solidarishkeyt

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Letter from Professor James Schamus

As Columbia survivors of last fall’s International Day of Jihad (sic), a not-surprisingly quite effective disinformation campaign, we still shouldn’t dismiss credible accounts of genuinely anti-semitic incidents on the rise, here and elsewhere. They deserve condemnation – as does the manufactured hysteria around them, weaponized in the movement to quell legitimate political speech on campus and elsewhere, mainly through the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism itself.  Let’s start with Rav Elie Beuchler, described in much of the recent massive press coverage of the terrors awaiting us Jews at Columbia as the “Columbia Rabbi” who sent an email to a few hundred students yesterday telling them to go home “as soon as possible” in fear for their lives and safety. One thing Beuchler is not, in fact, is the Columbia/Barnard Hillel campus rabbi; rather he is on the staff of the Orthodox Union-Jewish Institute for Leaning on Campus, run as a wing of the Orthodox Union.  To get a sense of the political mission of the OU-JILC, consider its Founding Director, Menachem Schrader, whose biography on the organization’s website attests he “has been community rabbi of Moshav Carmel in the Judean Hills and of Congregation Tiferet Avot in Efrat.” Carmel and Efrat are – and you can probably guess where this is going –  illegal Israeli settlements located in the Occupied West Bank, centers of the Amana movement, the radical settlement arm of the violent, racist Gush Emunim. Amana was founded and led for decades by Ze’ev Hever, a Jewish supremacist terrorist who spent 11 months in jail for a Jewish Underground bombing plot before becoming a major establishment figure in the settlement movement. (Ironically, after his own car was vandalized in a violent “Price Tag” settler vigilante action in 2012, Hever himself, at least publicly, called for a reduction in settler rampages – one needn’t wonder whether his fanatical acolytes heeded that call.) The OU-JILC actually brands itself as the “Heshe and Harriet Sief OU-JILC,” named, one assumes, after its major benefactors. Heshe and Harriet Sief, who are also major donors to Yeshivat Har-Etzion , which is located – you guessed it – in the Etzion bloc of settlements. It should be noted that funding for the Initiative, as with the Union itself, is opaque – the Union itself, given its prominent political activities, has been decried in Jewish philanthropy circles for its lack of transparency).   The Initiative has planted itself on thirty or so campuses in the United States, and has been welcomed into spaces controlled by International Hillel, which has become increasingly reactionary in its policing of Jewish students’ speech around Israel and Palestine.  That policing now threatens to engulf the University as a whole. Action based on genuine concern for the well-being and safety of our Jewish students and colleagues should be founded on the defense of the very principles and norms being assaulted by those hijacking that concern to give cover to the larger project of ethnic cleansing and settlement in the West Bank and, now, of course, Gaza.

a letter on the rabbi who said campus isn't safe and jewish students should stay home. yet again it should be noted that some of the students leading the protests are antizionist jews, and that columbia suspended the student jewish voices for peace organization several months ago, for which they are facing an ACLU lawsuit

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The straight woman is unsatisfied with straight studio porn. She wants to get off to something in which the actors actually emote and show passion beyond canned moans from the women and, at best, vacant grunts from the men. She turns to gay porn. She knows it's not "for her," but neither was the straight porn, and at least the actors look like they're enjoying themselves. And for a short while she is satiated by Sean Cody et al, but she runs into the same problems she had to begin with. She was not looking at sex but a simulacrum of sex, trapped in Plato's cave. Unsatisfied, she turned to vintage gay porn, harkening to a time when most gay bars still had darkrooms and reliably smelled of piss and Amyl Nitrite. Here was the real thing, in all its animalistic passion. But she still couldn't immerse herself in the fantasy. She wanted the media to engage with her own imagination and meet her half-way, rather than having it spoonfed to her onscreen. She turned to yaoi, with its elongated figures reminiscent of mannerist portraiture, then bara, including hardcore BDSM scenes. But the tactile sensations depicted in the pages didn't do justice to their real life counterparts. She turned deeper into her own imagination, this time reading erotica. No, not the poolside paperbacks sold at Barnes and Noble. The good shit. Why then, was she still not satisfied? She dug deeper, searching for the true meaning of eroticism. She studied the psychoanalysis of Freud, the cultural criticism of Susan Sontag, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde. She took vacation time and flew to Europe, starting at the caves of Lascaux to explore the human urge to create, then traversed the Camino de Santiago on foot, along the way meeting a 56 year old carpenter from Burgos named Andrés, with whom she had an explosive affair. They both knew it couldn't last, which made them cherish each other's touch all the more. Upon flying home, she gave up. If her search for true eroticism never bore fruit this whole time, why would it now? It would take years before she stumbled upon the answer by pure happenstance: dubstep.

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iran's retaliatory attack comes after israel bombed the iranian embassy in syria, killing seven. the inviolability of diplomats and the extraterritoriality of their property is the fundamental basis on which any kind of diplomacy operates: it was international law for thousands of years before international law existed, it has been respected by the most disgusting regimes in existence (e.g. both the soviets and the nazis deported each other's diplomatic missions, killing none), any transgressions have always been the blackest stain on the violator. a few days after israel's attack, ecuador raided the mexican embassy in quito to arrest the former vice president, who had been given protection by mexico. that a state-on-state attack on an embassy occurred is horrific enough, pointing to the rabid, brutal, rogue nature of the israeli state; that two happened within a week is a dire signal. we live in a much more stupid, dangerous, violent world

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A few years later, following in the footsteps of Ahad Ha’am, another veteran thinker and activist, Yitzhak Epstein, voiced similar criticism of Jewish settlement, though with a more political focus. In a 1905 speech, published as an article in 1907 and titled A Hidden Question, he addressed the ‘one question that outweighs all the others: the question of our attitude toward the Arabs’. It was an important question, he argued, because Zionists tended to ‘forget one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein’s concern was with land acquisition. Given that most land was already cultivated, ‘what will the fellahin do after we buy their fields?’ he asked. Although Zionist associations bought land legally, the owners usually were large landlords who had acquired their title to it ‘by deceit and exploitation and lease it to the fellahin’. It was customary for the tenants to remain on the land when it changed hands, ‘but when we buy such a property, we evict the former tillers from it … [and] we must admit that we have driven impoverished people from their humble abode and taken bread out of their mouths’.

Ran Greenstein, Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 2–3.

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There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror⁠—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917 [1889]), 105–106.

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As he stood in an Israeli military court, the Jewish revolutionary Ehud Adiv, said: “I am no terrorist; I believe that a democratic State should exist on this land.” Adiv now languishes in a Zionist prison among his co-believers. To him and his colleagues I send my heartfelt good wishes.

And before those same courts there stands today a brave prince of the church, Archbishop Capucci. Lifting his fingers to form the same victory sign used by our freedom-fighters, he said: “What I have done, I have done that all men may live on this land of peace in peace.” This princely priest will doubtless share Adiv’s grim fate. To him we send our salutations and greetings.

Why therefore should I not dream and hope? For is not revolution the making real of dreams and hopes? So let us work together that my dream may be fulfilled, that I may return with my people out of exile, there in Palestine to live with this Jewish freedom-fighter and his partners, with this Arab priest and his brothers, in one democratic State where Christian, Jew and Muslim live in justice, equality and fraternity.

Is this not a noble dream worthy of my struggle alongside all lovers of freedom everywhere? For the most admirable dimension of this dream is that it is Palestinian, a dream from out of the land of peace, the land of martyrdom and heroism, and history.

Let us remember that the Jews of Europe and the United States have been known to lead the struggles for secularism and the separation of Church and State. They have also been known to fight against discrimination on religious grounds. How can they then refuse this humane paradigm for the Holy Land? How then can they continue to support the most fanatic, discriminatory and closed of nations in its policy?

In my capacity as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and commander of the Palestinian revolution I proclaim before you that when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination.

In my capacity as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization I call upon Jews to turn away one by one from the illusory promises made to them by Zionist ideology and Israeli leadership. They are offering Jews perpetual bloodshed, endless war and continuous thraldom.

We invite them to emerge into a more open realm of free choice, far from their present leadership’s efforts to implant in them a Masada complex and make it their destiny.

We offer them the most generous solution—that we should live together in a framework of just peace in our democratic Palestine.

Yasser Arafat, “Palestine at the United Nations,” Journal of Palestine Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 191.

I realize this citation may be confusing—I am citing the transcript of Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the UN General Assembly as it appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies.

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hard to put concisely how awful milei, who has just won the argentine presidency, is. a thatcher-loving ancap who cloned his dead dog and named the clones after murray rothbard, milton friedman, and robert lucas, but who still does ouija-board sessions to take political advice from the first dog, who may or may not have incestuous relations with his sister, who wants to get rid of almost all ministries, who calls university students parasites, who wants to dollarize the economy and close the central bank, legalize guns and organ selling, and privatize healthcare, who may or may not have been involved in an operation to sell children's organs, whose vice president praises the dictatorship and visited videla and his gang in jail, and who regularly has meltdowns during interviews, laughing out of nowhere, or complaining about "voices" not letting him answer questions

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The division of the world into intrinsically opposed hordes and swarms attacks the very notion of shared humanity. I refuse to indulge in the despair that accepts the logic of the enemies of mankind. I had an argument with a friend: He insisted that Jews were only really safe in Israel among fellow Jews. I pointed out the absurdity of this since Jews were quite evidently not particularly safe in Israel. Then he shifted: “Well, at least if you died there, you’d die amongst your brothers.” This is what I mean about nationalism being a doctrine of despair: ultimately, when you pull back the layers, nationalism is about desiring death, death for others and death for yourself. A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

John Ganz

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I recommend reading the entire letter, but here are a couple excerpts:

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It’s become a real challenge to keep up with every Palestine protest and action happening in this country, but I am going to round-up some of that have occurred in recent days in case you missed them. Over 75 activists shut down and blocked all entrances to Boeing Building 598 in Saint Charles, Missouri. The facility manufactures the Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs) and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs that Israel is using Gaza. “We are joining millions of people across the United States and around the world in demanding an end to Israeli’s brutal assault on Gaza and its decades-long occupation of Palestine,” said Ellie Tang, a member of the anti-war organization Dissenters, in a statement. “We urge Congress and Biden to hear the calls of millions of us living in this country, and push for a ceasefire. Until Congress blocks the bombs, we will.” After shutting operations down for 2 hours, the facility canceled its deliveries for the day. 500 protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) took over the Statue of Liberty’s platform, dropped banners, held a sit-in, and chanted for a ceasefire. “HAPPENING NOW AT THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: Hundreds of Jews and allies are holding an emergency sit-in, taking over the island to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. We refuse to allow a genocide to be carried out in our names. Ceasefire now to save lives! Never again for anyone!,” tweeted the organization. Oakland protesters blocked a ship from leaving its port for hours. The boat was headed to the Port of Tacoma to pick up arms destined for Israel. Hundreds of protesters are currently occupying that port and at least one worker is refusing to take the cargo after learning about its use. At a Get Out the Vote rally, Democratic candidate Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) was confronted by a protester calling for a ceasefire. “4,000 plus dead children in Palestine. 9,000 plus dead civilians, get off the stage. … Get off the stage. I don’t care … get off the stage,” he yelled before being escorted out of the building by police. Tens of thousands gathered in San Francisco to demand a ceasefire. “I can feel the momentum of it and that’s why we had to get out today,” one told the local CBS station. “My son’s in Trafalgar Square right now or he was earlier today. Same deal. People who just feel the injustice of the world.” A speech by Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) in New Jersey was interrupted by activists calling on him to back a ceasefire. He quickly exited the stage. Rhode Island Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse were disrupted at event by protesters calling for a ceasefire. Rep. Grace Meng was confronted by protesters asking when she will back a ceasefire. She remained silent and her staff told them, “There’s a time and place for this.”

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Middle East Online

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"how can you say this is an apartheid state when [most racist thing you've ever heard]?"

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“As [persecuted minority], the wider world has always been our enemy. We can only find our refuge in one another; the [complement of the persecuted minority] will never truly accept you, always be willing to turn on you. Assimilation is impossible and what you call assimilation is just indirect and self-deluding suicide of body and spirit”

^consistent prelude to the most vile shit imaginable

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The state of affairs in Palestine, 10/23/23

Conditions on the ground in Gaza continue to deteriorate. Gaza has no fuel, electricity, or clean water, and it remains under constant bombardment.

Humanitarian aid is beginning to make its way through the Rafah border crossing (Gaza's border with Egypt) but the current quantity is completely insufficient. There have been two convoys. The first convoy of 20 trucks contained enough water for 22,000 people, or ~1% of Gaza's population, for a single day. It's unclear what was in the second convoy, but it only had 17 trucks.

Israel continues to gear up for a ground invasion of Gaza. It's unclear what exactly they will do or what the end result will be, to the point that the US is calling on Israel to publicize its goals.

In the meantime, Israel has aggressively increased its air bombardment of Gaza. [CW for the header image on the red link: wounded young girl] This, along with the lack of fuel and supplies, is causing the complete collapse of the Gaza hospital system.

There is a very real risk of further escalation of the war. Israel has repeatedly raided and airstriked the West Bank and targets in Syria, continuously exchanged volleys with Hezbollah on the Israeli border with Lebanon, and hit the Egyptian border (allegedly by accident).

Protests around the world are rallying to bring attention and support to the Palestinian cause.

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Bundling aid for Ukraine to oppose a military occupation together with aid for Israel to support a military occupation is certainly a US Foreign Policy Moment

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From Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish