Video: Palestine 1492: A Report Back

As part of RPL's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Book Series, Author Linda Quiquivix discussed her book "Palestine 1492: A Report Back." The book is a report back of what the author sees from 500 years of the struggle for life in words, maps, and images in the seven cardinal directions and in the spiral that is time.

Throughout the book, Quiquivix shares the lessons that Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and Jaguars have taught her along this journey, the most discouraging being that this world itself is unethical, and that changing it is at best difficult and at worst impossible. Even so, she calls for readers to dismantle such a world and imagine and help each other to build a new one from below and in common, together and side by side. 

The event was moderated by Hilary Rantisi, Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Palestine, 1492, A Report Back. February 27, 2025.

HILARY RANTISI: My name is Hilary Rantisi, and I'm the Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative here at Harvard Divinity School.

[APPLAUSE]

It's one of the programs of the Religion and Public Life, and I'm here with my colleagues. So tonight, this event is part of our new book series, and this event is the second in a series that we are offering this semester, so be on the lookout for invitations for at least two more book events. Before I introduce our program, I wanted to thank our colleagues without whom arrangements for all such programs is not possible. So first Reem, Tammy, Natalie, Rachelle, Delis, and Miriam. So please join me in thanking them.

[APPLAUSE]

And just a very brief introduction about the work of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, and you will hopefully see some connections with some of the themes that our speaker tonight will be talking about. So the work of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, of violence, and power. And the primary case study we're focusing on is on Israel-Palestine. But I feel like today's presentation-- the title of the book is Palestine 1492. But similarly, our work is-- the primary case study is Israel-Palestine. But through that case study, we learn about the world and about conflict, about structural injustice, and hopefully a way to move through this.

Our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peacebuilding and to examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation. So our book today, Palestine 1492, A Report Back, takes us on a global journey and introduces us to ways of thinking about intersectional struggles and how we can dismantle injustice together and build a more just world together.

So we're honored to have with us today the author of Palestine 1492, Linda Quiquivix, who will give us an overview of this most beautiful book. Where is my copy? I mean, we have a few copies for sale, but not many. This is a very unique book. I don't know how to describe it. It's an art. It's a piece of art, really. And it's all of Linda's art in here through maps, through drawings, photography.

And I think we will probably see a lot of that in her presentation today. So it's aesthetically exquisite, so encourage you to purchase a copy, if not tonight, to get one online. We'll have time for discussion after the presentation. But before that, I just wanted to briefly introduce our guest. So Linda Quiquivix is a geographer, an illustrator, and a popular educator. In her academic life, she received her doctorate in geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She's also been at Duke University and was a postdoc at Brown University, not far from here. In 2014, she left academia to place her training at the service of organized communities. In her words, to feel, think together about our liberation movements across struggles, calendars, ways, and geographies. So I feel that this book is going to take us on that journey, and I look forward to hearing more about it. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming our guest speaker, Linda Quiquivix.

[APPLAUSE]

LINDA QUIQUIVIX: It's so lovely to be here. Boston area has been the home of my Palestine fam, [INAUDIBLE] Selma, Hillary. I lived in Palestine while I did my doctoral research. It was research about borders, how Palestine got those borders that we're always looking at and taking for granted.

And I was in Bethlehem and was volunteering in Aida refugee camp as an excuse to hang out with little kids and learn Arabic from them, because they love to teach, and they're really great teachers. And what I was offering in return was doing some art together. And that is where I met [INAUDIBLE] and I'll show you some of the work that we did together with Aida camp. And I want to start off tonight by talking about the book cover, which is a very unconventional book cover for Palestine.

Usually, we see something like the colors of Palestine or like a flag or a map. And what the book cover is-- the book cover is a map that is maybe more recognizable. sideways-- yeah?-- of Mesoamerica, of the Maya world, more precisely, in the center, which is my ancestral territory. And it is this way, because it is oriented with east at the top, which is a very Maya geography. Maya geography-- we begin when we do ceremony and prayer by facing east, which is very common for Indigenous peoples all over the world. And the orientation of east is also the orientation facing Palestine in this case, because it was here in my ancestral lands where I got the calling to go to Palestine and wasn't really sure what that meant.

And so this book is my trying to understand why I felt such a pull to Palestine when I wasn't Palestinian. I'm not Jewish. I'm not Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, and I'm not from that part of the world. And the way that all started was I was studying geography as a master's student in California and just fell in love with the discipline. I didn't understand at first that it was critical. I didn't really know what being a critical thinker was. I went to public schools. I'm a child of undocumented migrants, and those are schools for indoctrination, and you don't really get to ask questions. And you just be a good student, and don't make any waves, especially when you're a kid of undocumented migrants.

And when I found geography, I was encouraged to just ask about the world, about the whole world. And I hadn't been encouraged to ask that before, although I did always critique borders, because my family had to cross borders, and there was always conversations at home about who just got deported or who just crossed.

And so in my geography studies, I wanted to study the Mexico-Guatemala border, because it was starting to look and is starting to look a lot like the Mexico-US border, where it's militarized, and it's trying to ward off migration. And in geography-- and I'll preface that before geography, my undergraduate was in business administration and information systems in the '90s, back when the internet was becoming mainstream. I went to college because I wanted to get a job. And everyone was saying, do computers, do computers, do computers. And so I became good at computers.

And so the things that I was learning in business school, though, were about global capital. It was the '90s, and the Soviet Union had just fallen, so everything was, quote, unquote, "opening up" for global capital. And so I was learning how to capitalism or how to global capitalism. And then when I entered geography, we were reading about globalization from below, the resistance against global capital, and it was there where I first saw the phrase Free Palestine. And I also saw the initials EZLN, not knowing what that was. I found out, of course, out of my curiosity. It's the initials of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation in Chiapas, in Mexico, who are Mayan also. And so I was just so touched that there are still Maya people in struggle resisting for 500 years.

So I wanted to meet Palestinians, and I wanted to meet Zapatistas. And so in 2005, 2006, that winter break, I had just started the PhD program at UNC Chapel Hill. And immediately, I got on a plane to go backpack Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Palestine. And I didn't really know what I would find, but I really wanted to go, because I already knew that the mainstream media wasn't telling the truth.

Especially with 2003 and the war in Iraq, I had had so many heartbreaks about the nature of the world that now I just needed to see for myself and see how I could learn. And I didn't have mentorship. I just had books, which are really great mentors and friends. And I had the internet and Wikipedia, and I ran into Edward Said's writings that were very convincing in a lot of ways as I'm sure you all know. And I went by myself backpacking, and I was just there for a few days.

Six months later, I was in Chiapas, trying to now meet the Zapatistas and trying to get started on my doctoral dissertation work on the Mexico-Guatemala border. And I couldn't find the Zapatistas. I found them later, and I detailed that journey in the book. But what did happen that summer in 2006 was Israel launched a war in Lebanon, bombing the Beirut airport. And because I had been there, it hit different now. And I was just barely starting to learn about what was going on that it was so impactful to me to see CNN in Español in Mexico, and then on my laptop, CNN in English, and seeing the coverage was so different, even in a corporate media setting. In Latin America, there are a lot of Palestinians, and some do have influence.

And I think that may be part of why the discourse talks more about Palestine in the context. And in Chiapas that summer CNN in Español had a professor, Argentinean, who gave an entire one hour lecture about context beginning in 1948, whereas of course, CNN in English begins history that morning or the day before. And so it was just one of these moments that I think a lot of people are going through right now or have gone through since October 7, where you see social media say something, and then the mainstream media say something, and you're like, I've been lied to so much.

What is the truth? And so that's the journey of becoming a critical thinker is trying to look for the truth. And so I ended up returning back to university, and all I could do was read and self-study on Palestine, watching documentaries, reading book.

Eventually, I had to change my topic, because I was not going to graduate, because I was neglecting the Mexico-Guatemala border. And thank goodness I had a great advisor who was very supportive of that. So my dissertation, called "The Political Mapping of Palestine," was trying to trace a genealogy of how we got those borders that we know today, and that appears partly in the book. And since my dissertation, since leaving academia, I've been on this quest to try to understand why I care so much, because I don't have the concepts for it, but I have the feeling for it. So I needed some concepts to try to explain it.

And so that's what this journey has been since graduating is I have been globalizing Palestine in an analytic that I will share with you tonight. And before moving on, I want to just zoom in on the compass in the middle, which is a Maya cross. So when we do ceremony, we have-- this is an altar. We have it on the floor, and this is where we put our offerings. We begin with the east, which is red. Then we go west, which is black. South, yellow. North, white. And each one of those has deep significance in the Maya world. The red is the physical.

The black is the spiritual. The yellow is the emotional. The white is the mental. And all of them together are the social. And something also interesting about Maya geography is the middle. There is blue and green in the middle always, and that points to the sky and the Earth. So there aren't just four cardinal directions in Maya geography, there are actually seven.

There's east, west, south, north, sky, Earth, which is six, and the seventh one is you, is me, is us. We're in it. And that is really important to point out, because that's the guide. That's the compass throughout the book. It is a critique of colonial geography that places the viewer above the land as if they're not part of the land, and then cuts it up into property without recognizing that is hurting even oneself.

I want to start with this map, which is a medieval European map of the world. Maybe you all have seen it. It's a famous T and O map, and it's oriented with the top as the east, the Orient. And this is from the European perspective that believes that Europe is a continent, although we know Europe is not a continent. It's Eurasia. But there is a worldview in European Christendom from above, empires and big powers from Europe, that believe that they are very separate from the rest of the world. And so you see here, this map has Asia at the top.

And then at the bottom. Europe and Africa are side by side in a very antagonistic way, sadly. And then you have the Nile at the top as the top of the T and then the Mediterranean as the stem of the T.

And you notice that under Asia, the word "Shem" appears, and under Europe, [INAUDIBLE] "Japheth," and under Africa, "Ham." Now, this was to my understanding added during the 19th century with race science coming out of Europe. And these are the names of the sons of the biblical Noah after the flood, where it is said, as the story goes, that each one would populate the three continents after the flood. And so Shem went to populate Asia, Japheth to Europe, and Ham to Africa.

And it is a very anti-Black narrative, because it calls Ham the cursed son, and therefore Africa is cursed according to this narrative. So it's a very anti-Black narrative that also shows us where the word Semite comes from. It's the children of Shem who, according to Europeans from above-- because there's a Europe from below, and I want to be very specific. I'm not homogenizing all of Europe. But European rulers, European powers for a very long time, for centuries, as we know, have been persecuting our Jewish relatives inside Europe. And so to call them Semites is to point that they don't belong in Europe, they belong in Asia.

So this whole discourse stems from this kind of narrative, which, again, is incredibly anti-Black. Maps, of course, change, especially after 1492. This is a map from 1581, so almost 100 years later, and you notice that the three continents still appear, Europa, Asia, and Africa. It's just that the north is now the orientation at the top. And notice in the middle, Jerusalem. Jerusalem-- this is sacred geography-- is the center of the world, according to Europe and before even 1492. So Europe calls itself the west because it's west of Jerusalem. That's why it's called the west.

And notice on the bottom left hand corner, there's a little blob of the new world, which didn't fit in that biblical neat geography of the clover, so we're over here on the end. And you also see the sirens over where the Indian Ocean is, which shows that it was an exotic place. And then the monsters down by Africa and the new world, it shows a dangerous place.

This is a more familiar world map in its layout, and notice that Europe is now in the center. And Europe is now in the center in space, but not just space. That is the meridian, the line that shows where the zero hour of the day begins, right? So it centers time and space to Europe. And this is something-- for me, someone who is from these lands, when I look at Europe, it's to the East. It's not the West. And when I look at Asia, it's to the West and not the East. But we're still forced, or it's expected that we keep calling Europe the West. And for that, I want to just point out there is still a sacred geography of Jerusalem in the European cosmovision.

That Europe still calls itself the West and forces us all to call itself the West, even though that's not a global geographic territory is very significant. So, Palestine 1492. Palestine 1492 is a book I began writing that was going to begin on October 12, 1492-- until I learned more about January 2, 1492-- which is a momentous event in Europe, where in the Iberian Peninsula, where today Portugal and Spain exist as nation-states. In the Iberian Peninsula, there had been Muslim rule for centuries, and a Holy war by the Catholic monarchs against Islam trying to ethnically cleanse the Iberian Peninsula. And that happened for centuries until the last battle, which happened in Granada on January 2, 1492.

Christopher Columbus was there, waiting for Granada to fall before he would talk to Isabella. Queen Isabella, she was the one leading the fight. He wanted to talk to Queen Isabella to see about taking Jerusalem next. We don't often hear this about Christopher Columbus. We often hear that the reason why he sailed west was because he was greedy and wanted money-- that's secondary.

Christopher Columbus was a very devout Catholic from above with an apocalyptic vision and a specific interpretation of a prophecy of the end of the world, that it would take place in Jerusalem. And he actually wrote a book called The Book of Prophecies, [SPEAKING SPANISH] where he says that, the end of the world was going to come in 155 years and that, in order for that to happen, the Catholics needed to be in control of Jerusalem. Because in the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus was laid to rest-- Jesus of Nazareth, that's exactly where he was going to return.

This might seem familiar if you know about Christian Zionism.

Yeah, still today. Columbus had this exact same worldview as did Isabella, and there's writings about it if you want to study more about Columbus and Jerusalem. But indeed, the reason why he wanted to sail west to get Jerusalem-- or needed to sail west, was because Islam was in the East.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire had just taken Constantinople, which was the last seat of the Roman Empire. That was only decades before 1492. It was still very much on the minds of the Catholic monarchs. So, of course, taking Jerusalem from the Muslims was an enormous feat.

October 12th was very small compared to January 2nd in that moment on the Iberian Peninsula and in Europe. And in fact, if you go to data Spain and you see the monuments to 1492, they always start with January 2nd. The narrative of Spain is that January 2nd and October 12th go together. So what happened on January 2nd and that followed was the continued ethnic cleansing of the Iberian Peninsula of Muslims and Jews. Jews very, very famously-- the Spanish Inquisition really takes off.

It had, of course, already existed, but it becomes more systematized where there's torture methods that take place if the Catholic monarchs believe that a Jewish person is lying about having converted. And in fact, when you go to Spain today, you notice that in the gastronomy, the food has pork in an excessive way. Even in the airports, there's pigs-- smoked pigs hanging on the walls.

Hi, welcome. Absolutely! You're very welcome. And that the gastronomy of Spain has so much pork, it could be traced back to these moments where there were Jews who had converted to Catholicism but were suspected of still being Jewish underground at home. And that's why they were forced to eat pork in public all the time-- to show that they were not Jewish anymore.

So 1492 on the Iberian Peninsula was this moment where one world on that land was being imposed, the world of Catholicism. There wasn't a respect for other worlds, whereas previously Muslims, Jews, and Christians could coexist, right? But no, that was no more. So we have the imposition of one world on the Iberian Peninsula-- everyone has to convert, books are burned.

There's an Inquisition then that happens after October 12th over here. That same thing happens over here where everyone is forced to convert. Where everyone, I mean, there's still resistance, right? But that was the plan.

And I have this map here to show a very important line. When Columbus returns to the Iberian Peninsula, instead of letting Isabella know what he had found, he lands in Portugal and tells the King there. And they're both Catholic monarchs-- the Portuguese King and the Castilian queen, and they start to fight.

And the Pope steps in saying, no, no, no, you're Catholic monarchs, you cannot fight. You have to cooperate because we have this work to do of converting everybody into one world, into Catholicism. So he draws this line, which is known as the Treaty of Tordesillas 1494, and says that everything east of that line- toward Africa and Asia, Portugal can invade and everything west, Spain, Castile can invade.

So notice that it hits where Brazil is today. And Brazil is a land where the official language is now Portuguese, and so many languages have been destroyed. So many worlds have been destroyed. Native worlds, even though, of course, many still exist. And east of the line and west of the line is Spanish. Then there's more cuts from that line the Treaty of Tordesillas, which is understood by scholars as the first global border. Now we get more borders. Abya Yala gets cut up into viceroyalties-- New Spain, New Peru. And that is so that the colonizers don't fight because remember the Treaty of Tordesillas-- the first global border, the function is so that the invaders don't fight.

It's not about what's going on the ground. It's not about consent from anyone living there. It's so that the above, the powers above, don't fight. And that's the same thing that we see here in cutting up the viceroyalties. It's so the plantation overseers, because the land is a plantation in the eyes of Europe, for extracting riches and enslaving people. These lines end up becoming the modern nation states that we know today-- Mexico, all of Central America like Peru.

So again, borders, as I have theorized them, are agreements between invaders so that they don't fight, so that they can have peace. But they mean peace for themselves-- they don't mean peace for everybody else. This way of reorganizing territory into these plantations, containerized with boundaries, with no interference, it's the basis of international law of the state system. You don't interfere in other states. That's the number one principle of the whole thing. There is an entire sovereignty within that container.

This is a map of the Peace of Westphalia 1648, which is usually the marker of international law. And you see there the Holy Roman Empire, which was the first Reich of Hitler's Third Reich. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, who Voltaire very famously said is neither holy, neither Roman, neither an empire. It's where modern-day Germany is, and actually the state of Germany, which would be, quote unquote, "unified" in 1871, is a Second Reich.

And so we start getting in the 19th century, especially after the French Revolution, this idea of the nation. The monarchy has been overthrown, and the people are saying, well, the people are going to rule. And so then there's this problem, who are the people? The nation. Well, who's the nation? Who's French? Well, I don't know. But I can tell you who's not French, and sadly, anyone who is different from that standard was persecuted.

And as we know, our Jewish relatives were persecuted as this whole formation in Europe was taking place of nationalism, of nation-states.

And that's where we get the growth, of course, of Zionism-- the idea of having a bounded territory that with one nation, a homogeneous space where everyone speaks the same language, has the same history, same culture, and it's a way, sadly, this quote unquote, "unification" of Germany or unification of Italy into nation-states. What that really was, was a destruction of other worlds, of so many languages.

And so, this is then the impulse that we have with the nation-state system is to have a homogeneous, containerized territory, to supposedly be easier to govern, to rule, where people won't fight. Germany comes in late into the imperial game. In 1871 when it becomes a nation-state, it now wants to be an empire neighboring France, neighboring Britain. And the way that it did that, not surprisingly, was by calling a conference to cut up Africa.

This is a rendering of that meeting, and notice it looks quite peaceful except for the Turk. I don't know if you can see him.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, with the [? fez. ?]

SPEAKER 1: Just his hand-- his head in his hands, just worried about what's happening. And so we have here the cutting up of Africa-- the Berlin Conference, and it took place over several decades. And it was peaceful, of course, only between these people, but it meant war for the ground. And that was actually what all the cutting up of Africa was is to prove who can prove that you can control this territory is the one that deserves that territory. And so we get these cuts.

And notice in the middle, King Leopold II was gifted the Congo as his personal property. Again, borders are agreements between the invaders so that they don't fight between the plantation overseers, so that they don't interfere with each other. So this is 1888 and it continues on until the early 20th century.

And of course, the early 20th century, we get these cuts happening in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East-- completely secretive.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement between the French, the British, and the Russians, who were lying to the ground by telling people on the ground, hey, if you fight with us against the Ottomans-- who had been the ones that had control of these territories, if you fight against the Ottomans with us, and we'll give you your freedom. We'll give you your self-determination, and it was all a lie. And we found out it was a lie. History found out it was a lie because the Russian Revolution took place in the midst of all this, and the revolutionaries leaked the documents.

And so what I did in my dissertation was, I traced how with Sykes-Picot, how that shape of Palestine had been designed 100 years before or in the century before. And that's also in the book. And of course, we get now from those lines, the outlines of today's modern nation-states, which cut up Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and cut off so many of the networks, and families, and communities, between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine.

And so here, something else I was really interested in studying was how not just Palestine was cut up into a bounded territory, but how Palestine was cut up inside as private property lots. That logic continues-- with the logic of private property lots. And the first panel of this map is the map of what the British empire was able to map of Palestine and settle to title, give somebody the title that they're the owner. And that happened in the '20s and '30s-- 1920s and 1930s. And of course, there was a revolt, a very famous Arab Revolt in 1936 to 1939.

And if you read the Peel Commission, the British paper on why the revolt?

They talk about how the Palestinian peasants, every time they would see a surveyor come mapping the land, and then they would get kicked off the land, they started to catch on. And so during the revolt, they were breaking all the instruments so that the surveyors couldn't do their work. And so the West Bank, as we know it, a lot of that struggle took place in the Northern West Bank. And so the West Bank is the West Bank. Still, it wasn't part of the cutting up of Palestine in that way largely because of this resistance.

And these are people who are likely not literate but could read the world. They understood what was going on. And so then the second panel is appeal commissions suggestion for how Palestine should be cut up into an Arab state and a Jewish state. And notice in the middle, it goes in and grabs Jerusalem because Jerusalem is the center of the world.

And actually, last April, with the Columbia hearings over in Congress, there was a representative from Georgia. They were using all this biblical language about, if you curse Israel, God curses you-- which you can't find in the Bible, but he said it anyway. And he said people think that Washington, DC, is a center of the universe, but that's not true. It's Jerusalem that is the center of the universe. That's in the Congressional record as of last year.

So then the third panel, we get the United Nations partition and notice Jerusalem in the middle-- that little tiny circle, is still taken.

And it's supposed to be an international zone. And the way that they define international is British, French, and Russian-- that's how they define international. And then the fourth panel is, of course, after 1948, and notice Jerusalem. The Israeli state, the militias, got right up to the edges of East Jerusalem. Jerusalem is what's at play. And that's really difficult to show on maps, which is why I like to show that three clover map of sacred geography that shows Jerusalem in the center. Because the way that Cartesian maps are now, it treats Jerusalem the same value as Tel Aviv or Ramallah, just a dot.

And so then the last panel is the present-day settlement scheme that is disappearing Palestine more and more. And it also includes on the northeast corner, the Golan Heights, which we often forget are also colonized. And that's part of what was cut up as Syria. So something that I want to offer, I offer a couple of theorizations for Palestine that I hope can be helpful and maybe we can disagree, and I'd love to be in conversation if you disagree or agree.

And one of them is-- as we've been saying, borders are contracts between the above.

They are so that the invaders do not fight. And so in order to have a state, you have to be accepted by the International community. You have to be accepted somehow by the above. Sometimes it's through violence, and the above respects violence very much. And so Israel is a state that has not defined its borders. Israel is still expanding.

And so when I was doing this research and I was reading the notes from the Oslo Peace Process, the negotiations, and I was seeing that the Palestinian leadership in the negotiations wanted a border because it would, quote, "solve everything". Give me the border of the two state solution. It will solve everything. And we know that's not true. The refugees are not going to accept that. It won't solve everything.

But the thing is that in order for that leadership to be accepted into the scheme where it could share a border with someone from above Israel, it needs to differentiate itself as the good Palestinian versus the bad Palestinian. So the West Bank is the good Palestine, and Gaza is a bad Palestine. The resistance is different. There's been economic development in the West Bank, and there has been a siege on Gaza for a very long time.

And so something that I say is that the border between Israel and Palestine already exists, and it's this line between those above who are supposedly superior and accepted in the world. And those below the human and the non-human, that's the line between those is the border between Israel and Palestine. I also argue for an analysis of not just the wretched of the Earth, per Frantz Fanon, the below, that's going to resist colonialism.

There's also the wretched of the empire. Those who have been crushed, who seek to be kept alive, survive through the acceptance of their own oppressors of empires. And Israel is emblematic of this, where there's been so many debates among Jews themselves about how to resist all of this persecution over centuries. And the one that we know of sadly, is Zionism.

When I say sadly, because this is a very emblematic example of the wretched of the Earth. Instead of connecting with other wretched of the Earth to struggle and do something else, instead ask their own oppressors for a seat at the table and use their wretched status-- the historical status of Holocaust survivors, for example, or victims as a way to maintain that to make it seem as if empire is benevolent now, and to also deflect critique away from Empire by using language right than calling us racist and things like that.

So this is assimilation-- and this is something that is very personal to me too. Again as a daughter of undocumented migrants, usually our parents tell us don't make waves, right? There's so much trauma from having left such a violent space that now you're in a relatively peaceful place, right? And so what that means is assimilating into being an American. But assimilating into being an American is very much structured in a superior-inferior relationship.

As we know, there's white supremacy and anti-blackness, right? It means being anti-black. It tries-- it means trying to be closer to white. So it means that going above, going up the ladder. As often as we're told, that means crushing others, and we don't talk about that enough.

If that's the ethics that we want to live by, and especially when we are in a world that calls itself secular, which likes to secularize the economy and politics, and then, creates this category called religion. So you can go to your ethics and your conversation with God over there, as if economy and politics are value free and neutral, and they're not.

There needs to be an ethics to everyday life, to economy, to politics, to everyday life. And it's basically the question of how do we relate to each other? How do we relate to each other? Especially when we're different, when we're not the same. We're not even from the same world.

We speak different languages. We believe different things, but we're sharing the world. How are we going to share the world with all our difference? How are we going to make it where we live in a world where many worlds fit, where all worlds fit, rather than just one world that we're all forced to live. How do we do that? This is a framework, as I call it, a framework for understanding fascism. And notice that it doesn't have identities. It has structural position because identities can shift. And that's actually sadly, the game is that we're trying to shift identities. We're trying to, for example, flip where Europe is at superior and non-Europe is inferior.

A lot of the time we make the mistake of trying to flip it and say non-Europe is superior and Europe is inferior, right? Or Black is superior and White is inferior. But we're still falling into this trap. And this is a critique Frantz Fanon himself had of his teacher, Amos Caesar, who would fall into that. He would fall into flipping the positions of domination where Black is superior now and White is inferior. He said, no, we need a whole other way. A whole other world.

And so here, I mentioned that I was looking for the Zapatistas when I was trying to meet the Palestinians too, at the same time. And so I found the Zapatistas, and I ended up being so inspired by them that I joined a collective in Durham, North Carolina, that was trying to do urban Zapatismo in Durham, in the city-- which meant trying to flow power where it is the assembly, the below that is the authority and not the above.

So that we had an assembly and then the assembly itself decided what we would do in the social center. And back then nobody had a phone.

So it was like, we need internet, right? Or we need homework help for the youth or things like that.

We also had a community garden so that we could learn to respect where our food comes from. We had a housing cooperative and also a domestic cleaning worker cooperative. So we're trying to build autonomy in the city as difficult as it is, because really, in the end, land is the basis for true autonomy. Because it's land, that's the source of life, right? And if we're in a situation where we live in the city, and we don't have land, we don't have access to land. And most of us who live in cities have been kicked off land or have had land taken away from us or have been kidnapped from the land.

We live in cities and so we're so removed from land as the source of life, as the condition of possibility for another world. And instead, we need money now to buy everything in order to live. We need money to get our water, to get our food, to get our shelter, right? And therefore, we're not autonomous to capital. In fact, we're dependent on capital. So it is really difficult to try to build autonomy in a city. But there are practices because it really is about how we treat each other and ourselves and not trying to go above and rank some below, which as you might imagine, is a very ingrained way of being in the world. Especially when we go to schools and we're here at Harvard, right? In schools, we are ranked from the beginning A, B, C, D, F, and it never ends. You go to college and now, oh, which school do you go to, right? And so then the IVs and all of this.

So this is just the way that we are taught to be on instinct that the stranger is an enemy, a competitor rather than a mystery, rather than someone that is so different from you. That if you get to know each other, we realize we have different gifts and different powers, and we can get into a formation. I do a lot of popular education, and I like to show the X-Men films-- which are the Mutants in Marvel. Because it's not one superhero. Its many different superheroes. And they all have different gifts, and when they fight together, it really shows how difference can be our power rather than being together in spite of our difference. No, difference is our power.

So I bring that up because this is Zapatista language. These are lessons from the Zapatistas who are Maya. It comes from the very, very Maya cosmovision of difference as complementary rather than competitive, which exists in so many parts of the world. In Africa, it's very common. Of course, the yin and the yang in Asia. And this exit plan, I have arrows exiting over here to being side by side. Now I get that from the Zapatista women.

I was mentored by a Palestinian Mexican scholar who is a direct interlocutor with the Zapatistas.

And I helped translate her work, and she has taught me so much. I call her a conceptual curandera-- a conceptual healer for her concepts who was the first person that I had ever heard that a duality doesn't have to be competitive. It can be complementary and it can be fluid. And that's how gender is understood in the Zapatista and the Maya world.

In Maya philosophy, male to be masculine that's the exteriority, to be feminine is our interiority. We have both-- some we intensify more than others. Some intensify some more than others and it changes on context, but there's a fluidity. And it really is about respecting difference in that. When the Zapatista women say that when they're fighting against patriarchy, they don't want to cancel the men, they don't want a world without men. They also don't want to be superior to the men.

So it's not like matriarchy in that sense that reverses patriarchy rule of-- no. They say we want to be together and side by side as the women that we are. Meaning, we don't want to have to become the men in order to have rights. And they also say we are equal because we are different-- which if you think about it, and I've thought about this. How did I first think of-- where did my ideas of equality come from? And it comes from citizenship.

There's a standard for having rights. You have to check off boxes in order to have rights. And Palestinians, of course, know this very well.

They don't have a state. And so they don't qualify for rights the way so many other people all over the world do. And the problem with that is that the moment we introduce a standard for equality, we have introduced inequality.

If we start with equality as the beginning assumption, then we need to respect difference. They say we are equal because we are different. There is no standard. And in fact, in the Maya world, children are raised by community to develop their special gifts that's unique to them.

So there is so much difference, and it's the community that allows that respect. So rather than the assimilation into sameness, which is assimilation into sameness. Their power, they say, is their difference. And that's what can allow a world where all worlds fit. And to me, that's the only conversation I wish to have with anybody. How can we share the world together with all our difference-- without me becoming like you, and without you becoming like me? And I have those arrows pointing to the left-- and I know leftism is a very fraught term. The Zapatistas say, from below and to the left.

And I've thought about that. What does that mean in this scheme of above and below? Well, one is that in the below, those who are crushed by others much a lot of the time, too often we want to crush others back. We are from below and to the right-- to the right is how the way I define it is the disrespect of difference. The annihilation of difference is the right. There can only be one way, and to be below and to the right is to try to have a horizon, to be above, to crush others.

To be below and to the left is to respect difference. There is a left from above though, and there's a left from below. And the left from above respects difference to a point. The multiculturalism of neoliberalism that we know of today, right? They want different faces like the progressives, right? They don't have a critique of that framework. They just feel bad that some are below and we need to put some above. But they're not fighting against the whole thing that's crushing others.

So there's an above to the left, a left from above, which is so limited because it's not trying to escape that. From below and to the left, that's the escape. And this book in my life has been so inspired by the Black radical tradition and the maroonage that escaped the flight of enslaved Africans to go create something else, not trying to switch the positions of master slave. No! To go do something else, and oftentimes with Native peoples and with European misfits who also didn't want to be part of the above below configuration.

So I just-- as I wrap up, I just want to show you a couple of spreads from the book. And this is a really special chapter-- Chapter 2, when the rooftops are streets. And this is my work in Aida camp. And the opening is a map of the villages that refugees in Aida. There's a Zoom there come from. And I wanted to show just they're walking distance. Our [INAUDIBLE] is from Al Kabul. It's five miles from Aida camp, and you can't return.

There's also throughout the West Bank, there are these plaques that point to how far Jerusalem is, and it's actually very close. But it's a tragic irony because even though it's so close, these border walls make it impossible to go. So there's a refrain that's very common in Palestine about how the map is completely useless. It's useless, at least the ways that we know maps.

And that's how I started my work. I was so angry at maps because so many-- because they had been created for colonial purposes, right? But then I go to Aida camp, and then I see the map on the wall. And also Palestinian homes, there's an embroidered Palestine map and necklaces. It's a counter map. It's a colonial outline, yes, but what is it that everybody within those borders has in common in spite of all their differences, right?

What everybody within those borders of that colonial outline of Palestine have in common is that they're all marked for extermination. And that is what brings them together with this map. It rallies them together against that extermination.

And so I walked around the camp, and I just kept seeing this map everywhere. And never have I ever seen or heard of anybody who has ever seen in a refugee camp, a map of Palestine that's just Gaza and the West Bank. No. And so this is a map of maps one day in Aida camp.

And this is a map, a tracing of Aida camp that I was asked to make. And when [INAUDIBLE] asked me to make it, he was the director of the [INAUDIBLE] Center. I was like, no, maps have ruined everything. What if Israelis get the maps? He's like, Israelis already have the maps. Every time they arrest us, they show us. They like to-- he didn't use the word, they like to flex it. But that's what the vibe was. They like to show you that they know where you live, right? And we don't have maps.

So because I had this training in GIS, geographic information systems, and all of that, I was able to get my hands on a high resolution map of Aida camp, which only the Israeli military is allowed to take, but then they sell it on the commercial market. And I met a Palestinian geographer who was working for a geography outfit in the West Bank, and I told him what I was doing, and he snuck me a copy.

And so then we started to trace it, and there's the apartheid wall there. And then it became such an accurate map because youth in the camp-- Nidal had a couple of youth in the camp walk with me, and every single little crook and crevice to make sure that I was right. And I had a lot of mess-ups because I was looking from above. But because they're from below, they know the camp so well. So it was a very accurate map of Aida that helped them eventually with some water issues, because it was a GIS as well.

And I love this story about when I was tracing the streets and, I asked Nidal, are my streets right? You know the camp, can you check my work? And he's like, yeah, they're right. But the rooftops are also streets where we jump when we are in curfew. And so he drew that map. And this was my point in Palestine. Of course, being advised and counseled by elders in the Zapatista movement.

When you go to Palestine, you don't go tell people what to do. You go look for how it is that they're resisting and how everyday life is where that power is exercised, right? And so this map to me, the difference between the professional cartographer where since the Oslo process, especially politics in Palestine, had been shifted away from the ground like with the First Intifada, it was very everyday life uprising. And then the state project comes. And so now power is up above with the technocrats, the cartographers, the professionals.

And everyone below is made to wait. And so it was just a perfect example of the limits of what the professional cartographer can do, and that Palestinians create geography all the time. And every Palestinian I've ever show this map to has some story like this too. And I think it's really important to emphasize. So I'll wrap up by talking about, how do we get from that world to over here? And something that I talk about in the book-- and there's a whole chapter called strategy and tactics, is about we need strategy in order to fight, because this is a war that we are all conscripted into, whether we like it or not.

At sometimes we're above, sometimes we're below, right? And that's the logic we're all conscripted into. And so I talk about how Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a 2,500 year old text, was not shown to the soldiers. It's a book of military strategy, a specific type of strategy, because all strategy is not military. But that's a military strategy. And it was only shown to the generals because they didn't want-- to teach soldiers strategies is to teach them how to overthrow you, right?

So they just get taught tactics, tactics, tactics, putting out fires, little things like that they get told what to do, but they don't know what the big strategy is behind all of those moves. So we need to learn strategy, because what we're doing in so much of our movement work, our scholarship, everything in the world, we keep doing tactics, tactics, tactics, tactics, tactics because there's so much need. There's fires everywhere, right? And we don't have often a guiding strategy, especially a strategy outside, above versus below.

A strategy outside the logic and practice of empire, the logic and practice of fascism, the logic and practice of patriarchy. The logic and practice of colonialism. On and on and on. Notice like above and below it is a way to show how patriarchy works-- males, non-males. Racialization works-- human, nonhuman. Capitalism-- value, non-value. Everything is like in competition.

So then in order to have a strategy, it needs to be outside trying to create something else. And then the tactics are when we go in and when we don't go in. When do we pull resources from the dominant world? When do we go into subvert? When do we go in to inspire? When do we go into convinced to have people come out and run away with us? All of those tactics need to be guided by a bigger strategy outside of the dominant world because if not, we're going to continue working within the dominant world, and we'll keep seeing some of the below come up above. And it'll be so confusing to us because we'll think that we have won and we know we have not won.

So in this chapter, strategy and tactics, we play chess, but not the regular chess. We play guerrilla chess where the pawns turn against the royals. And in fact, I saw this as an artist rendering, and I loved it so much that I decided to play it. And you can win every time. Yeah, you just have to keep the pawns together. And the pawns on the chessboard are the weakest piece, right? But if you stick together, you're a force. You're a collective forces, and you can win. So I wanted just to leave you all with that for some inspiration. And I hope that we can have a fruitful discussion about it. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Well, maybe I can start with a question. A report back, who are you reporting back to? I don't know if I can pull it out, yeah.

SPEAKER 1: Who am I reporting back to? So this book took me six years to write precisely because I didn't know who I was reporting back to but I knew I needed to report back, especially because I think, a duty for those who can travel because most people cannot travel. So we need to report back. What is it that we saw? What did we witness? Right? And so when you open the book, the dedication, is first to the product of 500 years of struggles, which is the first line of the Zapatista communique in 1994.

When the whole world found out about them was we are the product of 500 years of struggles. And then I continue to talk about the book is also dedicated to the captives and to the maroons, and to the war resisters. So I'm reporting back to the below.

I'm reporting back what I saw-- to the below, to others in struggle, trying to create something different. And it was when I realized that that's what I was doing, that it became such a lovely endeavor and such a beautiful process, and quite healing in that way, too. And what was really cool.

Just a couple of months ago, in December, in January, the Zapatistas had an encounter called The Storm and The Day After, where they're talking about collapse and how to survive, shelter through the collapse, and what's going to happen the day after seven generations from now-- very, very long time. And I brought books with me and I was able to present the book in Spanish-- even though it's in English, in San Cristobal de Las Casas-- which is where I saw CNN en Español and I got the call.

So I was reporting back to that place, and I was also able to give a copy to the leadership of the Zapatistas-- Subcomandante Sargento Marcos. When his boss, Subcomandante-- well, the former Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos used to be his name, he was a spokesperson of the Zapatistas and he is now Captain Marcos.

The new spokesperson is Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. So I go to Moisés and I tell him I just wrote this book. It's about Palestine. And he was so touched.

It's about Palestine. [SPEAKING SPANISH] And I was like, yeah, but sadly it's in English and I'm so sorry about that, but I'm going to translate it into Spanish. Should I give it to you? Should I give it to Marcos? Because very famously, Marcos becomes the spokesperson because he knows French, English and Spanish, right? And so I know he speaks English.

And so then he's like, yeah, go, go give it to him. And so he sends Marcos to come introduce himself to me, and we shake hands and I tell him what I did. And I said, I'm sorry, it's in English. Like, no, no, no, esta bien. It's OK. So it was quite a feat, and a big check box to be able to report back directly to the Zapatistas. And I'm really hoping that this will be a really beautiful a generative encounter further back. And it was one of those things where I never wanted to introduce myself to Marcos because there's a lot of fans and all of that, and that's really off putting to me. And I didn't ever want him to think that I was fangirling.

And then I realized when I was there in December, I was like, I actually have a duty to report back to him. I need to give him this book because they need to know what I saw. So that's what I'm reporting back to. And it won't be a celebration until I report back to Palestine. And in fact, when I graduated and defended my dissertation-- you shake hands with your professors and all of that, it did not feel complete until that summer I went to Palestine and presented it to the camps, and that's when I graduated. That's when I really defended my dissertation.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I think, in a way, we end up with a journey. We started with a journey. The book is a journey. And you gave us a map, an encouragement to strategize in different ways, to move in different ways. So thank you for everything you brought to us. And thank you all for [INAUDIBLE]. Please, join me--

SPEAKER 1: And thank you all.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: Sponsor, The Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life. Copyright, 2025. The President and Fellows of Harvard Colleg