My latest for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology

I spent much of winter break working on an analysis of the UAW 2865 BDS vote, where the movement in the US stands today, and how it’s already succeeded in shifting the terms of debate on Israel-Palestine – that article is now up on the Berkeley Journal of Sociology website!

Some thoughts on the UAW BDS result for the Intifada podcast

I checked back in with Nora Barrows-Friedman the morning after the UAW 2865 BDS resolution passed by an overwhelming 65%-35%. That interview is now up on the Electronic Intifada podcast.

I’d recommend listening to the whole podcast – it’s not just about activism; Nora and the rest of the EI crew consistently amplify the voices of solidarity activists while never decentering what’s going on in Israel-Palestine. They do amazing work.

I debate the UAW 2865 BDS resolution on KPFA

Tomorrow, members of UAW 2865 (the union for 13,000 graduate student workers in the University of California system) will vote on a resolution calling on UAW International and the UC to divest from companies complicit in Israeli occupation and human rights abuses.

I debated the opposition to the resolution yesterday on KPFA – listen here!

My interview on the Electronic Intifada podcast

I stopped by the Electronic Intifada podcast to talk Block the Boat and the UC grad student union’s historic upcoming BDS vote with the delightful Nora Barrows-Friedman – listen here!

My interview with BTB organizer Lara Kiswani now up on Jacobin

As we prepared for this past weekend’s Block the Boat action in Oakland, I interviewed key organizer Lara Kiswani (who helped immensely with my last article for Jacobin) about BTB, direct action, worker solidarity, and the future of BDS.

An edited transcript of the conversation is now up on the Jacobin website – check it out!

My latest is now up on Jacobin

It’s been over a month since my last post but I’m very excited that my latest piece, on Block the Boat, organized labor and the future of BDS, is now up on Jacobin!

I also had an op-ed this week in the UC Berkeley student paper, the Daily Californian, on the academic boycott of Israel and the anti-BDS bill that died in a student senate committee thanks to the work of Cal SJP and other campus activists.

More to come soon (but not too soon)!

Letter from Jewish American filmmaker: I’m canceling UIUC screening over Salaita firing

This week, Inside Higher Ed reported that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my alma mater, revoked the job offer of prominent Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita over his vocal defense of Palestinians and criticism of Israel, including its ongoing massacre in Gaza. Salaita, who left Virginia Tech to join UIUC’s American Indian Studies department, had been offered a tenured position.

In that article, Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s decision to nix Salaita’s offer at the last minute was affirmed by UIUC English professor Cary Nelson, who claimed Salaita’s “loathsome and foul-mouthed presence in social media” and “extremist and uncivil views” disqualify him from holding a faculty position.

I’ve been a regular reader of Salaita’s Twitter feed and have found the content of his tweets to be nothing more and nothing less than principled, unapologetic opposition to apartheid and ethnic cleansing, both in Israeli policy and Zionist ideology.

What irks liberal Zionists like Nelson the most (and sets him apart from many other academics who show solidarity with Palestinians) is his passionate and informal tone, which includes a willingness to antagonize those whose views he refuses to validate.

Tone is the last refuge of scoundrels. Defenders of apartheid and ethnic cleansing don’t like Salaita’s tone because he isn’t respectful in his disagreement with people who defend those things.

Wise faces a firestorm of criticism, including a strongly-worded letter from prominent academics like Joseph Massad and Judith Butler and a petition that’s gotten over 11,000 signatures since Wednesday (the 6th).

Now, Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins, a Jewish American academic and filmmaker, has canceled an upcoming screening at UIUC of his film Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, which features interviews with Jewish Americans, young people as well as prominent intellectuals and artists, on their changing relationships to Zionism and the development of their views on Israel-Palestine.

In a letter to the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, which he posted to his Facebook wall, Robbins explicitly accuses Wise of McCarthyism, stating that “the decision that Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the University of Illinois administration reached to fire Professor Steven Salaita for his political views makes it impossible for me to have anything more to do with that campus, at least until that decision is reversed and Professor Salaita is reinstated.”

Robbins’s decisiveness is admirable. This is BDS in action! With his permission, I’m reposting his letter here:

Why This Jewish-American Can’t Visit Urbana-Champaign

Professors Lauren Goodlad, Michael Rothberg, and Matti Bunzl
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Dear Lauren, Michael, and Matti,

Grateful as I am for your invitation to screen my film, “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists,” on the Urbana-Champaign campus in October, I am afraid I will have to decline. I am enormously appreciative of you all, for your scholarship and your solidarity with the projects of others. Thanks to you, Lauren and Michael, I spent a very exciting and rewarding two weeks in Urbana-Champaign as Mellon Professor, and I have benefited from your hospitality on more occasions than I can count. Nevertheless, the decision that Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the University of Illinois administration reached to fire Professor Steven Salaita for his political views makes it impossible for me to have anything more to do with that campus, at least until that decision is reversed and Professor Salaita is reinstated. I hope that will happen before October.

I will not rehearse for you the reasons why this firing is an outrage to anyone who cares about academic freedom or simple human decency. I’m sure you will already see them very clearly for yourselves. Professor Salaita spoke up privately, in his capacity as a citizen, against what history will surely agree (everyone outside the United States already does) was a massacre of the innocents in Gaza. In punishing him for speaking up by taking away his job, Chancellor Wise has inscribed her name in a shameful list that includes Joseph McCarthy, among others. I’m confident that history will deal with Chancellor Wise much as it has dealt with McCarthy. But she will not have to wait to be judged by history. Thanks to her, the Urbana-Champaign campus is going to become a no-man’s-land, famous for embarrassing itself in public. i’m sure I am not the only academic who will no longer want to be associated with it in any way.

With regret and, again, much gratitude to you as individuals,

Bruce

—
Bruce Robbins
Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities
Philosophy Hall
Columbia University
NY, NY 10027

Every Senate Democrat just voted to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza

I haven’t written since July 14 for two reasons: I can’t write about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza when others (see: Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss) are doing it so well, but I can’t write about anything else while Palestinians are being slaughtered by a government that receives upwards of $3 billion a year in military aid from our own.

Yesterday President Obama made people mad with comments downplaying CIA torture and blaming Hamas for the astronomical civilian death toll in Gaza. I won’t link to them because I don’t really care what he said. I can’t believe we still have to convince people the Democrats are the worst of the worst.

More important than Obama’s speechifying are the actions of Congress, who (also yesterday) voted overwhelmingly to approve $225 million in additional funding to replenish Israel’s arsenal, depleted by a three-week-long offensive that has killed over 1600 Palestinians, at least 75% of whom are, according to the UN, civilians.

Let me repeat that: After the Obama administration single-handedly torpedoed a UN inquiry into Israeli war crimes, the Senate passed by unanimous consent (and the House voted 395-8) to rearm the Israeli military during an operation that its most tactlessly honest defenders admit is a genocide. This is a massacre that has prompted the governments of Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and El Salvador to recall their ambassadors to Israel and the government of Bolivia to declare Israel a “terrorist state”.

What do those countries have in common? They all, to varying extents, have progressive governments willing to stand up to the US – a state sponsor and financier of terror if ever there was one. In taking a stand (however belated) against Israeli aggression, they stand in stark contrast to so-called progressives in the US government.

I’ve written a lot about issues on which Republicans and Democrats agree, but no issue makes a mockery of the “partisan polarization” narrative more than Israel-Palestine.

I recently argued that, should they run, candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (an “independent” whose independence from the Democrats is pretty tenuous) could pose a serious primary threat to Hillary Clinton, whose deeply conservative record is out of step with the Democratic Party’s “populist” base. On the issue of Israel-Palestine, a recent Gallup poll found that only 31% of self-identified Democrats think Israel’s actions in Gaza are “justified”.

Yet Sanders and Warren – along with every other member of Congress – voted not once but twice for symbolic resolutions endorsing Israel’s assault as “self-defense” and blaming the civilian death toll on Palestinians themselves. Both resolutions passed by unanimous consent: They were backed not just by mean old Republicans, not just by hawkish Democrats like neoliberal poster boy Cory Booker and Chuck “Bomb Iran” Schumer, but also by the party’s so-called left wing.

And now, leading House “progressives” like Barbara Lee and John Conyers joined their Senate counterparts (Ron Wyden and Al Franken, to name a couple others) to reaffirm yet again that, as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz once put it, there “will never be daylight between the two parties” when it comes to unconditional support for Israeli militarism and apartheid.

The 8 members of Congress – 4 Democrats and 4 Republicans – who voted against the additional funds are, on the Democratic side, Representatives Keith Ellison, Zoe Lofgren, Jim Moran, and Beto O’Rourke, and on the Republican side, Justin Amash, Walter Jones, Thomas Massie, and Mark Sanford.

They took a serious political risk going against the pro-Israel lobby and their respective party leaderships. I’ve linked to the Twitter accounts of each above – if you’re on Twitter, tweet them a “thank you!”, and if you aren’t, their Twitter bios include links to their websites where you can do so.

Here’s the thing, though: That this many members of Congress voted “no” in such a rabidly pro-Israel political climate as Washington is a testament to how undeniably horrific the reports and images from Gaza have been. People on the ground say this attack is beyond anything they’ve seen in their lifetimes.

But Israel’s draconian blockade of Gaza, also a point of bipartisan consensus, had already made it an open-air prison that the UN projected would be “unlivable” by 2020. Israel counts calories to determine how much food can reach its prisoners, blocking everything but the bare minimum needed for survival: Items banned since the siege began in 2007 include shoes, paper, coffee, tea, wood, cement, and iron.

Despite the withdrawal of its Jewish settler population in 2005, Israel continues to control Gaza’s water, electricity, borders, airspace, coastline, and population registry. It has to approve (and often doesn’t) every person, every molecule of food or raw material, that goes in or out. Even during “ceasefires”, the so-called Israeli Defense Forces conduct deadly raids and airstrikes with no accountability.

Gaza is surely unlivable today, after Israel has bombed 4 hospitals, 2 UN shelters, and its only power plant. More than a tenth of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are now housed in the same UN shelters that have become targets for Israeli bombardment, and 1.2 million Gazans lack access to clean water. 

As Americans, we are deeply complicit, and more and more of us are waking up to that reality. The politics of Israel-Palestine in the US are changing, as evidenced by the Gallup poll showing only 25% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 support “Operation Protective Edge”, compared to 55% of those 65 and up.

You can be on the right side of this 21st century struggle against colonialism, or you can sit idly by, congratulating yourself on how reasonable you sound talking about “both sides” and how hatred or religious divisions are the greatest obstacle to “peace”.

The greatest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine is apartheid, a racist system of segregation, discrimination, and expulsion. The greatest obstacle to peace is Zionism’s archaic project of an ethnically-exclusive state. The greatest obstacle to peace is the unconditional support of our government, including and especially its “progressive” darlings, for Israeli occupation and human rights abuses.

Empire rots from the inside out, and Congress will be the last domino to fall in the US-Israeli “special relationship”. Sooner or later, material support for Israeli terrorism will become a political dealbreaker. Make it sooner rather than later. Let your Congresspeople know: Enablers of mass murder and ethnic cleansing will lose your vote.

Whether or not you’re PEP – Progressive Except on Palestine – isn’t about ideological purity. It’s about whether you’re willing to stand up to evil when it really matters. Don’t call it evil if you don’t want to. Call it fascism, genocide – just don’t be silent. You’ll regret it.

NYU SJP protest called anti-Semitic on Fox News (again)

As we did last year, NYU SJP commemorated the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) with a protest action in solidarity with Palestinians, thousands of whom protested all across Israel-Palestine. May 15 is the date Palestinians mark the ongoing colonization of their homeland, much of which was ethnically cleansed in order to establish the European settler colony of Israel.

One of the delightful people who spearheaded the failed attempt to get SJP suspended (over our action involving mock eviction notices) came all the way from Boston just to see today’s protest – and to go on Fox News later that night calling us and our protest anti-Semitic.

This isn’t the first time, either: As I wrote in my recent article for the Electronic Intifada, I began receiving harassing phone calls after a different person made similar allegations (and an even worse one) on Fox two days after the action.

At least this time they were Fair & Balanced enough to ask us for a statement. If you can stomach it, you can watch the clip here.

My latest is now up on Intifada

Israel-Palestine isn’t a religious conflict, and neither was NYU SJP’s mock eviction notice action. So why did the university frame our “punishment” as an interfaith dialogue? My latest is now up on The Electronic Intifada!