The Palestine Exception

Screening of the documentary “The Palestine Exception” followed by a discussion with the film’s director Jan Haaken moderated by Aida Berisha and a communal iftar.

After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the new McCarthyism. As students across the country organize protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, decades-long taboos in academia around criticism of Israel – the “Palestine exception” – are shattered.

The film features professors and students as they join calls for a ceasefire and divestment from companies that do business with Israel and face waves of crackdown from administrators, the media, the police and politicians.  Scholars from diverse disciplines explain what is at stake in these protests and why so many young people identify with the Palestinian cause.

The documentary unfolds as a story of college campuses as sites of both rebellion and repression, places where personal and collective histories converge in unexpected ways.

Programme

Bio

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her documentary films focus on work carried out in contested social spaces and in sites of political controversy. Haaken has directed nine feature films, including most recently the 2-part NECESSITY Series: “Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance” and “Climate Justice & the Thin Green Line,” released in 2023, and “ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance,” completed in 2023. Haaken is author of Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling and Psychiatry, Politics, and PTSD: Breaking Down and co-editor of Memory Matters: Understanding Recollections of Sexual Abuse.

Aida Berisha is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on analogue photography and filmmaking. As a former refugee who was born in Kosovo, Aida is interested in stories of displacement, grief, growing up with multiple cultures and a sense of belonging. Their work aims to blur the lines between documentary and fiction and to juxtapose their subject’s material reality with their emotional world.

The screening is organised by the research cluster Global Entanglements. The cluster examines the position of artistic and cultural practices within the frameworks of global and translocal networks. From a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, the cluster seeks to dismantle Eurocentrism and essentialist narratives.