Description
For over a century, the Palestine question has come to shape the imperial legacy of the University of Edinburgh. Balfour’s 67-word promise, which he made in his chancellorship appointment at UoE (Vadasaria and Perugini, 2021), inaugurated a century of Palestinian dispossession and displacement, maintained in part by the University’s on-going investments in a political economy of genocide against Palestinian life and land. Simultaneously, this same institution has promised to investigate its institutional heritage with British empire within a wider remit of decolonial redress, which is now underway. As a result of pressure from mobilisation efforts, the “Decolonial Transformation Project” has begun a process of inquiry with Palestine in view. While the decolonial redress promise appears a responsive solution to Balfour’s imperial promise, it is set against a discursive and material frame that refuses to divest, let alone acknowledge the harm of Israel’s political economy of genocide in Palestine. Set in a ‘conflict agnostic approach,’ as named by senior leadership on UoE’s task and finish working group, the liberal limit points of decolonial redress to settler colonial and imperial violence are in clear view. By way of continued disavowal, what appears within these two so-called distinct promises is a shared commitment to Zionism via Euro-American imperialism. The simultaneity of these seemingly contradictory processes exposes the particular way that UoE has reproduced the Palestine exception, which in this context, explains the very limits of liberalism claim towards anti-racism and decolonial redress. This paper eflects on what these incommensurable politics reveal when they meet the historical question of Palestine, as written on its doorstep.
