As students worldwide head back to school this fall, in Gaza, there are no schools left. The U.N. considers the systemic obliteration of the education system by the Israeli military to be a “scholasticide” — all universities, over 80% of schools, the Central Archives of Gaza, and at least 13 libraries have been destroyed, as of April 2024, in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Almost 10,000 students are dead and 16,000 wounded, many killed in attacks on schools being used as sites of refuge.

Academics and university administrators in Gaza released an open letter asking for solidarity and resistance from the rest of the world: “We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”

As a graduate student, an aspiring professor, and the child of a Jewish academic, I take this call for solidarity seriously. Where and how do we learn ideologies of resistance, radicalism, and revolution? Once we have inherited a radical idea, what do we do with it? And how do we choose what ideas not to inherit?

This summer, my first time back to Chicago in five years, I visited my father’s collection of underground newspapers and pamphlets from the 1960s and 70s at the Newberry Library. Full of radical ideologies of Black, Indigenous, women and queer liberation movements, I came to search for traces of Palestine. Although my father was born in occupied Palestine and still supports Israel after 325+ days of live-streamed genocide, the origins of my politicization lie in the pages of his books and papers.

My dad taught Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University in Chicago. His apartment was a library full of books, old newspapers and magazines, and as a kid he took me to every used bookshop in the city. It was in his personal stacks that I discovered revolutionary writers and ideas. I would stay up late reading Hannah Arendt or one of many books about the European Holocaust or Auschwitz, where my great grandparents were murdered. I took his copies of Angela Davis’ If They Come in the Morning; Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich; and Black Anti-semitism and Jewish Racism with the first essay I ever read by James Baldwin. It was in a small pamphlet in his collection about the Nicaraguan revolution that I first learned about the Israeli military supplying weapons and trainings for the Contras, the U.S.-backed right wing military forces.

Despite the emphasis on education in my family, and our privileged access and proximity to books and education, it still took me two decades to unlearn Zionism. Now that I know the brutal realities of Israeli apartheid, the military occupation, the prison system, ethnic cleansing, ongoing displacements, the home demolitions, the siege on Gaza, the denial of food, water and medical care, among countless other Israeli crimes, it is my responsibility — and our collective responsibility — to share the ideas of Palestinian Liberation widely, and to act upon them.

Underground newspapers in the 60s and 70s were essential communal resources for the New Left movement. In a time when the revolution was not televised, it was printed in the “Underground Press.” They are a treasure of political graphic design from the pre-digital era, with the colors, layouts, the brilliant and creative language and complimentary typography, poetry, artwork, often inspired by psychedelic and rock and roll culture. They allowed revolutionary news and messages to be spread throughout the US and internationally through networks of activists, journalists, students, workers, and community organizations.

The archive itself consists of a few boxes of unorganized piles of newspapers. An additional box contains the newsletters of the Marynook neighborhood where my father grew up on the South Side of Chicago after immigrating from Israel in 1955, after the 1948-49 Nakba — the expulsion, murder, rape, and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Opening the first box, the smell of old ink and musty papers wafts out from the copies of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service and my eyes well up. Laying each copy out carefully onto the piece of black felt on the table, it feels like I am unwrapping a gift from my dad’s distant radical past. I’m in a room full of researchers, some high school students, everyone digging in the archives looking for clues for how to make sense of this world. The urgency of my task feels weighted. I’m wearing my keffiyeh.

Here are some of my findings:

I’m so enthralled by the visual of the page I encounter within the first 10 minutes, that I don’t write down what newspaper this is from, although I believe it’s from one of the Black Panthers’ papers. The typewriter text is barely legible over the image of a Palestinian fedayeen wrapped in keffiyeh. The article opens:

“The conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian people is one of the basic contradictions in the Middle East today. There was never any major conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish people living in Palestine until early in the 20th century, and the tensions that arose at that time were caused primarily by Zionist settlers with the aid of British colonialists. Zionism, a philosophy which claims that the Jewish people are racially pure descendants of the ancient Hebrews and have a right to a national home in Palestine, started in the 19th century. Zionist claims to a homeland in Palestine are based solely on biblical references and the 73-year rule of David and Solomon 3000 years ago. Zionism is a reactionary nationalist and imperialist ideology using racism as a means of accomplishing its aims.”

Zionism was declared a racist ideology by the UN in 1975 until the resolution was repealed as “anti-semitic” in 1991. After detailing why Palestine is also an anti-imperialist and workers’ struggle, the strategic use of kibbutz as a “socialist” cover for land theft, the article ends with an idea that today probably might seem even more radical than it did then — “abolish Israel”:

“We fully support the abolition of the Zionist state and its replacement with a progressive, democratic and non-sectarian Palestine in which people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds can live in peace with freedom from religious discrimination and economic exploitation.”

A short clip covering a small protest in Seattle by Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), the youth arm of the Workers World Party. The site of the protest was the launch event of a “Freedom Bus” tour sponsored by The American Zionist Youth Foundation, advocating for Soviet Jewry to relocate to Israel en masse. A 33-stop speaker tour traveling across the U.S., this was part of a campaign to “Save Soviet Jewry” that became popular in the 1970s, which of course would necessitate even more settlements to accommodate the incoming migrants. Although short, it’s an important nod to the longevity of inter-ethnic solidarity and anti-racist student organizing against Zionism. In response to the event, “Anti-Zionist Jews and Arab students drafted a leaflet denouncing the whole thing as ‘motivated…for the purpose of fanning hostility towards the USSR’ and duping U.S. Jews into being pawns of U.S. imperialism…”

When “a group of uniformed, swastika-bearing Nazis appeared on the scene,” three members of the YAWF “trounce” the Nazis and continue distributing their literature. The leaflet called for some of the same issues that the Palestinian Liberation movement continues to call for to this day: “lifting of U.S. immigration quotas for Israeli Jews, the right of return of Palestinian Arab refugees to their former homes and territory, a halt to the cruel and inhuman treatment of Arab prisoners, the end of the Israeli oppression against the Arab People, a halt to the arbitrary detention of Palestinians, equal justice for all, and […] a democratic and socialist solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

This essay by Susan Teller chronicles her trip with an American delegation of New Left activists hosted by the General Union of Palestine Students to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Teller shares her experience of life and schools in the refugee camps, where Palestinians are collectively cooking, making their own yarn and clothes, and forming their own schools and self-defense trainings after having been displaced in the Nakba. She recalls the tension between the Jordanian Army and the Palestinian fighters in the eve of Black September, and realizes how much her perspective on the Palestinian issue has bee manipulated by the American media:

“The best thing I can say about the American media, when they talk about the Middle East, is that they are playing a joke. But it is not a joke. I have been mislead. I have been taken advantage of. I never had a chance to read good things, real things about Palestinians.”

She goes on to share her reports on the Second World Conference on Palestine, held in Amman, Jordan, September 2-6, 1970, attended by representatives from South Africa, Eritrea, Iran, and Sweden, where the first Israeli defector escaped.

“My big question is: What do the Palestinians want?

The answer was so revolutionary, it was mind-blowing again. They see the possibility of all “Palestinians” living together – that means all exiled Palestinians, and all Jewish Palestinians (at the present, Israelis), provided that they reject Zionist racist chauvinism and fully accept living as Palestinians in the new Palestine. The state pictured is a unified, democratic, non-sectarian state.

I believe them. They do want a just peace…

I do not believe the liberal rhetoric about Israel. I could not have said that one month ago. Now I know that Israel is not a “socialist” state. When the native population is forcibly expelled and their towns demolished, the replacement cannot be called socialist, or even liberal. The state of Israel did not make the desert bloom – that piece of land has been fertile for centuries. Cooperative ownership and farming was common Palestinian practice – not a new nor progressive Israeli idea…”

Michael Fischbach, in The Review of Middle East Studies, writes more on this same trip and how it ignited interest from American New Left activists who eventually returned to found the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in 1971.

Fischbach quotes a statement released by the three Jewish members of trip:

“As revolutionaries of Jewish heritage in the United States of America, we take this opportunity to wholeheartedly support the Palestinian liberation movement.’ It went on to describe how their respective ancestors had participated in the Russian Revolution and the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, as well as the early struggles of the working class in America. As such, the signers noted, ‘We cast our lot with the Palestinian liberation movement which struggles in [sic] behalf of our semitic sisters and brothers … We plan to spread the true facts of the Palestinian liberation movement as the only hope for lasting peace in the Middle East. As American Jews, we will attempt to combat the Zionist propaganda machine which chokes freedom of thought in the Jewish community and prevents Jewish youth from rejecting Zionism and joining the ranks of anti-imperialist struggle …We know that our struggle is to get the Zionists out of the Black and brown colonies of Harlem, Chicago and Detroit, and out of Palestine … We thank our Palestinian sisters and brothers for welcoming us here and allowing us to see for ourselves the fascist nature of Zionism and the revolutionary and humane nature of the Palestinian liberation movement.”

There are two issues of LIFE magazine in the collection, including this issue covering the uprisings at Columbia University and another reporting on preparations by both Mayor Daley and anti-war activists ahead of the 1968 DNC in Chicago. The original 1968 occupation of Columbia, including the same hand-painted “Liberated Zone 5” banners and halls targeted for occupation, was the foundation of the 2024 mass student uprisings for Palestine at college campuses across the United States and the world.

Much of my dad’s archive also includes newspapers and newsletters about prisons in Illinois, which was his field of work and study, including issues of Chicago Connections, a prisoners’ rights paper; the Poverty Law Report; and Prisoner’s Digest International. Articles about prison uprisings, specifically the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, and poetry from prisoners, are abundant in the collection. He included several texts and documents on Angela Davis and her trial, the greatest advocate of prison abolition, Black Liberation, and of course Palestine. The horrendous Israeli prison system is not only racist and misogynistic, it is the manner in which most of the population is controlled, families are divided and traumatized, and popular resistance and political organizing are destroyed. Is there any real difference between the racist prison system of the United States and that of Israel? Can we not extend the calls for the abolition of prisons and for human dignity and freedom to the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including children, women, and healthcare workers suffering inhumane conditions, rape and torture?

Coverage of the American Indian Movement struggle, Wounded Knee, and Leonard Peltier’s case also appears throughout various issues. A particularly powerful piece was the Hau de no sau nee Statement to the World, given by the Iroquois Nation that same year in Geneva, Switzerland. The Newberry Library has a strong American Indian and Indigenous Studies collection. It has been at the forefront of decolonizing their collections in terms of giving context and opening up access to the community. It is important that we also see Palestine within the lens of colonial disaster and as an Indigenous rights issue – and not because of Jewish “Indigeneity” or biblical land claims. Because Palestinians have generational relations with their land, the olive trees, and the sea, in the same way other Indigenous peoples around the world do. Here, the Haudenosaunee people lay out why their spiritual relation to the land differs from the bankrupt nuclear “death path” of Western civilization:

“Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas of more efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet is the clearest of signals that our species is in trouble. It is a signal which most Westerners have chosen to ignore.

The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world’s surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.”

I’ll close with a letter written by my father that gave me a sense of my own lineage of radical complaint. In addition to newspapers, he also saved copies of his own letters of complaint addressed to his university in Southern Illinois as a student activist. Encountering these documents of my dad’s own dissent reminded me of the Decolonize the University of Hawaii Department of Art & Art History newspaper that I produced with artist Thad Higa. Or our recent petition to Hiroshima City and letter of complaint that I co-authored with international students to oppose Hiroshima’s invitation to Israel for the Peace Ceremony this August.

Discontented with the shitty student government system, he writes a letter to the editor of the university newspaper regarding the many students who decided not to vote in student elections:

“I propose the following plan, which, if adopted for the next student election, would for once give credence to the political sentiments of the thousands of students who refused to vote; a space should be made available on the election ballot which, if checked, would signify that the voter is disgusted with the whole system and refuses to vote for any person seeking political power.”

Seems like an appropriate choice for the shitty situation we find ourselves in today.

Sara Ahmed, in her book Complaint!, writes, “Impact is a slow inheritance.”

What we are tasked with, as this genocide rages on, is an activation of our revolutionary inheritances and the abandonment of ideas, like Zionism and militarism, that are contradictory to peace, justice, and freedom. The sanctity of life is the most fundamental lesson from our ancestors that is not even revolutionary – it’s simply human.

In the time it took you to read these ideas, the people of Gaza have been violently displaced and corralled, once again, and massacred with U.S.-made weapons. And now Israel has invaded the West Bank to begin another phase of the colonial genocide.

I write not to romanticize counterculture politics or aesthetics or my father’s once-upon-a-time participation in it. But rather, I bring these bits and pieces out of the archive to make a simple point: we all have ideological and educational inheritances that we must decide what we want to do with. This just happens to be mine. What is yours? And what are you going to do with it?

Free Palestine!