On May 26th and 28th, I mentioned a group of activists who’ve put their bodies on the line at Port Newark/Elizabeth, not far from Delaney Hall, to stop military shipments through those ports to Israel. These activists are part of a little-discussed worldwide effort–spanning Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Denmark, the UK, Canada, and the U.S. (Newark, Norfolk, Houston, Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles) to block the flow of military hardware to Israel.
Continue readingTag Archives: Gaza
Why We Upheld the U.S. War Crimes Act At Port Elizabeth and Were Arrested
On May 26, I posted a press release on the May 22, 2026 activist blockade of Port Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal. This post below is a reprint, with permission, of an item describing an earlier action of theirs that took place on October 3, 2025. For the original post,and more material, visit their Substack, Zoomed Out. I’ve supplied the hyperlinks.
I would just underscore the fact that if “[h]undreds of tons of tax-payer funded weapons are being shipped weekly from its docks to the Israeli ports of Ashdod and Haifa via commercial shipping companies, Maersk (Danish) and ZIM (Israeli),” then ostensibly civilian infrastructure and workers are being used as human shields, not just at Port Newark/Elizabeth itself, but at every point in this supply chain from beginning to end.
Continue readingBodies Blocking Bombs
New Jersey Activists Blockade Port Newark
Though press attention is currently riveted on what’s happening at Delaney Hall (and with good reason), the press release below describes a largely unnoticed activist action that took place at the same time at virtually the same place–the industrial east side of Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Taking a cue from successes in Oakland (see this and this), activists are putting their bodies on the line to block the shipment of weapons out of Port Newark/Elizabeth to Israel. (I’ll be posting a report on a prior action at the same location from this past October, and also on activity by the Oakland Peoples’ Arms Embargo.)
Calling All Palestine Activists
Converge on Princeton: Reunions, May 21-24
I’ve been making the case to pro-Palestine activists wherever I go: the experience of being shut down at LeMoyne, NYU, U of Texas at Dallas, and Rutgers (with the prospect of retaliation at Michigan) and elsewhere is certainly a dispiriting one, but the answer is not to keep demanding entry where entry has effectively been denied, but to find opportunities for visibility when and where they present themselves. Continue reading
The Unintended, the Foreseen, and the Defamatory
“We absolutely cannot and should not ever be cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children…”
–Sue Altman
Sue Altman and Adam Hamawy are both Democratic candidates for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. A controversy has recently erupted over Altman’s response to comments Hamawy made in an interview with Hasan Piker. The basics of the controversy are nicely captured in this short piece in Jewish Insider. I’ll quote the first few paragraphs, but urge readers to read the whole thing. Continue reading
Graffiti, Hate Speech, and Free Speech
Statement to Princeton Town Council
400 Witherspoon St
Princeton, New Jersey
April 27, 2026
I’ve twice previously mentioned the Princeton Police Department’s decision to investigate anti-Israel graffiti as bias intimidation, mostly while discussing other things. In this comment, I want to focus specifically on the bias intimidation issue.
As you know, the issue arises from graffiti discovered in various places around town last August. The Princeton Jewish Center brought the issue to the attention of the Council, and the Police Department decided to investigate the graffiti as bias intimidation. Given the Council’s positive response to the Jewish Center’s input on the matter, I think it’s fair to conclude that the Council accepts the Police Department’s approach. Continue reading
Meir Kahane at Princeton
Here’s another unprinted letter of mine, this one sent a few weeks ago to The Daily Princetonian (Princeton University’s student newspaper, popularly known as “The Prince”), a paper that prides itself on its fact-checking protocols, but has a lot of trouble admitting error when it gets things wrong. Well, sorry, but it’s gotten this issue badly wrong. Continue reading
No Words
We’re propagandized incessantly about anti-Semitism and “Islamism”—terms without stable definitions—but there turns out not to be any terminology in the English language to describe the forcible displacement of a whole population on sectarian grounds by a Jewish State, even if that State has spent its entire history and pre-history doing just that, and invokes an elaborate ideology to rationalize it. The predictable result is that we have words for things we can’t define, but lack words for things that keep recurring. The first thing leads to snap judgments, the second, to blindness about the obvious. Continue reading
The Power and the Glory
Imagine a society in the grips of civil war. On one side stand the partisans of theocracy; on the other, the partisans of secularism. As they fight over their country, a larger imperial power decides to invade, citing as justification the apparent approval of (a faction of) the secular side, along with the inherent evils of theocracy. Taking advantage of the smaller country’s internal division and weakness, the imperial power then tears the country to pieces that neither side will ever be able to govern. Besieging, starving, and massacring the people it claims to be liberating, the imperialists eventually conquer the place, lording it over the defeated population. They then spend the next several centuries singing their own praises–until they, too, are defeated by a rival power and swept away. Continue reading
War Is Peace
We’re reportedly about to go to war with Iran. I just checked a minute ago: The lead story at The New York Times is the Supreme Court’s tariff decision; likewise The Washington Post and MS NOW. At CNN, the lead story is Trump’s trade war. At Fox, it’s a toss up between the trade war and a debit card scandal in California. And so on. Literally business as usual. The pattern is clear enough: as we prepare for war, the thing to do is to turn inward and turn away from it in a spirit of make-believe. Tariffs matter more than war. Trump matters more than war. Debit cards matter more than war. At this point, anything matters more than war. War is imminent, hence unreal.
War, in short, has become normalized in the familiar imperial way, by equating peace with perpetual warfare confined to the periphery of empire, and to the peripheries of consciousness. It’s out there, hence not here, hence nowhere. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 