The Struggle for Palestinian Rights, and Justice Everywhere: Conversation with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

On today’s show, a conversation with Dr Rabab Abdulhadi, who has recently won a major national award from the Middle East Studies Association for her lifetime of work.

Dr. Abdulhadi is an organic intellectual and a renowned scholar-activist. She is the founding director and Senior Scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU).

Her publications include the influential and much-cited articles, “The Palestinian Women’s Autonomous Movement: Emergence, Dynamics & Challenges” (1998) and “Tread Lightly: Teaching Gender and Sexuality in Time of War” (2005); as well as the more recent, “Framing Resistance Call & Response: Reading Assata Shakur’s Black Revolutionary Radicalism in Palestine” (2018), and Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence (2019).

In 2017, Dr. Abdulhadi, along with Suzanne Adely (President of the National Lawyers Guild), Angela Davis, and Selma James (feminist activist and partner of the Black radical thinker C.L.R. James), co-authored an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Confronting apartheid has everything to do with feminism."

As a community organizer, she co-founded the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America; and served as a founding member of the recently launched Palestinian Feminist Collective.

In our conversation we talk about the institutional pressures she has worked under, and the slew of harassing frivolous lawsuits that have been leveled at her, and others who teach about Palestine, and the connections between Palestine work and all struggles for justice.  We end by talking about the ways we can take on the burden of activism and lean on and learn from each other in struggle.