When Rana Tomaira, Research Scientist and Lecturer, started teaching at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2015, she would always dedicate a week in her courses to address Palestinian issues under colonization. In her other courses on urbanization and social development in the Arab world, she found that students really engaged with the material but didn’t have a proper avenue to learn more about the complex issues of the Palestinian struggle.

Though not Palestinian by blood, the Iraq-born and Saudi-bred Tomaira holds this cause very close to her heart. Having grown up surrounded by Palestinian friends and gone to university in Jordan, she received exposure to the issue and considers it very central to her life. Tomaira visited the West Bank in 2008 and is a fervent supporter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization that helps Palestinian children receive medical treatment in the United States.

Later, she was approached by two students to teach a directed study on Palestine. With the help of one of the students, she devised a preliminary syllabus and proposed the course to the NYUAD Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, a body which reviews syllabi for new courses to ensure they meet academic and administrative needs. Tomaira’s proposal was met with enthusiasm, particularly by professors within the Arab Crossroads Studies department, who had hoped to offer a course on Palestine for some time. The course was approved in June 2020 and taught for the first time in the spring 2021 semester.

While the Palestinian struggle is often referred to as a conflict between Palestine and Israel, Tomaira intentionally titled the course The Colonization of Palestine to reflect the unequal and oppressive power dynamic between the two states. “It is basically a story of European colonialism that is still ongoing today and it informs geopolitics in this region at large,” she summarized.

The course seeks to educate students on both Palestinian history and current affairs, focusing on the root cause of the issue — settler colonialism, where colonists want the land without the people.

On a typical day, class starts with several students sharing media articles about recent events, which then springboards into a class discussion followed by a study of the course material at hand.

“Students seem to like it so far as it connects current events with historical [events] … it makes them link what is happening today to the events in the past and it helps them get the big picture and understand why things are happening the way they are today,” Tomaira noted.

Apart from engaging with secondary sources, students in the class also had the opportunity to learn firsthand about the Nakba — the 1948 exodus when more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland — from an ethnic Palestinian whose grandparents and parents lived through the ordeal. Through this experience, students were better able to understand the lived consequences of this colonial project.

Dania Dekedek, Class of 2022 and a student in the class, is ethnically Palestinian but was born and raised in Jordan. Though she has never been to her ancestral home before, she actively seeks opportunities to educate herself on the region. She is also the president of Students for Justice in Palestine, a Student Interest Group that campaigns for Palestinian rights.

“I haven’t really had the room to explore what it means to be Palestinian or to understand the issue for what it really is,” said Dekedek. “So when I came to university, I decided to take advantage of other resources around me to explore that part of my identity and this class was another perfect amazing resource.”

She also noted that there was a lot of enthusiasm among Palestinian students, as it was the first time that they felt represented in the largely Eurocentric curriculum at NYUAD. Though it wasn’t advertised excessively, the course filled up quickly and had a waitlist of 10, resulting in Tomaira having to expand the class size to 27.

“Even though our university is working towards the decolonization of knowledge, I don’t think we see a lot of it just yet. To have a course that explicitly says that, hey, this is wrong, and the production of knowledge in this way is just amazing,” she expressed.

“I’m looking at [the readings] in a fresh view because this is really not my area. I’m not a historian and I’m not a Palestine expert, so this has been part of the joy,” Tomaira marvelled. “Students at NYUAD come from all over the world, and they come with a fresh look and take on issues … They keep me on my toes and always engage [with] the topic at hand.”

Palestinian-American Sarah Afaneh, Class of 2022, has really enjoyed the course so far: “I think the best thing about it is the vast number of resources [Tomaira] gives us … a lot of different perspectives that aren’t always shown just because of politics and biases.”

Afaneh really cherishes the interactions that she’s had with other non-Palestinian students in class: “It’s very interesting to have a continuous dialogue with people who haven’t had this be a part of their life forever … for them it’s an outsider’s perspective.”

While it is encouraging to have a space for Palestinian students to explore their roots and voice their concerns, Dekedek hopes that more non-Arab peers will also take the course and learn more about their struggle.

“The Palestinian struggle is just one major example of the forces of power — white supremacy and orientalist thinking — that have dominated our world for the longest time,” she said. “For you to support the Palestinian struggle also means that you support Black Lives Matter, that you don’t support the marginalization of minority groups, so that’s why I think it’s important to take that course, just as an NYUAD student as well as a global citizen.”

Puerto Rican-American student Tatyana Brown, Class of 2022, took the course because she identified similarities between the Palestinian struggle and that of Puerto Ricans against American colonialism:

“As a non-Palestinian, I think the biggest thing that comes to mind from this course is thinking about solidarity, solidarity in struggle. That’s really, really, really important to me,” Brown said passionately. “I think I experience this course differently [as a non-Palestinian] because it allows me to frame things as an ally as much as I can be. It hits me personally from a different colonial sense. I don’t understand the pain of having family members who have experienced the Nakba or the pain of not being able to go back to your land, but I do understand the pain of yearning for a certain land … As an African-American, I do understand the pain of yearning for being able to connect more with your ancestry because that’s been interrupted by political experiences.”

Although remote learning is unavoidable given the present circumstances, Brown and Tomaira both wished that the course were taught in person as it deals with very emotional and personal matters for most students. In particular, Brown would have liked the opportunity to have heart-to-heart conversations with her peers in the class, as those emotions are very real and hard to convey through a screen.

Brown, nonetheless, remains grateful for the class and especially to Tomaira. “She is incredible, she is vulnerable, she is honest, she is loving, she is tender,” said Brown. “And I really appreciate her for putting this class together.”