The study of political theory is particularly well suited to pedagogical practices that involve music. Several canonical figures were themselves composers and instrumentalists who cared deeply about their musical commitments. For a notable few, including Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau, music arguably constitutes an indispensable feature of their respective ideas about politics and the social order. Yet even when music is less central to a thinker’s written work, it remains a useful tool for illustrating historical context and providing a richer understanding of shifting cultural currents. This article explores several considerations that will aid in the selection of music as a way of promoting conceptual clarification and contextual elucidation. While the overwhelming focus on music in the classroom has relied upon contemporary popular music, I prioritize the use of period music, which avoids some potential challenges. The article includes a musical connection rubric intended to help in the selection of music that will prove most effective as a pedagogical tool.

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Do those of us living in the present have an obligation to rectify injustices committed by others in the distant past? This article is an attempt to revisit the problem of historical injustice by bringing together recent work on structural injustice in relation to the problem of wrongful benefit. The problem of benefitting from injustice, I argue, provides firmer grounds of obligation in forward-looking accounts of responsibility for historical injustice specifically. I argue (1) that if the negative effects of historical injustice endure into the present, and (2) if we participate in structures that allow for its reproduction, then (3) our moral responsibility to set matters straight increases to the extent that we derive a benefit from the perpetuation of an unjust status quo. Finally, (4) a general moral obligation to make the world less unjust generates a motive for individuals to learn more about their place in a structure that reproduces the negative effects of historical injustice.

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Thirteen powerful, firsthand testimonials from scholars about campaigns to silence and repress those who speak out against Israeli apartheid and US complicity. 

As criticism mounts over Israel's violation of Palestinian human rights and international law, campaigns to silence and repress those who speak out against Israeli apartheid and US complicity have grown alarmingly. Scholars have been denied jobs, refused tenure and promotion, rejected for funding, and expelled from institutions, while student organizations have faced harassment and sanctions. We Will Not Be Silenced offers thirteen powerful, firsthand testimonials from scholars and students whose struggle to defend their academic freedom and free speech has garnered widespread public and international attention.

Praise for We Will Not Be Silenced 

"It is perhaps no surprise that as Israel drifts towards repression and reaction within, and becomes increasingly isolated internationally as a result of the harsh and criminal occupation, its informal lobby in the US becomes more desperate to stifle free and open discussion of the state they seek to protect. Efforts of the kind sampled here . . . are as deplorable as they are predictable, and should be dismissed with contempt, and strongly opposed." 

—Noam Chomsky 

"These testimonials provide a stunning and all too familiar portrait of the extent to which the forces that suppress free speech and academic freedom are at work in the US university system to stifle those who would call for social justice in Palestine. . . . These voices must be heard." 

—Bishop Desmond Tutu

Good research is often controversial. In the social sciences, the exchange of new ideas, new interpretations of history, and the excavation of counter-hegemonic or what Michel Foucault would call “subjugated” knowledge unsettles and upsets received wisdom (Foucault, 1980: 81-82; 2003: 7). For those of us fortunate enough to study a region as eternally fascinating and intellectually demanding as the Middle East, I think this point is especially salient. And for those of us who both research and teach these subjects in a post-9/11 United States it is more relevant still (see: Doumani, 2006). In the decade since that terrible tragedy, we have witnessed theemergence of a resurgent anti-intellectualism both in the halls of government and on our campuses. As the Bush administration pursued policies of reckless destruction abroad, self-appointed guardians of the academy swiftly appeared on the domestic front, contributing to the jingoistic fervor of the time by encouraging students to report on the alleged anti-American and anti-Israeli biases of their professors.Couching a narrowly authoritarian vision of the University in an Orwellian discourse of “tolerance” and even “academic freedom,” outspoken ideologues like David Horowitz insist that the academy suffers from insufficient “balance.” Of course, such attacks have little to do with a genuine concern for pedagogical practice; rather, they are the culmination of the Right’s long-standing attempt at eliminating the last vestiges of progressivism and critical intellectual inquiry from the American political landscape.

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In response to a 1994 Palestinian suicide attack in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin expressed his opinion that Israel “will have to decide on separation [from the Palestinians] as a philosophy” (as cited in Makovsky, 2004, p. 52). There needed to be “a clear border,” as he put it (as cited in Cook, 2006, p. 145). Echoing this sentiment during his own tenure as prime minister, Ehud Barak also called for “disengagement” from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)— and nearly every Israeli leader since then has supported ethnic separation in one form or another (Cook, 2006). Indeed, during the past decade, Israel has gradually moved away from the imposition of direct military control over the lives of the occupied Palestinian population to the implementation of policies inspired by a philosophy of separation. With the completion of the 2005 unilateral disengagement of Israel’s presence in the Gaza Strip, Israel has attempted to secure the safety of its citizens by physically separating them from Palestinian population centers and simultaneously increasing the level of military control— albeit from the periphery. This chapter argues that the philosophy of separation is a logical extension of Zionism’s exclusionary ideological history and that its implementation in the Gaza Strip has not reduced the level of violence against Israeli civilians. Instead, it has actually exacerbated Israel’s security crisis.

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Israel is a country uniquely affected by demography, insofar as the state is bound by an explicitly Jewish nature. This balance has forced Israel to combat external demographic threats from before 1948 up until the present. The implementation of policies including the endorsement of “transfer”—a euphemism for the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the razing of Palestinian villages, discriminatory legislation and the creation of facts on the ground—are a logical extension of the Zionist ideology. The construction of the West Bank Barrier (WBB) is the current manifestation of Israeli demographic fears and the Zionist desire to further curb non-Jewish elements.

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On June 16, 2002, Israel began to construct an elaborately designed barrier around the West Bank. Such an endeavor was not unusual, nor was it a new policy practice for Israel. Yet, the West Bank Barrier (WBB) has become the most expensive domestic project ever undertaken by the Israeli government, comprising a complex network of electronically sensitive fencing, stacked barbed-wire coils, concrete walls, watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads, and trace roads for detecting footprints. The WBB’s path has inevitably undergone a range of modifications, though it differs significantly from the Gaza barrier in one respect: it is built on the Palestinian side of the 1949 Green Line. This difference has arguably been the most important legal nuance of the project and has led to a massive swell of opposition, from both the resident Palestinian population and the international community. Yet, after much debate, including attention from the High Court of Israel, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations, and the United States, the planned 681 kilometers of barrier is virtually complete.

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