Columbia University Opens Nation's First Center for Palestinian Studies

A landmark moment for Palestine.

The earliest Zionists thought they could erase Palestine and Palestinian history from the map. Israel's first prime minister David Ben-Gurion said contemptuously of the Palestinians after their forced exile at the hands of Zionist terrorist militias: The old will die and the young will forget.

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The old did die, but every generation of Palestinians has risen to fly the banner of their old homeland higher and higher. The young generation of Palestinians today have never seen the land, but are more nostalgic for Palestine and their elders.

The Palestinians were not about to let Zionist colonizers deny them their heritage and rights. Israel did and continued to do its best to deny the Palestinians. Israel has sent letter bombs to Palestinian poets, writers and researchers who gave voice to the cause, the Palestinian population which came under Israeli occupation was denied the right to engage in any public rhetoric of waxing about Palestinian attachment to the land, and today Israel continues its colonization of Palestinian land.

But the Palestinians resist, resist and resist. Zionism may appear strong, but today it is at its weakest. Ideas not might eventually shape the world. And today the idea of Zionism is on the defensive everywhere with less and less allies. The idea of Palestine continues to gain traction. Palestinians were not about to be silent. An entire generation of Palestinians are building an international solidarity movement dedicated to bring about justice and peace to the Holy land. Real justice and real peace, not the slogan version used by Israel and the United States.

The failure of Zionism can be seen every time a Palestinian rally takes place, every time several American cities now host Palestinian film festivals, and when one of the world's most prestigious universities establishes America's first college center for Palestinian studies:

Rapturous applause, a movie screening and economy-sized tubs of grape leaves and babaganoush ushered into being Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies last night, the first of its kind in the nation.

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia's Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and noted Palestinian-American historian (not to mention Obama pal) introduced the center in the world's most famous classroom, emphasizing that the event was an "important moment in the history of Columbia," as Emeritus Provost Jonathan Cole wrote him in an e-mail.

The center has been in the works for years at the notoriously Israel-connected university (full disclosure: my uncle is a co-director of the center). After several metamorphoses, the scholars behind the division laid its foundation on seemingly (or rather, relatively) neutral territory: the legacy of Edward Said, who taught at Columbia for 40 years before his death in 2003. It was at the school that he formed a "crucial dialogue" about the question of Palestine in the U.S. The center, as the night's program reads, will be "committed to the academic freedom of students, faculty and schools in the Occupied Territories, as well as among the refugee populations and elsewhere in the world where scholars and students carry out academic work on Palestine and Palestinians." Khalidi said they hope to provide opportunities for academic exchanges both local and global.

Khalidi said the center will focus on preserving and studying that heritage, along with promoting research and supporting scholarship among Palestinians. Already, it is stocked with history -- beyond Said's personal books and papers, the center's website hosts archives of Palestinian newspapers, posters and oral histories.

Do not underestimate what this stands for. What it means that in 2010 America there is such an institution. And in pro-Israel America, no less. This is genuinely a momentous occasion. And, by the way, it will give Zionists more cause to hate Columbia which they already view as the home of the late Edward Said and a bastion pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionism. They refer to it as “Bir Zeit on the Hudson” after the Hamas-run university in occupied Palestine to give you a sense of their fanatically crude propaganda and desperation.

The Zionists could never have imagined this. They thought about everything in building the Jewish state, expect in the rights of the Palestinian people and the persistence, the stubborn persistence, of the Palestinian people. They never could have imagined it because they held such racist disregard for the Palestinians. They thought that after 1948 the Palestinian matter was settled: Zionism won, and the Palestinians would be forgotten by history.

They never could have imagined that over 60 years later, an Ivy League university would inaugurate a center dedicated to keeping the memory and cause alive. The Palestinian people will not be forgotten by history, they are a people so alive with eventual fulfillment, a persistent idea which continues to grow will not be defeated by the retrograd colonialism and militarism which is Zionism, and in the end the Palestinians will write the last chapter.

Here's the Center for Palestine Studies website, it's the real deal homez!

All this is a slow process. A bit by bit process. But in aggregate it will change the narrative even here in America and eventually change history. On that note, this upcoming film by the regarded Julian Schnabel will also make a difference by strengthening the Palestinian cause.