Eman Abdelhadi: “We Can Only Survive This Together”

As conditions in the United States grow increasingly unstable—with federal agencies unraveling and Trump unleashing reckless economic chaos—many have turned their attention away from Palestine and the Palestine solidarity movement. Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza is deteriorating rapidly. On March 2, Israel broke a two-month-old ceasefire agreement, resuming its bombardment of the Gaza Strip and blocking all shipments of food and fuel into the area. Since then, at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed. Now, the Israeli military is reportedly preparing to seize Rafah.

In the United States, the State Department revoked the visas of more than 600 students at over 100 schools, while universities have been hit with sweeping federal cuts under the pretext of combating so-called “antisemitism” on campus.

To better understand these developments, I spoke with Palestinian activist and author Eman Abdelhadi. Abdelhadi is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago.

[This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]

Kelly Hayes: I want to talk about what's happening with Trump, student abductions, and the capitulation of universities, but first, I want to talk about what's happening in Palestine right now. What can you tell us about the violence and deteriorating conditions people in Gaza and the West Bank are currently facing?

Eman Abdelhadi: It is really a new level of horror that we are seeing in Gaza right now. It feels like there are no holds barred. The Israeli government has always treated Palestinians this way, but these attacks are particularly vicious. It is clear that Israel has no red lines, so we're seeing paramedics attacked, journalists attacked, hospitals attacked, and people in tents attacked. At this point, a hundred Palestinian children are being killed per day, and no aid has come into Gaza since early March. Of course, all the means of procuring food have already been destroyed throughout the genocide, so people are facing extremely dire conditions, and of course, the world is distracted. The global economy is potentially crashing, and there's a new crisis every day. Israel is very attuned to whether the American public is paying attention, so it just feels like they have free rein.

KH: While the horrors Israel is perpetrating in Palestine escalate, we are seeing repression against the Palestine solidarity movement escalate here in the US. We have seen people abducted, visas revoked, and even people with permanent residency status, like Mahmoud Khalil, have been targeted. Rumeysa Öztürk appears to be facing deportation for co-authoring an op-ed about Gaza. The administration has also revoked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for multiple universities, while threatening to slash billions more, and blamed supposed unchecked antisemitism on university campuses for the cuts. Of course, we know that in the mouths of conservatives, “antisemitism” refers to any advocacy for Palestinian life or liberation. Amid these attacks, universities like Northwestern and Columbia have capitulated to Trump—taking an approach which has not spared them. 

Can you speak to what's happening on university campuses right now with regard to the Trump administration?

EA: What we're seeing is one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian handbook, which is to attack universities as hubs of debate and dissent. Our universities, god knows, are not perfect and have never been perfect, but they have been at the center of a lot of political conversation and a lot of political sea changes in US history, and in the contemporary moment, and the far right does not want that to continue. They want to destroy universities, which they see as the primary antagonist in the culture wars.

They're doing that by choking off federal funding and pitting universities and parts of universities against each other, scientists against the humanities and social scientists, administrators against faculty, et cetera. What we're seeing is the Trump administration trying to decide how knowledge gets produced, who gets to produce it, and what kind of knowledge is acceptable and not acceptable. Unfortunately, university administrators have always been cowards. They have almost always stood on the wrong side of history throughout our history.

However, we're in a particularly dire moment because universities in the last few decades have really moved to resemble corporations, and any faculty power and student power that has existed in the past has been woefully diminished. And so, what we're seeing are people who are not necessarily committed to the university as much more than a glorified corporation, and so, of course, those people are capitulating. Even the administrators who do want to take a stand are having their hands forced by boards of trustees, which are often just rich folks, including billionaires and millionaires.

Some Americans might be seeing the attack on universities and thinking, “Great, the elites are being taken down,” but in reality, this is just another form of the class war that we are all experiencing. We don't have a lot of upward mobility in this society, but the little bit of upward mobility that we have had has mostly happened through universities. What little space there's been to develop ideas about the conditions of Black life, brown life, and Indigenous life—so much of that work has happened within the halls of the university, and that's exactly why they are being actively destroyed. Unfortunately, university administrators are sometimes quite happy, if not ready, to ditch all of these things in order to appease the right.

The biggest tragedy of it all is they're still not getting back their funding. Columbia University was the first example where the Trump administration decided they would withhold $400 million. Columbia capitulated and agreed to all these additional disciplinary policies, to kicking out some of their students, to allowing the government to interfere in hiring and firing, to place academic departments, African studies and Middle Eastern studies in particular, in special supervised positions called receiverships, and yet they haven't gotten the money back.

They don't seem to understand that capitulating gets you nothing. You lose your morals, your principles, and the material goods that they didn't want you to have to begin with.

KH: You recently experienced something that reflects some of the capitulation and cowardice we've been seeing from administrators on university campuses when a speech you were scheduled to give at Notre Dame was canceled. Can you tell us about that cancellation?

EA: A group of students had invited me to give a talk at a peace studies conference that is entirely student run. It's a conference that students put on all by themselves and I was invited to serve as the keynote speaker. I got this invitation in January and I agreed right away, and it's been in the works the whole time. And then, on Saturday, which is exactly a week before I was set to speak at the event, I got this terse email from the dean of the school that houses the peace studies department saying, We just heard about your speech. Unfortunately, we have a policy that all Israel-Palestine events have to have security. We have other events and we can't organize this on such short notice. 

Now, it's an obvious lie and a flimsy excuse. This university hosts football games that draw hundreds of thousands of people pretty much every other week. I was a fellow at Notre Dame a couple of years ago. They have their own police force, and security at an academic event tends to just be one or two guys sitting in the back. They didn't say that this event was under threat or anything, so the idea that they can't coordinate security a week in advance is, frankly, absurd. But also, the idea that Israel-Palestine events have to have security, as a matter of course, is already extremely problematic. And so, what I did was I wrote a letter back to the dean, and I published both her letter to me and my response because, frankly, I'm sick and tired of fighting these fights with university administrators while there's a genocide going on.

It's absurd that I should have to spend my morning writing this woman an email or that a university where I was a fellow a couple of years ago would suddenly be a place where I couldn't give a talk because of some vague security concern. It's just another example of this massive wave of censorship and silencing that we've been seeing.

KH: What would you encourage people who are concerned about what they're seeing—in terms of the silencing, the repression, the abductions, and the federal targeting of academic institutions—to do right now? 

EA: Well, I think that, like everything else, we can only survive this together. People who are in university settings and are thinking, "Well, I'm just going to put my head down and wait for this to go away…" in fact, in many settings, whether it's the nonprofit sector, all of these settings that are being attacked by this fascist administration, I would say it's not going to work, they're going to come for you. It might not be right now, but it'll probably be tomorrow. If it's not tomorrow, it'll be next week. We are only safe if we're safe together, and so I think that people need to be organized; people need to be collectivizing university spaces. People need to be organizing with other students or faculty, et cetera.

We need to do the mutual aid work to take care of each other, whether that's walking people home or coming up with contingency plans around travel. We need to be doing all that work but we also need to be building collective power. At the university level, a lot of people are rebuilding AAUP [American Association of University Professors] chapters, which is sort of the closest thing we have to an academic union for those of us who are not unionized. Everyone should be thinking about unionizing at this point, and so I think that we have to face this head-on; we have to go on the offensive. Above all, we have to take care of one another.

KH: Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of our readers today?

EA: I think one thing that I would say is that I think we need to keep Palestine front and center in our conversations, especially as we face these horrific realities within our own borders—that we not forget that. Especially for those of us in the movement, that we're ultimately trying to fight for people whose lives are literally on the line every moment of every day. That's the only thing I would remind folks.

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