Arthur Asseraf

Can I ask for help? I’m not sure how to use this platform (or any social media) anymore.
I’ve been away bc it all feels a bit useless with the world right now. But when I was on Twitter a lot, it gave my work meaning - since then I feel in a bit of a crisis professionally, and stuck. Tips welcome!

Senior Teaching Associate [Temporary Cover] at University of Cambridge Searching for an academic job? Explore this Senior Teaching Associate [Temporary Cover] opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

JOB!!!
Four-year full-time job in Modern European History (Social/Economic) at Cambridge. By today's standards, it's pretty good! Split between Trinity Hall College and History Faculty.

It's also widely defined so do apply, deadline July 27.
@camhistory.bsky.social

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNR005/s...

No trans people were consulted on this decision that only affects trans people. In fact trans people were actively barred from consulting on this decision that only affects trans people. But transphobic bigots? Oh they got consulted for days.

Fucking grim. I'm absolutely fuming.

That institution obviously no longer exists. This unforgivable university administration that has targeted students and staff, and has restricted the freedoms of all students including Jewish ones. I trust those people that taught me more than my degree - they can have it back.

So Columbia at the time was a rare place for the young Jewish man that I was to learn a language that my ancestors had stopped speaking. I was taught by the best Palestinian scholars in a way that could only happen in New York City. It was an environment that was both safe and exciting 3/

Columbia was also where I had the first opportunity to take classes in Middle East Studies. In a class on Islamic Law, the most essential participant was a lawyer who had a deep knowledge of Jewish Halakhic law and kept comparing the two systems 2/

I want to send a very sincere Fuck You to Columbia University, let me be specific:

Columbia was where I started learning Arabic, and in my class were at least three Orthodox Jewish women who consistently bodied everyone else due to their excellent Hebrew grammar. 1/

Podcast indispensable dont 1 phrase résonne avec ce qui se joue ces dernières années autour de la place des legs coloniaux dans notre présent du Sahel à Mayotte, de l’Algérie à la Kanaky-Nouvelle Calédonie
« On a jamais aussi bien connu le phénomène colonial et on ne l’a jamais aussi peu reconnu »

Thank you this was a great read :)

DEFEND THE RIGHT TO PROTEST: SUPPORT SOAS & CAMBRIDGE STUDENT ENCAMPMENTS FOR PALESTINE | European Legal Support Center (Powered by Donorbox) Help us defend the right to protest on our campuses!     We are witnessing intensified repression and criminalisation of student-led protests, and your support is as crucial as ever to fight back.    ...

As things are getting worse for Palestinians, our ability to protest this abroad is shrinking.
Some UK universities (like mine) are trying to ban demonstrations for 🇵🇸

please consider donating to legal costs to resist this, esp. if you’re based at a university/in the UK
donorbox.org/studentprote...

PSA:
I’m sorry I didn’t answer your email. Yes, all of you. I have a very heavy admin job atm and cannot respond to as many requests for media, conferences or writing projects as I would like this year (especially if they’re far away). But keep bothering me and I’ll do my best!

We did not pay anyone for this review I promise

Rahmane Idrissa · The Time of the Whites: The Will to Colonise The will to colonise has not disappeared. Colonisation may be gone from much of what used to be the French empire, but...

A surprise to find that our book “Colonisations: notre histoire” which came out in 2023 is in this week’s
@londonreview.bsky.social

Especially great because of how seldom books in foreign languages get reviewed in English 👇🏼

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Fr government spent a vast amount of money compensating settlers for their property, which they then invested in France. No reparations have been paid to Algerians. So this exodus in 1962 cannot be separated from the status of people in an unequal society before + after

And finally on seizure of property: the most significant consequence of this was land redistribution. For those who lost property, this was obviously terrible but interestingly they sought redress from the French government - not the Algerian one, and that’s who compensated them -

It is a remarkable achievement of colonialism to not only dispossess people but then give them lessons on how they are meant to end this. If Palestinians had been listened to rather than told they need to come up with betters plans we would not be here in the first place

Do I wish things had happened differently? Sure. Do I find the FLN’s lack of an articulation of what an Algeria for different people might mean frustrating? Absolutely. Does that mean that I attribute the events to that and think that it was a failure? Absolutely not

This mainstream view, which is also that of the French government, has no historical understanding of colonialism, and of their state’s responsibility in generating that situation in the first place. The settlers were encouraged by the state and supported by its army

The mainstream view in France is that Algerian independence was a disaster. It goes from the center (or even center left) to far right, with different nuances. The argument is that 1962 was terrible and could have been avoided and that the FLN is dreadful

Ok, for me, the best way to explain this is to describe who the people are who make the argument you are making when it comes to Algeria, and why I disagree with them:

Yair, I truly do not see how you can read my essay and believe that I think it was ‘less bad’ or that lives were not destroyed. I don’t know what you’re implying by positionality but that can cut several ways.

The whole point is that it is easy to look back and say ‘well they were always going to choose to leave’. No. There is nothing fundamentally different about them compared to Australians or Israelis. And Algeria is no more or less paradigmatic a case than either. They all have something to teach us

I would warmly encourage you to read more about the different kinds of people who left Algeria: where they came from, their relationship to that land, and to France. What you’re writing glosses over a huge amount of pain and human experience to prove a point about categorization /

I am well aware of the similarities you’re describing and in fact that’s why I wrote them into the article bc I thought it would make it more powerful. But I think we fundamentally disagree about what colonialism is and how it operates

Because Algerians inherited in 1962 a state and society broken by colonialism - they tried to repair it, some things worked some did not. But comparing this to Zionists arriving and creating this problem is not helpful

I’m glad that my emphasis on developments in 1963 in Algeria, which I did mean to evoke developments with the Israeli constitution and absentee property law, came through to you. But there is a reason why I didn’t explicitly compare them which we keep returning to:

New record: not once but twice in one day have I received mail and email intended for Assef Ashraf (my taller, more attractive colleague who works on a different continent)

I include myself in this certain kind of person, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this job

… looking at all the different things that have been called settler colonialism by those doing it (which is my definition, not the fact that there happen to be settlers) shows that the category is messy anyways, and doesn’t predict outcomes

I take your point on the ability of this kind of analysis to reveal things. But I have noticed a huge amount of intellectual and political energy going into defining to what extent Zionism does or does not meet that theoretical model that seems (to me) misspent…