Tag Archives: Palestine

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 →

We Won’t Stop

Posted on by under activism, EVS Journal, Fatwas, Health Care Series, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

The New York Times has yet another article on the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education. As a former academic, I feel bad for higher education, but as an activist right now, I feel fine. Here’s my unapologetic comment in the comments section of the article:

When campus activists called for divestment, we were mocked. Now, as Defense Dept contracts are being canceled at those very universities, invoking our activism as a pretext, it’s our turn to mock. Don’t expect sympathy. It’s not forthcoming. You wanted us in jail. We want you broke. May the antagonist with the greatest moral endurance win.

My comment elicited a rejoinder from someone named Al Orin from New York City: Continue reading →

Princeton’s Genocide

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, moralism, MTSP Discussion: George Sher's Desert, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

In October 2024, after several years of activism (most recently spearheaded by Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divestment, or PIAD), the Council for the Princeton University Community (CPUC) invited written comments from members of the Princeton University community weighing in for and against divestment from Israel. The CPUC rejected the bid for divestment about a month ago.

What follows below is my written statement to the CPUC, which essentially speaks for itself–and likewise speaks to the title I’ve given this post.  I will, in the near future, be posting some supplementary material, including screen shots from The Daily Princetonian of Meir Kahane’s two appearances at Princeton advocating ethnic cleansing and genocide (April 1984 and February 1988), the written version of my follow-up question to the CPUC about the issue of complicity, and the transparently evasive “response” to my question offered by Hilary A. Parker, Vice President and Secretary of Princeton University. I’ll also be posting a written response here to John Groves, chair of CPUC’s Resources Committee. Both Parker and Groves refused my repeated requests to offer a candid disclosure of the facts concerning the University’s investments, opting for concealment and evasion. 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 →

Gaza: Tod Macht Frei

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

Some friends of mine associated with Jewish Voice for Peace of North Jersey (along with Peace Action and Pax Christi) have taken out a paid ad in the Star-Ledger this morning (Newark, New Jersey), condemning Israel’s violation of the ceasefire agreement signed January 17th (see below, under the fold). You might not, by reading legacy (“mainstream”) media, have grasped the blatantly obvious fact that Israel had violated the ceasefire, but if you hadn’t, here’s a primer by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept. Continue reading →

In Your Darkness, We Shall See the Darkness

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Hayek, libertarianism, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Trump 2

Columbia’s Capitulation
In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen
–“In Your Light, We Shall See the Light,” Columbia University’s motto

Of all the pathetic abdications of moral responsibility and expressions of cowardice I managed to see during the quarter century I spent in academia, few approximate Columbia University’s abject surrender to the Trump Administration the other day. I won’t bother belaboring the details, which you can read almost anywhere. As former Columbia law professor Katherine Franke aptly put it, this is a case in which the victim of a ransom note has not just capitulated to the demands of the ransomers but given them what they hadn’t asked for, in return for less than nothing. But if you stand back from the welter of detail, there are a few lessons here worth learning, and worth articulating. Continue reading →

In Defense of Mahmoud Khalil

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Election 2024, Fatwas, General announcements, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Trump 2, Uncategorized

Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana March 18, 2025

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. 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 →

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 →