Leila Khaled: The woman behind the symbol

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:58:55 +0000

The highlight so far of Pluto Press’s ‘sympathetic but not sycophantic’ Revolutionary Lives series, Irving chronicles one woman’s role in the Palestinian resistance movement and offers a valuable history lesson for the younger generation. Drawing extensively on recent interviews conducted with Khaled, the book reads like an oral history delicately framed within a political history of the past 65 years.
The book raises an impressively wide range of issues for a small tome, from Khaled’s attitude towards different tactics of resistance to the western media’s obsessive objectification of her. Perhaps the most interesting discussion concerns the debate over whether Khaled’s involvement in what some see as a ‘male mode’ of resistance – armed struggle – signified a limited feminist consciousness. She explicitly prioritises national liberation over social liberation, saying that the first and most direct form of oppression is the Israeli occupation, but does not take women’s rights for granted as an automatic follow-on.
Khaled tells Irving that becoming a mother prompted her and others to push for internal changes within the PFLP, which at the time had lessons to learn about facilitating women’s participation despite being one of the most progressive forces in Palestinian politics. We’re told that despite initial ambivalence to the women’s movement, Khaled learnt much from her involvement in the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW). Through attending international conferences as a GUPW representative, for instance, she encountered new and alien concepts – such as anti-Zionist Israelis – that although she was initially hostile to, Khaled came to appreciate.
Humorous anecdotes occur in unlikely places in Khaled’s account of her life. But there are also many tragic moments, particularly early memories of her family fleeing Haifa in the Nakba and, later, the effects her notoriety had on some family members.
Telling Khaled’s story is not simple. Just as her 1973 biography attracted a legal challenge in the US, Irving’s book, due to launch at Blackwell’s bookshop in Manchester, was also targeted by Zionists, forcing a venue change. This is a defiant and determined addition to a very limited literature and helps to demystify and humanise the woman behind the symbol.

The Assault on Universities: An education in democracy

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:00:28 +0000

The increasingly neoliberal university system in Britain has played a key role in shaping and undermining the debate about students, academics and universities. The contributors to this book aim to expand our imagination about education beyond the narrow confines touted by the government.
With essays devoted to the crucial role of education in democracy and the wider public good (not limited to education in science and technology but including the arts and humanities), this book debunks the myth that university education should be seen merely as a commodity from which private individuals gain by earning higher wages later in life.
Contributions from Michael Bailey and John Rees stress the role of academics and students respectively as truth‑tellers and progressive political communities in wider society. The latter feature of student life has only been present since higher education was opened up beyond elites after the second world war. With a large number of British universities – naturally not those that educate mostly the children of the wealthy – at risk of closure as a result of government funding cuts, this collection does well to fuse historical and philosophical perspectives with a sense of urgency and a grounding in real, current issues.
The LSE-Libya scandal, referred to by several contributors, is held up as emblematic of a number of symptoms of an unhealthy higher education system. One that is scrambling for funds and frequently feels it cannot afford to be picky about donors; and one in which some academics have begun to abandon any sense of an ethical facet to their vocation. Broadsides against the closure of interdisciplinary courses, academics who exist in ‘ivory towers’ and the devastating reversal of previous social mobility gains that will inevitably follow the tripling of university fees and the scrapping of the EMA, foreground the social context of the cuts.
This willingness to discuss the relationship between funding cuts and other aspects of life and learning is the joy of the book. Without bluntly or repetitively seeking to hammer home a single slogan, the essays offer a holistic analysis, and collectively they demonstrate eloquently why higher education matters.

Red Pepper » Hilary Aked

Leila Khaled: The woman behind the symbol

The Assault on Universities: An education in democracy