Project Esther: Suppressing Palestinian Solidarity in the US
- Details
- Written by Tariq Kenney-Shawa | Al-Shabaka Tariq Kenney-Shawa | Al-Shabaka
- Published: 15 April 2025 15 April 2025
Executive Summary
Read more at Al-Shabaka
Gaza is a ‘killing field’ where people are being starved. How long will the world tolerate this?
- Details
- Written by Arwa Mahdawi Arwa Mahdawi
- Published: 13 April 2025 13 April 2025
What is happening is, quite simply, annihilation. Yet our politicians keep funding it and media outlets normalize it
Where do I even start? In recent weeks I’ve sat down to try and write about Gaza and, every time I steel myself to write about one atrocity, another atrocity is committed. Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves, kids are being killed in their sleep. Meanwhile, in the US and Germany, speaking out about dead Palestinian babies can land you on a deportation list. Arguing that international human rights law should be respected can put you at risk of being snatched off the street and stuck in a detention centre.
I don’t know where to start and I don’t know what is really left to say at this point. After 18 months of endless carnage, it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war. That this is not self-defence. What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, annihilation. A litany of genocide experts have stated this. Respected international organizations like Amnesty International have concluded that Israel is committing genocide – and yet our politicians are still funding this.
Read more on The Guardian
The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide
- Details
- Written by Moira Donegan Moira Donegan
- Published: 29 March 2025 29 March 2025
Rumeysa Ozturk, a visa holder, was snatched off the streets by Ice agents and sent to a detention center 1,000 miles away for opposing war crimes in Gaza
Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.
It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.
Read more on The Guardian
‘It was revenge for our movie’: Oscar winner says soldiers helped settlers attack him in West Bank
- Details
- Written by Lorenzo Tondo Lorenzo Tondo
- Published: 26 March 2025 26 March 2025
The Oscar-winning Palestinian film director Hamdan Ballal has said that Israeli settlers who attacked him were aided by two Israeli soldiers who beat him with the butt of their rifles outside his home and threatened to kill him.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ballal, one of the four directors of the film No Other Land, which documented the destruction of villages in the West Bank and won best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards, recounted how on Monday two Israeli soldiers first encircled him while a settler was assaulting him, before violently striking him on the head and threatening to shoot him.
Read more on The Guardian
We call on Columbia to stand up to authoritarianism | Open Letter
- Details
- Written by Open letter Open letter
- Published: 25 March 2025 25 March 2025
To the Columbia University administration,
As journalists who were trained by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and who are steeped in America’s long traditions of free speech and academic freedom, we write to you to express our horror at the events of the past week.
The Trump administration has sent immigration enforcers into university-owned student housing and university public spaces at Columbia, has arrested and sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil – not for having committed any documented crimes, but for the thoughts that he has expressed; and has forced another student, Ranjani Srivasan, to flee to Canada after her visa was revoked, also apparently for thought crimes.
It has sought to financially cripple the university by withholding $400m in federal funds. And it has demanded the university shut down or restructure departments it deems to be politically problematic, and that it alter its criteria for who to admit to incoming student cohorts.
We come from diverse political backgrounds and worldviews; some of us were deeply alienated by last year’s campus protests around the war in Gaza, others of us were sympathetic to the students. Regardless of our political views, however, we firmly believe that the federal government should have no role in policing Columbia’s academic structures, in shaping course requirements and personnel choices made by the university, in dictating admissions strategies, and in terrorizing students for expressing political views that the first amendment clearly protects.
Yet, astoundingly, all of these changes are now being accepted by Columbia University in the vain hope of deterring a predatory government from cutting off federal funds and decimating the university’s science research facilities. The university higher-ups have sold out students and faculty alike in their efforts to access federal dollars.
Read more: We call on Columbia to stand up to authoritarianism | Open Letter