Category Archives: Palestine

Force and Fraud on Campus

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response. 

I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading →

“First They Came for the Professors…”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”

Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.

Continue reading →

“Free Meals in the Prytaneum”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“So if I’m to make a just assessment of the penalty I deserve, this is it: free meals in the Prytaneum.”

–Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 37a

Cough it up, Georgia. You assholes owe us all.

Silence, Complicity, Genocide

Posted on by under Palestine

Ever since the October 7 attacks on Israel, I’ve repeatedly threatened to go silent for a year, only to backslide a week or so later and sound off on something that somehow “demanded” comment. Having done this some eight times in a row, I decided to give myself until the end of 2023 to get any public comments out of my system, and then really stop. The reflex to keep talking was hard to kill, but I finally think I’ve succeeded. 

I happen to be writing this on the last day of 2023, so it’s my last day to avow the resolution in public and explain it. It seems absurd to explain a so-far failed resolution to go silent, but the situation itself is so surreal that the addition of yet one more absurdity on top of all the others seems like a drop in the bucket. In short: Why go silent now? Isn’t silence complicity in atrocity and injustice? 

Continue reading →

The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund

Posted on by under General announcements, Health Care Series, Palestine

I hope readers will consider contributing to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund for Gaza (ht: Norman Finkelstein). My further hope is that opportunities will open up after the war, if we can allow ourselves that phrase, for health care-related work in Gaza.

Planning for THE DAY AFTER

This Fund is dedicated to the children of Gaza: providing medical attention to the children who need it the most, helping to rebuild & relieve the medical sector in Gaza, and, eventually, establishing a sponsorship program for the over 20,000 children orphaned in Palestine. Continue reading →

Go Fund Me for Hisham Awartani

Posted on by under General announcements, Health Care Series, Palestine

Below the fold is an Instagram post from Morgan Cooper, an American living in Ramallah these past two decades with her Palestinian husband and two children, and something of a rising star on Instagram. (Mashjar_juthour and handmadepalestine are the names of two of her business enterprises, the first an arboretum outside of Ramallah, the second a handicraft business.) I’m not sure the Instagram post will come out in its entirety, but it’s a plea from three weeks back for a GoFundMe for one of the college students shot in Vermont in late November, Hisham Awartani. The man pictured on the right of the photo is Hisham’s father, Ali. In Western nomenclature, he would be “Ali Awartani,” but in Palestinian nomenclature, he’s known as “Abu Hisham,” the father of Hisham.

The son has been rendered a paraplegic from the shooting, is paralyzed from the chest down, faces a long recovery, and naturally, can look forward to large medical bills. His current status is likely what we in medical billing parlance call “DNFB”: Discharged but Not Final Billed. The billers and coders are no doubt trying to calculate the bill, and the insurance companies are likely trying to figure out how to avoid paying it to whatever extent they can. The charges are probably astronomical, beyond anyone’s ability to pay. But every little bit will help.

The Go Fund Me link is: https://gofund.me/026fa8da

Continue reading →

Israel: Hier Ist Kein Warum

Posted on by under Palestine

An interesting item I haven’t seen anywhere in the news: Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces yesterday raided and vandalized the Freedom Theatre of Jenin, arresting its two codirectors without charge (or even accusation), holding them for the better part of a day, and then releasing them the next day. Read the article for the backstory, but what’s of interest to me are the particular details of the arrest. Mustafa Sheta, one of the co-directors of the theater (and a Facebook friend of mine), 

told Al Jazeera how he was handcuffed and blindfolded before soldiers kicked him in the head and stomach. He was then taken to the Al-Jalama checkpoint, north of Jenin, where he was held in the cold, rain and mud for about 14 hours before being released.

“They did not tell me why they were there,” he said. “They did not tell me if I was wanted for any crime. No questions asked. They just took me.” Continue reading →

“The Future Is Being Bulldozed”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.

This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading →