Inclusion/Exclusion

A justice and math weblog

“X” in the time of Genocide

Guest post by Tarik Aougab

Editorial note from MKL: The “X” in the title refers to a variable whose precise value changes as in a mathematical equation. This is made clear in the body of the piece itself. It does not refer to the new name of the website formerly known as Twitter.

Gathering (some of) the facts

I wrote this post to document for myself what it’s been like being a mathematician during genocide: how mathematicians are reacting (and how they are justifying those reactions as mathematicians), what they are ignoring, what they are prioritizing, and how they can choose to act in solidarity with Palestinians. But first, given how rapidly the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate, it feels necessary to record a snapshot of the facts on the ground as they are right now, as I write this sentence:  

While I wish not to spend time on this for reasons this excellent piece makes clear, I can already hear the incessant chorus from colleagues and other readers: “I noticed you didn’t mention the terrorist attacks! Do you not condemn Hamas? WHY DO YOU NOT CONDEMN??” So in the interest of balance, let me also give a summary for the events of October 7, as I so far understand them: 

This second list is shorter, in part because less details are known for certain. But another reason why this list is shorter is because I am choosing to emphasize the genocidal onslaught enacted by Israel and against Palestinians, and supported by my government and my tax dollars. The rhetorical role of the demand for condemnation is to force us to place Hamas beyond all comprehension and context; it asks us to stop thinking, and then immediately, to step in line and cheer as the bombs fall. I refuse to follow that script. And in any case, I do not claim to be objective, removed, or above the fray, and the reader who is upset with my summary is free to compile their own. 

Me: Tarik Aougab

I owe those who make it this far some description of who I am, why this matters to me, and how my position and identity influences my own subjectivities. First and foremost, I am Algerian and Jewish American; one side of my family is Amazigh Indigenous Algerian and Muslim, and the other is Ashkenazi Jewish.

Algerians and Palestinians have shared a decades-long solidarity, and each of the two peoples see their own anti-colonial struggle in the experiences of the other. My family knows what it means to suffer under brutal colonial rule, and what it means to risk everything for freedom. As an Algerian, I was raised on these lessons, and raised to feel deep love and compassion for Palestine and for Palestinians. When Palestinians are dehumanized, I am also dehumanized, as an Arab. And for the record, almost all Arabs I know who live in the US are reporting levels of racism and discrimination that match or even exceed the days immediately after 9/11. So I am only safe in a world where Palestine is free. 

As mentioned above, I am also Jewish. My great grandfather emigrated from Russia to escape pogroms and forced conscription and many of my ancestors in (what is now) Hungary were exterminated in the Holocaust. I was raised with both Jewish and Muslim traditions, celebrated both sets of holidays, and was exposed to religious and cultural lessons from both traditions. In particular, I ground my anti-Zionism within– as opposed to in spite of– my Jewish culture. It is for this reason that me and other members of my family and community have chosen to risk arrest, political persecution, and even serious bodily harm at protests lead by anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and activists who refuse to let genocide be carried out in their names. When Palestinians are dehumanized in the name of Judaism, I am also dehumanized, as a Jew. Similarly, when Israelis argue that Jews who do not support their murderous regime should be shunned or culled, what they are doing is erasing a storied tradition of anti-Zionist Jewry. They aim to place constraints on what Judaism is and what it looks like, and in particular, they hope to conflate it with and implicate it in crimes against humanity, in apartheid, and in genocide. I view it as a deep and irreparable corruption of a beautiful tradition that my ancestors have practiced for generations. So once again: I am only safe in a world where Palestine is free. 

What does this have to do with “X”?

The title of this post comes from Steven Strogatz’s The Joy of X, referencing (amongst other things…) the joy and pleasure of doing mathematics for its own sake. So one way to interpret the title is that it was chosen for a post that means to explore what being in the mathematics world looks like in the context of everything mentioned above. But before we take a serious step in that direction, I’ll just mention that another reason for choosing this title is to emphasize that we are all–  in one way or another– involved. 

Medical and healthcare professionals are coming together to protest the intentional destruction of hospitals and emergency infrastructure. Dock workers are refusing to load weapons and other military cargo heading for Israel. Legal scholars are demanding that Israel no longer flagrantly violate international humanitarian law, and Palestinian lawyers are ingeniously crafting frameworks for capturing the unique colonial history of Palestine. Journalists are speaking up for their Palestinian colleagues who are displaying unimaginable courage to document war crimes while Israel intentionally targets them. Poets and other cultural workers are resigning from their positions at publications whose coverage dehumanizes Palestinians. Grassroots student-led movements that aim to push their institutions towards divestment of Israeli holdings are sweeping the U.S. All this to say: there can be no sidelines during genocide, and so one should interpret “X” in the way that we as mathematicians are used to doing: it is a stand-in, a variable. It can be anything, because we all need to be asking what it means to do whatever it is that we do in the context of this crisis. 

So, what about mathematicians? It bears mention that this violence is being carried out by a state that bills itself as one of the most important technological and scientific hubs in the world. Its crimes are committed only with the technical expertise of scientists and engineers with which mathematicians work and train. Its most prestigious technical universities aid the occupation in a variety of ways– not only through supplying it with brainpower and technology, but also by working directly with the military to facilitate the recruitment of soldiers both in and outside of Israel. Contrary to what many propagandists would have you believe, Israeli academic institutions  (very much like American academic institutions) are not politically neutral bastions of intellectual exploration. They are complicit– in literal, material ways– in the maintenance of apartheid.

Our Black, Brown, and anti-Zionist students are being targeted

Now, as students in the US are rising up against genocide, Israeli academic institutions are uniting behind one banner to defame and discredit them. And this should matter to anyone who sets foot in the classroom, because our Arab, Black, Brown, and anti-Zionist Jewish students are being doxxed and harassed. They feel betrayed by their home institutions who choose again and again to criminalize them before empathizing with them, for example: 

The list goes on. And the theme that binds these examples together is the conflation of genuine danger for Black and Brown students going face to face with cops who look for the smallest excuse to brutalize them; or being shot simply for being Palestinian, wearing kuffiyeh, and speaking Arabic, with the discomfort of Zionist (some Jewish, many others who are Christian, and some of the latter who are truly anti-semitic!) students, faculty, and alumni. Those in the latter category are perhaps understandably triggered by the political moment we are experiencing (and those Zionists who are Jewish may also be experiencing genuine anti-semitism simply because anti-semitism is a scourge that we need to eradicate, and unfortunately it’s common; it just happens to be completely distinct from anti-Zionism) but who do not know how to metabolize or process those feelings and who instead choose to demonize calls for freedom and liberation. 

On being an angry Arab

As I’m sure anyone who is plugged into Black and Brown student groups can confirm, the divide on campus is stark. On one side, there are Arab, Black, and Brown students (together with anti-Zionist allies) who justifiably see their own family’s anti-colonial struggles as being intimately connected to what is now happening in Palestine, and who know too well the feeling of being animalized; of being told that they’re too angry, or too loud, or too scary to be taken seriously. On the other side is everyone else, usually including administration. 

I thought about this as I consumed the media coming out of Palestine in the last several weeks: the murdered children who look like my own little brothers and cousins; the parents screaming the names of their children in hopes that one might respond from under the rubble; the doctor forced to perform an amputation on his own child without anesthesia only for that child to eventually die from the pain; the grandfather who lost both his grandchildren, Reem and Tareq, and who carries Reem’s earring – the only souvenir he has by which to remember his granddaughter– everywhere he goes; and the centuries of beautiful tradition and culture obliterated in an instant. And I could feel myself becoming more and more distraught: how can the world let this happen? Doesn’t anyone care about these people? 

This is (what I hope is) a deeply relatable emotional spiral, and at least for me, it naturally bottoms out into anger. I am angry at the world; I am angry on behalf of the Palestinian people; I am angry for myself. But of course, we are not all granted the space to be angry in equal measure. This is something that many Black and Brown people understand, because they are forced to: our survival depends on understanding how white people perceive our completely justified and healthy anger to be criminal, savage, or uniquely violent. 

This couldn’t be more true in the Palestinian context. Palestinian poets are arrested and held for months in prison for expressing their righteous anger, or kidnapped and beaten as they flee a barrage of bombs. Nonviolent Palestinian protest, when it expresses even an ounce of emotion, is met with tyrannical violence. For example, Gaza’s Great March of Return in 2018– in which protestors marched peacefully towards the wall that separates them from their ancestral homeland– saw over 150 demonstrators killed and over 10,000 injured by Israeli soldiers. And in the West, it doesn’t matter how we express solidarity with Palestine; it’s the solidarity itself that is threatening.

Are mathematicians capable of making space for Palestinian anger?

In this context of brutal repression, the least I could do for myself– and for the Palestinians who are literally begging us to pay attention – was to elevate the voices of those very Palestinians. And so, on my personal social media account (which has less than 200 followers and on which I don’t use my full name or identify myself as faculty or as a mathematician), that’s what I did. On October 7, I retweeted celebratory images of Palestinian civilians breaking free from their open air prison in creative and imaginative ways (contrary to what Israeli President Isaac Herzog would have you believe, namely that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”, “Palestinian civilian” is not an oxy-moron); and then after October 7, I retweeted Palestinians expressing their full range of anger as they endured indiscriminate bombing. And I conveyed the messages that I saw Palestinians shouting as loudly as they possibly could, on all platforms: FUCK Israel, and FUCK the U.S. for aiding and abetting this atrocity!  

I would not sanitize their anger then, and I will not sanitize my own, now, in this post. And for this, and because I chose to give a talk at the University of Toronto’s wonderfully organized Equity Forum on decolonizing mathematics with a focus on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, I was doxxed. Someone went through the effort of ferreting out my personal account, connecting it to the talk I was to give, and whipping up an online mob who (1) sent me racist, dehumanizing, and threatening messages, and (2) made contact with the administration at my home institution to try and get me fired.

Put simply, the crime of which I was guilty– that which made me deserving of harassment– was doing the little I could to ensure Palestinian will was represented in a space that systematically excludes it. In other words, if my sin is located in my retweets and in my talk, and that sin makes me unfit for the classroom, what does that suggest about the very many Palestinians who share the exact same sentiments that I expressed? Are they also unfit? Can they be angry, or do we only let them into our academic spaces if they’re well enough behaved? Note that in this calculus, “good behavior” entails lying down and dying, so even the obedient don’t make it through.

Unfortunately, I am not the only “misbehaved” one who– I hear through the grapevine– some are telling their students and colleagues to avoid in the aftermath of this controversy. The organizer of that forum– Ila Varma– went through the intensely thoughtful process of cultivating a space in which the talk could take place and not be heckled, interrupted, or shouted down. 

To understand why such effort is necessary, it’s important to keep in mind the political climate in the vast majority of American and Canadian mathematics departments. Most North American mathematicians have a number of Israeli colleagues, but very few know even a single Palestinian mathematician. Of course this is no accident: the realities of apartheid and occupation make participation in the international academic community very difficult. Those same obstacles do not confront Israeli mathematicians and Zionists, and so the politics on Israel/Palestine in most Western mathematics departments are skewed very heavily towards Israel. This means that if someone wants to organize an event that will attempt to represent Palestinians (and for the reasons just described, this is already a rarity), a tremendous amount of effort must go into figuring out how to moderate that event so that it can proceed successfully. 

Ila did just that, and they did it for the Palestinian students in their own department who expressed how unwelcome they’ve always felt there, but now especially so. Those students wouldn’t have been able to act, react, and interact fully and freely if the audience was stacked with Zionist detractors. So Ila chose to reply to all who expressed interest in coming to the talk with an open letter against the assault on Gaza (of which I am a coauthor), and encouraged faculty attendees to sign. Signing was not a prerequisite for attendance, and indeed several faculty attended the talk who did not sign. But this helped to set a tone for the event: these are the political commitments of the speaker and they will be treated essentially as axioms in this talk; the presence of someone whose only interest is to question or negate those axioms runs counter to the talk’s objective– to create space for our own Palestinian students to feel that they belong here.

In any case, in part because of the controversy already swirling on social media, Ila hosted the talk in Q&A mode, with chat and unmuting functions disabled. And the video of the talk is still available to view in full on their website, meaning that anyone who did not attend could simply watch the talk on their own time and miss nothing of the experience. Nevertheless, right wing buffoons picked up the story and portrayed it as a professor forcing their colleagues to sign a political statement “condemning Israel” in order to attend. Ila is still navigating the consequences of all of the negative attention that came from this. But rather than being protected or supported by the chair of the department and the dean of the faculty, they have instead received a “letter of concern” from the Dean citing a perceived incursion of academic freedom of other faculty. And the chair has decided to pause the Equity Forum starting in 2024 until further notice as a part of a review of all “equity”-related activities in math. 

So, what do we do?

We do everything we can to center Palestinians: their voices, their feelings, and their full humanity. We engage in solidarity– just like all of the other workers doing it in their own ways, with their own “X”, in their own spheres of influence– by feeding into movements already led and spearheaded by Palestinians. In our case, as mathematicians, we’re lucky in that we don’t have to be clever or creative, because Palestinian scholars have been asking us to do essentially one thing on their behalf, for the last 25 years: academic boycott of Israeli universities complicit in maintaining apartheid and occupation. The Just Mathematics Collective (JMC) has a campaign that you can join– available at the link in the previous sentence. It is open to all STEM practitioners, at any level of the academic hierarchy. Please, please join us. 

I personally worked on the JMC campaign statement, and I’ve been organizing to bring more people on as signatories for two years. Just in the last 6 weeks, I have emailed hundreds of mathematicians and scientists about this, and had dozens upon dozens of one-on-one conversations. I’ve interacted with many mathematicians on social media; some of those conversations were fruitful, most were not. But I feel the need to engage in those conversations, even though I know I won’t convince anyone of anything, when I see mathematicians parroting Israeli government talking points but also framing them– as mathematicians are wont to do– as if they are the clearly “logical” and obvious positions that any critically thinking person would take. It’s one thing to say what you believe and leave it at that, but another to imply that anyone who disagrees– including the millions in the global South who resonate with the struggle of Palestine – is illogical, irrational, or beyond the pale in some other way. 

This is why Palestinians– and more broadly, Black and Brown students and scholars with anti-colonial family histories– don’t feel welcome in our mathematics departments. It is not only because they know that faculty by and large don’t recognize their rights to peace and self-determination (although it certainly is partially that!), but also because so many among us equate the willingness to dehumanize them with the capacity to think logically itself, i.e., with the very basis of doing mathematics. How can anyone expect Palestinians to feel welcome in this environment? And how can faculty who have overseen these sorts of climates for years feel as though they’re in any way qualified to pass judgment on events aimed at undoing some of their damage? 

For concreteness, some examples: 

  • I’ve seen scientists speculate that IQ positively correlates with pro-Israel perspectives, and that therefore STEM faculty are less likely than their counterparts in the humanities to “fall prey” to Palestinian talking points (it would take another 10 pages to unpack everything wrong with this.) 
  • I’ve seen mathematicians argue that to apply the colonial framework to Israel– something done by millions of Palestinian and non-Palestinian thinkers, artists, activists, scientists – is “stupid” and “dumb” (their words). 
  • I’ve seen mathematicians argue– via an appeal to common sense– that giving a talk about boycotting Israeli academic institutions amounts to inciting violence (this included the implication that I somehow represent Hamas). 
  • Finally, and maybe most importantly, I’ve seen many mathematicians who will approach me privately, and let me know that they care about Palestinians and agree with everything we say in our JMC campaign. But when they think rationally, they realize they just can’t jeopardize their working relationships with Israeli colleagues. After all, they’re on the job market, they’re up for tenure, they’re writing a paper, etc. 

As grotesque as that last form of “rationality” is– a rationality that prioritizes professional opportunity over life itself– I sympathize with those who feel trapped by it, and I know firsthand that many of them are probably enduring deep internal turmoil. It would be easy to dismiss them as insensitive careerists if I hadn’t spent years in graduate school feeling similarly: that if I wanted to make it, I needed to shut up and keep my head down. But at some point this became untenable; I was poisoning myself. To say and do nothing when the asks of Palestinians were so clear – and also so simple! – was very literally sickening to me. As Audre Lorde tells us, our silence will not protect us.  If you feel similarly, you don’t have to email hundreds of people or give controversial talks to mitigate that feeling; you can simply take the small step of adding your signature– and your commitment to peace and justice– to dozens of others. 

It feels most natural to end a piece about centering Palestinian voices in our spaces, with the voice of a Palestinian. And so to any of you who are still on the fence, or who are worried that speaking up now will cost you an opportunity later, I leave you with Edward Said: 

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.

Marissa Loving

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