Category: 6. Opinion

A common cliche used by American politicians when describing the relationship between the United States and Israel is that “there is no daylight between the two” on policy. 

That aphorism has generally held, especially when it comes to Israel’s apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. It is shakier when it comes to the broader region. On Syria, for example, there is considerable daylight between the policy of the United States and that of Israel.

In fact, Israeli…

I come from a family of poets and healers. My grandparents and great-grandparents were writers, jurists, teachers, and physicians. They were keenly attuned to issues of social justice and social development, because their generation was tasked with rebuilding Hyderabad after it was forcibly annexed into the newly formed Indian Union via military occupation in 1948. The stories and anecdotes of our grandparents are most often passed down to me and my cousins, not just as political…

As the unspeakable genocide in Gaza reaches its most nightmarish phase to date, Israeli leaders think they have found an endgame that will achieve their ambition of emptying the Strip of Palestinian life. It is a plan that, as Gideon Levy aptly notes, would have been worthy of Adolf Eichmann. 

Last week, the head of Israel’s Mossad espionage agency, David Barnea, came to Washington to speak to Donald Trump’s lead Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, about plans to transfer large…

Amidst the ongoing genocide that Israel has been waging for over 700 days against children, women, and the elderly, the media often presents this war in a purely statistical and dehumanizing way in the news bulletins.

The broadcaster recites the numbers of the martyrs mechanically: “Today, 105 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, and 500 others were injured.” And then, the news ends.

But what about the stories of these martyrs? What about their dreams? What about the ambitions…

It should be clear to everyone not invested in the mythologies of Zionism that the Western crackdown on something being named “antisemitism” not only has nothing to do with antiracism, but is a wholly racist endeavor. What the Palestinian scholar, Anna Younes, calls the “war on antisemitism” is waged “by managing, criminalizing, and targeting migrant, refugee, and of colour communities,” Palestinians in the first instance. In a similar vein, Dylan Rodríguez reminds us…

When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for NYC mayor last month, I thought it was the end of liberal Zionism—the faction that insists that Israel is a “democratic” Jewish state. Having long acted as gatekeepers to keep anti-Zionist ideas from entering the mainstream discourse, liberal Zionism was at last exposed and discredited by the emergence of a movement for equal rights that delivered at the polls. 

I was wrong: the Mamdani election is, in fact, a moment for…

Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,
an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as…