Two people wearing keffiyehs stand facing a wall covered in flowers. Photo: Institute for Palestine Studies.
By Aziz Yafi – Oct 11, 2024
Academic institutes responded to pro-Palestine voices on their campuses by immediately censoring, intimidating, and defaming anyone who challenged institutional power. However, largely thanks to the global student intifada, these institutions’ walls are beginning to crumble. Still, work remains to dismantle the structures of supremacy, coloniality, and racism within these spaces.
In almost all universities across the Western, genocidal world—where I write from—this censorship is starkly visible. Students, faculty, and staff alike are targeted, and the university remains passive, unwilling to safeguard the freedom of speech it claims to champion. This suppression mirrors a broader trend in Western academia, where coloniality/decolonization is only accepted as a subject of study, used as a buzzword that interprets—but does not interrupt—institutions. Decolonization is vehemently resisted when it seeks to challenge or disrupt the material structures of power: the university cannot allow for decolonial theory to become a tangible anti-colonial praxis, threatening the foundations on which these institutions are built.
As scholars, we are forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that Western institutions cannot truly be decolonized. What do we do, then, when the very structures we seek to change enforce the limits on our activism, writing, and thoughts? I propose an alternative solution: clandestine publishing as a form of intellectual resistance, and as a pathway to knowledge production that bypasses the gatekeepers of Western academia and operates beyond its restrictive boundaries. Clandestine publishing allows us to topple institutional walls, reveal the weaknesses of the powerful, and center the hope and vitality of the struggle.
UK Censorship in Numbers
Since 2021, censorship of pro-Palestine speech in the UK has surged by 450%, according to reports from various legal and civil rights groups. This repression extends beyond universities, infiltrating workplaces, schools, and public spaces. Employees have been suspended or dismissed for as little as wearing a keffiyeh, while students have been subjected to surveillance under programs such as Prevent, which falsely equates pro-Palestine speech with signs of radicalization.
This campaign of silencing is deeply entrenched in university culture. Zionist organizations like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) employ students to spy on pro-Palestine voices on campuses, incentivizing them to falsely accuse their peers of antisemitism. This is all while powerful lobbying groups—such as UK Lawyers for “Israel”—pressure institutions to terminate the contracts of academics who challenge dominant pro-“Israel” narratives. Such attacks are not grounded in legitimate legal claims but are rather part of a broader strategy to financially destabilize those who speak up for Palestine and intimidate future pro-Palestine voices into silence. This culture of fear leads many scholars to self-censor and reduce their political engagement to private conversations.
These acts of repression are not new. Historically, those who challenge dominant power structures — whether during the Cold War, under Thatcher’s regime, or in the wake of more recent movements, such as BLM— have always faced retaliation. However, the repression of pro-Palestine voices today reveals a profound hypocrisy: while the West claims to champion freedom of speech, it enforces silence on any issues that threaten its imperial and colonial ambitions. This hypocrisy has been amplified by Western institutions’ swift and outspoken condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Historic Clandestine Publishing
In this context, the role of clandestine publishing becomes critical. Throughout history, from the underground press in colonial India to the anti-psychiatry publications in Europe and the US, those oppressed by censorship have turned to anonymous, hidden forms of knowledge production to spread anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary thought. These efforts proved invaluable while circulating radical ideas and resisting dominant power structures.
Palestinians, too, have a rich tradition of clandestine publishing, particularly during the revolutionary movements of the 1970s. Often produced anonymously or pseudonymously, publications such as Arab Palestinian Resistance, Free Palestine Newspaper, and other pamphlets and periodicals allowed for the dissemination of revolutionary ideas that challenged colonial narratives and affirmed Palestinian self-determination. Similarly, Palestinians living in refugee camps have always used the walls of their camps to powerfully write their truth for all to see, without fear of repercussion. Today, this practice is more relevant than ever. In an era where speaking publicly about Palestinian liberation invites severe repercussions, clandestine knowledge production offers a powerful alternative.
The university system has historically commodified and extracted knowledge from marginalized communities, but it always stops short of allowing that knowledge to inform real resistance. Universities have circumvented militant knowledge, preached neutrality, demanded knowledge be depoliticized, and confined decolonization to distant history. These institutions demand theory without practice and draw a border between the university and the public; education and politics; academics and activists. Our knowledge production is only useful if it can be a commodified product that brings in more students and money, and enhances the university’s reputation. The money we would bring in would then be invested in our genocide.
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As Edward Said reminds us, the role of the intellectual is to speak truth to power. And yet, today’s academic structures constrain our ability to do so. The pressure to publish in prestigious journals, secure conditional grants, and adhere to the Western model of named authorship limits our capacity to produce militant, collective knowledge that can truly challenge systems of oppression. It strangulates any time spent sharing our knowledge with our communities. In seeking to end our own financial and immigration precarity amid the cesspit of late-stage capitalism and militarized borders, we sacrifice the radicalism of our thoughts, while also entrenching—financially and socially—the very systems and ideas we seek to dismantle.
By embracing clandestine publishing, we reject the commodification of knowledge and the constraints of Western individualism. We center the collective over the individual, the struggle over the author. This strategy, borrowed from revolutionary movements across history, allows us to bypass the structures that seek to censor and punish us, creating spaces for radical ideas to thrive and circulate beyond the confines of institutional power.
Resisting the commodification of knowledge also requires resisting novelty. Clandestine writing does not necessarily have to be new. It can also involve the revisiting of revolutionary ideas from the past and archival sources that have been suppressed by the passage of time and institutional power hierarchies—returning revolutionary knowledge to our collective struggle.
Ultimately, we must recognize that our energies are better spent outside the academy, and in strategically extracting its resources to fuel our anti-colonial work elsewhere. It is time to return to the archives of insurgent knowledge, revive the revolutionary spirit of past movements, and produce knowledge that resists (self) censorship and affirms the struggle for Palestinian liberation by all means necessary.
In times of intensified repression, clandestine publishing becomes a necessity and a vital form of intellectual and political survival. As censorship tightens, we must draw from history, learn from past movements, and rely on one another to keep the flame of resistance burning. This is not a call to abandon the academic space entirely, but to master the art of navigating both worlds—maintaining our presence within institutional frameworks while never losing sight of the collective struggle. To go underground as academics means to learn from the endurance of Palestinian resistance, the steadfastness of Gaza, and the struggle of Palestinian prisoners. It is a call to learn rather than teach, to apply knowledge rather than extract it.
The tunnels dug by Palestinian prisoners with spoons, and those created by Gaza’s resistance, symbolize a reorientation of our approach—teaching us to think not just laterally but vertically, subverting spatial barriers and borders. These tunnels remind us to delve into our collective history of knowledge production, to republish what has been buried or scattered in lost archives, and to make accessible what’s been withheld by institutional gatekeepers. Doing so teaches us to reject the Western capitalist drive for constant novelty, which seeks to erase the wisdom of militant generations before us. The words of those who were often assassinated for their ideas remain alive.
To learn from Palestinian resistance is to carve and dig escape tunnels from academia’s mental production lines, with pens as our tools. We go underground not to bury our heads and remain hidden but to traverse and dismantle the borders that confine us. We go underground to emerge stronger, to speak loudly and radically in spaces where our voices are suppressed, and to break through the boundaries that seek to silence us.
Note: Aziz Yafi is a pseudonym the writer chose as an ode to the same pen name used by Dr. Abdul Wahab al-Kayali, founder and editor of Free Palestine newspaper published in London between 1968 and 1984. He was assassinated by “Israel” in 1981, but his pen name continued to be used as an editorial byline until 1991, according to archival material found by the writer of this article.
