The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable
Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on power depends on his nation being at war. The region is paying a high price
Category: Columns
The Organizers Are Jewish. The Cause Is Palestinian. This College Won’t Be Hosting.
On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it’s a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible.
Devastation From Gaza to the West Bank
While much of the world’s attention has been concentrated on Gaza since October 7, 2023, the same Israeli policy imperatives in Gaza have been followed in the West Bank. While the level of carnage has been of a lesser degree until now, the methods and policies are the same. It has been estimated that since October 7, over 700 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed. Furthermore, the Israeli settlers have intensified their attacks on Palestinian farmers and the rate at which they are taking over their land by force, all the while benefiting from the impunity that Israel has been enjoying and the relative silence of the world.
MESA Board Joint Letter With CAF condemning the decimation of the education sector in Gaza
Various organizations have been documenting the Israeli military’s killing of Palestinian scholars and university professors. As a precise accounting is obstructed by the ongoing attacks and insecurity, we provide below only a partial list of the names and, where possible, academic affiliations of those scholars who have been killed. These individuals represent a very small percentage of those who have been integral to higher education and intellectual life in the Gaza Strip and have been catastrophically affected by death and suffering: the hundreds of faculty and staff and thousands of students and their families who have been killed in military assaults, bombings, or through prolonged exposure to starvation and disease since 7 October 2023.
Testing the boundaries for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
The current operation in the West Bank is meant to test the boundaries of what Israel will be allowed to get away with. It is setting the stage for the forced ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Jewish Faculty Response to Columbia University Task Force Report on Anti-Semitism
“We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in response to the Antisemitism Task Force’s second report, which documents a number of disturbing incidents and student experiences. We join the report’s authors in abhorring all instances of harassment, intimidation, and violence against students for being Jewish, and agree that at Columbia, “[n]o one should feel excluded, marginalized, disrespected, or unheard.” We are writing to demonstrate how the report undermines these fundamental values by subjecting the incidents described to analysis and framing that misrepresent their meaning and implications. We are troubled by the way the widely publicized report contributes to a hostile narrative about Columbia, which is used to justify interference in the institution’s governance and operations.”
From a hospital in Gaza: ‘Please let me die’
We urge the international and medical community to demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire, and to allow access to the humanitarian aid so desperately needed.
Michael Berry is an anesthetist and intensive care doctor. Suheal Khan is an orthopedic surgeon. Edward Brown is a consultant vascular and general surgeon. They recently returned from volunteering in one of Medical Aid for Palestinians’ and International Rescue Committee’s emergency medical teams in Gaza.
Academic Freedom | Letter Regarding Draft Joint Parliamentary Resolution in Germany
We write on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) to express our profound concern over a draft joint parliamentary resolution of the parliamentary groups of the SPD, Bündnis90/Die Grünen, FDP and CDU/CSU that claims to aim to protect, preserve and strengthen Jewish life in Germany, a draft version of which recently became public. The draft resolution that you are proposing, however, fundamentally undermines artistic and academic freedoms protected both by international law and by Germany’s Basic Law, and therefore must be abandoned. There are several deeply concerning aspects of this proposed resolution.
In Defense of Life and Breath: Free Khalida Jarrar
On August 12, 2024, Zionist prisoner authorities violently transferred researcher and lecturer at Birzeit University, Khalida Jarrar, into solitary confinement. This occurred after nearly eight months of an unjust imprisonment without charge, where she has been held under illegal administrative detention. In the early morning hours of December 26, 2023, the Israeli settler army invaded Khalida Jarrar’s home and stole her away from her family and her work. Khalida Jarrar is a political leader and a researcher and lecturer. Over the course of her life as a feminist activist and political scholar, the Israeli state has consistently tried to silence her. This most recent solitary confinement is part of the landscape of structural violence against Palestinians and an intensification of its war of elimination of Gaza and all of Palestine.
“Zionism Über Alles”
The German political establishment has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust gave it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.