Several members of The Race, Culture and Equality group (RACE) Working Group wish to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people, alongside other academics, scholars and activists including the BISA CPD convenors. The past weeks have witnessed Gaza further devastated by multiple aerial bombardments that have taken the lives of thousands of people, and injured and disabled countless others. These events must be understood within the colonial and settler-colonial history and context in which they unfold: the 75 year dispossession of land, and extraction of resources of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. The imbalance of power that enables Israel to cut off all supplies of electricity, food, water, medical care, combined with insurmountable disparities in wealth, military and policing, and international support, means that there can be no equivocation in response. Palestine is under occupation and we stand wholly for its liberation. The naming of this deep structural inequality does not negate the loss of life of Israeli’s – no loss of life is condoned. 

The RACE Working Group was founded in 2015 to counter racial oppression, within the discipline and through our geographical research. Geography as a discipline, and geographers as scholars and students cannot be complacent about our own complicity. As a discipline, geography has contributed to colonial expansion on a multitude of levels. Geography’s foundational concern with mapping and exploration has enabled colonial and imperial projects in Palestine and elsewhere. This includes the co-creation of nations, borders, treaties and forced migrations that ensure lasting conflict. These interventions have been theoretically and methodologically justified by geographers, leading to the function of the discipline as the ‘science of imperialism’. Factions of the discipline are also actively involved in the research and development of military weapons, in collaboration with Western governments and corporations that profit off war. Weapons ‘battle-tested’ in Palestine are used to suppress dissent in nations across the globe.

The Geographical discipline has long had a parasitic relationship with the so-called ‘Middle East’ and Palestine in particular. The region remains a popular site of ‘knowledge production’ that benefits British academics’ careers, while local knowledge and community organising is sidelined, including through administrative issues such as work and conference visa refusals. Most recently, on 13th October, the RGS-IBG opted not to host the PalFest citing risk of protest; the discipline feigns a-criticality as it contributes to deplatforming Palestinian voices at the moment in which expressions of solidarity are urgently needed. 

Action: Geographers, RGS-IBG, and the research groups to actively consider how they reproduce extraction in their engagement/research and how this extraction could be countered.  

This parasitic relationship with Palestine enables geographers to disengage from the region’s ongoing struggles in practice; an expression of what critical theorist Sara Ahmed describes as “the missing link between critique and anti-racist activism”. While scholars in the UK who express solidarity in their work face censorship, the threats against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim geographers are intensified by the expansion of political backlash, reducing the space to discuss the history and context of one of the longest ongoing conflicts in the world today. 

Action: We call other groups to consider how they might be silencing Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, and to provide meaningful opportunities for these voices to be heard. 

We are gravely concerned by the discipline’s silence on this issue, and it is our role as a working group to contribute to extending teaching and learning resources to all geographers. As a first step towards this, we will collate a list of works by Palestinian authors useful for geographers, and invite you to disseminate these broadly amongst colleagues and students. We will be updating this over the next months on the RACE blog and encourage geographers to contribute in resources as well. 

We also want to engage the wider community and invite you to suggest productive ways forward to counter the silences, violence and extraction of discipline and those who align with it. 

We are contactable at: raceingeography@gmail.com

The information, practices and views in this statement do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) or wider Society/Working Group membership.