Category: 6. Opinion

For the past 20 months of genocide, the Israeli military has regularly carved the Star of David into Palestinian soil, spray painted them onto walls and buildings like on Jenin’s Freedom Theater and the Qatari Consulate, drawn them onto children’s books and Islamic texts, shaved them onto the heads of Palestinian political prisoners, and emblazoned them across military equipment. Several recently released Palestinian political prisoners were forced to wear shirts with the Star of…

Everyone is talking about Israel and Iran. But in Gaza, we remain trapped in a brutal siege, starving and struggling to survive heavy bombardment.

Social media overflows with breaking news, countdowns to escalation, jokes about the end of the world, and videos of people dancing as missiles fall on Israel. Images of Israelis in bomb shelters go viral, drawing sympathy, as if they were not the ones who ignited this war.

Meanwhile, hunger is killing us slowly. For Gaza, the world…

Liberals in the West who want to criticize Israel will often point to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the source of the country’s issues. They will emphasize his corruption, his attempts to avoid prison, or his need to court those further to the right to explain away everything from expanding settlements in the West Bank to carrying our a genocide in Gaza. 

They are now framing Israel’s aggression in Iran in the same way as Netanyahu’s war, but opinions within Israel,…

The Israeli regime, drunk with western-backed impunity, flush with western-supplied weapons, and driven by a violent, western-born racist ideology, is rampaging across the Middle East, leaving a trail of blood and destruction in its wake. 

The Israeli regime’s blatant act of aggression against Iran is just the latest crime perpetrated by the regime in its current twenty-month orgy of violence in the region. 

But Israel is not a lone rogue. And it could not get away with its…

For three days, I was trapped in the area between three villages, no more than a ten-minute drive apart. At the entrance to each of the three villages, an actual iron gate blocked the road, quite literally caging in their residents. This was how Palestinians in the West Bank were informed of the new war that Israel started with Iran.

As soon as Israel launched its unprecedented attack, igniting the ongoing war between the two states, media attention shifted immediately away from…

I write under circumstances which some might consider to be a distorted reality; as a Muslim Iranian-American while Israel bombs Iran, backed by the United States. 

I comb through WhatsApp exchanges and scroll through Telegram images of residential areas, where the blood of civilians and the rubble of their homes stain the familiar square of Tajrish and the blocks of Valiasr Street.

Mohammed El-Kurd and Assal Rad’s commentary on media coverage of Palestine underscores how…

In May 2025, after 23 years of service, I was fired from my position as a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). As healthcare workers were being targeted, tortured, and killed in Gaza by Israel’s US-backed genocide, I could not remain quiet. I spoke out as Gaza’s hospitals were bombed. I brought everything I had as a physician dedicated to building a world of health for all, as a scholar of colonialism and health, as an activist who has stood…

In the spring of 2024, half a year after Israel’s escalation of its genocide of the Palestinian people, I received an invitation from an old colleague to submit an article for a special issue of The Journal of Somaesthetics. The issue’s theme, according to the call for papers, was “Eros and Thanatos,” including “how the art form serves as a vehicle for expressing the themes of mortality, loss, and transformation.” This immediately reminded me of Palestine, specifically a…

The war between Israel and Iran marks the culmination of decades of shadow-boxing between Tehran and Tel Aviv. This is a war that has long worn the mask of deniability, played out in assassinations, cyber operations, and various forms of entanglements from Damascus to the Red Sea. Its rules were unwritten but widely understood: escalation without full rupture. But now it’s unfolding in a surprise Israeli intelligence and military attack, which was met with a subsequent Iranian…

In the early hours of June 13, Israeli fighter jets struck deep into Iranian territory, targeting military installations, apartment blocks, and reportedly killing senior Iranian officials, including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The attacks came without warning. They were neither reactive nor defensive. And yet, the Israeli government, true to form, rushed to describe the assault as a “preemptive strike”—as if the law bends itself to match the anxieties…