From the Jewish News (UK):
An arts group behind a controversial pro-Palestinian event in Glasgow has received more than £900,000 in public funding, sparking criticism over its use of a slogan widely condemned by Jewish groups.Arika, which is organising a five-day event called Episode 12: From the Rivers to the Seas, was awarded £911,950 by Creative Scotland, a public arts body funded by the SNP-led Scottish Government, for the period 2025 to 2028.The funding was revealed by the Daily Mail, which reported that the event had sparked accusations of antisemitism over its title.
I looked through the program and saw these two lectures taking place next Sunday:
Decolonising Time
Ramón Grosfoguel and Luke Devlin
2.45 - 3.45pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first servedJoin world-renowned Puerto Rican decolonial thinker and activist as he unpicks the Eurocentric lie of linear time, and shares anti-colonial temporalities that arise out of, and in light of the life ways, suffering, dignity, and creative drive of oppressed communities around the world.
Access: Live Captioning
In the Time of Intifada: From Palestine to the Planetary Anticolonialism
Sherena Razek & Peter Makhlouf
4.15 - 5.30pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first servedHow does Palestinian anticolonial resistance struggle against the colonization of our concept of time?
Access: Live Captioning
The idea that one thing follows another is apparently Eurocentric colonialism.
There is so much that is so stupid about this. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians kept records of their kings' succession records thousands of years before Europe emerged as a world power. Conversely, the Europeans also maintained a cyclical concept of time along with linear, with agricultural seasons, liturgical calendars, and recurring religious observances.
There is merit to the idea that Europeans imposed their ideas of calendars and 24-hour days on indigenous peoples. But that is much different from saying that linear time is a "Eurocentric lie."
And what does this have to do with Palestinians? Glad you asked!
In answering the call to abolish the cultures of Nakba, how do we confront the Nakba’s planetary scale and the forms of “elemental intifada” by which the land refuses its colonial subjugation? In the wake of the World Wars, Palestine proved the epicenter of the West’s attempt to reestablish capital’s global rule by whitewashing its crimes in the colonies. The genocidal onslaught against historic Palestine and the ecocidal assault on our shared earth are inextricably bound to the same global reordering. Both are grounded in a foundational lie: that catastrophe is inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest. In thinking with the Arabic language, to speak of ecological “disaster” is always already to have named “Nakba.”
In this conversation, Palestinian thinkers Peter Makhlouf and Sherena Razek sketch the chronic contours of Nakba as a temporal technology for securing colonial-capitalist futurity. They will probe how Palestinians militate against the imperial grammars of time that anesthetize us to the infrastructures of accumulation and dispossession that join Palestine and the planetary. Moving across poetry, film, visual culture, and collective praxis, the conversation will explore the temporal cosmologies within which the Palestinian culture of resistance refuses to allow the crimes of Nakba to be consigned to the elemental ash heap of history.
In short, the "nakba" cannot be understood merely as something that happened in 1948, but as something happening now. Which is, in fact, how it is increasingly presented. The distinction between a historical event and its present consequences is treated as a colonial imposition.
But there is a problem. If the "nakba" is defined as an ongoing condition rather than a historical event, what could ever bring it to an end? Palestinian statehood? Reparations? Peace? Or does the "nakba" necessarily continue as long as Israel exists?
The description condemns the idea that catastrophe is "inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest." Yet by making the "nakba" an enduring feature of the political order, it risks making the catastrophe permanent by definition.
And there is a lot of evidence that this is exactly what Palestinians want to do. This is why they relate everything back to 1948, because until Israel is destroyed, they are victims of a "nakba" today. The millions of Hindus and Muslims who became displaced in the same year during India's partition are not suffering a current crisis, nor are the descendants of tens of millions of World War II refugees. But Palestinians are. The simultaneously complain that they are eternal victims yet they want to define themselves that way. They could complain that Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and the Gulf states do not allow them to become citizens, but that redirects the blame for their misery away from Israel: better to remain stateless and tell the world that the "nakba" is ongoing.
That's why they hate the idea of UNRWA being dismantled. An organization created by those horrible Europeans is what gives them "refugee" status today.
It isn't colonialism that makes catastrophe inevitable and permanent. It is the Palestinians themselves.
The further irony is that if you extend their concept of time to everyone else, then the Jews belong in Israel at least as much as they do. 2,000 years of expulsion is meaningless when linear time is a lie. We might as well invite the Romans, Greeks, Crusaders, British and Turks into the land, because the Palestinian claim is only a recent one and recency is colonialist.
Anyway, if the concept of linear time is so colonialist, why is the earlier lecture at 2:45 PM and the later one at 4:15 PM? Everyone should be able to attend every lecture simultaneously. I think they are imposing Eurocentric ideas on the attendees of the festival. Burn the programs!