 Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Rafiq Ziyada. I am a lecturer in the Politics Department here at SOAS, University of London, and I will be moderating our event tonight. I'm very excited to welcome you to the fifth event in the SOAS University of London, Continuing the Conversation series. SOAS will be hosting more virtual events as the month comes along. Today's event will be recorded. Please use the following hashtags to discuss or follow. Hashtag SOAS, SOAS alumni, or we are SOAS. Today's event is with assistant professor and acting and she will be discussing US and Palestine shoot to kill policies and transnational resistance. This is a very timely conversation and it is very exciting and a pleasure for me to be introducing Noora. Noora will present for about 20 minutes and then we will have a question and answer session. Please submit your questions in the chat box to the side. We cannot get to all of the questions but I will try my best to get to most of them. Introducing Noora for all of you tonight. Most of you would know her who are familiar with this topic. Noora is a human rights attorney and an assistant professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the program in criminal justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Noora is a co-founding editor of the famous blog and electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines both scholarly expertise as well as local knowledge. She is the author of the excellent justice for some law in the question of Palestine Stanford University Press, which is the winner of the 2019 Palestine book concert by the Middle East Monitor and the winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards, Bronze, Medal in Current Affairs, Current and Foreign Affairs. It is my pleasure to welcome Noora. We will have the conversation and turn to your questions. Noora, over to you. Great. Okay, fantastic. Take two. I was saying what an honor it is to be with you, Daktora and sister Rafiq Zyadeh. It's an honor to be here with the SOAS community. I want to, I'm going to be reading my remarks for the sake of time, especially because there's so many events unfolding that there are more critical analysis that are not part of the system, so I want to leave room for that conversation. The purpose of this talk and the theme of it was to think about transnationalism, transnational solidarity, but also transnationalism as a practice and a theoretical approach how we understand state violence. And in doing that, one of the things that I'm confronted with is, for me, transnationalism is a contemporary iteration of internationalism. Historically, and internationalism, as I understand it, is an anti-imperialist framework, an analytical framework of understanding the world through an anti-imperial lens. So thinking through that, having that hold this conversation, I want to think about contemporary forms of state violence in the United States and Palestine and specifically the phenomenon of shoot to kill. To have this conversation, I'm going to start from the very personal because my family, like many Palestinian families and marginalized communities, has lost a beloved member of our family as a result of shoot to kill policy. So I'll start from there in the personal to think through what does transnationalism do for us in this moment. What does it reveal about racism in Palestine? What does it reveal about colonialism in the United States? My cousin Ahmed, Ariqat is a 27 year old young man with a screening t-shirt business, a fiance and a future. He was on a journey from Abu Diz to Bethlehem on June 23rd, running errands for his sister's wedding, about two months ago. He rented a Hyundai that has since been revealed as the subject of an international class action lawsuit indicating motor malfunction and this inexplicable tendency of the Hyundai vehicle to jerk out of control. That is precisely what happened with Ahmed as he waited at the container checkpoint that separates Abu Diz from Bethlehem to Palestinian cities. It bears to be noted that so many of the demarcations that are inscribed by Israel's settler colonial apparatus, so framed as security measures, are actually intended to fragment, isolate and separate Palestinians from one another. As Ahmed waited at that checkpoint when he was called to approach, his car jerked out of control and he hit four soldiers who were there, all fully armed. One of them was knocked to the floor and as we saw in video, quickly gets right back up on her feet in enough time to witness her fellow soldier shoot seven rounds of live ammunition into Ahmed's body who had stepped out of the car raising his arms indicating that he had no arms and taking a step back. Watching that, I can't describe it in any other way. Besides the horror of having to watch that in real time, watching him wilt literally like a flower onto the asphalt. Once he's on the ground, he's bleeding out and he's not shot dead immediately. There was an opportunity to save his life. When the Israeli ambulance approaches in order to treat the Israeli soldier who was only lightly wounded, they declined to treat Ahmed. Though they've told human rights watch and others otherwise, we understand from the first set of witnesses that they declined to treat Ahmed. Soldiers also refused access to a Palestinian ambulance to treat Ahmed and they refused access to his father, Mustafa, who arrived on the scene as well, then forcing him to bleed out for over an hour before he died. Immediately afterwards, they compounded the car, they confiscated Ahmed's body, they placed it in a morgue at Tel Aviv University in the Queensborough Forensic Institute and have refused to release it now for over 80 days. We're talking two and a half months for over 80 days and I cannot tell you how much we as a few individuals in the family have organized ourselves. It's a joke. It's absurd to say that we're seeking justice for Ahmed. There is no justice in the situation beyond the full liberation of Palestinians. Palestinians understand that Ahmed is unfortunately one of many. Our hope is that he be the last and already we know he's not the last because others have been killed since June 23rd. One in captivity in detention and another one near his home during an Israeli raid. Two young men now remain in critical condition, so we fail to do even that. But the other work that we've been doing is just to release Ahmed's body from captivity. We've filed a submission at the United Nations with 87 cosponsoring organizations addressing five special repertoires. We filed a petition against Tel Aviv University calling for boycott indicating once again the imbrication of the academy and Israel settler colonial regime and the fact that you can't necessarily take the university out claiming some sort of objectivity when the entwinement is so clear and obvious. We've organized ARACAT family members who reside in the United States to lobby six U.S. senators to directly impose and pressure Israeli authorities to release Ahmed's body as a humanitarian exception. We have not only failed on that front, but we think that that may have been counterproductive as those who were appealed to have made have since then made the policy even more harsh, which I'll tell you in a minute. We've obviously launched a media strategy and retained an attorney with Adela, Adela attorneys to represent the family at the Israeli High Court to release the body. Upon the hearing in July, the High Court responded that the government had provided no justification for withholding the body and has two weeks to do so. It has since been a month and a half and they have not only failed to provide a justification, right? And this was on just to let you know the depths of violence. On the 33rd day of captivity after death, the High Court said to the government, you haven't provided a justification, which makes you wonder how have you held on to his body for 33 days without having to tell anybody why you do that, right? But since then, rather than provide a justification, now the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, who is incorrectly and inaccurately has been considered the liberal alternative to Likud Netanyahu, he is representing the black and white, black and blue and white party, made the policy more harsh so that no Palestinian bodies can be released under any circumstances. Instead, they want to retain them to do a prisoner exchange with Hamas specifically for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers who are now held in the Gaza Strip. Putting aside the fact, and I'm pinning it, you can ask me in the Q&A, but even this equivalence between the now 67 bodies held at Tel Aviv University and the two Israeli soldiers held by Hamas, there is no equivalence. It's a false equivalence and one that is deliberately obscuring the power disparity and what might be considered an irregular armed conflict. But ask me questions about that later. For now, I want to, you know, just highlight that in the course of this ordeal, which was, I did receive a lot of attention, especially because Ahmed's killing was caught on camera, as well as his slow death was caught on camera. And many, many allies and friends reached out to encourage me to draw the parallel with the movement for black lives in the United States. We are in the midst of one of the most significant black uprisings in U.S. history. It has reverberated across the globe. There are solidarity demonstrations in at least 18 countries across the entire continental United States, as well as occupied territories of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Sweden has issued a weapons sanctions on the United States. It will not transfer tear gas to the U.S. in response to its behavior. And this issue has also been taken up by U.N., various U.N. tribunals, indicating once again the international nature of white supremacy and the threat that it poses to the whole world as the authors of the 1951 submission we charged genocide. The American blacks accused the United States of genocide against their population in 1951. Once that legal framework had crystallized in a post-World War II order, they indicated in that submission that white supremacy threatens to become the impetus for fascism in the United States and across the globe and thereby threatens world security in the same way that the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and Nazi ideology indeed threatened world security and destabilized it. And we are bearing out their very prescient analysis. Because of the way that we understand and have accepted that white supremacy is just wrong and that black uprising is just, there was an appeal, a personal appeal to me to draw the parallel between Ahmed's killing, you know, an unarmed killing, you know, comparing him to Eric Garner or comparing him to Michael Brown, who was also left to bleed out for four hours in Ferguson's summer heat in August 2014 before his family as a form of terror, state terrorism, against the family and the black community. And because we understand that the idea was make the appeal to the American public, draw the comparison and explain to people this isn't about security, but that indeed Palestinian lives matter too. I obviously have not taken that appeal public, one, because being an ethical solidarity with black uprising, I didn't want in any way to inadvertently co-opt the conversation or detract from what it's been 400 years. I mean, there's finally attention to, you know, the violent nature of white supremacy in the United States. There's high risk of drawing parallels, especially to Palestine, developing in conversation and organically. That was one. The other reason I didn't want to do that was also because there's something to be said about the flatness of an analogy. What do we lose in making an analogy without bearing out its texture? And what I want to do in this conversation is actually bear out that texture, flesh it out a little bit, because the analysis, black Palestinian solidarity and a transnational analysis is incredibly illuminating, but not in the way of just indicating sameness or similarity, but in a way that urges us to think about what is the anti-racist dimension of Israel's settler colonial apartheid regime? What is the anti-colonial nature of the black liberation struggle? I obviously didn't stay on my writing, but here I say that not all blacks, American blacks and Palestinians believe in black Palestinian solidarity. A lot of American blacks see their struggle as one for equality and making the U.S. better so that it can reach its full potential as the United States. The second is that a lot of Palestinians see their struggle as a nationalist struggle against Israel, but not necessarily against U.S. hegemony in the Middle East or against client-era regimes or the extraction of natural resources in the region or the control over the region in order to compete with other colonial powers. This anti-imperialist analysis is a political orientation and not a matter of identity as such black Palestinian solidarity is not merely about sympathy with one another, it's literally a commitment to joint struggle for joint futures. Based on this, one of the things that it helps us do is bear that analysis that I discussed. On the first, what about how do we think through the racialization of Palestinians? Since 2000, at the start of the second, what's known as the second in the fall, that Israel has created a new category of war that has allowed it to use military force against Palestinians and made any Palestinian use of force terroristic and criminal. A central part of this approach has been a legal technology that I've called shrinking civilians, quote-unquote shrinking civilians, which essentially shrinks the number of Palestinians considered civilians. And thus, once you say that they're not civilians, they become legitimate targets of war. Otherwise, civilians are always immune and never targets of war. The targeting of them is considered terrible, and the targeting of them negligently would be considered as collateral damage. And yet what Israel has done with using legal technology that I'm happy to address is to actually use the language of law in order to shrink who gets counted as a Palestinian civilian in doing so. They've expanded the permissible use of force that Israel can use, as well as the tolerance for the high registers of death and destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure, as we've seen in multiple wars against the Gaza Strip, and then recently onslaughts against the Gaza Strip, and then most recently in the Gaza March of Return where Palestinians were shot to kill like birds. And I'll address that shortly. But on the shrinking civilian itself, it's predicated on the thorough racialization of Palestinians as innately dangerous subjects, racial ideologies reflecting settler colonial desires to remove and replace the native populations, render Palestinian bodies unwanted, and sanctions they're killing with impunity. The native population is by definition terroristic and presumed guilty by virtue of its refusal to disappear. Thus, Palestinians are racialized as dangerous not because of how they may individually harm Israelis, but because their national existence challenges Israel's settler sovereignty. And the most obvious example of that is the fact that the right of return and the return of Palestinian refugees is framed as an existential threat to Israel. Most recently, as I mentioned, we saw this and how it was deployed against marchers in the Great March of Return. Several human rights organizations challenged Israel's shoot to kill policy where they basically set up snipers on the perimeter at a distance of 300 meters on hilltops around a territory that's already circumscribed by a militarized fence. And the day before the protests began, in March 2018, the head of Gaby Ashkenot said that excessive use of force will be deployed. So before they saw what the protests were going to be like had already decided what kind of force that they would use, that was challenged in the Israeli High Court as being an illegitimate use of force against civilian protesters, which the Great March of Return was, and yet the army, the Israeli government responded and said, no, this is not a civilian protest. There are no civilians. If they're there, they're there as a matter of exception. And in fact, the Israeli High Court, upon hearing, agreed with the Israeli government and called the Great March of Return, quote, a new tactic in the struggle against Israel, end, quote. The court's acceptance of the state's agreement that Hamas led the protests overdetermined its conclusions and foreclosed the possibility of Palestinian civilian protests. This has had real consequences. Between March and October 2018, Israel killed 217 Palestinians, including 40 children injured, nearly 23,000. And in response, Palestinians killed one Israeli soldier. So in any other legal register, this would be considered a disproportionate use of force. And yet under Israel's new legal technology, it becomes permissible in the language of law. Israel today defends Ahmad's killing and claims the right to use similar force against, again, right? Not that they defend what they did to Ahmad, but they insist that it was the right thing to do because it does not consider that Ahmad's car accident could have been human or mechanical error. Like nearly all Palestinians, he was considered always already guilty. It is based on the same Schmittian logic of a priori culpability, which assumes that certain groups have greater propensity to violence or criminal behavior, so that they should be stopped before they can strike. This logic, the Schmittian logic, who is the infamous Nazi jurist who is also central to so many theories in national security law, but this logic of a priori culpability is at the heart of preemptive strikes, as well as stop and frisk, as well as the school-to-prison pipeline in the United States. By attributing social behavior to nature as opposed to environment, the problem is framed as the group itself and not the context. Hence, the target for remedy is the group through dialogue, through nonviolent training, through counter-extremism workshops, through surveillance, over-securitization, and cruel, cruel punishment and not the context that needs to be remedied. In the United States, we understand this attitude towards American blacks, but we stand to benefit from an anti-colonial analysis that brings, you know, forests into light the colonial nature of white settler-colonial rule in the U.S. Defined as a property value, whiteness can be understood as the right to ownership of land, of self, and of country. Race can thus be understood, as Patrick Wolfe has shown, as colonialism speaking, a technology invented to ensure the externality of racialized subjects from the national body politic and their geographic separation and containment, right? So this is a colonial logic about the separation containment within the colony. In 1951, as I mentioned, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the UN the We Charge Genocide petition and explained that, quote, once the classic method of lynching was the rope, now it's the policeman's bullet. End quote. The policeman's bullet, like lynchings historically, were used and are used as a form of collective punishment to ensure a rigid and higher article racial order aimed at preserving white supremacy in the United States. Black internationalists in the U.S. have conceived of themselves as an internal colony whose conditions in futures mirror those of all other colonized peoples. These conditions aimed at limiting black life in the United States include ghettoization, exclusion from gainful employment, medical experimentation, forced sterilization, exclusion from quality housing, lack of access to quality health care education and credit, the systematic taking of life with impunity, and then finally the criminal justice system, which features over policing, racial profiling, selective enforcement, mass incarceration, disproportionate sentencing, lack of adequate representation and hyper surveillance, right? So what the overemphasis on policing in the United States and police brutality, what we miss in that critique, which is the rightful critique, is that policing is the end of really a much broader problem and works to do two things. It works both to exploit black communities in order to make them more vulnerable for, you know, the takings of their labor, the takings of their time, the takings of their likelihood of life, and then simultaneously works to make them more vulnerable for prosecution and incarceration and basically formal captivity. All of this, of course, is to protect the privileges of a white racial class. And so similar to historic slave patrols, which in the United States was the first function of police, which was to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to capture enslaved African Americans fleeing the juridical slave south to the north to capture them and return them to their enslavers. So like the police, like their function historically today, is merely the enforcement arm of a settler colonial political economy. James Baldwin in 1966 highlighted that this was the primary role of police, which was to keep black people in their place and then, you know, critiques the response to any black protest or black activity specifically in Harlem by describing Harlem as occupied territory. He writes, it is axiomatic and occupied territory that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once with the full weight of occupying forces. End quote. Indeed, black protest in the United States has historically and continues to be treated like an insurgency and reflects the steady militarization of police in the 20th century. So just so you have an idea, if you're paying attention to the protests in the United States from Portland to Kenosha, Wisconsin, Kansas City, Missouri, Chicago, and elsewhere, we see heavy military tactics that are being used. But this has a legacy that begins during the U.S.'s intervention in Vietnam, where it perfected counterinsurgency tactics that it then brought back to the United States and has manifested as SWAT teams specifically to squash the Watts uprising in 1965 and later to squash what it described as the war on drugs, which has really been a war on black communities. During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration also passed the Safe Streets Act and allocated surplus weapons from Vietnam to U.S. cities to quash rebellions. And in 1990, Congress enacted the 1033 program, which also transfers excess military weapons from theaters of U.S. wars back to local precincts, all indicating the militarization of the police in suppressing black uprising and other people of color uprising, but primarily black uprising. Since September 11th, enforcement has also been training in Israel, which is a continuation of this trend. The risk, you know, and many people have said, oh, the U.S. acts as it does because it was trained by Israelis, that's actually not true. That's actually not true. Yes, there has been an exchange of technologies. Yes, it indicates something worrisome, which is that Israel, which decries Palestinians as a foreign enemy, is training the U.S. on tactics to use against people of color and black communities, which are not a foreign enemy, except that's what we're being told. But beyond that, what we do by sharing that inaccurate description of U.S. law enforcement training in Israel is to obscure a colonial reality in the United States. Trump has recently called these black activists, quote, terrorists, and he's not borrowing from a distant geographic experience, but he's continuing the trend of casting American blacks as enemy of the state. Hence black protest as a national insurgency that justifies state violence both to quell and prevent them. This has not been lost on anti-imperialist black activists who understand their condition as reflective of an international order. These activists are committed to scaling back U.S. hegemony from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean. So as they engage in black Palestinian solidarity, I think now as historically it's really been engaged in a black internationalist tradition of understanding the colonial nature of the United States and understanding that their fate is not tied to making the U.S. live up to its potential as outlined in the Constitution, but actually shattering American exceptionalism and is a commitment to decolonize the U.S. as it is to decolonize the rest of the world. In solidarity with Palestinians in the U.S., activists have challenged technologies used by U.S. prison systems in the Israeli military, like G4S surveillance systems, the police exchange program, the one that I was just describing, and organized campaigns to end U.S. military support to Israel, which amounts to $3.8 billion a year. Not merely, right? This is great to challenge that military aid and part of the framing of challenging that military aid has been to say, well, if you're not funding these endless wars, you can actually be providing and making more robust a U.S. welfare state that would diminish the need of securitization of people. And that's certainly true, but as scholar and activist Judy Peters in Smith has pointed out to me and others, when we think about scaling back the U.S. military abroad, we can also think about what is a future without military presence, right? That opens up for the possibility for us to imagine life outside of resistance to this, to endless war and securitization. These, this work is both working to make prisons obsolete, as well as to challenge U.S. imperialism, which has given rise to the hashtag defund police, hashtag defund military. And in doing so, activists have demonstrated how a vision aimed at global decolonization can be operationalized in local projects. We've seen this work already being done. Barbara Lee has proposed slashing $350 million from the U.S. military budget. We've seen the Minneapolis city council disband the police. We've seen several different U.S. municipalities cut the budget of police. All of that is moving in the right direction. And what we've witnessed is basically a generational shift that's happened in the past few months in the United States that's akin to other generational shifts casting racism as an illegitimate system that has cast colonialism as an illegitimate form of governance. So, you know, I want to just end that in this solidarity and in this work by bearing out, you know, by using black Palestinian solidarity to both tease out an anti-imperialist framework that helps us recognize what racism might be doing and is not necessarily just redundant, but might be redundant with colonialism in Palestine, what colonialism is doing in the United States and may not be just redundant with racism in the U.S. And all for the sake of insisting not upon programs to democratize and democratize the settler colony for greater integration, but in fact are aimed at a future of decolonization and a commitment to decolonial futures. Thank you. Thank you so much, Noora, for that very informative and moving and grounded discussion and presentation. We have some excellent questions already. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to try and take as many questions as I possibly can, but if people can keep them to questions or I'll try to reframe comments as questions as best as I can. One of the first thoughts was around the differentiation or how do you weigh up the difference between the shoot to kill policies versus the shoot to maim policies as we saw in the Gaza Strip, of course. That's an excellent question. I think that both are operationalized along the spectrum of the availability of Palestinian bodies for taking and for destruction. I think that Jasper Puar has highlighted to us how a shoot to maim approach basically spares Israel from a rebuke of actual killing but and makes it appear as if it's somehow in compliance if they only maim in order to incapacitate Palestinians, which reifies a security framework and actually makes it appear as humanitarian when in fact I think both indicate the sheer disposability of Palestinian bodies, which is predicated on a deeply racial analysis of the potential of Palestinian humanity. Obviously Palestinians reject that and don't need to respond to it, but these are the messages that are sent. I think both need to be critiqued just as much for better or for worse. It's the shoot to kill policies that are what receive the greatest amount of attention, but also as other abolitionists have pointed out to us like Dericka Pernell upon the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. What if the cop only kept his knee on the neck of Floyd for seven minutes and 16 seconds instead of eight minutes and 16 seconds, right? He wouldn't have been killed, but he would have certainly been maimed. Doesn't he still deserve the uprising that we are now witnessing? Are we just trying to tame state forces into into maiming rather than killing or is the vision for something completely different and more radical? Alexandra is wondering if you could elaborate on the role of age and gender in shoot to kill policies, especially the criminalization of young men. So I think one of the things that we see in your right to point out that so many of the victims are shot and killed without respect to gender or race, right? We've seen this, sorry, gender or age. We see this very, you know, as a legal matter and the fact that Palestinian children are considered adults a year before Israeli children are considered adults. So even in here you can see how legal technology is used to obscure these types of violence by mere, you know, an arbitrary designation of when somebody becomes mature. That's on the face of it. But what we also see is a lack of distinction, a lack of distinction. When I was discussing earlier this idea of a priori culpability, that concept is, and I said it's at the heart of preventive, you know, preventive strikes or preemptive self-defense, right? Or stop and frisk. At the heart of it is this idea that certain groups are racialized as born with a propensity to kill and a propensity to violence. So whether they be Palestinian adults or Palestinian children, in this framework the Palestinian children will eventually become a Palestinian adult and all along the way the insistence is that they are going to be violent, right? So when we obscure and fail to distinguish even these categories, it's less about saying that children don't matter and more about insisting that Palestinian behavior can be attributed somehow to their nature rather than to the context in which they live, which separates them and distinguishes them from any other people that we would consider how they would react under similar circumstances. Suddenly they become exceptionalized and distinguished so that they no longer, we no longer analyze that behavior based on the circumstances, but basically on the logic of whether or not they are in fact inherently dangerous. Just to let over 100 people that are with us right now know we're going to be wrapping up in around 10, 15 minutes so please put your questions in the chat so you can get the chance before we have to wrap up. Changing gears a little bit, here someone is asking about a comparison between Israel and what Arab regimes, particularly the Syrian regime has pointed out as what they do to their own people. Does that weaken the Palestinian cause or does it present it as one of many examples of abuse of human rights and state terrorism in the region? That's a great question. And it's very loaded, obviously. So let me start by saying that one of the reasons that the question of Syria I think has become so difficult to deal with and engage in is because we have not left room for nuance to both understand and anti-imperialist critique and hold that intention with what are unabashed state crimes and state violence and, you know, state terrorism against Syrian people and I think that we should be able to hold that together. So does the next part of the question that I want to answer is that nothing that any state does, not least Israel, operates in a vacuum but is actually reverberating practice that can be replicated and entrenched across the globe. So for example, I mentioned shoot to kill policies but other forms of legal technology that we need to be really aware of that Israel has basically set in motion that was later adopted by the United States and has since been adopted by Saudi Arabia and its coalition against Yemen as well as by the United Arab Emirates and even, you know, combating their own adversaries has been the idea of preventive force, right? And what they did there was to take self-defense, here we go on a little bit of a legal tangent, but what they do is say self-defense has at least two meanings. One is the Charter Meeting and Article 51 of the UN Charter that describes it that you can only use force against another actor in the case of an armed attack. Will the customary definition of it doesn't require an armed attack but requires that the use of force be necessary, proportionate, and imminent, right? And what Israel does in the start of the 2000s and in response to the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada is to diminish the framework of imminent so that there's no longer a time, a temporal requirement in deciding when to kill somebody. So self-defense says that you can't kill somebody when you have no other time to use other means to incapacitate, right? What Israel has done in its analysis is to say we don't know when they're going to attack, but we know that they're going to attack for sure. So even if you kill them, right, these suspected assailants in their sleep, in bed, with their families, in their home with their families, that becomes justified because you're preventing something that was going to happen inevitably based on, you know, military intelligence that is not, cannot be scrutinized by any other actors, right? The U.S. has adopted, this is why, how they transform Israel transforms extra judicial assassinations into this neutered concept of targeted killings. They were the progenitors of this, you know, lethal violence and legal technology that the United States adopts and has been using. And in fact, it's taken to its apex in new form when the Obama administration uses it. The Obama administration uses it because now it's no longer capturing, you know, suspects in the theater of war and kidnapping them to bring them to Guantanamo Bay. And I say kidnapping deliberately as opposed to capturing because so many of the detainees in Guantanamo are not combatants. We're just civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so in order to respond to that critique, the Obama administration of continuing that practice, which had been delegitimized within the American public, starts to shoot to kill, right? Starts using targeted assassination as a new policy, which is why we see the number of detainees diminished, but we also see the number of casualties rise. Well, that technology that Israel offered is offered to the world, because it's actually a proposition for the creation of a new law of war and certainly not just by, you know, actors that we disdain, but also even by actors that we might otherwise, people might otherwise defend. Just due to time limitation, I'll try to do two questions at one go here. Shahid has asked first thanking you for your presentation, but then asking is it still important to have international authority and try to pursue international? Have you cut out? Can you hear me better now? Yes. Okay. Shahid is thanking you for the presentation, and she's also asking whether you think it's still effective to continue to pursue international condemnation through the international court and the UN or whether we need to spend more time humanizing Palestinians in the Israeli eye to affect policy change. The second question I think you were probably anticipating is the one around the recent UAE Bahrain normalization attempt on signature. Thank you. So on the first question is a question of strategy, and I'll start by saying broadly that I actually as someone who believes, you know, I'm 40 and things got worse, they got better, they're gotten worse, and I'm just 40. So I can't imagine what's going to happen in the next 40 years if I'm given that life. And I'm not sure that in my lifetime, you know, what this cycle will look like. So all of that to say is I believe in resistance. I believe in resistance in all the forms that it takes, regardless of whether or not we can demonstrate, you know, some sort of output, which is what, you know, a capitalist framework would have us believe that if you put input, there should be an output that you see. Oftentimes, as a form of input, we can't see the output manifest immediately, and is not, right, is not discernible. And so, which is what gives to my very liberal reading of I believe everything is good, right, I believe everything is good, because we do not know the moment at which these various vectors will culminate and will be catalyzed into massive transformation, right, how many, unfortunately, how many black people have been murdered, and nobody could have anticipated that, you know, that the last murder of George Floyd, who was not the first nor the last, he has not been the last, would be a catalyst, right. People had been organizing in Egypt for decades who knew that a turning point would come in 2011 and forward. So there are things that we can anticipate, which leads to, you know, my answer, which to say that everything everything should be pursued, but should be pursued in life. If we have, you know, a limited amount of resources, I don't know that I would ever want to explain to Israelis who negate my humanity that I am human, right, as much as I believe in a decolonial future and that that decolonial future must involve Israelis who have to, you know, contend with a history of ethnic cleansing, removal of their settler sovereignty and violence. I also don't think it's incumbent upon any Palestinian to be doing that work that there's a certain violence in that it's almost like what do you have to do to prove that you're human except that you were born, right. So maybe there I wouldn't do that, but in terms of the international for I see that as complicated because using international law is very risky. It can inadvertently reify certain frameworks that are no longer no longer useful, right. Certainly the framework of occupation is increasingly not useful despite the fact that it is it is the one thing that Palestinians have been able to build international consensus around. And yet now the more that we engage in international legal accountability that challenges the occupation, how much are we obscuring an apartheid reality. Maybe it's not the time, but we should be asking that question that there will be a time when that is in fact the case. I don't know that it's right now it as I see that there's still useful ways to build on that consensus. Anyway, okay, so let me shift and I just want to point out that other DMC says just published an article that demonstrates why the occupation is actually illegal, which would be another way for us to think about it. The second question was about normalization. Here's what I'll say about normalization. And I've said this a few times, so I'm just going to repeat myself. This shows us three things I think. Number one, it reminds us that Palestine is part of a region and doesn't exist in a vacuum. Palestinians are part of a larger region that is also struggling against imperialism. And what we're seeing in this moment is the U.S. entrenching its fear of influence by aligning in very explicit relations, Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, and still more to come. So it again should remind us that Palestinians have historically and continue to claim that the pathway to freedom and the pathway to Jerusalem flows through other Arab capitals who are also challenging despotic, tyrannical, violent regimes. And this is a reminder of that. Number two, I think that the other thing that it shows us is that or that it reminds us is how the framework of peace has become such a violent framework because they tell us that this is a peace process. And what that does, it obscures the fact that the only reason Arab states have withheld normalizing relationships with Israel is not in order to end hostilities. There are no hostilities. There are no ongoing hostilities between the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel. But in fact have withheld normalization as a carrot to incentivize Israel to grant Palestinians their national rights. And it was a way of increasing Palestinian negotiating leverage in order to do that. By now, it's a reward. It's a privilege by giving it to Israel without Israel having to give anything in return. And then calling it peace is basically obscuring the fact that Israel doesn't have to do much to normalize relations, but doesn't want to do anything at all. And what Bahrain and the UAE has done is not just betrayed Palestinians but now become part of that apparatus. And then lastly, the last thing I'll say is just to indicate that Bahrain is now the fourth country to normalize relations with Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, none of them, none of them have exacted any enduring concessions for Palestinians in the course of their negotiations. Egypt did recoup the Sinai Peninsula but had the greatest potential to exact Palestinian national rights, failed to do so. Jordan didn't do any of that as they were seen as basically reneging the rights which now belong to Palestinians in the aftermath of the Declaration of Principles. And Bahrain and the UAE I think is part of something more to come, which basically indicates for us a very harsh reality for Arabs who are all still, you know, struggling for their own freedom. And we were reminded of that when Bahrain took to social media to tweet and trend Bahrain is against normalization because they too are in a struggle against their own regime, which now has the benefit of US military support and impunity that the US is sure to provide an international fora like the UN Security Council. Thank you so much for that very comprehensive response. I thought we should end on a hopeful note about the future. And Elena here has an excellent question around what does an anti-police future look like to you. She mentions that although the Minneapolis City Council has disbanded their police department, they've contracted private security details instead. Is this a blue washed step towards abolition? And what would you consider to be an anti-police future? I think all of us need to be asking that question about what, you know, what is an, what does an abolitionist future look like? What does a decolonial future look like, right? And I think that so many activists have actually shown us what that future is. We've seen it in the form of mutual aid of an increasing interdependence on one another. The fact that we have been so socially isolated and atomized from one another is a deliberate, it has been a deliberate part of, you know, neoliberalism's entrenchment in our life, right? Which allows us to believe that we can survive in isolation from a broader society within which we're interdependent. So I think part of an anti-policing future is us, you know, overcoming capitalism. Us slowing down significantly where we replace the value of efficiency and productivity with a different set of values about how much we are able to survive in co-operation and interdependence. I also think that, you know, part of overcoming the first and the second means that we also ascribe different values, the real value of something to those things that we care about. So for example, within a capitalist, you know, rendering you spending time with your grandmother, watching a television show has no value, has no economic value. And yet these are the very things that we fight for. And so things are not given their proper weight and value. And I think that's also part of our abolitionist work, which is to overcome capitalism and the ways that it dehumanizes us, ascribes the wrong values to the wrong things. It's not giving the real value. It's giving, you know, a market value that is quite inaccurate and violent. And I think in terms of the policing itself that you're asking about, right, we have used in the United States, especially used police in the place of a welfare program, we refuse. And so our struggle in the U.S. might look different than others elsewhere in the world. But, you know, our largest mental institution in the U.S. is a prison, right? So there are things that I think are going to look like gradual steps of sending out first responders, sending out EMTs, sending out clinical therapists, sending out people who are trained to respond to conditions, rather than constantly relying on the police to do that and then to give them, you know, qualified immunity and untold amounts of power that they can abuse. And there's many ways that we can detail this. And abolitionists who are, you know, committed abolitionists who have written and studied this can provide you with the resources and thinking through that. And I think critical resistance is one such organization that does that. But also, you know, authors like obviously Angela Davis of the Prison is Obsolete, as well as Ruthie Wilson-Gilmore of the Golden Gulag, two of many who provide us, Dylan Rodriguez and others who provide us with ways to think about abolition isn't necessarily a dream, decolonialism isn't necessarily a dream. It's a plan of action. Great. I'm very glad we ended on that question. Thank you to everybody who joined us today. We had over 100 people. Thank you to all the excellent questions. I'm very sorry if I didn't get to every single one of them, but I was trying to get the largest we can for events. Please follow the series, the hashtags SOAS, SOAS alumni, we are SOAS. You'll be able to also hear about other events in the continuing the conversation series on the website and you can get tickets for those. If you have any questions about this event or future events, feel free to email events at soas.ac.uk if you'd like to discuss anything further and of course I'd like to end by profusely thanking Noura. It's always such a pleasure and an honor to hear you speak. I know it's been a difficult few months and you as I've emailed you instead have stood proud, made us all proud of everything you've been able to achieve and speaking truth to power throughout this time. Thanks to everyone who attended and speaks to you soon, Noura. Bye. Thank you so much, Rafiq. May Allah give you the pleasure.