A Palestinian you should know: Loubna Noor Qutami

The following was originally published in Palestine in America’s 2021 Politics Edition. Order a print copy, download the digital version or subscribe today!

Assistant Professor, Department of Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. 

Palestine in America (PiA): What balad(s) is your family from? 

Loubna Noor Qutami (LNQ):My maternal side is from Hay al-Ajami, Yaffa. They were displaced during the 1948 Nakba and turned into refugees. My mother grew up in Jabal al Natheef, Amman, Jordan. My fathers side is from Anjara, a small village on the outskirts of Ajlun, Jordan.

PiA: Was there a moment(s) that drove you to begin your career? 

LNQ: September 11, 2001 was a foundational moment that shifted the way I understood the world, and how I moved within it. I think it solidified my political commitments and my love for knowledge, scholarship and education. My mother and I had heard about the attacks on the twin towers on the radio on the way to school. I was in high school at the time.  My mom was shocked but I think, for whatever reason, I was just desensitized to it. To be honest-- I might have been writing off my mom’s burst of emotions as overly dramatic. I wasn’t really mature enough or emotionally equipped to decipher when my mom was rightfully reacting. I was a teenager of immigrant parents growing up in the US. 

When I got to school, I realized what had happened that morning was major. My classmates were crying and our early morning sessions were dedicated to grieving and processing what had happened. I still didn’t understand why the impact was so monumental and foolishly asked why people felt so devastated by what had happened when war and catastrophe was happening across the world every day, including in Palestine. I didn’t say that as an act of political protest. I hadn’t yet developed strong political convictions. I genuinely didn’t understand why the loss of life in New York could hurt people so deeply in San Francisco, and why the loss of life in a place like Palestine didn’t have the same effect.

During that period, the Intifada was unfolding in Palestine and our family had just been introduced to Dish Network TV where we were following along daily so as a young person the images in New York were not as jarring because countless images of lifeless Palestinian bodies appeared on our family television screen every morning. In retrospect, I realize what I was questioning was really about nationalism, patronage, national belonging and interrogating why some forms of life were grievable versus others which were constantly erased and ignored. My comment really upset my peers and I think maybe even permanently altered some good friendships. But as the months went on, some of them starting showing their anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic and pro-war sensibilities and it made me hungrier for knowledge so that I could feel equipped enough to speak back. 

Up until that time, I think I was a pretty ordinary kid. It was the sudden experience of being “othered” that made me more interested in oppression, exclusion, racism and alienation. At the time, I didn’t have a community of Arab peers that validated my thoughts. I found that once I got to University, through my student organizing with the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS)  and other students of color and Black and indigenous peoples and from the lessons I was drawing from my Ethnic Studies classes.  I read the works of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Aimé Césaire in a class on Arab American Identity taught by Dr. Mathew Shenoda and Dr. Jess Ghannam. That class, and these texts, were vital to making me interested and committed to knowledge for liberation. Yet I always felt that in other Ethnic Studies classrooms, the over-centering of the U.S. didn’t quite get to the heart of what I was interested in understanding which really was the linkage between oppression on a global scale which certainly included the US but also in Palestine and the Arab region. 

By the time I completed my undergraduate degree and was exploring MA programs, Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi had been hired at SFSU to build out the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program. She encouraged me to apply to the College of Ethnic Studies. Initially, I was reluctant because I thought the field of Ethnic Studies was limited to domestic racialized contexts but Rabab helped me understand that the origins of Ethnic Studies were always based on an  internationalist anti-colonial ethos even if its current form doesn’t always stay true to that legacy. I guess this was the moment where both my political organizing and intellectual frameworks I was striving to learn about converged more seriously charting out the path I have been on since. 

PiA: What is your earliest memory of participating in political work?

LNQ: I grew up in a relatively politicized family. My mother and grandmother were both in the Union of Palestinian Women (UPWA) and my aunt was a member of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). My grandfather was deeply committed to Palestinian community organizing and really was the anchor who kept my family connected to the struggle. Prior to the Oslo Accords,  I remember being surrounded by the Palestinian community all the time. Meetings took place at my grandparents house and we went to a number of protests. After the Accords, political spaces sort of just vanished and by the time of Oslo II (1995) my grandfather had passed away. As my family mourned, politics sort of faded away even if it was always there subversively. In a way, there was a jarring severance from the community. I remember there being children who I used to play with as a child who I had never seen again and always wondered about them.

 By early 2000’s  that temporal disconnect changed: My sister became involved in GUPS and started bringing me out to the rallies to protest Israeli killing sprees during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Following 9/11, I began developing more of a political consciousness that tethered the racialized experience of being an Arab youth in the U.S. with the beginning of US imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and ongoing support for the colonization of Palestine. It was like a sudden burst of politics, a blast from the past except by this time I was old enough to comprehend that it was probably there all along. 

My time in GUPS was really my first formative political experience of my own, one that wasn’t facilitated by my family. After high school, I went to San Francisco State University, not necessarily because I wanted to, but because that is what most of the working class Arab kids in my community did. We weren’t allowed to live away from home. It was just the way it was. But in retrospect I am really glad I went to SFSU. I was able to join GUPS and it was there that I developed my political consciousness along with Arab students my own age. We were joining the student movement against fee hikes and budget cuts, against attacks on Ethnic Studies Professors and classrooms, against racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia on campus. We also were participating in political activities organized by the community including the annual conferences for the Al-Awda: Palestinian Right of Return Coalition and were forming our own Arab Student Coalition of California which brought together student organizers across the state. 

Together we also worked on creating a Palestinian Cultural Mural honoring the late Dr. Edward Said. We experienced a brutal Zionist repression campaign in the process which attacked the mural arguing that images of the right of return key and Handala represented a “culture of violence.” That silencing campaign had the opposite effect. It made me more committed to Palestine and curious about the history of our struggle. Once they made those comments about Handala, I remember spending a lot of time researching Naji al-Ali’s politics and life-work, and engaging elders in the community in discussions about the right of return and Handala. My undergraduate student organizing  period was such a formative time in my life. I really learned a lot about myself, family, history and built incredible friendships and relationships with my peers

In 2006 I had the chance to study in the Palestine and Arabic Studies (PAS) program at Birzeit University and that trip solidified by attachment to Palestine. It was the first time I was allowed to leave home and experience the world as my own person, following my own curiosity and seeking answers to questions I had long held. It really sharpened my critical thinking skills and social maturity as well.  I learned a lot in Palestine, not only about the history of the struggle and its current form but also about my relationship to the land, people, cause and history. I developed a complex emotional bond with Palestine at this time. The relationship became a personal one---it was no longer about being Palestinian in a hostile U.S. racial climate or learning about Palestine from the trauma or political conviction of my own family. It became my own struggle after that trip, not only something I inherited. I really think this trip solidified a commitment of my whole self to the struggle, emotionally, intellectually, politically and organizationally. 

Everything that came after was a matter of opportunity. Deciding to commit my whole self to Palestine at this time was not easy. When I returned I had a really hard time adjusting to the business as usual practices of life here. I just couldn’t shake how devastating the situation was back home and how seemingly disconnected our community in the Bay Area was in a way. The struggle felt so urgent for me at the time, but it was really hard to convey the magnitude of the crisis and the urgency of political struggle to my family and community.  It was not the trend in our communities at this time. I think people read me as a little excessive and I resented them for that. I think I was able to continue on with my organizing because of the privileges I hold but also because I always had validation from my Mom who allowed me to explore what I wanted to do and to commit to Palestine despite the repercussions. She created a sort of psychological safety net for me, giving me a sense of power in a world that effaces it for young people who dare to challenge authority, especially young women. She was my biggest champion and supported all of my activities, never asking me to prioritize other things that the internalized capitalist rationalities of many in my community had valued so dear. My mom prioritized the struggle by supporting me to commit to it wholeheartedly. 

PiA: How does Palestine play a role in your work?

LNQ: In November of 2007 GUPS had finally inaugurated the Palestinian Cultural Mural at SFSU after a three year fight. Later that month, I was able to attend an international conference of Palestinian youth in France. This was the second conference of the Palestinian Youth Network (now the Palestinian Youth Movement PYM). I had gone to France thinking I was just attending an educational conference. I left the 11-day summit with a new found dedication to transnational Palestinian youth organizing. I joined the conference follow up committee and together with an incredible group of my peers prepared for the founding conference of PYN in Madrid, Spain in 2008 which gathered Palestinian youth from thirty-three countries worlwide to examine our shared aspirations and dilemmas in assuming a more relevant role in the liberation struggle. 

As the network grew, we were developing pedagogical approaches to diagnosing the crises affecting Palestine and Palestinian social and political life for youth in the homeland and globally. In many ways, we were attempting to reverse the depoliticization that had been rampant in Palestinian communities since the Oslo Accords and the fragmentation of our societies. We were attempting to rebuild the transnational Palestinian nation despite all that has meant to annihalte its bonds to one another, to the national body politic, to history and to the land. To attempt such a feat makes you deeply linked to the people you are building with. I think my comrades in the PYN/M came to know me more than anyone I had ever known. They knew the depths of my heart, my weaknesses and flaws, my convictions and ways of processing things. I developed deep love, trust, friendship and respect for my peers. Sometimes it felt like we lived in a different social world even though there were so many geographic borders and boundaries separated us. But the process of collectively studying, engaging, debating, imagining, strategizing and moving together resulted in two important takeaways for me. First, it made me deeply committed to believing that academic knowledge must be in service of liberation praxis akin to Paolo Freire’s idea that action and theory must be in a dialectic relation to produce a guiding praxis for liberation. Second, it made me more certain that knowledge should be generated collectively rather than individually. 

I dedicated both my MA thesis and PhD dissertation to the formation, development, political theorizations and pedagogical praxis of the PYM. During the course of writing my dissertation especially, I was able to link experiential realities and first-hand lessons learned from movement building praxis to theories and ideas in Ethnic Studies, anti/decolonization, transnationalism, youth movements and more. I had a powerful team of brilliant thinkers and mentors at UC Riverside who allowed me to bring my whole self to my work which included the emotional depths of what I was experiencing as a Palestinian in the US academy and constant forms of exhaustion, precarity and frustration that come with it. I am especially indebted to Dr. Dylan Rodriguez, Dr. David Lloyd, Dr. Jodi Jim, Dr. Setsu Shigematsu and Dr. Fred Moten for all the guidance and support they offered me. They also encouraged me to bring an affective ethos to my work---a truly feminist practice at play in their mentorship. This was really important after I was denied entry from Palestine in 2015. I was easily able to politically comprehend the ban but it wasn’t as easy emotionally and what it would mean for my actual fieldwork and dissertation project. They did not ask me to neutralize the emotional depths of what I was trying to communicate and why and helped me craft a deterritorialized analytical framework for understanding Palestine/Palestinians that could account for the variety of Palestinian experiences, including my own. I think that first hand movement experience coupled with the rigorous training in Ethnic Studies during both my MA and PhD really made it so that Palestine could be a constant life practice, not just a component of my work. 

PiA: What’s a Palestinian adverb/quote/person/poem/song that you often reflect on in this work?

LNQ: There are simply so many! I think one that has stuck with me over the course of the last several years is by Ahmad Diab. He wrote a brilliant essay on the decimation of Yarmouk Camp in Syria called “From our Facebook Balconies, the Dark Heart of Al-Yarmuk.” He concludes by stating:  “In coming to terms with its impermanence, the memories of al-mukhayyam for the second- and third-generation refugees are what the memories of Palestine were for the first. They are not a reminder of a previous place or a past life as much as they forge a fragmentary incoherent community amongst those who lost it all, yet somehow still manage to start anew anywhere they are allowed entry. Rather than enduring existential crises, Palestinians learn to deal with existence as a crisis. History suggests that this is the stuff of nation building.” I think this quote really captures the depths of the Palestinian experience collectively and intergenerationally. We have all faced the dictates of settler-colonial erasure, impermanence, annihilation and catastrophe in some form or another.I don’t say this to flatten crucial differences and scales of material subjegation within Palestinian communities. It is always important to be mindful of the way many Palestinian bodies and homes are on the frontlines of destruction in a way my own is not. But rather, the quote links the experiential depths of crisis Palestinians faced during the 1948 Nakba (and its afterlife) with the new catastrophes that govern Palestinian land and life. At first glance the last sentence seems to possess a sort of cynicism which Palestinians are, rightfully so, entitled to. But as the work of Emile Habibi teaches us, cynicism can be instructive. In learning how to deal with “existence as a crisis,” Palestinians have demonstrated profound displays of creativity, resilience, sumud (steadfastness) and the tenacity to continue on despite so much destruction and pain.  Referencing those acts, theories and practices of resistance in the Palestinian tradition historically, I  have been empowered to move through struggles in my own life---always understanding that based on scale it cannot compare to the crises our people have faced and that such struggle is the worthwhile cost of freedom. The struggles of our own lives must not---indeed cannot--diminish our commitment to collective freedom. In fact, it allows for a rekindling of the bonds between the emotional, psychological, social and political scales through which we dedicate our lives to freedom--because crises of such magnitude leaves us no other choice. 

PiA: What do you hope to achieve in your line of work?

LNQ: This is a hard question. Most days, I just think about how to most effectively teach themes of power, oppression, and movements for freedom to give my students some inspiration, hope and guidance on how to become change-makers in their families, schools, and societies. This really is my priority. Making sure new generations of young people, particularly students of color, can access tools that can make them feel stronger,  and more equipped to achieve the change they need and desire in the world. I care about this deeply---as my scholarly work argues---I believe student and youth movements are important sites of revolutionary change and have been so across the world throughout history. But I guess in the grander scheme of things, I also hope to challenge the way and the reason knowledge is produced through academia. It should never be about maintaining the status quo or “giving voice to the voiceless.” Rather it is about cultivating and retrieving the methods, processes, and mechanisms by which knowledge can be produced for the purpose of social transformation, both for Palestine and globally. This is why I feel so indebted to Indigenous, Black, Third World and Feminist thought and movements, my training in AMED and to the important historical, political and theorhetical lessons I have learned working with my peers in PYM. These sites produce knowledge relevant for collective freedom---something sorely lacking in many disciplinary fields of study and increasingly under attack by academic institutions. I think this is important, because I don’t believe struggles for freedom can (or ever have been) anti-intellectual. True movement praxis must always be guided by revolutionary philosophies and ideals. I don’t really see my role as needing to produce those ideals---I probably couldn’t even if I tried--rather my work is to piece together important pieces of knowledge and to make it accessible to the communities and young people that have a hunger for liberation and that can use it in service of their strategies. 

PiA: Many times, Palestinians endure marginalization on all sides of the aisle -- what obstacles do you face/have you faced, and how have you overcome it? 

LNQ: It is certainly not easy being a Palestinian in the US today let alone being active for Palestine or teaching Palestine. We only need to look at the scores of Zionist repression, silencing and criminalization campaigns that have targeted Palestinian students, community leaders and scholars. I have certainly experienced some forms of this backlash but nothing compared to the incredible community leaders whose every move is traced, catalogued, scrutinized and suppressed. I think for me, the hardest thing has been the interrogations by Israeli soldiers at the border and in the final instance, being banned from ever going back to Palestine. It is not easy thinking, dreaming, and working for a place that you are severed from. But I think Palestine is as much a community, set of ideas and principles as it is a place. The various forms of racialized harassment  and repression we face are intimidating, certainly. But I try not to let them get to me. It is expected. We are fighting a very hard fight and our colonizers will do all that they can to erase our narratives and punish us lest we overturn their power and authority. 

I think what hurts more is when spaces that should be safe for Palestinians tend to reproduce those same power dynamics. A number of well-meaning allies have fallen short of creating and sustaining safe-space for Palestinian expressions of identity, aspirations for freedom and justice. This is in part because they themselves do not want to be the targets of Zionist backlash, so it is understandable in a way but no less disappointing. There are certainly these dynamics in academia and I think it's really difficult for Palestinians to find their place in the academy. 

There are various forms of epistemic violence Palestinian scholars face in classrooms, faculty meetings, and in the process of crafting their teaching pedagogy and writing practice. There is simultaneously no shortage of people doing work on Palestine in the academy---in fact there is quite a lot. It is hard to find your place in a conversation that seems so established, so limiting and is not always very welcoming. It is also hard to think about what you can contribute that hasn’t already been said/done and whether what you do in the academy can be instructive or useful for liberation.  I personally have been blessed with a lot of support but still have to navigate those dynamics from time to time and pretty paralyzing feelings of insecurity. As a Palestinian, you always have to be cautious of how you present yourself with highest form of professional integrity, knowing that whatever you say or write will be treated with the highest form of scrutiny not only by Zionists but by your own community and the field of Palestine studies. It is a lot of pressure to feel that the weight of history is always conditioning how you move in academia. Sorting out how to handle that pressure while also staying true to your values and ethics and accountable to your community is a lot. The feeling that you have to be 100% at all times can be exhausting. But again, it is understandable. There is a lot at stake---we are trying to end colonial dispossession and occupation and there is an urgency behind that goal knowing that we all must play a distinct role in an ecosystem to realize it. 

I think also, something that is hard is the monumental forms of conflict and harm that happen within our communities, especially among fellow organizers. Sometimes we take out the traumas we have endured in our own lives on one another, or limit space for an intellectual flow of ideas because of fear of losing our own legitimacy, standing or power. Marginalization is a constant part of this work. If the work was easy we would have freed Palestine by now. I think I overcome it by understanding that there are a variety of historical and transnational conditions that have caused such discord in our communities and try to find ways to love my people despite our differences. We must necessarily attempt to (re)build a different social ethos where we can love and respect one another through our differences anyways. This is not an easy process, especially if one feels that injury has happened. But I think if we can’t sustain love for ourselves and our people---even with our flaws--we can’t sustain ethical commitments to our struggle. Our struggle must always be guided by love.

PiA: What’s your advice to folks looking to deepen their political journeys?

LNQ: Revolutions are not made overnight. They require tenacious dedication, patience and commitment; understanding that we are picking up where former generations left off and working toward something we may not see in our lifetime. Revolutions are not free of complexity, tragic mishaps, struggles for power and authority, corruption and betrayals. There is no monolithic Palestinian identity or history. But there is power in our collective experiences coalescing to lay the foundation for our collective visions, creations and strategies. Politics for us cannot be about acquiring formal forms of political power individually but rather must truly be popular.  It must be rooted in our histories, in the needs and aspirations of everyday people, and we must do the labor-intensive work of meeting our people where they are at. Most of that work is silent labor, behind the scenes and does not get very much recognition and very rarely is compensated. A lot of the spaces we navigate are not very nurturing, uplifting, kind or forgiving. But we have to remember that our people are collectively carrying the weight of history on their shoulders and experience so much struggle in their own day to day lives. True liberation must be comprehensive and it must never prioritize some demands for justice and freedom over others. I think this is an important principle that a lot of Palestinian organizers struggle with. Limited by material disenfranchisement, many of us slate pragmatic priorities subordinating other principles. I have been and still am guilty of this. But I think this whole concept of designating our strategies by understanding primary and secondary contradictions is really flawed. It resulted in our movements and people turning a blind eye to many forms of violence and pain distinct Palestinian communtiies have faced as well as other people. Today, I see this play out mostly in our community tensions over Syria and it's led a lot of us to ignoring the experiences, needs, aspirations of everyday people because it didn’t fall into our political design of how we understand our principles. As hard as this all is, movement spaces also can give so much to us. They give us love, comradery and companionship in a very isolating and lonely world. They challenge us to think deeper, move collectively and see things critically. They foster the imagination of the future Palestine and world we want to build. Politics to me, at the end of the day, is about dismantling systems that harm us and creating an alternative vision of the world we want to see. That is very different from establishment politics that seek to uphold the current status quo. 
The only other thing I would add is that sometimes our Palestinian political spaces overly emphasize politics in the absences of the social and communal dimension of everyday people. The truth is, while GUPS, PYM, and my academic departments really fortified my political convictions, analyses, theorizations and vision, it is not where I developed my day to day community based organizing and service experience. I learned that by working at the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC) which was a cultural and service providing local institution in the SF Bay Area. The ACCC did not really do de jure political work. But I think of its programs as political in a way. Through a variety of programs including social services, youth programming, violence prevention and intervention services, womens programs and cultural empowerment programs, my work at the ACCC really made me value community care as part of my political ethos. Building vibrant, healthy, and socially connected communities should be an intrinsic part of our political work. Under the guidance of mentors like Dr. Sally al-Daher and Inas Atawneh, I learned a lot about the importance of a social fabric in achieving political self-determination. I think this is something people who are cultivating their political journeys should keep in mind.

PiA: How do you see the Palestinian diaspora intersect with issue based work amongst other communities?

LNQ: I think that for former generations of Palestinian organizers in the US, the political ethos that molded their epochs were often times motivated by solidarity with all oppressed people. The mutual cooperation and exchanges between these movements were instrumental in fostering important displays and principles of solidarity. I think now, some of that history still shapes the current political practice between Palestinians in the US diaspora and other oppressed peoples but I think there are new social factors that we must consider. While many young Palestinians are rejecting “American identity” as a nationalist and imperialist project of empire, the truth is there are deep forms of social kinship, friendship, and comradery between our communities and everyday people in this country including with immigrants, Black and Indigenous peoples, working class people and even white people. Many of our young ones are politicized through other community struggles before learning the history of their own Palestinian/Arab struggles. Many can cite theories, ideas, quotes and lessons from Black and Indigenous Revolutionaries before they can from radical intellectuals in the Arab revolutionary tradition. Many of our young people have developed relationships of friendship, intimacy and care with these communities before having their own Arab/Palestinian space. I think this is important because I think it means that the struggles for racial, political, gendered, sexual, class, climate, and disability justice in the US are struggles that young people see as their own, not just struggles they stand in solidarity with. Bringing in a sound Palestinian/Arab political conviction into these spaces is but one way our young people are facilitating renewed bonds of solidarity but it is important to understand the social forms of belonging our communities feel to these causes and communities and the ethical and political committments that come with it. Recently, I had a family member ask me why I cared so much and was participating in the anti-racist uprisings that spawned the country this last year. I think they presumed I would answer something like “their movement is like ours” but I just didn’t feel that way. I answered that these are my people just as Palestinians are my people...we grew up together, organize together, work together and even if we experience systemic oppression distinctly it does not diminish our comradery with one another….you don’t walk away when your people are getting slaughtered. 

PiA: How would you define solidarity?

LNQ: Historically, the Palestinian struggle has always been an internationalist one. Palestinian revolutionaries of the 1950’s and 60’s borrowed learned lessons, theories, strategies and resources from global anti-colonial struggles. Their alliances with movements in the Arab region, across the Third World and oppressed peoples in first world countries, were key to maintaining the revolutionary ethos that drove the political movement for a long while. As geo-political and global reconfigurations of power took place, particularly in the 1980’s, many of those de jure alliances were diminished. By the early 1990’s the Palestinian leadership was entering into negotiations with their colonizers trading in their anti-colonial visions for the hollow promise of a state, which we have yet to achieve. But I believe the spirit of cooperation, the political ethos between Palesitnians and global struggles for freedom has always remained intact. In the recent decade, we have witnessed a rekindling of those relationships even if they take form in new ways infrastructurally and politically. 

In the US, there are a number of ways the Palestinian struggle is made instructive for contemporary anti/decolonial, anti-racist and other struggles for liberation. The questions of borders, displacement and refugeehood, which have long charachterized the Palestinian experience, deeply resonates with immigrant and refugee communities, anti-border militarization groups and movements. Linkages between policing, prison and surveillance apparatus in Palestine,  through a system of racial capitalism and particularly the varied forms of racial containment of Palestinians under siege in the Gaza Strip, is deeply linked to the ongoing struggle against anti-Black racist state violence. Struggles against home demolitions, land confiscation, and denial of access to stay, return and move and access natural resources resonates with indigenous peoples who continue to fight for their lands and sovereignty. These are only a few of the various ways the struggle for a free Palestine resonates with various communities experiencing colonial/racial oppression in the US and how their histories of resistance and steadfastness continue to offer invaluable insights to Palestinians who are (re)crafting resistance methods. 
To me, solidarity must always be reciprocal through a joint-struggle framework. Many oppressed communities can relate to one another because of shared experiences of harm, pain, and grief. This allows for a politics of compassion between struggling communities which is an incredible starting point for solidarity. But I think solidarity is a departure from only empathizing or recognizing someone's pain to actively working to combat the system producing the harm. A joint-struggle model recognizes that the system producing harm for one community is, more often than not, the same system or tied to another system producing harm for other communities. Joint-struggle is about working together in a shoulder to shoulder struggle with shared principles even if we indeed have different realities and experiences. It must never be transactional and never conditional and again, must always be motivated by deep and genuine feelings of respect, love and appreciation for distinct groups' contributions to liberation. For our communities in the US, there is an additional component in refining our solidarity praxis. We really need to do better at refusing to be implicit in other peoples subjugation---in this inverted world of racial hierarchy, one can be both the subject of racialized oppression and beneficiaries of it. It is complex but our own experience of oppression does not necessarily mean we don’t benefit from oppression of other communities, especially Black and Native peoples in the US. 

PiA: What do you want people to know about you/your experience as a Palestinian in this work?

LNQ: I think what I have already stated speaks to this question. However, what I want to address here is in relation to being Jordanian as well. As I became more deeply engaged in academia and politics, I started to question why my identity as a Palestinian was such a strong influence over my political outlooks. I think this is completely understandable; Palestine remains under a de jure military colonial occupation, refugees remain dispossessed and Palestinian narratives and experiences are criminalized and suppressed even within the far shatat. Palestinians have a distinct colonial experience compared to other Arabs insofar as they continue to resist a complex settler-colonial regime. The fight for a free Palestine is one that carries a lot of currency primarily because it is so urgent, necessary and seemingly impossible. 

But I want to say that it is important to understand Palestine in its own geographic and historical context and that Arabs are not just any other group in solidarity with Palestinians. Zionism affects the region on every level and the social and political histories of Arabs even once they exist in diaspora. Today, Arab peoples are still struggling for justice and freedom from the grips of Zionism, historical forms of colonial plunder and imperialist rule but also from authoritarian Arab regimes even if they claim to challenge Western power. As a Palestinian, I think there is a lot of work Palestinian communities need to do to challenge some ethno-centric trends that we have. For example, I think we can understand the particularities of the Palestinian experience and be atune to the intimate forms of violence, pain and trauma Palestinians have had to endure without suggesting that Palestinians are the only or most oppressed people. Too often, I hear slogans within Palestinian spaces that the “Arabs” abandoned Palestine. This is simply not true. Certainly Arab regimes traded in Palestine for hollow promises but they did it under coercive circumstances, just as the Palestinian Authority has. As Arab regimes surrendered Palestine, they also surrendered their own peoples rights to dignity, justice, and freedom. And there are a number of Arab leaders who boast that they never surrendered Palestine who still subjegate their own people (and Palestinians for that matter) to torture, violence, economic deprivation and more. So it is important to empathize and be atune to the subjegation of Arab masses even if it looks different than our Palestinian subjegation and even if it is enacted by leaders who have not normalized with our colonizers.

And for Jordanians and other Arabs, I think we have a lot of work to do to reclaim Palestine as our Arab struggle and to combat Zionism as a system that we are directly confronted with as well. I think one thing that is really important is to understand that we cannot achieve freedom for our lands, countries and peoples under the boot of authoritarian Arab regimes without the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians. There certainly needs to be more work within our broader Arab communities on confronting the endemic forms of anti-Palestinian sentiment that has culminated over the years and to re-affirm our place in movements for liberation.

PiA: What does a free world mean to you?

LNQ: I think a free world is exactly that---freed of the various ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized forms of oppression, violence, exclusion and pain that governs our world today. It is certainly about achieving freedom of land, movement, people, and political freedoms. I think anyone committed to true liberation in Palestine knows that it can’t be achieved without the dismantlement of other forms of oppression and to be honest, there is overall a pretty close consensus on what that political freedom should look like. What I would like to speak more to here is the social freedoms that must be deeply linked to that political freedom. In order for us to dream up free futures, to craft them and build toward them, freedom of thought must be the first requirement. There resides a number of social constraints within our families and communities that limit freedom of imagination, of feeling, expression, of communication and the ability to tackle social issues with an ethical set of principles. Even within movement spaces, the socialized forms of policing that govern the world tend to reproduce themselves, except they reproduce themselves along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status and other axis. 

All this to say, my understanding of a free world links the scales of the political and the social, the collective and the personal and allows for the harnessing of what Josefina Saldana Portillo calls a revolutionary imagination or what Robin DG Kelley refers to as the power of Freedom Dreams. As Black Feminist thinker Adrienne Marie Brown states so poetically: “we who believe in freedom must build our muscle of imagination: because we are living in, and only sometimes surviving, an imagination battle – who imagined this world?” In order for us to dream up free futures, to craft them and build toward them, freedom of thought must be the first requirement. This is why I went into academia. 

PiA:Was there a moment that made you consider leaving political work? What was it and what kept you working in politics?

LNQ:I don’t know if there was ever a serious moment I considered leaving political work. As I mentioned, feelings of frustration, exhaustion, and cynicism are a pretty recurring part of this work. The burnout is real. It is strange that the very same communities and spaces that contributed to various moments of burn out are also the same ones that helped me regain the passion and perseverance to continue this work. It is just part of the process I guess. One thing that I would say after doing this work for a while is that it is important to try to exercise self-care in this work. I don’t really mean a neo-liberal idea of self-care, I mean actually making sure that one's own needs are being met. This is important because I see many people leave movement work permanently when they feel that their own needs have been put on the backburner for a very long time. I think there is a fine line between centering individual interests (political and financial gain for example) over the needs of the collective versus taking care of ourselves to make sure we can continue to give to the cause. The former distorts the principles I think are necessary for the movement while the latter secures them.

There were a lot of things I was hoping to do in life, many creative pursuits I had to put on the sidelines, many professional and academic skills I wanted to gain that I didn’t properly dedicate time and attention to; and many personal matters and relationships that were deprioritized for the sake of the cause. These decisions didn’t go unnoticed by my loved ones. I faced a lot of social pressures to live differently, to take care of my emotional, mental and physical health, and to make marriage and starting a family a priority for example. I was never opposed to these things on matter of principle though I recognize these forms of social pressure can also be very oppressive, particularly for young Palestinian/Arab women. It was more so that I couldn’t seem to fit them into the lifestyle I was living for a long period of time. I guess I mention all this to say, it is important to nurture one's own mind, emotional, spiritual and political self, skills, passions and joy as we continue to do this work because our struggle cannot afford another Palestinian feeling resentful of the movement and because we need our community to be strong, healthy and equipped to sustain the struggle for the long haul. As we do this, we must continue to craft movement spaces that seek to uplift and nurture us on all levels so that we may retain/sustain old and new strugglers for a free Palestine.