Feeling Safe

Immediately after the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood of October 7, 2023, the affective police came in to secure the range of appropriate feeling. In the imperial core, only certain feelings were permitted. Shock and horror were, understandably, the most prominent, given the evasion of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and the civilian casualties accompanying the attacks on military targets. Mourning, too, was affectively appropriate, along with expressions of grief and meditations on grievability. For some Jewish Americans, the attack triggered deep feelings of unsafety. The one place on earth dedicated to Jewish protection had been violently breached in the largest collective loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. If Jews weren’t safe in Israel, could they be safe anywhere? Nourished by the familiar language of loss and trauma, the permitted feelings helped naturalize a therapeutic response in some academic settings. Providing support for those grieving and traumatized appeared as morally proper. Universities mobilized counseling services even as Israel and the United States mobilized their militaries.

As time passed and the Palestinian death toll mounted, mourning the loss of Palestinian civilian life was permitted, especially when accompanied by expressions of sorrow over losses on both sides. Such mourning not only remained in the familiar frame where Palestinians are treated as humanitarian subjects doomed to endure suffering and occupation, but also contributed to an affective setting where Palestinians bear responsibility for their own extermination. Had they not resisted, had there not been an attack on Israel on October 7, thousands upon thousands of civilians, especially women and children, would still be alive.

As permissible—even required—responses, mourning and grief didn’t shore up a ruptured sense of safety. They reasserted the prior normative order of appropriate feeling as if it hadn’t been ruptured, as if it were possible to continue to blindly ignore illegal settlement, a siege in its seventeenth year, mass imprisonment, and apartheid. Palestinian lives can be mourned, but the Palestinian political project must not be mentioned. And yet it was being mentioned, daily. Global mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine and the deluge of images of death and devastation belied any easy recourse to prior fantasies of safety. 

Most out of bounds were feelings that amplified Palestinian political subjectivity, feelings that might arise from standing up against oppression, feelings of liberation. These could be neither acknowledged nor expressed. They had to be distorted and condemned, decontextualized and misrepresented. In October 2023, Cornell history professor Russell Rickford’s words at a Palestinian solidarity rally were taken out of context and widely circulated, garnering media attention and outrage that resulted in Rickford’s taking a leave of absence from the university. Rickford observed that in the initial hours of the attack “many Gazans of good will, many Palestinians of conscience who abhor violence,” were able to breathe “for the first time in years” because of the ways that Hamas had shifted the balance of power, “punctured the illusion of invincibility,” and changed the terms of debate. In words for which he later apologized, Rickford said, “It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated” (Rubinson). Columbia professor Joseph Massad described the jubilation of millions of Arabs as they watched on the news the scenes “of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.” As a consequence, thousands signed a petition calling for him to be fired (Platek). During her questioning of Columbia president Minouche Shafik before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, 2024, Elise Stefanik, representative from New York, misrepresented Massad as describing the attack as “awesome” (Buchwald). Shafik condemned Massad’s statement, calling it appalling. She also failed to correct Stefanik’s misrepresentation and engaged in some of her own as she inaccurately characterized Columbia’s response (Robbins). The pattern of distortion and condemnation continued with respect to visiting Columbia professor Mohamed Abdou. Even as he acknowledged differences among political projects, the fact that Abdou voiced solidarity with the resistance, identifying resistance groups by name, made him a target. He dared to take seriously the politics of opposing settler colonialism, a project he associates with 1492 and Christian efforts to divide Muslims and Jews.

Affective policing isn’t a new phenomenon. Anti-communists in the United States have long fought to control the expression of revolutionary ideas, particularly in cultural and affective forms, when these forms are created by Black people, and when they challenge white supremacy. Attacks on communists in schools and universities, in Hollywood and the arts, and in connection with any support of national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles are not just part and parcel of capital class power in the United States. They are also instruments of epistemological production, as Charisse Burden-Stelly’s work demonstrates so clearly. Truth—what is permitted to be true—is at stake.

The difference between then and now is the merger of politics and individual identity. Individual identity has come to anchor itself in politics. People speak as a conservative, as a libertarian, as a democratic socialist, and so on. Criticism of a political view is experienced as an existential attack on one’s personhood. It’s no wonder, then, that slogans rejecting a worldview foundational to one’s sense of self feel like violence. The very presence of views contrary to and critical of one’s own can make a space threatening and unsafe.

The therapeutic orientation of the neoliberal university nurtures this sense. Proceeding as if the capitalist system is functional and that with a little hard work and creativity everyone can win, the neoliberal university individualizes and medicalizes systemic exploitation and degradation. With proper support—prescriptions, accommodations, counseling—anyone can succeed. Oddly, this view predominates at the same time that a critical vocabulary charging universities with being irredeemably sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and so on, operates and incites affective management and policing. The combination of these two orientations has engendered an academic environment where critique buttresses surveillance and control on behalf of institutionalized power, and not simply of the university but of the class forces the university system upholds (and of course to the detriment of precarious students, staff, and faculty). 

One might prefer to say that what’s going on is a hypocritical and duplicitous deployment of left critical discourse. That would not be incorrect in some cases. It’s clear that conservatives long hostile to higher education are opportunistically attacking the Palestine solidarity movement in the name of addressing an antisemitism with which they have long been comfortable. Nevertheless, the charge of hypocrisy misses the sincerity and good intentions that also hold the progressively neoliberal university in place, just as so many NGOs and so much humanitarian aid help maintain an imperialist world order. Good intentions—protecting the students, creating safe spaces, promoting civility—explicitly aim to decrease tension and depoliticize conflict by managing affect. What Nancy Fraser terms “progressive neoliberalism” establishes the terrain of permissible speaking and feeling: internationalism looks like capitalist globalism; a faux multiculturalism replaces anti-imperialism; humanitarianism substitutes for national liberation. To suggest otherwise, to challenge this framework, to install a gap and expose or produce a divide, makes people uncomfortable. It destabilizes politics grounded in identities by exposing identities’ inability to ground the politics furthered in their name, as so many Jewish faculty, students, and activists have demonstrated through their commitment to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

The student encampments spreading across universities in the United States and around in the world in April and May 2024 are most remarkable for their insistent creation of a new structure of feeling. Against the neoliberal university’s managerial therapeutism, they have embraced a politics. This politics is anchored not in identity, but in solidarity with the liberation struggle of an oppressed and colonized people on the other side of the world. Where the neoliberal university pushes individualism and self-interest, the students have emphasized moral principles: they are trying to stop a genocide and end an occupation. From the over two thousand who have been arrested as their craven university administrators called in police to violently crush their encampments, through the thousands more facing suspension, expulsion, and eviction, the students put self-interest aside. Against the nihilism and superficiality of communicative capitalism’s erosion of the difference between truth and lies, they stand firmly on the side of truth. It isn’t just opinions all the way down. There are truths (as Alain Badiou has also long insisted).

The media’s misrepresentations of the encampments are but another version of the distortions accompanying the affective policing of support for Palestine. Far from antisemitic rallies, the encampments nurture diverse religious traditions: Christian, Jewish, and atheist students protect Muslim students at prayer; Jewish students invite everyone to participate and learn from their Passover seders. The politics opposes white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. The solidarity is across difference, the condition of possibility for differences to flourish. A feature common to the encampments is the teach-in. Students, faculty, and community members think and study together. They share knowledge built over the last decades of organizing around Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions as well as through the experiences of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. They build the trust that enables them to challenge ideas—and authorities—without fear. The very division between the university and the community begins to crumble as parents, friends, comrades, and alumni provide sustenance and support. Of course, the division has always been in a certain sense illusory, reliant on the omission of the university’s deep investment in the military and defense industries as well as on the disavowal of the myriad forms of care and service work indispensable to the university’s functioning.

A principled politics of solidarity, meaning that arises from the moral seriousness of stopping genocide and ending occupation, strikes a blow against the capitalist and carceral version of safety on which the neoliberal university depends. The encampments, and the broader movement for a free Palestine, don’t reject safety; they take it back. The students’ protection of each other, as well as faculty’s protection of their students, expose the violence of the police and the complicity of the administration with U.S. imperialism. Our solidarity keeps us safe; cops throw faculty members to the ground and destroy our tents. The safe spaces the encampments create aren’t characterized by suppressing disturbing ideas. On the contrary, they bravely confront them. Safety is the opposite of the infantilization of delicate snowflakes; it’s the nurturing of revolutionaries. 

Edward Said writes that “The idea of resistance gets content and muscle from Palestine” (125). To support Palestine is to reject the status quo, the normative order, the repression of political subjectivity under conditions of neoliberal acquiescence to fragmentation and humanitarian management. Taking the side of the Palestinian resistance, we respond to and may even become a revolutionary subject—the subject of the Palestinian cause fighting against occupation and oppression. If something like safety is possible, it will be because of the principled solidarity of this subject. The radical rupture presented by the movement of students in solidarity with Palestine is that they show U.S. imperialism and the neoliberal university that, yes, safety is possible.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, and, with coeditor Charisse Burden-Stelly, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing.