This week brought increased repression of the pro-Palestine student movement. The Trump administration canceled $400 million dollars worth of grants and contracts to Columbia University, where last year’s student encampment protests started. The Department of Justice released a list of ten schools, including Columbia, that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism will be visiting to look into allegations of anti-semitism on campus. As we have reported extensively for years, Zionist organizations and the Israeli government have worked hard to conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. Tamara Turki reported on nine students at Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia University, who were arrested at a sit-in protesting the recent expulsion of three student protestors.
To track this increased repression, we launched a new email newsletter this week from our U.S. Correspondent, Michael Arria. He’ll be writing the Power and Pushback newsletter twice a month, focusing on the Palestine movement and growing efforts to stifle dissent and Palestine solidarity. Click here to subscribe today.
I want to direct your attention to a couple of pieces about Gazans celebrating Ramadan amidst the devastation left by Israeli bombardment. Tareq Hajjaj wrote about how his family celebrated Ramadan in the past and what his relatives in Gaza are doing this year. Hend Salama Abo Helow says her family will cherish this Ramadan as proof they are still alive.
Lastly, the film, “No Other Land,” which tells the story of Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian village struggling against Israeli colonization, won the Oscar for best documentary this year despite having no U.S. distributor. This week, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel issued a statement clarifying that it believes the film “violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines.” Nada Elia said the Oscar win was “well deserved”, but Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham “center[ed] the needs of Israelis over Palestinian freedom” in his acceptance speech. Mohammad Hesham Huraini, a journalist and activist from Masafer Yatta, says that despite the attention the film’s win brings, the village is still facing imminent danger of ethnic cleansing.
Thanks for reading,
Dave Reed, Publisher
Must Read: Nine students arrested at Barnard during pro-Palestine sit in
Tamara Turki: Nine students were arrested after Barnard College called police onto campus to break up a sit-in staged by pro-Palestine demonstrators over the recent expulsion of three student protesters.
Catch-up
🚧 Qassam Muaddi: The Arab states are assuming responsibility for the Palestine question not just because their plans for the region’s future are at stake, but because the very stability of Arab regimes is on the line. But is the Arab plan good for Palestinians?
✊🏾 D. Musa Springer: Palestinians show the world what it means to develop a culture that fiercely defends and values their political prisoners. Our survival as Black people inside the U.S. relies on us seriously heeding this lesson.
📉 Michael Arria: A new Gallup poll shows that support for Israel among Americans has dropped to its lowest level in at least 25 years, while sympathy for Palestinians is at a record high.
🤝 Mitchell Plitnick: While Israel and the United States are working together on a plan for Gaza, they have slightly different interests. This gap is opening space for regional Arab leaders to propose an alternative vision that avoids full-scale ethnic cleansing.
🗳️ Michael Arria: Residents across five towns in Vermont voted to cut ties with Israeli apartheid making the state the first in the country where municipalities have voted to cut economic ties with Israel.
☪️ Tareq Hajjaj: When I ask my family members in Gaza how they’re spending Ramadan this year, they answer it’s just like any other month of deprivation in the past year and a half of genocide.
🇮🇱 Tareq Hajjaj: The Israeli army has resumed random shelling and airstrikes against Palestinians in Gaza, marking the latest Israeli attempt to sabotage the ceasefire following Netanyahu’s violation of the agreement by stopping the flow of humanitarian aid.
🇺🇸 Alexander Shelby: When Donald Trump proposed turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” by forcefully removing its indigenous Palestinian population, he was not introducing a new idea but following an American tradition as old as Manifest Destiny itself.
📽️ Nada Elia: “No Other Land” won a well-deserved Oscar, but co-director Yuval Abraham’s speech epitomized liberal Zionist hasbara, centering the needs of Israelis over Palestinian freedom, while undermining the resistance of the Palestinian subjects of the film.
📰 James North: The one-sided ‘New York Times’ coverage of the latest news from Israel and Palestine continues, unchanged.
🪑 Hend Salama Abo Helow: For families who lost loved ones, Ramadan is a seat left empty at the Iftar table, and the unbearable weight of being the ones left behind.
🇵🇸 Mohammad Hesham Huraini: Masafer Yatta, the Palestinian community at the center of the Oscar-winning film ‘No Other Land’, is still at imminent risk of forcible displacement. An activist from the community writes about the daily settler pogroms targeting his people.
🇮🇱 Qassam Muaddi: Israel has suspended the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and resumed targeting Palestinian civilians, bringing the ceasefire with Hamas the closest it has even been to collapse.
