This is exactly why academic boycott of Israel is justified and necessary. Palestinian scholars and students suffer arbitrary regimes of confinement and severe restrictions of movement.

https://twitter.com/MosabAbuToha/status/1553850495495716867

What reason does the Zionist regime have to prevent this young man from acquiring a study visa? Because it can. Because it's capricious and ruthless. Because it dispenses rights according to religion.

Okay, we're getting close to publication time for the new English translation of Ghassan Kanafani's "On Zionist Literature" (July 8). If you'll be so kind as to humor me, a few observations about the process and the book itself.

ebb-magazine.com/books/p/on-zio… I didn't contribute much labor to the project--I wrote a short intro--and was only tangentially involved, but I have a decent sense of how the book came into being. It's a more complex process than you might imagine.

You've probably heard the phrase "the Palestine exception to the first amendment" or "the Palestine exception to free speech." (Or simply "the Palestine exception.") I've long been curious about it and finally got around to researching its provenance. This is what I found: The phrase doesn't simply denote an inconsistent application of "free speech" where criticism of Israel is concerned. It also suggests a systemic absence of civil and political rights for Palestinians in the United States and Canada (and in some cases Europe).

Career is never a valid excuse to betray the downtrodden. "But she wants to run for Senate!"

"But she needs to appease Pelosi!"

"But she has to get reelected!"

These tired excuses are profoundly disdainful of Palestinians.

Why should we suffer to facilitate AOC's bourgeois aspirations?

Why are you asking us to in the first place?

Israelis had to invent a language, a cuisine, a paleo-history, a nationality, and a folk culture from a set of mythologies about the ancient past and then have the goddamn nerve to declare that Palestinians are a fiction. For the many left-liberal types objecting to my comment:

First of all, if you deem that comment "antisemitic," then you're not merely a bad faith interlocutor; you're also resorting to the tired Zionist tactic of trying to punish Palestinians who refuse to cede our existence.

This young Palestinian, brilliant and kind, recently graduated college with honors and began a good job. A fanatical Trump-loving Zionist account doxed him and snitched him out to his employer. Now he faces severe recrimination. A few thoughts below...

https://twitter.com/levantinehabibi/status/1402473451655512064

"pretty boy" has an agile mind and a big heart. He's somebody our community can be extremely proud of. This is precisely the kind of person Zionists like to target for punishment, for they abhor our talent, they fear our pride, they dread our joy.

British novelist/philosopher Israel Zangwill, credited with the fateful phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land" (which he borrowed from Lord Shaftesbury), later recognized his grave error and acknowledged that Palestine in fact had a large population. Zangwill realized that "unless the Jews are to begin their new life by massacring the modern Canaanites—which is out of the question—Zionism must, it would seem, remain largely moonshine."

Unfortunately, massacring the "modern Canaanites" was very much a part of the question.

Zionists claim that Palestine had no urban centers or agricultural network--that its populace consisted of a few nomadic barbarians--but here's the so-called founder of "spiritual" or "cultural" Zionism, Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am), telling a different story in 1891. Elsewhere in the text, "Truth From Eretz Yisrael," Ginsberg speaks at length of infighting among Jewish settlers and the difficulty they had with Palestine's climate. He also marvels at the acumen and industriousness of "the native population" (i.e., Palestinians).

If you told me I'd get a tenured professorship or a lucrative podcast or a comfy political gig merely by compromising a long-held vision of Palestinian liberation, then I'd tell you to fuck off before calmly putting my school bus into drive. I apologize. I know I sound self-righteous. But this notion of "compromise" I often see from professional loudmouths triggers severe disgust, both personal and philosophical. You needn't accept their attenuated vision of "compromise." You don't even have to entertain it.

Getting tired of people holding up Tucker Carlson as a paragon of free speech when his website (at the time), The Daily Caller, helped set in motion my termination from the University of Illinois and then spent months justifying that brazen violation of academic freedom. The website has a long history of stirring up shit for the purpose of getting leftist professors in trouble. It characterized Lisa Durden (a Black woman) as "belligerent" after she appeared on Carlson's Fox News program and was fired from Essex County College days later.

Judging by my feed, I missed some kind of blowup about Palestinians and whiteness. I have no interest in relitigating the debate, but want to point out that many scholars have taken up the question (it's an old topic). Take a look and add your own recommendations: Ronit Lentin:

Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism

bloomsbury.com/us/traces-of-r…

Hi friends: a few hours ago, for reasons I don't understand, Twitter wiped out all of my follows. I'll follow you again as I see your name in my feed. I didn't unfollow on purpose. Feel free to shoot me a note, especially if we've been connected on here for a long time. Well, it's lovely seeing so many old and new friends, at least! I really apologize for the hassle. It might take me a little while to catch up to everyone, but I promise I'm trying.

The most damning aspect of Zionism is that white nationalists hate Jews but love Israel. Okay, because people will argue semantics, perhaps I should have said "like" or "admire" rather than "love," but whatever diction we choose there's an abundance of evidence for the original point.

Socotra, south of Yemen and east of Somalia, is unique and irreplaceable. The UAE and Israel's theft of the island in order to facilitate Western imperialism is a disaster of both politics and ecology. More information about this disaster:

middleeastmonitor.com/20200828-uae-a…

Lots of people celebrating Seth Rogan on my feed. I'm happy that his politics seem to be getting less horrible, but my humble advice is to keep wary of anyone who suddenly discovers that Zionism isn't so great after all but studiously avoids the word "Palestinian." For context. The headline makes Rogan's comments sound more radical than what he actually said.

mondoweiss.net/2020/07/israel…

The Washington Post has the most aggressive paywall on the internet and still has the nerve to declare that democracy dies in darkness. It's almost like the talking points were lined up in advance. (And "most people" don't in fact spend at least five dollars a day on a cup of coffee.)

In discussions about reopening schools, please don't forget custodial staff and bus drivers. I don't know what it looks like elsewhere, but where I work the majority of custodians and drivers are over the age of 50 and often in contact with body fluids. At the beginning of the school year, bus drivers can put down the windows, but it'll be miserably hot (I know, because my bus has no AC). And then what happens when it gets cold? Kids scream. They spit out crumbs. They spill drinks. They put their mouths on seatbacks.

If you support (or signed) the Harper's letter, don't invoke me as an example of somebody who was "cancelled." My academic career was systematically destroyed by the same institutional forces the vast majority of signatories uphold (and from which they benefit). If the letter had meant to be in support of people punished for criticizing Israel, its authors would have invoked Zionism as the biggest threat to free speech in the West. They didn't, because the majority are themselves Zionist.

I'm one of the defendants in this lawsuit filed by four Zionist scholars. Damn glad to see this ruling. They'll learn one day: nobody can threaten supporters of Palestine into compliance.

theasa.net/about/news-eve… The scholars who brought the lawsuit against their own colleagues are Simon Bronner, Michael Rockland, Michael Barton, and Charles Kupfer. Let their names elicit shame throughout the profession.

Palestinian activist Alex Odeh was murdered by the Jewish Defense League in Santa Ana. Consider renaming Orange County Airport after him. Odeh's murderers, by the way, fled to Israel and were never prosecuted. They live freely to this day.

White Leftists in North America need to understand that for Natives, Palestinians, Hawaiians, or any other colonized group, national liberation isn't merely a discourse or ideology; it's an essential feature of our existence. Without it, we doom ourselves to genocide. Nationalism is our concern, our burden, our future, i.e., ours to define. And we *have* defined it--in thousands of lectures, books, stories, songs, struggles, and articles, and in relations of love and solidarity that span the world. It's there for anyone who cares to see it.