Weekly Briefing: This article is not antisemitic. The people saying it is are cowards.

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives held its ninth hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Like the others before it, the hearing was political theater. Politicians were performing their faux concern for the safety of Jews while eagerly throwing basic free speech rights into the trash. Terrified university leaders were ready to say whatever it takes to avoid being targeted for career execution next.

One focus this time was a tweet by historian Ussama Makdisi. It linked to a Mondoweiss article titled “I could have been one of those who broke through the siege on October 7.” Republican members of Congress called the tweet antisemitic.

Rich Lyons, the Chancellor of UC Berkeley, where Makdisi teaches, and where the Free Speech Movement launched in 1964, gave them what they wanted. When asked about the tweet, and by extension, the article, he said, “I believe it was a celebration of the terrorist attack on October 7.”

It was not. And I doubt Lyons or anyone on the panel even read it.

The article was written by Salman Abu Sitta, one of the most respected historians of the Nakba, the mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Abu Sitta was ten or eleven years old when Zionist militias destroyed his village and forced his family into Gaza to live as refugees. His life’s work has focused on preserving the history that Israel desperately wants to erase. His article does not praise violence. It is about loss. It asks readers to imagine what it means to grow up in a cage, stripped of dignity and denied a future.

That is not antisemitism. That is the history of the Zionist colonial project. That is truth.

We are proud to have published Salman Abu Sitta’s writing over many years. His voice and life’s work challenge the foundational lies that Israel and its supporters use to justify their oppression of Palestinians. And that is why we are being targeted.

Also, this week, Hillel International claims there has been a rise in antisemitic “incidents” on college campuses, while the number of antisemitic assaults or vandalism dropped. An example of these “incidents?” Another article we published.

Last November, we ran a lengthy piece by Beshara Kehdi arguing that UC Davis should end its veterinary medicine exchange program with Hebrew University because of its ties to the Israeli military. He called on other professionals to support the academic boycott. According to Hillel, this opinion piece is itself an antisemitic act.

Let’s be honest about what is happening.

These attacks are not about keeping Jewish students safe. They are about protecting Israel from accountability. They are about labeling any support for Palestinian freedom as dangerous. And they are about silencing anyone, especially Palestinians, who refuse to stay quiet.

If we’re honest, the strategy is working. Professors are being fired. Students are being suspended and deported. News outlets are being pressured to stay silent. And organizations like Mondoweiss, which continue to publish the truth, are being smeared as threats.

What we are seeing is a coordinated campaign to control what can be said and who can speak. This is not just about Palestine. It is about the future of free speech, academic freedom, and independent journalism in this country and around the world.

I know we just wrapped up a fundraising campaign, but if you believe our work matters, we need your support now more than ever. The attacks will keep coming. And we are determined to keep publishing, no matter what.

Read these articles. Share them. Speak out. And if you can, make a donation today.

– Dave Reed, Publisher

Must Read: In a historic gathering, 12 countries announce Israel sanctions and renewed legal action to end Gaza genocide

María F. Fitzgerald: Meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, representatives of Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, and South Africa announced sanctions against Israel to cut the flow of weapons facilitating genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

Catch-up

🇸🇾 Qassam Muaddi: Israeli warplanes killed one and wounded at least 20 in a series of airstrikes on Damascus, Syria, on Wednesday. Israel claimed the attack was to ‘protect’ the minority Druze community in Syria. But there’s more to the story.

⛪ Tareq Hajjaj: Israel shelled Gaza’s only Catholic church on Thursday, killing three and wounding several others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said it was a “mistake.”

Michael Arria: The Trump administration is calling on Israel to investigate the killing of Sayfollah Musallet, but Israel rarely holds soldiers or settlers accountable for violence against Palestinians.

🍞 Tareq Hajjaj: “This was not aid distribution,” said Ahmed Abu Amra, who witnessed gas bombs being fired at aid seekers at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site. “It was a real massacre committed against the hungry who came hoping to get some food.”

🛂 Michael Arria: Muhanad J. M. Alshrouf, a 22-year-old Palestinian man, was detained by immigration authorities at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport for nine days. Attorneys say his detention is just one part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown.

🇵🇸 Qassam Muaddi: The villagers of Taybeh have lived in harmony with the nearby Bedouins for generations. Israeli colonization and the shrinking land available to these communities are now straining social relations, as Israeli settler violence threatens both.

💧 Tareq Hajjaj: On Sunday, Israel bombed a water distribution point in the central Gaza Strip, as dozens of civilians, mostly women and children, waited in line for water. Twelve people were killed, eight of them children. It was not the first time.

🏦 Tara Goodarzi: A growing movement is calling on Illinois to divest $100 million in Israel Bonds, and has filed an ethics complaint against Treasurer Michael Frerichs, alleging abuse of authority, corruption, improper use of state time, and misuse of public assets.

🧑‍🏫 Muhammad Ali Khalidi: The Trump administration is attacking academia because it threatens existing power structures and dominant elites. This is seen most clearly when it comes to Palestine.

🇵🇸 Muhannad Ayyash: Haidar Eid’s “Banging on the Walls of the Tank” reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible.

🇮🇱 Tareq Hajjaj: Israeli forces carried out another massacre at an aid center in southern Gaza run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Witnesses described Israeli tanks shooting toward the crowds with machine guns and soldiers sniping aid-seekers in the head.