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October 2015

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Northeastern chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine protesting censorship on campus. (Photo courtesy of Northeastern SJP)

Over the last decade, the movement for Palestinian freedom and equality has increasingly become the focus of social justice movements, especially on college campuses. Like prior movements fighting a status quo of structural violence, this movement faces heavy-handed repression designed to silence marginalized voices and stifle progressive ideas that might chart the path to a better tomorrow. Two recently released reports, one by Jewish Voice for Peace and the other by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, document this widespread and systematic suppression.

Michael Marder writes: According to classical political theory, human beings enter into a social contract and renounce their right to exercising unlimited violence in order not to fall prey to the violence of others. In Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the Leviathan, they invest the sovereign with that right, so as to be better protected from arbitrary force in a hostile “dog eat dog” world. What is going on today in Israel/Palestine is the unraveling of the original social contract, given that the Israeli Leviathan can no longer fulfill its task of maintaining internal stability through the denial of human rights and unlimited violence channeled outwards in the direction of Palestinian people.

An Eritrean national shot by an Israeli security guard after he was surrounded by a frenzied mob of Israelis in a Beersheva bus station in southern Israel Sunday night, died today of wounds sustained during the assault. A video circulated on social media shows the man, Haftom Zarhum, 29, laying on the floor in a pool of blood, as security officials attempt to stave off the crowd. One Israeli threw a bench at him.