readingsquotes - Tumblr blog

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"What we are witnessing in universities today is the weaponization of safety, particularly in relation to the weaponization of antisemitism. This weaponization deflects attention from the ongoing genocide in which universities actively participate and justify. University administrators falsely claim that they are concerned for the safety of the “university community.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Take, for instance, the violent repression of the Student Encampments for Gaza. Students and faculty have been teargassed, tased, tackled on the ground, and arrested. On April 25, a police officer violently threw Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin on the ground. Black students, as is usually the case, are disproportionately affected. Videos have shows them being choked and tased."

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"Since October 7, 2023, we have seen how the US media has a separate set of rules when discussing the total war being waged on the civilians of Gaza. With more than 35,000 dead, an unprecedented number of child amputees, and over a million at risk for starvation, the urgency to decode media obfuscation of a genocide has never been greater. Much has been written about this, especially after were revealed The New York Times’ language constrictions that limit how writers should discuss the current attacks on Gaza. "

...

The goal is to chill the discourse and to make sure people are scared. None of this is by accident. We now know that the Israeli government formed a task force to target American campuses and intimidate students and faculty and administrators into silence. And Congress has also joined in, holding hearings and interrogating university administrators about student protests at high-profile campuses like Harvard and Columbia, knowing full well it will trickle down and spread fear through other institutions. In that sense, I think you really can describe it as neo-McCarthyism. It’s designed to create a climate of fear and stamp out the expression of ideas. And there’s a logic behind it. Universities are one of the last places left in this country where there’s any kind of debate and diversity of opinion on the Israel-Palestine issue. So that has to be shut down. It’s deeply anti-intellectual in addition to being profoundly antidemocratic.

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"...the same propaganda patterns we’ve been analyzing in our films for years when it comes to wars waged by the US or with US backing, from Vietnam to Iraq. First and foremost, there’s been no sustained coverage of the US’s role in Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians. Instead, it appears the US is doing everything in its power to help protect Palestinian civilians and restrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The extent of US complicity in Israeli atrocities in Gaza, especially the fact we’re supplying most of the weapons to carry them out, is mostly hidden from view. Likewise, in keeping with media coverage of other US and US-backed wars in the past, the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians has been repeatedly described as “unintended” and “unfortunate” rather than the entirely predictable result of Israel dropping tens of thousands of US-made bombs on civilian centers in Gaza. In addition, we now know that reporters have been encouraged by their bosses to use sanitizing language to describe the horrors unfolding in Gaza, to avoid using words and phrases like “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “occupied territories.” As media critic Norman Solomon has argued, the result is a dominant media narrative that tells Americans that Israeli lives matter a lot more than Palestinian lives.

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"Summer Lee was one of just 37 House Democrats who cast courageous votes last Saturday against providing $14.3 billion in unconditional military aid to Israel. The Pennsylvania representative’s reason for breaking with President Biden and House Democratic leaders on the issue was sound; since last fall, she has been an ardent champion of a cease-fire to end Israeli’s assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians—most of them women and children—and led to a crisis so severe that the enclave is now on the brink of mass starvation.

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But Lee’s “no” vote came in the context of an immediate electoral reality that distinguished her from her colleagues. After having been nominated two years ago by the narrowest of margins, she faced what was supposed to be another serious Democratic primary challenge. Her opponent, local elected official Bhavini Patel, made Lee’s advocacy for a cease-fire and a new US approach to Israel and Palestine a key focus of her campaign. Aided by more than $600,000 in super PAC spending by hedge-fund billionaire Jeff Yass, Patel claimed that she would be a “strong partner to our president,” which was read by many as a reference to Biden’s support for Israel. That made Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary election, coming just days after the aid vote, a critical test for Lee in particular and cease-fire supporters in general.

More cautious and compromising politicians might have avoided a supposedly controversial vote on the eve of a high-profile primary. But Lee went with her conscience.

And then she won her primary by a landslide.

Lee’s 61-39 victory margin was a powerful rebuke to those who imagine that progressive advocates for a cease-fire and justice for Palestinians are necessarily vulnerable in this year’s Democratic primaries.

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“Opposing genocide is good politics and good policy. #CeasefireNow.

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"

Calhoun’s email, which cited the “disruptions” occurring nationally, was a response to Gaza Solidarity encampments at other colleges and likely also a response to leaked documents about the now ongoing pro-Palestine encampment at Princeton. But Calhoun’s characterization of these sorts of protests — occupations, sit-ins, and encampments — as “inherently unsafe” is incorrect, and endangers our community. Targeting these encampments with immediate arrest and disciplinary action is a break from Princeton’s traditionally respectful and accommodating treatment towards sit-ins and other forms of prolonged protest, and it fails to be “viewpoint-neutral,” as Calhoun claims.

Princeton, notably, has not disciplined students for occupations in the past: In 2015, the Black Justice League (BJL) sat in the office of President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83 for 33 hours. And in 2019, Princeton Students for Title IX Reform (PIXR) organized a sit-in outside Nassau Hall that lasted nine days. Both protests occurred under the watchful eyes of President Eisgruber and Calhoun, yet protesters were not warned of, or punished with, arrest. In fact, administrators engaged with the protesters, leading to direct policy changes. Destiny Crockett ’15 recently clarified in a statement to The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board that students participating in the BJL sit-in were not threatened with “arrest, just suspension and expulsion,” and ultimately “did not face disciplinary action.” Just because Princeton can legally enforce punishment does not mean that it should, especially in a biased manner.

The current threat of disciplinary action for engaging in “unlawful” actions that result in arrest has not been applied to students who have been subject to legal proceedings in the past. For example, Larry Giberson ’23 — a student who was indicted by a grand jury for participating in the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol by the end of his senior year — graduated from Princeton on time with no disciplinary action taken against him. He has since been convicted for his involvement. The discipline Calhoun laid out in her email, and the arrests undertaken this morning, are therefore incongruent with past precedent."

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Texas Governor Abbot, known for his closeness to Israel, sends police and national guards against University of Texas students.

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DECEMBER 22, 2023

"What is missing from Congress are hearings into the decades of illegal anti-Palestinian espionage, covert action, and blacklisting of Americans within the United States by the Israeli government and its domestic collaborators—actions far more serious and damaging than campus semantics. As noted in my earlier articles for The Nation, they range from dispatching a secret agent to interfere in a presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump; to launching a covert operation within the US targeting academics and others who support a boycott of Israel; to conducting a massive operation to spy on and “crush” pro-Palestinian students throughout the country; to establishing a secret Israeli-run troll farm across the US to harass anyone critical of Israel; to hiring Americans to secretly spy on American students and report back to Israeli intelligence. And then there is Canary Mission, a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them—charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability. ...

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Like its campus spy operation, Israel on Campus Coalition, Canary Mission acts as a key intelligence asset for the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service. Not only is it intended to silence anti-Israel dissent; its list of names is also used to prevent those individuals from entering Israel and attempting to visit family, including both Jews and Palestinians, and professors as well as students. 

...

Like all of Israel’s espionage and covert operations in the United States, Canary Mission’s links to Israeli intelligence—and the Mission’s American financiers—are well hidden. But as a result of a slipup on a tax form a few years ago, those links began to be revealed. And in the process was exposed the role played by one of the wealthiest families in California, headed by publicity-shy billionaire Sanford Diller, a major Trump backer who had donated $6 million to a pro-Trump political committee. Diller was also a pro-Israel extremist, supporting a long list of right-wing Islamophobic organizations. They included the American Freedom Law Center, founded by a man who even the Anti-Defamation League said has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry,” and Stop Islamization of America, which “has sought to rouse public fears about a vast Islamic conspiracy to destroy American values,” according to the ADL.

For donations to a variety of causes, the Diller family maintains the Helen Diller Family Foundation. But in order to get a tax break, they turn the funds over to a much larger trust, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, which then channels the Diller family donations. According to The Forward (formerly The Jewish Daily Forward), in 2016 the Diller Foundation donated $100,000 through the Jewish Community Federation to an obscure Israeli nonprofit called Megamot Shalom. Untraceable, off the grid, unheard of, Megamot Shalom was actually the front for Canary Mission.

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There was a key reason for so much secrecy. Those Americans who were financially supporting Canary Mission were potentially committing a serious crime, acting as agents of a foreign power. They were financing a clandestine foreign organization with ties to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli intelligence agency—which was using Canary Mission to identify, detain and deport Americans entering the country, like Lara Alqasem and Professor Katherine Franke.

Not content to secretly fund Canary Mission to carry out its spying and intimidation on American college campuses, many of the wealthy donors also wanted generous federal tax breaks for their donations. The problem was that tax breaks are not allowed for donations to foreign charities, just those in the United States, and Megamot Shalom’s being in Israel would rule out the deduction. To solve the problem, years ago a family living in Israel’s illegal settlements came to the United States and set up shop in New York City as a nonprofit “charity,” calling itself the Central Fund of Israel."

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"The Israeli army is not killing children because they refuse to be careful, or out of some uncontainable vengeance. They are killing so many children because, as explicitly stated by past and present officials, and as demonstrated by the facts on ground, they intend to.

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The anger and pain felt by the world for and on behalf of the children often gets attached to the idea of innocence. Children are protected as a category because they are presumed to be innocent of the crimes and misdeeds of adults; more than this, they are somehow presumed to be innocent of our world. This category, as it has been used, fails Palestinian children when applied from the outside to their situation as members of an occupied, besieged population. For Israel, all Palestinian life is terrifying, and killable. Israel has shown the world what every genocide has shown before: that when men are killable, so too are children and women. That is the logic of eliminatory violence, which is what Zionist force enacts: killing, terrorizing, and dominating in order to eliminate Palestinians from their land.

From the perspective of the colonizer, innocence is impossible for colonized children, because innocence would mean innocence of knowledge of the domination that has already conditioned their lives. Think of the young child facing the gun while sheltering in a school, about to be killed, that child’s terror. That terror is not innocent—that is a terror with knowledge, as is the terror of the child watching their father executed or their home collapse. Or the child who knows they can’t travel because of Zionism, that their family are refugees because of Zionism, that they don’t have enough food because of Zionism. This knowledge refutes the kind of unknowing innocence the world seems to require of children: they are already more than that. They are political subjects, subjects with agency and within historical time. Even the babies in the incubator, innocent of language, contain the political potency of time, of the future, and so are made killable."

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Following the arrests of hundreds of protesters at Columbia University, students have gathered on campuses across the country demanding that their schools stop doing business with Israel.

In solidarity with these students, we're offering free ebooks on Palestine, mass protests, and student rebellions. 

This is in addition to From The River to the Sea, the free ebook we published alongside Haymarket Books, which is also still available for free.

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"Sen. Tom Cotton, last seen demanding U.S. infantry mow down Black Lives Matter protesters, calls for drivers inconvenienced by pro-Palestine demonstrations to "take matters into their own hands." Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of a genocide in progress, compares nonviolent students to Nazis and declaresthat "more has to be done" to silence them. Meanwhile, mass graves are being discovered on the grounds of the Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza that the Israel Defense Forces sacked.

Not a single one of these frauds care for an instant about the safety of Jews, their supposed motivation. Jews are among the protesters. Jewish students protesting at Columbia held shabbos services, even as some of them were locked off campus as threats to the safety of… themselves. "This hits home the absurdity of current discourse," Rabbi Abby Stein posted from the service. To read that absurdity as a text, it is a text that distinguishes Real Jews from Fake Jews through their allegiance to Zionism, in keeping with how similar 19th century European nationalisms distinguish Real Citizens from Conditional Citizens, with the Conditional Citizens' lives being far cheaper, if not forfeit.  But the Zionists do not speak for us Jews, and the louder we anti-Zionist Jews become, the greater their fear, their hatred, and their absurdity. "

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"For 77 minutes while a gunman massacred fourth-graders at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school in 2022, members of the Texas Department of Public Safety roamed school hallways. Not once during that time did they attempt to open the doors to the classrooms in which the gunman was killing children and teachers.

On Wednesday, however, the Texas DPS took a different approach to campus safety. Dressed in riot gear, the state police force descended on the University of Texas at Austin, aggressively detaining protesters and tackling a television cameraman at a nonviolent pro-Palestine protest, leading to at least 30 arrests."

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These escalations against students are a choice. Police can be patient, even passive. The Texas DPS proved that when they loitered outside the ongoing slaughter of grade-schoolers. Indeed, data shows that police are not primarily crime-fighters, devoting a small percentage of their stops to suspected crimes and a much greater percentage to things like racially biased traffic stops. Their work, by the numbers, is foremost the enforcement of order and inequality along race and class lines.

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“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” the father of a murdered Uvalde child tweeted above footage of Texas DPS officers in riot gear storming toward unarmed students at UT Austin. “But what do I expect….1 AR-15 keeps 376 officers at bay.”

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The police response on college campuses does little for public safety or protection of Jewish students. Statistically, police have seldom filled this role. The same Texas DPS that made mass arrests at UT Austin on Wednesday also shoved away students who protested a speech by open antisemite Richard Spencer at Texas A&M University in 2016, and handcuffed Uvalde parents who demanded DPS save their children from a school shooting.

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These students are calling for ceasefire. America’s militarized police forces are bringing the war home.

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"We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolitioning racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different.

Rules are rules, and the rules never change."

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"Even if for the sake of argument we accept this defense of hypocrisy, it does not apply to Israel. There is no national security reason the United States should support atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians are not a national security threat, and, if only in a pro forma way, presidential administrations of both parties have long been committed to a two-state solution. Images of Palestinians being maimed and killed don’t make the United States stronger. Instead, in very obvious ways, they fuel terrorism and instability in the Middle East and elsewhere. Any real commitment to a liberal international order, even one predicated on American hegemony, would require reining in Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The shielding of Israel from any consequences for its human rights abuses isn’t the familiar hypocrisy of realpolitik. Rather, it’s a curiously gratuitous hypocrisy—a violation of norms done because much of the American political elite regards Israel as a special pet, given a unique impunity.

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Such an egregious display of favoritism makes clear that the liberal international order means nothing more than a purely selfish assertion of dominance: Washington gets to set the rules and the rest of the world has to simply abide by them. But there’s little reason for the world, especially the countries of the Global South, who don’t enjoy the special protection given to European allies, to submit to this regime. As America and its core allies become a smaller part of the world—in terms of both population and wealth—there’s no reason to think this version of the liberal international order is sustainable. In 1974, China, India, and the rest of developing world made up only 26 percent of the global economy. That number has doubled to 53 percent in 2024. Conversely, the share of First World countries (the United States and its core allies in Europe plus Japan) in the global economy has shrunk from 62 percent to 44 percent. These numbers make clear how precarious any long-run project of American global dominance through sheer force is. 

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"A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested.

Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested.

....

The absurdities that follow are almost funny. The University of Austin, the pretend university launched by IDW types like Bari Weiss, is preparing its “Forbidden Courses” for the summer. It stands silently by as the actual University of Texas at Austin is censored, safe in the knowledge that they are regime-approved.

You don’t have to be blind to the real cases of anti-semitism in America to be troubled by accusations of anti-semitism to shut down the most visible protests to a military response that has become increasingly unpopular. The looking glass nature of the argument is reflected back at us: senior Israeli officials who oversaw the destruction of every university campus in Gaza complain that what is going on American campuses is unacceptable. Tarring every objection to Israel as anti-semitism makes it harder to address actual cases of this malign worldview, which unfortunately is not in short supply.

....

But in places where the university administration has not responded aggressively, protest tactics of the kind used in Texas and Columbia have not created unrest. Overwhelmingly, the actual experience of protests on campus has not been one of violence, as Harvard professor Ryan Enos noted:

Some claim that universities are overrun with antisemitic hordes, while others, including myself and my colleagues, have seen only peaceful actions from diverse student protesters, including many Jews, earnestly challenging what they see as a grave violation of human rights. University leaders must be clear about what is happening on our campus, rather than letting social media and opportunistic politicians manufacture narratives.

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In the long run, student protests are often unpopular in their own era, but have a pretty good track record of being right about major issues of conflict, such as Vietnam, civil rights, apartheid in South Africa, or the war in Iraq. The students in Austin should retain mementoes of their arrests for when the university runs a retrospective event applauding their courage decades from now.

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Here is a very simple test: The next time you read an opinion piece about protests on campus, ask yourself if the author bothered to engage in the basic question of whether the war should continue, and whether the US government should continue to provide arms for it.

It says something truly profound about the blinkered view of the American pundit class that they only way they can understand a real war is through their own worn culture war framings. They squint just enough to be outraged by the fact that students are protesting but refuse to engage in a discussion of what the students are protesting about.

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"The German state is taking extraordinary measures to clamp down on pro-Palestinian activism, including arresting activists in their homes in the middle of the night.

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Germany functions as an extension of the Israeli apartheid state. Not only does it extrapolate the same propaganda onto Palestinians as Israel, but Germany has also adopted similar tactics of psychological warfare against activists to deter solidarity within the country.

The raids due to social media rings extremely similar to Israel’s “zero tolerance policy” toward social media activity in Palestine, which has led to the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who expressed solidarity or support for the people of Gaza. In a viral video earlier in this war, Israeli police arrested a woman over a Whatsapp post, and in the video she pleads with the officers, and out of fear even retracts her statement by saying, “God protect Israel.” 

Of course, the posts do not pose a threat, neither to Israel nor to Germany. The raids and arrests are meant to instill fear and deter others from participating in protests or speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

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“The German state is criminalizing and intimidating Jews who stand up against genocide, the ludicrous thing being that the state is selling this as ‘fighting antisemitism,’” the Congress organizers said.

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"Then came the bombardment, and the people of Gaza showed the world what the mainstream media could not: wounded civilians, leveled buildings, long lines of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets, bombed-out universities, bombed-out mosques, toddlers trembling in shock and covered in the gray, ashy dust of debris. Stray cats circling corpses, thousands of people taking shelter in hospitals and schools, or walking with all their belongings down “humanitarian corridors” to “safe zones,” which would later be bombed, too. On Instagram, journalists and doctors gave updates to the front-facing camera in English: They are still bombing, the sound of the drone overhead is constant, we cannot sleep, my neighbor’s house was destroyed, we don’t have power, we don’t have food, we don’t have anesthesia, the internet went down but now it’s back up, there’s nowhere to go, I am so traumatized, we are starving, this man is eating grass, there is no bread, please help us, don’t stop posting, please keep posting. A lawyer presenting South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice called it “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.”"

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It can be difficult for those inundated by Gaza images on social media to remember that wide swaths of the US population have never seen them, and likely never will. .... The mainstream media, by and large, does not show graphic images of Palestinian suffering, if they show images of Palestinian suffering at all.

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Even as Israeli officials state their genocidal intent on the record, Israeli civilians have accused Gazans of faking the genocide. ...Israel’s social media activity since October 7 has been a crash course in hasbara, Israel’s word for propaganda, or diplomacy, directed at foreign audiences.... There is something uniquely disturbing about this type of cultural production, which feels like it should be satire but is not. It reveals a stunning disregard for life — a perverse, almost gleeful nihilism.

....The smiles are the scariest part. They call to mind the grins of Charles Graner, Lynndie England, and Sabrina Harman posing with their thumbs up next to the tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The only thing scarier than the cheerful expressions of latent aggression are the plain demonstrations of malice: a soldier shooting at the interior wall of an apartment whose walls have been spray-painted with the words LET YOUR VILLAGE BURN. Soldiers lighting food aid on fire. Soldiers destroying a warehouse where aid was stored. A soldier standing beside the exterior wall of a house that is spray-painted with red graffiti: INSTEAD OF ERASING GRAFFITI, LET’S ERASE GAZA.

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"Six thousand. Eleven thousand. Twenty thousand. This steady rhythm of fatalities marked the progression of the following pieces, which I wrote  during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip this autumn. The official number of people Israel has killed in Gaza now approaches thirty thousand, but in reality that number has already been surpassed. Israel is killing two hundred and fifty Palestinians per day, ten people per hour, one person every six minutes. Each figure corresponds to a life snuffed out by a merciless killing machine for which killing has become an end in itself."

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October 25, 2023

Recently, an Australian Palestinian friend of mine was invited to appear on an Australian national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza. His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you condemn Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was one killing per day — yet one killing per day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the prime minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? . . . A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak, which is the tacit assumption that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as other people’s. Questions are framed by the initial Hamas attack on Israeli civilians (the Hamas attack on Israeli military targets and Israel’s belt of fortifications, watchtowers, and prison gates surrounding Gaza goes unnoticed), and any attempt to place it in a wider historical framework gets diverted back to the attack itself: How can you justify it? Why are you trying to explain it instead of condemning it? Why can’t you just denounce the attack? If Palestinian commentators want to be asked about Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians — about the history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that produced the contemporary Gaza Strip and the violence we are witnessing today; about the structural violence of decades of Israeli occupation that cuts farmers off from their fields, teachers from their classrooms, doctors from their patients, and children from their parents — we have to ask to be asked. And even then, the questions don’t come.

I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists from a lot of different media organizations over the past two weeks. With rare exceptions, the pattern is consistent, as it has been for years. I’ve experienced it too. A recent appearance on a major US cable news channel was canceled at the last minute, immediately after I sent in the talking points the producer requested I submit; they clearly weren’t the talking points they had in mind. For years, I was on the list of regular guests for BBC radio and television interviews concerning Palestine — until, during a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I told the interviewer he was asking the wrong questions and that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now. That was my last appearance on the BBC.

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions — or even bullets and machine guns — to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments. Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way. Thirty-six of those babies died as a result. That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics."