History does not bode well if you think about it. But I don't know. I'm sorry, that was a very unsatisfying answer, but I don't think anybody knows. It's okay.

Said El-Hajjat: It is a very, very complex situation.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Yeah, I mean, I think it has both. It has, for some people it's positive, for some people it's not.

Said El-Hajjat: But no, no, no. It's not.

Anne Lyko: Big chunk of Syrian land.

Said El-Hajjat: That's right.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Is he right?

Said El-Hajjat: Yeah, he's right. They're not going to give it back. You're absolutely right. You're right. No, of course not. And then, you know, it's funny, we raised this issue at the State Department in the last couple of days and they say, well, you know, So Israel says it's temporary. And then you ask them, look, you know, you talk about transition, peaceful transition, about, you know, the rights of minorities, all this stuff, which is a good thing. I mean, catchy phrase words and so on. What about this, these, you know, relentless attacks that Israel is basically attacking, waging war on Syria, unprovoked?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Mm-hmm.

Said El-Hajjat: And they say, well, That's an Israeli private matter. And I asked him, this war that you're supplying arms and so on and giving cover and all this is a private matter? I mean, that was the exchange between us. But the fact is that the United States of America has worked historically against any Arab country that shows solidarity with the Palestinians.

Anne Lyko: Yeah.

Said El-Hajjat: So this is a fact. I mean, they did. And there's a famous saying, by Henry Kissinger. When he achieved the engagement, the disengagement treaty with Egypt, and he said, there's no war without Egypt and there's no peace without Syria, because Syria was basically sticking to the point that we are not going to have peace with Israel until the Palestinian issue is resolved. So now it's a whole different ballgame. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. I mean, these fellows, whatever you want to call them, the, you know, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, they are criminals. They are terrorists. They, you know, they killed people. They slaughtered people. And the fact that they are not slaughtering people today is good enough for him to hold them in our good graces, is just not good enough. Thank you.

Amira: Thank you, Professor, for your talk. I was actually thinking about, like, when you think about the US imperialistic ambitions, Israel has always been the imperial foothold for the US, right?

Anne Lyko: Mm-hmm.

Amira: And then it doesn't matter whether you have a republic or democratic government, It's always going to be the case. And I also wonder, there is actually any space for real radical politics in the US? That on the one hand. And you talk about people power. Yes, there are grassroots movements. Yes, there are movements from, you know, originating from universities led by students. But then the backlash is concerning. And also you talk about masses, the disparity between the kind of language that we as students speak and the so-called masses have, you see a lot of disparity. It's still a society which upholds capitalist values and things like that. So I'm really interested in hearing about when you talk about a new kind of politics that is needed, How do you— what do you envision really, given all these complexities?

Mustafa Bayoumi: Sure. I mean, I don't know if I have an answer to the question. I think it's— you framed the question well. And I'm not saying that it's going to be something that's very straightforward and in front of us. But I also know that the way that it's going right now, it's continually heading us in the wrong direction. And I don't think I'm the only person who sees that. I think everybody is seeing And it's also connected to a kind of rising right-wing populism, not just in the United States. But I think that the Democratic Party was itself a right-wing populist party by the time that they're leaving power now.

Said El-Hajjat: True.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Said El-Hajjat: That's very true.

Speaker 4: I'm so worried about that.

Mustafa Bayoumi: Exactly, exactly right. Exactly right. And so, so I don't, I don't know, you know, and it's not going to be easy. People will have to make certain, take certain risks and make certain sacrifices. But it's never easy, you know, and what's the other alternative? It's just to, to just vote? I don't think voting is enough. Like, so I don't know if I have an answer for you, but I know, I know what's not enough.