Tag Archives: Israel

Stirring the POT (3)

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Genocide and the Academic Chairs of Virtue

I had meant “Stirring the POT” to be a monthly series, but my last one was back in March and it’s now July, so I guess the “monthly” promise was destined to be broken.

I wrote my last installment just after the talk I gave on institutional neutrality at APPE, and a couple of months before the one I was then scheduled to give at the Heterodox Academy conference in June. The Heterodox Academy talk ended up being significantly different from the APPE version or the version I put on the blog back in March. At any rate, the third version was the charm. The talk was well attended and went very well. There were a few skeptical or critical questions during the Q&A which I expected, but there was also some significant agreement, which came as a surprise. I’ll save all the squabbling for a separate post. Continue reading →

My First Foreign Visit as Mayor

Posted on by under Fatwas, slices of life

I was aimlessly surfing online when I happened on that now-famous clip of the New York City mayoral candidates being asked what foreign country they would visit first on being elected to office. It’s amusing to me that, put in that situation, I would truthfully have answered Israel. It’s even more amusing how uninformative that answer turns out to be. Funnier still is the number of people who, on hearing it, would confabulate their way to an explanation and get it wrong. But I would not have prefaced or explained what I said. Ask a stupid question? Get a cryptic answer. Under the circumstances, they should be grateful to get an answer at all. Continue reading →

Davenport et al on Regime Change in Iran

Posted on by under Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, War with Iran

PoT’s own John Davenport has a piece in The Defense Post attacking the idea of regime change in Iran. John argues, reasonably enough, that a war with Iran is ill-conceived, partly because it’s based on Israeli deceptions, and partly because it’s likely to lead to terrible, even catastrophic consequences. Continue reading →

Against War with Iran

Posted on by under Fatwas, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Trump 2, War with Iran

People like to say that Near East politics is complex, but the war on Iran is blindingly simple. Aggression is immoral, as is participation in it. Israel’s war on Iran is a blatantly obvious, incontestable act of aggression, as is US participation in the war so far, along with any further participation. No one has bothered to provide even a semi-plausible justification for this war, no one can, and no one will. The whole thing is insane.

Continue reading →

Israel’s War with Iran

Posted on by under War with Iran

Between January and March of 2020, I wrote a 24-part series condemning the idea of war with Iran. I then reluctantly added a 25th part last April. I’m not going to repeat any part of that performance now. If you want to read it, click the “War with Iran” tag. Suffice it to say that I knew this day was coming, did my inept share of tilting at windmills about it, and now it’s here.

Continue reading →

Valley of the Ghosts

Posted on by under Palestine, Ramadan, slices of life

Facebook does this thing where they exhume something you posted on this day, x years ago, just to remind you that you did: “You have memories on this day,” it helpfully intones. Sometimes you want to be reminded, sometimes not, and sometimes you can’t be sure. This one, I guess, falls into the third category. It was the midpoint of a long walk I took on June 10, 2016, which fell during Ramadan, when I was fasting. I was living at the time in Abu Dis in the West Bank, just east of Jerusalem. It was either a day off from teaching, or I was just done teaching, so I started walking, on a whim, from Abu Dis to the neighboring town of Eizariya. Continue reading →

Against Trespass

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

“The conflict over Palestine is unusual in many different ways, principally of course because Palestine is not an ordinary place.”

–Edward Said, “Introduction,” Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, p. 1.

“Direct action,” in activist parlance, is a form of public protest to induce some party to meet one’s demands–a demonstration, a sit-in, a disruption. Some direct actions (not all, obviously) involve trespass of some kind. What counts as trespass in any given context, particularly a university campus, can often be a confused and confusing affair. So I’m restricting attention in this post to the cases in which it’s clear that a given action commits trespass (is “trespassory”). Given all that, I want to make a case that pro-Palestine activists should stop engaging in direct actions that involve trespass. But first, a few clarifications. Continue reading →

Mass Death by Starvation

Posted on by under Palestine

I once had to go a week without food. It weakened me and made me ill, but didn’t kill me or come close. It actually takes a long time to die of starvation, at least if you have water and shelter, as I did. If hundreds or thousands of people begin to starve to death, it’s because people are bent on killing them that way.

That’s what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has been for months, or years, or decades, depending on how you look at it. Most proximately, it has intentionally violated a ceasefire to which it agreed in order intentionally to starve the population of Gaza to death.

Continue reading →

Why Princeton students disrupted Naftali Bennett

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

This post was written by Princeton Alumni for Palestine, of which I’m a member. The piece was rejected for publication in both The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Alumni Weekly. I’ll be posting a separate post on this topic, in my own name, in the near future.–IK

To understand why students had to disrupt Naftali Bennett’s visit to Princeton on April 7th, it’s important to recenter ourselves on the ongoing events abroad. Hamas and Israel at last reached a ceasefire earlier this year which was recently unilaterally broken by Israel, which resumed its genocidal campaign. Full stop. Well over 50,000 deaths have been recorded, of whom 15,000 are children. These figures are a “clean” report. Yet according to the Lancet, the death toll is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone who does a cursory search of the images from Gaza will find evidence of the deeply horrid violence that Israel  has been enacting on innocent civilians, journalists, medics, UN aid workers and children. And let us not forget that these weapons are supplied with our tax dollars. Continue reading →

Those Corpses in Yemen

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Just to state the painfully obvious: The “Signalgate” controversy broke this past Monday, March 24th. It’s now Friday, so five full days have gone by since it began. In five days, I think it’s safe to say that 99.44% of mainstream discussion on this controversy has focused on the Trump Administration’s inappropriately having used Signal to discuss war plans, stupidly having mistakenly put Jeffrey Goldberg on the chat, and then immorally having lied about it. Not even 1% of the remainder has focused on any deeper question of moral substance: Why are we bombing Yemen? Is it justifiable to do so? Continue reading →