The initial decision for Berkeley to cancel the course ‘Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis’ was located within the transparently self-serving but now widespread claim that any discussion of Palestinian human rights or Israeli violations of international law constitutes a threat to the ‘safety’ of Jewish students. In reality, Juliana Farha writes, this shoddy affair and similar incidents make clear that for university administrators, legislators and others, it is Palestinian students and defenders of Palestinian rights that should have no expectation of safety.

Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate about the health and well being of Palestinian children, Juliana Farha reports from a sold-out presentation by Defense for Children International-Palestine at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies: “Ayed tells us that physical torture of Palestinian children was common a few years ago, but interrogators observed that those being tortured often call up reserves of strength to resist, rendering it counter-productive. Instead, they discovered, psychological terror can be more effective: threatening to arrest the child’s family members, for instance, or to revoke his father’s work permit.”

Juliana Farha responds to news that the Society for Psychotherapy Research intends to hold its annual conference in Jerusalem.

Juliana Farha writes: “Over the past month the Israel-Palestine narrative has become a perverse echo chamber in which the means, intention and capacity that define a target’s ‘legitimacy’ are continously reformulated to post-rationalise the same grisly outcome. Oftentimes, the ‘means’ only appear after the guns have stopped: as my children would say, the knives are ‘magicked’ into the scene. Intention and capacity are givens, woven into the very fact of being Palestinian. So it was with Dania Arsheid, Fadi Alloun, Saad Muhammad Youssef al-Atrash, and many others, prompting Amnesty International to demand this week that Israel cease its ‘unlawful killings.’”

Juliana Farha writes from London about the murder of 18 month old Ali Dawabshe: “It’s a world in which Conservative MPs queue up to prevent academic debate about Israeli policy, and Tory Prime Ministers defend the slaughter of unarmed Gazan civilians sheltering in UN schools by the same forces that have maintained an eight year siege against those same civilians. These people are unashamed by their unconditional support for a regime that made the death of this toddler and his parents entirely predictable, if not inevitable. Indeed, they split linguistic and moral hairs in order to justify their shrewd indifference. They tell themselves and each other that this hell on earth is someone else’s normal.”