Amith Gupta comments on the controversy over NYU President Andrew Hamilton’s undermining of campus free speech when he censured Steven Thrasher’s NYU commencement speech celebrating BDS. He says lost in the discussion is any meaningful discussion about which ideas are being suppressed at NYU in the first place — and which ideas are being promoted.
“Antisemitism is not some abstract idea to me. It is very personal. It destroyed a good part of my family,” Bernie Sanders tells the American Jewish Committee, and says that history leads him to fight Israel’s military occupation, which has “crushed” Palestinans for over 50 years in pain and humiliation and denies them freedom of movement.
Josh Ruebner reviews Khaled Elgindy’s new book ‘Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump’: “Reading Blind Spot, one is struck by the coherence of US policy toward the Palestinian people over the past century even as political realities have continued to dramatically change. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.”
The role which the Labor Zionist movement has played in establishing apartheid in Palestine/Israel, and the irrelevance of today’s Labor Party in Israel’s right-wing drift, reveal something important about Israeli society.
Just eight days after an administrator offered public high school teachers in Skokie, Illinois, the opportunity to take a summer professional development course called “Teaching Palestine” as part of “Equity” training, the school district retracted the offer in a statement from top administrators apologizing for for the hurtful, “one-sided nature of this course.” Pro-Israel groups had pressured the school district to remove the “propaganda” course.
Faced with the current Israeli political turmoil, however, the Trump administration might prefer to abandon efforts to press ahead with its “deal of the century” peace plan. But even if that specific threat is lifted, the next Israeli government – whether led by Benjamin Netanyahu, his successor, or Benny Gantz – is not likely to depart from Israel’s long-term consensus, one that the Trump plan was simply set to accelerate.
At a session on reproductive health at Aida refugee camp in Palestine, a community health worker asks, “In our political condition, men in prison get their sperm out, illegally, to women. What is the best condition for the sperm to be in?” Alice Rothchild, a visiting doctor, tries to imagine the conditions and desperation that lead to this practice.
Today is an exciting day in the history of Mondoweiss, which has grown and developed considerably over the past few years. Please join us in welcoming new team members: Michael Arria and Olivia Katbi Smith, new Editors-at-Large Walaa Ghussein and James North, and an impressive group of Contributing Writers. We are proud of the progress we have made in providing essential news to the world, and we also wanted to alert our community and make it visible on our new masthead. This is also a great time to thank our loyal community of supporters, without whom this work would not be possible.
Senator Kamala Harris is seeking to separate herself from the Democratic field by being an unapologetic booster of Israel. Her message to the AJC yesterday contains a vow– “I will do everything in my power to insure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense” — but not a word of criticism of the “democratic and Jewish state.”
Dr. Rima Najjar is suing the website Quora after being banned from the website for reasons she believes are a direct result of her national origin. Nada Elia interviews Najjar about her experience, and discusses the implications of this disturbing case.