The Zionist lobby in the U.S. is openly anguished over Israel’s political crisis– and we are getting to witness the ordeals of the entitled.

After nine years of legal battles, the Superior Court of Washington, DC has dismissed a lawsuit targeting academics over their support of the BDS movement.

Palestine Writes Literature Festival was an exhilarating relief from the pandemic. Writers including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ibtisam Barakat and Ghada Karmi spoke of indigeneity, dispossession, erasure, settler colonialism, oral history, collective memory, the right of return, Palestinian queerness, radical feminism, and the burning need to explore and document all of this in art, film, and writing.

Steven Salaita writes about his experience of being forced out the American University of Beirut, “I didn’t leave AUB; I was ousted, deprived by management of a permanent job for which I had been selected.  For a long time after it happened, I was shocked that Zionist pressure could succeed in the Arab World.  Having suffered that pressure in the United States, I knew the danger of aggravating pro-Israel groups, many of which make a living denying the same right to others.  The affair made me rethink some of my assumptions about Zionism as a settler-colonial project.  I realized that Zionism informs class loyalty as strongly as it does ideological devotion.”

Steven Salaita’s book “Israel’s Dead Soul” (2011) merits serious attention and ultimately effusive praise. It contains five critical essays that not only offer brilliant insight into the cultural and ideological practices of Zionism in both Israel and the United States, but implicitly explain why his conscientious efforts would be denigrated and rejected by the ostensibly liberal aspects of this culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.