Category Archives: Palestine

You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Palestine, Ramadan, slices of life

Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon. 

“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (5/5)

Posted on by under activism, liberty and the left, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Controllers, Stakeholders, and the Claims of Justice

This is part 5 of a five-part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here. 

I began this series by distinguishing between an Institution and its Stakeholders, and have made two basic assumptions throughout: (a) that “stakeholder” is a legitimate concept, and (b) that stakeholders can legitimately make moral claims on corporate institutions. Though widely regarded as conventional wisdom, the assumption is in some quarters deeply controversial: a minority of dedicated critics have argued against both (a) and (b). Against (a), it’s argued that “stakeholder” is a vague and rationally unusable concept. Against (b), it’s argued that to the extent that “stakeholder” means anything, it fails to identify anyone who has a legitimate moral claim to make against, say, a corporation.(1)  Continue reading →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (4/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Rectificatory Justice and/vs. Business-as-Usual

This is part 4 of a five part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here.

In part 2 of my post, “Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity,” I discussed the common objection that activist demands for rectificatory justice like divestment are objectionable because they disrupt business-as-usual. As I say there, I don’t think disrupting business-as-usual is necessarily objectionable. If business-as-usual is sufficiently unjust, then a continuation of business-as-usual is just a perpetuation of some terrible injustice. We can reasonably argue about the threshold that must be crossed before it’s reasonable for an injustice to disrupt business as usual, or argue about the kind of causal contribution that a given institution has to make before it can be regarded as complicit in injustice. But absent such a discussion, pleas to continue business-as-usual should not strike anyone as persuasive. They should be regarded as rationalizations for moral complacency, and dismissed as such. Continue reading →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (3/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Complicity, Exposure, and Activism

This is part 3 of a five part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here.

At this point, the Stakeholders have criticized, the Institution has half-responded, and the Stakeholders have rebutted that half-response. What’s most likely to happen next is that because the Institution controls the terms of the debate, it will insist on a purely procedural discussion. The substantive issues are to be set aside as “too complex and controversial.” The issue of complicity is quickly to be submerged in a broth of procedural acids and left to corrode. The Institution, it will be repeated, must be governed in an orderly fashion—a fashion that just happens to give a systematic, unyielding presumption to stasis and the status quo, that places a nearly impossible burden of proof on anyone who seeks to change it, and that then describes doing so as a binding norm. Continue reading →

Let Them Eat Each Other

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, Fatwas, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post here called “Academic Hiring and Genocide,” in which I argued that genocidaires should, at the very least, be excluded from academic life, but ideally should be excluded from gainful employment itself. Whatever anyone thought of the argument, readers might have wondered about its practical relevance. “So Khawaja’s calling for the on-campus cancellation of ‘genocidaires’. Interesting vendetta, but how many genocidaires are there, anyway? And how many are actively seeking employment right now, including academic employment?” The New York Times reports that the “Defense Department [Is] to Cut Over 5,000” workers due to the Musk-Trump rampage against the “Deep State.” Could I possibly have meant them? Take a wild guess. Continue reading →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (2/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Stakeholders, Politicization, and Standing to Complain

This is part 2 of a five part series. For part 1, go here.

Background context: an institution accused of complicity in injustice counter-accuses its accusers of politicization and lack of standing.

Start with the politicization objection. The Stakeholders have two separate responses here. 

Responding to the politicization objection. First, they point out that it’s not clear that the politicization of a previously apolitical scene is necessarily objectionable. Productiveness, order, and justice are three separate values whose relative value is far from self-evident. Given this, it’s obviously not the case that the value of productiveness and order so outweigh justice as to trump it altogether. Continue reading →

Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (1/5)

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Complicity and the Strategy of Evasion

Imagine that an institution (“the Institution”) maintains a set of investments in various enterprises that make a clear and demonstrable contribution to some indisputable injustice. Now suppose that a set of stakeholders (“the Stakeholders”) objects to these investments, calling on the Institution to divulge the facts in a fuller way, and demanding divestment from the clearly objectionable investments.  Continue reading →

Academic Hiring and Genocide

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, character based voting, ethics, Fatwas, Palestine

“In the literature of complaint and reform, and in the endless reports from distinguished groups identifying a crisis in some element or all of higher education in America, a key defect is often the absence of practical solutions.” 

–John V. Lombardi, How Universities Work, p. 31. 

In an essay I posted here a few weeks ago, I argued that genocidaires seeking lower-level electoral office should be denied such offices at the ballot box. The argument was framed as a response to Jason Brennan’s account of the ethics of voting, which he describes as “the ethics of voting in political contexts.”(1) Though he doesn’t quite define “political contexts,” it’s obvious enough that he means voting in democratic elections for governmental office, e.g., for U.S. President, for legislative offices, and in some cases for judicial offices, taking U.S. electoral politics as the paradigm. Continue reading →

Nowhere to Hide

Posted on by under Palestine

About a month ago, I described an unwelcome encounter I’d had at work with the Department of Homeland Security (ICE). Today I had one with the Israeli authorities–while sitting at a desk in Iselin, New Jersey.

A friend of mine, along with his wife and several small children, is literally going hungry in the West Bank, has had nothing to eat for days. They’ve been fully locked down since 2023: no work, no money, nowhere to go. The army is in their village every day, smashes into their house every now and then. The world a mile outside of their village is a shooting gallery where violent death lurks around every corner. The IDF told them flat out to leave now or die later. They’ve opted for “die later.” Continue reading →