Blog / Justice for Palestine

Two Poems

May 31, 2024 - By Haya Abu Nasser

I met Haya Abu Nasser in January 2024 under the auspices of We Are Not Numbers, a youth-led literary mentorship program founded in Gaza in 2015. We Are Not Numbers, or WANN as it is called by its members, pairs young Palestinians who are writing in English with international mentors. The goal is to help the young writers develop their skills and to amplify their voices around the world. Since October 2023, WANN, its writers, and its mentors have forged literal lifelines, providing an outlet for expression, emotional sustenance, and material support for a people under siege. In this time, Israel has killed WANN mentor and teacher Refaat al-Areer,...

What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do?

May 24, 2024 - By Christian Appy and UMass Faculty for Justice in Palestine

I have been a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for twenty years. On May 7, I was one of a handful of faculty members arrested for standing in support of hundreds of students who were engaged in nonviolent protest of university complicity in the ongoing slaughter and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. They want the school to divest from companies profiting from the carnage.

In the hours before UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes called in more than a hundred state police in riot gear to arrest anyone who did not disperse from the area in and around a small encampment, I wrestled with questions of conscience and practicality. Am I willing to be arrested? Is it the right thing to do? Could it make a difference? Would there be negative consequences for my...

Seventeen Songs for the Truthtellers of Gaza

May 17, 2024 - By Farah-Silvana Kanaan

(An earlier version of this essay, titled “They tried to kill the truth, but it came back stronger” was published in Issue 4 (Spring 2024) of the print magazine, Discontent.)
 

1.

Every time I’ve opened this document to continue writing, I’ve had to turn to the death toll in the second paragraph and adjust it. Every time I closed this document, I knew that, while I went on to do seemingly mundane things – go for a walk, softly squeeze an avocado at the grocery store, sit in silence, the closest thing I have to prayer – by the time I returned to what’s supposed to be something between an ode and a eulogy, a celebration and a lament, an indictment...

AN OPEN CALL TO FELLOW JEWISH ACADEMICS

May 16, 2024 - By Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council

May 16, 2024

As Jewish academics, researchers, and higher education professionals, we are appalled by, and refuse to accept, the deliberate mischaracterization, and weaponization of persisting fears about Jewish safety and well-being on campuses across the United States as the singular excuse for a series of misguided and dangerous policies by university administrators. These include attempts to destroy one of the largest and most significant student and social movements of the last half century, efforts to crush academic freedom and freedom of expression, encouragement for brutal invasions of peaceful student-led encampments, attacks and arrests by police forces, and facilitating the wholesale takeover of universities by the most illiberal and...

Partisan Review: Of Dreams and Hallucinations

May 14, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

It must be awful to be a Republican these days. So many reasons to be terrified: immigrants flooding across our borders, gender subversion from within, swarthy people rising from below, and so few of “our nation’s core principles” left unassailed. Even Sean Hannity, culture warrior supreme, can’t seem to keep up. How on earth to fight so many foes at once?

Enter Ethan Keller, a Hannity Show producer as well as cofounder and executive director of the Locke Society, an organization with its sights set on “ensur[ing] that the next generation of Americans is not overwhelmingly socialist.” Only by “encouraging the conservative youth to pursue careers in public and private...