One thought on “No Rest Until Divest”

1. Here’s coverage from The Daily Princetonian on the event.

   https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/09/princeton-news-following-tightened-protest-regulations-pro-palestinian-organizations-hold-protest

   Unfortunately, The Prince (as it’s called) failed to stay at the event long enough to cover what was probably the most riveting speech given at it–one woman’s recounting of her recent trip to Jenin. Actually, what she recounted was the last few decades of life in Jenin, including all of the relatives she’d lost to the Israeli occupation over those decades.

   Critics of divestment express anger over the fact that the call for divestment doesn’t fixate on October 7. But no one has given us any reason whatsoever to fixate on that one date except for the fact that fixating on it distracts attention from Israel’s depredations before and after it. The historian Zachary Foster offers the following far-from-exhaustive list of Israeli aggressions against Palestinians just before October 7. (Incidentally, Foster got his PhD from Princeton, as did Norman Finkelstein, whom I mention below.)

   https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/ceasefire-oct-6th-2023

   Why not start out with October 5? Or September 22? Or September 13, 15, 17, 18, or 19? How about the seven Israeli naval attacks on Gazans in the weeks before October 7? Or the wholesale assaults on the West Bank in the ten months before October 7? Or the 27 discrete other attacks Foster enumerates in his post? Or the wholesale slaughter during the Great March of 2018-19? Or any of the wholesale Israeli slaughter mentioned on virtually any page of Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza? Or the acts of “de-development” mentioned in Sara Roy’s The Gaza Strip? That’s a good thousand pages of alternative starting points to October 7. Every one of them is a reason for not fixating on October 7. October 7 was one event in a sequence of prior and posterior events. Either we put the whole sequence in context, or we’re engaged in willful amnesiac nonsense.

   The Prince’s coverage of the September 3 event is itself an instance of this. It’s not just that American journalists can’t get October 7 right, or its antecedents right, or what happened afterwards. They can’t even get the attempt to get it right right. These are people habituated to not getting anything right, ever. It’s not our job to bring ourselves down to their level. It’s their job to bring themselves up to the level of reality, all of it. Forget October 7, 2023. How about starting with September 3, 2024, all of two days ago?

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