Seizing Knowledge Production in Solidarity With Palestine
What is the responsibility of knowledge producers to Palestine?
How can journalists, scholars, writers, photographers, translators, editors, and artists produce knowledge and art in solidarity with Palestinians?
For too many of us, our answer confines solidarity to content. It is through the material we produce — we tell ourselves — that we document and bear witness to the subjugation of Palestinians. It is through our ideas, writings, images, and tweets that we spread the word, counter dominant narratives that normalize Israeli racialized violence, and even engender new ways of seeing. This is how many came to describe the occupation of Palestine as apartheid, or better yet, as settler colonialism. Knowledge as content can unsettle the production of consent, or so we hope.
For those for whom ideas alone feel unbearably insufficient, solidarity has demanded that we embody other identities — “activist,” “organizer,” or simply “worker” — and that we hold them in harmony, or at least in productive tension, with that of “knowledge producer.” These intersections have birthed the praxis through which academics and artists create and perform in solidarity with liberation. This is how the campaign to boycott, divest, and impose sanctions on Israel (BDS) continues to grow in academia and art.
Yet for all our efforts to employ knowledge production towards Palestinian liberation, here is an uncomfortable fact: We routinely and unknowingly surrender our greatest power as knowledge producers. Here I mean producers in the economic sense, meaning people who create economic value from the knowledge we produce. And in the economic sense, it is an undeniable reality that our greatest power as knowledge producers comes from our participation in the hegemonic global regime known as Intellectual Property.
Intellectual property (IP) is ubiquitous and all-encompassing. All writing — from the highest of scholastic achievements, to this editorial, to even a notebook doodle — enters the economy as a specific type of IP, copyright. As does all art, music, photography, graphic design, video games, and even software. Technological inventions and life-saving medicines enter it as another form of IP, patents. Even some plants and seeds are now patented.
Intellectual Property now runs through every global supply chain and every trade agreement. Whereas international human rights law has no teeth, infringing international IP laws can shut down trade.
Its ubiquity has transformed intellectual property into the world’s most valuable and powerful asset class, dwarfing tangible commodities, resources, and physical property. Imposed by European colonizers and settlers on the rest of the world through colonial and neocolonial trade relations, IP now runs through every global supply chain and every trade agreement. Whereas international human rights law has no teeth, infringing international IP laws can shut down trade. This is how Samsung, for example, has been banned by US courts from importing some products into the United States — not because of child labor in its supply chain but for infringing Apple’s patents.
As a hegemonic system, IP has inspired much discursive critique about its excesses, injustices, and harms; about the racist and colonial practices that undergird it.
But when it comes to action, when it comes to our own participation in this omnipresent system, when it comes to our own IP, many creators and knowledge producers remain passive. They see IP — when they see it at all — as a legalistic scaffolding far removed from their interests and passions, one they may only interact with when their publisher, agent, or granting agency brings it up. Many academics fully cede their IP to the universities that employ them without knowing they have done so.
The indifference to intellectual property is understandable. After all, who wants to engage with legal rights that are purposefully dull, technical, and seemingly impenetrable? Like so many systems that shield power, the apparent complexity is crucial to gatekeeping. But there is a second culprit in the indifference: a pernicious narrative by institutions of knowledge and art production that creatives are not workers. Because we may enjoy our work a little too much, creatives are expected to refrain from demanding economic rights, to pretend we operate in quaint, economy-free zones. Earning livable wages, unionizing, demanding our employing institutions divest from slave labor or fossil fuels or apartheid, owning our own creations — all become luxuries not rights. How can we realize our full potential as producers when we are still not recognized as such?
Awakening to our power as the producers of the valuable asset the economy codes as intellectual property, taking back the rights to our creativity, unleashes intriguing possibilities for transnational and abolitionist solidarity.
Awakening to our power as the producers of the valuable asset the economy codes as intellectual property, taking back the rights to our creativity, unleashes intriguing possibilities for transnational and abolitionist solidarity.
For Palestine, occupying our power as producers grants us another action in the arsenal to weaken Israeli institutions. In addition to boycott, divestment, and sanction — valuable in their own right — we can add production. Where boycott, divestment, and sanctions seek to condition the free movement of tangible and intangible Israeli production on the freedom of Palestinians, this strategy demands we also condition the free movement of our own production.
Which brings us to a fun fact: As IP producers, we already have the tools to weave our political commitments through the structure that governs how our knowledge is used commercially in the world.
Like all property, IP is nothing if not the right to exclude. Awkwardly built atop 17th century European ideas about individualism and real property, the legal and economic codes known as IP have rendered all creative expression and invention into individual exclusive rights. Every copyright symbol © you come across — every “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice — is essentially a border sign notifying you of the creator’s rights to exclude you from their “property.” Even when it is not visible, copyright is still there simply because it is automatic. You may not want it as a creator but copyright automatically sticks to all your creations if they happen to fit the legal definition of copyrightable subject matter.
But here’s the loophole: Every creator can decide how to exercise their right to exclude. You can decide what your border sign says.
Many have already decided. The popular Creative Commons licenses — which The Public Source itself had used until today — are a suite of standard border signs that reflect the specific political commitments of those who drafted them. Ideated by computer scientists and cyber law scholars in Europe and the United States in the 1990s, when the internet still held the promise of decentralized sharing, they carry the central preoccupation with how to share ideas and culture more freely.
Awkwardly built atop 17th century European ideas about individualism and real property, like all property, IP is nothing if not the right to exclude. But here’s the loophole: Every creator can decide how to exercise their right to exclude. You can decide what your border sign says.
But what if we do not care about knowledge flowing “freely”, as an abstract disembodied principle, but instead about knowledge feeding liberation? What if we actually hear the voices of Indigenous peoples and critical scholars who have long warned that commitments to “open sharing” and to romantic notions of the “public domain” as a neutral landscape actually exploits the labor and bodies of people of color, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished? What if we take seriously that movements like Creative Commons do nothing to interfere in structures of oppression?
What if we wrestle with the Eurocentric economic and legal rights we have been given as creators — to exclude others from our creative expression — and flip the logic on its head, choosing to exclude only oppressors and their infrastructures?
In the spirit of this reflection, The Public Source is launching an experiment in radical solidarity.
In solidarity with Palestinians, we are exercising our right to exclude the use of our production from the settler-colonial institutions that subjugate them. The Public Source copyright license now grants free commercial use to any individual or entity who accepts a Duty of Care to Palestinian life and uses this license in their own intellectual property. This naturally excludes any individual or entity identified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a target for boycott. With these terms, we join others in the ethical licensing movement.
The Public Source copyright license now grants free commercial use to any individual or entity who accepts a Duty of Care to Palestinian life and uses this license in their own intellectual property. This naturally excludes any individual or entity identified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a target for boycott.
We are aware of the symbolic weight of any individual copyright license. As a small all-women publication in Lebanon directly targeted by oligarchs who would have us be silent, The Public Source holds a tiny space in the vast landscape of knowledge production.
Thankfully, the most powerful experiments are collective. And we are inspired by the possibilities of collective action around our combined creativity.
Let us imagine, for example, coming together in a commons of knowledge producers who pool their inventions, art, and research in the service of Palestinian liberation. Let us envision – in the same spirit that Palestine scholarship has aligned itself with Indigenous studies as a “political endeavor” — that Palestinian creators could collaborate more closely in Indigenous-led projects to protect and reclaim knowledge. Let us think together about other strategies to deploy creativity as economic warfare against occupation.
A particularly fruitful engagement might emerge from the growing resistance in Palestine to digital rights becoming yet another arena of subjugation, this time through unrestricted mass surveillance and censorship on social media platforms. In collaboration with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, which has laid a path for grassroots organizers and techies to resist by withholding labor, a No IP for Apartheid campaign would pull at the IP strings within digital power. And it would also move beyond tech. No knowledge for apartheid. No creativity for apartheid. No seeds for apartheid.
Because of the way creative work is ordered and governed in our economies, our experiment necessarily engages with legal systems. But should it not be obvious, we do not place our faith in the law. We do this because we believe that vulnerabilities, incongruities, and hidden sources of power in oppressive systems invite us to occupy them, to play with them subversively, to radically re-imagine them anew.
We invite you to join us in our transgressive experimentation.
Knowledge will be free when Palestine is free.