Category: 6. Opinion

Fresh from face-to-face meetings in Washington with fugitive from justice Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the extraordinary step of declaring sanctions against the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese. 

The announcement was accompanied by a flurry of false and defamatory statements by Rubio attacking Albanese, further demonstrating…

A month ago, I kissed my children goodnight — then watched five-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil walk through an inferno. That hellish orange glow of childhood cremated alive is still seared behind my eyelids. Ward’s resemblance to my own daughter shattered me. I see it every time I blink: her ponytail bouncing with each step, a warped reflection of my child’s carefree walk. 

The fact that the entire world saw what happened to Ward with barely any consequence led me to a…

“I can’t buy him milk every day,” my friend Rania told me as she held her firstborn child, Kareem, in her arms. He was barely past his first few weeks of life, and Rania had been desperately searching for a can of baby formula for him, to no avail. She was unable to nurse him herself, because she wasn’t eating enough to produce enough milk. 

We were standing in the middle of Nuseirat market in central Gaza, a once-bustling center where essentials were bought and the scent…

U.S. President Donald Trump seems to have largely moved on from Iran and is now setting his sights on instituting a broader new order in the Middle East. 

Trump’s vision consists of an Israel-centric regional order that sees Iran and Hezbollah defeated and normalization with Israel spreading across the region, from Lebanon and Syria to Oman and Saudi Arabia. Joining him in creating this vision is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is slated to visit the White House…

It was 4:00 a.m. The air was thick with fog, and we could barely see a few meters ahead of us. I walked alongside my friend, Ahmad, toward the Israeli and American-controlled aid distribution center, run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It felt like we were marching toward our own deaths, but we had no other option. Our tents had no food.

We only left because we had heard that the American distribution point might open at dawn. Everyone was saying to be there early…

By the time DHS agents showed up at Mahmoud Khalil’s door, a full-spectrum campaign had already marked him as a target. Columbia professor Shai Davidai had posted Khalil’s name and image online, called him a terrorist, and urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport him. The smear was picked up by a network of doxxing accounts like “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus,” which publicly lobbied for the revocation of Khalil’s visa. Rubio repeated the call, Khalil received death…

It’s June, which means a similar scene is playing out at tens of thousands of Jewish houses across the continent. Duffel bags dug up from basements. Toiletries laid out on carpeted floors, emergency trips to the drug store for one final item. Last-minute clothing decisions. Bags of carefully curated candy. Tearful midnight goodbyes to school friends. For so many of us Jewish North Americans, the summers of our younger years mean one thing: sleepover camp. Unfortunately, it’s not…

Two Junes ago, I spent my birthday at the house that my grandmother—medzmair, in Armenian—lived in as a young girl in Istanbul. The old ivory building, just a block off one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, looks so renovated that I doubt she would recognize it today. She left the city in the early days of the Turkish Republic, a few years after her father was killed in the Armenian Genocide.

I stood in front of her old house unbothered by anyone on the street. I thought I could…

In the United Kingdom today, the line between political expression and criminal offense has never been more perilously thin. As witnessed through the lens of Palestine solidarity, the extent of Britain’s encroachment upon basic freedoms becomes painfully clear. 

The ongoing proscription of Hamas is being used as a blunt instrument to suppress, not acts of terrorism, but the articulation of political belief, emotional solidarity, and moral outrage. In doing so, the British state…

When the polls closed in New York City, announcing Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic nominee for mayor, the outcome was never supposed to look like this.

For months, Zohran Mamdani’s opponents tried to reduce his candidacy to a caricature. They darkened his skin in campaign ads and sharpened his beard. They flooded the city with rhetoric that collapsed criticism of Israeli apartheid into accusations of antisemitism. They leaned on the same script that for decades has cast Muslims…