Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

In Memoriam: Ghassan Shabaneh

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I was both shocked and saddened to discover news of the death of Dr. Ghassan Shabaneh, for several years an Associate Professor of Middle East and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College, and more recently a researcher at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies in Doha, Qatar. The news is now almost a month old; I happened to discover it, painfully enough, while trying to “friend” him on Facebook.

Despite being on a first-name basis with him, I didn’t know Ghassan well enough to call him either a “friend” or a “colleague.” Having heard great things about him for years from his Marymount colleague Carrie-Ann Biondi (my then-wife) I happened to meet him exactly once, purely by coincidence, in the summer of 2013–in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I was touring Bethlehem with my friend Sinan; he was visiting with his wife Tara. After expressing shock at the coincidental nature of the meeting, we had our one and only conversation, promising to meet up again in the near future. Our schedules never seemed to coincide, so–to my eternal regret–we never did meet again. I’d been looking forward to the meeting for years.

My deepest condolences to his family and loved ones. Unfortunately, I’ll have to miss the memorial service that will take place for him in a few days in New Jersey, but hope to attend the service that will be held for him this fall at Marymount.

When Translation Apps Attack

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After covering Plato and Aristotle in my political philosophy seminar here, I assigned my students their first paper. I wrote the assignment in English. My (human) translator Amer translated it into Arabic and posted it on the class’s website–a closed group site on Facebook. Facebook then automatically had the assignment re-translated back into English via Google Translate. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Continue reading →

Safe Haven Abu Dis

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In catching up on the news from back home, I find myself reflecting on the number of people who, on hearing of my plans to spend another summer in Abu Dis, Palestine, worried out loud about my safety. As we all know, the West Bank is a dangerous place. Well, I’m perfectly safe. I just regret I didn’t ask my friends the same question regarding their plans to spend the summer in the United States.

The U.S. State Department “warns” Americans about the risks of traveling in Palestine, imposing a long list of regulations on travel by U.S. government employees stationed here. It’s not an amusing topic, and yet there seems something funny about it: a warning to Americans about the risks of violence in Palestine? Shouldn’t the State Department be warning those of us in Palestine about the risks involved in going home?

Hussein Ibish on Elie Wiesel

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Here’s an excellent piece by Hussein Ibish in Foreign Policy on the mixed legacy of Elie Wiesel. I’d be hard pressed to find a sentence in it that I disagree with. I found this paragraph particularly poignant and admirable:

Many Palestinians have allowed the conflict with Israel to embitter them to the point that not acknowledging, learning about or engaging with the history of the Holocaust becomes a social and political imperative. This was most tragically illustrated in the experience of Professor Mohammed S. Dajani, a Palestinian scholar with impeccable nationalistic credentials, who led the drive to teach Palestinian university students about the Holocaust and ultimately had to leave his university position because of the backlashagainst the simple teaching and learning of history. Many Palestinians do want to learn about and recognize the tragedy of Jewish history, but many more myopically can’t see past their own present-day suffering and recognize Jewish Israelis as anything other than their occupiers and oppressors.

Until recently, Professor Dajani taught here at Al Quds University. I regret that I won’t be able to meet him. I particularly regret why I won’t be able to meet him. Continue reading →

Thoughts on the Middle East Quartet’s Report on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

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Americans often wonder what the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is about, and why they should be obliged to care about it. They can’t get a clear sense of what it’s about from the mass media, but lack the time, energy, expertise, or inclination to wade through history books or specialty websites to figure it out from scratch. What to do? The situation seems one designed to induce apathy about the issue. Continue reading →

Working Man

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In a rather hilarious development, my class here at Al Quds was canceled yesterday due to lack of enrollment. Apparently, the enrollment minimum for summer classes here is 20. Since my class has only 14 enrolled (of whom only four students have regularly attended), it was canceled. (This comes after a strike shut down classes on the first day.)

I don’t know whether I was thrilled or dismayed to learn of the cancellation, but I ended up going from office to office with my friend and translator Hadi Abu Hilweh to see if an exception could be granted in my case. On the one hand, the prospect of a whole summer without academic responsibilities was an attractive one, to put it mildly. On the other hand, it seemed a little absurd to have traveled 10,000 miles to teach a class and not teach it. And then, I kind of needed to get paid, so that I could cover the costs of my airfare here. We finally ended up at Academic Affairs, and after some skillful negotiation (on Hadi’s part), got the class re-instated. Definitely a first in my career–begging to teach a class that’s been canceled. Continue reading →

My Name is Ahmad

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So I’m taking the 4 pm bus into Jerusalem from Abu Dis. There are maybe ten people on a bus that probably fits 70 or 80. We’re approaching the Ma’ale Adumim checkpoint, and I’m thinking, “This is going to be a breeze.”

We stop at the checkpoint. There’s yelling. Nothing happens. There’s more yelling–in Hebrew. I have no idea what’s being said.

The younger people get off the bus and stand in the “cage.” The cage is my name for a steel enclosure a few yards away that looks a lot like…a cage. In the past, I’ve sometimes voluntarily gone into the cage, but then, sometimes I haven’t. I’ve taken this bus dozens of times before and never been asked to stand in it, so I decide not to do so today. I just don’t feel like getting up. I’m comfy. It’s hot out. It’s my Rosa Parks moment. Continue reading →

The Circumstances of Injustice: Ben Ehrenreich on Tel Aviv and Hebron

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I’ve said before that American reporting on violence in Israel and Palestine involves a single predictable pattern: ignoring the moral significance or experiential nature of the occupation, such reporting fixates pointillistically on discrete, acontextual acts of violence by Palestinians, treating such acts without argument as initiatory violence or aggression “against civilians”; it then treats the Israeli response to such acts as retaliatory force, only raising questions (at best) about the “proportional” or “disproportional” nature of Israel’s resort to force. Continue reading →

CFP: Symposium on Rasmussen-Den Uyl’s “The Perfectionist Turn”

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I think I’ve posted this before, but thought I’d repost this CFP on Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s forthcoming book, The Perfectionist Turn, from the editors of Reason Papers. Here’s an article that states Rasmussen-Den Uyl’s case in a nutshell. I’ll try to see if I can find an informative blurb on the book, but I take it that the book is in part an answer to the problematic David Potts raises in his recent series here on “Morals and the Free Society.” For more information, contact Reason Papers at reasonpapers@gmail.com. Continue reading →

Mega-Bleg: Plato, Aristotle, and the Jews

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This is the sort of question that never occurs to me when I teach Plato and Aristotle back home (itself a rare event), but it’s the kind of question I’m sure to get asked while teaching them here in Palestine next week. And damned if I know the answer.

Were Plato and Aristotle acquainted with Abrahamic monotheism?

Put more concretely for purposes of historical inquiry:

Were Plato or Aristotle familiar with the Jewish people or the Hebrew Bible?

I’ll bet that David Riesbeck has an answer, but I pose the question(s) above (as well as those below) for anyone with answers. Continue reading →