Palestine/Israel and the Dynamics of Suspicion

*Note: I conceived of this article and wrote much of it prior to October 7th, 2023. It's reasonable to contend that cultural repression is not the most urgent matter in the face of genocide, yet if scholars, writers, artists, and activists can't express themselves, the world is granted less access to information about and representation of what is transpiring in Gaza. It's also vital to grasp the larger forces at play that preceded this period and that have since been taken to a horrific extreme.

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A generation of the most prominent Palestinian poets, dubbed Poets of the Resistance, knew the inside of a prison cell. They knew their own homes as makeshift prisons, too, under house arrest. They, and some of their less well-known counterparts, were — and still are — sporadically detained by the Israeli government on various charges and pretexts, from traveling without proper permits to "incitement."

Among this group, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish was imprisoned five times, in addition to having spent over three years under house arrest, all before the age of 30.1 One of Darwish's most famous early poems, "Ilá Ummī" (To my Mother, 1965), was occasioned by a visit the poet's mother paid him while he was detained in Ramleh (now Ayalon) Prison, the maximum-security facility that held Adolf Eichmann and, for a time, Yitzhak Rabin's assassin Yigal Amir.2 (Darwish's crime? Not exactly murder. Traveling from Haifa to Jerusalem without the proper permit to attend a poetry event at the Hebrew University.) Darwish's mother had brought food and coffee for her son, which the guard unceremoniously dumped out before her. Moved by her tears, the poet later scrawled the following lines on the paper from a pack of cigarettes:

          I long for my mother's bread
          My mother's coffee
          And her touch . . . 

This simple, bare opening expresses the pangs of desire for the comforts and protections of home life. It becomes a point of reference to which the reader may turn as they come upon the poem's more abstract, dreamily reverential imagery addressed to the speaker's mother: "Take me [...] /as a veil for your eyelashes/Cover my bones with grass/baptized by the pure heel of your foot."4 Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife seized on the universal elements of the poem, which, after all, is not explicitly about prison, popularizing it as a song that launched the poem to its fame years after its publication.

More than two decades later, Darwish would write the genre-bending lyrical essays or prose poems of Memory for Forgetfulness (1986), reflecting on another confinement-driven longing, this one experienced during the heaviest bombardment of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War. Under siege in Beirut, his apartment and the city outside it transformed into an apocalyptic hellscape, Darwish's speaker longs for quotidian ritual — above all, for coffee: "I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee," he writes, "And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being."5

It is coffee — and coffee's transportive capacities here and the traces it bears of home in the earlier poem — that restores the speaker's humanity. It is also, of course, writing about coffee that does so. To be a prisoner, then, is to face lack and constraint so acute that they expose and aggrandize the meaning of the everyday materials and practices of life, the small and great exercises of agency, including the resistant and recuperative act of writing.

I often think about the conditions of daily life imposed on Palestinians living under occupation: how a well-maintained system of cultural and political repression has become normalized, more deeply entrenched with each passing year. How Palestinians in the Occupied Territories cannot move about freely, cannot express themselves or assemble peaceably, and are subject to different, arbitrary, and draconian forms of surveillance and discipline relative to those of their Jewish neighbors. Palestinian citizens of Israel — also known as '48 Palestinians/'48 Arabs or Arab Israelis (an identity-effacing term favored by the Israeli establishment) — face injustice as a matter of routine, as well. Touted as an equal, enfranchised minority by those who deny Israeli apartheid, '48 Palestinians lived under military rule for nearly two decades and are still subject to a host of racially discriminatory laws, including, most fundamentally, the Law of Return, and the related Ban on Family Unification.

Part of what motivates the differences, arbitrariness, and harshness of these rules, besides the consolidation and show of power meant to demoralize the population and deter their resistance, is suspicion: the mistrust brought about by the idea that any Palestinian (including people mistaken for or profiled as Palestinians) could be an agent of violence or, through anything from words to artistic expression, could incite others to become such agents.

A State of Perpetual Emergency

If Israel were to have its way, it would confine not only Palestinian poets but also, as Darwish expresses in his poem "A Song and the Sultan," their words, preventing the circulation of each. Since its establishment in 1948, the Israeli government has allowed for censorship of textual materials, including prohibitions on their importation, exportation, printing, and publishing. It bases its authority to do so on the Defence (Emergency) Regulations 1945, a relic of Mandate-era British governance. These provisions saw Britain consolidating a slew of its previously established powers, which, along with new ones, it used against Palestinian Arabs and Jews at a time of growing unrest and looming war. Such powers, from curfews and house demolitions to deportations, created a "virtual regime of martial law," which Zionist leaders at the time compared unfavorably to Nazi Germany.6 Yet Israel integrated those very laws into its own code in 1948, using it in their military rule over Palestinian citizens of the state until 1966, and, afterward, over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories from 1967 to the present.7

According to part 87 of the Regulations, "The Censor may by order prohibit generally or specially the publishing of matter [...] prejudicial [...] to the public safety or to public order."8 That which constitutes a threat to public safety or order is, of course, a matter of interpretation — one taken up by the military censor, a term denoting a unit of the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate, as well as the individual officer(s) authorized to act on its behalf. In 1982, journalist Amos Elon interviewed the individual censor who oversaw and personally inspected (or, as Elon noted, merely glanced at) the tens of thousands of texts permitted or denied entry into the West Bank and Gaza that year. "The poets especially are the black sheep of the censor," Elon wrote.9 Drawing on Elon's interview in his introductory comments to a 1989 publication on censorship by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, literary scholar Nissim Calderon indicated that the military censor had banned "almost every important book published by a Palestinian poet during the last forty years."10

Earlier the same year, B'Tselem put forth a written inquiry for clarification on the criteria for banning books in the Occupied Territories, singling out a few works, including two books of poetry by Darwish and an unfinished novel by Ghassan Kanafani. An "Information Officer"11 from the Office of the IDF Spokesperson replied, echoing the language of the Defence Regulations: "These books were banned because their contents were damaging to state security, public safety, and public order." The officer further indicated that such damage included "calls for uprisings," "support for terrorists," and "encouragement of violence," though he did not specify which book(s) each charge applied to or provide examples of what such offenses look like as drawn from those books.12 The substance of Elon's interview and the wording of the Defence Regulations give the sense that censorship could be carried out arbitrarily and often at the unchallenged whim of a single individual. Having examined the 1,000 titles included in Israel's 1976 censorship order, journalist Anthony Lewis described it as "the work of over-zealous bureaucrats."13

The antidemocratic nature of Israel's legal code is part and parcel of the decades-long state of emergency ushered in prior to Israel's establishment and that persists until this day. Such a state, by its very name, is an outlier from the normal order, like the crisis that occasions it. And although it is enacted through and governed by special laws, it, in turn, presents the possibility of undermining the legal order by warranting changes to it and dispensations from it (such as the suspension of habeas corpus) in the name of restoring order. Such changes and dispensations are intended to be a temporary means to an end. But what happens when they're not — when, in fact, a country claims to be in an ongoing emergency since its establishment over 75 years ago, or when its system of legal norms comprise continuous derogations of the law?

Carl Schmitt famously located the idea of sovereignty in the capacity to decide on, or bring about and delimit, the "state of exception," which is "not a special kind of law [...but] the suspension of the juridical order itself," according to Giorgio Agamben.14 "The exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state's authority," Schmitt writes, "and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law."15 Agamben, who reads Schmitt as responding to Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," refers to this paradox in visually semiotic terms as "force-of-law."16 Yet as Benjamin, writing during the horrors of the Third Reich, challenged, the "state of exception" is unexceptional: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' [note: also translated sometimes as 'state of exception'; Benjamin employs the word Ausnahmezustand, Schmitt's term for "state of exception," in the original German] in which we live is not the exception but the rule."17 If that which we call the state of exception is neither a historical outlier, nor, as Agamben points out, always short lived, then, by collapsing its distinction from the norm, it undoes its own claims to juridical legitimacy.18 That doesn't, however, make it fictitious. The "state of exception" exists and is experienced, certainly by those abused by it, as Benjamin notes. What is fictitious about it, Agamben underscores, is the Schmittian insistence on and legitimization of its relationship to legal order: "[It] is nothing but a zone of anomie, in which a violence without any juridical form acts."19

In differentiating between the "state of emergency" and the related "state of exception," Ellen Kennedy writes that, "Emergency, depending on its intensity, can be the precursor of exception. What begins as exercise of legal powers can end in the chaos of a world without rules, norms, and procedures."20 The Israeli government and its legal code operate somewhere between emergency and exception in two regards: first, the emergency has never been called off, and deviations from the legal order are one of its permanent fixtures (we see this instantiated in the practice of administrative detentions that are ostensibly restricted to a period of six months . . . that may be extended over and over without limit); second, these conditions are imposed primarily on Palestinians, who, as a population, are treated as an exception living within a "zone of anomie" that exists for them (nearly) alone.

To be in a perpetual state of emergency or exception, or between the two, is to extend and magnify the crisis that serves as its grounds; it is to see threats everywhere and find peril always looming, while unleashing the dangers of unchecked power and even, at the most extreme, totalitarianism, by serving as a mandate for force — both lawmaking force and the violence that underwrites it.21 It is to transform suspicion from a transient feeling of wariness into an existential condition, an incurable paranoia. Of course, suspicion doesn't merely reside within the individual or collective; it is also cast upon an object or objects. Under these parameters of constant and therefore unexceptional exception, the Palestinian people are the targets, and, frankly, victims, of suspicion. It is Palestinian towns that are subject to curfew; their homes, demolished; their immigration, restricted. And it is Palestinian poets, and not Israeli ones, who have been detained and imprisoned according to the state's suspicions.

The Exportation of Suspicion

A sense of suspicion, like the repressive tactics it authorizes, also works by proxy outside of Palestine/Israel concerning discourses about it. Anyone who has ever encountered Hasbara, a Hebrew term that literally means "explanation," but which serves as an objective-sounding shorthand for Israel's public advocacy efforts, can understand this. They know that the state wants to convey a particular image of itself, to control the narrative under conditions of asymmetric power vis-à-vis the Palestinian people, and to sway global public opinion, even while it seems increasingly willing to stand at odds with its allies or act as though it does not need foreign support.22 The tenor of much of this propaganda has been defensive, pointing to the violence that Israel is subjected to, including, over the past few decades, rockets launched by Hamas in Gaza, and stone throwing incidents in the West Bank, rationalizing its own use of absurdly excessive force. Anyone who points out the force as excessive, who understands "explanation" as a euphemism for propaganda, or who seeks out more context and other narratives — anyone, essentially, who asks why? — is suspect.

And where do such nuance-enjoying people exist in concentrated numbers? At institutions of higher learning, where Hasbara-ists focus much of their effort.

Because I research and teach on Israel/Palestine, because my colleagues and close friends are scholars and activists, I've come to encounter and feel, at various points, both threatened by and inured to the threat of some of the tactics of delegitimization and silencing that serve Israel abroad. I have witnessed my colleagues — Palestinians, Israelis, American Jews, among them — be harassed, undermined, censored, doxxed, deported, defunded, and fired or see their job offers rescinded. A year after I'd interviewed for academic jobs, I learned from an acquaintance that I didn't receive one specific offer because university donors didn't agree with my politics. "Did you know?" she asked me. No; my campus visit had felt successful, but that didn't guarantee anything. Consider, then, the likelihood that many such unpublicized cases exist — cases, that is, of employment denied on grounds of ideological incompatibility with donors regarding the issue of Israel alone.

One favored and effective tactic of late is blacklisting. You'd think that, of all people, Jews — or those who claim to advance causes they believe to be important to Jews — would be sensitive to the idea of creating conspiratorial lists, but when it comes to suspected enemies and critics of Zionism, suddenly the idea holds appeal. Israel-centered academic blacklists have existed since the early 2000s, gaining traction in the wake of the Second Intifada.23 ("I knew it was only a matter of time before I appeared on one," a mentor of mine in graduate school told me of this rite of passage.) However, one of the most comprehensive, most active, and arguably most pernicious of these lists, is Canary Mission's.

The Danger of Imagined Threats

"The canary in the coal mine" is one of those perverse sorts of idioms that rings folksy to the ear until you remember what it's all about: a helpless little bird whose death was the equivalent of a carbon monoxide alarm. I find it to be an unintentionally apt metaphor for the work undertaken by Canary Mission and groups like it. Certainly the folks running the site — whoever they are — think that they've mastered the art of spotting dying birds, or signs of danger, in tweets and decontextualized excerpts of articles, lectures, social media posts, and books. But really, they've done their part to sacrifice hundreds of academics, students, and activists in a fear-driven McCarthyist operation of suspicion.

Canary Mission and entities like it are self-appointed watchdogs. It's hard to say that, as vigilantes, they function independently, since their funding sources and institutional connections are often purposefully obscured and hard to trace.24 These organizations place themselves in superposition to other institutions and individuals, tasking themselves and those they've deputized in their name with surveilling and exposing individuals and groups, primarily academics but also, lately, a smattering of others.

The very name that Canary Mission chose for itself conveys apprehension about hidden threats, suggesting that they operate from a premise of suspicion — a premise, I'd argue, that is twofold: first, the suspicion that any given person, especially within academia and especially of a certain, shall we say, ethnic or religious profile, is a dangerous ideologue; and second, the suspicion they've conveniently already confirmed for themselves that certain ideologies and modes of opposition — including nonviolent and cultural ones — are harbingers of violence. The second suspicion, whether an actual feeling or cynical pretext, justifies the work they do in the name of the first.

The call that Canary Mission puts forth on their website for the public to "report incidents," a word whose vagueness allows for an open interpretation of possible offenses, lends the campus and the classroom an atmosphere of mistrust, especially in courses that deal with contentious or sensitive subjects. In this sense, paranoia is involved in something of a reciprocal relationship when it comes to blacklisting; it is not only the blacklist's authors and the people deputized to do their dirty work who are suspicious of others. Students and even faculty internalize that suspicion, worrying that they will be its next target and engaging in acts of self-censorship. If the idea of paranoia sounds farfetched, consider recent reports by author and intelligence expert James Bamford, that other, more clandestine surveillant groups work with and for the Israeli government, and they too deputize students as spies. One such group is the Israel on Campus Coalition, whose "intelligence brief, containing secret details about targeted American students and faculty, [had been] passed on to Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs."25

Though not a novel organization, Canary Mission does model its own tricks, at least when we compare their tactics to those of other academic blacklists. One way they do so is by attempting to cultivate bipartisan legitimacy, to appear equitable in their denunciations, by purportedly tracking extremists "across the entire political spectrum" in and out of academia.26 They feature among their profiles and in a catalogue of propagandistic videos a smattering of neo-Nazis and far-right conspiracy theorists, conflating their words and goals with those of scholars, students, and activists. It is certainly a choice, as they say, or a form of shady opportunism, to aggregate the names of scholars and specialists, especially those devoted to the study of the history and political dynamics of the Middle East, alongside failed-rappers-turned-Nazi-activists. But whom are they kidding, comparing Nazi grifters to, say, preeminent authorities of Middle East history such as Rashid Khalidi and experts of Genocide Studies like Omer Bartov? Doing so clearly makes it easier to dismiss what a serious person who has devoted their life to the subject at hand has to say about it. But only for the uninitiated.

On Khalidi's considerable body of scholarship, the folks at Canary Mission have nothing to say. One might even, dare I say, suspect them of not having engaged with his ideas at all. Instead, after a brief biographical profile, they note that he has gone on record supporting the BDS movement, and, from there, they provide a canned cut-and-paste exposition of their objections to BDS. In short, one of the movement's founders, Omar Barghouti, wants to see Israel alienated as a pariah state and believes, among other things, that Palestinian refugees should be able to return to their homeland.

And what was Bartov's grave sin? In an analysis of the October 7th attack on Israel, he described the de facto occupation of Gaza as a "siege" of 16 years and pointed out that people living under such conditions will invariably react to them — even with, and I quote, inexcusable violence:

This was an event waiting to happen. If you keep over 2 million people under siege for 16 years, cramped in a narrow strip of land ... you cannot but expect outbreaks of ever more desperate and brutal violence, inexcusable as those atrocities were.27

For his criticism of Israeli actions and policy, Bartov is listed on a site that also includes the guy who tries to get random teenagers on the internet to do the Sieg Heil salute.

A Close Reading of a Canary Mission "Text"

In an archetypal video28 featured for a time on Canary Mission's homepage, former Israeli politician turned leading Hasbara-ist Dr. Einat Wilf offers a half-baked theory on why Zionism as a term and ideology "has become so toxic." (Spoiler alert: none of it has to do with any policies or actions that the state of Israel carries out in its name.)

Wilf attributes this turn, which she claims has been going on for decades, to a "placard strategy," whereby Zionism is semiotically equated with "all that is evil in our world" (i.e., on a protest sign, we might see the Israeli flag = swastika), from Nazism to Islamophobia and apartheid. As a dramatic score plays in the background, viewers are treated to a kaleidoscope of signs and snippets of speeches delivered by pro-Palestine activists during protests and lectures. Soon, and without any kind of signpost or distinction, the video turns away from advocates of the Palestinian cause. It moves to content created by folks like Rick Wiles, known for using such colorful idioms as "Jew coup" in reference to Donald Trump's impeachment and for warning Americans of genocidal purges plotted by the "Jewish cabal"; Angelo John Gage, a very online white supremacist who is singularly obsessed with Jews; and David Duke — you know the guy.

The first few clips from activists and scholars include Omar Barghouti ("Zionism is essentially a racist ideology") and sociologist Ramon Grosfuguel ("Zionism links with Islamophobia"). By claiming their comments to be part of a "placard strategy," Wilf and Canary Mission also engage in placarding of their own, stripping the speeches of context and gutting their ideas of everything but self-evident rationale. Whereas a slogan or an idea expressed on a placard must be pithy, given limited space, ideas delivered in orations and lectures are not only emphasized but also unpacked. Yet the creators of this video don't leave time or room for that. Referring to a thesis without its corresponding analysis or evidence as a "placard strategy" means imposing the very conditions to which Wilf objects onto the ideas she critiques through her suspicion that they must be homologous; it's a straw man.

It is ethically and intellectually necessary to distinguish among the kinds of rhetoric we encounter here, because Wilf's argument and Canary Mission's project at large hinge on conflating and implicitly comparing decontextualized claims about Zionism and supremacist, conspiratorial ideology. The activists and scholars spotlighted in the video, like Barghouti and Grosfuguel, refer directly to Zionism as an ideology linked to other ideologies and phenomena, from colonialism to apartheid. One might not like or agree with these claims, but they are critiques that speak to the history of the political Jewish nationalist movement and the policies enacted by the Israeli government — that is, to the ideas and events related to the expression of Zionism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are not the unsubstantive talking points of bigots, nor are they an indictment of a people based on their immutable traits. This, in essence, is the major distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

On the other hand, the rhetoric of some of the figures of the far right — Holocaust deniers, Nazis, conspiracists, and other grifters — is falsely metonymic: the "Zionism" they rail at is a stand-in they have constructed for all Jewish people and has nothing to do with Jewish nationalism or Israel. When Wiles condemns "Zionism" for having "brought the slaughter of 65 million babies to America,"29 what he's actually saying is that American Jews, the majority of whom vote along liberal, Democratic lines, are to blame for the prevalence of abortion in the U.S. You see, when white supremacists speak out loud, they can't use nose emojis or the poorly Photoshopped infographics they favor online, so they encode "Jews" as "Zionism."

Other right-wing extremists featured in the video use rhetoric that purposefully obfuscates its Nazi agendas, or that benefits from the conflation of Zionism and all Jewry, providing their conspiratorial claims with a veneer of legitimacy. When British neo-Nazi Mark Collett bids viewers to "stand up to the might of Zionism," for example, it may sound like he's critiquing the Israeli Defense Forces' employment of asymmetric warfare; he follows it up, however, with, "and we have done it before. We have done it 109 times."30 This is coded language (placard strategy!) for the historical expulsion of Jews from an alleged 109 places. To "stand up to the might of Zionism" is thus a call to ethnically cleanse Jews from one's country or to commit genocide against them (the video concludes with Collett adding, "And the last time we did it was in the 1930s in Germany"), not to dismantle the Israeli state. It is ultimately a false metonymy, too, though perhaps a more bald-faced one.31

All of the critiques of Zionism, both those carried out in good faith and those done so by Nazis, are "carefully chosen," Wilf tells us, because they "connote evil." Yes, we're meant to understand, the words of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, other international rights-focused NGOs, and a host of legal experts and scholars, have been chosen to associate the Israeli state with Biblical sin, turning the notion of Jewish election on its head. It isn't because, say, the ongoing occupation and the current litany of war crimes carried out in Gaza happen to be unethical. "If you tell people there is an evil out there," Wilf continues, "then they will do anything they can to eradicate this evil, even use violence."32 This is how a non-violent protest movement like BDS gets subverted. If you point out the crimes of the state, you may potentially incite violence. If you make art about it, incitement. If you complain? Incitement. If you say "good morning"? Incitement. Non-violence is only violence waiting to happen. And, in this sense, suspicion begets surveillance begets censorship.

The Weaponization of Suspicion

As a professor, I accept that my work is somewhat public facing. I've taught thousands of students over the years, and I publish my research and creative writing. This means that my teaching and publications are open to critique by academics, students, administrators, and laypeople. And that I've even come to expect emails from enraged or otherwise reactive strangers, who have thoughts and, I suppose, materials to share with me. 

But students fill a different role, and the social contract they sign is — and should be — of another kind. Let's leave aside graduate students for the moment, since they occupy a liminal space as established learners, many of whom also work: teaching or assisting in teaching, publishing their research, and contributing to their institution or discipline through acts of service. Undergraduates, however, are often young and untested in their beliefs. Some are far more cautious than I was at their age, but they shouldn't have to be concerned in this way. They shouldn't have to worry about ending up on a blacklist alongside professionals who likely have more of an understanding than they do about the risks involved in staking out a position on Zionism or Israel.

By placing disproportionate emphasis on academics and on leftists, including on students, while claiming to track extreme ideologies across the political spectrum, Canary Mission makes it clear that it is primarily suspicious of academia as a site of ideological propagation — basically, a propaganda mill operated by academics with their students as brainwashed agents who harbor and disseminate pernicious ideologies.  Given not only whom they select for their list but also the way they rationalize their choices, it becomes evident that, at the most basic and hypocritical level, Canary Mission thinks it can determine the bounds of what it means to be a dangerous ideologue. In purporting to do so, it weaponizes suspicion, indexing supporters of economic, cultural, and academic boycotts and other forms of nonviolent protest side by side with actual Nazis — people whose words have been linked to historical systematic violence and genocide — and imperiling listed individuals' job prospects, travel, and safety. In blacklists of this kind, suspicion itself functions as the indictment and the punishment.

The weaponization of suspicion in the context of discourse and cultural expression in and related to Palestine/Israel is thus not merely a metaphor — and neither are its consequences. In the region itself, Mahmoud Darwish, Dareen Tatour, Tawfiq Zayyad, Samih al-Qasim, and scores of other poets and writers spent years of their lives incarcerated, whether under house arrest, in administrative detention, or in prison. Several saw their books banned, some were exiled. In the U.S., people who express solidarity with Palestine have lost their jobs and been doxxed, among other material repercussions and threats to their safety. Since the 10/7 attacks, these tactics of intimidation have become exacerbated, with conservative nonprofits sponsoring "doxxing trucks" emblazoned with pictures of individual students underneath defamatory phrases, such as "Yale's leading antisemites." These are young people who are engaged in study and who demonstrate concern over global politics; they are by and large not people who have threatened anyone or tried to hurt anything. And if they were such people, then their university should take care of the matter. We live in a world where three students their age — two of whom were wearing keffiyehs at the time — were recently violently attacked, one paralyzed from the waist down. If Canary Mission actually cared about the threat of violence, it would respond to arguments and ideas it suspects — and, in its particular rhetoric of suspicion, therefore deems — dangerous without putting thousands of students between a set of crosshairs. Likewise, if Israel were a true democracy, they might care to do something similar, responding to ideas it finds damaging with more effective Hasbara rather than through suspicion-based censorship and other forms of repression. At the very least, they would learn to differentiate between a poem and a plan of attack.

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Sheera Talpaz (Twitter, @snarkademic) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She co-edited the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and Nation and is completing her first monograph on the figure and concept of the national poet in Palestinian and modern Hebrew literature.

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References