The legendary human rights lawyer Michael Ratner’s life is exemplary for Americans seeking to undo an outmoded view of Israel. “I thought of [Israel] as the home of my people. I had my bedroom ceiling painted with the seven wonders of the world and a huge map of Israel. I had no idea how my view of Israel would change later in life,” Ratner relates in his posthumous memoir, Moving the Bar.

Israel’s assault on Gaza is a painful reminder of how the United States bombed my country to the Stone Age. In times where interracial solidarities are being revived, most prominently Black-Palestinian solidarity via a mutual understanding of anti-Black and anti-Palestinian racism, Vietnamese and Palestinians ought to look within ourselves and our histories, and hopefully we can see the common struggles that once united us and will reunite us in the present.

Helena Cobban reviews, “The Movement and the Middle East,” Michael R. Fischbach’s look at the roots of the politically progressive Palestinian-rights activism we see in today’s United States.

There were 473 readers’ comments on a NYT editorial about Iran, and they are universally against another war in the Middle East, and many oppose sanctions on Iran. Moreover, they see through the Times’s equivocations, and point out that the newspaper was the handmaiden of the Iraq disaster when it was credulous about government claims.