This post is part of a two-post series on teaching with the work of Edward Said. Read part one here. 

They are there all right, but the narrative of their present actuality—which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine, later Israel—that narrative is not. A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light, and for punishing those why try to tell the truth. (Said 1984)

In The Myth of the Lazy Native, Syed Alatas (1977, 9) writes: “I believe in the primarily negative influence of colonialism … [and] in the need to unmask colonial ideology, for its influence is still very strong.” This “need to unmask colonial ideology” Alatas writes about became especially important during the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The presence of settler colonial violence, the Orientalist image of the “native,” and racist and gendered stereotypes spoke to colonial ideology at work, the process of “othering,” and the concurrent thingification (Césaire 1950) of others. During the winter version of the course, which started over a year after the enhanced ethnic cleansing assault on Gaza, we saw it as our moral responsibility to address these specific themes, and more broadly the livestreamed genocide we were all witnessing.

Control over the land also means control over how its history, and what remains of it, gets to be erased, curated, (untold), and weaponized. In her latest report, entitled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 Francesca Albanese identified archaeology and Middle Eastern studies as two of the core components of the ideological scaffolding of apartheid and genocide (Albanese 2025, par.82). The cruciality of that fact cannot be understated. Indeed, Zionists have used and continue to use ancient history as a core justification for land theft and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Witnessing the epistemicide and attempted historicide of Palestine in real time requires us to address the role of antiquity fields such as archaeology, ancient history, and biblical studies in the Zionist project. It also propels us to teach our students what critical historians know about the ancient histories of Palestine, which are way more intricate, multilayered, diverse, and therefore potent, than Zionists want the world to believe. We did so by assigning a selection of readings on ancient Palestinian history (Masalha 2018; Blouin 2024) and its relationship to Zionism and the Israeli settler colonial project (Srouji 2020; Hamilakis and Greenberg 2022; Sabbagh-Khoury 2023; Paz 2024). This material was paired with podcast episodes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s podcast series Stuff the British Stole, respectively dedicated to the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes, as well as to two short journalistic documentaries dedicated to the targeted obliteration of Palestinian heritage in Gaza since October 2023. Our aim with this pairing was to help students contextualize, and tie, the Palestinian case to broader, transnational imperial processes. While unpacking the preparatory readings during our weekly talking circle, most students shared how the material made them take stock of how much they did not know, how what they thought they knew was wrong, how what they (un)learned helped them make more sense of the present unfolding of genocidal violence in Palestine, and how Palestinian heritage is at the very core of what is at stake.

Said’s use of Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony to describe how Orientalism gets its durability and strength through consent or common sense, struck a chord with our students. How do we give our consent to the violence taking place around us? How do Orientalist ideas and concepts become common sense or part of popular culture through the influence of ideas, of institutions and of other persons in the form of affiliations to schools, communities, and political associations that are constitutive of a society’s culture? If the Orient is not simply there but man-made and remade as both cultural and geographical entities that rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, and agreed-upon codes of understanding, then what we consider “truth” becomes a function of learned judgments. Unlearning this created a space for many emotions, including surprise, discomfort, and grief.

Using examples of anti-Palestinian tropes posted on social media in the fall of 2023 that had been digitally archived by Katherine (Blouin 2023) and pairing them with Gregory Stanton’s “The Ten Stages of Genocide” (1996), we examined how the exception of Palestine is weaponized by national leaders and university administrators not only to silence and shut down conversations about, and support for, Palestine, but also to manufacture consent (Herman and Chomsky 1988) for genocide. We discussed how the “permission to narrate” (Said 1984) stems from certain methods of attention that speak to Canada’s alignment with settler colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Palestinian racism, even as we acknowledge settler land relations (Coulthard 2014). Indeed, such performances of recognition are often based on the condition that settler colonial and capitalist relations remain unchanged—that colonial whiteness remains unchanged—and that any attempts to unsettle these liberal, institutional-settler relations will be met with purposeful occlusion and harm.

In one of our classes, we invited award-winning journalist and producer Samira Mohyeddin to speak about how journalism participates in Orientalist tropes and, more specifically, on the media coverage on genocide. For nearly ten years Samira was a producer and host at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio and CBC Podcasts. She resigned in November of 2023 and founded On The Line Media to be able to tell the truth about the times we are living in. Samira spoke with us about the complicity of legacy media and the self-censorship of journalists in their coverage of the genocide in Gaza. With the aim of drawing connections to earlier CBC coverage of the anti-apartheid protests in Canada in 1986, Samira played for us a segment from the documentary “The South African War for Canadian Hearts & Minds” hosted by Barbara Frum. In the clip, the presenter speaks of “two stories” and “two points of view” coming out of South Africa, while Black South Africans are seen protesting an end to apartheid. In this clip, the anti-apartheid South African protestors are described as violent, and the white South African ambassador to Canada is heard explaining how “emotionalism” (on the part of anti-apartheid protestors) dominates such debates. The University of Toronto student protestors featured in this video are described by the journalist as emotional, a “bizarre audience,” while Queens university students are described as disruptive and noisy. Samira compared these descriptions of anti-apartheid student protests in 1986 to anti-genocide student protests in 2024—revealing similarities in language and forms of enframing (CBC 2024).

The underlying premise that colonialism remains an “unfinished business” (Tuhiwai Smith 2021) is at the core of the recent rise of fascism occurring in several parts of the world, including the United States and Israel. Aimé Césaire (1950)—among others—famously helped us understand that the origin of fascism is located within colonialism itself. Colonialism creates a boomerang effect, which can be understood as “a formidable shock in return.” As Césaire (1950) writes, Europeans tolerated “Nazism, before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had applied only to non-European peoples.” Indeed, fascism only became an evil of concern when it oppressed white people, “which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the [n-word] of Africa.”

This is what is happening to us again, now. And this is what we mean when we tell colleagues and students that fascism is directly related to the genocide in Palestine (and Sudan). That they first must understand the Israeli/U.S.-funded genocide that is happening to non-white people in Palestine before they can complain about Donald Trump. Many do not know Palestinian history and have grown up with a “hasbara,” whitewashed packaging of history. Others do not have the desire to know the truth and are comfortable in believing the lies they were fed.

The genocide in Palestine says a lot not only about Israel but about us, about the lies we have grown up with and choose to continue living with. This includes the colonial fantasy of “western civilization” (Blouin 2018) and our respect for human rights (Hedges 2025). At a time when many choose not to connect the dots or to read Palestinian history, our students were able to ask questions and discuss “what is a genocide,” “what is a settler colonial state,” and how we participate in a collective “performance of stupidity” (in Albanese’s words). As several of them told us at the end of term, the space we created allowed them not only to learn about/through anthropology and history, but it allowed them to learn about themselves and their place in the world better—to feel how the past and the present collide, and what are the pieces worth living, and fighting, for in the process.