Permission to narrate denied again: A trial by ordeal at UC Berkeley

Congressional hearings are the modern equivalent of the trial by ordeal. In a trial by ordeal, the logic was simple and cruel: if you survived the ordeal, you were deemed innocent. But the ordeal was often impossible to survive. The point wasn’t to deliver justice, it was to exert control through fear and ritualized punishment. Congressional hearings often follow a similar pattern. They are structured to be combative, operating under the pretense that if a person can withstand the pressure, they must be in the right. But the design of the hearing makes genuine defense nearly impossible. As in the trial by ordeal, the real purpose is not to seek truth or justice, but to assert power, enforce ideological discipline and stage a public spectacle of control. In both, guilt is presumed and innocence is nearly impossible to prove. A system built on the spectacle of suffering is not so different from one fueled by viral soundbites — less concerned with truth than with political theatrics.

Watching Congressman Randy Fine and Congresswoman Lisa McClain question UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons about antisemitism on campus, I couldn’t help but feel the entire scene was futile. The structure of the questions, the insistence on yes-or-no answers to complex issues, and — most disturbingly — the deliberate decontextualization of a social media post by history professor Ussama Makdisi all pointed to one thing: this was not an inquiry, but a performance designed to score political points.

The post in question was a retweet of an article by Salman Abu Sitta titled I could have been one of those who broke through the siege on October 7. Both congresspeople chose to interpret the “I” in the title as referring to Makdisi, rather than to Abu Sitta — the article’s actual author. This interpretive sleight of hand conflates the author’s “I” with every reader who merely references it — a logic reminiscent of the Inquisition, where individuals were persecuted not for what they wrote, but for possessing books written by others. Reading has always been a serious business, especially when those in power rule through lies and propaganda.

However, the real issue is not merely one of authorship. It is that both scholars — Abu Sitta, founder and president of the Palestine Land Society in London; and Makdisi, chancellor’s professor and May Ziadeh chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies — have spent their lives building the Palestinian archive and contextualizing Palestinian history, only to be denied, once again, what Edward Said rightly called the “permission to narrate”: the ability to tell one’s own story, so often censored by those who control the terms of discourse.

The label “wannabe terrorist,” casually used by Congressman Kevin Kiley in reference to Makdisi, is not just inflammatory, it is a colonial gesture, an act of naming meant to dominate and erase. Just as Robinson Crusoe, the archetypal European colonizer in Daniel Defoe’s novel, gave himself the authority to name the native man he encountered “Friday” — erasing his history, language and identity — so too does labeling Makdisi a “wannabe terrorist” function as a colonial act of domination. It asserts the power to define, delegitimize and silence.

When asked about the article’s title, Lyons — who clearly did not know the piece or its author — initially tried to evade the question. Congresswoman McClain, however, insisted he put himself in the shoes of a Jewish student and imagine how such words might feel. Pressured by her provocation, Lyons finally responded that the article was “a celebration of the events of October 7.”

Despite my sympathy for Lyons, I wish he had answered differently. First, the “I could have been” in the title is very different from “I wish I were.” What Lyons interpreted as a “celebration” is, in fact, a historical explanation — one that Abu Sitta courageously offers to illuminate the conditions in the Gaza Strip. As the accomplished scholar he is, Abu Sitta explains how the Gaza Strip is populated largely by Palestinian refugees expelled from their lands in 1948. He demonstrates — using maps and data — how Israel has systematically shrunk the strip over the years, creating an unbearable and deeply humiliating reality for its residents. The phrase “I could have been” marks the probability of something happening, not a celebration of its occurrence.

Second, I wish Lyons could have asked: Why would a Jewish student in Berkeley feel threatened by a Palestinian refugee in Gaza expressing that he too might have tried to break a siege? And why would the same student feel endangered by a professor simply retweeting this article? For Palestinians and Arabs, this is not a religious conflict, it is a political one. At the end of the day, it wasn’t Abu Sitta’s, Makdisi’s, or the entire Palestinian population’s idea to conflate Zionism with Jewishness. That conflation has a much older genealogy, one rooted in the ideological visions of Zionist leaders themselves. In a better world, it would be David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky who’d be questioned about the trap they set, not only for Palestinians, but for Jewish people as well.