What I'm Doing Here

It is a commonplace on the American political Left that the plight of the Palestinians is typically mitigated, misreported, or effaced altogether in mainstream press coverage of the decades-old Israel-Palestine conflict.  But it is also the case that the three intervening decades separating Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon from the present have witnessed the emergence of a solidarity movement advocating on behalf of Palestinian rights which has grown steadily from an exiguous assemblage of fringe elements to a standard cause célèbre on college campuses from Brown to Berkeley.  And there are probably few places where American engagement with the Palestinian struggle for rights, statehood, and peace is more prominent and organized than the Northeastern coastal cities of Boston and New York.

For the past several years I have been personally involved with many Northeastern nodes in the diffuse network of what are, for better or worse, commonly referred to as “pro-Palestine” organizations. (My friends and I prefer to think of ourselves as "pro-justice" and "pro-peace" rather than partisan fans rooting for our chosen team).  My involvement has led me to participate in actions as diverse as ballot initiatives, protest demonstrations, academic conferences, and film screenings.  This work has been gratifying and hopefully, in some small way, has advanced the cause of bringing justice and peace to Israel-Palestine.

But my experiences as an activist have also kindled a kind of fascination with the movement itself—the people, rhetoric, goals, and tactics, along with their reception among various swaths of the public have been exciting to follow and analyze purely insofar as they form a peculiar and dynamic social phenomenon, independent of any personal stake I might have in their particularities or consequences.

Moreover, I can’t count how many times since I first became engaged with Palestine as a political cause that I have taken part in a wildly effervescent rally or sat, utterly engrossed, through an informative and provocative lecture, only to come up empty in the days that followed when I searched online media for reports documenting the event.  There’s a lot of noteworthy engagement with this thorny issue going on here in the Northeast, and much of it is unfortunately going under- or altogether unreported.  

Hence this blog.

Here you’ll find coverage of local actions, campaigns, and lectures pertaining to the Palestinian cause in and around the two cities I simultaneously call home, as well as interviews and character sketches of locals who’ve heeded the call to free Palestine (and perhaps, for good measure, some locals who decidedly have not).  And while it would be impossible to completely set aside my own solidarity with the people these activists seek to help, I will strive–in the spirit of Palestine’s most eloquent and incisive voice: the late Edward Said–to maintain a critical distance from my subject.  Rather than use this blog simply as a channel for spreading the word about local activism in its original terms and framing, I want to do proper justice to this important work by documenting it, where possible, with the unblinkered eyes of an outsider and by subjecting it, where appropriate, to earnest critique.

Hence the title.