The Wild Reed

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

Judith Butler on the Ongoing Student Protests Against the Gaza Genocide

American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler was recently interviewed by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. In this interview, Butler shares her perspective on the growing protests taking place on U.S. college campuses and universities against the Israeli government’s ongoing genocidal violence against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Butler also shares her thoughts on the meaning of academic freedom.

I find it to be a very worthwhile interview; perhaps you will too. Following is an excerpt.

______________________

Very often when it comes to Israel–Palestine, we hear people say, “Well, it’s so complex.” I think for many of the young people, it’s not that complex. This is a genocidal violence being enacted against the Palestinian people in Gaza. And it is obvious and it is clear, and they have the footage and they circulate the footage and they know it.

They’re also reading: They’re getting the history of Zionism. They’re getting the history of occupation. They’re getting the history of Gaza. They’re learning online and in seminars and in their own colleges. And the mobilization is born of an unequivocal conviction – not just that the bombardments and killings, the loss now of over 34,000 Palestinian lives is horrific. Not just that, but the history of Zionism, the history of occupation, the structure of apartheid within the state of Israel, the fact that Palestinians remain stateless or living within administrative authorities that do not have full state powers and do not represent full political self-determination. And that even now, Palestinians who live within the state of Israel, within its current boundaries, they also are suffering harassment, violence, and second-class citizenship in many different ways.

I think that there is a broad educational effort happening here. And I like the fact that education is being mixed with activism because activism should be informed. And sometimes we see ill-informed instances, like somebody yelling, “Jews go back to Poland.” No, that’s not acceptable.

What does the liberation of Palestine mean? What does it look like? Well, in my view, it means that Palestinians and Jews and other inhabitants of that land will find a way to live together. Either next to each other or with one another, under conditions of radical equality, where occupation is dismantled and all the colonial structures associated with occupation is dismantled.

It doesn’t mean pushing Jews off the land. It does mean, in my mind and in many people’s minds, the taking down of settlements and the redistribution of that land to Palestinians who lived there. And it does mean, in my mind and in the mind of many others, a just way of thinking about the right of return for Palestinians who have suffered forcible exile and who wish to return to the lands or at least to the region, or to have compensation or acknowledgment for what they have suffered.

. . . [W]hat’s behind the slogan [“Free Palestine”]? . . . Yes, I want to free Palestine from colonization, from bombardment violence, from settlements, from military and police detention. I want to see freedom from all of those things. But then we also have to ask: Freedom to do what? What will freedom look like? How will it be organized? How will people live together in a free Palestine, or in a free Palestine–Israel, whatever it may be called, or in two states who will have to have a negotiated agreement or a federated model?

A lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time, so I think I would like to see more seminars in the street, seminars on college campuses that try to take apart the slogans – distinguish the hateful slogans, the ignorant ones, the antisemitic ones from those that are actually helping to realize justice and freedom and equality in that land.

So if we were to have another public seminar on these campuses where everybody is assembled, it should surely be on academic freedom as well. Academic freedom means that educators have a right to teach what they want, to build their own curriculum, to express their ideas without the interference of state and without the interference of donors.

But I think that’s also collapsing right now as donors, we see at Columbia University, are making threats to withdraw funds, that also happened at Harvard and elsewhere. Also state powers, governments pressuring universities to suppress the rights of speech and assembly that their students have. These are forms of interference in university and college environments that ought properly to be protected from that interference. That is what academic freedom is.

– Judith Butler
Excerpted from “Judith Butler Will Not Co-Sign
Israel’s Alibi for Genocide”
The Intercept
May 1, 2024

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Hello Australia Autumn!

I arrived two days ago from spring in Minnesota to autumn in my homeland of Australia. I’ll be in the Great South Land for a month, and as it’s been over a year since I was last in my first home, I’m very much looking forward to reconnecting with family and friends.

Although in leaving Minnesota at this time of year I will be missing the literal blossoming of spring – one of my favorite natural occurences of the year, I’m already enjoying the autumn colours of Australia as, with my American frind Kate, I’m currently in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.

Above: Ay American friend Kate with my Australian friends Kerry and Max – Bundanoon, N.S.W., Sunday, April 28, 2024.

Right: Outside the Baby Dragon Bar in Newtown, an inner-city suburb (or neighborhood) of Sydney – Friday, April 26, 2024.

My American friend Kate has been in Australia for over two weeks. She's based herself in Newtown and has been enjoying the sights of Sydney and the Blue Mountains. Before returning to the U.S. in early May, Kate is accompanying me to the New South Wales locales of the Southern Highlands, Batemans Bay, and Goulburn, and Hanging Rock in Victoria.

Above: Newtown streetscape – Friday, April 26, 2024. I was last in Newtown in 2008.

Above: The Urban Newtown, where my friend Kate stayed while in Sydney.

Above: The Old Nunnery Bed-and-Breakfast in the Southern Highlands town of Moss Vale, where Kate and I stayed on my first night back in Australia – Friday, April 26, 2024.

Above and below: Visiting the historic town of Berrima – Saturday, April 27, 2024.

Above and below: Fitzroy Falls in Morton National Park – Saturday, April 27, 2024.

Above: With friends Sandra, Kerry and Max – Exeter, Saturday, April 27, 2024.

NEXT:
Bundanoon, Batemans Bay,
Braidwood and Goulburn

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Farewell Minnesota Spring
• A Season of Listening
• Newtown (2008)
• Journey to the Southern Highlands & Tablelands – Exeter and Mt. Alexandra (2017)
• Journey to the Southern Highlands & Tablelands – Bundanoon and the Sunnataram Forest Monastery (2017)
• Exeter (2016)

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Farewell Minnesota Spring

I leave later today for my homeland of Australia. I’ll be gone for a month, and as it’s been over a year since I was last in my first home, I’m very much looking forward to reconnecting with family and friends.

It’s been on my mind that in leaving Minnesota at this time of year I will be missing the literal blossoming of spring – one of my favorite natural occurences of the year. But then just yesterday the pear tree in the backyard burst forth in all its color and fragrance. What a wonderful send-off!

In the past few weeks – I guess since Easter, really – I’ve been making the most of the numerous days of warm (sometimes unseasonably hot) weather we’ve been experiencing here in the Twin Cities. This includes bringing my wildebeest-of-a-bike out of the garden shed and onto the bike paths along the Mississippi River near my south Minneapolis home. I’ve even twice cycled over to my friends John and Noelle’s place in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul.

In bidding farewell (at least for a while) to my life here in the North Star State, I share this morning some photos I’ve taken these past few weeks of both the return of spring and how I’ve been enjoying this welcome return.

Above, right and below: With my Palliative Care work colleagues at an after-work event on Friday, April 12, 2024.

Throughout the past year we tied to a wreath a ribbon for every patient we had walked with and cared for as they approached death.

At our April 12 gathering we had a ritual in which we committed this wreath to the flames of a fire.

As part of this ritual we shared the following words of Suzanne Guthrie from her book Grace’s Window: Entering the Season of Prayer.

A hospital can be a mysterious place, a threshold, both challenging and rewarding, upon the boundary of feelings and meanings deep within ourselves and others; a depth that some call the soul.

When we interact with ourselves and others at this level, when we elicit and listen with compassion to what others say is most meaningful in the midst of crisis and loss, we may discover we’re being invited to experience and embrace unexpected aspects of the deepest dimensions of the human condition, dimensions that some understand as sacred.

The reading from Grace’s Window was followed by this prayer/reflection that I wrote for our ritual.

With Suzanne Guthrie’s words in our hearts and minds, let us honor all those life journeys that have merged with ours within the context of our work; all those life energies that have gone beyond this world and which are represented by the ribbons of this wreath.

Let us also honor the range of emotions we may feel, perhaps even be burdened by when we remember some of the more challenging cases that we’ve given our energies to.

In honoring all of these journeys, lives and emotions, may we also release them to the transforming Love at the heart of all things. May we recognize the flames of this fire as a symbol of this transforming Love.

And in the glow of this fire, and from this moment onwards, may we and those we remember know peace.

Above: My friend Deandre and his animal companion Tyga.

Above: Friends John and Noelle. We enjoyed our first outdoor meal of the spring at their home in St. Paul on Sunday, April 14, 2024.

Right: With Amelia, John and Noelle’s granddaughter – Sunday, April 21, 2024.

Above: Amelia with her mother Liana, discovering how a tape recorder from the 1980s works.

Left: Amelia, rocking out to ’90s music being played on her mum’s old tape recorder – Tuesday, April 9, 2024.

Above: Penny.

Above: Dinner at Soberfish with my friends Barson and Germaine – Sunday, April 7, 2024.

Above: With my friend Kate on the day she left for a month-long visit to Australia – Monday, April 8, 2024. You may recall that in January Kate and I travelled to New Hampshire to work with and for Marianne Williamson’s presidential campaign.

Above: Friends Kathleen and Lori, chillin’ in my attic abode in south Minneapolis – Monday, April 15, 2024.

Above: On Friday, April 19, 2024, a number of my Palliative Care colleagues and I enjoyed lunch at the Midtown Global Market, close to where we work at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

Above: My friend Joseph at Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield, MN – Monday, April 22, 2024.

Above and below: Spring in Minnesoa – April 2024.

Above: My saaxiib qurux badan by lamplight – Thursday, April 18, 2024.

Our greatest power during times of chaos is to cultivate internal stillness. Finding that space within ourselves – whether through prayer, mindfulness, meditation or however – we claim a magnetic power that attracts harmony and good. You can’t bring order to a pile of iron shavings by sticking your fingers into it and trying to rearrange them. You can only do that by using a magnet. In human affairs, the Light within us is that magnet.

The Light within us has many names, but in essence it is Love. Compassion. Forgiveness. Peace.

Love is so needed now. We are starving for it. It’s painful living in such a tumultuous moment. . . . The [Light within] is the voice of Love, and it will guide us to a better place.

– Marianne Williamson
via Facebook

Above: The wild reeds of Wood Lake – April 22, 2024.

Above: The Mississippi in moonlight – Sunday, April 21, 2024.

Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you’re goin’, I’m goin’ your way

Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waitin’ ’round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon river and me

– “Moon River”
by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer

To hear Frank Ocean’s version of “Moon River,” click here.