The Humanities After Gaza

Cynthia G. Franklin

Betrayal at the Modern Language Association

“Boycott is not a threat, not a sword. It’s a tree, a light.” —Fady Joudah, “Shifting the Gaze: A Brief History of Censorship of Palestinian Literature in English,” a talk presented at the 2016 MLA Convention in Austin, TX, and archived on the MLA Members for Justice in Palestine website.

AT ONCE UTTERLY inhumane and singularly human, genocide poses difficult questions to the humanities.

Theodor Adorno’s assertion that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms, 34) has occasioned much debate. Palestinians, martyred by as well as living through the ongoing US-Israeli genocide, have provided a firm response to Adorno’s provocation: It is possible, and necessary.

Reflecting on this genocide and an ongoing Nakba, novelist and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah tells Huda Fakhereddine, “Perhaps this line of poetry I wrote 42 years ago applies to me now: ‘I write now so that I do not die’” (Palestinian, 31).

A month before the Israeli Occupying Forces assassinated him on December 7, 2023, in words that resonate with Nasrallah’s, Refaat Alareer posted to X, “If I must die, let it be a tale,” along with his 2011 poem containing those lines.

In Malak Mattar’s 2023 art work, “No Words,” in a mural within her mural, the words “will haunt you 4 ever” hover over an image of Naj al-Ali’s child refugee Handala, symbol of the ongoing Nakba’s pain, and resistance to it.

These poets and artists remind us how art and literature give expression to an inhumanity that should haunt us all. They also present humanities scholars with a responsibility: to raise our own voices against colonial violence and genocide — not just in Palestine but also in the Congo, the Sudan, West Papua and elsewhere–and to lift up the stories of those without the privilege to look away.

To do otherwise is not only to sell out the humanities, but to dispense with our own humanity.

In this light, consider the Modern Language Association’s two refusals to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, first in 2017 and again in 2025. Selling out is precisely what North America’s largest organization for humanities scholars has done.

In mobilizing for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), many MLA members have worked to hold the MLA accountable to the organization’s claim to being “a leading advocate for the humanities” — but the MLA leadership has failed utterly, emptying the humanities of humanity.

Because I care about the humanities, I am compelled to call this organization to account, to consider the costs of MLA’s shilling for the Israeli state, its capitulating to racial capitalism and the turn in the United States to authoritarianism. The capitulation makes the MLA complicit in genocide, an active participant in an era of oligarchy and empire that requires the evisceration of the humanities.

The MLA may sell out Palestine and the humanities, but there are alternatives. Instead of the corporate and colonial cannibalism of the MLA, there is a vibrant practice of the humanities that heeds the call for BDS, and finds liberation in its embrace of a free Palestine.

The Place of Palestine

The MLA Executive Council’s refusal to allow its members to debate proposed Resolution 2025-1 continues its dismal history of failing to support the 2005 Palestinian call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

In 2017, following the passage of the highly undemocratic MLA Resolution 2017-1, I wrote an open letter renouncing my nearly 25 years of membership in the MLA. Resolution 2017-1 put the MLA on record as the only academic organization actively prohibiting the right of its members to organize in support of BDS, the most impactful Palestinian-led global movement to pressure Israel to adhere to international law.

Resolution 2017-1 was part of an orchestrated backlash against Resolution 2017-2, which called upon the MLA membership to endorse Palestinian civil society’s call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and to affirm the right of faculty and students to advocate for the academic boycott, free from retaliation.

This resolution failed, owing In large part to an unscrupulous campaign waged by “MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights” with the explicit support of the Israeli state and Zionist organizations.

Another factor was the MLA leadership’s inconsistent enforcement of its own policies and procedures. (Spoiler alert: In an instance of what Nada Elia calls “the Israeli exemption,” rules were overlooked, as they often are, when violated by Zionists.)

I concluded my 2017 letter of exit from the MLA by writing, “Although I choose not to work within an organization structured to foreclose democratic debate and participation in social justice work, should these conditions change, I look forward to rejoining these colleagues and friends [who remain in the MLA]. Both within the MLA and beyond it, as with other progressive movements, the fight for justice in Palestine will continue.”

Several years later, as the fight has continued — as it will, until Palestine is free — those conditions did change, in ways that seemed to open possibilities for bringing BDS back to the MLA.

In 2025, with genocide raging, it is no longer possible to deny the Israeli state’s colonial violence against the Palestinian people — and the role of the United States as a full partner.

Starting in October 2023, Israeli officials dropped all claims to the morality of their military occupation. They own and admit out loud their campaign of genocide. A database amassed by the non-profit Law for Palestine has documented over 500 statements of genocidal incitement issued by Israeli officials and public figures since October 7.

Live-streamed before our eyes, this genocide has sparked global outrage: massive protests, student encampments, thoroughly documented denouncements by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, genocide charges filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued by the International Criminal Court.

Under such conditions, academic boycott has found firmer footing in the academy. In a July 2024 statement, the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure reversed its 2006 objection to academic boycotts, finding that “they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

Although unnamed, the conditions prompting this shift surely included the Israeli genocide’s destruction of every university in Gaza, its murder of students, and assassination of professors.

History Repeating

By 2025, with widespread awareness of a genocide that includes scholasticide, some past and present MLA members thought an academic boycott resolution was an achievable aim for an organization claiming a concern with humanity. It also seemed a belated one, given the number of academic associations that have passed boycott resolutions.

Another changed condition: a new generation of faculty and graduate students within the MLA was bringing fresh energy and vision to organizing for justice in Palestine. Through actions staged at the 2024 MLA Convention, and through sustained organizing, they were successfully building a groundswell of support within the MLA for an academic boycott resolution.

With these shifts, some of us who had renounced the MLA in 2017 rejoined to support the renewed efforts to advance BDS. We harbored hope that maybe, after all, it was possible to hold the MLA accountable.

All too aware of the MLA’s history of defeating any progressive movement by way of a maze of bureaucratic rules and regulations designed to maintain the status quo, Tony Alessandrini, who submitted the resolution on our group’s behalf, consulted with lawyers, studied the MLA’s procedures, and communicated with Executive Director Paula Krebs and the staff person for governance to dot every “i” and cross every “t.”

After going through this process, and to address concerns about legal obstacles, we agreed to revise the resolution to make clear (as we did in 2017) that support for academic boycott was only an expression of members’ sentiments. Palestine Legal confirmed that this protected the organization from anti-BDS laws.

Despite taking all of these measures, in October 2024, the Executive Council voted down the resolution. They issued a report citing “fiduciary” responsibilities to justify their refusal to advance the resolution for consideration by the membership, thus killing it even before a discussion by the membership at large.

History was repeating itself within the organization, albeit with some significant differences, including popular support for Palestinian liberation.

These differences matter to the struggle for justice in Palestine. They matter less when it comes to assessing the viability of an organization that, in its ever more repressive and craven leadership, draws on Steven Salaita’s formulation, not “progressive except Palestine,” but “regressive because Palestine.”

Let’s rewind to the 2017 MLA, to take stock of this history. At that time  MLA Members for Justice in Palestine (MLAM4JP) put forth a BDS resolution. Submitted by Rebecca Comay and David Lloyd, this resolution was the culmination of a multi-year effort.

In tandem with the attempt to pass a “Right to Enter” resolution proposed by Bruce Robbins, much of the organizing for academic boycott began in earnest in 2014. This work is archived on our MLAM4JP website.

It includes an impressively documented evidence report with findings from an MLAM4JP Delegation to Palestine, and other research establishing the decades-long complicity of Israeli universities in the Israeli state’s practices of settler colonialism, occupation and apartheid. Much of the data we presented in 2017 remains foundational to groups condemning Israel’s genocidal state practices.

What’s Changed

I want to highlight a few things that connect but also differentiate that campaign from the most recent one.

First, in the 2023-25 push for a BDS resolution, we met with few explicitly Zionist public responses. By contrast, at the 2017 convention and in the years leading up to it, Zionist opposition within and beyond the MLA had been fierce, vocal, and well-funded.

“MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights” violated MLA rules and hired third party actors to mine members’ emails, then spammed us with an email attacking the BDS resolution. Worse, this email was designed to appear as if it came from the MLA Executive Council.

At the Delegate Assembly, as we lined up before the mic designated for support for the resolution, they took not only their own mic but stacked the one designated for questions. They dropped anti-Palestinian literature on every seat in the Delegate Assembly.

In town halls and at the DA, they twisted facts to fearmonger members and demonize Palestinians and anti-Zionists, while also weaponizing Robert’s Rules to interfere with debate of the resolution itself.

They also worked in concert with other Zionist organizations and entities. As noted by David Lloyd, “The Israeli Council of University Presidents claims to have orchestrated the counter campaign, doubtless in co-ordination with the Israeli Ministry of Security Affairs.” The doxing site Canary Mission participated in a social media campaign of bullying and harassment. The Brandeis Center also entered the fray, threatening lawfare against the MLA.

(I can add here a personal experience that speaks to just how low Zionist trolls go. Shortly after I was vilified in an article from the Legal Insurrection, a male co-organizer received a text message from a number spoofing my own. It featured a link to a porno video with my head photoshopped in.)

“Fetishization of Process”

In keeping with the Israeli exemption, the MLA leadership had little to say about any of these interventions and violations, even as MLAM4JP members were held to every last Robert’s Rule and MLA regulation.

In their letter of resignation from the Executive Council, David Palumbo-Liu and Lenora Hansen powerfully detail how the EC displayed “a troubling fetishization of process.” The EC prioritized “the minutiae of procedure,” neglected their own distinctions between resolutions and motions as well as disregarded their fiduciary responsibilities. When it came to supporting the “Kafkaesque” anti-BDS resolution, it completely ignored the Israel-supported campaign of misinformation.

As a complement to the anti-BDS Resolution that demonstrates what Neelofer Qadir names as “the insidious depths of Zionist roots in MLA’s organizational culture,” MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights submitted a third resolution. It asked the MLA to condemn the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for denying Palestinians their academic freedom.

Resolution 2017-3 blamed Palestinians themselves for the Zionist settler state’s structures of apartheid and military occupation. As noted in the minutes to the 2017 DA, when they failed to pass the BDS resolution by a vote of 79 to 113, and voted 101 to 93 in favor of the anti-BDS resolution, the DA proposed tabling Resolution 2017-3. In the spirit of “reconciliation,” its proponents agreed.

In an act of supreme hypocrisy, the DA then went on to pass an emergency resolution. Resolution 2017-4 asked the MLA to endorse an AAUP statement supporting academic freedom, in anticipation of Trump’s move that same month into the White House. This resolution was supported without a trace of irony by proponents of the anti-BDS resolution.

2025: Second Time Around

If in 2017 the anti-BDS resolution kept glaringly hypocritical company with an anti- Trump academic freedom resolution, by 2025, as we entered a second Trump presidency, the MLA didn’t bother to provide even a fig leaf of liberalism. Nor did it issue any moves to counter or cover over its neo-McCarthyism, its disrespect for democratic process, its support for a US-Israeli genocide, or its abdication of any responsibility to our Palestinian colleagues.

In 2025, the MLA leadership doubled down on the organization’s 2017 defense of Zionism. Through the rationale they provided (“fiduciary concerns” that might come from legal challenges the proposed resolution had already circumvented in its language), and through undemocratic processes, they disregarded MLA’s mission to support “justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.”

In 2025, the MLA as an organization capitulated not only to a Trump presidency, but to a longer history of corporate capitalism. In “What the MLA is….,” Matthew Seybold observes that the word “fiduciary” appears 15 times in the MLA leadership’s 3000-word report justifying their suppression of our resolution. “Genocide” appears zero times.

Seybold also notes, the recourse to “fiduciary concerns” has characterized neoliberal governance since the 1970s as “a rhetorical justification for private corporations to do what they prefer to do anyway: act contrary to the interests of rank-and-file employees, harmed communities, and social activists.”

As Anthony Alessandrini observed in his article urging members to exit the MLA, the EC’s report on the BDS Resolution also made clear, “albeit buried in the faux-legalistic language,” that they were not only warding off anticipated legal threats, but had already cravenly signed anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts, without informing or consulting with members.

Its acts of anticipatory obedience have positioned the MLA to partake in the march towards oligarchic fascism that the second Trump presidency is already accelerating, Nazi salutes and all.

What connects those earlier resolutions 2017-1 and 2017-3 and the censorship of the 2025 academic boycott resolution — just as what conjoins liberals and neoliberal policies to far-right forms of fascism and authoritarianism — are investments in racial capitalism and different but interdependent sites of settler colonialism.

At stake is the grabbing of land and money. The MLA, in putting profits over its mission “to support the humanities community,” buys into this economy and continues its shameful legacy.

In turning its back on Palestine, the MLA turns its back on all of humanity, because as Hala Alyan notes, “what is happening in Gaza is atrocious and breaks the limits of collective humanity.” But for many of us, our humanity is not for sale.

Not the Whole Story

And yet. The moral bankruptcy of the MLA and its selling out of its members —including our colleagues who are resisting a genocide, and including members engaged in Palestine solidarity, most especially those who are Arab and Muslim — is only part of the story I want to tell here.

This is because the MLA leadership has set a course that makes the MLA increasingly irrelevant, and it will become only more so. The truth is that the MLA needs Palestine far more than Palestine needs the MLA.

Palestine will live on, with or without an MLA endorsement of BDS. Meanwhile, having sold off the organization’s humanity, the leadership has set up the MLA to wither, to exist as but a shell for the humanities, or perhaps more precisely and certainly more shamefully, as a shill for Israel.

This is particularly deplorable because, based on the support we received from members at the convention, including delegates publicly resigning, were it not for the Executive Council’s refusal of a democratic and transparent process, I think our resolution very well might have passed. (Its recent scrambling to regain members is particularly craven and pathetic; the leadership, “hearing members’ concerns” issued a one-sentence statement which was unable to even name scholasticide.)

So let us leave the MLA and turn to the other parts of this story, which concern the power of collective organizing, the importance of a humanity that need not find a home in the MLA, and the unbreakable sumud (steadfastness) and beautiful resistance — in all its forms — of the Palestinian people who will ensure that Palestine will live well past the age of oligarchs and the Zionist entity known as the state of Israel.

I reentered the MLA fray in 2024 reluctantly — still bitter from the 2014-17 struggle, and somehow still burned out from that experience. I preferred to put my energy into getting a national FSJP network started and into local organizing with Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai‘i.

In fact, it was my co-conspirator at UH, Hannah Manshel, who drew me back in. And it was the community we built that revived my faith — not in the MLA, but in the humanities as a formation.

Manshel writes about this community beautifully in LitHub, including an account of the pop-up poetry reading we held outside the open hearing meeting for the Delegate Assembly:

“Spread across universities from New York to Georgia to Hawai’i, we came together over hours of zoom meetings and thousands of words in Signal chats, we came together to plan, to organize, to build community, and to speak out for Palestine. Together, we planned actions: a pop-up poetry reading, a die in, a walk out. We wrote open letters and statements for people to read out before their panels. No business as usual during genocide, we said. We weren’t here to fight with MLA leadership or to win small concessions from corrupt institutions. We were here for Palestine. We were here for each other. We were here to build a world.”

“Humanity” might be a noun, but it is not one that names a given condition. Instead, it is an interactive practice, one we enacted together, as an act of refusal of the MLA’s business as usual. As Manshel put it so well, for Palestine and for each other.

Humanities and Liberation

I want to close this piece, however, by thinking about the humanities outside and beyond the MLA, and why the humanities cannot exist without a place for a liberated Palestine.

With this turn, I leave behind the spirit-sapping language of resolutions, the deadening effects of moribund institutions, in a turn towards the vibrant world-making that becomes possible with the understanding so beautifully expressed by Fady Joudah that “Boycott is not a threat, not a sword. It’s a tree, a light.”

With this departure, I join in solidarity with Nouri Gana, Jeff Sacks, Huda Fakhreddine and Tony Alessandrini, contributors to the MLA 2025 “Poetry after Gaza” panel, who refused the containment of poetry within the parameters of western humanism, and who took their leave of the MLA as a genocide institution, and urged that we meet elsewhere.

For the pop-up poetry reading, as we participated in the creation of such an event elsewhere, I came ready to read Joudah’s poem “Mimesis.” Written for his son and appearing in his 2024 collection, it follows the poem by the same name written for his daughter in 2013:

This morning, I don’t know how,
an inch-long baby frog

entered my house
during the extermination

of human animals live on TV.
I recognized the baby’s dread.

It leapt into the shadows,
under the couch, into my shoe.

My son was watching.
Gently, patiently
I followed it
on my knees

with shattered heart
and plastic bag.

Coaxed it, caught it,
released it
into the yard,
and started to cry.

Joudah is not only a poet but a physician, and his work has prompted me to think about how poetry complements the practice of medicine.

Poetry and Power

What work does poetry do, at a time when, at any and every moment, we can open our phones and see livestreams of the Israeli Occupation Force wielding weaponry from the USA?

When we witness this systematic practice Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian theorizes as “ashlaa’,” which shreds Palestinians, the so-called “human animals” of Gaza, to pieces? Or what can poetry do when we see Palestinians’ loved ones, left with shattered hearts to gather remains, in bits and pieces, in plastic bags, 17 kilograms for a child, 70 kilograms for an adult?

What good is a poem when doctors tend to those surviving dismemberment in tents set up next to bombed out hospitals, tents that the IOF then goes on to bomb, leaving boys to burn alive, still attached to their IVs? Why is it important that, as a poet and father, Joudah shares with us his tears, and the tenderness, denied by the world to Palestinian children, that he extends to that baby frog, as he releases it whole and free from that plastic bag, before the watching eyes of his son?

The answer, I think, is in this poetry’s radical refusal of death, disappearance, and dehumanization. The Israeli state, which tortures and assassinates Palestine’s medical workers as well as its poets and professors, fully understands, perhaps in a way the MLA Executive Council has yet to learn, what joins the practices of poetry and medicine.

It is no accident that Israel’s and America’s “smart bombs” target not only hospitals, but schools and universities, institutions that produce and archive knowledge. This scholasticide is not a byproduct of genocide. It is necessary to it.

As do the doctors, it is the poets of Palestine who insist that each and every life is worth fighting for, is precious. And that to fail to act upon this understanding is to diminish our own humanity.

This is perhaps never more true than in a time of genocide. Living through such a time, I believe the question of what we are doing to make life livable is an urgent one, and that even as the answer is always going to be never enough, so too the answer is that we must do what we can.

To write and study language and literature is not to reassemble limbs and repair hearts with surgical instruments. However, this does not mean that we are without tools and practices that can help heal our hearts, re-member our individual and collective bodies, and create worlds in which we all can live in true safety, freedom, and dignity.

As humanities scholars, we can study and teach and gather in community to read Palestinian poems and literature and scholarship. These works by Palestinian artists and academics have been censored and demonized in the United States and throughout the West.

The rise of authoritarian regimes counter this literature with narratives promulgated in mainstream media. These narratives make increasingly clear the connections between fascism, Zionism, settler colonialism, and capitalism. Politicians and university administrators, as well as executive councils of professional academic organizations, lip synch these narratives as they sell out those they should be protecting.

To them we say: This is scholasticide!

As Zionists justify dehumanization and dis-memberment, and the desecration of life and land, we can refuse to abdicate a commitment to humanity and to the humanities as we continue to organize to create new structures and communities through which we can support BDS and the struggle for justice in Palestine.

To return to Joudah’s proclamation that boycott is “a tree, a light,” this is how we honor his words. And this is how, to draw on the fierce and beautiful promise made by George Abraham to K?naka Maoli in an address at the University of Hawai‘i, we fight for liberation, “from every river to every sea.”

May-June 2025, ATC 236