Category: Columns

The People’s University of Providence

“There are no universities left in Gaza,” read one sign from Brown’s encampment for Palestine, which officially came to a close yesterday. The sign faced University Hall, an administrative building, and telegraphed one of the many themes of the encampment: that divestment, among many other, perhaps more pressing, issues, is also an educational issue. Because Brown has repeatedly shooed away calls for divestment under the powerful banner of being A University—a title that supposedly carries nonpolitical implications—the eighty-some students who have chosen to pitch tents in full violation of student-conduct policies are making a point with their teach-ins. If Brown wants to make this about education, the students will make this about education.

Yes, it is genocide

In most cases of genocide, from Bosnia to Namibia, from Rwanda to Armenia, the perpetrators of the murder said they were acting in self-defence. The fact that what is happening in Gaza does not resemble the Holocaust, writes Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, does not mean that it is not genocide