Teaching Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism During Genocide in Gaza and War in Lebanon: The Classroom as a Space of Solidarity

Introduction

On September 17, 2024, Israel committed one of its cruelest war crimes to date: detonating portable pagers in the hands of civilians living their daily lives in Lebanon, killing more than 45 people and maiming an estimated 4000 others in just three seconds. ¹ As the detonation happened, my graduate class “Imperialism, Colonialization and Anti-Colonization” at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut was discussing settler colonialism through the work of Fayez Sayegh, Patrick Wolf, and Abaher el Sakka. While we had already been witnessing a livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza and a war in Lebanon, little did we know that a war crime was, at that moment, maiming and leaving scars on the bodies of the people in Lebanon next to our homes, our university, and our markets. As Jana, one of the graduate students in sociology, a third-generation Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, would later write in a reflection assignment for the class: “The violence we studied and analyzed was no longer confined to words in books; it is around us; it is here. This is no longer history; this is now.” As we took a break during the three-hour seminar, news about the pager attack started circulating. Everyone rushed to their phones to check on their relatives, but everyone was still in disbelief: indeed, this war crime was beyond our mental conceptual maps, with no words adequate to describe what happened. We decided to continue the class, as we did not realize the magnitude of the tragedy at that point. But soon—with ambulance sirens rising along with calls to donate blood and avoid driving (to allow ambulances to reach hospitals faster), along with everyone’s growing shock—we ended the class. Some of us rushed to donate their blood at the increasingly crowded hospitals. “Every scar, every crutch, and every disability as an effect of the attacks resembles a visible sign of settler colonial dominance, leaving an everlasting mark of a violent history of colonial suppression,” Jana later wrote.

It soon became clear that the pedagogical orientations and practices I had prepared for this class would need to be revised to respond immanently to the intrusion of lived violence into the classroom. I found that although important scholarly work has been produced in recent years about the critical and emancipatory relevance of the social sciences during times of wars and genocide (Burawoy, 2025; Finkelstein, 2021; Sabbagh-Khoury, 2024; Shatara, 2022), and about the status of education in general during war and displacement (Heleta, 2025; Jebril, 2025), very little has been written about teaching social sciences within a situated war context. I found myself pondering a series of questions: What does it mean to teach the sociology of colonialism and anti-colonialism when we live in a horrific war—amid the explosions of bombs, endless ambulance sirens, and the unrelenting hum of Israeli drones? While students and educators face sweeping evacuation orders and forced displacement? When we do not know whether we will meet again? How do these events reposition the teaching of sociology in this time and place? How can the classroom engage with liberatory scholarships in such violent contexts? Most importantly, what is the role of professors in engaging and fostering spaces for critical thinking and liberatory pedagogies in the midst of a genocide and in a situated war context? I use the word “violent” although it does not convey the monstruous unfolding in front of our eyes in Gaza, historic Palestine, and in Lebanon.

Our language and our concepts became impotent, betraying our ability to describe what happened (Kabel, 2024). Despite sharing the public feelings of confusion, fear, and helplessness, as an activist scholar committed to social justice, I see it is a political and pedagogical duty to think of and develop new concepts to explain the intertwined registers of violence Lebanon is currently subjected to.

Given that the course not only teaches sociology scholarship framed through various liberatory frameworks, but that it is also committed to an emancipatory pedagogical praxis, addressing the effects of the intrusion of the war on the dynamics of teaching and learning assumed a particular urgency. While my students and I experimented with new modes of discussion, the process of centering students’ voices, experiences, and concerns, as well as balancing the pedagogical uptakes and course requirements remains deeply challenging. Tensions and contradictions emerged about our limited abilities to translate our liberatory thoughts and decolonizing aspirations into immediate material transformations outside the classroom. The sense of urgency and reality of living under bombardments and witnessing a genocide require tangible immediate materialist changes in the structures of colonial and imperial power—including the colonial structure of academia. Another disconnect was the need to rigidly adhere to the graduate curriculum that requires intense training in research writing. Despite the negotiations of students to replace the written final paper with another oral assignment, I was unable to meet this demand and had to prioritize the university’s requirements over the psychological situation of students. Yet, and in coordination with the university’s modified deadlines, students were given an extension of two months to submit their work, which coincided with the “ceasefire” period.

Importantly, the intrusion of the war into the classroom intensified the dilemma of how to fully embed a decolonial approach as a pedagogically lived experience, particularly in the institutional context of the university and its regimes of academic knowledge production and dissemination. As one of my students put it, the possibility of decolonization within the university must contend with the ways in which institutional spaces of learning may be supportive and aligned with decolonial values, or on the contrary, complicit, indifferent, or antithetical to such emancipatory approaches (Fúnez-Flores, 2024a, 2024b). Long-standing critiques of the university as an “ivory tower”—where discussions about decoloniality could remain abstract and inconsequential—suddenly assumed urgency and specificity, as some faculty and students raised questions about the role of the university in responding to the immediate emergency, and the impossibility—ethically and practically—of conducting “business as usual.”

Indeed, in recent decades, universities’ “business as usual” has slowly transformed in agreement with neoliberal mandates and logics, shifting the weight away from critical inquiry and non-instrumental knowledge into market-oriented priorities and agendas (Nadeau & Sears, 2011). The centralization of administrative power, the dependency on corporate funding and private investments, and the adoption of business models based on efficiency are all symptoms of the crisis of higher education. As universities struggle to justify their relevance in a fast-changing world, they need to consider how their mission and social purpose may be co-opted by neoliberal agendas that, by definition, weaken the university’s values and raison d’être. These profound transformations in the governance structure of the university created a crisis of its mission and its social role, and increasingly tied it to align with its donors’ agendas and priorities. The accountability of the neoliberal university to its donors and board of trustees, who are increasingly from the business industries, apply to the Arab universities likewise. In Lebanon, most universities, whether public, private non-profit, and for-profit ones, adopted the neoliberal model of governance. Western institutions in the Arab world have colonial roots and have long served the colonial interests in the region, and in recent years, have adopted neutral language vis-à-vis the Zionist violence (Badaan & Abu Moghli, 2025), for the fear of losing American funds.

Student movements around the world have accurately diagnosed this problem: a university that invests, directly or indirectly, in the expansion of colonial or settler-colonial projects, weapon markets, or fossil fuel corporations loses its legitimacy as a space for social critique. In Lebanon, and despite the weakened student union body and relative sense of defeat in the aftermath of Arab uprisings in the last decade, students at the Western affiliated universities, like the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University, were actively involved in demanding their universities to disclose its financial investments and divest from companies benefiting from Israeli occupation and settler colonialism.

Having outlined the various registers involved in the experience of teaching in a war context, I will now unpack how my students and I engaged with these challenges as these unfolded in the register of teaching and learning.

Course Content and Analytical Methods

My Fall 2024 graduate seminar “Imperialism, Colonialism and Anti-Colonization” unfolded during the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalated war in Lebanon. The first half of this graduate course provides students with an in-depth analysis of the transnational processes of colonial and imperial socio-economic, epistemological, and political dominations. More specifically, it offers an in-depth sociological exploration about the processes of colonialism, settler colonialism, and imperialism by examining the coloniality of power, colonial ideology, accumulation by dispossession, annihilation, enslavement and exploitation of indigenous populations, expropriation of labor and resources, knowledge production, and transformation of culture.

The second half of the course engages various forms of national and transnational resistance and solidarity building that emerged, either as a top-down or bottom-up approaches, to confront the political, economic, and cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. This includes discussions about the anti-colonial movements that spanned the previously colonized countries in the 1950s–1970s era, from the non-alignment movement, the Bandung Conference and Third World Internationalism to the Dhofar revolution, Pan Africanism and Pan Arabism, Palestinian Intifadas and boycott movements, to the Black Lives Matter, the Zapatistas, Idle No More and the Indigenous resurgence. The course ends with a discussion about decolonizing sociology. During this period, students gave presentations on the ideas of any anti-colonial intellectual of their choice, regardless of discipline (students presented the work of Amílcar Cabral, Gloria Anzaldúa, Abdallah Öcalan, Ali Shariati, and Fatima Mernissi, among others). Given that this course was offered during the Gaza genocide and the war on Lebanon, most of the class discussions were de facto linked to the Palestinian struggle and Zionist settler colonialism in the region.

Students and the professor in this class have endured prolonged exposure to war from an early age. As of September 2024, six out of eleven students were Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, survivors of the 2006 July war which lasted 33 days, and witnessed the various terrorist bombs by ISIS during the period of 2013–2014. One of the students survived the Syrian war that started in 2011 and was forcibly displaced from their country to Lebanon, and another witnessed from afar the Syrian war and the displacement of their own relatives. One student lived in the West Bank under the Israeli Apartheid regime. Another student carried the generational trauma of the Nakba and the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West. One grew up in Eritrea during an unstable militarized and repressive period. As for myself, I have experienced five Israeli wars on Lebanon, a Lebanese civil war, the Israeli occupation of Lebanese lands, and various terrorist bombs by ISIS. This exposure to violence and war allowed us to analytically understand the entangled history between their geographies and the regional and global powers.

To examine the impact of the course curriculum and the classroom experience in relation to the unfolding war in the country, this article reflects on class discussions and students’ positionality papers as responses to their process of learning in a war context. ² As a genre, the positionality paper asks students to explicitly make connections between lived experience and the themes, problematics, and questions that occupy the course. In the first assignment, during the first week of the class, students submitted a personal reflection guided by the syllabus’s focus on colonialism, imperialism, and anti-colonialism. Building on this first positionality paper and on cumulative course learning, the second assignment asks students to theoretically locate and contextualize their personal experiences within the larger frames of collective, political, and historical unfoldings. This second positionality paper is specifically designed to move students from the immediacy of the first-person narrative to a theoretical and political understanding of the contexts that have shaped their lives. In the context of a direct experience of war, positionality papers allowed students to see themselves as subjects of history. The first positionality paper was submitted when the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon had elapsed for 11 months; before the war escalated in Lebanon and the pager attack occurred. The second positionality paper was written at the end of the course, when the escalated 66-day war on Lebanon had ended, and the fragile ceasefire started. This assignment also coincided with the collapse of the Assad’s Syrian regime and the subsequent expansion of Israel’s occupation and intense bombing on large areas in Syria. As we discussed these events in real time, my students and I strove to make use of the theoretical tools offered in the course to work through intense feelings of fear and uncertainty while searching for sources of hope and solidarity. Their positionality papers reflect this accumulated work.

Students have embodied an identity that allowed them to understand the privilege of Western geopolitical perspectives, which suppress, annihilate, exploit, and extract from their bodies and their societies. They expanded their knowledge about the tools of settler colonialism as well as the imminent relation between the project of European modernity and colonialism. They engaged with Aimé Césaire’s claim that the Holocaust was not a one-time genocide on the Jewish population in Europe, but a repetition of the same European politics that have also played out in non-European countries (Césaire, 1955). However, some controversial ideas arose related to the trajectory of anti-colonial movements, particularly the transformation of most anti-colonial movements in Arab and African societies into authoritarian regimes once they gained power. Another controversy was the hierarchy of oppression in the world, whereas some struggles generate more visibility among global solidarity movements based on strategic interests and racial hierarchies. The intensity of genocidal violence and the lived experience of the war for all students further entrenched their belief in the need to prioritize resisting colonialism. As one graduate student, Jemal, wrote, “I initially believed that those concepts [anti-colonialism and decolonization] were tools used by authoritarian regimes to justify oppressive policies and an argument that masked their true intentions of maintaining control over people.” Partaking in these class discussions as each of us experienced extreme violence outside the classroom created a transformative experience of learning.

Historicizing Present Colonial Violence

The history of Israel’s wars and invasions in Lebanon should be situated within the Zionists’ inspirations to establish “Greater Israel,” that stretches from “the Brooke of the Egypt to the Euphrates,” i.e., annexing historic Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, part of today’s Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt (El Hage, 2024). While this project became more visible and openly articulated in the right-wing governments of Netanyahu, it has been propagated since the early inception of the Zionist project and articulated among both secular and religious politics in Israel. At the time of revising this article, Israel is waging a war and invasion of Lebanon that started on March 2, 2026, resulting in the most updated data of the martyrdom of 2050, injuring more than 6500, displacing more than a million people, and massively destroying entire villages and neighborhoods. This is the seventh invasion of /war on Lebanon since 1978, but the history of Zionist violence in Lebanon dates back to 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba. That year, Israeli forces committed massacres in the villages of Salha and Hula (Hourany, 2024), setting a precedent to ongoing violence and incursions such as repeated cross-border raids, kidnapping of civilians, detonation of houses, burning of crops, and aerial bombarding (Khayyat, 2022). In 1968, Israel bombed Beirut International Airport, and started a wave of assassinations of Palestinian leaders based in Lebanon in the 1970s. In 1978, it invaded South Lebanon, which led to 22 years of occupation, until the sustained resistance forced the Israeli army and their collaborators to withdraw. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon on a larger scale and occupied Beirut, the capital city, and was complicit in the Sabra and Shatila massacres that killed more than 3000 Palestinians and Lebanese in one day. Israeli aggression continued in 1993 and 1996, through war campaigns across the country. After Lebanon’s liberation in 2000 (except from Chebaa Farms, Kfarchouba, and El Ghajar), Israel launched another war in July 2006, resulting in the martyrdom of 1200 people, the injury of an estimated 4200, an internal displacement of hundreds of thousands and a massive destruction of infrastructure and houses (Ministry of Public Health of Lebanon, 2006). During the 2006 war, Israel adopted a military strategy involving large destruction of civilian infrastructure, in what became known as the Dahiyeh doctrine, named after Beirut’s southern suburbs which were the target of Israel bombardment (a strategy that will be used in all its wars after 2006 in Lebanon and Palestine). After October 7, a devastating 14-month war started on October 8, 2023, when the Hezbollah resistance launched the war in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. The military solidarity would escalate into a large-scale war in September 2024, resulting in the displacement of more than a million people, most of them from South Lebanon, Bekaa, and the southern suburbs of Beirut (Dahiyeh). The war resulted in the martyrdom of more than 4000 civilians, the injury of more than 16,500, an unknown number of missing, and the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure (Ministry of Public Health of Lebanon, 2024).

In the 15-month period between the “ceasefire” and the start of the ongoing war (November 2024–March 2026), the situation was fragile and can be considered a low-intensity war waged by Israel, which has violated the “ceasefire” more than 15,000 times, killing more than 350, injuring more than 1000, and causing damages worth millions of dollars. Israel expanded its occupation to key locations at the borders, and continued to undertake air and artillery strikes and assassinations, to violate Lebanese airspace and to expand its campaign of surveillance.

Contrary to what I originally thought, students looked forward to a space that would defy the logic of destruction and violence, and would offer a reliable and containing structure and predictable rhythms allowing them to process complex emotions and work through their experiences. The class provided a space to engage with the intensely relevant coursework as it spoke to their immediate lived realities. Insisting on attending hybrid classes—after a long night of loud bombing, or endlessly checking the news while in constant readiness to leave sometimes temporary housing to shield from bombs—symbolized “a refusal of the logic of the oppressor to define the boundaries of the possible” (Shuayb, 2025, p. 9). Here, Shuayb is referring to the destructive logics of Zionism that aim to annihilate all forms of life among Indigenous Palestinians and people in the region. It is a defiance of the coalescence of a violent past, an intensified violent present, and an absent future, and a redrawing of new possibilities while facing the very conditions the state of Israel is dictating and imposing. Indeed, during this time, our meetings and discussions became rooted in the collective aspiration to refuse Israel’s attempt at destroying all ways and means of life. In this sense, the classroom facilitated small acts of resistance that insisted on the need to meet and to think together about structures of domination and on learning from past and current anti-colonial movements around the world.

As soon as the pagers detonation took place on September 17, the university, in accordance with the announcements from the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, stopped its instructional activities, the same day when another wave of walkie talkies detonated. On September 23, Israel waged an escalated war on Lebanon, killing 558 people and injuring 1835 on that same day. The escalated war pushed the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (and consequently the university) to suspend all instructional activities on campus during the rest of this week. The suspension of classes would be further extended to the whole week of September 30. It was eventually determined that classes would resume synchronously online—and hybrid when allowed— and syllabi were accordingly adjusted.

As a professor, I had to intervene in students’ personal and emotional lives in ways that would be inappropriate in “normal” circumstances, redrawing the privacy lines between us. I sent an email to students checking on their situation and asking them specifically to let me know if they have been displaced, or welcomed displaced people in their homes, if they were living alone, if they have siblings and/or parents that will be heavily consuming the internet, working synchronously with them, and sharing any other information that they deem important for me to know. This information was needed to assess students’ access to technology, and to limit as much as possible the reproduction of educational inequalities. In this class of 11 students, half the students and I were displaced, three joined their families outside Lebanon, and others welcomed displaced relatives in their homes and/or volunteered in displacement-related services. All those who stayed in Lebanon suffered from frequent power cuts—ranging from 3 hours to 12 hours a day—recurrent internet blackouts, especially in the areas that witnessed high density of displaced people or in areas with buzzing Israeli surveillance drones. Two weeks after the escalated war, we resumed our classes online and collectively agreed on an adjusted syllabus.

Lived Colonial Violence

The entangled history of colonialism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and the past-present-future of the postcolonial states have shaped the personal lives of my students. Their lived and prolonged experience of wars, exploitation, genocide, and other systems of oppression enabled them to thoroughly understand the logic of coloniality and the way it is presented as a stage in modernity. The co-constitution of coloniality and modernity is translated into systemic structural violence expressed through imperial and colonial domination, land dispossession, resource extraction, racial subjugation, and epistemic violence (Bhambra, 2007; Go, 2016). For the students, colonization and war did not describe an alien experience of another community; indeed, each one of them dwells within a settler-colonial project and is witness to a totality of violence, i.e., “genocide, spaciocide, sociocide, politicide, urbicide, economicide, epistemicide, historicide, memoricide, culturicide, linguicide, phenomenocide, ontocide, semanticide, educide, ecocide,” as Abaher El Sakka (2022, p. 45) wrote. These terms invoked their own experiences, identities, self-discoveries, and transgenerational memory. As one of the students wrote, “I have found myself more entrenched in the subject of colonialism than ever before, affected by it on every possible level—my studies, my work, and even my mere existence has been altered beyond reparation.” While she has been living the effects of colonialism all her life, the 2024 war on Lebanon made visible and tangible the violence of colonialism.

Jana wrote of the Zionist regime and her grandmother Radiyah:

The Nakba is yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day as long as the Zionist regime is alive and breathing. I have acknowledged that Radiyah’s land became another alien’s settlement, and her backyard olive trees were a stranger’s prize. In learning about indigeneity, indigenous communities carry their culture, lands, and languages deep within their souls and refuse colonial systems of erasure and elimination. Radiyah carried Palestine within her soul for as long as she lived, but Palestine transcends beyond the bodies of those who have lived there. As Radiyah was gone, Palestine is still alive within the stories and the memories of its indigenous souls, within my soul. And while my feet never touched my grandmother’s backyard, and I never drank the cup of coffee with her as we sat under the olive trees; I realized that I was born out of the olive trees, and the olive trees are reborn within me.

The violence of Zionist settler colonialism is an ongoing process lived by Palestinian students in their intergenerational transmitted memory, in their inability to return to their homeland, in their ongoing sense of uprootedness, and in their commitment to liberation.

The transgenerational memory is a related experience by another Lebanese Russian student, who had been deprived of the chance to learn her ancestral Circassian language and connect to her roots. She wrote,

Colonialism was no longer an intangible entity, one whose mere existence erases languages, traditions, and population. Over the course of the 66 days of war, it took on a tangible nature. Colonialism became something I could see, smell, feel, and hear. With every falling missile, every sonic boom, every life lost, I found myself drawn further into its deadly jaws, with a looming sense of helplessness. I felt, as such, that there was nothing I could do but watch. And watch I did. I missed none of it. Every time the walls of my mother’s home shook, I ran to the window in the kitchen and pushed my head outside. I took it all in, the sound, the cloud of smoke, the smell of chemical fires. I memorized this feeling, photographed what I saw, and chronicled my emotions. I went to the destroyed quarters many times and remembered the names of the buildings, stores, restaurants, and markets that once were. Stories of war are often erased from our psyche. My father never told me of what he saw in his 64 years except in passing anecdotes. I, on the other hand, vow to pass these stories to my children, alongside every picture and video I have taken. Colonialism seeks to make us forget—we must strive to remember.

Here, the student is clearly articulating the connection between her own immediate experience with the war, the longer history of colonialism in various contexts, and the processes of political socialization and intergenerational dynamics that sedimented and shaped their political subjectivity. The endurance of violence in different contexts reinforces their commitment to anti-colonial politics, and, in contrast to her father, vows to transmit it to the future generations. The intimate and sensorial description of the war indicates a prolonged exposure to the violence and its experience as a collective society, in what Al-Masri (2019) calls “living with war” (Mo’ayashat el ‘arb), i.e., the normalization of war and colonial violence in everyday encounters. Students study colonialization and wars while simultaneously embodying them. Indeed, as explained earlier, the Zionist settler-colonial violence on Lebanon has been recurring since 1948, with various episodes of wars, prolonged occupation (from 1978 to 2000), recently occupied strategic areas in South Lebanon, in addition to airspace violations, assassinations, surveillance. . . Along with the colonial violence, Lebanon witnessed a 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990. In this highly militarized ecology, surveillance, landmines, cluster bombs, clashes, border control, are the everyday reality in many areas in Lebanon.

Students read about the foundations of the Zionist movement and its expansionist aspirations to establish the “Greater Israel” project (Chomsky, 2015; El Hage, 2024; El Na‘amani, 2017; Herzl, 1960). The ongoing annexation in the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, the establishment of private companies selling soon-to-be settlements in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and the usage of the term “Greater Israel” on the clothing of the Israeli Occupation Forces have further provided concrete examples about the expansionist aspirations of Israel (Middle East Eye, 2024a, 2024b). In her reflection, Jana wrote:

On a random Monday afternoon, the parasite came to cast its hell on Lebanon and proceeded with its repetitive nature of destruction and its violent offspring. I watched my relatives and my friends fleeing their homes, their treasured lands, and their memories of the South behind. The parasite was destroying, murdering, and devouring the sorrows of the Lebanese people. We have come to acknowledge that the parasite not only want to conquer the olives trees of Palestine, but the Cedars of Lebanon, the Jasmine trees of Syria, the Wadi Rum of Jordan, the Nile River of Egypt, the Euphrates River of Iraq, and the Empty Quarter of the Hijaz.

As this excerpt reveals, students analyzed the war on Lebanon within an understanding of the Zionist expansionist inspiration. They understood the war as a continuum of previous ones and of territorial expansion, in order to realize the “Greater Israel,” through expanding “little by little” and annexing more lands from historic Palestine and neighboring countries.

The Language of Dehumanization

The Israeli state continuously frames its actions as inherently defensive and presents itself as a beacon of civilization engaged in a moral battle “between the children of light and the children of darkness,” as articulated by Israeli officials on multiple occasions (El Sakka, 2025; Middle East Monitor, 2023; Murphy, 2023). Through this language, Palestinians are dehumanized and described as “human animals,” “beasts,” “monsters,” “cockroaches,” and “bloodthirsty terrorists” that seek the extermination of the Western civilization. Such dehumanizing rhetoric does more than justify violence; it actively strips Indigenous Palestinians of their humanity, reducing them to an animalistic essence that legitimizes their disposability and their extermination. As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2016) asserts, Palestinian bodies—both living and deceased—are rendered “no-bodies,” occupying a space outside the margins of what is recognized as human.

In class, we discussed the construction of the idea that Indigenous people are animals—the same dehumanizing language that each one of us was experiencing, through the Zionist discourses justifying their war crimes and genocide and through the Western and Western allies’ media distorting the narratives. Although the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples around the world is well-documented (El Sakka, 2025), its ongoing and continuous occurrence across settler societies is nevertheless disturbing. Students experienced the same cynicism when we analyzed a speech by the European Union’s outspoken foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who gave opening remarks at the inauguration of the European Diplomatic Academy in Belgium in November 2022 (Geopolitical Economy Report, 2022). In that speech, Borrell described Europe as a “garden” with economic prosperity, political freedom, and social cohesion, while the rest of the world was a “jungle” aiming to invade the garden. Borrell continued, saying that in order to prevent them from invading the garden, Europeans should be more engaged with the jungle. This openly articulated dehumanization and racism, and the call to colonize other countries affirmed for all of us the ongoing nature of structural and symbolic violence inflicted on non-Western societies.

While students were familiar with dehumanizing language and understood the underlying rationale, encountering this language was always troubling and unsettling. The grotesque, genocidal violence in Gaza, the deafening silence of the world leaders, and the inability of international institutions to intervene, “exposed global coloniality, colonial complicity, and moral bankruptcy in their most obscene, unadulterated, and shameless forms” (Kabel, 2024). Carla wrote, “The major difficulty I have been having is navigating this moral shock. I believe the whole idea of justice was shattered during this war, and I will never be able to see the world in the same way.” The USA’s veto of a ceasefire in Gaza on November 21, 2024—an expected yet demoralizing and enraging action—further shattered any hope in international institutions and law. As Majed Bamya, the Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine, said in his speech at the UN General Assembly on November 21, 2024,

Is there a UN charter for Israel that is different from the charter you all have? Tell us. Is there an international law for them, an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die? What the hell does Israel need to do more for this council to act under Chapter 7? Or will this council be the last place on earth that cannot recognize a threat to peace when they see it when it is so glaring, so undeniable? You are witnessing the attempt to annihilate a nation, destroy a nation. It is not even hidden—it is in plain sight. (Al Jazeera English, 2024)

The last day of the class, November 26, 2024, coincided with the last day before the fragile ceasefire came into effect. As Israel began carpet-bombing vast areas in Lebanon, it issued more than 40 evacuation orders in Beirut alone. Hala had just started her presentation discussing the ideas of Ghassan Kanafani, a revolutionary Palestinian author, as these evacuation orders were released; in the space of one minute, we received 16 evacuation orders for the area in Beirut where most of us were living. Zainab informed us she was leaving the class, as the building next to hers was in the target area for an attack. Joe interrupted to inform us about another evacuation close to his place, and my husband entered the room where I was teaching to tell me not to be afraid, as the Israeli army were about to hit less than 100 meters from where I was displaced. Throughout the semester, sharing the latest evacuation orders from the Israeli Occupation Army had already become the norm. The violence of these orders takes shape as a form of psychological warfare on us, as a tactic of political terror producing an endless feeling of emergency, and conditioning of the population to view these orders as normal and routine.

Later, in her final positionality paper, Zainab, a Lebanese student, would describe her escape from her building to the streets to an unknown place and the chaos and screams of people around her:

I cannot stop thinking about the words of Josep Borrell [European Union’s outspoken foreign policy chief] as he gave our lands the definition of a jungle, we discussed it all in class, and I watched its implications and consequences unfold in front of my eyes. Europe is a garden, everything works, and it is the best combination of freedom, modernity, etc. The rest of the world is a jungle. The gardeners will take care of the garden, they build high walls to protect the garden. So, the gardeners have to go to the jungle, they have to be “engaged” with the rest of the world to prevent the jungle from coming in. But the insinuated truth behind those words was embodied perfectly in Netanyahu’s speech as he explained the mission behind this war, how Israel must fight human animals and bloodthirsty beasts, and how it is the children of light against the children of darkness. The civilized is against the law of the jungle.

The violence of Zionist settler colonialism is fundamentally entangled with a web of imperial and colonial structures across geographies, as well as with the violence of racial capitalism (Desai, 2021). This perspective situates Zionist settler colonialism alongside American imperialism and other colonial/ settler colonial projects in the world. This intrinsic relation is maintained and sustained through material and non-material support, through military aid and training, diplomatic lobbying, political intervention, corporate investments, financial and economic aids, judicial structures, and ideological justifications.

Space of Building Solidarity

It was particularly in the second half where the course became a site of possibilities and imaginaries, of learning about solidarity relations and imagining ways to foster further alliances, and of exercising agency over our lived experience of genocide, war, and dehumanization. Students were able to locate themselves as agents of change as their spatial and temporal references about anti-colonial and anti-imperial solidarity building expanded. While facing various and intertwined dimensions of violence, a pedagogical and political space was opened for potential social transformation, where we could forge solidarity relations with others across the globe by acknowledging our connected experiences of colonial violence. Tuesday afternoons became a rendezvous for most of us, a space where we exercise a pedagogy of sumud and learn about past solidarities and the possibilities of reviving or solidifying these experiences, despite the significant global geopolitical changes since the anti-colonial era. It was a virtual space to discuss the developments of the war on Lebanon and the genocide in Gaza, and the solidarity actions around the world, and most important, to refuse to be erased.

The post-World War II (1950s–1970s) witnessed a period of anti-colonial revolutions that spanned Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and encompassed both top-down and bottom-up practices. Anti-colonial revolutions in the Global South intersected with the African American civil rights movements, anti-imperial movements, mobilization of diasporas and progressive groups in the Global North, and the creation of Third World Internationalist imaginaries of solidarity (Sukarieh, 2024). Revolutionary strategies, ideas, and military training were diffused and exchanged among revolutionaries cutting across state and race borders to create radical global emancipatory politics. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was rooted in Third World Internationalism and in anti-colonial solidarity logics and collaborated with other revolutionary struggles around the world (Abdulhadi, 2017; Tabar, 2017; Turki, 1972). In this context, the Palestinian liberation became one of the iconic causes in the 1960s, when the solidarity relations between different movements and the PLO were translated morally and materially through funding, training, and the exchanging of human, cultural, and material resources.

The interrogation of the structures, tools and processes of colonialism and settler colonialism was instrumental to establish an anti-colonial pedagogy and learn from past solidarity relations around the world. Students were able to trace the continuity of global violence (albeit with new technological tools) into our present day, and to outline an entrenched system that oppresses in order to further accumulate wealth, land, and power. During the class discussions, they unpacked the intertwined relations between technologies of surveillance in the West Bank, the drones in Lebanon and Gaza, and the high-tech border walls in Native American Lands. They investigated the dissemination of border control ideas between Israel and American Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and analyzed the slogans of anti-ICE protests in the USA, and the revival of solidarity relations with various Latino communities.

Shifting the lens from the violent structures to the resistance of these structures offered students a window of hope in the midst of the extreme violence we were living in, and exemplified how emancipatory pedagogy can be exercised, even during the war. Learning about past solidarities allowed students to “reimagine the collective identities of those who share the same struggle, the captivating mosaic of resistance against elimination . . . For every colonizer, a rebel is born. For every silenced voice, another rises in defiance,” a student wrote in her final positionality paper.

Building a decolonial pedagogy and (re)imagining possibilities were achievable through analyzing the statements of solidarity movements, reviewing their strategies, discursively analyzing their publications, and learning about their grievances. Paying attention to their political imaginaries and their practices became a central debate in classes, taking into consideration the changing global order from the 1960s to today—and also the possibilities, had the social movements joined in solidarity with each other. Tracing the continuities of these movements with more contemporary ones (such as Black Lives Matter, or Idle No More), and with discussions taking place at the encampments in Western countries illuminated the enduring nature of political solidarity and the possible resurgence of historic solidarity relations during intensified moments. The classroom was also a space to reflect on our own positionalities in relation to the various struggles. While we are victims of colonial and imperial violence, we acknowledged that our Arab societies are rife with anti-blackness sentiments that may hinder the possibility of solidifying solidarity relations. While we discussed how the economy is used as a neocolonial tool, we also questioned our own embeddedness in exploitative economic activities.

It is precisely within these discussions and radical imaginaries operating in parallel to the ongoing bombs that the classroom practiced sumud and enforced its decolonial pedagogy. The space that we built was not only one for resisting our shared experience of violence and for rejecting our erasure but also for (re)building anti-colonial political consciousness and unbreaking the colonization of our imagination. At times, we were hopeful, and at other times, we were just daydreaming. Observing the sumud and care of Palestinians in Gaza as well as the mutual aid effort for displaced people in Lebanon gave us rays of hope in the midst of somber realities. These moments confirm what bell hooks (1994) perceived of the classroom as “a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (p. 207).

On Learning Through War: Final Thoughts ³

What I am proposing in this article is not a pedagogical reflection on the students living in war, but rather a reflection by, for, and with them about the meanings and challenges of learning amidst an ongoing war. As our class lived through the unlawful Zionist attack on Lebanon, we continued to learn and reflect on the history of colonialism and settler colonialism and the global matrix of power that upholds it. As we were reading about the colonial effort to dehumanize the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, we were also listening to Zionist speeches that sought to humiliate us. And as we were learning about anti-colonial movements of the 1950s–1970s, and the Indigenous insurgency of the last three decades, we were also witnessing the millions that protested in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon in the world, and the various strategies movements deployed in their efforts to stop Gaza’s genocide and Lebanon’s war.

To teach the sociology of colonialism and anti-colonialism during genocide and wars is to make sense of our personal and collective experiences; to create a space of hope, solidarity, and radical imagination of a better future—a future that has been enacted in the past and is being practiced in several contexts, but needs to be broadly revived. It is about co-creating a pedagogical space with students where identities get destabilized, structures of power get revealed, colonial occupation of the mind can be unlearned, and where emancipatory politics get articulated, negotiated, and practiced.

The intensification of attacks on critical education—including Palestine studies, critical race theories, gender studies, anti-racist movements, and other topics that challenge the hegemonic structures of power—threatens the foundations of critical thinking and challenges the role of the university as a space for transformative and critical thought. Increasingly, educators have a responsibility to engage in emancipatory and liberatory education and uphold the values of social justice. As sociologists, it is our responsibility to create this space for students, to allow them to critically discuss the power structures in the world, and to imagine—and enact—a better world. If we cannot commit to this work during a livestreamed genocide, amid ongoing wars, deepening inequalities, and the global erosion of democratic rights—then when will we?