Category: 6. Opinion

I felt as if I were heading toward the end of the world. The sea and sky were a dull grey, the road rough and ominous, and the buildings lay in ruins. Everywhere I looked, there was only rubble, accompanied by a heavy sense of despair. 

As the car reached Tal Al-Hawa, I took in the scene in shock. The streets were unrecognizable, and I felt as though I had wandered into a maze. What should have felt like the way home was now completely strange. Everything had changed. 

Perhaps…

“Finally, disciplinary action will be taken against anyone who violates this policy up to and including termination.”

This was the second line of a response sent by senior leadership to me and all my coworkers at PEN America in an email thread on June 26, 2024. I started the thread by posting a link to an article titled “What Unlearning Zionism Can Teach American Jews about Israel and Palestine” to my organization’s listserv channel for disseminating interesting articles…

Earlier this week, while Israeli warplanes were resuming their carpet bombing campaign in Gaza, Israel also expanded its offensive on the West Bank, this time reaching the al-Ain refugee camp west of Nablus. Israeli forces entered the camp in the early hours of Wednesday morning when an undercover Israeli force opened fire on a vehicle, killing its driver, Odai Qatouni, and confiscated his body.

Israeli forces took over several houses and used them as military positions for 14…

Just two days before Israel resumed the full scale of its genocide in the Gaza Strip, the United States began a bombing campaign in Yemen. 

The U.S. aggression is a significant part of the recipe for endless war and devastation of the Middle East that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are cooking up. 

While Israel and the U.S. clearly communicated about these operations, each country has presented its actions as independent of, but…

On the morning of February 9, the al-Ashqar family sat in terrified silence as news spread of the Israeli military’s advance into their neighborhood in Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem.

Unbeknownst to them, Israeli forces had planted a bomb at their front door — an explosive device that would soon take the life of 21-year-old Rahaf al-Ashqar, one of over 70 Palestinians killed during Israel’s ongoing assault on the northern West Bank.

Her father, Fuad al-Ashqar, recalled…

Israel has renewed its pummeling of Gaza, having killed well over 400 Palestinians in a matter of hours. 

This marks a definitive end to a ceasefire which Israel had kept violating. Israel had closed off all of Gaza two weeks ago in violation of the ceasefire agreement, ostensibly because Hamas refused to accept Israel’s unilateral changes to the agreement. Israel’s demands would have delayed its withdrawal from Gaza and postponed the cessation of hostilities, or possible…

Israel announced resuming its military assault on the Gaza Strip early on Tuesday morning. The first wave of airstrikes killed over 400 Palestinians, including 130 children, and wounded more than 500, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said that several families were completely wiped out in the assault.

The renewed offensive also targeted key figures in Gaza’s civil administrative authorities, which is part of a new strategy meant to…

The following letter was dictated by Mahmoud Khalil to his lawyers over the phone from an ICE detention center

March 18, 2025

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans…

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University, was forcibly abducted on March 8, by undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stalked him on his way home to university housing. Khalil was targeted for his activism and involvement in Columbia’s student encampments protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. His detention is not just an injustice—it is a blatant act of vengeance for going against U.S. and Israeli coordinated…

In the last week, Miami Beach has rapidly become an international news story as the local government seeks to silence opposition to Zionism through baseless accusations of antisemitism, but this kind of authoritarian repression of pro-Palestine perspectives isn’t a new development – either internationally or locally. Instead, based on the City’s recent history, it is predictable: Mayor Steven Meiner wants to censor the Oscar-winning film No Other Land, and is using the power of…