Albert Memmi, the great prophet of anti-colonialism, embraced Zionism without ever questioning its colonial implications.

Albert Memmi, who passed away on May 22 at the age of 99, was the author of that indispensable analysis of the colonial psyche, The Colonizer and the Colonized, and dedicated adherent of that impossible conjunction “left-wing Zionism”. How can one reconcile Memmi’s commitment to Israel with the fact that his work continues to have exceptional explanatory power for our understanding of the Zionist settler colonial state?

Irish novelist Colum McCann says that he was “cracked wide open” when he met West Bank Palestinian Bassam Aramin and his Israeli Jewish colleague Rami Elhanan one evening in Bethlehem. But his novel “Apeirogon” that elevates the two runs the risk of normalizing the occupation by treating reconciliation as the answer to political oppression.

In order to legitimise the Jews’ right to Palestine, Zionism sought to delegitimise the Palestinian existence in the land. That involved a largely psychological process of ‘nativisation’ of European Jews and ‘de-nativisation’ of Palestinians. The term ‘Arab’ was one of the tactics used to achieve such goal.

The Netflix series “Fauda” attempts to rewrite the cliched one-sided Hollywood narrative of the conflict, but only to a point. It has a hierarchy of victims, in which Jewish Israelis are at the head of the line, and repeatedly slips back into all-too-common Israeli narratives about the Other.

Palestinian memory of the Nakba is even more crucial in the time of the coronavirus when usual forms of resistance have been made impossible. Palestinian literature has been one way memory of the Nakba has been shared.

A news story of Indian migrant workers who hid in a cement mixer to avoid a national lock down reminds Aarushi Punia of Ghassan Kanafani’s classic novella ‘Men in the Sun’

Naim Mousa writes, “[Inside Arab Music’s] greatest achievement is its ability to accurately reflect Arabic culture as a whole.”

Jewish scholars defend Achille Mbembe, one of the most important intellectuals in Africa, from attack by Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein. Klein, they say, is seeking to curb free speech about Israel and “is clearly obsessed by the
BDS campaign.”

Bruce Robbins on why he made a documentary about Shlomo Sand: “If everyone knew what Sand has discovered about the construction of the Jewish story of exile and return, beautiful but false, they would be a little shaken… I hope that American Jews who tend to be liberal will transfer their democratic values to Israel. Let’s be democratic across the board.”