Paper short abstract

This paper discusses an ongoing lecture series entitled “Eyes on Gaza,” curated by 3 Israeli academics. Stemming from our complicity in the Gaza genocide and our resistance to it, the series highlights the possibilities of using our positions as faculty to forge a form of complicit political action.

Paper long abstract

A central problem of structural complicity is the paralyzing impetus to ethical purity that arises in response. Moreover, because of the need to distance ourselves from its associated blame, complicity also seems to be paralyzing our capacity for political action. In my project, I seek to think of complicity as a political quandary (what is the best way to act in a situation of involuntary complicity) rather than a moral status (am I good or bad). I contend that the intractability of complicity can also be the source of its epistemological strength, allowing us to account for that which we cannot will away. In this way, complicity might ultimately also offer a political practice.

“All there is, while things perpetually fall apart,” writes Alexis Shotwell, “is the possibility of acting from where we are” (2016, 4). In this talk I thus wish to think of the affordances of this theory to examine our ongoing Zoom lecture series entitled “Eyes on Gaza,” which disseminates and archives academic, practical, and activist knowledge sorely lacking in Israeli media and all but banned in public discourse. The series is curated and facilitated by two colleagues from the University of Haifa and me. It stems equally from our complicity in the Gaza genocide and our resistance to it as citizens and as faculty members. I discuss the difficulties and pitfalls of using the complicity inherent in our tenure to forge a form of complicit political action.