I’m not one to give anyone specifically military advice, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to comment on the fraud of Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Only one thing really needs to be said, and said at top volume: under no circumstances should any Palestinian militant group disarm for anyone or anything. That goes for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the Lion’s Den, and anyone else with a weapon and the will to use it. Do not disarm. Do NOT disarm. To disarm is to commit mass suicide by placing yourself in the hands of confirmed liars and psychopaths. Things are bad, but nothing could be worse than that.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Palestine
Kaddish
“Is there anyone for whom we’re saying kaddish tonight?” the rabbi asks the congregation.
Yes, I think to myself. More than one. But in another way, for no one. No one can say kaddish for so many.
Robert Massie at Princeton
“Divestment and the Boundaries of Conscience”
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been involved since 2024 in the campaign to induce Princeton University to divest its holdings, not just from Israel, but from arms manufacture and military affairs as such.
It was about a year ago that I got it into my head to get Robert K. Massie IV involved in our efforts. Massie is one of the architects and chroniclers of the decades-long campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa; I’d first encountered his book Loosing the Bonds twenty years ago, and been impressed by the rigor of his argument, as well as by the wealth of detail and moral passion he brought to the subject. Continue reading
Albert Aghazarian, a Postscript
About five years ago, I posted a memorial essay here for the late Albert Aghazarian, the Armenian-Palestinian translator I met on my first trip to Palestine about twelve years ago. By chance, I met a friend of Albert’s tonight, Gaby Kevorkian, a retired physician and resident of Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, currently living in Princeton. Gaby points out that my description of Albert’s home–“he lived so simply”–may well have been misleading. “Have you ever been inside Albert’s home?” Gaby asked. In fairness, I had not. “Well,” he pointed out, “If you go inside, there are many rooms.” The latter claim does indeed raise doubts that Albert lived quite as “simply” as I had suggested. I have amended the post accordingly.
Morituri Te Salutant
I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best friends in Palestine, someone who lives in a small village in the South Hebron Hills. I’ve excerpted it below, deleting personal names, and omitting place names and other particulars, and corrected the grammar of one sentence for clarity. It’s in English, but I’ve provided a tl; dr translation just after the block quote. The word “football” refers throughout to soccer. Continue reading
Karma Comes for Mikie Sherrill
A controversy has recently broken out in the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Mikie Sherrill, who has long touted her experience as a helicopter pilot for the Navy, is now facing the somewhat exaggerated charge that she “cheated her way” through the Naval Academy (to quote hearsay from the Internet).
The backstory is this: Nicholas DeGregorio, a supporter of Sherrill’s opponent in the race, made a records request re Sherrill, including her Naval Academy record, to the National Personnel Center of the National Archives. Continue reading
Imperium et Dolus
After helping Israel destroy Palestine and commit genocide there, Australia, Britain, and Canada are “recognizing” a “State of Palestine”—a “state” under military occupation, in the process of annexation, without borders, without a government, and without a military—while continuing to arm and support the regime destroying it.
If this is recognition, what would repudiation be?
Thoughts on Complicity
I’ve recently given a handful of talks critical of the Kalven Committee Report’s (KCR) conception of institutional neutrality–three or four, depending on how you count, with one or two more to come, depending on what the referees say. My argument is pretty straightforward: it’s an adequacy-condition on any account of academic norms that the account deal with the problem of institutional complicity in wrongdoing. The KCR defense of institutional neutrality doesn’t just fail to deal with this issue; it offers complicit institutions a blueprint for evading accusations of complicity even when those accusations are recognized as true, well-documented, and incriminating. Continue reading
His Deeds On His Head
Fifty or sixty years from now, this is how they’ll be rehabilitating the reputations of the assholes running our current genocide in Gaza. Oh, the private doubts they had! The anguish they suffered! Poor, poor things! Judge not, lest it be discovered that you figured out on Day 1 what these “experts” were too cowardly to admit or act on for the duration.
The “war hawk who wasn’t,” except that he was.
Is It Time to Bomb Columbia University?
I had a conversation the other day with a friend who just started law school at Columbia. This person told me that on the first day of orientation, the first-year law students were visited by officials from Columbia’s so-called Office of Institutional Equity (OIE). According to OIE, the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” is presumptively to be understood as advocacy of genocide, as discrimination against Jews, and therefore as a violation of Title VI. Anyone who chants it thereby becomes a candidate for reprimand, suspension, and/or expulsion. So they were instructed not to chant it. A couple of things can be said about this, I think. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 