- All articles

All articles

- Alphabets on the Sand: 2025 Nov 12

- Mamdani Created a Left-Liberal Coalition on Israel/Palestine: 2025 Nov 5

- The Olive Harvest Deportations: 2025 Nov 3

- Portrait of a Campus in Crisis: 2025 Oct 31

- The View From Evin: 2025 Oct 31

- House of Words, Ibau, Where’s Your Story?: 2025 Oct 31

- The Event: 2025 Oct 31

- Higher Ed's Bad Bargain: 2025 Oct 31

- Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: 2025 Oct 31

- The Upper Room: 2025 Oct 31

- Whose Jewish Dystopia?: 2025 Oct 31

- The Dream Logic of Fascism: 2025 Oct 31

- Degrees of Separation: 2025 Oct 31

- Elaine Mokhtefi: 2025 Oct 31

- Anti-Mamdani Letter Draws Support from Liberal Rabbinate: 2025 Oct 30

- The Myth of Israeli Innovation: 2025 Oct 27

- The Meaning of Trump’s $10 Million Grant to a Jewish Nonprofit: 2025 Oct 23

- Process of Punishment : 2025 Oct 21

- The Making of a Coal Boycott: 2025 Oct 20

- How the Swedish Public Saw Israel/Palestine: 2025 Oct 16

- The Anti-Soros Strategy at the Heart of Trump’s War on Progressive Nonprofits: 2025 Oct 15

- Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity: 2025 Oct 14

- What Israeli “Victory” Looks Like: 2025 Oct 14

- A Time That Refuses to Pass: 2025 Oct 8

- "An Elegy for All of Palestine": 2025 Oct 7

- Bari Weiss, CBS News, 1965: 2025 Oct 7

- The Recognition Trick: 2025 Oct 6

- Famine's Long Shadow: 2025 Oct 6

- A Brief History of Solitary Confinement in America: 2025 Oct 1

MEMOIR | 12 NOV 2025, 2:57 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 12 NOV 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

Alphabets on the Sand

In Gaza, language is insufficient to describe the magnitude of our loss, but I write anyway.

Abdullah Hany Daher

Palestinian children attend a lesson in Gaza City, February 26th, 2025.

Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP

In Gaza, books were not simply burned; they vanished. Libraries turned to dust. Schools became piles of concrete. Notebooks disintegrated in the mud, letters dissolving into the rain. Children drew alphabets on the sand, and watched as the wind erased them. They drew alphabets on the walls of their tents, then watched as dust concealed them. Children no longer read stories; they became the story.

When the war began, formal education was suspended across Gaza. Schools closed, then reopened as shelters; later, they were converted into cemeteries. Children lost their desks, their homework, their songs. Teachers no longer asked, “Did you study?” but “Did you survive?” Walls burned. Playgrounds became burial sites. The child who once memorized poems now repeats the names of the missing. Where devastation is the classroom, it often feels as though knowledge itself has become a form of mourning.

In June 2024, I was walking through Jabalia Camp when I saw an improvised graveyard beside a school. No marble headstones. Only cardboard boxes previously used by UNRWA to deliver flour, now carrying the names of the dead. The cardboard that once held supplies for survival had become markers for those who didn’t survive. I stopped in my tracks, unable to move. I wanted to copy the name of one of the martyrs into my phone, but I felt like a traitor. How can I carry a name of someone whose eye color and joys I don’t know, whose voice I’ve never heard? Will all this life evaporate like dust from an explosion—heavy, and then gone?

This past February, I went to the Shadia Abu Ghazala School in Al-Saftawi to see a friend who was staying there. The buildings that had once been brimming with chattering children were reduced to rubble, chairs that had once held eager students strewn broken throughout. In the courtyard, a man sat on a stone, holding a Quran. Ten children surrounded him, listening. No pens. No paper. No board. He was not a teacher, but a father. When teachers fell, he replaced them. When classrooms disappeared, he built one with his voice. As I stood there, ashamed of my silence, I, too, became his student, learning anew how to name loss without surrendering to it.

Now I am a high school senior. In Gaza, this final year of secondary education determines everything—our future studies, our careers, the paths of the rest of our lives. But only a few schools have reopened. From where I live in Khan Younis, it takes more than three hours to reach the nearest functioning school. On the broken roads, there are no buses, no taxis. I travel by foot. Sometimes I walk past craters deeper than I am tall. The internet comes and goes. Every day, the occupation cuts or jams the signal. When the internet returns, it crawls at 100 kilobytes per second. We wait hours to open one page, download one file, glimpse one line of a lesson we may never finish.

And still, many in Gaza refuse to stop learning. In the mornings, children walk through the ruins with plastic bags instead of backpacks. Some classes meet under trees, others in half-collapsed mosques. A child sits in the corner of a tent, reading from a half-burned notebook. A girl explains to her sister a grammatical rule she once heard. A boy searches through rubble for a torn page to keep. Education becomes resistance—not an institution, but an instinct. To learn in Gaza is to say, “I am still here.” We read not because we hope, but because each sentence feels like defiance of the ruin that surrounds us.

The ceasefire came, but the bombing never really stopped. In each moment of silence people still count the dead. In each interval of calm, I feel time slowing down—as if the world outside Gaza moves forward while we remain stuck inside the same unfinished sentence trapped between survival and meaning.

When I write, I don’t feel proud. I feel late. Words cannot keep up with what happens here. Language always follows loss. Still, I write, because forgetting is another kind of death. Writing does not save anyone; it only makes absence visible. It says, “We existed.” It says, “We tried.” And in Gaza, we have no more space to bury names.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/alphabets-on-the-sand at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 5 NOV 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 7 NOV 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

Mamdani Created a Left-Liberal Coalition on Israel/Palestine

The surprising story of the New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but their support.

Peter Beinart

Zohran Mamdani speaks during a victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party, November 4th, 2025.

Yuki Iwamura/AP

In the weeks before election day, supporters of Israel stepped up their attacks on Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral contest on Tuesday night. In late October, over 1,100 rabbis across the country signed a letter denouncing “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.” As Alex Kane reported in these pages, the signatories included not just conservatives and centrists, but also liberal Zionists: At least 65 rabbis and cantors affiliated with the liberal Zionist lobbying group J Street signed on. On October 31st, Angela Buchdahl, arguably New York’s most prominent Reform rabbi, accused Mamdani of promoting “the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problem here.”

This was predictable: Liberal Zionists have long opposed anti-Zionism’s “political normalization” and regularly oppose candidates who challenge the Jewish state. The more surprising story of the 2025 New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but liberal Zionist support. Even before the Democratic mayoral primary, Mamdani received the cross-endorsement of his primary rival, Comptroller Brad Lander, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the city. After the primary, Mamdani won the backing of Representative Jerrold Nadler, the longest-serving Jewish member of Congress, as well as State Assemblyman Micah Lasher, the frontrunner to succeed Nadler when he retires next year. In the campaign’s final weeks, Lander, Nadler, and Lasher were joined by other prominent liberal Zionists, figures who oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, yet support its existence as a Jewish state. Victor Kovner, one of the founders of J Street, Sharon Kleinbaum, rabbi emerita at the LGBT synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, and State Senator Liz Krueger all endorsed Mamdani’s campaign. Each has said that they disagree with Mamdani about Israel, but support him all the same. “I differ with some of Mamdani’s views about the future for Israelis and Palestinians,” wrote Kovner in The Forward, “including his failure to vocally support a two-state solution. But one doesn’t have to agree with all of his views about the Middle East to conclude that he is the best candidate for mayor.”

This is a new political phenomenon. Since at least 1967, the organized American Jewish community, and virtually all US politicians, have treated Israel’s system of Jewish legal supremacy as nonnegotiable. Anti-Zionism has been beyond the pale. Mamdani’s victory suggests that we are witnessing a historic change. The increasingly right-wing character of both Israel’s government and the pro-Israel establishment in the US is not only leading more Americans to question Zionism, it’s also leading some Zionists to cease making Zionism a political litmus test. By bringing together anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists, Mamdani has forged a coalition that allows Americans who disagree in their ultimate vision for Palestine and Israel to work together to end unconditional US support for Israel. In the coming years, that coalition could change the Democratic Party, and American politics, as a whole.

In recent decades, barely any anti-Zionists have competed seriously for high political office. But when they have, liberal Zionists have shunned them. In 2018, when then-candidate for Congress Rashida Tlaib suggested she might prefer a single democratic state in Israel-Palestine, J Street withdrew its endorsement. The lobbying group, whose Political Action Committee says endorsees must “commit to supporting US security assistance to Israel as outlined in the 10-year Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by President Obama,” has not even endorsed progressives who are less explicitly anti-Zionist than Mamdani, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. As The Forward has noted, J Street endorsed 48 candidates in 2022 who were also endorsed by AIPAC, which supports the Israeli government unconditionally, but only one who was also endorsed by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). And it’s not just J Street that won’t ally with anti-Zionists. Last year, Kamala Harris’s campaign refused to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention. This summer, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party revoked its endorsement of mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, a JVP-endorsed candidate who supports boycotting Israel.

Mamdani’s success shows that this firewall is starting to erode. As I noted after Mamdani’s primary win, he presents his positions on Israel-Palestine—which are radical in the context of American politics—in liberal and universalist terms, framing his opposition to Jewish statehood in the language of equality under the law. In an October debate, he said he “would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” Rather than exceptionalize Israel, he’s said that he opposes not only Jewish supremacy in Israel but Hindu supremacy in India and Islamic supremacy in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

These arguments may appeal to some liberal Zionists, who are increasingly alienated from the actions of the Jewish state. On its website, New York Jewish Agenda declares that “we are proud to call ourselves liberal Zionists.” But in a Guardian report last month, its executive director Phylisa Wisdom acknowledged that its members’ views are in flux: “There are a lot of people who couldn’t ever imagine voting for an anti-Zionist mayor and who also could never have imagined their own feelings about Israel and the Israeli government that they are having right now,” she said. Many liberal Zionists, she suggested, think Mamdani is correct “that Benjamin Netanyahu should be behind bars.”

J Street’s views are evolving as well. In January 2024, the group withdrew its endorsement of New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, in part because he accused Israel of committing genocide. But this August, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami declared that he had “been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.” J Street does not endorse in local elections, but after Mamdani won the primary, Ben-Ami said that “political figures like [him] may well have an important role to play if we’re going to succeed” in achieving J Street’s goal of “Jewish safety” and “Palestinian freedom.” J Street still supports a Jewish state. But by suggesting that Mamdani, who opposes one, has an important role to play in achieving J Street’s vision, Ben-Ami implies that liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists need not be political adversaries. As he said in his statement after the mayoral primary, their shared commitment to “democratic principle” requires that they work together “to beat the threat we all face from the authoritarian right.”

If some liberal Zionists have warmed to Mamdani because they’re more alienated from Israel, they’ve also warmed to him because they are more alienated from many of Israel’s defenders in the US. Lander, arguably New York’s most prominent Jewish liberal Zionist elected official, has accused Israel of “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “forced starvation” in Gaza. Yet Mamdani’s chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, in his effort to woo New York’s pro-Israel establishment, joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team at the International Criminal Court. Cuomo has also engaged in blatant anti-Muslim bigotry, calling Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer” and laughing when a talk show host said Mamdani would have cheered 9/11, which drew reprimands from J Street and Rep. Nadler. In 2022, the Canadian political scientist Mira Sucharov asked American Jews whether they supported Zionism according to different definitions of the term. When she defined Zionism as “a belief in a Jewish and democratic state,” 72% agreed. But when she defined it as “the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” the figure dropped to only 13%. By embracing Netanyahu and Islamophobia, Cuomo defined Zionism in a way that makes some liberal Zionists uncomfortable. Despite identifying as Zionists, figures like Lander and Nadler may find Mamdani’s emphasis on equality in Palestine-Israel more appealing than Cuomo’s.

Mamdani’s coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists will be tested in the years to come. Despite Mamdani’s success, liberal Zionists in other states may refuse to follow Lander and Nadler’s lead when faced with anti-Zionist insurgents. If they instead help AIPAC-friendly centrists triumph, they will alienate the party’s young, progressive base. Lander will likely enjoy the backing of Mamdani and many of his supporters if he challenges AIPAC-aligned Congressman Dan Goldman next fall, as some expect. But if no major candidate with Mamdani’s views enters the 2028 Democratic presidential primary—and there are none on the horizon—will the activists who powered his campaign mobilize for a candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, or Chris Murphy, who oppose unconditional support for Israel but stop short of challenging Jewish supremacy itself?

At this moment, both anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists are far from achieving their goals. Neither one decolonized state between the river and the sea nor partition into separate Jewish and Palestinian states is plausible in the near term. But the fact that their ultimate visions remain distant might make it easier to unite around shorter-term goals: In particular, halting—or at least seriously curtailing—US military aid to Israel, and fighting Donald Trump’s authoritarianism at home. Mamdani’s victory offers a glimpse of a left-liberal coalition for Palestinian freedom and American democracy, which echoes the great American progressive coalitions of the past. Between 1935 and 1939, the Communist Party of the United States supported the New Deal. In 1967, the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society joined protests led by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an umbrella group that included more moderate anti-war activists. In those cases, leftists supported liberals. And given how rare anti-Zionism remains among American politicians, leftists may sometimes make the same calculation in the years to come, as the struggle for Palestinian rights wins influence inside the Democratic Party.

But given the generational and ideological trends that Mamdani’s campaign represents, it may be that over time the power dynamics nationally shift leftward, and liberal Zionists play the supporting role. If this coalition becomes a politically viable alternative to both white Christian supremacy in the United States and unconditional support for Jewish supremacy in Israel, historians may look back at the 2025 New York mayoral race as the moment where it began.

Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.

PeterBeinart

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/mamdani-created-a-left-liberal-coalition-on-israel-palestine at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

REPORT | 3 NOV 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 31 OCT 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

The Olive Harvest Deportations

Alarmed by efforts to publicize its violence against Palestinians, Israel is moving to expel international solidarity activists from the occupied West Bank.

Maya Rosen

Israeli soldiers stand by as settlers destroy olive trees in Abu Falah, a village to the east of Ramallah, October 24th.

Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Activestills

On October 16th, a group of 32 international volunteers was interrupted while helping Palestinian farmers pick olives outside the village of Burin in the occupied West Bank. “The Israeli army arrived in a white van, and the farmers said we must leave,” one of the activists, who requested to remain anonymous, told Jewish Currents. The activists quickly moved into a farmer’s home. But according to Ghassan Najjar—a Burin resident who helps coordinate the annual olive harvest—the military, along with armed settlement officials from nearby Yitzhar, followed them inside and raided the house. At the insistence of settlement forces, the military called the police, who claimed that the area had been designated a closed military zone and proceeded to arrest all 32 activists. The volunteers, who came from across the United States and Europe and ranged in age from twenties to eighties, were taken to the police station in the settlement of Ariel. Over the next five days, they were transported to prison and then deported.

Najjar said this mass deportation of international activists, the largest ever apart from the expulsions of those aboard the recent Gaza solidarity flotillas, shows the extent of coordination between settler bodies and Israeli government officials. According to the Religious Zionist news site Srugim, it was settlement forces that initially noticed the activists. Settlers reached out to the head of their local governing body, the Samaria Regional Council; the head of the Council then contacted top military personnel as well as the Minister of the Interior, demanding deportations. Soon after the deportation decision was made, settlers loudly celebrated it as a win. On October 18th, Member of Knesset Tzvi Sukkot, a settler who has been arrested numerous times for violence against Palestinians, posted on Facebook that “this mass expulsion will, God willing, send a clear and unmistakable message to anyone thinking of coming here into the area to smear Israel through planned, violent provocations.” In an interview with Jewish Currents, Sukkot reiterated this sentiment. “These are people who come to bait, to provoke, to create a distorted picture of reality,” he said, adding that he was “certainly proud of” the campaign to deport them. That effort has only grown in the past days, with Israeli police arresting an additional 11 activists in Burin on October 29th and moving to deport the two in the group who were on tourist visas.

The arrest of international activists is a small part of Israel’s sprawling war on the Palestinian olive harvest. For decades, and especially in the past few years, Israeli settlers, soldiers, and government leaders have all targeted the harvest due to its economic and cultural importance across Palestine. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed an estimated one million olive trees in its bombardment, an assault leading experts have called a genocide. Meanwhile, less than two weeks into this year’s West Bank harvest, Israeli settlers have carried out over 150 increasingly violent attacks against harvesters. Settlers have stolen olives and damaged equipment; cut down and burned olive trees, destroying whole groves; and regularly teamed up with soldiers to prevent farmers from reaching their trees. “It has become a long-standing tradition during the olive-picking season for settlers to do everything they can to prevent Palestinians from enjoying their agricultural produce,” said Lea Tsemel, a human rights lawyer who represented the arrested activists.

In response, the harvest has become a time of particularly intensive protective presence, a practice wherein outside activists join Palestinian hosts in the hopes that their presence will decrease violence, or that they will at least be able to document attacks. Multiple Palestinian, Jewish, international, and Israeli groups have launched such initiatives in coordination with local communities, helping to produce media and human rights reports about settler and state attacks, bringing international diplomats to the field, and otherwise attempting to put Israel’s abuses in the spotlight. Coming amidst growing criticism of Israeli violence, these efforts have incensed Israeli settlers and leaders. “Israelis now feel isolated from the world because people have started to know the truth; they’ve started to know exactly what the settlers are doing here,” Najjar told me. This concern has given rise to an escalating Israeli campaign to hinder activists’ participation in the harvest, as well as the harvest itself, by smearing both as “terrorist” activities and calling for arrests and deportations. In light of this mobilization, human rights experts say that the recent wave of deportations may be only the beginning of a bid to radically curtail the role of activists in the area. In Tsemel’s words, “it’s an attempt to prevent the presence of anyone who could be a witness.”

Israel’s alarm over international activists in the West Bank started growing in the aftermath of October 7th, as skyrocketing settler violence began drawing global scrutiny. In March 2024, Sukkot launched a series of Knesset hearings on activists in the West Bank as part of the Subcommittee on Judea and Samaria, which he heads. Attended by military, police, and government top brass, as well as right-wing NGOs, the five such hearings to date focused on the ways that, in Sukkot’s words, foreign activists were “do[ing] everything in their power to obstruct our just war.” Much of this panic concerned activists’ efforts to bring attention to settler violence: At one of the hearings, a representative of Im Tirzu accused activists of “releasing false reports to the International Criminal Court” and of bringing diplomats to the West Bank, while at another, far-right Jewish Power Member of Knesset Limor Son Har-Melech complained that activists “blacken Israel’s name around the world.” “Ultimately, the campaigns against Israel and the sanctions come from them,” Sukkot said in September 2024. Therefore, Israel must work on “weeding them out one by one.”

Such calls to “weed out” activists have been accompanied by the creation of concrete enforcement structures. In early April 2024, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir set up a special unit within the police to handle foreign activists arrested in the West Bank. The unit—which was established soon after the Biden administration began implementing sanctions against violent settlers and settler organizations, and was reported to be in direct response to this move—carries out its work in cooperation with the Population and Immigration Authority (PIA) because of the organization’s low threshold for revoking visas. As a result, the unit has been able to swiftly enact deportations: According to data provided by the Human Rights Defenders Fund, 16 international activists were expelled from the country in the months following the start of Sukkot’s hearings and Ben-Gvir’s special unit. Similar trends have held when it comes to Israel denying people entry into the country: The Religious Zionist publication Arutz Sheva reported that only 30 left-wing activists were refused entry to Israel between 2017 and early 2024, whereas the first five months of 2025 alone saw over 100 refusals. “Many discussions in which we worked to connect the relevant bodies and actors finally bore fruit,” Sukkot said of the increase. “The special staff set up by Ben-Gvir . . . together with cooperation that we led between the PIA, the Ministry of the Diaspora, and the Central Command, led to a rise of thousands of percent [sic] in the refusal of entry of these hostile actors into Israel.” “Our message is clear,” Sukkot concluded. “The State of Israel will not be a playground for de-legitimization activists.”

These policies often lead to certain areas being arbitrarily marked as off-limits to both Palestinians and those accompanying them. “Across the West Bank, there are many places that are simply closed—huge swathes of land where access just isn’t permitted,” said Qamar Mashriqi, a human rights lawyer who works to protect Palestinian land rights in Masafer Yatta. Such practices are in direct violation of a 2006 Israeli Supreme Court ruling stating that the military cannot prevent Palestinians from accessing and working their land, as well as the Israeli military’s own stated commitment to following the court’s ruling. Documents obtained by Jewish Currents show that in a May 2024 response to the court, the military acknowledged that “the fact of arriving with activist accompaniment cannot be considered a provocation or a reason for declaring a closed [military] zone.” This position was reaffirmed in a September 2025 Civil Administration document released ahead of the olive harvest, also obtained by Jewish Currents. But Avi Dabush, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights—which organizes daily protective presence during the olive harvest—has told +972 Magazine that activists with his group have nevertheless been prevented from accessing olive groves almost every day this season. As Yonatan Pollak, a veteran Israeli activist who helps to coordinate protective presence during the harvest, noted to Jewish Currents, “this is a clear case of how reality and stated policy are two completely different things.”

Since this year’s harvest began, that reality has become more and more violent. In a particularly horrific incident on October 19th, the first day of the local olive harvest, over 100 settlers attacked farmers in Turmus Ayya, beating international activists with clubs and leaving a Palestinian woman with a brain bleed and 18 stitches in her head. The event was captured on video by the American journalist Jasper Nathaniel and received millions of views. Two days later, a settler on an ATV drove among the olive harvesters, asking people for their names and photographing them, and a few hours later, the military announced that only people from Turmus Ayya were allowed to stay in the fields. “They were looking for the activists. They wanted the activists to leave the area so they wouldn’t witness any intimidation or attacks from settlers,” Yaser Alkam, a landowner in Turmus Ayya who serves as the head of the foreign relations department in the local municipality, told Jewish Currents. Both Nathaniel and Alkam believe the attempt to root out the activists was due to the attention the video of the attack two days earlier had received. “All the soldiers and police officers seemed very upset about all this publicity they’re getting,” Nathaniel said. “It’s clear that they understand the bad optics, and they are trying to clean it up.” The same pattern unfolded the next day, when Alkam went to harvest his olives along with Dutch journalists. The same settler came through on his ATV to intimidate people and, Alkam said, “saw the cameras, the journalists taking videos of him.” Soon after, the military came and declared a closed military zone, forcing both the journalists and Alkam to leave.

Palestinians in nearby areas report a similar situation. Najjar, of Burin, said that there had been many cases this season of the military declaring closed military zones and forcing internationals to leave. “Many times over the last two months, the Shin Bet [the internal Israeli security police] have called me and threatened me and told me not to bring internationals,” Najjar said, noting that this is the first year that he has received threats concerning activists. In Masafer Yatta, too, where the majority of olive trees are now under closed military zone orders for the entirety of the olive harvest season, there is concern that Israel will restrict activists. In a recent message, the settler-led South Hebron Hills Regional Council has told residents that “only land owners who can prove their ownership will be permitted to take part in the olive harvest. The entrance of outside actors or anarchists will not be permitted.” The message went further, clarifying precisely what was concerning the settlers. “On entry to the olive harvest,” it noted, “there will be a security check and mobile phones must be deposited.” Such directives show that “they do not want the word to spread,” said Najjar. “They do not want anything that goes on in those areas to be documented.”

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-olive-harvest-deportations-israel-west-bank at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

REPORT | 31 OCT 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 NOV 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

October 31, 2025

Portrait of a Campus in Crisis

UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before President Trump came calling. As a result, its students have repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence.

Will Alden

Adali Schell

The encampment at UCLA, spring 2024.

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Around 8 pm on the last evening in April, some 200 people gathered in Bruin Plaza on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus for a screening of the documentary The Encampments. As the sky darkened and lampposts clicked on, members of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) stretched a white sheet of fabric between two metal poles, while their comrades in flannels, puffer jackets, and loose-fitting jeans, most faces obscured by medical masks or keffiyehs, settled on blankets near the Bruin bear statue. The Encampments chronicles the Palestine solidarity movement at Columbia University, but it includes a brief portrayal, nearly 30 minutes in, of the UCLA students’ own encampment on Royce Quad, not far from this evening’s screening—the site where, exactly one year earlier, an off-campus mob wielding wooden boards, metal rods, fireworks, and chemical spray had staged a ferocious overnight attack while police looked on. Victims of that mob attack were among the crowd marking the grim anniversary, yet they never got to see their protest represented on screen. About 25 minutes into the film, a column of 30 University of California Police Department (UCPD) officers in riot gear emerged from behind a concrete stage at the northeastern edge of the plaza, marching two abreast, visors down, batons and pepper-ball guns in hand.

This aggressive interruption of the students’ movie night marked a new phase of the sprawling police operation that had dominated a section of campus for the previous week: UCPD officers from up and down the state—including the Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco departments, in addition to UCLA’s own—had spent the days leading up to the anniversary of the attack patrolling Royce Quad and sitting in police SUVs prominently parked near the grassy expanse. The SJP students had originally planned to screen the documentary on the quad, but on the afternoon of the event, university security personnel sealed off the area with steel barricades, and a long caravan of California Highway Patrol SUVs pulled into a campus parking lot nearby. This expensive show of force, while unusual in its size, exemplified post-encampment UCLA, described by a group of faculty members in a May essay in The Nation as “a fortress” that was “nearly unrecognizable as a university.” In the wake of the 2024 mob attack—and the subsequent mass arrest of the student protesters who had been attacked—the university went to work “ensuring that the Royce Quad encampment and related incidents could never happen again,” including by redrawing its emergency-response plan so that police officials “no longer need[ed]” to consult senior administrators before curbing campus protests, according to a sworn declaration that summer by Rick Braziel, then head of the newly formed Office of Campus Safety. In the fall, under a preliminary federal injunction premised on the idea that the encampment had been a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” UCLA announced an interim update to its “time, place, and manner” rules, effectively limiting protests to certain “areas for public expression” and forbidding “tents, campsites or other temporary housing or other structures” anywhere on campus unless specifically approved by the Events Office.

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Police attempt to break up a screening of The Encampments on

the UCLA campus, April 30th, 2025.

Edward Ho/Daily Bruin

The revision to these free-expression policies was widely viewed as unfairly targeting the Palestine solidarity movement, gathered under the banner of the UC Divest Coalition at UCLA. Campus authorities invoked the new rules in October, as they dismantled Jewish students’ solidarity sukkah, and again in November, when they arrested four people connected to a protest on Bruin Walk. When, on the evening of the Encampments event, the SJP activists arrived in their backup location—Wilson Plaza, down the steps from Royce Quad—with an inflatable screen, a Student Affairs official informed them that, “the second that thing goes up,” facilities workers and police would confiscate it: Apparently, the backyard movie rig qualified as an unauthorized structure. Rather than argue, the students packed up their equipment and directed the group to Bruin Plaza, one of the few designated “areas for public expression,” where amplified sound was allowed until midnight. Ditching the inflatable screen, they opted for a more DIY approach. “We thought, ‘Hey, we have this white bedsheet; let’s just have two people hold it,’” one of the screening’s organizers, a computer science graduate student named Dylan Kupsh, told me later. “It’s not a temporary structure because it’s not attached to anything.”

The audience in Bruin Plaza—including experienced SJP members like Kupsh who’d been keeping tabs on the police while the film played—were on their feet before the UCPD officers reached them. “We’re going to move together,” a student in a black “University of California Intifada” t-shirt and a keffiyeh worn as a hood said into the megaphone. “Together we keep each other safe, right? We keep us safe!” Their number dwindling, the students walked west until they reached De Neve Plaza, a courtyard surrounded by dorms. There, having lost the police, they encountered another familiar antagonist: Eli Tsives, a curly-haired sophomore, perched on a low wall and holding out an Israeli flag. A frequent counterprotester who had amassed a major Instagram following on the back of his post-October 7th advocacy—most prominently with an April 2024 viral video in which he portrayed encampment activists as “promoting hate” because they were blocking his preferred path to class—the 20-year-old Tsives had a proven ability to attract attention and push the administration to take a heavier hand with the student movement. In previous confrontations, the activists had been careful not to take the bait: Tsives’s own videos typically show them responding calmly to his finger-jabbing and bellowed accusations. But this time, just seconds after Tsives brought out the flag, someone snatched it and ran.

Tsives, in his muscle-hugging t-shirt and white Nikes decorated with Israeli flags, sprinted after, into the tide of arriving students, where I lost sight of him. “This person does not deserve our attention!” said a woman with a keffiyeh around her hair, urging others away. Soon, I watched Tsives shove his way out of the crowd. “Only Jewish kids getting assaulted right now,” he shouted, as if narrating for an audience. In the caption of the video he posted later, Tsives said the protesters were “violent” and suggested that they tried “to beat me up,” but the video itself doesn’t support this. Though the action is obscured, Tsives is shown roughly grabbing someone in a black hoodie and demanding his flag, while others in keffiyehs try to intercede. When I approached him afterward, he told me he’d been put in a headlock. Watching with arms crossed as the students set up their film equipment in De Neve, Tsives said, “I feel better than ever, because the police are going to come and get rid of them.”

The group of activists had just gotten the film playing again when the riot police appeared—breaking into a run as they entered the courtyard. The students stopped their chants of “Shame!” and fled. There were isolated screams as the officers, batons drawn, chased them up the steps outside the Dogwood dormitory, and as two motorcycle cops roared in from the opposite side of the courtyard, misery lights flashing. The police arrested the two people who had been holding the poles of the makeshift screen—one a student and the other an alumnus—and barred them from campus for two weeks, citing a Vietnam War-era law that the university unearthed last year and now regularly deploys against pro-Palestine student activists. The alumnus was sent to the emergency room that night with minor injuries to his hip, shoulder, and wrist that he sustained when the arresting officers pinned him against the concrete steps.

Tsives’s all-but-inscrutable Instagram video, promoted by pro-Israel accounts like Jew Hate Database and JewBelong, quickly became the latest flash point in a concerted campaign to paint UCLA as a hotbed of Israel-related antisemitism. The hardline Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA declared in a statement the next day that the film screening had “resulted in the violent assault of a Jewish student who had expressed support for Israel.” On Fox News @ Night, the anchor Trace Gallagher played Tsives’s video and pronounced him “the victim of an antisemitic attack.” The UCLA administration, in a statement, rushed in to apologize to the student (they did not identify Tsives by name) who had been “physically assaulted” on the night of the screening: “We are sorry for what this student experienced, and we have already been in touch with him to offer support.”

This kind of distortion was nothing new, Catherine Hamilton, a former editor at the Daily Bruin student newspaper, told me. But something about the anniversary of the mob attack added insult to injury. A year earlier, Hamilton herself was hurt while reporting; assailants sprayed a chemical into her eyes and hit her in the chest, causing pain in her sternum “so intense that she could not stand up,” according to a lawsuit filed in March against university officials, police agencies, and known attackers. Though the violence at the screening was smaller in scale, Hamilton seemed pained by the familiar pattern—the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors. “It is, in many ways, just sickening,” she said.

Hamilton seemed pained by the familiar pattern—the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors.

An “Exceptional Failure” to Protect Students

This is a story about UCLA in the long aftermath of October 7th, but its outlines could apply to any number of American universities embroiled in struggles over political speech that are rapidly remaking our democracy as we know it. The dominant narrative advanced on cable news and in every major American newspaper over the last two years is one of a crisis of campus antisemitism. In The New York Times or on CNN, the student movement has been represented not so much by its core demand—that universities divest from companies complicit in the grinding annihilation of Gaza—as by the emotional experience of Jewish students who feel upset by it. Students at Columbia created a buddy system “so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe,” wrote Franklin Foer in an April 2024 cover story in The Atlantic; Jewish students’ account of “the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel” led Foer to conclude that the university was “a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews.” This image of the Jewish student in peril was even projected internationally: “Every place you go around the world, you hear from Jews, and they’re worried about coming here to the United States, particularly to college campuses,” CNN host Jake Tapper said on air in December 2023.

This narrative—which tends to shift public attention to American fora and away from the abundantly documented atrocities in Gaza—has cast the most outspoken Zionists on campus as representative of Jewish students. There was the student at Yale who alleged that a passing protester “stabbed” her in the eye with a small Palestinian flag “because I am a Jew” (on Fox News the next day, her eye appeared unharmed); the Florida State University student in an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt who told police he’d been “hate-crimed” in the gym by a graduate student who said, “Fuck Israel, free Palestine,” before she allegedly grazed his shoulder while making a grab for his smoothie. Such stories, often accompanied by inconclusive video, catch fire online among those predisposed to read them as examples of antisemitism, even in spite of “scant details,” Arno Rosenfeld wrote recently in The Forward. They evince “a kind of spiritual truth rather than a detailed set of facts.”

The students on this social media dais have become savvy ambassadors for a worldview, endemic to organized American Jewish life, that conflates Jewishness and Zionism. In his senior year of high school, for example, Tsives did an internship with the Zionist group StandWithUs, where, he told me, instructors taught him “not just Israel 101 but also everything that you need to know about how to hold an argument” with pro-Palestine activists in college. Even those young American Jews who do not attend such programs are often raised within institutions that instill in them a powerful identification with the Jewish state. “They’re taught that threats to unqualified support for Israel are threats to Jewish safety, and they take it to heart,” said Marjorie Feld, a professor at Babson College and the author of The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism.

Long before President Trump adopted the allegation of antisemitism as the central tool in his crusade against higher education, university administrators—under pressure from their donors and trustees and from activist members of Congress—have elevated even the flimsiest reports of harm to Jewish students as justification to tamp down on pro-Palestine activism. Despite video of the alleged eye stab depicting something far more ambiguous, Yale opened an inquiry into the claim and enlisted the help of the FBI in tracking down the flag-waving student; at FSU, the graduate-student worker who’d said “fuck Israel” on video was fired, suspended, barred from campus, and charged with misdemeanor battery. Universities have suspended clubs, fired teachers, and punished their own star students for speaking out against Israel. Their official task forces to study campus antisemitism, convened in the months after October 7th, were sometimes chaired by professors of dentistry, epidemiology, and real estate finance—nonexperts who happened to be Jewish and who produced credulous reports that relied on outside pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for their analysis. Yet even kowtowing, in televised grillings on Capitol Hill, to the notion that strident protest of Israel amounted to anti-Jewish hatred did not spare the presidents of Columbia, Penn, Harvard, and other universities their jobs.

What it did, instead, was help pave the way for President Trump to attack the nation’s leading sites of critical inquiry under the cover of what movement strategist Sharon Rose Goldtzvik has called “smokescreen antisemitism.” In March, the same month that The Atlantic’s Foer released a follow-up article taking aim at Columbia’s “anti-Semitism problem,” the Trump administration canceled $400 million in funding for the university and, apparently acting on information provided by Zionist doxing group Canary Mission, sent ICE agents to detain Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil. In April, the same month that The New York Times was amplifying the “scathing” report by Harvard’s task force on antisemitism, the Trump administration withdrew $2.2 billion in grants over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and alleged antisemitism at the university. Unlike Columbia, Harvard took the feds to court—drawing praise from liberal commentators—yet the university had already fulfilled parts of their demand list, dismissing the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and suspending the research partnership between its school of public health and Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s wide-ranging assault on universities has been built upon the successful efforts of campus pro-Israel advocates, along with donors and outside groups, in lobbying for the illiberal and violent repression of pro-Palestine speech. Though Foer contended in his March article that the Trump administration was “exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism,” its demands of Columbia substantially echoed a previous list of demands by the university’s own Zionist faculty activists. Similarly, Harvard’s CMES and its partnership with Birzeit had both come under attack by an influential Jewish alumni group in a distortion-filled May 2024 report.

The crisis at California’s largest public university, while attracting less national attention than its Ivy League equivalents, has exemplified these dynamics. I spent the spring quarter visiting UCLA and interviewing more than 40 people—students, faculty, staff, and outside advocates on all sides of this drama—in an attempt to understand how these national political trends were playing out at a single university. The picture that emerges is one of a campus besieged from without and within, caught between the crusaders in the White House and those walking its own halls. Contrary to the ubiquitous narrative of Jewish victimhood, a sober look at the nation’s No. 2-ranked public university in this moment of fracture reveals that the power on campus overwhelmingly accrues to the most right-wing Zionist students and faculty in their efforts to stifle opposition to what United Nations experts call a genocide in Gaza. Theirs is a faction supported by well-resourced communal organizations and Trump-aligned law firms, and defended by police and the federal government. Successfully pushing their message to a sympathetic media and stoking the outrage of powerful allies, the pro-Israel advocates on campus appear more as agent than object, more doer than done to. Their concerted pressure campaigns targeting administrators have gotten results in the form of new, strictly enforced policies; disciplinary proceedings against protesters; interventions into academic curriculum; and the repeated use of police and other security forces to quell the student movement.

Contrary to the ubiquitous narrative of Jewish  victimhood, a sober look at the nation’s No. 2-ranked public university in this moment of fracture reveals that the power on campus overwhelmingly accrues to the most right-wing Zionist students and faculty.

Pro-Israel demonstrators at a rally for the Israeli hostages on the UCLA campus, November 7th, 2023.

Raquel Frohlich/Alamy

This activist infrastructure long predates October 7th, gaining steam over the last decade in response to boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campuses. A “complex landscape of many different campus groups” and donors, in the words of Josh Nathan-Kazis, the journalist who documented these efforts in a series of articles in The Forward in 2018, has collectively poured cash into “very aggressive, and very hard-nosed” strategies to counter campus activism. Nathan-Kazis pointed out in a 2019 interview that “this whole wave of hardline tactics and entities” did not come from Jewish students themselves, but rather “from ideas developed by think tanks in Israel, and leaders of the American-Jewish community.” This dynamic persists: When students in the UC Divest Coalition at UCLA established their encampment in April 2024, the Miriam Adelson-backed Israeli-American Council, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, and other groups quickly organized a rally on campus with the university’s permission, where Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, draped in a combined American-Israeli flag, pointed to the nearby encampment and said, to cheers, “Their evil and their fascism will not win.” The backdrop to the rally stage was a “Jumbotron” TV screen erected by an off-campus group calling itself the Bear Jews of Truth and paid for by a list of prominent donors, including Jessica Seinfeld, a cookbook author and the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld; Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund billionaire who has gone to war with Harvard over its student protests; and a host of local machers in real estate and law. The intention for the screen, according to archived versions of the GoFundMe page, was to create a “legendary counter move” to the encampment, drowning out student chants by playing “nonstop clips” of “the screams and cries of October 7th.” In the wake of the mob attack two days later, Jewish student leaders at the campus Hillel—who self-identify as Zionists—wrote in a pointed statement, “We can not [sic] have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus. Do not fund any actions on campus. Do not protest on campus. Your actions are harming Jewish students.” Of the Jumbotron, they wrote, “We can’t learn over the constant noise of Jews being slaughtered.” Yet even if the Zionist activists, like Tsives, represent only a fraction of Jewish students, they style themselves as the embattled avatars of UCLA Jews in general and are often adept at flexing the power arrayed around them. In our first interview, in April, Tsives described the network of organizations operating on campus as a “Jewish powerhouse,” adding that the new chancellor, Julio Frenk, who was “brave enough” to suspend SJP in his second month on the job, had provided “that final cherry on top.”

Pro-Israel demonstrators play a video called “This is Hamas”

across from the UCLA encampment, April 29th, 2024.

Qian Weizhong/VCG via AP

At UCLA, fearmongering by outside groups and their allies on campus eventually led to violence. Out-of-context audio and video clips like Tsives’s—promoted by members of the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, by then-Chancellor Gene Block in a widely circulated statement, and by outside groups including the Maccabee Task Force and the Israel on Campus Coalition—spread through local group chats including Persian Jews of LA, Israelis of LA, and Beverly Hills neighborhood groups. In the ensuing hours-long attack on April 30th, at least 25 activists from the encampment were rushed to the ER with blunt-force head traumas, fractures, lacerations, and chemical-induced injuries, while more than 150 required on-site treatment for pepper spray and bear spray, according to a report by volunteer medics. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I’d never see my family again,” one student, who was hit in the head twice and received stitches and staples in the hospital, told Hamilton in her Daily Bruin report. Thrust into an international spotlight, UCLA administrators answered this assault on their own students by directing the California Highway Patrol, armed with riot guns, to clear the encampment the following night, resulting in additional injuries and 209 arrests. In allowing “people who violently disagreed with the political message of the encampment to dictate the terms of the protest,” the university submitted to a “heckler’s veto,” as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contended in a lawsuit, and “trampled” on students’ right to free expression. In the weeks following, and into the next academic year, the university adopted a muscular new approach to enforcement, with the police continuing to arrest student protesters, send them to the emergency room, and temporarily ban them from campus. In the last two years, roughly 130 students have faced disciplinary charges related to pro-Palestine activism, with some of them charged multiple times, according to faculty and staff supporting their defense.

Now, like other schools, UCLA has responded to the Trump administration’s opportunistic quest by aligning itself more fully with the most radical pro-Israel activists in its midst. Frenk, who took office as chancellor in January, said in a May interview with Jewish Insider that the prospect of losing federal funds “occupies me at night.” His administration has rapidly expanded the crackdown that began under Block, suspending at least 11 students over Palestine solidarity activism, placing SJP on interim suspension, and launching an “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism,” led by real estate finance professor Stuart Gabriel, to “implement” the recommendations of the university’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which Gabriel chaired. Dov Waxman, a UCLA professor of Israel studies, told me that the task force report was a “problematic” document that “presented people’s perceptions or experiences of what they considered to be antisemitism as antisemitism.” He resigned from the task force rather than put his name to the draft. Another resignee, Shalom Staub, UCLA’s assistant vice provost for community engagement, told Gabriel in a September 2024 email, obtained through a public-records request, that the draft report repeatedly “conflate[d] political speech, albeit objectionable and repugnant speech, with antisemitism,” while adopting an “ahistorical, non-contextual approach” that “minimiz[ed] the context of the severe Israeli military action in Gaza post October 7.”

Yet Frenk’s maneuvers failed to keep the Trump administration at bay. Over the summer, UCLA became the first public university penalized in the government’s anti-antisemitism gambit, facing a $1.2 billion fine and a slew of other demands reflecting right-wing anti-DEI and anti-trans objectives. Negotiations between the two sides were ongoing as of press time, even after a federal judge restored virtually all of the $584 million in research funds that the Trump administration had suspended as part of its efforts. Those cuts, UC President James B. Milliken said in an August statement, did “nothing to address antisemitism”; Milliken further complained that “the extensive work that UCLA [has] taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored.” But it hadn’t been ignored. On the contrary, at least one product of that “extensive work,” the antisemitism task force report, was repeatedly cited by the Department of Justice in the letter outlining its findings. Two federal grant-making agencies, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, likewise justified their suspension of funds by citing “UCLA’s own” report.

Again and again, the university’s validation of Zionist critics, far from protecting it from censure, has provided an opening for further punishment. After UCLA law student Yitzy Frankel and other plaintiffs claimed in a June 2024 lawsuit that encampment activists had made a section of campus into a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” the Trump-appointed judge in that case noted that the university “[did] not dispute this” version of events. University officials ultimately settled the case for $6.45 million. One UCLA administrator, quoted anonymously in the Los Angeles Times, conceded that the Frankel settlement—announced just hours before the Trump administration accused UCLA of civil rights violations, heralding the funding freeze—had “backfired,” inviting the federal government to pounce on the apparent admission of failure. “If you placate the bully, the bully comes back,” said legal scholar Katherine Franke, who was forced to retire from Columbia in January after being targeted with harassment and threats over her pro-Palestine advocacy.

In response to a list of detailed questions about these events, a spokesperson for UCLA said in an emailed statement that “there is no room for violence, hate or intimidation” at the university. “The events in the spring of 2024 tested the bonds that unite UCLA as a learning community and created mistrust in some corners of our campus,” the statement went on. “UCLA continues to take meaningful steps to ensure we can both maintain our commitment to free expression and make our campus a place where all Bruins feel safe, supported and able to thrive.” (The spokesperson had previously declined to make Frenk available for an interview.)

The attack of April 30th, 2024, remains an untreated wound, with the university thus far avoiding any official reckoning with its role in the most extreme night of vigilante violence endured by any Palestine solidarity encampment nationwide. The story of that night and what came after is particular to UCLA. Yet the experience of the students, treated as expendable by their own university, is vividly illustrative of the forceful opposition arrayed against the student movement as a whole. And it shows how advocates for Israel set the terms of the campus battle. “The only way UCLA really has been exceptional,” Waxman told me, “is in its exceptional failure to protect the students in its encampment from violence.”

“The only way UCLA really has been exceptional is in its exceptional failure to protect the students in its encampment from violence.”

Pro-Israel demonstrators attack students at the UCLA

encampment in the early morning hours of May 1st, 2024.

Ethan Swope/AP

An injured person is carried away amid

an attack on students at the UCLA encampment,

April 30th, 2024.

Ethan Swope/AP

The Fire In the Med School

Not long after October 7th, 2023, Kira Stein, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, started a “support group” for Jewish faculty who felt “isolated, fearful, or demoralized” by what was occurring on campus, as she later put it in an email. Stein, who is 55 and wears a blonde bob and cat-eye glasses, was affiliated with the university on a volunteer basis, seeing patients and supervising residents in a campus clinic that her mother, psychiatry professor Vivien Burt, had founded. But while Stein did not draw a salary from UCLA, she possessed an employee ID number and a university email address—and would soon make herself into a force on campus.

In the first month after the Hamas attack—with scholars and activists already warning of an unfolding genocide in Gaza as Israel laid siege to the territory, killing more than 10,000 by early November—students at UCLA’s Westwood campus were joining their peers around the country in holding rallies, walkouts, and teach-ins to advocate for divestment. A November open letter that was signed by Stein, Burt, and more than 350 other professors and affiliates decried “explicit calls for violence” at pro-Palestine rallies, citing chants featuring the word “intifada”—a term that has been associated with periods of acute resistance in Palestinian history, both violent and nonviolent—and “event advertisements featuring images of weapons/violence.” “A number of faculty members were clearly very upset” and “traumatized” by the protests, Burt, now 81 and a professor emeritus, told me recently. According to Stein, “what started as emotional support quickly evolved.”

By January, Stein’s new group, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG), had collected hundreds of signatures on a letter to administrators with a list of demands, including that UCLA formally adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which classifies broad swaths of anti-Zionist speech (including calling Israel “a racist endeavor”) as antisemitism—and that it mobilize campus police to “respond promptly to instances of violence and hate.” The group established an antisemitism tip line, organized faculty to speak at UC regents meetings, filmed student testimonials to send to congressional investigators in Washington, and put up a billboard near campus asking the public to “REPORT Anti-Jew Hate at UCLA.” Yet its aspirations went beyond local activism: In a speech at a May 2024 fundraising event at the Museum of Tolerance, Stein described her vision for a “grassroots rapid-response team and command center on every single campus.” For this, JFRG would need to “immediately” raise $1 million to counter the “terrorist organizations and foreign governments” that she claimed were financing her adversaries, like SJP, which she described as “pro-Hamas, neo-Marxist, and anarchistic.”

Like Stein and Burt, many of JFRG’s most active members are affiliated with the medical school, which, through its teaching hospitals and government research grants, generates an outsize share of revenue for the university. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent period for which information is available, the UCLA Medical Center accounted for about half of the university’s total $11.2 billion in revenue, an analysis of the financial data shows, far surpassing the $983 million garnered from student tuition and fees. This makes the medical school a particularly sensitive target—and gives the members of JFRG a powerful perch from which to lobby administrators. Elsewhere, too, medical faculty have been outspoken in their pro-Israel advocacy, with doctors organizing at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Yet in many ways, JFRG, which registered last year as a nonprofit and recently posted a job listing for an executive assistant to Stein, stands apart. As one UCLA medical school insider said, insisting on anonymity for fear of retaliation, “If you’re looking for the source of the fire, in terms of UCLA, it’s in the med school.”

“If you’re looking for the source of the fire, in terms of UCLA, it’s in the med school.”

Kira Stein addressing antisemitism at UCLA, May 20th, 2024.

Still: JFrgatUCLA on YouTube

Compared with faculty in the humanities, medical faculty are often highly paid, and even those who engage deeply in teaching or research rarely, if ever, interact with undergraduates. American medical education has traditionally “imagined itself as removed from social issues and social pressures,” said Lara Jirmanus, a family physician and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. But amid mainstream recognition of mounting data showing social factors like class and race to be leading health determinants, conservative-leaning doctors have sought to cast such research as “a politicized interpretation of the world that is somehow discriminatory against white people,” Jirmanus told me. In academic contexts, this view has translated into a suspicion of DEI initiatives, including on the grounds that they harm Jews. At JFRG’s Museum of Tolerance fundraiser, Burt responded to a question about “combatting antisemitism” by declaring, to applause, “We need to end DEI,” which she said casts Jews as “oppressors,” “even more so than just your average white person.”

In early April 2024, psychiatry residents Afaf Moustafa and Ragda Izar delivered a lunchtime Zoom lecture entitled “Depathologizing Resistance” to members of the medical school community. The talk took Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in protest of Israel as a provocative entry point for a broader analysis of the ways that the field of psychiatry has “pathologized actions that counter our power structures of colonization, homophobia, and white supremacy.” To Stein, a supervisor in the same department, the talk amounted to “anti-Israel and antisemitic libel” that echoed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as she put it in an email that evening to Chancellor Block and other senior administrators. She lambasted the administrators for their “lack of intervention after we had alerted you to the concerning nature” of the talk, even as she and her JFRG colleagues were already launching an intervention of their own. Within hours, JFRG posted a video recording of the lecture, which Stein made with a screen-recording tool, to its website, alongside screenshots of Stein’s emails to administrators, listing Moustafa and Izar’s names. The same day, Physicians Against Antisemitism—an Instagram account run anonymously by psychiatrist Katherine Hulbert that says it works “behind the scenes” with pro-Israel doxing outfits including Canary Mission, StopAntisemitism, and Jew Hate Database—published slides from the lecture, also including the two residents’ names.

This package of internal medical school material quickly found its way to right-wing media. Even after JFRG removed the video from its website—under pressure from medical school colleagues who insisted in a faculty meeting that the recording had been made illegally—an audio-only version of it, alongside the names and headshots of the residents, appeared in the Washington Free Beacon, followed by the Daily Mail. Moustafa, who is Palestinian, immediately began receiving death threats. “I was having trouble sleeping. I was having nightmares,” she told me. “I was really worried someone was going to come to my office at work, which is public information. And I got extra security at home.” More than 70 of Moustafa and Izar’s medical school peers signed a letter to Block and other administrators accusing Stein of “actively trying to silence and dox, and thereby endanger the physical and psychological safety of the only two female, Arab psychiatry resident trainees in the program.”

The department quietly suspended Stein from teaching, pending an investigation, though she remains on the volunteer faculty, Burt told me. Yet while Stein distanced herself from any doxing—“If doxing has occurred, it will be stopped,” she said during a heated exchange at the faculty meeting, a transcript of which I reviewed—the incident with the psychiatry residents was one entry in a pattern of “organized repression” of voices critical of Israel by “a small number of students and faculty” in partnership with “non-university actors,” according to the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism in a January report on the medical school. The task force, co-chaired by two experts on race and racial violence and convened at the same time as the task force on antisemitism, described multiple instances of discriminatory abuse directed against Palestinians and their supporters of color. (In the month following the report, a Black UCLA medical student was doxed by Jew Hate Database; the post included details about her scholarship known only to a small circle at the medical school.)

Even with Stein under fire, JFRG continued to establish itself as a player in campus politics. Eight days after the “Depathologizing Resistance” lecture, it organized a group of around 25 faculty members to attend a UC Board of Regents meeting, marching from the medical center with yellow hostage ribbons pinned to their chests. They were joined by an influential outsider, Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, which is a major funder of the UCLA Hillel. “I want to say on behalf of the Jewish community that you, UCLA, are embedded in a larger city, the largest Jewish community on the West Coast . . . and we are watching you,” Farkas said when it was his turn at the microphone. “We will organize against you.”

As Trump has intensified his assault on higher education, JFRG leaders have capitalized on the opportunity, giving media interviews on “the crisis Jewish students and faculty are facing” and promoting their far-reaching demands as “the path forward.” In April of this year, two UC regents—influential Hollywood superagent Jonathan “Jay” Sures and consulting firm CEO Richard Leib—met with leaders of JFRG in a private conference room on UCLA’s campus, Burt told me. The regents, who had requested the meeting, were “obviously moved by the many things we had told them” in public-comment forums, said Burt; they saw the federal government withholding funds from Columbia and wanted to prevent something similar from occurring at UCLA. In response, JFRG created “a comprehensive, faculty-driven road map for addressing antisemitism (including anti-Zionism)” that it shared with the entire board of regents, Chancellor Frenk, and Gabriel, the antisemitism task force chair. The document recommends that the UC system adopt the IHRA definition, implement mandatory trainings “taught by vetted third-party experts aligned with the IHRA definition,” and “immediately remove antisemitic content in the medical curriculum,” among other points. “The folks affiliated with JFRG have the administration’s ear instantly,” Hannah Appel, an anthropology professor and associate faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, told me, noting that Frenk “routinely” repeats JFRG talking points.

“The folks affiliated with JFRG have the administration’s ear instantly.”

On campus, JFRG’s reactionary Zionist movement continues to get results: In the spring, administrators moved to end the medical school’s Structural Racism and Health Equity (SRHE) course, which required first-year medical students to grapple with how social inequities affect patient health—and which had been a favorite target for JFRG members and their right-wing allies off campus, including pundit Ben Shapiro and Do No Harm, an anti-DEI medical advocacy group that sued the UCLA medical school in May, alleging “illegal racial discrimination” that harmed white and Asian applicants. After pausing the SRHE course for a curriculum review, the school laid off the course’s tutors at the end of June, citing the “current curtailment of federal grants and funding,” according to an email sent on June 13th, weeks before any federal funding to UCLA had actually been suspended. When I asked Burt, in our September interview, about JFRG’s policing of academic material, she insisted that limits had to be placed on “political indoctrination” in classroom settings. She was pleased with the winding down of SRHE. “Whatever is being done to lessen antisemitism, we’re in favor of.”

The “Don’t Fuck With Us” Jew

On a Monday in late April 2024, Eli Tsives approached the southernmost entrance of the Royce Quad encampment. Now in its fifth day—having drawn hundreds to its discussions and teach-ins, and to the collective act of disruption it represented—the encampment had swelled beyond the quad to a nearby paved walkway. Tsives, then in the spring of his freshman year, was known to the activists as the student provocateur who’d shown up on the encampment’s very first day wearing an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt and holding an Israeli flag, and who’d gone on to post a video to his Instagram page of a confrontation with student safety marshals (“Let’s get a nice look at their faces. You can kiss your jobs goodbye,” he’d told them). Now, a friend filmed Tsives, a large Star of David dangling from his neck, as he demanded entry. The students at the steel barricades, in medical masks and keffiyehs, moved to form a wall with their bodies. By this point, experienced activists in the encampment had created a list of Zionist agitators from on and off campus who, for safety reasons, were not allowed in, according to a student organizer, Ethan, who asked that I not use his last name. These included “the undergrads who aren’t much of a threat—they’re just annoying—and the adults, who are there to get violent,” he said. Tsives was in the former category. “Everybody, look at this, look at this,” Tsives called out to onlookers off camera, giving the impression of a crowd. “I’m a UCLA student. I deserve to go here. We pay tuition. This is our school. And they’re not letting me walk in. My class is over there. I want to use that entrance,” he said, pointing past the activists toward Kaplan Hall. “We’re not engaging with agitators,” one of the students replied.

The son of two Soviet Jews who emigrated to the US in their youth, Tsives grew up south of San Francisco, playing water polo and acting in school plays. His family wasn’t particularly religious, but Tsives’s mother, now a tech executive, often spoke about Israel as an insurance policy. “She always told us: ‘If bad things happen, we’re going to Israel,’ ” Tsives said. When he was 13 and the family was living in Shanghai for his mother’s work, a science teacher at Tsives’s international school “said something along the lines of ‘The current state of Israel should not exist because of what they do.’ And I was very confused,” he told me. “My mother sat me down and grilled me on Israel education. That was pretty much the spark that lit the fire in me becoming an activist.” He arrived at UCLA just weeks before October 7th, fresh from his StandWithUs internship. When pro-Palestine protests broke out that fall—which Tsives viewed as “blatant antisemitism happening on my campus, right in front of me”—he felt galvanized. “Not a lot of things were being done about it,” he recalled. “I said, ‘If no one’s gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.’” He identifies specifically as a Russian Jew, not just an American one—a “chutzpah-driven, loud, don’t-fuck-with-us Jew.” Tsives told me, “When people hate my people, my natural instinct is to be louder and prouder of who I am.”

Eli Tsives in Washington, DC, in October 2025.

KT Kanazawich

A theater major at the time of the encampment, Tsives said that the class he was trying to get to on that Monday in late April was Introduction to Lighting Design, which met in Kaplan Hall (he has since switched his major to political science, in part because of the “absurd amount of antisemitism and anti-Zionism happening in the School of Theater, Film and Television,” he told me). But Kaplan Hall has six main entrances; the encampment was blocking only two, on the building’s western side. The closest unobstructed entrance was roughly a 45-second walk south from the spot where Tsives starred in his one-minute video. Waxman, the Israel studies professor—who was a critic of the encampment at the time, posting on X the week it appeared that “groups like SJP” were “exploiting the sympathy that many students rightly feel for the suffering of Palestinians”—told me that students “could simply walk around the encampment.” Though it was “in a central part of our campus,” he said, “it didn’t block any building. The idea that Jewish students couldn’t enter UCLA, or couldn’t go to class, is just misrepresentation.” When I asked Tsives why it was important to him to use that particular entrance with other entrances nearby, he said, “There’s no reason why masked protesters who are harassing Jewish students should tell me to walk around the school just because I’m a Jew.”

Though the encampment was “in a central part of our campus,” Waxman said, “it didn’t block any building. The idea that Jewish students couldn’t enter UCLA, or couldn’t go to class, is just misrepresentation.”

Eli Tsives in the April 2024 video in which he claimed he was being blocked from getting to class.

Tsives’s performance, with his insistence that the activists were promoting “aggression” and “hate,” entered the cultural bloodstream. Promoted by influential right-wing accounts, the video spread like wildfire through Jewish networks and family group chats, racking up millions of views across Instagram and X, and was soon featured on Fox & Friends. But its influence extended beyond the Jewish echo chamber and the culture-warring right, making its way to CNN’s Inside Politics, where a stone-faced Dana Bash followed the clip with sensationalized commentary: “What you just saw is 2024 in Los Angeles, hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe. And I do not say that lightly.”

The university swiftly endorsed Tsives’s narrative. Flooded with complaints from parents, alumni, and politicians, Chancellor Block, in his first university-wide email about the encampment since its creation, declared that “students on their way to class have been physically blocked from accessing parts of the campus,” putting Jewish students “in a state of anxiety and fear.” By that point, journalists and other observers had documented numerous instances of harassment directed at students in the encampment, including physical shoving and shouted threats of violence, by a loose confederation of Persian Jews, Israeli Americans, and other off-campus locals. “It was rare to have a moment where at least one random middle-aged Zionist wasn’t trying to get in,” Ethan told me. But Block’s official email, which condemned “instances of violence completely at odds with our values as an institution,” declined to say who was committing the violence. Graeme Blair, a political science professor who serves as one of the spokespeople for the campus chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, told me that he believes Block’s equivocating statement, which validated and amplified incendiary claims, was “one of the key factors that led to the escalation of violence” in the April 30th mob attack. “They’re stopping students from going to their classes,” one of the attackers told local news channel Fox 11 that night. “We’re here to stop them from doing what they’re doing.”

There are a number of Eli Tsiveses nationwide—Zionist students like Shabbos Kestenbaum at Harvard, Bella Ingber at New York University, and Lishi Baker and Eden Yadegar at Columbia—who, in one way or another, have successfully bent their schools toward their version of reality. Many of these students have been the faces, and beneficiaries, of lawsuits against their universities. Kestenbaum sued Harvard over “rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment” on campus; his co-plaintiffs settled in January, winning concessions including undisclosed “monetary terms” and a pledge that Harvard would adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, while Kestenbaum held out for a separate settlement in May. Ingber also received an undisclosed settlement from NYU over assault claims that, though challenged by security footage, separately resulted in another student being charged with a hate crime (a grand jury could not be persuaded to indict the student, and the charges were dropped). At schools across the country, “the students who have actually caused harm are the ones winning thousands of dollars in university settlements,” Noura Erakat, the prominent Palestinian American human rights attorney and Rutgers professor, told me. “Their grievance aligns with power’s aspiration for expansion.”

Beyond the financial rewards, these students’ political activism has launched them into the world of influence. The path they’re on was charted by the famed pundit Bari Weiss, who first rose to prominence as a campus crusader at Columbia in the early 2000s and whose staunchly Zionist outlet, The Free Press, was recently acquired by CBS. Few among the latter-day Weisses can rival Tsives’s following on social media, which numbers more than 50,000 on Instagram, but Kestenbaum provides another study in mainstream sway. He broke through on the stage of the 2024 Republican National Convention, where, in his kippah and hostage dog tag, he sold himself as a former Bernie Sanders supporter disgusted with the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the fight against antisemitism. In May, he was the subject of a sympathetic New York Times profile, “The Jewish Student Who Took On Harvard,” which portrayed him as the glad-handing David to Harvard’s Goliath. Tsives first met Kestenbaum, whom he described as a “good friend,” on his first trip to Israel, at 16, through the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, where Kestenbaum, who is six years older, was an assistant bus director. “He’s been part of my journey,” Tsives said of Kestenbaum, “I’ve been part of his.” This year, the two were promoted as “visionaries and advocates” on a slate of candidates, which also included Ingber, in the World Zionist Congress elections. But they have their sights on American politics: Kestenbaum told Jewish Insider that, at the encouragement of “New Yorkers from a broad ideological spectrum,” he was considering a run for retiring Democratic representative Jerry Nadler’s House seat. When Tsives met the Israeli celebrity and activist Noa Tishby at a May 2024 event, she anointed him the future “first Jewish president” of the US. “I will be,” Tsives told me. “That is the end goal.”

Bean-Bag Rounds and Flash-bang Grenades

It was just before midnight on April 30th, 2024, when UCLA police chief John Thomas arrived on campus. By that time, attackers had begun tearing down the encampment’s steel barricades and shooting fireworks at the activists inside. One of Thomas’s lieutenants had requested help from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to quell the escalating violence; the university would soon call in the California Highway Patrol (CHP) as well. But the 19 officers assembled there upon Thomas’s arrival were hanging back. An LAPD lieutenant informed him that the force was too small and that they had to wait, Thomas told the Los Angeles Times. (He was later reassigned and left the UCLA police department in December.) “No one from UCLA PD took command of the scene,” according to a UC-commissioned report completed in November 2024 by the consulting firm 21st Century Policing Solutions; officials from outside police agencies got the impression that “no one was in charge.” That week, administrators had engaged in a “chaotic” decision-making process “without clarity on who maintained final decision-making authority,” according to the report. This resulted in “institutional paralysis” and “an inability to effectively respond and protect students from violence.” On the night of the attack, with students being bloodied, the police did nothing. In one instance, past 2 am, when assailants rushed the encampment and slammed a plank of wood into someone’s head, police officers some 200 feet away stood still, according to an analysis of video by The Washington Post.

When assailants slammed a plank of wood into someone’s head, police officers some 200 feet away stood still.

Pro-Israel protesters shoot fireworks at the UCLA encampment, May 1st, 2024.

Shay Horse/NurPhoto via AP

The attackers viewed the student activists as “outsiders” who had “violated” the firmly rooted Persian Jewish community—as Sean Tabibian, a real estate developer on the scene that night, told me—and they assumed that the police would take their side. Tsives, who was there to observe at the behest of a Fox & Friends booker, said on the show that the attackers told him that “the main reason they were doing this was to attract police [to] finally go inside the encampment and start making arrests.”

University officials have claimed in court documents that they were already planning to remove the encampment when it was attacked. Those plans quickly translated into action as the sun rose on May 1st. In a meeting that afternoon attended by Chancellor Block, UC President Michael V. Drake, and LA Mayor Karen Bass, the UCPD and outside police agencies sketched out a plan for ending the encampment: The CHP—which has authority over state property, including university campuses—would dismantle the barricades and arrest protesters, the LAPD would protect the CHP, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would bus arrestees downtown for booking, according to an after-action report by the LAPD. (Such “mutual aid” requests by campus police that spring, along with private security, ultimately cost UCLA $10 million, the most of any UC campus.)

As sheriff’s deputies pulled up to Wilson Plaza, rumors of a police sweep spread across campus. The student activists—exhausted from the attack the night before—reinforced the encampment perimeter with wooden pallets and collected hard hats, goggles, umbrellas, and other protective gear. Starting just before 6 pm, a dispersal order played over loudspeakers declaring the encampment “an unlawful assembly” and telling the students to leave or risk arrest. Many people did leave over the ensuing hours, but hundreds remained, keeping up their call-and-response chants as police and news helicopters thundered overhead, and as large formations of officers marched outside the encampment walls. (Nearly 600 officers from the LAPD alone responded to the UCLA protests between April 30th and May 3rd, according to the city controller.) “That was the day that it hit: UCLA has changed forever,” Dylan Kupsh, the SJP activist, told me. “It marked a turning point in the militarization of campus.”

The raid began in the predawn hours, when armored CHP officers fired 12-gauge shotguns loaded with bean-bag rounds, as well as grenade launchers with sponge rounds designed for “pain compliance,” at the students, discharging a total of 57 projectiles, according to the CHP’s use of force report. An investigation by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters found at least 25 instances in which the officers “appeared to aim their weapons at the eye level of protesters or fired them into crowds,” in apparent violation of training guidelines and state law. (The CHP, in its one-page report, said that the officers were defending themselves against frozen water bottles and other thrown items and that they did not fire “indiscriminately in the crowd of protesters.”) One student, Kira Layton, was shot in her right hand. She needed surgery to install screws in her metacarpal bones and intensive physical therapy. “It stopped my life completely,” she said, her voice unsteady under the weight of the memory, at a press conference on campus this May to announce a lawsuit, alongside other plaintiffs, against the city of Los Angeles and the state of California. A reddish mark from the injury was still visible, 12 months later, on the hand clutching the microphone. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go to school. I had to move out of the apartment I was living in to stay with my mom. I couldn’t sleep.” Returning to campus in the fall, she experienced panic attacks and started failing her classes “for the first time in my life.” In the course of arresting 209 people the night of the sweep, the police dealt emergency-level injuries to at least 15, including head trauma from fired projectiles and burns from flash-bang grenades. The encampment was reduced to a heap of smashed and overturned tents on the matted lawn.

“That was the day that it hit: UCLA has changed forever. It marked a turning point in the militarization of campus.”

Police enter and clear the UCLA encampment, May 2nd, 2024.

Jae C. Hong/AP

Ethan Swope/AP

In an administrative shake-up three days later, Block shifted command of the campus police to a new Office of Campus Safety, whose inaugural head, Rick Braziel, a former Sacramento police chief still living in the state capital, reported directly to him (while earning $52,000 a month for the short-term role). Faculty activists privately referred to this new office as UCLA’s version of the Department of Homeland Security. The university had consolidated power in the hands of the police, and the effects were immediately apparent: On June 10th, 2024, after a long afternoon of protests that included attempts to read the names of Palestinian dead in different places on campus, UCPD officers kettled students in a narrow passage between two hedges outside the law school, forcing them back, videos show, into a line of LAPD officers. Jakob Johnson, a history major then in the final days of his senior year—and now a plaintiff in the omnibus lawsuit against university officials—saw a UCPD officer aim a grenade launcher at his chest from less than ten feet away. The sponge-tipped bullet “completely knocked the air out of my lungs,” Johnson told me. At the emergency room, after coughing up blood, he was treated for contusions on his lungs and heart. Johnson is a dedicated runner; for months afterward, the injury significantly limited his aerobic capacity. “It just felt like my lungs would stop functioning” beyond a certain point, he said. The recovery also included a period of severe depression. Having planned to matriculate to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Johnson withdrew two weeks before the start of classes that fall. “For my own university, where I’ve come into myself in so many ways, and which has given me the education that put me out there in the first place—for that university to shoot me just shattered so much,” Johnson said, when we met on UCLA’s campus in May. “Any faith I had in the institution was lost.”

“Parents are sending their kids to schools with the assumption that the school won’t make intentional choices to harm them,” said Ricci Sergienko, a civil rights lawyer representing Layton and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the state and city governments. “When you call in the police, you’re ensuring violence against young people.” The increased reliance on militarized police to suppress student protests is itself an alarming sign of UCLA’s priorities, his co-counsel Colleen Flynn told me; the administration is “willing to sacrifice the safety and physical well-being of their students to keep the money flowing in.”

Lawfare Finds “UCLA in Full Retreat”

At 12:13 am the night of the mob attack, as the violence raged, JFRG posted on X that it “unequivocally condemns the clashes and riots on our campus.” Mainstream Jewish groups likewise moved quickly to express their disapproval of “the abhorrent actions of a few counterprotesters,” as LA’s Jewish Federation put it. Yet even then, a counternarrative was already forming—virtually from one paragraph to the next, in the Federation’s statement—that shifted the focus to the “illegal encampment” and the question of “Jewish safety.” In her speech at the Museum of Tolerance event weeks later, JFRG’s Stein asked the audience to imagine “if you [had] to show a wristband . . . to be allowed free access to public property.”

The wristbands had become a symbol, among campus Zionists, of perceived anti-Jewish discrimination. It was true that activists had used a wristband system to speed re-entry to the encampment. The requirement for getting one, organizers told me, was to agree to a set of community guidelines, including “I will not use cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol,” “I will respect everyone’s preferred names, gender pronouns, and expressed identities,” and “I will not wield a weapon or act violently.” The guidelines make no reference to Israel or Zionism. At the same time, in at least one case caught on video, an activist asked someone seeking entry if they were a Zionist—which, for the activists, served to gauge hostility toward their project. “It was never ‘encampment policy’ to ask people if they were Zionist or not,” one Jewish Voice for Peace organizer told me, while acknowledging that, in part because of “constantly shifting circumstances,” with activists “cycling in and out of roles,” the question was sometimes asked.

“It was never ‘encampment policy’ to ask people if  they  were  Zionist or not,” one    JVP organizer told me, while acknowledging that, in part because of “constantly shifting circumstances,” with activists “cycling in and out of roles,” the question was sometimes asked.

Protesters block a photographer from entering the UCLA encampment, April 26th, 2024.

Ringo Chiu/AP

In June, Yitzy Frankel, then a UCLA law student, filed a lawsuit alongside other plaintiffs accusing UCLA and UC officials of failing to protect Jewish students and faculty, and specifically claiming that pro-Palestine activists in the encampment were excluding Jews. It was not that protesters had physically blocked Frankel from activities on campus; instead, he claimed that the “knowledge that he could not go through the encampment without violating his faith by disavowing Israel” forced him to change his routine. Describing the encampment as a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” the complaint pointed to the wristband system, which, it said, involved swearing fealty “to the activists’ views.”

Representing Frankel were two firms known for their conservative activism: the Washington, DC, firm Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—which represented the craft store Hobby Lobby in its successful Supreme Court effort to deny birth-control coverage to its employees—and Clement & Murphy, led by Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush. The lawyers pursued a careful legal strategy: As an Orthodox Jew, the complaint read, Frankel “believes, as a matter of his religious faith, that he must support Israel.” Legally, Frankel’s argument was “a little bit narrower than ‘to be a Jew is to be a Zionist,’ ” said Noah Zatz, a UCLA law school professor. “It’s ‘For me, to be a Jew is to be a Zionist,’ in a religious sense. It actually lowers the burden, because they don’t have to get into an argument about the intrinsic nature of Judaism.”

In its legal defense, the university did not dispute the idea that the encampment excluded Jews; rather, it argued that the activists’ “antisemitic conduct” was “not perpetrated by UCLA.” The result was that the “Jew Exclusion Zone” narrative “risk[ed] becoming the official record of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment,” wrote Thomas Harvey, a lawyer representing Jewish pro-Palestine activists and others, in an unsuccessful motion to intervene in the case. On August 13th, 2024, two months after the lawsuit was filed, Judge Mark C. Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited UCLA officials from “offering any ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas” that “are not fully and equally accessible to Jewish students,” and specified the protection of Jewish students’ “religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.” (Harvey, in his motion, warned that this conflation of “political perspective” and “protected religious belief” would “infringe on the free speech rights and religious freedom of anti-Zionist Jews or anyone else who criticized Zionism as a political project.”) UCLA appealed the injunction, stating through a spokesperson that the ruling “would improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground.” An injunction, the university had argued in a filing, would effectively allow “the Court to take the reins and manage UCLA’s response to protest activity on campus, down to ordering when and where law enforcement should be deployed.” Yet the appeal immediately drew a howl of protest from JFRG. “REALLY, UCLA?” the group said in an X post, plastering the words in red lettering on an image of a court document. “Why is UCLA appealing a ruling that bars anti-Jewish exclusion on campus!?” Eight days later, the university backed down, withdrawing the appeal and accepting the injunction. Mark Rienzi, the president and CEO of the Becket Fund, said in a statement, “We’re glad to see UCLA in full retreat.”

Universities across the country have similarly retreated in the face of “nuisance suits” that “have no legal basis,” according to Franke, the retired Columbia law professor. These legal efforts typically rely on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects students from discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin”—and whose use in antisemitism cases dates to a novel interpretation of the law promoted by Kenneth Marcus, who led the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the post-9/11 era. Since October 7th, 2023, pro-Israel advocates across the country have filed 26 lawsuits, including the Frankel case, against colleges and universities alleging antisemitism under Title VI, compared with just two such cases in the years prior, according to data compiled by the Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Initiative. (This tally does not include the roughly 100 Title VI antisemitism investigations opened by the federal government in the last two years.) Of the 28 total suits, nine have had their Title VI claims dismissed at an early stage of the proceeding, with judges sometimes ruling that the alleged antisemitism actually counted as political speech protected by the First Amendment. One reason judges have not dismissed more of these claims, according to Radhika Sainath, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal, is that universities, under political pressure, are generally “not making all the arguments they should.” Nine cases have resulted in settlements. Franke called it “appalling” that universities “are settling the suits and paying out large sums of money.” She said, “The law is being used in a range of ways to extract funds from our institutions through private litigation that parallels what the government is doing in pulling public funds.”

“We’re glad to see UCLA in full retreat.”

The University of California settled the Frankel lawsuit in July. In addition to making Judge Scarsi’s injunction “permanent” for 15 years or more, the deal required UC to contribute $320,000 to UCLA’s new Initiative to Combat Antisemitism—charged with implementing the task force recommendations—and $2.3 million to a list of Jewish and Zionist organizations including the ADL. UC also agreed to pay $3.6 million to the lawyers who brought the case and $50,000 apiece to Frankel and the three other plaintiffs. (In response, Shabbos Kestenbaum tweeted a now-deleted message of congratulations “to my friend Yitzy and the other plaintiffs at UCLA for this historic win,” adding, “I encourage ALL Americans: hold your universities accountable! DM me if I can be of help.”)

At UCLA, legal challenges to the pro-Palestine movement have played out on an individual scale, too. In late May, Dylan Kupsh found himself in a downtown LA courtroom, looking the part of a slightly bewildered computer science grad student in a rumpled white dress shirt and black slacks. At the table to his left were lawyers for United Talent Agency vice chairman Jay Sures, who, as a UC regent, helped oversee university investments, and who had been a vocal opponent of the student movement. Sures was seeking a restraining order against the 26-year-old Kupsh, whom he had described in a sworn declaration, citing information from the UCPD, as “the ring leader” of “a pro-Palestinian mob”—a reference to the group of students who had protested outside Sures’s home in a leafy Brentwood cul-de-sac on a February morning, leaving handprints in red paint on his garage. (Kupsh told me that SJP does not have an individual leader; he believes he was targeted because, as a frequent police liaison at protests, he was known to the UCPD.)

In court, Sures’s lawyers claimed that their client, who is Jewish, was a victim of antisemitism, even postulating that the pigs depicted on a banner held by the students were wearing yarmulkes. Judge Kimberly Repecka wasn’t buying it; the pigs’ hats were clearly police hats. “They look very much like the cartoon images from the ’60s and ’70s of law enforcement officers that are specifically meant to mock them as pigs,” she said. She granted Kupsh an anti-SLAPP motion under the California law that protects individuals targeted for exercising their free-speech rights on a public issue. Running through a list of the evidence, the judge repeatedly found that particular allegations made by Sures, including that he was targeted as “a prominent member of the Jewish community,” reflected not what had actually occurred, but rather “Mr. Sures’s state of mind.”

Yet only a week after Sures’s case fell flat, UCLA informed Kupsh that he had been placed on interim suspension and immediately barred from campus. This punishment, according to a letter Kupsh received from the Office of Student Conduct, resulted from an accumulation of five outstanding student-conduct cases he had collected for his activism over the past year; among the accusations in those cases was that Kupsh had been “repeatedly asking questions” of university officials at a Nakba Day protest “in an apparent attempt to distract” them. The office had determined that there was “reasonable cause to believe” that Kupsh’s presence on campus would “lead to other disruptive activity.” (Kupsh was one of three students who received similar letters that day.) Kupsh—now entering the fifth year of his PhD program—may lose his employment as a graduate-student instructor or even be forced to withdraw entirely. His fate will depend on Zoom-based student-conduct hearings like the one I attended across two sessions in June and July, where a panel of two students and one university staff member heard allegations that Kupsh “participated in setting up an unauthorized encampment . . . after having been warned and ordered by University officials to disperse.”

Dylan Kupsh in Los Angeles, October 2025.

Photo: Adali Schell

“There’s been a full year of investigation into this case, one that’s been pretty stressful,” Kupsh said in a prepared statement in the July session, sometimes pausing to draw a steadying breath. Ultimately, after hearing testimony from a dozen witnesses, including students and professors whom Kupsh had rallied to his defense, the panel found for Kupsh, citing “insufficient information.” If he wants to remain a student at UCLA, Kupsh must successfully repeat this exercise four more times.

“Vindication” for JFRG

In August, with the Trump administration demanding $1.2 billion from UCLA to settle claims over alleged antisemitism, David Myers, a prominent professor of Jewish history and director of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, joined other faculty organizers in collecting more than 360 signatures for an open letter, “Jews in Defense of UC,” intended to show the university that campus Jews and alumni representing “a diverse range of approaches and opinions about how to define and combat antisemitism” stood united against the Trump administration’s efforts. But Trump has crudely written off the many Jews who dissent from his right-wing vision, while UC administrators have offered scant acknowledgment of the intra-Jewish ideological diversity that the letter reflects.

Dov Waxman in London, October 2025.

Sophie Davidson

Waxman, who also signed the letter, left his role last year as director of the university’s Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, which he had held since 2020. “I felt—I feel—strongly that the Nazarian Center is about the study of Israel. It’s not a pro-Israel center. Its mission is not to support the Israeli government,” Waxman told me. But the center’s funders, the Nazarian Family Foundation—a powerful Iranian Jewish family philanthropy run by the Tehran-born Sharon Nazarian, who also serves as a vice chair of the ADL—apparently felt differently. In May 2024, Waxman posted on X, welcoming the request by the International Criminal Court for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside leaders of Hamas. “This is not about drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel,” he wrote. “It is about upholding international law.” That tweet led the Nazarian Family Foundation to express “that they had no confidence in my leadership,” Waxman told me. On the face of it, the dispute was over whether the director of the Nazarian Center “should take public positions.” Yet “I felt that I was only being asked [not to take public positions] because my views were critical,” Waxman said, “whereas if I had been perceived to be pro-Israel, that demand would not have been made.” (The Nazarian Center and Nazarian Family Foundation did not respond to emailed requests for comment.) Ultimately, Waxman stayed on as director until the completion of his term at the end of 2024 (he continues to be a professor at UCLA). This August, in an introspective post on Medium, he wrote, “I no longer dispute the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” Ten days later, Waxman’s successor as director of the Nazarian Center, public policy professor Steven E. Zipperstein, staked out a different public position in The Times of Israel, with an article entitled “The Gaza genocide claim fails the test of law and fact.”

A former chief legal officer of BlackBerry and Verizon Wireless, Zipperstein was “highly recommend[ed]” by Kira Stein and other leaders of JFRG, in a March 2024 email to medical school dean Steven Dubinett, as a resource on “left-wing antisemitic anti-Zionism.” Yet if Dubinett had declined, in that instance and others, to overhaul the medical school curriculum according to Stein’s wishes, he received a letter this summer that bolstered her ongoing campaign: Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, informed Dubinett that his committee was pursuing its own Title VI investigation into reports that the medical school had not “meaningfully responded” to “hostility and fear” felt by Jewish students and faculty. In the August letter, Walberg demanded years of internal documents and aired Stein’s personal grievances, including details about the fallout from the “Depathologizing Resistance” lecture. Stein, in a brief appearance on a local Spectrum News channel, declared: “This vindicates us.”

As her advocacy gets results, Stein has had to strike a delicate balance in her public statements, neither endorsing the Trump administration’s funding suspension—which overwhelmingly affected her colleagues in medicine and the sciences—nor condemning it. “Our members did not create the illegal encampments, occupations and acts of intimidation that brought about UCLA’s recent crisis,” Stein and a colleague wrote in an October letter to the editor published in the Daily Bruin. The university’s own negotiators, meanwhile, are “totally aligned” with the Trump administration “on the issue of antisemitism,” Frenk said in an online event hosted by an LA Jewish group in September; still, he objected to the Trump administration’s approach, which, he warned, could make antisemitism “worse.” “Now we hear people saying, ‘It’s because the Jewish faculty are complaining so much, now I had my grant canceled,’ ” Frenk said.

When we met for an interview in the spring, Kupsh, who wryly describes himself as “the most doxed person in SJP,” told me that he had gotten used to being recognized by the police and private security officers who patrol campus. “They’ll start waving at me, like, ‘Hey, Dylan!’ ” The morning of Frenk’s inauguration ceremony in early June, the day before Kupsh was barred from campus, he was approached, he said, by a security officer who had a photograph of Kupsh as a child, evidently pulled from the internet, as his phone background. (That same morning, UCPD officers charged at a group of activists outside Royce Hall and made four arrests.) Stories of police harassment abound. “Most of the UCPD officers know my face,” another SJP member who is currently barred from campus told me in the spring. “They’ll follow me home. When I encounter them on campus, they’ll say ‘hello’ in a way that’s like, ‘I’m watching you.’ ” The day after the attempted film screening, campus police detained eight students in a parking garage for at least 20 minutes after a traffic stop, according to witness accounts. The students, seven of whom were cited for not wearing seatbelts, had been wearing keffiyehs. It remains to be seen whether the mounting punishments for individual activists will succeed in permanently quieting their movement. The stately façade of Royce Hall, briefly covered in anti-colonial graffiti, is now pristine, just like in the brochures, as if the encampment had never happened.

What is special and even unique about universities in American political life is the freedom that tenured professors have to challenge authority, whether that authority is a long-dead writer, the president of the United States, or the administrators of the university itself—a freedom that professors extend to their students, whose own political identities are still being formed. “My biggest concern is not so much what the university will lose in terms of money, but what it will lose in terms of integrity,” Robin D. G. Kelley, a distinguished professor of history at UCLA who served on the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, told me recently. “I don’t know any students now who love the university. They’re all so worn out and pissed, even those not involved in the encampment. It’s a question of the integrity of an institution that claims to believe in academic freedom and intellectual inquiry showing that it doesn’t give a shit about any of that.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Will Alden is a writer living in Los Angeles. His journalism and essays appear in The Nation, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

williamalden

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/portrait-of-a-campus-in-crisis at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

ESSAY | 31 OCT 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 NOV 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

The View From Evin

My family’s history with the notorious Iranian prison links me to a world of unfinished liberation movements.

Sahar Delijani

Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, January 1987

AP

When Evin Prison erupted in flames on the night of October 15th, 2022, Iran was already alight. A month prior, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, had been beaten to death by the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police, for the crime of not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards. Grief gave way to fury, and fury to defiance as women flooded the streets, tearing off their headscarves and rejoicing around bonfires. The uprising came to be known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, its name drawn from a slogan first popularized by the Kurdish liberation leader Abdullah Öcalan. It soon grew into one of the largest and most enduring rebukes to the theocratic regime that, for the past 46 years, has relentlessly smothered dissent and denied even the smallest acts of self-determination, attempting to control how people dress, what they eat and drink, whether they sing or dance. The state had met the movement with characteristic brutality, countering the people’s hope with batons and bullets. Within the prison—which held thousands of activists, artists, and others who had dared to contest this oppressive order—chants of “Death to the Dictator” sounded in unison with the cries of the protesters outside.

No journalists were able to report how the fire started or document the casualties. From my Brooklyn apartment, where I sat clutching my phone, I could see only what was captured by flickering videos taken from neighboring windows and rooftops. I watched plumes of smoke tower over the prison, and what looked like Molotov cocktails hurled from the hills. I heard the echo of gunfire. As sporadic news came of security forces taking injured prisoners not to hospitals but to other detention centers, and blocking streets to prevent families from reaching their incarcerated loved ones, I felt myself unravel.

I called my parents in California. “Are they about to kill everyone inside?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Burn them alive? Is this another massacre?” My parents were silent. We knew the horrific possibilities of that place intimately. My uncle Mohsen, my father’s brother, was among the thousands of people executed there during the notorious 1988 massacres of political prisoners that took place around the country. My parents only narrowly avoided this fate; they had once been political prisoners in Evin. I, too, had passed through its halls. This was the place where, in 1983, blindfolded, handcuffed, and chained to a bed, my mother gave birth to me.

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A room in Evin Prison following a fire that killed four prisoners, October 16th, 2022.

Koosha Mahshid Falahi/Mizan News Agency via AP

As flames engulfed the prison that day three years ago—and again this past summer, under Israeli bombardment—this truth confronted me: I am undeniably tethered to this place. Evin is not just a distant cluster of buildings where I happened to be born; it is the axis of my geography. The prison stamped its coordinates on my body. In the key of its fearful and tyrannical map, my destiny was fixed. This map seeks to contain not only me and my family but the very idea of us and our people. Denying the enduring evidence of resistance, it aims to trap us within a familiar script, rendering us unruly people in need of discipline or helpless victims awaiting salvation.

And yet, because Evin is, for me, where everything began, my compass points out from this narrow place toward a wider world. My origin directs me to return, always, to what the regime, along with its imperial co-conspirators, disclaims: those stubborn histories of revolt it has never been able to fully crush—the archives it has endeavored to destroy, the voices it has tried to silence, the lives it thought it had extinguished. When I look out from Evin, the view widens beyond Tehran’s walls: toward other uprisings, other unfinished liberation struggles, every place where people refuse the borders drawn to contain them.

Evin Prison’s role as an antagonist of popular struggle precedes the Islamic Republic. Opened in 1971 in the beautiful village of Evin in northern Tehran under the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the prison was originally a high-security detention center run by SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police. The complex comprised two large communal blocks designed to hold 300 people, 20 cells for solitary confinement, a court room, and an execution yard. In 1953, after the US and UK, hoping to protect Western oil interests, orchestrated a coup ousting the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA assisted in establishing SAVAK, and the prison became a key site for the secret police to incarcerate, torture, and kill opponents of the Shah. (In the 1960s, as relations between the US and Iran became increasingly strained, Israel’s Mossad helped to train SAVAK agents, with whom they also carried out several joint operations.) By the 1979 revolution, Evin held more than 1,500 people, including 100 political prisoners in solitary confinement.

In February 1979, a month after the Shah fled Iran, as Ruhollah Khomeini rose to power, the doors of Evin opened to the public for the first and only time. Crowds stormed the prison to bear witness to the torture chambers and solitary cells that had come to symbolize the Shah’s brutal rule. Hours later, the gates shut again. The revolution had prevailed; the Shah was gone for good. But what awaited the population was not the end to state violence that the newly formed Islamic Republic had promised, but a new wave of it, even deadlier than before. Inside Evin, the regime established the notorious Ward 209, where political prisoners—including dual nationals and foreign citizens—are held in particularly brutal conditions, and which has since become synonymous with fear in the Iranian imagination. People incarcerated here are kept in prolonged solitary confinement, denied legal access and medical care, and subjected to torturous interrogations designed to coerce confessions.

When the Iran–Iraq War began in 1980, the regime used the fighting as a pretext to further crush internal opposition. Among those arrested and sent to Evin were my aunts and uncles, my father, and my mother, who was pregnant when she was taken. After my birth, I stayed with her in her cell for just over a month, and then was handed to my grandparents, who raised me along with my cousin and my brother until my parents were released in the mid-1980s.

A bracelet of date pits the author’s father made while incarcerated in Evin, from the early 1980s.

Courtesy of the author.

The author’s father on the day of his release from Evin Prison with, from left to right, the author’s brother, the author, and the author’s cousin, 1986.

Courtesy of the author.

By the time Iran entered the final stretch of its eight-year war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic had suffered an estimated half a million casualties. The regime, humiliated by its failure to deliver the divine victory it had promised the nation, turned its wrath inward. In July 1988, Khomeini issued a fatwa to execute all those members of the opposition forces judged unrepentant “in their war against God.” A “Death Committee” was formed to adjudicate. The doors of Evin and other prisons were sealed shut. As desperate families camped outside prison gates, and the world’s attention shifted to the UN-backed ceasefire between the warring nations, a hidden massacre was unfolding. In a matter of months, thousands of prisoners—including my uncle Mohsen—were hanged or shot, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. The massacre clarified in no uncertain terms what many had long feared: Utter impunity was the blueprint of the regime. Families like ours were banned from displaying photographs of the murdered, holding funerals, or speaking publicly about what had happened.

A few years after the massacre, my family moved to California, where a different kind of silence enveloped us. Here, no one knew anything, no one asked anything, no one seemed to care. The agonizing stories we carried felt surreal against the imperturbable placidity of our new surroundings. What was I supposed to say amid the Christmas parties, sleepovers, and green lawns? How could I possibly explain the tangled labyrinth of our inherited trauma to the people living by the bright blue ocean? In America, I wasn’t afraid to speak. What I feared was the void I’d face once I did.

Still, that past was inscribed deep in me, waiting to resurface. It was as simple as that: One day I beckoned the stories, and they began to arrive. To tell them, I turned to fiction, which felt like the genre that welcomed them most fully. It offered distance from the regime’s official records—its denials of the atrocities, its criminalizing of our grief—and a route to enter memory, to speak in the language not only of the survivors but of the dead and the disappeared. I began writing my novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. Drawing on my family’s experience, the book traces the way the horrors within Evin’s walls reverberate in lives far beyond them.

Fiction offered distance from the regime’s official records—its denials of the atrocities, its criminalizing of our grief—and a route to enter memory.

When I approached my parents as part of my research, it had been years since we had spoken about their time in Evin. As they told me about the interrogation my mother endured while in labor; about the bracelet my father carved from date stones for a daughter he’d seen only once in the prison courtyard; about my grandparents raising three grandchildren while fleeing Iraqi bombs; about my uncle, his lifeless body swaying from a noose—something felt different. I’d heard these stories before, but now they would no longer be ours alone. They would leave the safety of the private world we’d worked so hard to build and enter the realm of a public we had never trusted. And, in 2013, as the book began to make its way in the world, I felt the warnings we had received as children to never speak of where our parents had been or what had been done to them surge within me once again. My hands shook as I read from the novel to audiences gathered in bookstores. My voice caught every time I said “Evin.” At night, I dreamed of abandoning my mother and father to drown at sea. But despite my fear, making this suppressed, private history public also felt like a kind of release. For me, Children of the Jacaranda Tree was not the narrow story of a few people living in the shadow of Evin; it was a bid to stoke what the prison itself aims to extinguish. It was a small rebuttal to power’s claim to its singular truth, to its attempts to erase our stories and deny our will to speak.

On June 23rd, 2025, Evin Prison was once again targeted, this time by Israeli airstrikes. Bombs struck the visitation center, administrative buildings, and multiple wards, including Ward 209. The assault came during Israel’s Twelve-Day War, which struck not only government targets, as Israel claimed, but also hospitals and residential buildings. When Israel, followed by the US, attacked Iran, it was no aberration but a continuation of a long, bloody campaign of domination and control: the slaughter of Palestinians, the bombing of Syrians, Lebanese, and Yemenis. Within hours of the attack on the prison, Minister of Defense Israel Katz took to X to boast that Israeli forces were assailing “regime targets and government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran”; an IDF press briefing called Evin “a symbol of oppression for the Iranian people,” emphasizing that “individuals defined as enemies of the regime” are imprisoned there and “subjected to severe torture.” With this familiar rhetoric, Israel attempted to frame its assault as an act of solidarity with the Iranian people, even as the bombs reportedly killed not only staff and guards but also prisoners, visiting relatives, social workers, and a five-year-old child.

According to testimonies from political prisoners inside, security forces stormed the prison just hours after the bombing, not to offer protection to the besieged inmates but to force terrified prisoners back into blown-out cells at gunpoint. Wounded, thirsty, and starving, many lay trapped for hours while the shaken regime scrambled for its next move. As dusk fell over Tehran and Israeli bombardments continued, prisoners were ordered to prepare to evacuate under the threat of death. Given just minutes to gather what remained of their belongings, they were chained together, passing corpses in body bags as they were marched at gunpoint through the wreckage. Those who had been held in Evin were dispersed to other prisons and detention centers, and, yet again, all information was withheld from anxious families outside the prison. Days later, some relatives received brief phone calls. Many received nothing at all. Once more, people who lost loved ones were interrogated and made to promise their silence in exchange for the return of the bodies of their kin.

The Israeli attack against Evin Prison was part of a long, unholy alliance between imperial forces that claim to free us and the regimes that claim to protect us from them.

Iranian journalists gather outside an office building at Evin Prison, destroyed by Israeli strikes in northern Tehran, July 1st, 2025.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AP

I sat with this torrent of news, struggling to assimilate another iteration of the same structure of violence that has terrorized my family, my people, for generations. Following events from the US, which had endorsed and participated in Israel’s strikes, the terrible logic they revealed was especially clear. Despite their outward antagonism, and beneath a thin pretense of care, the Islamic Republic and Israel—along with its sponsor—acted in unison against the Iranian people; the attack was thus part of a long, unholy alliance between imperial forces that claim to free us and the regimes that claim to protect us from them.

It should come as no surprise that the locus of this shared assault was Evin. The prison, filled with generations of dissidents, contains—and attempts to extinguish—a story that defies the one upheld by dictatorship and empire alike. Its crowded cells speak not of masses cowed into submission or awaiting salvation, but of a people fiercely committed to their own liberation. Contrary to the isolation these oppressive orders seek to impose, those who reject the imposition of such violent enclosures—from Kurdistan to Iran to Palestine—draw the lines of a different map pointing the way toward a future where not only the prisons, but the very orders that sustain them, will burn.

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, BOMB, and many other publications.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-view-from-evin at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

POETRY | 31 OCT 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

House of Words, Ibau, Where’s Your Story?

Afrizal Malna Translated from the Indonesian by Daniel Owen

(English follows the Indonesian, below.)

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Rumah Kata, Ibau, Mana Ceritamu?

Aku masuk ke rumahmu seperti memasuki sebuah cerita yang mengubah siapapun yang mendengarnya. Apa saja yang pernah kita ucapkan, membuat jalan pulangnya sendiri, merangkai kembali yang pernah dilupakan. Kalung di lehermu adalah kisah. Tetapi sejak kata diganti dengan sinar listrik, tombol-tombol yang bisa menanam tomat, tak ada orang bercerita, tak ada undangan untuk pulang. Halaman di belakang jadi gudang sepatu bekas. — Ibau, apa kabar? Apakah kau masih menulis? Malam mulai menyusun lagi sebuah buku dari hati yang tak pernah tidur. Aku berjanji padamu untuk merangkai sebuah cerita, membongkar makam waktu dalam sebuah dongeng. Seperti kerinduan yang meminta air matanya sendiri, seperti genggaman yang meminta tangannya sendiri. “Ibau berceritalah, seperti burung-burung pertama kali membuat hutan dari kepakan sayapnya.” Suara becak berdering, sebuah rangkaian besi dan kayu di atas aspal jalan. Waktu menjadi nyata. Pori-pori di leher kita, seperti kota-kota kecil yang menyediakan sumur untuk membasuh muka. Waktu menjadi nyata. Kecepatan, yang pernah membunuh kita di sebuah jalan, menjadi sebuah peti yang sedang tenggelam ke dasar laut. Kita jalan bersama sambil membuat malam penuh cerita. Tapi kemana kita mau pulang? Pemilik kata—telah terusir. Rumah kata hanya ada dalam cinta. Sebuah pohon jambu air tumbuh. Teh panas. Lala suara ledakan. Api. “Apakah kamu baik, Ibau?” Kota ini memiliki sejarah kucing yang lehernya tercekik, di balik panggung-panggung politik penuh pecahan kulit telur, tulang-tulang ayam, dan deretan toko berdagang es campur. Beras, gula dan minyak goreng mulai menjadi politik. Orang membuat partai-partai baru, seperti memencet tombol tv. Menciptakan seorang presiden yang memimpin api pada setiap kata. Ia yang membakar pusat-pusat akademika untuk api politik. Lalu mengirim bangkai sebuah kota, memecah alat-alat kekuasaan untuk menyelamatkan diri. Tak melihat anak-anak mulutnya tak lagi berbau susu. Aku genggam seluruh jemari di leherku, seperti usaha terakhir untuk merebut kata lewat sihir cerita. Lalu jemari-jemari waktu memasang kembali sayap-sayap malaikat setiap kata. Membiarkan ketakutan pergi dari setiap hati. Lalu kata-kata mulai membuat rumah baru lagi di situ, lewat perjalanan panjang dari ribuan cerita yang pulang mencari para pendengarnya. Membiarkan cahaya matahari membuat tanaman di halaman. Bermain bola di ruang buku, ikut membuat lapangan tempat anak-anak bernyanyi. Seperti suara yang sedang sibuk memasuki dan membuka genggaman tanganmu.

House of Words, Ibau, Where’s Your Story?

I enter your house as if entering a story that changes whoever hears it. Whatever we’ve said makes its own way home, threading back together the sequence of the forgotten. The necklace around your throat is a story. But ever since words have been replaced by rays of electric light, buttons that can plant tomatoes, there are no storytellers, no invitations home. The yard out back has become a warehouse for used shoes. — Ibau, how’s it going? Are you still writing? Night begins to recompose a book using sleepless hearts. I promise you I’ll assemble a story, exhume time from its tomb in an old tale. Like a longing that seeks its own tears, a fist that seeks its own hand. “Ibau, tell the story, speak, like the birds first building the forest from their wing flaps.” The trill of a becak’s ring, an assemblage of iron and wood atop an asphalt road. Time becomes tangible. The pores in our necks are like little cities that proffer wells for us to wash our faces. Time become tangible. Speed, which once killed us on the streets, becomes a chest sinking to the bottom of the sea. We walk together while making a night full of stories. But where can we go home? The keeper of words has been evicted. The house of words is found only in love. A water apple tree grows. Hot tea. Then the sound of an explosion. Fire. “Are you alright, Ibau?” This city has a history of strangled cats, behind political stages filled with eggshells, chicken bones, and rows of shops selling es campur. Rice, sugar, and cooking oil become politics. New parties are formed, like pressing the buttons on a tv. Create a president who leads a fire through every word. Who incinerates the centers of learning for the blaze of politics. Then ships off the city’s corpse, shatters the instruments of power to save himself. Not noticing that the children’s mouths no longer smell of milk. I hold every finger to my throat in a final effort to seize words through the spell of story. Then the fingers of time restore each word’s angel’s wings. Let fear loose from each heart. Then words begin to build a new home there, through the long journey of thousands of stories coming home to find their listeners. Let the light of the sun make a plant grow in the yard. Play ball in the space of books, make a field for children to sing. Like a voice busy entering your fist and opening each finger.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Afrizal Malna is a poet from Jakarta who has recently been making performance poetry in the form of digital videos. His books in English translation include Document Shredding Museum, Morning Slanting to the Right, and Anxiety Myths.

Daniel Owen is a poet, editor, and translator between Indonesian and English. Recent publications include a revised translation of Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/house-of-words-ibau-wheres-your-story at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

FICTION | 31 OCT 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

The Event

“Something has taken place that we cannot speak of or know or even fully perceive, yet the fact of which sits before us.”

Henry Bean Art by Adam Liam Rose

Stages of Fallout (Flower II), excerpt, 2021, graphite on paper, 9 x 12 in

1

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It is still not possible to determine how the fire began or when or precisely where. Did it have, in fact, a single ignition, then subdivided as it spread, or were there several fires that started separately and joined together as they consumed the fuel between them? (And, if we are to take Nolan’s speculations[1] seriously, we have to ask: Was it even a fire?) Individual reports from outside the Event Field—there are, of course, none from within—are contradictory and of little value.

Direct, overhead satellite imagery (>60°) was lost three years ago on March 30 at 09:17:54 GMT (11:17:54 local time)[2] after which the only recorded orbital surveillance is “angular” (<45°, much of it <30°) with limited detail. All satellite footage preceding loss of contact, direct or angular, is open source and has been studied as closely as the Zapruder film, by far more people, without discovery of a consensus “initiating moment” or, indeed, any definitive evidence of a fire prior to 09:00:00 GMT. (The “thermal points” south of Hebron, visible from 03:29:06 GMT, are now generally accepted to have been Bedouin campfires.) All angular footage (<45°) that continues through the Event remains classified and unobtainable and, in any case, is said to be inconclusive. (Since the US withdrew from the IAST, the EU Directorate-General for Science & Technology has coordinated international research, set security policy, and monitored data release. This has not kept US spokespersons from disputing IAST figures and conclusions. Himmelfarb, Reed, and others have argued that these disputes and the resulting uncertainties are not accidental; that “authorities”—possibly rival authorities—have devised and deliberately spread conflicting accounts and competing rumors to effect a “reassuring unknowability.” As Himmelfarb put it, “Better seven theories than one.”)

We have spoken to nine individuals who claim to have seen at least some of the classified angular footage. Four refused to sit for a polygraph or fMRI, and those conversations went no further. Three gave vague or evasive accounts, lacking persuasive detail. The two we judged most reliable were interviewed separately, by different teams; each reported that in the footage viewed (roughly 11 minutes in one case, 19 in the other), the fire had already begun, and they could see almost nothing but smoke and, here and there, what they took to be flames. When asked, both asserted that the smoke blanketed not only the land itself, but also significant portions of the eastern Mediterranean.

Because the Event Field remains inaccessible to both humans and machinery, proper soil and debris tests cannot be performed. Atmospheric analysis in regions bordering incidents of this kind (Bhopal, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Rahway, Koeberg, as well as of various volcanic eruptions) is notoriously unreliable and, in any case, what readings we do have reveal nothing as to the source or progress of the fire. Airborne particulate matter (inorganic compounds, vegetable ash, fragments of carbonized animal remains) has, of course, blown across borders into accessible regions, but the samples reveal very little other than that all were subjected to extremely high temperatures, and that heat intensity appears to have been constant and uniform across much and perhaps all of the burn zone, a finding that contradicts everything we know about wide-area fires.

What happened was so vast and terrible, “absolute in its terribleness,”[3] and its cause so obscure that it became, in Marguiles’s sardonic formulation, “a perfect culture for growing theory.”[4] The number of “explanations” offered in the first month alone, by experts and amateurs, was beyond count,[5] many of them untestable, absurd or meaningless (“a local suspension of the laws of physics”; “invasion by an alien species”; something called “renumerology”).[6]

The most credible and widely accepted account of the fire was that an explosion (likely preceded by a meltdown) had occurred in one of the nuclear power plants or a missile silo. This, it was speculated, had ignited a coal seam or natural gas deposit, which, in turn, ran through underground formations to other power plants or silos and so forth. The theory had several virtues. It explained the remarkable speed of the fire, particularly in desert areas lacking sufficient vegetation to sustain it; the intensity and uniformity of the heat; and, importantly, the seeming omni-directionality of its advance—how it could appear to spread north across the Negev, south through the planted forests of the Galilee, and, as if at the same time, east from the coastal plain. The theory also contained an important promise: that once the relevant isotopes had been identified, we would be able to calculate when scientists or at least robotic equipment might be able to re-enter the land and gather evidence for further study. As Skomorovsky wrote at the time, “Of the several traumas inflicted by the Event, the epistemological is hardly the least serious.” The prospect of knowing more at some point in the future, however far off, was comforting not just to the technical community, but to the public at large.

Therefore, when tests conducted by satellite and at 23 sites around the perimeter of the burn zone—in the four contiguous states and from ships on the Mediterranean—failed to reveal elevated levels of radiation or even of atmospheric carbon and the nuclear theory began to deflate, there were urgent attempts, some of them quite ingenious, to patch the hole and pump it back up. As these failed, one after another, a strange silence began to descend over the subject. Even the professional talking heads one had heard from the start, the “experts” who, though they understood nothing, indeed precisely because they understood nothing, never lacked for a reassuring explanation—a new one each day when needed (theories which were, as Pauli used to say, “not even wrong”), even they managed finally to stop speaking. The ensuing silence was a relief. For the first time in months, it became possible to think.

2

Out of that silence, an unexpected consensus soon emerged: to put aside all theory and explanatory effort and focus instead on the so-called “reporting record.” Bardach (citing Benveniste, et al.) had proposed precisely that in the immediate aftermath of the Event.[7] But it would have taken a great deal of work to gather the reports and devise a methodology for analyzing them, and in those shocked early weeks, everybody wanted, as Michaelson wrote at the time, to “consume the whole apple in one bite”; few had the patience for such a dogged, tedious, and, frankly, modest method of inquiry. As it turned out, however, Bardach and her team had begun even then the work of collecting the extant record, so that when, months later, the Theorists finally yielded the stage to the Reporters, they already had a considerable part of what there was to find; and they knew where to look for the rest.

In the end, Bardach’s group had neither the manpower nor the conceptual apparatus to make full use of all the data they assembled. They tried for some months, but after her death, it became harder to go on, and eventually they—specifically Lagomarsino and Prempeh—approached us for help. I agreed at once (even before I got board approval) and quickly made two important decisions. First, that we would look only at exchanges between persons inside the Event Field and those outside. As I put it in a memo at the time: “We will presume that any communication which took place wholly within the field has been lost (and all participating parties are gone) and that any communication taking place entirely outside it is irrelevant.” If neither premise was strictly true, we would act as if they were. Second, we confined ourselves to communications occurring (though not necessarily commencing) in the 11 minutes between 09:12:00 and 09:23:00 GMT (11:12:00–11:23:00 local time). Loss of direct satellite contact (LDSC) occurred, as I’ve said, at 09:17:54 GMT, and the telecommunication record ends precisely there. We included the final six seconds of that minute and five additional minutes as a “safe margin” in case of stray or missed messages, or ones delayed in their delivery. These limitations produced a paucity of data that made the task possible. Instead of wading through tens of millions of telephone calls, emails, social media posts, and the like, we began with just under 9000 relevant communications, complete or interrupted (the latter, obviously, more important), 807 of which contained apparent reference to the Event as it occurred. The great majority of these are sudden silences, followed, a second or two later, by a break in the connection. In 241 we found an unarticulated vocalization, a half-blurted sound, usually just a gasp, an intake of breath, a grunt; sometimes, the beginning of a word that is never completed. These are not without a cumulative power. If you listen to them often enough—especially to some of the compilations (“playlists”) Braunschweig put together—they constitute, as he often said, a kind of music. Life being cut off so suddenly it is gone before the speaker can register its going. (El Koussa called it “death without dying” and “a kindness.”) All of them bear further study, but these notes will focus on three that are more elaborated.

The earliest real-time reference we have to the Event appears in an SMS exchange (in Arabic) between Ghena al-Masri, a kitchen worker at Grille Brasilia in Eilat (18 Derekh Begin) and her son Bassem, a porter at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Aqaba, Jordan. (The al-Masri home is in Aqaba, and Ghena would walk across the border every day to go to work. The Aqaba-Eilat checkpoint had recently reopened, and she had completed a full retinal scan, allowing her to pass through security in a matter of minutes.) The texts begin with Bassem’s complaints about the hotel (the “vulgarity” of the guests, the harshness of his supervisors) and Ghena’s response that his unhappiness at the job is not important, much less grounds for quitting. (“Think about what you are working for, not why it is difficult . . . ”) She then turns to the grocery shopping Bassem has said he will do after his shift. She is listing the items she wants him to buy (eggplants, peppers, cheese) when she abruptly types shob kt— (presumably shob kteer, “so hot” or “very hot”) at which point the text breaks off, seemingly in mid-word, yet was nevertheless transmitted. Ghena may have accidentally pressed “send” before she meant to, or perhaps the heat of the fire somehow caused the message to be sent. Whatever the reason, according to Bassem’s recollection in an interview conducted that September, at the same moment that his phone pinged with this message, he heard what he took to be fighter jets buzzing the city. He looked out over the Gulf of Aqaba—he had just brought a guest’s dry cleaning up to a penthouse suite—expecting a squadron of low-flying F-47s (“I was already furious”); instead, he saw Eilat completely engulfed in smoke, “like a corpse,” the translation reads, presumably referring to a shroud. He remembers turning to pick up the room phone, but nothing more. Apparently, he passed out and fell, hitting his face on the bedside table. The field notes record that he still had a scar at the time of the interview.

Ghena’s final message reached Bassem’s phone at 09:16:06 GMT, one minute and 48 seconds before LDSC. There follow more fragmentary but similar reports from Be’er Ora (09:16:15), Yotvata (09:16:39), Lotan (09:17:11), and Neot Semadar (09:17:39), as if the fire were traveling northward, albeit at a velocity not only greater than anything on record, but which thermal physicists maintain is physically impossible; molecules cannot transfer heat that quickly, regardless of wind speed. (There was very little wind that morning, pre-Event.) Lobadil has speculated that other fires were already burning in those places—perhaps separate ignitions—but, absent the nuclear theory, he cannot explain how they could have gone unnoticed and unreported.

Prior to the start of the al-Masri SMS exchange, we have an account of a telephone call placed from Mas’ade (not to be confused with Masada), a Druze village in the Golan Heights, over 400km to the north. A car dealer, Kadir Zeitouni, had gone to a local mediator to settle a dispute with a former employee over sales commissions. (Zeitouni appears to have been something of an outlier in the Druze community. He drove flashy cars, married a Sunni woman from Akko, and, his wife told us, took the dispute to this particular mediator hoping to “repair relations” with local authorities.) After presenting his case, Zeitouni stepped outside and telephoned his wife, Badia, who was on Cyprus vacationing with their children. He was—she told Prempeh in a phone interview—in a foul mood, worried that he had been “too argumentative” with the mediator, felt certain the decision would go against him and that he would lose a lot of money. Therefore, he was canceling his plans to fly over that afternoon and join them. Badia suspected that this was simply a ruse to spend the weekend with his mistress, whom he had sworn not to see again, and they argued about her with increasing vehemence until suddenly, in the middle of his rage, Kadir fell silent. She said, “What’s wrong?”—worried he had given himself another heart attack. He said nothing for several seconds then pronounced a single word: “Nar” (fire). There followed a sound she describes as “like the roaring of a great beast.” Just as it became so loud that she had to move the phone away from her ear, the connection was broken (09:17:51 GMT). She expected him to call back, and when he didn’t, she tried him several times without getting through. About 15 minutes later there was a tremendous noise. Everyone on the beach looked up and saw smoke billowing thousands of feet into the eastern sky. At the same moment, phones began buzzing all around her. She says she knew at once that she would never see her husband again and could not help thinking, though it made no sense, that whatever had happened was Kadir’s fault, that he had brought it on with his endless anger and impatience. Even so, she tried his number repeatedly for several hours. We know how many times she called and precisely when because, like Ghena al-Masri in Eilat, the Zeitounis used Orange Telecom as their carrier, a French company whose data is stored in the Alps. (The records of all local carriers are inaccessible and presumed destroyed.)

An hour and 17 minutes before the Zeitounis lost connection, long before Ghena al-Masri’s final text to her son, Eleanor Reynolds-Richards, an intellectual-property lawyer in London, initiated a three-party Zoom meeting with her clients Idit Geller and Aryeh Zachai, partners in a software design firm, ZGD; Geller was at the company’s offices in Tel Aviv, Zachai at his husband’s parents’ home in Goa. The call was recorded, audio and visuals, and we have obtained a copy.[8] The copy is technically damaged, or perhaps has been redacted to conceal proprietary information, but it brings us closer to the Event than anything else we have found. For that reason, I’d like to put a warning before what follows, some version of: Read at your own risk.

The previous week, the US Patent Office had rejected an application by ZGD (their initial application for this process), and the purpose of the call was to formulate an appeal. There is intermittent static on the audio track, but one understands that they are taking up the Patent Office objections, point by point. It is a technical conversation, a mix of IT engineering and patent law, and quite interesting. Reynolds-Richards explains an objection; Geller and Zachai propose amendments to their claim; Reynolds-Richards discusses why she thinks each of these will work or won’t; and on they go. Seventy-seven minutes into the call, at 09:17:21 GMT, Geller (in Tel Aviv) turns to look over her shoulder at a window that has been visible behind her throughout. She seems to have heard something not yet audible on the recording, or to have noticed a shift in the light, imperceptible to us. Or perhaps she has sensed a sudden change in temperature. This turn—I’ve watched it thousands of times—appears entirely ordinary, indistinguishable from other movements Geller has made during the conversation, yet Reynolds-Richards immediately asks, “Is everything all right?” Geller says, “Something’s happening.” Zachai (in Goa) says, “Idi . . . ?” Geller doesn’t respond, but begins to rise and turn toward the window, which is covered with one of those shades made of very thin bamboo strips; through it we get an odd, rippling view of the apartment block across the street.

It is difficult to describe what follows. As mentioned, there are dissenters even from the idea that it is a fire,[9] and while our internal consensus remains that what we see are flames, fire as we understand it cannot consume matter (steel, glass, poured concrete) at the rate at which it appears to be happening. Chen and Eftekhari have postulated that a sudden “massive transfer” of energy from the sun or, perhaps more plausibly, the center of the earth (the temperatures are similar) could conceivably have generated the heat capable of what we see on the recording.[10]

But what, in fact, do we see? Viewing the footage at normal speed (30fps), most people, myself included, perceive only chaos: incomprehensible disorder, impossible movements, and a shattering. (The camera mic blows out immediately, and it is hard to determine how much of what we hear thereafter is the Event itself and how much is audio distortion.) Even when we slow the footage down—going through it essentially frame by frame—the images remain largely nonsensical. (It would be simpler if they were entirely so). Often, one frame bears no obvious link to the next. Certain architectural features, the window in particular, persist throughout, but in unpredictable relationship to other elements: the aluminum electrical conduits, the ventilation ducts, even the ceiling soffit. Viewing it like this, of course, we miss details that are perceptible only in motion. Therefore, a serious study of the footage—and we regret not being allowed to make it publicly available; if there was ever a project for crowdsourcing, this is it—requires watching at many different speeds and trying to correlate one’s own (multiple) responses with those of colleagues. As Braunschweig wrote in an internal memo during our initial study of the footage: “These images cannot be ‘seen’ directly. They must be felt first, then seen . . . In the right state of mind (relaxed, open, without intention or purpose) they become legible; we are admitted to them. If one struggles, attempts to ‘will’ understanding, there will be nothing” (emphasis original). Yet it is important to say that when I describe, as I am about to, what “can be seen,” these are not just private, subjective fancies—the rhinoceros or outline of Virginia one divines in a passing cloud. Several dozen people from a variety of disciplines (and amateurs with no technical expertise at all) studied this footage over a period of months and recorded their individual responses. We then began to meet in groups and exchange impressions, sharing with one another what we thought we saw. We spoke, and we also listened. In time, each of us came to feel that at certain moments others had seen more clearly than we had, and—this is crucial—we began, in those places, to see what they had observed. The description that follows constitutes our collective understanding of “what is there,” much of which has been confirmed by persons outside the subgroup who, not privy to our conclusions, saw substantially the same things.

To wit: Geller rises from her chair and turns in a single movement.[11] As she takes a first step (left foot) toward the window, i.e., away from the camera, the Zoom image is engulfed in flames. These do not appear to come from outside—through the window—or from the floor or the ceiling, but from all directions at once, in an instant. If, instead of 30fps, the camera had been running at 60 or 300 or 1000, it would have further subdivided the instants, and conceivably we would see the fire appear and then advance. But this is all we have; in one frame there is no fire—no smoke, nothing—and in the next, it is everywhere. Geller immediately pivots back toward the desk (13 frames), her eyeline searching for and then finding the laptop’s camera lens, i.e., Reynolds-Richards and Zachai (22 frames). Her upper body inclines toward them, while her weight remains on the left foot, so we do not think she is coming back this way, yet she clearly appears to be seeking them out. Braunschweig, whose intuition in these matters was uncanny, believed that Geller was imploring their attention, saying, in effect, “Look. See this.” Not because they might fail to see it, or somehow overlook it, but in the sense of, “Behold . . . ”

Once Braunschweig had proposed this, many of us began to read the positioning of Geller’s arm, reaching back behind her, like a gesture in an allegorical painting directing our gaze to the essential subject, though what that is, we cannot see. In the next frame, her hair is on fire—all of it, at once, a corona. As it blazes, a living crown, her face remains calm. Her eyes are open. Her mouth forms a perfect circle,[12] yet there is no sign of pain—or horror, or even surprise. Then, in a single frame, she is gone. Everything is gone. The image is unreadable. There follow eight more frames (nine total) in which Geller is entirely absent (or has become indecipherable) each more chaotic than the previous, if that’s possible. On the final frame, the image pixelates, freezes, then stutters erratically for another 23+ seconds, at which point the connection breaks, and the screen fills with static. The break occurs at 09:17:54 GMT, 14 seconds after the end of the Zeitounis’ call, Golan to Cyprus, and well over a minute after Ghena Al-Masri’s final text in Eilat. LDSC takes place at the same moment, suggesting that it may not have been the fire in the room that ended the recording, but London losing the satellite feed. Conceivably, the camera in Geller’s laptop went on receiving images for some additional interval—seconds, even minutes—without being able to send them. If such footage exists, we would, to say the least, very much like to see it.[13] In any case, the reporting record ends with that frame.[14]

I want to pause here and make a comment not really relevant to my purposes in this document, yet I feel compelled to say it. There have been countless attempts, both in fiction and in what we might call “speculative journalism” to “re-create” (imagine) what happened on the ground during the Event. These seem to me futile and pointless. That the fire left no survivors now goes without saying. That was not initially evident, but in late May, when the smoke and clouds began to clear, there was a fresh deployment of surveillance drones and low-orbiting satellites. Those sent directly over the region again disappeared; however, the ones that passed nearby survived, returning patchy but useful images, both optical and thermal. From these and other data, one was forced to conclude that in the entire area west of the Jordan River—the state proper and the territories[15]—no human or large animal could have survived. The heat (which remains constant to this day) would have boiled off all water, blood, lymph, and mucus. The long-held hope of finding people alive in bank vaults, bunkers, underground caves, and the like had to be abandoned, and we were forced to accept that all that the many rescue efforts accomplished, heroic and selfless as they might have been, was to add to the number of victims.

About that, we can do nothing. But to then “depict” deaths no one has seen, a catastrophe and horror of which we know almost nothing, to try to “humanize” these moments with our fantasies of suffering and grief, seems to me not just naive but obscene. Perhaps we are all tempted in that direction; we want to personalize the impersonal. Yet that is exactly what cannot be done. When Prempeh asks me where I was when I first learned of the Event—people seem to love that conversation—I tell her this or that (it was 4 am in Washington; I was asleep; the calls woke me about 6), but never the truth. Not just because it’s none of her business, much less that there is anything to hide, but because all that is irrelevant. Who cares what I felt or thought or did? I am convinced that the best we can do by way of understanding (and honoring) what has happened—and this is important, it is necessary—is to recognize that it is beyond our grasp, beyond our selves. Something has taken place that we cannot speak of or know or even fully perceive, yet the fact of which sits before us.

It is for this reason that, despite agreements not to, I have described what appears on the Geller video—hoping to replace these nightmare speculations with what scraps of reality we possess, however fragmentary. All evidence suggests that any actual “experience” on the ground was extremely brief, and—given the fire’s speed and intensity, not to mention the physiology and neurology of the human body—no one felt more than an instant of astonishment. There was literally no time for suffering. There would have been, at most, a brief confusion or a sudden awareness—we see it in Geller—then nothing. Nothing. I am convinced there was no suffering there at all. The suffering is ours.

Stages of Fallout (window grid), 2022, graphite on paper, 9 x 12 in

3

Within 36 hours of LDSC, military forces from Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt had massed on the borders of the Event Field.[16] This occurred under a complete news blackout, so what followed remains largely unknown, and it has taken us months to piece it together. As early as the night of March 31—unaware of or ignoring initial accounts of failed rescue missions—the first troops crossed into the Event Field and were immediately incinerated. (We believe that crucial information, including the disappearance of advance drones, was deliberately withheld from the soldiers and even from their field commanders.) In several places, the ash of the forward units blew back into the faces of the men behind them; but because these incursions took place at night, in radio silence and under thick clouds of stinging smoke, those at the rear were often unaware of what had happened up ahead, so they kept going and were similarly destroyed. Military strategists tended, in those first hours, to dismiss these deaths as “local anomalies” and ordered squad leaders to try crossing at other points, first here, then there, looking for “vulnerabilities.” Only when the troops began to refuse orders, leading to summary executions, followed by the “fragging” of COs, did the generals and the politicians begin to accept that there were no vulnerabilities, that, at least within its boundaries, “the anomaly was universal.”

There is a piece of digital footage, made at about this time by an Egyptian soldier near Al Kuntillah in eastern Sinai. It was shot on an HH L6 and lasts just under eight minutes. We see a pack of 40-odd Nubian ibex (Capra nubiana, a desert-dwelling goat with large, curved horns) moving along at a decent clip. Without warning, the lead three animals burst into flame, one after the other, and are reduced to ash in a matter of seconds. The pack immediately veers off and pauses. After a moment, a few of the larger males warily approach the charred remains, and while they sniff the air, a kid of about six months wanders too close and is similarly destroyed. A mature female runs after the kid and is destroyed. The pack exhibits alarm and confusion. One of the large males, inadvertently it seems, steps too close; its right foreleg and shoulder suddenly ignite like a gas jet and crumble. The animal emits a terrible, piteous braying. For whatever reason, maybe a shift in the wind, we can hear the flesh crackle, but then it topples forward, burning; its magnificent horns burst into twin arcs of flame, and its vocalizations cease.[17] The other ibex now back away, turn and, without further ado, trot off in another direction. As the camera watches them go—not one looks back this way—a large bird appears in the upper right corner of the frame, and the Egyptian soldier, whoever he was, abandons the departing pack and follows this new subject. We quickly realize that it is an enormous creature (the wingspan estimated at over eight feet) with brown-tinged black feathers and rose-colored markings around the eyes. It would later be identified as a lappet-faced, or Nubian, vulture (Torgos tracheliotos), but we know on sight that it is a bird of prey, a scavenger come to see about the still-smoldering ibex. It passes once near the carcass, then, circling back for a second look, crosses directly over the animal and drops out of the sky, a ball of fire before it hits the ground.

Bardach, by means I still don’t understand, obtained a copy of this video only days after it was made.[18] Based on visible features of the terrain and her knowledge of Egyptian troop movements, she concluded that it had been shot right at the border[19] and that the goats and the vulture were destroyed when and as they crossed it. If you look closely at the images of that last ibex as it burns, you can see its blood running across the sand, then abruptly turning to pink steam precisely—we presume—where it transects the international boundary. Unlikely as that sounds, we have similar footage shot along the borders of the four contiguous nations, in which eagles, seagulls, camels, horses, donkeys, rabbits, tortoises, frogs, toads, scorpions, and snakes are obliterated in similar fashion. In the most difficult to watch (and hardest to obtain), a clan of Bedouins, perhaps confused by the absence of border patrols, attempts to drive its flocks west across a shallow stretch of the Jordan River into the smoky haze; they fare no better than the ibex.

It is strange how long it took us to accept what we were seeing. Watching those tapes hundreds and in some cases thousands of times, certain facts became apparent. The perimeter of the Event Field had been drawn as if with scientific precision, and it was inviolate; nothing could cross it and live. This was true not only on the ground, but to an altitude of at least 20,000 meters: Insects, birds, drones, aircraft, weather balloons, and so on were destroyed, at once and entirely. How far up this zone extends has still not been established. High-orbiting satellites have reported few difficulties, hardly more than pre-Event. The moon, the planets, and the stars appear to continue on their usual paths, though the IASA has scheduled high-precision observations over the next two years to confirm this. Yet for all that, it was not until September of year one, after a series of storms had swept through the region[20] and the skies cleared, that satellites on steep angular paths sent back the first comprehensive images of the area and, as El Koussa put it, “we finally saw what we already knew”; that the shape of the burn zone was a perfect outline of the vanished state and its territories, “from the river to the sea.” That and nothing else. This seemed impossible, yet it was so.[21] Where there were natural boundaries (the Jordan, the Dead Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba on one side; the Mediterranean on the other; even the hills of Golan in the north), this was easier to account for. But where it was simply—and literally—an invisible line drawn in the sand (Sinai, Lebanon, the Arabah region of the Jordanian border), life on one side, death on the other, a different sort of explanation was needed.

The religious had answers, as always, but they satisfied only the religious.[22] The practical had questions, the most salient being: Could this have been an attack by a hostile foreign power or asymmetric entity? Several terrorist groups had claimed responsibility, albeit without offering credible evidence. AllWorld, 4chan, Reddit, frommissouri, and similar sites teemed with speculation ranging from detailed foreign policy assessments to theoretical weapons systems (orbiting lenses to focus solar rays; “nano-explosives” dropped from the air or somehow “sown” into the land). The most astute of these, by Kaplan and Meyers,[23] argues that even in theory the resources required to develop such technology are beyond the capacity of any known terrorist organization and all but five state actors. Of the latter, they dismiss out of hand both the US (politically inconceivable) and China (not on their agenda); they maintain that “the Zionist state” as a US client was so useful to Russian ambitions in the region that Moscow would not have benefited from its disappearance. The Iranians were no doubt delighted when this happened, and had long been considered the most likely to attack, but “nothing in their weapons programs points even vaguely in such an exotic direction.” The authors then turn to the final and most interesting “suspect” on their list: the Jewish state itself. They theorize that a country surrounded by enemies committed to its destruction and waging a demographic war it seemed destined to lose might decide to build its own Doomsday Machine to assure that should the land ever ceased to be theirs, it would become no one else’s; and that, having done so, the device might have been triggered by an accident or conceivably by an act of sabotage.[24] Yet what was this device, and how did it work? Even if one could explain the fire’s ignition, how had the destructive force been sustained for three years without evident fuel or visible flames? Above all, what would contain it precisely within historic borders? Kaplan and Meyers don’t know: “We continue to believe that a military strike (a conscious human act) is the only plausible explanation for the observed phenomena, yet we cannot propose or even theorize a credible technology for one.”

4

“Is the Event singular or exemplary?” El Koussa has repeatedly asked this, not for himself, I take it, but by way of thinking about the Christian response and particularly that of the Evangelical community. He finds in the latter’s writings and sermons three recurring themes: (1) grief for their Zionist friends; (2) joy at the impending Rapture, Apocalypse, Second Coming, and Final Judgment; (3) competing predictions about the timetable for these eschatological events. It is the problem of Judgment that especially interests him. He asks without irony—indeed, with his unfailing graciousness—if what has happened is unique to this one place, a single Judgment that for obvious reasons has been rendered in what he calls “the navel of the world.” Or is it the first in a series to be visited on various “trouble spots”? Should we understand it as a warning to humanity to shape up, or the material consequence of our having failed to do so? Or is it, rather, on the order of a plague, a comet, the explosion of a star, too vast to contain a mere “message” or “meaning”?

In attempting to discuss the religious and political aspects of what has occurred, I am hampered by both a general incompetence in these subjects and, I confess, doubt as to their explanatory value. Since comprehensiveness demands it, however, I will try to be brief.

The fire was greeted by an outpouring of what the Western press labeled “regional jubilation,” though that was a deliberate oversimplification. In fact, the celebrations extended well beyond the Arab world, to Iran, of course; to parts of Central and Southeast Asia, not all of them Islamic; across much of Africa and into the Muslim communities of Europe. One even heard a note of grim satisfaction in the responses of many European and North American leftists, progressives, and “pacifists” at what a commentator in The Guardian called “this inevitable reckoning.” To a gentile like myself, one who gives religion and politics barely a passing thought, it was difficult to understand how people who had been incensed at the destruction of olive groves and houses could accept so calmly, with almost a hint of approbation, an event which, after all, entailed the deaths of more than 15 million human beings. But the reality on the ground, even and perhaps especially in the Middle East, was more complex; not only Arab and Muslim grief for their Palestinian brethren and for the loss of beloved holy sites, but also terror and awe in the contiguous nations when they grasped the full power of the destructive force and how close it had come to their own borders. (Thus, the “miracle of our survival.”)

The response of diaspora Palestinians (the only Palestinians left) is of particular interest; the Event has generated myriad forms of denial that their homeland is gone—none more shocking than the “Children of the Return” (see below) even as many intellectual and spiritual leaders are advocating new varieties of sumud (steadfastness, perseverance), many of them reconceiving their national identity as “a way of life, rather than a place.” A number of these have remarked on the similarity to diaspora Judaism; as Y. Basharat put it in their “Family of Abraham” essay, “The Arabs and the Jews, brothers from the first, are together again at the last.”

Perhaps stranger still has been what one can only call the Zionist reaction. When, in the first hours after the Event, a visibly devastated Reuven Arieli, the legendary former ambassador (still residing in the Virginia countryside), said on CNN, “If you had told me it was just the settlements, maybe I would have understood. But the whole country, everybody . . . ?” he was denounced by allies, friends, and two of his own children; and he received sufficiently credible death threats that he had to disappear for several months. The stance of the former state’s apologists and defenders has been largely denial that anything fundamental has changed, mixed with outrage at the monumental “injustice” and “disproportion” of what has undeniably taken place. Many of them have continued arguing to this day, as if before a court that might somehow be persuaded to change its mind, that Syria or Saudi Arabia (not to mention the major powers) were “vastly worse” and “more deserving” of punishment; there was particular bitterness that recent diplomatic breakthroughs had been ignored or given insufficient weight, that the catastrophe had occurred just when peace was “within reach.” An AIPAC spokesman actually insisted that the “sovereignty of the Jewish State has not been altered in any way, nor its size diminished by one square centimeter.” An Iraqi minister agreed, telling a Paris luncheon, “The Zionist entity has been granted all the territory it ever claimed, from the river to the sea. And its borders are secure.” (He later denied saying this.)[25]

Stages of Fallout (mirror portal), 2022, graphite and charcoal on paper, 11 x 15 in

5

Over the past month, Prempeh and I have been making our way around the perimeter of the Event Field. It is a trip I had been scheduling and postponing for over a year, and in the end both the board and the staff strongly urged that I take her with me—i.e., they think I’m getting difficult, perhaps unreliable, and want someone along to confirm (or refute) my reports. They also know that I trust her completely. In fact, she is an excellent ambassador, not just for her youth and appearance, but even more for her manner: direct, pleasant, dignified, almost regal. Just the other day, thanks to her gentle non-insistence, we got to view some extraordinary, unedited footage shot near a refugee camp in one of the contiguous states.[26] From the codes on the tape and other details, we know that this was recorded on April 4, five days after LDSC, and already we see people holding up for the camera weathered parchment scrolls and crumbling documents, many of them hand-lettered in gorgeous Arabic script. As they speak in a variety of accents and languages, we realize that these are Palestinians come from all over the world—from Amman and London, Brooklyn and Brazil—bearing 19th-century Ottoman title deeds in the expectation that they will, at last, be able to recover their ancestral properties. By this point, the fate of the rescue missions and military incursions had been widely reported, so it is not clear what these “Children of the Return” (a phrase we see on countless signs and t-shirts) were telling themselves, but one feels the crowd working itself up. Some sort of anthem is playing on a PA system; there is a good deal of cheering and fist-pumping and, one infers, alcohol. A disparate collection of vehicles has assembled, everything from military personnel carriers to expensive Land Rovers, all-wheel drive SUVs, broken-down jalopies, and a couple of camel-drawn wagons. A man in a keffiyeh makes a speech in Arabic, and even without subtitles, one understands that he is rousing the crowd, inciting them to action. When he dismisses the “alleged dangers” attendant on entering the land as “Zionist lies” (the people showing us the footage translated), there are shouts of approval. Many appear to remain skeptical, but more than a few, caught up in the excitement, climb into their vehicles, start the engines, and drive in a large circle, waving their colored smoke sticks. Then, as if at a signal I fail to hear, they all head off toward the mountains of dark cloud looming over the border. After the last of them has vanished from sight, we still hear their engines and stereos, but these sounds eventually fade, and the green and red smoke dissipates into the desert air. None of them was ever heard from. Nevertheless, over the following days, others arrived with documents of their own, and some of those took the same path. Eventually, the contiguous nations stationed troops along these borders to keep people from coming to harm.

The land’s refusal to be possessed or repossessed by anyone at all did not bring the celebrations to an immediate end, but it muted them, after which, as Braunschweig reported last year, they transformed into something quite different. The living continued to visit the borders alone and in pairs, in family groups and on tour buses, but now, instead of firing guns into the air and blasting music over battery-operated loudspeakers, they simply stood or sat or walked along marked footpaths looking out over what the locals had begun to call almakaan almustahil (“the impossible place”). There was no music and very little conversation. Some left flowers or cakes or dyed eggs; some lit candles and said prayers for the dead. A grizzled figure along the Syrian border told Braunschweig in broken but impassioned English, “We are dead! We are all dead!” I was surprised how easily Braunschweig had gotten into the country, but it turned out that Jews had been making this pilgrimage almost from the beginning, though at first only on boats and ships that would anchor off the Mediterranean coast, where they would stand at the railings, looking eastward into the same silence that others were watching, looking westward across the Jordan. Many Jews initially refused to enter Arab countries, and the countries likewise restricted tourist visas for Jews, especially those with Israeli passports. But that, too, changed. During April of Year 2, a group of American yeshiva students made a well-publicized trek across Sinai with Egyptian friends,[27] and after that, others came to Jordan, Lebanon, and eventually Syria. Following some initial chilliness, hotels rented them rooms, and kosher meal plans were introduced.

Late last summer, a 19-year-old youth, reportedly healthy, intelligent, and in good spirits, walked across the 1974 ceasefire line in the Golan Heights and was incinerated before his father’s eyes. They were affluent Tamil Hindus, living in France, and the family had been camping for a week in the Syrian Golan. They cooked over a wood fire, swam in a small lake, and spent extended periods each day on the large rock formations that look out over the border. Prempeh and I visited there this winter, and we were told that although the number of visitors has fallen in recent months, back in August, on an afternoon of good weather, upwards of a hundred people, all ages and nations, many of them families, would have been scattered across the rocks, rarely speaking, sometimes reading or sleeping or quietly eating; yet whatever their eyes or mouths or hands were doing, they all sat facing in the same direction, like compass needles. Because it is hill country and the winds are strong, one can get excellent long views out to the west over the silent land. They are breathtaking.

The boy, Sharav, had not wanted to come on the trip; he was an athlete and had to miss an important Tae Kwon Do competition and was quite bitter about it. Yet from the moment he went out on the rocks, his complaints vanished. He sat in one spot for two hours saying nothing and seemed, his mother told us, “like a different person.”[28] He became helpful and good-humored in a way that the parents found almost worrisome. At home he was often surly, even a bully, but here all that changed. He would get up before dawn and go out on the rocks to see the land in the first light, spend much of the day there, coming back to help around the campsite, then going out again, especially at sunset; when he returned to camp at night it was pitch black and one could see nothing. On their last full day, he begged his parents to extend the trip or let him stay on by himself (there was another French Tamil family that could have brought him back to Paris), but they had their return tickets, and, frankly, the mother told us, they wanted to get him home and “back to normal.”

The next morning, they were all up early, and after everything had been packed in the rental vehicle, Sharav asked his parents if he could go sit on the rocks one last time. An hour later, his father came to get him. He couldn’t find him at first—that particular formation is large and elaborate, with scrub pines growing up out of crevices; you have to scramble about to see it all—and he called the boy’s name. Sharav’s voice answered him. The father waited, gazing out at the view, and perhaps his thoughts wandered, but after a couple of minutes, when he hadn’t appeared, he called again. This time there was no answer. He climbed about looking for him and reached a point where he could see out over the small, steep valley through which the Purple Ceasefire Line ran. There was a solitary figure down there, walking west toward the border, and he wondered for a second who that crazy person could be; then he realized. He says he knew at once what was happening. He called, shouted, waved his arms. Sharav turned and waved back, seemed to smile, but he kept walking and didn’t turn again. The father ran down the rocks into the valley, shouting the whole time. From the westward base of the rocks to the border is just under a kilometer, and the father, who had been an athlete himself, felt sure he would be able to catch him in time. But somehow the conformation of the land was deceiving, and though he ran as fast as he could—faster, he felt, than he had ever run—and though Sharav kept walking at the same unhurried pace, he saw finally that he was not going to make it, and he told himself that if the boy went across he would go, too, and either bring him back or die there with him. He was still 200 or 300 meters behind when the figure of Sharav turned to ash before his eyes. He slowed then; there was no longer a need to hurry. He realized that he lacked the strength or inner will or whatever it was to follow his son, and this seemed to him unbearably shameful. “The worst feeling of my life,” he told us. “Worse even than his death.” He stopped about ten meters from the line, and, as he stood there, a light breeze scattered the last of the ashes. With that, all trace of the boy was gone, and it somehow lifted his spirits.[29]

6

For obvious reasons, accounts of Sharav’s death and especially the way he met it (smiling, open-eyed, serene) were largely suppressed—over his parents’ objections, the local coroner ruled it an accident—so it is hard to argue, as both Statler and Katadin try to do,[30] that what followed was triggered by this incident. More likely, whatever moved Sharav moved others as well, and only when the number of “accidents” reached into the hundreds and then the thousands, and the world could no longer ignore them—passing in an instant from denial to panic—was the tale of the “happy martial arts champion” retrofitted as an origin myth. What strikes us both now, as we finally get access to the actual records, is the variety of people who, as they say, “took a walk.”[31] There were, inevitably, the old and the sick, troubled adolescents, brokenhearted lovers, and a few who declared it a form of martyrdom. But there were also middle-aged couples in good health with adequate means, farmers, lawyers, store owners, government bureaucrats, emergency room nurses, trust fund babies, at least two professors of philosophy, and a husband and wife wanted for several murders. Perhaps because of travel costs, there were not many poor people and, as far as we can tell, nobody who was actually homeless. Once Jews could easily enter the contiguous states, many of them crossed over, and because traditional halacha (Jewish religious law) requires withholding mourning rites for suicides, various rabbis have issued rulings that these people had not taken their own lives, but, rather, had “made aliyah” (literally had “ascended,” i.e., from the diaspora to the Holy Land). Before long, the neighboring nations had to redeploy the forces they had originally used to keep out returning property owners. But, as usual, the enterprising and the committed found ways around these impediments; the soldiers proved easy to bribe.

Indeed, the Jordanian troops here in this campground are so lax it is almost comical. When Prempeh and I arrived the other day, just to test their response, we walked down the embankment and across the mud flats toward the trickle that is the river at this time of year.[32] We had gone well more than halfway when a soldier with a bullhorn told us to come back; we could easily have made it across before anyone reached us. That evening, I asked one of them if they got in trouble when people died. He shrugged and told me: “They yell at us, but nothing happens.” We learned later that the soldiers themselves cross over more often than the tourists.

We are in the same part of Wadi Araba where the Bedouins are seen in that shocking video (and where Bardach disappeared). We have watched the footage so many times that, as with Dealey Plaza, I recognized the place almost before we got here, and felt such dread I might have turned back if I’d been alone. But Prempeh, who knows the footage as well as I do, simply said, “Here we are,” and we went on. A moment later, coming over a rise, we saw the nearly deserted campgrounds (which would have been crowded with visitors six months ago), the trash-blown parking lot, the desultory watchtower, and my fear dissolved into a kind of numbness or vacancy or something for which I cannot find the word. Pushed into a far corner of the parking area is a collection of vehicles left behind by people who have crossed over. These are now the province of rodents, snakes, scorpions, and their prey, which, one of the soldiers told us, is usually one another. The handful of tourists have spread themselves out over the vast grounds so that each party is almost alone, but there is a family camped near us, and that first evening, after we had pitched our tents and eaten something, we walked over and introduced ourselves. They are Palestinians, descendants of people who fled Jaffa in 1947, and they have traveled here from Southern California and Vancouver. Prempeh hit it off with them at once, especially the women; they were dazzled by her, the Oxford accent, the deep blackness of her skin and hair. They showed us a rusted iron key the size of my palm and talked about reclaiming their property, especially “a marvelous orange orchard” that none of them had ever seen. It is gone, of course, since long before the fire. Prempeh asked how they expected to take possession “with things as they are.” The oldest of them, a woman in her 70s, a dentist who had been born in Egypt after the family fled, told us, “We will never stop waiting.” She said it calmly, as if the waiting itself were sufficient. Her middle-aged children, a physical therapist, a drug counselor, a “first A.D.” (whatever that is), kept a respectful silence.

As I may have mentioned earlier, the number of new technical papers about the Event (the fire and its aftermath) has declined steadily over the past year, and I’m told that recent submissions are even lower. Whether this indicates gloom, acceptance or a quiet gathering of energies is unclear, but it feels like a second silence, the first having followed the collapse of the nuclear theory. In the absence of significant new work—without which, Prempeh maintains, I don’t know what to do with myself—I have gone back to my favorite thinker, the Russian physicist E.I. Skomorovsky, and during the trip have been rereading some of his major papers[33] while keeping up with the shorter posts that still appear every week or so on his website. It was Skomorovsky who famously said that we know more about the Big Bang, which no one observed, than about the fire, of which we have actual video evidence. Lately, he has gone further, arguing that we will never know what happened, indeed, cannot know, that the obstacle is not “the impenetrability of certain events occurring in the Levant on 30 March” three years ago, but the shape of the human mind. We are “blind” to those events and even to our blindness. Yet we sense what we cannot see, “as if by the mental version of touch.” (El Koussa speaks of “seeing with our lips, our skin, our proprioceptive systems.”)

In a post that went up this Monday, Skomorovsky describes a Norwegian study that found an observable tendency in people living just outside the burn zone to avoid looking in that direction. He links to a video in which we see the subjects performing bizarre contortions for just that purpose, “averting their gaze from what they cannot fathom.” They have no idea they are doing it. When shown the videos, they are astonished and often laugh at themselves. Yet 30 minutes later, they are doing it again—again unawares. As usual, Skomorovsky draws unexpected conclusions: He believes that, in a cognitive sense, the Event Field is disappearing, “withdrawing from human consciousness,” even as the actual space remains before us. He predicts that within a few decades it will rarely be mentioned.[34] And if that is so, he speculates, it must surely have happened before in human history; other places (persons, colors, sounds, ideas, words) have vanished and been lost “like the sea closing over a sunken ship.” He wonders “if that is what became of Atlantis,” which I take to be a joke, though I’m not certain.

I read the whole post aloud to Prempeh yesterday afternoon as we sat on the embankment looking out over the river. What with questions, discussion, and going back over difficult passages, it took a couple of hours, and when we finished, we were silent, watching a pair of large black birds (Monk’s vultures, I believe[35]) circling over the desert to the south, looking for prey. They kept wheeling closer and closer to the perimeter without ever crossing it, and Prempeh remarked that they were not, as one might think, “avoiding” the Event Field; for them it had already ceased to exist. It was no longer there. The same appears to be true for most animals. Only a few humans (and a rapidly dwindling number of those) continue to be interested in that boundary and what lies beyond it. Prempeh recalled a paper she had read recently, a soil analysis of sand that had blown across the borders from the burn zone; it found a “complete lack” not only of burrowing animals and insects (their scat or DNA) but of microorganisms, fungi, even bacteria, actinomycetes, algae, or protozoa; there was no evidence of mitochondria. She pulled up the article on her phone and read aloud the final sentences. The author, Gosha, writes, “The sand is inert in a way one would not have thought possible in Nature. All life is absent, presumably burned up and consumed. Spinoza held that for every finite mode of extension (for every thing in the world), there exists a corresponding mode of thought from which it is not truly distinct. That is, every thing has a mind (of some sort) and is, to that extent, alive. But not this land. It is without life and without mind. It is not just dead. It is death.”

We sat there the rest of the day, reading, talking a little, and watching the river crawl past—it seemed to have freshened somehow, as if from an underground source. Around sunset, the clouds broke up, and we got a decent view of the blasted terrain on the other side. It was featureless in a way photographs cannot convey—there are no words for the color—and, as everyone remarks, it was entirely silent. When it began to get dark and cold, I said, “We should go,” and stood up. Prempeh, who is usually so responsive and accommodating, sat there as if she hadn’t heard me, staring out at the barely visible, barely audible river and the emptiness beyond it. Silence in daylight is one thing—sight fills the void—but in the dark we want sound, insects, animals, wind, something. Finally, she got to her feet, and we walked back to our campsite. The Palestinian family had left during the day, and the few remaining visitors were all at the far end of the grounds, their fires mostly lost in the darkness. Prempeh heated some food, we ate, and then, as I cleaned up, she went into her tent to read. With everything put away, I sat in one of the camp chairs meaning to answer emails and look at a few websites, but I did nothing. Prempeh’s electric lamp had turned her tent a glowing yellow orange, like a giant lantern, and I stared at it without a thought in my head.[36]

7

I woke up an indeterminate number of hours later in my own tent—maybe 30 minutes ago. It was cold and dark, and there was no light anywhere, which seemed odd since she is invariably up long before me, making our fire. Possibly, she had slept late for once, but that felt unlikely. I went outside with the small torch (Prempeh’s word for it) and let it play around the site, hoping she would see it and emerge. I said her name aloud—her Christian name, which I almost never use—then shone the beam through the netting; there was no one inside. I clicked it off, hoping that would make it easier to see her light if she was out there somewhere, but I saw nothing, not the other campfires, not the moon and stars, which were presumably hidden behind overcast, though I couldn’t see that either. I couldn’t see even the ground before me, yet the darkness felt more hospitable than the light, which had just bounced off the moisture in the air, obscuring more than it revealed.

I decided to walk out to the river; in case she had headed back over there. My body half-remembered how to go, what direction we’d turned as we left the campsite, and my feet felt their way across the uneven ground. I told myself I would sense the embankment when I came to it and the land started to slant downward, but, in fact, I wasn’t sure. I’d seen it in daylight, but hadn’t paid close attention, hadn’t thought to, and I could imagine stepping off the edge, or the ground tapering down to the river so gently I wouldn’t notice. After a bit, I felt . . . What I felt, in addition to the ground beneath my feet, was a chill in the air against my skin, more on one side than the other, which I took to be a breeze. If the wind was out of the west, as usual, and I walked into it, i.e., toward the cold side, it would take me to the river. So, I went that way and soon enough heard what sounded like moving water. Yet every step was so uncertain—I stumbled repeatedly without ever quite falling—that I couldn’t tell where I was or how far I had gone. Over and over, at each slight downward slope, I would think I had reached the embankment, yet it always seemed to lie farther ahead—unless the wind was out of a different direction, what sounded like water was something else, and I’d gone the wrong way altogether. Skomorovsky has written somewhere—I think it was Skomorovsky—that if truth is a correspondence between certain statements and the world they purport to describe, the Event corresponds to nothing at all, so no truthful statement can be made about it. (In which case, this report is useless, yet its very uselessness is a comfort, almost a purpose.)

Then I heard something I knew at once was neither the water nor the air. I stopped and listened. It came, and it went; and then it came again. I wondered if the breeze was carrying away the sound and bringing it back, but it rose and fell too steadily for that. It sounded, in fact, like something breathing. I stopped my own breath and held completely still. I filled those moments with thoughts of what it might be, a human, an animal, possibly a plant, even the land itself. Gosha had called the land death, but death might have its own sort of life. Maybe there was a realm, a truer reality, where death was ascendant. I found myself picturing Geller’s face in that final frame—as I often do, I think all of us do—the black circle of her mouth. I couldn’t hear the breathing anymore and wondered if whatever it was was holding its own breath, listening for me. But then, just before my air gave out, I heard it again, a soft, living exhale that was not myself. I could have spoken to it, I suppose, or shouted in a threatening way to frighten it off, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. It seemed important not to. The area is home to wolves and jackals, which travel in packs, and to striped hyenas, which hunt alone. Yet I had no fear—I had, in fact, a complete absence of fear—and for whatever reason I moved toward the sound. I didn’t care what the thing was or what it might do. I meant it no harm and felt it would know this, and that it was similarly disposed toward me. Even if it killed me, I believed, it would do so in all innocence.

The reason I closed my computer last night was that there was an email from Leah I wasn’t ready to look at; it had been there for two days, actually. Yes, I’ve made a mess of my life—who hasn’t—but the great blessing of the Event is that in its shadow none of that matters. It doesn’t take our sins on itself; it renders them meaningless. I began to smell mud and the odor of old, burnt things, like after a fire or in a ruined house. I sensed a vastness before me—it is before me now—sound and air, cool, fresh, yet with traces of fetidness coming up from below, and just then my foot felt beneath it a distinct lip of earth, beyond which the ground dropped away, and I knew I had reached the embankment at last. I sat down right there. Here. My legs reached over the edge; my feet rested on the downward slope. From this spot, I can hear the river quite clearly and, much closer, the other thing, whatever it is, still breathing to my left; I can hear particles of earth shifting beneath it, as if, like me, it is sitting or lying on the ground. I smell its fur or hair or skin, or what might be soap (though, if it is Prempeh, why hasn’t she spoken? but why haven’t I?) and feel heat coming off its body, for which I am grateful. I am not looking at it and feel certain it is not looking at me, but that we are both facing out to the west, toward the land we cannot see.

Footnotes

1

Nolan, Erich, “Disputing the Combustion Theory: A Quantum Wind Hypothesis,” Earth Science Review vol. 41, issue 2.

2

Benveniste, Byers & Oswego, An Ongoing Chronology, proposed considering this moment, loss of direct satellite contact, the beginning of the Event. As nonsensical as that sounds—how can a consequence be the beginning?—it anticipates Bardach’s notion of the “reporting record.” (See below.)

3

El Koussa, “First Anniversary,” Die Zeit.

4

Marguiles, Leah, private correspondence with her son, Julian, made available to me by him; cf. also her numerous skeptical posts on her Substack, Dubious Battle.

5

For a useful survey of discussions and conspiracy theories proliferating on X, TikTok, various subreddits, independent message boards, etc., see Perić, S.N., “Event Chatter” in Journal of Media Studies vol. 61, no. 4.

6

The commonest of these, unsurprisingly, was “an act of God,” though why God might have done it and to what end is a matter of dispute. Many saw it as a reproach or punishment of “the occupying power” (notwithstanding that the power’s victims suffered the same fate); certain eccentric rabbis, however, maintain that, as one of them wrote, “G-d [sic] did this out of his love for the Jewish people.” What that might mean is unclear.

7

There has been, of course, considerable disagreement as to exactly when—or if—the Event actually ended.

8

Pursuant to our agreement with the provider, we cannot discuss how we received it or from whom, except to say that it was not from Reynolds-Richards or anyone in her office.

9

Nolan, op cit, and after him others.

10

They don’t suggest how this transfer might have occurred.

11

Geller had been a gymnast and a dancer, and one feels that.

12

Physically impossible, but measurements confirm it.

13

Nolan contends that it would simply depict “more chaos,” and tell us nothing, a conclusion I agreed with at the time, though today I’m less certain. Skomorovsky recently offered what he calls a “proof” that the term chaos is itself now without meaning, and though I have trouble following his math, the conclusion has an intuitive appeal.

14

Braunschweig made a still from that final image of Geller’s face—flaming corona, mouth in a circle—blew it up to 24 x 18 and hung it on the wall of his cubicle. It so disturbed the staff—Lagomarsino called it a Gorgon—that a lot of them stopped going in there, and I was asked more than once to have him take it down. I didn’t, though frankly whenever I saw it, something in me shuddered, and I wished he would do it on his own. (He certainly knew how people felt.) Yet as Prempeh later pointed out—I hadn’t noticed this myself—I kept finding excuses for going in there and discussing matters I could have handled by text or email. Prempeh believes I wanted to see it; that the shudder had become a need. Others seemed to need it, too, and the complaints stopped. After Braunschweig left, someone suggested moving this image out into our cramped little “lobby,” but we never did; it remains hidden away in his former cubicle, like one of those cave paintings nobody sees.

15

Many, of course, maintain that there never was a clearly defined “state proper”; that its borders were always shifting and disputed.

16

Jordan declined to participate; the Egyptian government sent troops only after massive street demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities.

17

Reading this document at our campfire last night, Prempeh asked how I could reconcile the ibex’s agonized bellows with my assertion above that the fire caused no suffering. She suspects I am indifferent to the pain of animals (Leah once said something similar). My presumption is that the animal was caught between two zones—inside and outside the Event—and was therefore, in a sense, torn apart. That is, I feel certain, an exceedingly rare occurrence. Still, perhaps I am insufficiently concerned with animals.

18

At Bardach’s memorial service, her brother told me that as a child she never failed to find the afikomen. This is a piece of matza, hidden during the Passover seder, that has to be brought back to the table and eaten before the service can be completed.

19

There had been a fence on the eastern side, but, of course, it was incinerated in the first moments.

20

For a general discussion of the effect of burn zone heat on regional weather patterns, see Lobadil and Marmo, “Atmospheric Repercussions” in Report on Atmospheric and Meteorological Studies, no. 137.

21

On the night of the Event, I was, in fact, up late, proofing a paper, saw the first news alerts as they came in (none of this matters), and, without really thinking, I telephoned Leah, though we hadn’t spoken in months. I assumed I’d wake her—it was 1:30 am in California, and she is invariably in bed by 10—but she was up and in tears (Julian had already told her and was on his way over), which puzzled me since that whole subject had never seemed at all important to her—to her parents, sure, of course; to her right-wing brother, no doubt—but Leah, the Leah I knew, had always been on the political left, very critical of everything that happened there; yet here she was sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak. As she used to tell me, “You’re not a Jew. You don’t understand how these things work,” which I clearly don’t. In any case, she thanked me for the call, said she’d try me later, though of course she never did. Julian texted me some sort of explanation. As I say, all this is irrelevant.

22

I’m being unfair. There are a number of excellent collections of religious writing on the Event; even putting personal considerations aside, I would recommend, in particular, Fire This Time, Marguiles, Leah and Astroth, Julian, eds.

23

Jane’s Unconventional Warfare: 3003 Report.

24

Their list of possible saboteurs includes various foreign agents (remnants of Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.), former CIA/MI5 “cut-outs” now in private employ, anti-Zionist Hasidim, left-wing radicals, and, curiously, members of the nation’s own intelligence community—Shin Bet, Aman, Mossad—who “had begun to despair.”

25

I have omitted—for lack of space and because, frankly, I don’t know what to make of it—claims that the Event constituted “a second Shoah”; the launching of “fertility drives” to replace the “lost Jews”; the war of competing memorials (including physical violence in the dispute over giving “equal mention” to the Palestinian victims), the negotiations for a new homeland in the Western Sahara or the Canadian Arctic. And so on.

26

For complicated reasons, we have agreed not to identify the camp or the nation.

27

See “Pharaoh and Moses Take a Road Trip,” in the February issue of Strange Journeys.

28

Prempeh and I visited with the family in Paris on our way out there.

29

His actual words were, “C’était bien.”

30

National Geographic “Special Edition Year 3”; The New Realist, issue no. 4.

31

In fact, many drove or pedaled; a number even flew.

32

Without the snow runoff from Mount Hermon and other peaks, water levels are dangerously low.

33

See especially “The Blind Men Agree,” “Repeating Backwards,” “Has the Event Yet Begun?”

34

Unlike, say, Holocaust survivors, who dread the world forgetting what they have gone through, Skomorovsky treats it as natural, necessary, beneficial..

35

The guards told us these have reappeared in the region lately after a long absence.

36

Maybe this is the time to say that nothing has happened between Prempeh and myself, and nothing will. Twenty-five years ago, when I was her age, I probably would have made a clumsy attempt in that direction—one way I helped wreck my marriages—but at this point it’s hard even to imagine such things.

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Henry Bean wrote and directed The Believer, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, and has written screenplays for many other films. He was a staff writer on K Street and The OA. His 1982 novel The Nenoquich was republished last year, and his short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Black Clock, and elsewhere.

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UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

Higher Ed’s Bad Bargain

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An Israeli drone dropping tear-gas grenades in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, August 25th, 2021.

Momen Faiz/NurPhoto

On June 16th, 2025, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the American Council on Education joined with 12 institutions of higher education to sue the United States Department of Defense (DOD). At issue was what the coalition characterized as yet “another attempt to slash funding for critical American research” by the Trump administration. In May, the DOD had announced that it would significantly reduce the rate at which it reimburses the recipients of its research grants for “indirect costs” (such as facilities and administrative expenses), which would represent a colossal hit to the budgets of affected universities. The overhead expenses the DOD was asking schools to shoulder, the coalition wrote, “are the real and necessary costs of conducting groundbreaking research that has made our nation the world’s leading military superpower.”

The day after the joint lawsuit was filed, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the DOD policy change. For now, universities will continue to receive the accustomed overhead reimbursement rate for their military research, like those projects at MIT that have equipped “drones used by Israel” with “automated weapons systems and the ability to fly in swarm formation,” according to a recent report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories. Other proposed DOD funding cuts may be more difficult to block, to the chagrin of partner universities. After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the termination of his department’s support for social science research, Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law warned that the move could “harm national security by cutting DOD off from critical information and the ability to understand and respond to current and emerging threats.”

In pleading the case for continued DOD funding, university leaders who had spent the past year and a half denying the charge by campus activists that their institution was complicit in the genocide in Gaza have pivoted to celebrating the research that forms the clearest site of their complicity, even more so than the financial assets targeted by campus divestment campaigns. Where once they shook their heads at the naivete of the students whose chants asked them how many kids they’d killed today, now they are practically submitting their tallies to the DOD, one last desperate gambit to maintain the status quo. The fact that much of the federal research funding affected by the Trump administration’s offensive against higher education is not disbursed by the military and has no explicit connection to the defense industry makes it all the more striking that so many scientists have chosen to emphasize their contributions to American imperial glory. “NSF [National Science Foundation] investments have made America—and American science—great,” a University of Vermont environmental scientist wrote in June, criticizing the cuts with self-consciously Trumpian diction. An open letter published in March by nearly 2,000 scientific and medical professionals warned that Trump’s “wholesale assault” on research means that other countries “will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health.” In the face of Trump’s cuts to climate funding, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard urged universities to “tell the story of . . . the economic and national security benefits of basic science research” more persuasively. “The federal government has been the world’s largest investor in science research since the Second World War,” the Institute’s post noted, implicitly affirming that federal funding for research depends upon the extent to which it follows dutifully in the footsteps of the Manhattan Project.

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It would be relieving to dismiss this rhetoric as a strategic concession to our reactionary moment: If a little jingoism is what it takes to shore up popular support for lifesaving research on cancer and climate change, perhaps that’s a price worth paying, distasteful as it may be amid a US-funded genocide. The more disturbing possibility is that the entire academic research enterprise does, in fact, play a vital role in helping the United States to project its strength around the world, with the intolerable consequences of that strength on full display today in Gaza. At MIT, one of the 12 universities that joined the lawsuit to block the DOD’s overhead reimbursement rate cut, some students and researchers have taken a less rosy view of the school’s entanglement with US imperial might. In its 2024 report “MIT Science for Genocide,” the MIT Coalition for Palestine demonstrates the university’s prominent place within the US military-industrial complex, noting that MIT receives over 17% of its research revenue from the DOD alone. The school also partners with a wide range of private weapons manufacturers as well as the Israeli Ministry of Defense, whose research grants are, in turn, frequently underwritten by the US military. “These collaborations,” the coalition writes, “legitimize abuse of political, human, and civil rights in Palestine. They also recruit MIT faculty and students into militaristic activity and bias scientific research agendas toward belligerent instead of life-affirming applications.” Properly understood, the advocacy of the MIT Coalition for Palestine and its allies on campuses across the country entails much more than simply pruning some unethical practices or structures from the otherwise healthy trunk of American higher education. The call by Palestine solidarity activists to end institutional complicity in human rights violations would, if taken seriously, require a reconfiguration far vaster than anything that could be captured in a protest chant, or even a letter of demands. The movement opens Pandora’s box.

The call by campus activists to end institutional complicity in human rights violations would, if taken seriously, open Pandora’s box.

Now, as Trump’s top-down attack on universities throws their operations into disarray, it is tempting to judge that we should keep the lid closed, at least temporarily. This past spring, after the university where I teach rebuffed Trump’s most extortionate demands, signs reading “Thank You Harvard!” began to appear at rallies that had once excoriated the university for its repressive treatment of protesters and cooperation with US and Israeli militarism. The calculation is clear and, on its own terms, logical: We can make common cause with our institutions against the Trump administration, return to the status quo ante, and then, once our academic freedom is secure from outside interference, get to work unraveling our bloody entanglements.

Demonstrators protest military research used by the Israeli military at MIT in Cambridge, May 9th, 2024.

Josh Reynolds/AP

The problem with this approach is that the academic freedom it defends is one that has already been compromised by the bargain universities struck with the federal government in the mid-20th century, during the construction of the modern military-industrial complex. According to this agreement, academics could govern their own affairs as long as they remembered who was paying them and what their benefactors hoped to gain. The exercise of academic freedom reaches its limit when it threatens what higher education does to bolster American power. Within this circumscribed freedom, criticizing the academy’s service to militarism and imperialism is itself a destabilizing transgression; asking critics to hold their tongues until their institutions are more secure belies the fact that universities entwined with the military can only ever purchase security at the price of subservience.

When Franz Boas called the first meeting of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF) to order on March 17th, 1939, the 80-year-old anthropologist was nearing the end of one of the most distinguished careers in the history of American science. Born in 1858 in Prussia to a Jewish family, Boas settled in the US in the late 1880s, bouncing from one scientific institution to another before finally securing a professorship at Columbia University. His revolutionary approach to anthropology, which turned to culture to explain much that his contemporaries reduced to biology, brought Boas into the political fray, where he emerged as one of the first and most vocal opponents of scientific racism in the white-dominated academy. As the name of the ACDIF reflects, Boas understood democracy and scientific freedom to be interdependent. Scientific truth bolstered democracy by undermining racist ideologies, but scientists needed autonomy to arrive at truth.

Franz Boas at work

Alamy

Over the first decades of the 20th century, Boas had come to believe that militarism—and the willingness of his professional peers to lend their services to it—was one of the most pressing threats to intellectual freedom. In 1919, after learning that four American anthropologists had agreed to spy for the US while working in Mexico during World War I, Boas wrote an incendiary letter to The Nation in which he declared that anyone “who uses science as a cover for political spying . . . prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.” The mutilation of Italian and German science following the rise of fascism confirmed for Boas that science could not thrive when subordinated to military purposes. That meant that militaristic but not yet fascist countries, including the United States, needed systemic transformation if they were to truly safeguard scientific autonomy. “Fascism, we know, will mean the end of all intellectual freedom and our main task is to stop it,” Boas told the Communist newspaper Daily Worker in 1938. “The ultimate solution, to my personal way of thinking, is Socialism.”

By that point, Boas was far from alone in these judgments. In 1937, a group of radical scientists in Philadelphia, dissatisfied with what they perceived as the political timidity of existing professional organizations, formed the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), modeled on the recently founded British Association of Scientific Workers (BASW). The AASW and the BASW were explicitly antifascist, anti-militarist, and economically progressive, allied with the labor movement and the era’s Popular Front between social democrats and communists. By the end of 1938, a Boston-Cambridge chapter had joined the Philadelphia group, and the organization debuted to the public with support from a roster of prominent scientists (most famously Robert Oppenheimer, who would go on to lead the Manhattan Project). One of the AASW’s first major initiatives was a boycott of scientific materials, including laboratory equipment, imported from Germany; a policy of financial noncooperation with fascism was, the Harvard biologist Kenneth Thimann felt, “the least action which the Association, if it stands for anything real, could take.”

“Everything which tends to strengthen national industry and improve the efficiency and economy of its processes increases its military strength. To this extent all national industrial research is potentially war research.”

Those scientists who shared Boas’s conviction that fascism was latent wherever militarism and nationalism could be found hoped that taking action against European fascism would help prepare their colleagues to work for radical transformation at home. Writing in 1939, BASW leader and Irish scientist J.D. Bernal observed “a much greater reluctance than heretofore among scientists voluntarily to assist in military research, and a strong feeling that in doing so they are violating the spirit of science.” Bernal, an outspoken activist in the Communist Party of Great Britain, maintained it was imperative that such acts of individual refusal be linked to the broader fight against capitalism and imperialism. “Everything which tends to strengthen national industry and improve the efficiency and economy of its processes increases its military strength,” Bernal argued. “To this extent all national industrial research is potentially war research.” The implication was that no one’s hands were clean until everyone’s were. Bernal, who continued to work as a scientist, wasn’t demanding that his colleagues put down their pipettes until war was abolished, but he maintained that even scientists doing “basic” research still had an obligation to join political efforts working toward that horizon. Given the contributions of even quite theoretical work in thermodynamics and electromagnetism to the development of modern industry, scientists could only ensure their work didn’t find military application by ending militarism itself.

By the late 1930s in the US and United Kingdom, even those scientists committed to the long-term struggle against war were also increasingly convinced of the necessity of military struggle against the Nazis in the short term. That conclusion wasn’t incompatible with Bernal’s arguments in principle; Bernal himself ended up cooperating enthusiastically with the British war effort, despite the low security clearance to which his Communist affiliations condemned him. Most radical scientists in the US, like Oppenheimer, eventually followed the same trajectory—but in the meantime the advent of war plunged their movement into bitter recriminations. Within the ACDIF, tensions mounted after the national executive committee found itself divided on a petition that would have committed the group to opposing American entry into the war, on the grounds that “the war threatens to destroy intellectual freedom and the rights of free men” and “will inevitably entail death, permanent physical or spiritual injury to millions of people, and serious interference in cultural and scientific progress.” Boas supported the petition, but many of his key collaborators did not. When Boas died, exactly two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the ACDIF had already folded. The AASW still persisted on paper, but a similar fissure about supporting US entry into the war marked its end as an influential organization in American science. Those who believed that the external threat of fascism needed to be repelled with force before scientists could redress their professional collaboration with military-industrial devastation won the debate.

The postponed reckoning finally arrived in 1945, after scientists helped the US build the most destructive weapon ever devised. A new mass movement of scientists erupted to advocate for international civilian control over atomic technology and to preempt the arms race looming on the horizon. Many of the movement’s leading figures, echoing their prewar predecessors, urged scientists to work for the radical political and economic change without which they could find themselves responsible for the total annihilation of civilization. In his essay in the 1946 book One World or None, published by a weapons control advocacy group founded by former Manhattan Project scientists, Albert Einstein argued that to avert nuclear catastrophe, it was necessary to create “a supranational organization” to which the world’s superpowers turned over their military resources, so it could then prevent individual states from making war.

This efflorescence of anti-militarist advocacy after the end of the war suggests that Boas’s opponents within the ACDIF were correct that taking up arms against fascism would not necessarily prevent scientists from organizing for peace once the fight was done. But the genie of military patronage, once released to grant scientists’ every funding wish, would not so easily return to its bottle. The Manhattan Project had integrated American science more fully into the war apparatus than ever before, and some scientists found that they quite enjoyed the nearly unlimited resources now at their disposal. In the late 1940s the US federal government allocated some 2% of its total outlays to scientific research, especially within the national lab system that emerged from the Manhattan Project. By the mid-1960s that figure had swollen to 12%—some of which was channeled through officially non-military institutions like the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950), but much of which continued to be routed through military bureaucracies like the Office for Naval Research (founded in 1946). And it was channeled not merely to laboratories under formal governmental or military operation, but increasingly to universities, whose enrollments were spiking, with federal encouragement, at the same time.

As this Cold War science regime crystallized, scientific anti-militarism largely withered to the posture that sociologist Kelly Moore calls “moral individualism”—lone courageous researchers, often motivated by Quakerism or other pacifist belief systems, refusing to cooperate with the military, even as they watched their profession as a whole embrace its status as an appendage of the American war machine. The movement of atomic scientists, bereft of the relationships that prewar Popular Front organizations like the AASW had developed with the labor movement and other forces struggling for broader social transformation, abandoned a confrontational posture toward the state, preferring instead to dispense expert advice about the mechanisms that would reduce the risk of nuclear apocalypse. That meant these activists needed to keep the peace with their more conservative colleagues so that “science” could appear to speak with a single voice, which drove their advocacy toward the lowest common denominator. While the scientists succeeded, with the McMahon Act of 1946, in securing formal civilian control over nuclear weapons and energy development, this control became a closely guarded prerogative of the executive branch, with vast swaths of information about the nation’s nuclear infrastructure shrouded in secrecy. The consolidation of the Cold War eventually confirmed the defeat of the movement, at least in its radically internationalist form, although its legacy lives on in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its famous Doomsday Clock, ticking down to an apocalyptic “midnight.”

In a brutal piece of irony, many postwar scientists justified their embrace of military funding with the concept that to Franz Boas was practically synonymous with scientific anti-militarism: intellectual freedom. Influential scientists like MIT vice president Vannevar Bush and Harvard president James B. Conant, both former Manhattan Project leaders, distinguished the American system from the Soviet project of “planning” science to achieve predetermined social goals, arguing that American institutions displayed a characteristic commitment to freedom as their central principle of operation. Funders identified “really first-class men,” in Conant’s phrase, and equipped them with the money they needed to pursue their creativity wherever it led them, secure in the faith that the results of such free inquiry would ultimately redound to the benefit of the United States and its military. True scientific freedom was not, as Boas believed, freedom from military oversight. It was the freedom of military support. “There’s no such thing as tainted money,” the Cold War-era quip went, “except ’t’ain’t enough.”

In a brutal piece of irony, many postwar scientists justified their embrace of military funding with a concept that to radical scientists was practically synonymous with anti-militarism: intellectual freedom.

A billboard urging silence at the Hawley Plant in Milwaukee, a sister site of the Manhattan Project, 1943.

RBM Vintage/Alamy

The natural sciences were not the only fields to benefit from the Cold War bonanza in research funding. The era now romanticized as a golden age by many academics in the humanities and social sciences was made possible because policymakers and government strategists calculated that investments in those fields would pay off, believing that the “softer” disciplines could help the US outmaneuver its adversaries and demonstrate to the world America’s intellectual and cultural achievements. Money from the Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, helped underwrite the groundbreaking postwar work of anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz, and Clyde Kluckhohn, as well as some of the early work of the anarchist political scientist James C. Scott; the literary achievements of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s and 1960s; and the transnational network of philosophical luminaries coordinated by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to name just a few examples. The beneficiaries of such funds were not just hacks and propagandists, in other words; many were not even fully aware of where their funding was coming from. In the mid-century decades, Cold War largesse was the water in which everyone was swimming.

The radical agitation that erupted on college campuses in the early 1960s and intensified with the escalation of the Vietnam War disrupted this complacent status quo. The student movement, and its allies among faculty and research staff, forced the denizens of the Cold War university to clarify which side they were on. In 1969, more than 80 scientists convened in San Francisco by the organization Science for the People pledged that they would “not participate in war research or weapons production” and that they would “counsel [their] students and urge [their] colleagues to do the same.” This was a marked break from the era of individual refusal, as Science for the People saw its boycott as a pathway to collective action against the military conscription of American science.

Many of the university-based activists seeking to purge their institutions of military influence recognized that severing direct financial ties to the US military would redress only one axis of the academy’s relationship to the violence of American empire. As researchers in the 1960s and ’70s grappled with the place of knowledge production in a fundamentally destructive political-economic order, the more structural critique of J.D. Bernal—who used the phrase “science for the people” in his 1952 book Marx and Science—returned as an inspiration. In 1970, the Harvard Medical School professor Jon Beckwith made headlines for announcing he would donate the money he received from a prestigious award for his groundbreaking work on gene isolation to the Black Panther Party. He had previously explained that he was troubled that his research could someday be used against his intentions for bioweapons production, since “we see work in biology used by our government in Vietnam and in devising chemical and biological weapons.” Mitigating this possibility, in Beckwith’s view, required “changing society so that it serves the people,” a task that revolutionary groups like the Panthers were undertaking. The 1973 Science for the People-aligned manifesto “Toward an Anti-Imperialist Science” similarly proclaimed, “As scientists and revolutionaries we unite with anti-imperialist scientists of the world and with popular movements of our countries.” This declaration, drafted in collaboration with left-wing Mexican scientists, wasn’t just a promise, but a description of how activists in Science for the People had been conducting themselves for years, traveling around the globe, often at great personal risk, to lend aid to revolutionary forces in the Global South, including North Vietnam. In May 1971, the Boston-based Red Crate Collective, an affiliate of Science for the People, published a pamphlet on “Science for Vietnam,” a program for coordinating scientific aid and soliciting donations of textbooks, medicines, and physical equipment useful to the continued development of scientific and medical capabilities in North Vietnam.

Students and supporters demanding a halt to military research at

MIT in Cambridge, November 6th, 1969.

AP

Science for the People cover, August 1970

Courtesy of Science for the People

Throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, anti-war students and faculty picketed military-funded labs at dozens of schools; they also occupied, vandalized, and in one case, bombed the sites of war research. The suppression of such protest was often carried out under the cover of the denatured Cold War conception of academic freedom. In 1972, Stanford fired tenured English professor H. Bruce Franklin for suggesting at a rally the year before that the crowd should forcibly shut down the university’s military-funded Computation Center, with university administrators and conservative faculty insisting that Franklin didn’t deserve institutional protections like tenure, because of the threat he was mounting to free inquiry. “When students try to stop, interfere with, or even question too closely, some university function (class, lecture, research project) that has a connection to some political controversy,” wrote a group of Science for the People affiliates in 1972, “they are accused of violating the academic freedom of those who scheduled the activity in question.” The group juxtaposed this accusation with the response of the Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann when questioned by young scientists in France about his work advising the Pentagon: “I am not free to answer.” The secrecy that military research nearly always required made the free exchange of ideas impossible by design. But it was in the name of freedom that universities clamped down on scholars who interrogated their colleagues’ choice to submit to the yoke of secrecy.

The universities’ repression of protest in the late ’60s and early ’70s was only a pale shadow of the state violence inflicted on off-campus revolutionaries, and by the end of the 1970s radical academics were left to contend with the awareness that the broad societal transformation they understood as an indispensable condition for the full redemption of their institutions was off the table, at least in the short term. During the Reagan administration, DOD science funding exploded. When the Cold War ended, fears that the federal gravy train would end along with it sent universities scrambling to expand their partnerships with private industrial partners, including in the defense sector. (These fears ultimately proved unfounded: The train may have slowed in the 1990s, but it was back to running full speed following the 2001 declaration of the War on Terror.) Under the Clinton administration, the federal government began the practice of funneling grants toward universities with formal industry partnerships in place. Lockheed Martin has been particularly aggressive in establishing a host of American universities as “strategic partners,” a designation which entails research collaboration as well as recruitment initiatives. As Penn State’s Corporate Engagement Center puts it, the defense giant and its academic collaborators establish “a holistic relationship that grows, evolves, and spans a remarkable breadth,” including research, classroom education, and post-graduation student recruitment.

When today’s anti-war activists protest their universities’ ties to defense contractors and the military, administrators defending these collaborations still draw upon an idea that was forged in the Cold War and has only calcified since: A commitment to intellectual freedom requires academics to acquiesce to the military-industrial takeover of their institutions, while challenging military research in the university is tantamount to a violation of this freedom. “Calls to deprive fellow students of their choice of where to work and to prevent researchers from choosing whom to work with are deeply troubling,” a New York University spokesman told the student newspaper in 2024, after a protest targeting the engineering school’s research and recruiting partnerships with institutions like the US Navy and Lockheed Martin. “NYU rejects calls for academic boycotts,” the spokesman explained, “because they are at odds with the receipts [sic] of the free exchange of ideas and academic freedom.” Eighty years after academic researchers wagered that the necessity of defeating fascism justified the short-term sacrifice of their intellectual freedom, the logic of military collaboration has revealed itself as an Orwellian monstrosity. War is freedom; dissent is repression.

Under the second Trump administration, anti-militarist activists in the academy face an organizing landscape that looks less like that of the Vietnam era and more like a twisted version of the dilemma radical scientists faced on the eve of World War II. When the fight looked something like the campaign against the Vietnam War, the beats could feel almost comfortingly scripted. We knew what the demands were and to whom and how best to pose them: take up physical space, disrupt business as usual, pull every possible lever to make the higher-ups uncomfortable. Now college and university leaders are more uncomfortable than we ever managed to make them, because their alliance with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, has broken down. The clear battle lines of last year, which pitted activists on and off campus against an unholy alliance of university administrators, weapons manufacturers, and military bureaucrats, have dissolved and been replaced by a three-way standoff between The Good (anti-imperialist activists), The Bad (our new fascist president), and The Ugly (American higher education).

As in the late 1930s, intellectual freedom seems threatened simultaneously by far-right authoritarianism and by the subtler constraints of mundane collaboration with military partners. Once again, there is an argument to be made that the former threat needs to be confronted first, in order to ensure that scholars have stable footing on which to grapple with the latter, more complex menace. We would do well to learn from past capitulations to this logic. Accommodating militarism in higher education for the sake of fighting Trump will not do anything to prepare the academic profession to eventually confront its complicity in American-sponsored atrocities. It is time, instead, to imagine a more robust academic freedom, one that draws on the vision of Boas, Bernal, and other radical antifascists of the interwar period and breaks from the perverted Cold War formulation—the freedom of academics to sell their services to the highest bidder, without bureaucratic interference or ethical challenges from their peers. How might we, as academic organizers and committed anti-militarists, begin to enact this more expansive notion of academic freedom?

Accommodating militarism in higher education for the sake of fighting Trump will not do anything to prepare the academic profession to eventually confront its complicity in American-sponsored atrocities.

A 2007 lecture by Science for the People veteran Richard Levins might help us grapple with the challenges confronting us today. Delivered to the Socialist Caucus of the American Public Health Association, and aptly titled “One Foot In, One Foot Out,” the lecture charts the options available to the politically committed researcher facing the dire circumstances of the 21st-century university. The first is to push the envelope—taking bold stands, challenging professional orthodoxies, and making principled decisions about which funding sources to pursue. This approach entails joining the struggle to defend and strengthen academic job security (“Here is where unions are important,” Levins notes). The second is to focus on advancing one’s research career in conventional terms while also building relationships with organizations outside the academy that could deploy one’s findings to advocate for legislative change or other reforms. The last option is “to leave the institutions that are so frustrating and increasingly demoralized,” devoting oneself full-time to activism and figuring out how to “make a living in some other way.” Levins acknowledges that there is no perfect approach, and that an individual might incorporate elements from each path.

Although nearly two decades have passed since his address, this schema remains useful for understanding the forms that political engagement in academia has taken in the 21st century. The academic labor movement, especially unions of graduate students and non-tenure track teachers and researchers, has grown considerably since 2007, winning contracts that have protected hundreds of thousands of academic workers from retaliation and harassment. At the same time, academics have gotten more comfortable writing for a general readership, helped in part by an expanding ecosystem of advocacy groups that help scholars share their most salient research findings with policymakers and the public at large. And the accelerating collapse of the academic job market has made defecting entirely for a life of full-time political work more tempting for countless unemployed and underemployed radical scholars.

The movement that emerged after October 7th to protest the complicity of American higher education in the Israeli genocide in Gaza exemplifies how the three strategies Levins gestures to could work together productively. The academic labor movement has played an indispensable role in supporting campus activism, whether by defending individual workers from punishment for their advocacy or by coordinating protest directly. Researchers have also lent their expertise to the solidarity movement, sharing their insights on Palestinian history, genocide, famine, and the American military-industrial-academic complex in essays, reports, and teach-ins, while also contesting the obfuscations that many of their co-workers have peddled. And the campus struggle has always relied on movements outside the American academy for support, leadership, and inspiration, be it organizations of socialists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, anti-Zionist Jews, or, most importantly, Palestinians themselves, both in the US and in occupied Palestine. At the peak of their power, during the encampment wave of spring 2024, student activists succeeded in prefiguring a radically different kind of university, one where “civil discourse and critical inquiry are not abstract concepts” but rather “active principles,” as my Harvard colleague Walter Johnson put it. The encampments, at their best, showed how a movement grounded in the university could also point beyond it.

Though now dismantled, this liberated educational zone in the belly of the beast offers a site from which to affirm the vision of those scientists and academics who have insisted, against immense pressure, that true academic freedom lies beyond the militarized university. Franz Boas was right when he warned the ACDIF that scientific cooperation with the war effort would threaten its ideals in the long run. Since militarism and imperialism are themselves the seeds of fascism, an antifascist science must always orient itself toward a world without war and without empire. And while we may sympathize with the decision of scientists like J.D. Bernal to temporarily compromise their anti-war ideals for the sake of defeating Hitler, the pragmatic case for short-term collaboration is weaker when the fascist threat in question is not the official enemy of our military but rather its commander-in-chief. If we understand Donald Trump as akin to the dictators of interwar Europe, then we must aspire to more than just forcing his regime back into tolerantly financing our institutions.

As Israel perpetrates its extermination campaign in Gaza not only with technologies developed by American scientists but also with American power—the power that has prevented global actors from coming to the aid of the Palestinians and that has enabled, through the precipitous inequality in wealth and military capability that it sustains, the slaughter to proceed so rapidly—we might conclude, as Daniel Ellsberg did about the Vietnam War, that the US isn’t simply on the wrong side; it is the wrong side. That leaves even the good things we academic workers do in American universities—everything that makes America healthier, wealthier, safer, and smarter—stained in blood. This implication may have been one reason why so many academics and administrators, even those without a strong commitment to Zionism, found the Palestine solidarity movement that spread across American campuses last year so threatening. And it is why, as university leaders boast of American higher education’s role as an appendage of the national security machine, opponents of that machine in academia have no choice but to confront their schools and their government simultaneously.

There were academics whose careers flourished in Nazi Germany, scientists who made groundbreaking discoveries and scholars whose historical and philosophical insights still endure. Most of us regard them, justly, as criminals, disgraces to our profession. The more resolutely our nation commits itself to a genocidal project of its own, the more unsparingly we must look inward: If our scholarly contributions do in fact aid the cause of American greatness, are they worth making in the first place?

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Erik Baker is a historian at Harvard, the senior editor of The Drift, and the author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

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Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist

Najati Sidqi’s reminiscences, which chronicle the upheavals of the early 20th century, resonate with shocking familiarity today.

Najati Sidqi Introduced by Margaret Litvin

In the opening chapter of his posthumously published memoir, the activist and intellectual Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) wryly recalls how, in the early 1920s, “Jewish immigration to Palestine brought customs, ideas, and social practices alien to the conditions of Arab life” there. He reminisces about the cultural heterogeneity of his birthplace, Jerusalem—various tongues, intermingling styles of dress—as well as the influx of foreign ideologies:

We started hearing of Bolshevism, of Anarchism, of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, and of Herzl. We got to know the workers’ movements among the Jewish immigrants, such as the Histadrut (the Federation of Jewish Workers), the Fraktsiya (the leftist opposition within the Histadrut), the Po’alei Tzion (Workers of Zion) party, and the kibbutzim . . . The Jewish workers with leftist inclinations sought to propagandize among the Arabs.

Sidqi, then a teenage postal worker, frequented a coffee shop where he learned of these competing leftist tendencies and of the socialist revolution in Russia. All this, he reflects, at first seemed “distant from our local concerns,” yet “we were ready to listen to anything, to accept anything that might lift from us the nightmare” of the hardening British occupation in Palestine.

At the café Sidqi befriended former members of the Po’alei Tzion who had broken with the party over its commitment to “a socialist Jewish state.” These activists, who coalesced into the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), rejected both British imperial rule and Zionism, which they considered “a bourgeois movement that benefited only wealthy Jews.” They insisted that their party, which “was for all inhabitants of Palestine,” could “reconcile the interests of the working classes” of Jews and Arabs alike. After the PCP was admitted to the Communist International (Comintern) in 1924, Sidqi became one of its first Arab members. When Moscow pushed the party to “Arabize” its upper ranks, he joined the youth central committee and was sent to the Soviet Union to study.

A freethinker and protean public intellectual, Sidqi has been admired from many sides. The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani hailed him as “probably the first” materialist chronicler of the Arab nationalist movement. Historians of Arab antifascism celebrate his 1940 book Islamic Traditions and Nazi Principles: Are They Compatible?, written to counteract Hitler’s appeal to the Muslim world and amplified by the British war effort. Sidqi also translated Pushkin and Chekhov, published comic short stories such as “The Millionaire Communist,” and helped popularize Descartes, Darwin, and the medieval Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun among Palestinians. But few readers have encountered his masterpiece: this rich and riveting memoir, now available in English for the first time.

Completed in 1976, Sidqi’s memoir—which I co-translated with Gideon Gordon and Anas Farhan—traces the arc of his early life as it intersects with the upheavals of the early 20th century, mixing reminiscences on the day’s political movements with winding digressions and gossip. We learn about his years at Moscow’s Communist University of Toilers of the East, his role in the PCP’s organizing against Zionism and the British Mandate, his cat-and-mouse games with police and nearly two years of imprisonment in Jerusalem, and his activist and intellectual work abroad—including stints in France, where he edited a clandestine Communist newspaper, and Spain, where he wrote Arabic anti-Franco propaganda during the Spanish Civil War. He chronicles all this with verve, noting the Communist movement’s hypocrisies and subtle racism. The memoir cuts off abruptly in 1940 with his expulsion from the party for writing against Nazi Germany—then an ally of the Soviet Union under the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact—and for doing so with reference to religious texts.

Sidqi’s rollicking tale reads like a political travelogue from a bygone age, partly because it omits the tragic experiences that followed his Communist adventures. After coming back to Jerusalem in 1940, Sidqi left Palestine shortly before the Nakba and never returned. Exiled in Cyprus and then Beirut, he and his family endured poverty and separation from many relatives; they saw Arab nationalism falter and many postcolonial hopes turn to ash. (During the Lebanese Civil War, they fled to Athens, where he died in 1979.) The memoir also suppresses his personal life during the period it covers: It barely mentions Sidqi’s 50-year marriage to Lotka Lorberbaum Sidqi—who had immigrated to Palestine from Lviv as a teenager, joined the PCP„ and converted to Islam—or their three children; the eldest, their daughter Dawlieh (“Internationale”), was raised in Soviet children’s homes long after her parents’ release from British Mandate prison and even after her father’s expulsion from the party. The family petitioned bureaucrats in three countries for the right to live together, to no avail. Dawlieh was still under Soviet power as Sidqi wrote, which may help explain this elision.

However carefully depersonalized Sidqi’s story, it still resonates with shocking familiarity today. The following excerpt, the memoir’s seventh chapter, focuses on the five debates Sidqi sees as most central for the PCP between 1929 and 1931. These include the Comintern’s directive to “Arabize” the party, which Jewish members resisted, and the party members’ divergent responses to the intercommunal violence of August 1929—events now known in Jewish historiography as “the Western Wall riots” and “the Hebron Massacre” and in Palestinian memory as “the Buraq Uprising.” Some activists saw only an anti-Jewish pogrom, while others (and Moscow) saw a national liberation uprising. Sidqi, his Jewish-born partner already pregnant with their first child, must have seen both. Though his account is matter-of-fact, it evokes the torment of this moment when the PCP—and the global left—was riven between mutually incompatible interpretations of history that fed on, and in turn reinforced, contradictory structures of feeling.

It is striking that this pattern, which has repeated after the October 7th attacks, was already present even before the accumulated trauma of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Israeli occupation. Today, as in 1929, the left is forced to reckon with these irreconcilable perspectives. Sidqi cannot help us do so. But he can at least help us understand the challenge.

— Margaret Litvin

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Najati Sidqi (center) with his father and older brother. Courtesy of the Sidqi family.

Five leading issues arose in the time I spent as a party official, from 1929 until my arrest in 1931. The issues were: Arabization; the uprising of 1929; Jewish immigration; the rural land issue; and our stance with respect to the Arab national movement.

1. Arabization

The directive to “Arabize” the party came directly from the Comintern. This meant that the party had to give more opportunities for Arab members affiliated with it to enter sensitive positions, from the local committees to the Central Committee. This didn’t mean that the membership had to become majority Arab and minority Jewish, but we were meant to tilt the leadership more toward the Arab side. What drove this decision was that the party’s Jewish members and supporters comprised about ten thousand people, while Arabs numbered fewer than one thousand.

Arabization was not easy or effortless. The Jewish Communists were very cautious about it, as they were convinced that the Jewish Communist was more ideologically and organizationally prepared than the Arab Communist, and that the Arab member would collapse if ever exposed to pressure and persecution, causing problems for others.

The Jewish leadership were the ones who put forward this argument. They stalled Arabization, supporting it in theory but impeding it in practice. Meanwhile, messages from the Comintern urged us to courageously implement Arabization. They highlighted how the movement in Palestine was chaotic and confused relative to the rest of the Arab world, and that as a consequence, “the wheat was being separated from the chaff.”

The Jewish party leadership wavered about implementing the Arabization policy and could not find the courage to open the doors to Arab leadership. It decided to send the largest possible number of Arab members (and even Arabs who were just sympathetic to the party) to Moscow to be educated. Then when they returned to Palestine, they could take up sensitive positions in the party once the Comintern knew them, had gauged their capabilities, and assigned their role within the party. Agreeing to the leadership’s proposal, the party took to sending student missions of every class and profession. These included ironworkers, woodworkers, students, peasants, office workers, journalists, and street vendors.

The party had a fixed leadership, composed of known people like Tepper, Barzilai, Berman, and Lichtinsky,[1] who managed to keep themselves well out of prison, and a shifting leadership in the local committees, composed of people who entered sensitive positions only when spots opened up there, although the nature of their work and their constant contact with the public (running unions, organizing strikes, and leading protests) exposed them to arrest. This therefore produced a “leadership crisis.” A matter that exacerbated this serious crisis was that many Jewish Communists who carried Soviet passports or Russian birth certificates got deported to the Soviet Union by the British authorities. Some Jewish Communists had every hope that they would meet this fate—until they stumbled into it. They were crammed into prison for three to six months, then were shipped from Jaffa to Odessa on the next Soviet ship.

Despite all this, the party actively worked on the issue of Arabization. In 1931, the Comintern dispatched a representative named Mueller to investigate the progress of Arabization. I joked to him, “In Moscow, the acronym for the Communist Party was V.K.P., the Communist Party for the Nations of the Soviet Union, and they added a B to it, to stand for Bolshevik.”

He replied, “Yeah . . . so?”

I said, “We abbreviate the name of the Palestine Communist Party as P.K.P. So what do you think about adding an A to the end, for Arabized?” He shook his head, laughing, and said, “That could also stand for ‘antisemite’ . . . ”

On that note, Mueller almost fell into the hands of the police in the suburb of Nahr al-Uja near Jaffa. We had held a meeting with him in a safe house, and after the meeting about eight of us set off together in the direction of Jaffa. We were halfway there when we ran into a Jewish cart driver who knew that some of us were Jewish Communists. He said, “Don’t go on along this route; there’s a police squad stationed ahead. No doubt they would love to do you mischief!” We thanked him, split up, and went in different directions, thus evading the trap planned for us. But we were burning to know: Who had told the police about our secret meeting? Was the informant among us? Suspicion fell on an Arab journalist from Jerusalem, D. Sh., who had hosted the meeting. Considering the evidence, we decided not to rely on him for party activities anymore.

Anyway, Arabization was a central concern of the party at all levels and during all its conferences. In the end the Jewish Communists conceded central leadership to the Arab comrades, while they remained in their leadership positions in Jewish areas. The creation of a sort of “federal” structure within the single party allowed us to implement the concept of Arabization and kept peace with the part of the party apparatus that the Jewish leadership administered.

The main dispute was over how to define the nature of this uprising: Was it a nationalist revolt, or a sectarian massacre?

2. The Uprising of 1929[2]

The uprising of August 23rd, 1929, shook the party quite violently, and left the Jewish Communists completely at a loss. There were some who defended their countrymen, and others who clung to neutrality and preferred to distance themselves from it. However, this situation created a problem in the party between the Jewish comrades and the Arab comrades. We held a contentious meeting in which we discussed the uprising and its consequences. The main dispute was over how to define the nature of this uprising: Was it a nationalist revolt, or a sectarian massacre?

Here a division emerged in the party. Among the Jewish Communists, some said that it was a massacre, but others supported the Central Committee in saying that it was a national uprising caused by unjust British rule, the seizure of lands, and the impoverishment of the peasants.

After a heated back-and-forth, it was decided that it was a nationalist uprising that had no connection to outbreaks of incidents of sectarian violence like the murder of the sheikh of the Jaffa mosque and his family,[3] the massacre of students in a Talmud school in Khalil [Hebron], or other anomalous incidents uncharacteristic of uprisings. Some of the Jewish members complied with this decision; others were enraged by it and withdrew from the party, or were expelled by the party until they changed their stance.

At the time, I was overseeing the party’s activities in Haifa in close coordination with the Federation of Trade Unions, which was managed by a Lebanese man, a railroad employee from Qlailah. He had also opened a school to fight illiteracy in Qlailah, with the help of another young Lebanese man, who was from Fathallah.

In Haifa, I communicated secretly with the Sheikh of the mosque, ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a towering man who lived on the slopes of the mountain, east of the bridge over the Rushmiya wadi. He told me about his struggle against the French in Syria in 1920, his flight to Haifa since then, his fight with the English in Palestine, and how the authorities were pursuing him. I found out in 1935, while I was in Paris, that al-Qassam had been martyred with four of his comrades near Jenin.[4]

While I was stationed in Haifa during the uprising, I came down with dysentery from eating polluted food at a restaurant in the fish market. I was taken to the government hospital, where I stayed ten days until I had recovered. I had barely left the hospital when I was asked to make my way to Jerusalem to join the Central Committee. So I put on a [Jewish-style] hat[5] as a disguise and took a seat on a half-empty train. When the train stopped at Lydda [Lyd], I looked out the window and saw two Arab youths approaching my seat. In each one’s hand was a knife; they were waiting to attack me once the train was in motion. So I laughed and said, “I’m an Arab, like you.” They both put their knives back in their pockets and said, “Take that thing off your head and go away.”

The train arrived at the Jerusalem station at nine in the evening. The station was shrouded in darkness, and the streets were empty. Here and there, I heard the whistle of bullets. I hired the only carriage in the square to take me to the home of my co-worker from the post office, from before I went to Moscow in 1925. This was Qustandi Rofa, who lived in the Greek colony near the railway station. I knocked on the door; he opened the latch with great caution. He saw me in the dim light after my long absence. But he welcomed me and hosted me for three days until I could rendezvous with my comrades in Jerusalem.

The Central Committee had assigned Joseph Barzilai to rent a house in his name in Beit Safafa, an Arab-majority neighborhood, from an Arab farmer. I moved there and lived there. While in Jerusalem, I contributed to a report to the Comintern about the 1929 uprising and the party’s stance on it.

An odd event occurred at the time. The landlord had advised Barzilai to leave the house, so that he and whoever he hosted would not be endangered. The landlord helped Barzilai pack up the furniture, then, pistol in hand, he escorted Barzilai in the moving truck to safety in the Jewish neighborhood of Talpiot, on the eastern side of the al-Fawqa neighborhood. Then the landlord bid Barzilai farewell, saying, “I have fulfilled my duty to you; go on your way. If I run into you again, I’ll kill you!”

So the 1929 uprising placed the party actively on the side of Arab rights, and opened the door to a new push from Arab activists and officials. It also highlighted the Communists as an organized and active party, present and influential in both the Arab and Jewish camps.

In the process, the party’s headquarters was transferred to a house deep in a pine forest owned by Jamil al-Shakir al-Husseini, on the western side of al-Fawqa. Joseph Barzilai paid the rent, as usual, using his cover as a journalist.

The 1929 uprising placed the party actively on the side of Arab rights, and opened the door to a new push from Arab activists and officials.

3. Jewish Immigration

The party was preoccupied by the issue of Jewish immigration and was led to debate it and publish pieces about it more than once. Which stance were we to take on it? There were a few different positions that the comrades took at the time, and they were:

First—that the door should be closed to immigration, since the country’s economic situation could not support more newcomers. Among the immigrants were some who competed with the Jewish labor force itself in the fields of manufacturing and agriculture, in addition to their negative effect on the Arab community, which intensified public hostility toward Jews.

Second—that it was impossible to stop all immigration so long as it was a pillar of the Zionist movement, and that it was better to try to prevent illegal immigration and to stick to a stance of limiting Jewish immigration, a policy which the Arabs themselves demanded. This would unite the party with the Arab national movement, so that cooperation between the two groups could take place on a point of serious political importance.

Third—that we should seek a halt to Jewish “bourgeois immigration” while supporting Jewish “working-class immigration,” as workers were the sinews of the socialist movement. Their presence would produce a conscious proletarian movement, which would help to create social change in Palestine. Those of the latter opinion converged with the theory of the Po’alei Tzion party, which called for the greatest number possible of Jewish workers in Palestine, considering them the educated and conscious vanguard of socialism. In the Po’alei Tzion platform, the Arabs would be integrated into the Jewish socialist society through social mixing and marriage.

Ultimately, the position the party adopted was that immigration should be halted in principle, and that immigration should be restricted and limited to a certain number annually so long as it was impossible to prevent it in practice. The party benefited from this stance, which pleased the Arabs and mollified the Jews.

4. The Land Question

The agricultural situation in Palestine was not feudal, i.e., one in which the large feudal landowners ruled vast expanses of land while peasants worked the land like slaves, as was the situation in Russia, Egypt, and Iraq. Rather, Palestinian agriculture consisted of: a relatively limited area of land, distributed among a few large landowners (farms and orchards, including orange groves); “common” land, which villagers worked with crude cooperative methods; state land, of which some was useful for farming and some was fallow; and finally, many small plots of lands dispersed among small farmers. The latter category made up most of the agricultural land.

As the Jews were making preparations to establish their state with the help of the Mandatory Power, and as this state required ownership of the land, their leaders established two funds to implement plans for the colonization of Palestine. The first of these was the “National Fund” (Keren Kayemeth), the purpose of which was to collect funds from Jewish capital: donations in “shekels” (an ancient Hebrew unit of currency), levies, investments, and so on. The second was the

“Establishment Fund” (Keren HaYesod; the United Jewish Appeal), the mission of which was purchasing land and utilizing it in every possible way.[6] It prevented the resale or transfer of land: The land became the national property of the Jewish people, and only Jewish labor could work there.

The Establishment Fund was active in purchasing land through skilled Jewish and Arab agents. The process of land “purchase” often took on tragic dimensions, as all the departments of the Mandatory government were mobilized to support it, from the agricultural courts to the criminal courts. The result was that the central prison in Jerusalem was overflowing, as were the ‘Atlit quarry near Haifa and the Acre fortress, with immense numbers of peasant “rebels.” The sentences issued to these people ranged from ten years to life imprisonment to execution.

The party had taken a unified stance on this land issue, calling for opposition to the Mandate’s policy, which was designed to impoverish Arab farmers, coerce them into selling their land, then drive them from that land, and against the “businessmen” and landowners—the wealthy farmers and the effendis [educated, middle-class Arabs]—who were selling their land to Jewish institutions. The party wanted to force them to take responsibility for these sales. In this position on agricultural policy, the party worked closely with the Arab national movement, serving our ideological and social struggle.

5. The Arab National Movement

The party took a stance distinct from that of the Arab national movement, as the nationalists were divided: Some were activists struggling against Zionist colonialism, but others were opportunists, collaborating with the occupiers.

The activists were divided into two groups. The first was the Executive Committee, elected by the seventh Palestinian conference in 1928. It was a bourgeois activist group and worked within a framework of Arabism and Islamic solidarity. The second was the leftist nationalist movement, which represented the middle class; it was a petit-bourgeois group that worked in a framework of Arabism combined with internationalism.

The party cooperated with the Executive Committee, supporting its campaigns against the Mandate and Zionism, and collaborated closely with the leftist activists both individually and collectively, even if we did not fully merge with them in a fixed organization at that time. As for other Arab parties in Palestine at the time, the party considered them to be either lacking a popular base or opportunistic and paid them little attention.

Footnotes

1

Eliyahu Tepper, Joseph Berger-Barzilai, Yankel Berman, and David Lichtinsky all served on the PCP’s Central Committee. Sidqi recounts that Lichtinsky briefly “lived in Cairo disguised as a Talmud student” to rekindle Communist activities there but then was discovered and deported. Tepper and Berger-Barzilai were each imprisoned in the Soviet Union under Stalin (the former for “Zionist deviations,” the latter for allegedly meeting with Nazis); both survived.

2

The 1929 violence began in a dispute over the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where Jewish protesters had raised Zionist flags and chanted, “The Wall is ours,” on August 15th, 1929. As fighting spread to a dozen cities, Arabs killed 133 Jews and injured between 198 and 339, while Jews and British Mandate police killed 116 Arabs and wounded at least 232 in one week (August 23rd–29th). The violence peaked on August 25th, when an attack on Jewish civilians in the West Bank city of Hebron killed 67 Jews and wounded 53. The British investigating commission found that the violence was sparked by tensions over communal rights at the Western Wall but fed by a broader “Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future.”

3

This refers to an attack on Sheikh ‘Abd al-Chani ‘Awn and his family during the August violence in Jaffa.

4

Sheikh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1881–1935) was a Syrian-born Muslim preacher and fighter who helped organize resistance movements against Italy in Libya, against the French army in Syria, and finally against British colonialism in Palestine. He declared jihad in Haifa on November 12th, 1935, and was killed by British forces in a forest shootout a week later. His funeral drew more than 3,000 mourners, mainly workers and peasants.

5

The Arabic word used here, “qub‘ah,” is cognate with the Hebrew word “kippah,” but pre-1948 photographs and dictionaries generally show the yarmulke to be strictly indoor headwear in Palestine. This word likely refers to a European-style brimmed hat such as a fedora, which would have marked Sidqi as Jewish because a Muslim man would have worn a fez. However, it is also possible that Sidqi actually wore a yarmulke in public, or misremembered himself doing so.

6

These organizations still exist today—the former as Keren Kayemeth-LeIsrael (or the Jewish National Fund), the latter as Keren Hayesod (or United Israel Appeal)—and serve essentially the same functions for the State of Israel.

Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) was an activist, journalist, translator, and writer. One of the first Arab members of the Palestinian Communist Party, he studied in Moscow, ran a clandestine newspaper in Paris, served in the Spanish Civil War, and opposed Hitlerism.

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and a co-founder of the group Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff. Her book Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance is forthcoming from Princeton Uni. She co-translated Najati Sidqi’s memoir with then-undergraduate students Gideon Gordon and Anas Farhan.

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The Upper Room

Coleman Collins’s exhibition considers how attempts at making a new world risk reproducing the cruelties of the old.

Joseph Earl Thomas

Coleman Collins:

Untitled (Hotel Africa), 2025

Engineered wood, UV print on Dibond

18 x 24 in

On screen, a plantation burns, while a voiceover by the artist verifies a feeling: “For us in particular, there was no hope,” not in what “I would (begrudgingly, unfortunately) describe as my homeland.” My satisfaction at witnessing this classic iconography of escape is tempered, though, by the encroachment of a certain uncanniness. Our speaker’s voice is deep and somber and familiar, definitely black; that is to say, it resonates beyond both pop culture’s fixed repertoire of staid signifiers and the speaker’s own denotative claims. What are you really after? I wondered—waiting, not without delighting in the film’s knowing humor, for the conditions of the scene’s strangeness to reveal themselves. Gazing at the too smooth texture, it struck me: Of course, the plantation is AI generated; the scene transformed from one emblematic of escape into an ouroboros of obliteration. I’m reminded of how the massive energy expenditure required for this technology’s supposedly limitless calculations falls upon the planet, and particularly on the same populations ravaged by the plantation; our acquiescence is manufactured for everything from Grok’s incessant revelation of the obvious to a barrage of nonhuman replacements for the kind of love we never learned to practice ourselves.

The film, The Upper Room, is from Coleman Collins’s exhibition of the same name. The show, first mounted last year at Brief Histories in New York City, crystallizes the artist’s inquiry into fraught efforts at absconding from the anti-black capture at the heart of the American project. It orbits several attempts at escape—most robustly the colonization of Liberia, an endeavor by a cohort of “free” African Americans who, in the early 19th century, sought to resettle in the West African territory in order to escape the United States. (Notably, the process was initiated by the American Colonization Society, a group led by white elites who sought to dispense with black people who were, for the moment, not enslaved, as well as to quell rising abolitionist sentiment.) African Americans then subjected Liberians to a series of displacements and humiliations common to any history of colonization. In a series of low-relief fiberboard wall works based on the interiors of Liberian buildings, Collins draws out the architectural resonances between colonized Liberia and the plantation structures that African Americans carried over from the antebellum South. The reliefs are accompanied by archival photographs; most of the images depict interactions between African Americans and native Liberians—such as Liberian artifacts changing hands amid upper class soirées—and some are drawn from the collection of an African American police officer who trained Liberian police. As Collins makes plain, this attempt at revalorizing the norms of Western conquest should make us hesitant about the heroic gestures of any nascent nationalist enterprise.

While these wall pieces amplify the unsettling spatial continuity between the forms of control African Americans sought to flee and those they reproduced in this experiment of escape, the film unmoors the viewer’s relationship to linear time. As Collins’s voiceover sutures archival footage and AI imagery, I feel alongside the narrator a “vague, yet menacing sensation”: This line of flight does not fulfill its promise to wholly leave behind the past for a new future. Nor should it. The unfinished project of freedom is, well, unfinished. Collins’s work refuses the allure of didactic ease and moral absolutism; instead, it offers a poised reevaluation of mimesis, lest we forget, chasing the promise and necessity of flight, that there’s always a chance we might slide back into a celebration at the heart of that same burning building.

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Still from The Upper Room, 2025

UHD video, 20 mins

Untitled (Ducor basement), 2025

Engineered wood, UV print on Dibond

18 x 24 in

Untitled (Ducor), 2025

Engineered wood, UV print on Dibond

18 x 24 in

Untitled (EJ Roye), 2025

Engineered wood, UV print on Dibond

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I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of the Center for Fiction first novel prize.

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Whose Jewish Dystopia?

With their dark visions of the future, two recent novels illuminate mutually incompatible forms of contemporary Jewish fear.

Lily Meyer

A supporter of the movement to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem passes through Jaffa Gate during a protest in the Old City, January 2nd, 2006.

Kevin Frayer via AP

Discussed in this essay: The Third Temple, by Yishai Sarid, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, Restless Books, 2024. 320 pages.

Next Stop, by Benjamin Resnick, Simon & Schuster, 2024. 320 pages.

In 1895, the journalist Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary that he had “been occupied with a work of infinite grandeur”; that is, developing his vision of Zionism. Despite his utter commitment—“for days and weeks it has possessed me beyond the limits of consciousness”—he wasn’t yet sure what would come of his “mighty dream.” But even if the “conception is not translated into reality,” he mused, “at least out of my activity can come a novel. Title: The Promised Land!” Of course, his efforts did dramatically shape the real world, but not before they produced a work of mediocre fiction. In 1902, he published a utopian tale called The Old New Land, which expounded on the political program set forth in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State. The novel showed readers a former “wasteland” transformed into a technologically and politically modern society where suffering Jews, liberated from both antisemitism and religion, thrived alongside Palestine’s Arab occupants, represented in the novel by one man, an engineer from Haifa who supports Jewish settlement and becomes a political leader. The Old New Land envisions Israel as a society where, as scholar Jeremy Stolow writes, “‘rationality’ and ‘liberal tolerance’ have become the supreme principles of state.” Many of Herzl’s mighty dreams came true; this one, needless to say, did not.

In that period of perilous uncertainty about Jewish life in Europe, Herzl wasn’t alone in articulating possible Jewish futures through utopian fiction. Many of his contemporaries turned to the genre to imagine what might become of them in a Europe that seemed increasingly hostile to Jews. Adolf Agai’s 1877 story “Budapest One Thousand Years Later,” which scholar Stefania Ragaù identifies as the first piece of modern Jewish utopian literature, offers a quite different vision, imagining a Hungary free of antisemitism; in his 1918 sci-fi novel In the Future City of Edenia, Kalmen Zingman did the same with his home country, Ukraine. The lapsed Zionist Nathan Birnbaum channeled his rejection of the movement into a 1907 novel in which Jews multiply enough that the world’s metropolises come to contain their own Jewish utopias. After the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, Jewish utopian literature more or less vanished—perhaps many Jews outside Israel were too scarred by the Shoah to imagine a perfect world, while Zionist true believers turned their utopian energy toward building the fledgling Jewish state. But as Israel gained and abused power, some of its writers began turning to the inverse genre: dystopian literature. (Unsurprisingly, there is a strong dystopian current in Palestinian national literature.) Amos Kenan’s best-selling and influential The Road to Ein Harod (1984), which begins with a fascist coup in Israel and ends with Armageddon, was followed by other works foretelling varyingly disastrous futures, from Yitzhak Ben-Ner’s The Angels Are Coming (1987) to Dror Burstein’s Muck (2016) and Shimon Adaf’s Shadrach (2017).

Among the most acclaimed of these Israeli dystopias is Yishai Sarid’s The Third Temple (2015), which was released in Yardenne Greenspan’s English translation last year. After a faux-scholarly preface identifying what follows as a record from a conquered kingdom, we meet the narrator, a priest named Jonathan, whom we soon see sacrificing a lamb in a temple on Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah. He does so carefully, conscientiously, determined that the animal shouldn’t suffer as it carries out its “superior destiny” of pleasing God with its aroma. Sarid lingers on the scene, writing it with deliberate beauty and collaging in a line from the binding of Isaac in Genesis and Leviticus’s injunction that “the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.” This ancient act unfolds against an explicitly futuristic milieu; in order to enter the temple, Jonathan had to go through a scanner that “read from the computer chip implanted beneath the skin of my neck: ‘Jonathan son of Jehoaz, Jewish, priest, authorized to enter.’” As this suggests, the novel is set in a world in which the State of Israel has transformed into an authoritarian theocracy. Its ruler, Jonathan’s father, Jehoaz, has destroyed the Al-Aqsa Mosque and erected a new temple, replaced the Supreme Court with a rabbinic one, and instated biblical law. He’s also gone to war to annex more of historic Palestine, expelled all Palestinians, and implanted “Judaism chips” in his subjects to track their movements and ensure the kingdom’s ethnic purity. He brutally suppresses dissent, enriches his own family while his subjects starve, and keeps the country in a constant state of war that has left it a pariah nation without a single friend, besides the diaspora Jews who continue to support it and send funds.

Just a few months before Sarid’s Israeli nightmare landed in the US, American Conservative rabbi Benjamin Resnick published his debut novel, the diaspora dystopia Next Stop. This debut novel, set in an unnamed city that is unmistakably New York, it describes a near future in which the State of Israel has not degraded but disappeared entirely and mysteriously, consumed by a black hole. In the aftermath of this cataclysm, countries around the world rush to restrict Jews’ rights and movements. Soon smaller “anomalies” begin to appear in major cities across the globe, causing minor miracles and emitting a siren song that beckons Jews to descend into them; some do so, living underground and riding a “subway below the subway,” presumably searching for a permanent home. Aboveground, the anomalies inspire increasingly rampant antisemitic conspiracy theories, interpersonal violence, and state discrimination. In the city where Next Stop is set, Jews are banned from public spaces and certain lines of work, forced to live in a ghetto called “the Pale,” and subjected to brutal policing by robotic dogs.

Read alongside each other, Next Stop and The Third Temple offer dark visions of the future that illuminate two frighteningly relevant—and mutually incompatible—forms of contemporary Jewish fear. While Sarid’s dystopia is rooted in a terror of untrammeled Jewish power, Resnick’s is grounded in the notion that antisemitism is an inexplicable, ineradicable force only kept in check by the strength of the Jewish state. This deeply Zionist idea, consciously cultivated by Israel and promulgated by mainstream Jewish communal voices, has become enormously influential; in the wake of October 7th, President Joe Biden repeated variations of the remark that “were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.” Indeed, though Next Stop doesn’t explicitly address Zionism—and was written well before the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the genocide in Gaza—it’s hard not to notice the resonance between the novel’s premise and the worldview of those who see any hostility toward Israel as antisemitic. After all, Resnick imagines a world in which the fabric of time and space itself discriminates against Jews; its dystopia is essentially just the exaggerated existence of antisemitism, which Jews can escape only by reaching some mysterious homeland. Sarid’s dystopia, by contrast, hinges on the conviction that a Jewish ruler can be venal, brutal, and authoritarian enough to destroy an entire society, and that his subjects can be manipulated into such fervent Jewish chauvinism that they’ll let him do it. That is, while Next Stop rests on an old and dangerous delusion, The Third Temple has proven alarmingly prescient.

When The Third Temple came out in Israel in 2015, it was responding to political developments that sowed the seeds of the catastrophic present. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was solidifying power and welcoming far-right religious hard-liners into his coalition, including those who aspired to demolish Al-Aqsa and build a new temple where it stands. Sarid, raised in a family of committed leftists and secularists—his father, Yossi Sarid, spent decades in the Knesset, arguing for civil and human rights, a two-state solution, and a complete separation of religion and state—was appalled. He wrote The Third Temple, his fourth novel, to warn against the future he feared his government was ushering in.

The Third Temple’s narrator does not share its creator’s view. Jonathan is a naive, repressed loyalist who clings to the sense of purpose he gets from his priestly duties; even when an angel of God urges him to reconsider his commitments, he refuses. Through Jonathan’s worshipful eyes, Sarid shows us the horrors of life in a despotic, warmongering nation that is unmistakably a hyperbolized version of contemporary Israel. The dystopian features of the new “Kingdom of Judah” are all amplifications of existing Israeli policies and dynamics or manifestations of real political currents. The mandatory “Judaism chips,” for instance, are an eerie advance on the ID cards that facilitate Jews’ safe passage through Israel’s apartheid checkpoint system. Dissenters from the regime are considered “defeatists,” or worse, “inciters and sinners”; the chief of the secret police brags that he can “punish you for your thoughts.” With Palestinians expelled from the territory under its control in The Third Temple, the kingdom generates internal scapegoats. In a clear evocation of Nazi ideology, this Jewish fascism espouses racial purity, physical strength, and a “clean life of harmony with nature” and oppresses the disabled and anyone else understood as weak or imperfect. This remains a source of ongoing shame and grief for Jonathan: He was severely injured by a grenade in his childhood, and treated with great scorn as a result of the lasting damage.

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The dystopian features of the new “Kingdom of Judah” are all amplifications of existing Israeli policies and dynamics or manifestations of real political currents.

Meanwhile, the kingdom’s aggression toward its neighbors—referred to collectively as “Amalek, the ancient and evil enemy of Israel”—is unmitigated, though the Jewish nation understands itself as the victim. Reflecting on the steady stream of casualties within the kingdom, Jonathan declares, “We all knew who was to blame: the Amalek and the nations of the world whose hatred for us is eternal.” (The reference to a biblical foe the ancient Israelites are enjoined to exterminate, long used by the Israeli far right to justify violence against Palestinians, was deployed by Netanyahu to announce his genocidal intentions after October 7th.) This is not the only time Sarid has explored the dangers of the narrative of eternal Jewish victimhood; his 2017 novel, The Memory Monster, which appeared in Greenspan’s English translation in 2020, satirizes Holocaust memorialization in Israel to suggest that this self-understanding has allowed Jews to become perpetrators. Discussing that novel in Haaretz just after its US release, Sarid said of his nation, “We’re no longer helpless Jews, but we still make allowances for ourselves as if we were still weak, helpless Jews.” In The Third Temple, these allowances—and the sense of impunity they foster—lead directly to endless devastation.

Next Stop springs from a variation on the very beliefs Sarid criticizes. Resnick has said that he views antisemitism as a “monster living in the closet”—a beast that may sleep, but always “wakes up . . . hungry.” With the novel, he explained, he was “trying to imagine what it will look like when the monster, inevitably, wakes up here in America.” The book opens with the meeting of its protagonists, Ethan and Ella, two Jews in their mid- to late thirties, who attempt to launch a relationship and lead normal lives, even as antisemitic animus grows and society crumbles around them. Ella, a single mother, is far more anxious about their fate than her boyfriend, who feels that their dystopian black-hole situation “would resolve itself and . . . things would be fine because they were always fine.” Whatever the narrative justification for his comparative optimism—perhaps the fact that, unlike Ella, he has no child to worry about and no family who vanished with Israel—he ultimately functions as a straw man of sorts; the novel swiftly disproves his point of view and validates Ella’s. The implication is obvious: For Jews, nothing is ever fine.

Next Stop, which is built on that belief, is so convinced of its obviousness that it makes no effort to imagine the political conditions that would actually imperil Jews. Indeed, Resnick’s decision to dump readers straight into his antisemitic dystopia implies a fundamental assumption that his audience—like his novel—is paranoid enough that he doesn’t need to establish the details of his dystopia and the antisemitism that drives it. Why is it the case that the majority of world Jewry disappearing suddenly makes all non-Jews more inclined to hate and ghettoize those who remain, rather than ignoring, pitying, or even trying to save them? How does the circulation of ambiguous antisemitic conspiracy theories trigger dramatic legislative shifts and social upheaval? And what, by the way, is the status of other religious and ethnic minorities in decaying societies that discriminate against Jews? Resnick answers none of these questions.

While Next Stop is carefully and even somewhat lyrically written—full of lovingly drawn scenes of childhood, holidays, and miraculous events—it’s marred by this rampant imprecision, which even extends to its sense of Jewishness itself. Despite occasional vague references to “registration apps” that track Jews’ movements, Resnick gives no account of how the coffee shops and bakeries that refuse to serve Jews identify them as such. They have no chip, as in The Third Temple, nor any special ID or armband; sight alone seems sufficient. (In fact, at one point a sympathetic non-Jew remarks to Ella that “everyone seems to be able to spot a Jew these days,” himself included.) This representation, combined with the anomalies’ inexplicable machinations—their “strange interior pull” manifests physically within all Jews, and according to the government, scientists suspect that Jewish mobility around the globe somehow makes them grow—makes it clear that in Next Stop, Jews are an essentially and visibly distinct race.

Next Stop tells a story of Jewish vulnerability at the very moment many American Jews have retreated into victimhood to avoid confronting Israel’s crimes.

Given the novel’s emphasis on inescapable Jewish precarity, it’s no surprise that one review, written by Megan Peck Shub for the Jewish Book Council in August 2024, declared that despite its implausibility, the narrative may seem “familiar, as if its events, in one form or another, have already happened—or are happening right now.” Next Stop tells a story of Jewish vulnerability at the very moment many American Jews have retreated into victimhood to avoid confronting Israel’s crimes. In fairness, The Third Temple could also be accused of telling certain Zionist readers what they want to hear: Its emphasis on a single corrupt leader may appeal to readers who blame Israel’s ongoing slaughter solely on Netanyahu, while its association of violence with Orthodox extremism might seem to let mainstream, secular Israeli society off the hook. Notably, in a postscript to the English edition in which he contextualizes the novel within the gradual rise of the religious far right, Sarid writes that in 1948, “reconstructing the temple was not on the agenda” because “the nation’s secular leaders were focused on building a home for their persecuted people,” declining to mention the violent dispossession wrought by those secular leaders. The novel itself is likewise not interested in interrogating the violence and dispossession involved in the building of that home.

Still, The Third Temple is a lucid and chilling examination of just how easily the belief in eternal Jewish victimhood gives rise to a terrifying politics of Jewish impunity—an urgent warning in 2015, and all the more so now. Last November, four years after insisting in Haaretz that Jews shouldn’t consider themselves weak and helpless, Sarid told the same journalist, now interviewing him about The Third Temple, that he feels we “are in a fight . . . over the image of Judaism. Will it continue to be a Judaism that includes morality, and also creativity, and free thought? Will it have tolerance for others? Or will it be a Judaism of extremism, and racist, as I describe in the book—the direction we are going in today.” For Resnick, dystopia is always just around the corner, and fear is the natural, practical response to the Jewish condition. But for Sarid, such fear, felt only for ourselves, is the sure route to a dystopian future.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novels The End of Romance and Short War.

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The Dream Logic of Fascism

In Charlotte Beradt’s study of nightmares under Nazism, the analysis often seems inadequate to the material.

Raphael Magarik

Image from a 1943 Charlotte Beradt essay in Free World that became the basis for The Third Reich of Dreams

Discussed in this essay: The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, by Charlotte Beradt, translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University Press, 2025. 152 pages.

Several weeks after Trump’s inauguration, I dreamed that my wife and I wanted to have our infant daughter’s room painted but could not afford to at today’s rates. Fortunately, we had access to a time machine; a house painter from the past would be much cheaper. Concerned about our workman interfering with history upon his return, we knew we would have to keep him absolutely insulated from current events. I suggested that we hire a young Adolf Hitler, whom we would have every incentive to hide from the world. He did good work, and we happily sent him back to the 1920s, but I soon noticed that we had somehow slipped up and made the Holocaust even worse. We agreed that if we did this again, we would have to be more careful.

By enlisting the past-future führer (and mediocre painter) in our home-improvement project, my mind seemed to express absurdly what, in those days, I found myself constantly remarking upon to friends: namely, the absolute incongruity between the unfolding catastrophes of the world at large and my nuclear family’s tiny Eden. The ominous tendril to creep in under the nursery door was, appropriately, a rise in prices—a proximate cause of Trump’s victory and thus our current authoritarian woes. The dream also evoked an uncomfortable truth: Much as my imaginary Hitler was serving rather than threatening our domestic tranquility, in the increasingly nightmarish real world, fascism was purporting to protect my family. A week before the dream, Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident, had been kidnapped, detained, and threatened with deportation under the pretense that he, and the pro-Palestine protests he helped lead at Columbia, represented a threat to young Jews, which is to say that our daughter was, in a sense, the rationale for storm trooper thuggery. Indeed, my fantasy of a Hitlerian TaskRabbit resembles the mainstream Jewish institutions’ delusion of collaborating safely with Trumpists to quash criticism of Israel.

At the time, I had Nazi dreams on the brain; I was reading the new edition of The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, a remarkable book by German journalist Charlotte Beradt, originally published in 1966 and now freshly translated by Damion Searls and reissued by Princeton University Press. Inspired by her own terrible nightmares, Beradt began collecting them from friends and acquaintances in 1933. She eventually assembled more than 300 dreams, which she anonymized, rendering certain key terms in code—Hitler became “Uncle Hans,” an arrest was “the flu”—and hid in the spines of her books. Before she and her husband, both Jews and Communists, fled to London in 1939, Beradt mailed some to friends abroad for safekeeping. In 1943, living in New York, she wrote a short article for the left-liberal magazine Free World about the material she had amassed, before finally releasing the collection of several dozen dreams with her commentary. (An English edition, translated by Adriane Gottwald, followed in 1968.)

The Third Reich of Dreams makes a powerful impression; I found it literally breathtaking. Some of the dreams are terrifying, as when a girl imagines that the angelic figurines hanging above her bed were surveilling rather than shielding her. Others are more subtly ominous. Many people reported dreaming: “It’s forbidden to dream but I’m dreaming anyway”; one hatmaker imagined that “to be safe” from government persecution, she was “speaking Russian . . . so that I wouldn’t understand myself.” As Beradt exposes the fears and desires of ordinary Germans, one feels oneself encountering an unmediated underbelly, as if the Holocaust had been made to lie on an analyst’s couch.

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As Beradt exposes the fears and desires of ordinary Germans, one feels oneself encountering an unmediated underbelly, as if the Holocaust had been made to lie on an analyst’s couch.

The marketing of the new edition suggests that Beradt’s book offers not just historical insight but lessons for our frightening present. A front-cover blurb by novelist Zadie Smith describes it as “essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state—or is worried they’re about to find out,” and a new preface by poet Dunya Mikhail calls the text “strikingly relevant” and “incredibly timely.” Some of the reception has been even more direct: Mark Dery wrote in The Washington Post that “this travelogue through the German unconscious will look chillingly familiar to anyone living in Trump’s America.” Smith says much the same in her own essay about the edition for The New York Review of Books.

Right-wing authoritarianism is at its worst globally since the 1930s; some analogy between the two moments is unavoidable and even useful. But comparison can easily lead to analytic imprecision. For instance, despite conceding that there are significant differences between Nazism and Trumpism, Smith’s review nonetheless describes both as “totalitarianism,” with the ideologies sharing a common “propaganda machine.” (Now it’s the “algorithm,” instead of the “megaphone, the radio, and the printing press,” that is “imposing mandatory conformity.”) Thus the relevance of Beradt’s “straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.” However authoritarian and fascist our contemporary regime is, it is generally not described as “totalitarian”—and for good reason. Far from subsuming private life into the public state, Trump is aiming at something like the reverse: the federal bureaucracy dismantled, health care regulated by innumerable quack influencers, more “school choice” and church charters. Even his assertion of federal authority hinges on the preservation of the private sphere, like state repression to secure the private rights of Zionist students to their “safe spaces.” (And whatever social media’s baneful contributions to Trumpism, ten minutes on X will confirm that it enforces not “conformity” but abrasive, partisan disagreement.) Careless analogizing produces not just platitudes but actual obfuscation.

One can hardly blame an author for her posthumous reception, but Beradt’s text itself offers the kind of too-tidy conception of Nazi totalitarianism that facilitates facile analogies to the present and impedes a knottier mode of historical comparison. Reading the dreams she collected as invested with a pristine clarity and oracular foresight, Beradt posits a single shared psychology of life in the totalitarian state. In so doing, she oversimplifies the past, leveling the social contradictions out of which Nazism arose and treating 1930s German society as if it were already the uniform singularity toward which the state aspired. The Third Reich of Dreams is thus easily assimilable into straightforward tales of authoritarian power and valiant resistance, and satisfying to those seeking the consolation such stories can offer. Those binaries comfortingly cast us as heroes or victims. But dreams can do much more interesting work. As my own surreal reflection of my family’s role as authoritarian pretext suggests, they can instead reveal the web of complex conflicts, both psychological and political, in which we are caught. Ultimately, Beradt’s dreams thus have most to teach us if we attend to the ways they exceed her interpretations—to their stubborn hints of the entanglements from which fascism emerges.

Beradt was fascinated by her dream archive’s apparent prescience; she repeatedly calls attention to moments and images that anticipate later events. Although their visions are “not prophetic,” she writes in the first chapter, “these dreamers, with sensitivity sharpened by fear and repulsion, perceive almost imperceptible symptoms in the profusion of daily events.” The hatmaker’s dream about speaking a language she did not understand “in case [she] said anything about the government,” Beradt writes, “has since become reality in Auschwitz, where the impossible became possible”; at the 1947 Auschwitz trial, a camp prisoner who had worked as a secretary testified to her fear of having revealed state secrets in her sleep. Elsewhere, a young woman dreams of hiding beneath a pile of corpses. “What comes to mind,” Beradt writes, “is that ten years after this dream, during the mass exterminations of ‘the Final Solution,’ people without the right papers really did have to hide beneath piles of corpses.”

But the uncanny portrait of a nation glimpsing its inevitable fate depends on Beradt’s editing and commentary. Sometimes, in its commitment to predictive reading, the exegesis discards or obscures the past and present. In the case of the dream about the pile of corpses, the dreamer herself connects the gruesome scene to “a description of the pile of corpses left outside of Khartoum after the Mahdist revolt,” a brutal struggle in which Sudanese rebels fought first the Egyptian army and then the British Empire. Beradt’s emphasis on the dream’s anticipatory quality requires turning away from the Holocaust’s precedents in the colonial violence that anticipated Auschwitz. Later in the book, Beradt writes that a Jewish woman’s dream of a “Vermin Keep Out” sign at a restaurant in proves the dreamer’s ability to “predict in detail the upcoming campaigns,” because such signs “had not yet started showing up in restaurants”—except the dream occurred in “the winter of 1936-’37,” when they certainly had. In such cases, Beradt’s book contains what biblical scholars describe as prophecies “ex eventu,” that is, ones written after, and with consequent knowledge of, the events they purportedly predict. More often, though, Beradt extends early symptoms of Nazism’s ultimate catastrophe into premonitions of a more general concept of 20th-century oppression. After an account of a dream involving surveillance, Beradt remarks, “It is important to realize that this dream . . . dates from 1933. What today are political facts, everyday realities, were not yet described in novels: Orwell’s ever-present Big Brother did not yet exist.”

Beradt’s tendencies toward consolidation and abstraction were part of a broader contemporary trend that elevated the Holocaust above the contingencies of ordinary history and into the realm of indelible myth. The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes the 1950s and ’60s as pivotal decades for the “removal of the Holocaust from particulars of time, place, and person” and its transformation into a “moral universal.” What early observers often understood as various specific war crimes were reinterpreted as a single, unified event and given the name we now take for granted—a conceptual shift that made the Nazi genocide newly available for abstract analogizing. In her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt interpreted Nazism and Stalinism as twin instances of the same phenomenon; this analysis not only gave intellectual heft to a common-sense, liberal anti-communism by casting the USSR as absolutely villainous but also helped fashion from the Holocaust an explanatory paradigm to be applied elsewhere. A decade later, the Milgram experiments proffered universal, social-psychological theories of human susceptibility to authoritarianism (one participant reported that his wife told him, “You can call yourself Eichmann”). Gradually, the Holocaust came to be seen as potentially relevant to everyone, the global paradigm for genocidal evil.

Beradt’s tendencies toward consolidation and abstraction were part of a broader contemporary trend that elevated the Holocaust above the contingencies of ordinary history and into the realm of indelible myth.

As in this emerging myth, the details of history are less important in The Third Reich of Dreams than the clash of moral forces, from which Beradt derives an analytic typology concerned with the degeneration of the individual personality under totalitarianism: The majority, who submitted to the regime, lost their very personhood, whereas the few who resisted were rewarded with continued psychological coherence. She describes a woman who dreams of hiding her copy of the possibly subversive Schiller play Don Carlos under her maid’s bed; when the storm troopers find it, she realizes the book she hid was actually a harmless atlas but nonetheless “stood there feeling horribly guilty and let them throw it on the truck.” Here, Beradt identifies “the new kind of individual created by totalitarianism.” Even though innocent, she is ashamed—it hardly matters whether for her subversive intentions or her failure to speak up, since in either case the point is that totalitarianism has induced an absurd self-alienation. Similarly, a construction worker dreams that a post office refuses to sell stamps to the regime’s critics; he stands meekly waiting his turn until, eventually, an Englishman cuts the line and tells off the postal clerk. The construction worker sees clearly the moral of the dream: “I made myself a ridiculous man.” Beradt explicitly outlines this near-universal template in her sustained analysis of the dream that opens the book:

Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.

The dream, she writes, reveals a paradigmatic devolution into “a non-person”; it “depicts not so much an individual’s fate as a typical event in the process of transformation,” exhibiting “the nature and effects of totalitarian domination as numerous studies by political scientists, sociologists, and doctors would later define them.”

According to Beradt, only dissidents’ dreams—which involved “decisive action” and lacked the absurd, paradoxical distortions that characterized others’—show them holding fast to their agency and individuality. In one 1934 dream from a “resistance fighter’s wife,” she explains, the dreamer “defends herself and is neither a non-hero nor a non-person.” Another finds an underground journalist being discovered and cunningly evading capture, all while knocking down Nazi flags and ripping a picture of Hitler from a café wall; in this “action-packed” narrative, Beradt notes, “every blow is followed by a counterattack.” The strict binary strains credulity—and, indeed, it is absent from the original 1943 article. There, she views resisters’ dreams as less distinctive: Although they notably included struggle against Nazism, they finally “shifted back from the realm of action into that of suffering” that characterizes the other dreams.

The book’s more rigid division, conceived and retrofitted sometime in the ensuing decades, suggests a misunderstanding of the moment from which many of these dreams emerged. In the early 1930s, after all, the distinctions in Germany were not yet between a singularly obsessive and murderous state, on the one hand, and resisting heroes, on the other; totalitarianism, like everything else, develops historically, congealing from a complex stew of political antagonisms. Beradt’s key binary leads her to downplay more salient differences: those between social groups variously affected by the rising Reich. This tendency is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in her treatment of Jews. Though they are accorded their own chapter in the book, she insists that their dreams “occupied the same realm of fear and oppression as the dreams of all the other groups” and thus exhibited exactly the same themes “we have seen so much of, but to an extreme.” (When the British rabbi Lionel Blue quipped, “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so,” I do not think he had the Holocaust in mind.)

Beradt’s neat buckets of moral abstraction prove too small for her dreams, which repeatedly overflow with details, offering not straightforward dichotomies but a messy hermeneutic surfeit. At stake in the factory owner’s dream, for instance, is not just his “humiliation” before his workers but also his transformation into one. Thus, the unnaturally slow arm, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, depicts the thoroughly material alienation of the factory, in which the employee’s body acquires its own mechanical, inhuman rhythm to complement the assembly line’s. (It is not Mr. S’s soul that is deformed but his body, as accentuated by his final gaze at Goebbels’s “clubfoot.”) To generalize the experiences of a factory owner into a universal paradigm implies a theory of Nazism to which labor exploitation is irrelevant: She pointedly notes that Mr. S was a “Social Democrat” who “had employed many of his old Party comrades,” as if to forestall any thought of class conflict. For Beradt, the mortification lies in the inversion of traditional hierarchies, the unmanning of a solid, upstanding bourgeois. But to me, the bracing force of this dream is rather the continuity between the authoritarianisms of the factory floor and of fascism—the anticipation, partial yet undeniable, of Nazi dehumanization in the objectification of capitalism itself.

Beradt’s neat buckets of moral abstraction prove too small for her dreams, which repeatedly overflow with details, offering not straightforward dichotomies but a messy hermeneutic surfeit.

The thorny particularity of dreams is, of course, one of the great themes of psychoanalysis. Nowhere is the de-particularizing spirit of Beradt’s book more explicit than in the contrast she draws between her own approach and the therapeutic one, which she declares inadequate to the circumstances of totalitarianism. While for Sigmund Freud, dreams are coded expressions of private neuroses, Beradt asserts in the first chapter that those she collected refer to a public, overwhelming reality, and communicate unambiguously: “They have no façade concealing personal contexts and association, and there is no need for anyone else to interpret how events in the dream are related to events in waking life.” In other words, the dream is not the object to be interpreted but rather itself the interpretation of political life. Later, considering a dream in which a child of a “mixed marriage” dreams of fleeing with her Jewish mother on her back, only to experience “a horrific sense of relief” when she realizes her mother is dead, Beradt absolutely rejects speaking of any “latent, repressed hatred of the mother . . . waiting for an outlet,” and quotes the philosopher Karl Jaspers on the “existential nonsense of dream interpretation,” part of a “trend of degrading the individual person,” presumably by postulating that our psychic lives are determined by shared subterranean desires. Her suggestion that psychoanalysis collaborates with the Nazi debasement of the individual is dubious as well as ironic: Here, Beradt is the one insisting on the absolute priority of a single shared public situation over private history.

By contrast, Jewish psychoanalysts and cultural theorists on the left claimed from the beginning of Nazism that its pathologies interacted complexly with specific histories and social contradictions, especially of class—and were therefore experienced psychologically in radically different ways by different sectors of German society. Already in 1933, Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian student of Freud and one-time communist, was arguing that fascism grows from the “reactionary germ cell” of the nuclear family, so that the sexual repression of the proletariat funnels erotic energy toward authoritarianism. In his 1941 Escape from Freedom, the German analyst and socialist Erich Fromm tried to profile Nazism psychologically; placing Freud’s ideas in dialogue with the longue durée development of capitalism, he theorized that the material precarity of the middle classes encouraged certain ego insecurities, which in turn rendered them prone to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column from the early 1950s mixed Marxist and psychoanalytic insights, rooting fascist tendencies in the banal humiliations and commodity consumerism of middle-class life. The particulars of such interpretations have aged variously, but they all share virtues that Beradt’s analysis lacks: a sense of Nazism as the product of concrete histories and social dilemmas, and the understanding of individual psyches as differing not just through their moral choices but because of their places in social hierarchies.

Yet, as the stray allusion to Khartoum or the questions raised by the factory owner’s class suggest, Beradt’s dreams are often fraught with luminous wrinkles, ironed out by her readings. Take that half-Jewish woman who dreamed of bearing her dying mother on her back. (She thus resembles not Freud’s Oedipus but Virgil’s Aeneas, who similarly schleps his father Anchises out of a burning Troy, and who must prize himself free from the old man’s death grip before he can sire Rome, his new fatherland.) Beradt’s dichotomy between the psychoanalytic and the political ignores how Nazism grew from, reinforced, and remade all manner of nasty familial structures, through its hypermasculinity, fascination with racial genealogy, and invocations of the Vaterland. In 1936–37, this unfortunate young woman was classified by the Nuremberg Laws as a “mischling,” situated in an agonizing ambiguity and tantalized by the possibility—almost invariably elusive—of admission into a new fatherland. Thus she also dreamed she “had a child with an Aryan man and the man’s mother wanted to take the child away from me because I wasn’t pure Aryan. I screamed, ‘Now that my mother is dead none of you can hold anything against me!’” This fantasy of simultaneously spurning and replicating her mixed lineage, of disowning and becoming her mother, shows she experienced the rise of the Third Reich and the personal fixations of her own nuclear family as tightly, excruciatingly knotted.

We owe Beradt a tremendous debt for preserving such dreams, even if, or in fact because, her analysis often seems inadequate to them. They incite us to the torturous, particularized, and necessarily speculative interpretations of the innumerable hidden and contested pathways between public and private; it is this invitation, not a general exhortation to resist, that we could use now. (We lack, after all, not political will but a winning strategy, which will require a richer understanding of our conditions.) Indeed, such a mode of analysis may even serve as an alternative model for historical thinking. Today, one most commonly reaches for a Holocaust analogy desiring clarity or moral authority. But at its best, dream interpretation involves a sequence of tentative symbolic identifications, proposed and revised in a fraught dialogue. We’d likewise be best served by looking to history not as an anthology of nightmares reminding us what we already know but as a shifting storm of social forces whose meaning never settles. For there are in fact no universal morals, any more than there are universal dreams.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago; his book, Fictions of God, is coming out in November 2025.

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Degrees of Separation

Israel’s new international college programs offer American students an escape from campus activism while training them as state cheerleaders.

Maya Rosen

Graduation day at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, June 2025.

Reichman University Facebook page

On a sunny afternoon in April, I filed into an auditorium at Reichman University in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, with some hundred prospective students and their families. Outside the auditorium, staff handed out brochures, pens, and tote bags emblazoned with the motto of Reichman’s international school: “Live in Israel, study in English.” We watched a short promotional video for the school, featuring smiling students and grassy quads. Afterward, Jonathan Davis, the head of the international school and the university’s vice president for external relations, took the stage. His presentation was largely like any other college information session: We heard about the school’s majors, dorms, sports teams, and an alumni network he boasted was comparable to those at Ivy League universities. But there was one important difference between those schools and Reichman, Davis explained: “We’re a university where you won’t find any woke or cancel culture or antisemitism.” The crowd cheered.

At a time when university campuses around the world regularly erupt in protests against Israel, Reichman University offers a markedly different option. “We’re not embarrassed to call ourselves Zionist,” Davis told the prospective students. “You’re going to find yourself in a very comfortable situation on this campus.” On the other hand, he noted, “if you’re an avowed anti-Zionist and you support BDS, I don’t think you’ll feel comfortable here.” Davis went on to describe the “tremendous amount of unity” on campus in support of the Israeli military, boasting that 55% of Reichman students had served in reserve duty since October 7th. The school encourages former combat soldiers to enroll by offering them reduced admissions requirements and has even adapted aspects of Israeli military hierarchy into its own social structure: Each new student is assigned to an older student counselor, most of whom, Davis explained, are former military officers.

Reichman, Israel’s only private university, has an enrollment of some 8,500 students, about a third of whom came to the school from outside the country. This international student body is growing, including since October 7th: For the 2024–25 academic year, it increased by 6%. Among the influx were several dozen students who transferred to Reichman from US universities in the middle of the school year. Applications were up for this year, too, and Davis believes the school’s unabashed Zionism is “a big selling point. People don’t want anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstrations,” he told me. “They don’t necessarily want Palestinian flags in their face. And they don’t want to be made to feel bad.”

Reichman has operated its English-language international school since 2001, making it something of an outlier among Israeli universities. Most of its peers have run study abroad programs for decades, and in some cases have offered undergraduate degrees to a small number of international students in particular fields—but full-scale undergraduate BA programs for foreign students were by and large not part of their educational model. Now, though, these schools are following Reichman’s lead; in fact, nearly every research university in the country—including Hebrew University, the Technion, and Tel Aviv University—has opened or significantly expanded English-language BA programs since October 7th or plans to soon. The trend is also spreading to smaller colleges like Kiryat Ono and Western Galilee, which are opening English-language BA programs for the first time in the 2025–26 academic year.

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Nearly every research university in Israel has opened or significantly expanded English-language BA programs since October 7th.

Overall numbers of international students in Israel remain small, but they are growing quickly. According to a report by the Kohelet Forum, an influential conservative Israeli think tank, some 1,500 international undergraduates were enrolled in BA programs in Israel in the 2021–22 academic year, a number that doubled to around 3,000 in 2023–24. A spokesperson for Ariel University, which is located in the occupied West Bank, told me the school had seen a 50% increase in enrollment in its English-language program since October 7th; a promotional video for Bar-Ilan University, posted by Jamie Geller, an online influencer who has worked with the school to promote international recruitment, claimed that applications to its international school were up by 40% in the same period. Many of these students’ home communities report the same trend: “It’s night and day in terms of how many students are considering college in Israel, more than ever before,” Esther Genuth, a college-guidance counselor at the Modern Orthodox Frisch School in New Jersey, told me. A few years ago, she said, “there’d be a handful of students looking into Israeli colleges.” Now, “the numbers are really astounding.”

They are increasing in the context of a post-October 7th Israeli immigration boom: Between October 2023 and September 2024, Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration reported a 62% increase in American Jews opening immigration files—a total of more than 6,000 applications—compared with the same period the previous year. (“Aliyah” is a term used to describe Jews moving to Israel; it literally means “ascension.” Anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent is eligible for citizenship in Israel under the country’s Law of Return.) Increases in applicants from other countries during that period were striking as well: France’s pool of would-be immigrants to Israel topped 5,550, an increase of 355% from the previous year, and Canada’s files numbered over 800, an increase of 87%. The Israeli military is seeing the same trend: During this past March–April recruitment period, for example, enlistment of new immigrants arriving to join the army increased about 40% compared with the same period in 2023. Many of these immigrants are “October 8th Jews,” a term coined by the right-wing American commentator Bret Stephens—and now broadly popular among conservatives—to describe Jews whose commitments to Jewish identity and Israel intensified after October 7th. When I spoke with Geller, the Bar-Ilan-associated influencer, she referenced the “October 8th” concept and explained that “there’s a pipeline” from increased Jewish engagement to studying in Israel to, eventually, aliyah—“the ultimate realization,” she explained, of a “Great Jewish Awakening” that followed October 7th.

Some on the right have been trying to direct diaspora Jews into this pipeline for years, focusing especially on university students. In a 2019 article for right-wing Tablet magazine, the writer Liel Liebovitz called for American Jews “to radically rethink their choices when it comes to higher education” in response to the alleged phenomenon of campus antisemitism and promoted the “crazy idea” of college in Israel as a way forward. When campus pro-Palestine organizing accelerated two years ago in response to Israel’s military campaign against Gaza, the same pundits seized the moment to normalize this “crazy idea” and render it urgent. “Jews need to get out of academia, and they need to get out now,” Liebovitz urged in November 2023 in Makor Rishon, a newspaper associated with Israel’s Religious Zionist movement. “They must understand that there is nothing left for American Jews in the world of academia.” A few months later in the Jerusalem Post, conservative historian Gil Troy proposed “encouraging America’s best students” to attend college in Israel as a way of “draining the academic swamps” in the United States.

Far from empty rhetoric, this sort of hyperbole advertises a political project with increasing formal backing by the State of Israel. Since October 7th, and especially following the rise of encampments on US campuses in the spring of 2024, Israeli university administrators, politicians, and organizations have been urging their government to do more to absorb Jewish students from abroad. Last April, Peretz Lavie, the former president of the Technion—a highly ranked university in Haifa that specializes in science and engineering—published an op-ed in the business newspaper TheMarker comparing the situation of Jewish students at Ivy League schools today to that of German Jewish students in the 1930s. “Now is the time to open wide the doors of Israeli academia to Jewish students,” he wrote, calling on lawmakers to make this project “a national operation.” Days later, Israel’s Association of University Heads released a statement offering to assist Jewish students and faculty “who wish to join Israeli universities and find a welcoming academic and personal home.” In January 2025, the Kohelet Forum published a policy report proposing a plan for doing just that. Like other iterations of this idea, the report argues that at Israeli universities, these students would find “a much more supportive and welcoming environment than at elite institutions” abroad. Projecting this vision into the longer term, it goes on to argue that, over time, “parents and children will change their views on continuing education in American universities. The idea of pursuing a degree in Israel will begin to permeate.” Perhaps most notably, the report positions young diaspora Jews as an “important human capital reserve” for the State of Israel, imagining international students as “strategic assets” who would go on to serve an ambassadorial role on the country’s behalf. In the future, the report concluded, this “Zionist reserve” might play a pivotal role in “enhancing the global reputation of Israeli universities” and “creating a foundation for the advancement of Israel’s academia and economy.” The reports’ authors told me that the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism adopted this plan and has begun implementing it this year.

The calculating language of the Kohelet report un-derscores the fact that the push to expand Israeli international schools is not just ideological but strategic. As the scholar Maya Wind, whose book Towers of Ivory and Steel maps out Israeli universities’ role in Palestinian dispossession, noted in an interview, foreign students function as a tool of soft power in the practice of Israeli statecraft: These students, and the esteem and connections they bring with them, have the potential to burnish Israel’s image on the world stage. “It’s a question of prestige, a question of funding, a question of political legitimacy,” Wind explained. Similar to the Kohelet report, multiple advocates I spoke to explicitly framed the presence of international students in Israel as a matter of national interest—even if they don’t ultimately complete the pipeline and move to Israel. “A certain percentage will want to tie their fate to Israel. That helps the state. On the other hand, those who return to the US will be ambassadors of goodwill,” Lavie told me. This comes in the context of Israeli officials’ concern that “what’s happening on US campuses is a strategic threat” to the State of Israel, as Knesset member Oded Forer declared during a parliamentary hearing last May. “The American president, in another 15, 20, 30 years, is a student today . . . on one of these campuses.” For the recruiters of American students, this same threat can also be recast as an opportunity. Yuval Sinai, the co-author of the Kohelet report, was blunt about his plans: He and his colleagues hoped, he told me, to “take advantage of the crisis of antisemitism and the difficulties that students are experiencing” as “an opportunity that would bring diaspora Jews closer to the State of Israel.”

Israel is developing this new soft power strategy as an older one breaks down. Since the 1990s, the Israeli government and Zionist organizations in and outside the country have tried to shore up attachment to Israel among diaspora Jewish youth through tourism and exchange programs that promote an image of Israel as a liberal democracy and support for it as apolitical. As that image becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, these programs have struggled. Their flagship initiative, Birthright Israel, which has brought a total of close to a million diaspora Jews on free trips to Israel since 1999, is now a bellwether of this decline: Participation in the program had already significantly dropped by the summer of 2023. This shift also marks the broader collapse of a multigenerational liberal base receptive to Zionist messaging, particularly in the United States. “There’s a bifurcation going on,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist and scholar of Middle East studies at Columbia University, referring to the emergence of two opposing poles: a left-wing student movement galvanized by the genocide and a countermovement of young Jews who have embraced a stridently right-wing pro-Israel identity.

The push to expand Israel’s international student body might be understood as an attempt by pro-Israel institutions to cultivate a smaller, more committed base that can substitute for the broad liberal constituency that has been lost. Multiple sources for this piece described Israel’s growing international school network as an intensified heir to Birthright; as the Kohelet report puts it, the older program was like “a good first date; now it’s time for the relationship between Jews abroad and Israelis to take the logical next step” of integration into Israeli society. In framing this narrowing as a “logical next step,” rather than as evidence of contraction, Zionist organizations appear to be attempting to rebrand retreat as progress—and to transform the loss of wider appeal into a show of vitality. In the process, they are drawing on a long-established international tradition of using foreign study programs to serve political goals. Internationalizing its campuses is a “very important legitimizing mechanism” for the state, according to Wind, even if the strategy “has mostly succeeded in attracting Zionist Ashkenazi Jews.” Furthermore, she added, “escalating this strategy over the past two years and in the wake of the student encampments is intended to reinforce the Zionist narrative that American campuses are dangerous for Jewish students and that Israel”—a country that has committed itself to perpetual war—“is the safer choice.”

The push to expand Israel’s international student body represents an attempt to cultivate a smaller, more committed base that can substitute for the broad liberal constituency that has been lost.

Promotional material from Thrive Study Abroad’s Instagram page

The campaign to recruit international students to Israeli universities has involved the combined efforts of the Israeli government, American Jewish foundations and communal institutions, and the universities themselves. Israel has supported the project largely through its Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which has grown significantly in the past few years (its annual budget increased from 93 million NIS to 230 million NIS—or $27.8 million to $68.8 million— between 2022 and 2024, including subsidies for settler and other right-wing propaganda initiatives). According to Sinai, the Kohelet report author, the ministry has started funding scholarships for eligible foreign students beginning in the 2025–26 academic year. It has also advertised money for Israeli academic institutions that want to establish additional English language programs and market them to Jewish students abroad, prioritizing those from “hotbeds of antisemitism.” The call specifies that programs must be “Zionist and pro-Israel in nature” to receive funding and that they must require students to participate in a Zionist ideological program developed by the ministry called “Right to Identity.” Other Israeli state funding has been provided by the country’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, which recently launched a slew of “academic integration programs” geared toward students coming from abroad who plan to stay in Israel. Last year, 15 tracks opened at 11 institutions, and at least seven more tracks are opening in the 2025–26 academic year, according to Avital Feldman, the head of the English language desk at the Israeli government’s Student Authority, a department within the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration that offers potential immigrants guidance on college admissions. Participating students receive a year of English language courses alongside intensive Hebrew language study, then transition into courses taught in Hebrew.

Much of the private funding for the creation of these academic integration programs in Israel has come from an American venture capitalist named David Magerman via his foundation, Tzemach David. Formerly a major donor to the University of Pennsylvania, Magerman cut ties with his alma mater shortly after October 7th. “There is no place for self-respecting Jewish people at an institution that supports evil,” he wrote in an open letter castigating the university’s president and chairman for failing to explicitly condemn Hamas. “My only remaining hope is that all self-respecting Jews, and all moral citizens of the world, dissociate themselves from Penn.” Magerman told me he now believes that American Jewish parents are engaging in “a form of child abuse” if they send their kids to a top university with a pro-Palestine presence. “The golden age of Jews in America is over,” he added, echoing the title and argument of former New Republic editor Franklin Foer’s popular 2024 piece in The Atlantic. “I view myself as post-America.” Magerman’s pessimism has prompted him to take on a new role in the university fundraising landscape: “diverting money, students, and other resources from American colleges to convince people to support and attend Israeli colleges.” Last summer, he began by redirecting a $5 million gift of his own: Originally earmarked for Penn, the money went to five Israeli institutions of higher education in order to implement the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration’s academic integration program for Hebrew language learners.

One of Magerman’s guiding conceits is that families are more likely to take the idea of college in Israel seriously if it is presented early and often in kids’ secondary education. “Ultimately,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy last June, “we need to get middle school parents to start thinking about Israeli college.” For now, he hopes to make the idea ubiquitous at Jewish high schools in the US and has enlisted college-guidance counselors, mostly from Modern Orthodox schools, to serve, in his words, as its “cheerleaders.” To that end, last summer, Tzemach David—together with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a Religious Zionist organization called World Mizrachi, and an Orthodox Union program called the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus—flew ten guidance counselors to Israel, where they toured nine college campuses in four days. Several participating counselors I spoke with afterward seemed to embrace their mission. Rafael Blumenthal, the director of college guidance at the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School in New York City, told me Ramaz has started sharing information about college in Israel with its freshmen and sophomores because “there’s a better chance that they will be intrigued and [the idea will] catch hold earlier on.” Tzemach David ran a second trip to Israel for a new cohort of counselors this summer, and more are planned. The foundation has other initiatives in the works: Early next year, it will debut a new program that will send American Jewish high school sophomores to school in the West Bank settlement cluster of Gush Etzion for a semester, in the hope that they will later attend college in Israel and ultimately settle there.

Israeli universities have also increased their direct recruitment in the US. Last year, Israeli consulates launched college fairs in cities including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Washington, DC. Multiple guidance counselors I spoke to credited these fairs with their students’ rising interest in college in Israel. “We’re planning to make these annual events,” said Gal Braun, the director of academic affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York. “Jewish high schools are asking us to do them even more often.” Israeli university representatives have likewise ramped up visits to high schools—mostly Jewish ones, but sometimes public schools with large Jewish populations—as has the Israel Student Authority.

Israeli universities can advertise some concrete advantages to American students facing soaring tuition costs at home. Public universities in Israel cost around $4,000 annually (and are free for students who decide to officially immigrate), and even private Reichman, the country’s most expensive school, tops out at $16,900 a year—a fraction of the cost of most US private colleges. Most bachelor’s degrees in Israel take three years to complete rather than four, and professional degrees in fields like law or social work can be attained in the course of undergraduate study. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” said Orit Coty, the marketing director for Tel Aviv University’s international school, for American students to accept a steep discount on “the level of education equal to a very, very highly ranked university in the States.” Still, it may not be easy to sell many American Jewish families on abandoning the elite American universities that serve as core status symbols in certain milieus. Magerman admitted that one obstacle to his project is that he sees parents “burying their heads in the sand and hiding from reality because they so desperately want their kids to get a diploma with a famous college name on it.” As a result, he said, he anticipates that getting enough American students on board will be a more significant challenge than building Israeli capacity to absorb them.

Promotional materials from Thrive Study Abroad and Rimon Jerusalem’s Instagram page.

In the last few decades, universities around the world have undergone a process scholars call internationalization, pouring resources into programs that foster academic cooperation across borders: study-abroad programs and faculty exchanges, joint research projects, foreign-language degree tracks, and grant partnerships. These projects often have clear economic benefits: NAFSA, a nonprofit that supports international education, estimates that foreign students contributed $43.8 billion to the US economy in the 2023–24 school year and that decreases in international student enrollment for 2025 due to new US immigration practices could cost the country some $7 billion. Universities also get a prestige boost from the presence of international students, with higher-education rankings using this data as a factor in their metrics—a fact that the authors of the Kohelet report pointed out to me numerous times. But foreign student programs have also served a more directly political function since they were popularized during the Cold War. In the mid-1940s, for instance, the US government started the Fulbright Program—one of the first large-scale academic and cultural exchanges of its kind—as part of an attempt at “establishing a democratic empire,” the education scholar Ravinder Kaur Sidhu writes in his book Universities and Globalization; the program’s goal, Sidhu argues, was to “persuad[e] elites from other nations to regard the United States as a friendly authority with whom they shared common interests as members of a ‘free world.’” (The Soviet Union maintained its own international student programs, including Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, founded in the early 1960s to educate elites from newly decolonized countries tuition free.) Today, the US may be retreating from such tactics because of Trump’s preference for hard power over soft—in addition to suspending student visa opportunities, the president has proposed slashing Fulbright funding—but the approach remains alive and well around the globe: In the words of a 2018 Chinese government document, foreign students were meant to “tell China’s story and spread China’s voice” upon returning home, while British government documents from the aughts and 2010s refer to their international students as “unofficial ambassadors” and “long-term advocates.”

Israel has participated enthusiastically in this global trend. In 2017, the country’s Council for Higher Education (CHE), the body that oversees higher education policy and allocates university funding, launched a national five-year plan, with a budget of 435 million NIS ($130 million), to centralize and accelerate the internationalization process. The council’s Study in Israel initiative, which began in 2019, aimed to more than double the number of international students in the country by 2022. The CHE has been explicit about the fact that international partnerships are important not simply for research or profit, but also as a means of securing legitimacy for institutions facing international scrutiny: After a government committee convened in May 2024 allocated 90 million NIS ($26.9 million) to fighting academic boycotts against Israel, of which 32.6 million NIS ($9.8 million) was allocated to the CHE, the Chair of the CHE and Minister of Education Yoav Kisch said that he would work “to incentivize international collaborations in research, and to enable the brightest Israeli and Jewish minds who wish to do so, to complete their research in Israel through unprecedented research grants.” Historically, this tactic has been evident at Ariel University, the only Israeli university located in the occupied West Bank. Ariel has long been excluded from prestigious international research collaborations and funds and has responded by boasting of its international partnerships, which number at least eight with universities in the US, including a 2019 agreement with Florida Atlantic University and most recently with the University of Utah. International collaborations thus become evidence of normalcy; global recognition from certain quarters becomes a defense against boycott from others.

Today, Israeli universities within the country’s 1948 borders are being treated as pariahs in ways once more typical of Ariel, in part because of increased attention to their violation of Palestinians’ rights and their role in supporting the military—the latter of which includes 57 current programs at Israeli universities for active soldiers and those set to be conscripted. The push to boycott Israeli academic institutions, as called for by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, continues to gain steam. Many student encampments in the spring of 2024 explicitly called on their universities to cancel exchange programs and research collaborations with Israeli universities, as with a campaign at Columbia University to close the university’s Tel Aviv Global Center and end its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University. In February 2025, the Association of University Heads in Israel released a report warning of a dramatic increase in boycott activity, documenting a 66% rise in “incidents”—including suspended partnerships, canceled conferences, rescinded invitations, grant refusals, and journal editors declining to publish Israeli scholarship—between October 2024 and February 2025 compared with the previous year, with US cases doubling.

The CHE’s five-year plan was in part an attempt to get ahead of this shift: It established internationalization offices at every Israeli university and tasked them not only with academic collaboration but also with responding to the growing pressure of boycotts. Over the past several years, these offices have gone on to establish programs like Ben-Gurion University’s Desert Academic Research Experience, or DARE, which brings scientists from abroad to the university for a funded summer sabbatical. Ben-Gurion’s vice president for global engagement, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, told me that the program aimed to humanize Israelis in the eyes of visitors: “They’d meet us, they’d know who we are, and it would be much harder afterwards to imagine us as monsters who eat Palestinians for breakfast.” The name, she noted, was meant to challenge them: “We dare you to come.” She hoped that exposure to Israeli academia would cultivate a more “balanced” perspective less likely to lead to support for BDS. Other initiatives have taken a more overtly political approach to shaping international perceptions. This October, for instance, Ariel University opened an English master’s degree track in “communication, public advocacy, and combating antisemitism” aimed to help students “be ready to legally and rhetorically resist antisemitism in a campus environment.” In another case, an organization called Thrive offers international undergraduates at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Reichman University a “boot camp” experience to simulate Israeli military training. The program, explained marketing director Rena Zoldan, was designed to counteract media narratives around the Israeli military by giving students “a first-hand understanding” of life within it: “They spend 24 hours under fake fire learning how to shoot and crawl,” followed by a weekend with soldiers. “If you’re just at Tel Aviv University going to the beach every day, maybe you’ll meet soldiers,” Zoldan said, “but you’re not going to get to these conversations and these nuanced views of Israeli life.”

Students in the Thrive Study Abroad program participate in a 24-hour “training” experience with the Israeli military.

Still via Thrive Study Abroad’s YouTube channel

This dynamic—at once embattled and opportunistic—has helped shape the state’s approach to encouraging foreign students to come to Israel, especially for full-degree programs. Emmanuel Nahshon, a former Israeli diplomat who works to combat academic boycotts for the Association of Israeli Universities, said he has been in talks with the country’s Foreign Ministry to promote Israel as a destination for international students. His office proposed a 20 million NIS ($6 million) annual initiative to fund tuition and scholarship aimed at “turning Israel into a safe haven for Jewish students from around the world,” though Nahshon stressed the program would also recruit non-Jews. “The idea is to open the doors of the Israeli universities as much as possible,” he told me. “Those who are looking to destroy Israel know that our universities need to interact with the broader academic world,” he explained, “and they see this as a weak point. We must make sure they don’t succeed.”

Israel’s academic community is now confronting a situation reminiscent of South Africa’s in the 1980s, scholar of Middle Eastern studies Seth Anziska said in an interview. The African National Congress first called for an academic boycott in the late 1950s; in December 1980, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for the academic boycott of South Africa, initiating an era of heightened debate and polarization in the international community about how to relate to collaborations, conferences, exchanges, and other work with South African institutions and scholars. As Anziska noted, the South African boycott’s power ultimately lay in “creating an atmosphere of unacceptability,” marking apartheid as beyond the bounds of legitimate engagement. Even if the boycott’s material impact remains a subject of debate among scholars, it helped designate South Africa as an international pariah—an outcome that resonates in Israel today, where boycotts are producing the very sense of isolation that many American Jewish students imagine they are escaping when they choose to study there.

There’s “a fragility about dealing with the reality of Palestine, a fragility in thinking about Israel as a perpetrator of obscene violence,” Anziska said. In Israel, by contrast, these students feel like “lords of the land.”

Even beyond the reach of the boycott movement as such, it is unclear whether the project of internationalizing the Israeli university remains viable in the face of perpetual war. In the past two years, US State Department travel warnings have complicated exchange programs between American and Israeli universities, and many American universities have called off and suspended their programs. Flight cancellations, inflated ticket prices, and limited airline options have further hindered mobility. Israel’s own international student programs are not immune to these logistical challenges: While every program administrator and government official I spoke to had their sights set on expansion, several also reported serious barriers to increasing international enrollment since October 7th.

Still, for the students who will choose Israeli universities, such material barriers, and even dangers, may not outweigh the emotional comforts on offer. When I spoke with Anziska, he emphasized that what Israeli campuses really offer their potential applicants—who feel increasingly alienated in the diaspora yet are insulated from the material realities of Israel’s war in Gaza—is psychological refuge. “It’s a fragility about their identity in America,” he said. “A fragility about dealing with the reality of Palestine. A fragility in thinking about Israel as a perpetrator of obscene violence.” In Israel, by contrast, these students feel like “lords of the land.” The Israeli international schools have made this a clear selling point. A video advertising Hebrew University’s new English-language bachelor’s program opens with footage of Palestine solidarity encampments and the sound of explosions. “Stop. You’re Jewish, yet you’re considering attending universities that you know don’t support your heritage and facing dangerous groups that you know want your people erased?” its narrator asks. “Don’t do this to yourself. Come to Israel . . . Israel is your home. Choose pride. Choose your people.” Now that that program is in its second year, it can also use current students to deliver this message themselves. “The biggest thing for me is that I can proudly assert my Jewish identity on campus,” Shira Litvack, a student in the program, told prospective applicants at an open house. Litvack said that she had started her degree in Canada but had dropped out because of antisemitism. At Hebrew University, she said, “I don’t feel like I have to hide.” The cost, according to Anziska, is that students will accede to “a suspension of reality. They’re in a silo of anxieties, fears, and messaging,” he said.

At the same time, history suggests that there is no guarantee that study abroad programs will achieve their desired political goals. Scholarship shows that students often arrive in a host country on the basis of preexisting sympathies and maintain them—but as the education researcher Sylvie Lomer notes, international study can also lead students to “reach their own, potentially critical, conclusions and act accordingly.” While Israel has made a bet on recruiting passionately Zionist students who are unlikely to change their views, it could still be hard to keep all of them in the fold under the pressure of Israel’s never-ending, and increasingly escalating, aggression. Although the organized Jewish community wants to use the turmoil on US campuses to their benefit, “without resolving the political crisis at the heart of it, it’s just window dressing,” Anziska said. “There’s mass killing 40 kilometers away. It’s dissonance—an illusion.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/degrees-of-separation-2 at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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Elaine Mokhtefi

“There was a current of confidence and warmth between all of us who were in Algiers working with liberation movements.”

Ari M. Brostoff

Illustration: Nadyia Duff

The organizer and writer Elaine Mokhtefi, who helped transform Algeria into an epicenter of anti-colonial liberation movements, was born Elaine Klein on Long Island in 1928. After a childhood spent crisscrossing the United States with her parents, struggling Jewish dry-goods merchants, she left home at 16 to attend college in Georgia; she was shocked by the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South and was soon kicked out of school. Mokhtefi returned to New York, where she threw herself into the bustling world of postwar peace-building, working as a student organizer for the United World Federalists (UWF), which sought to create a democratic world government. As anti-colonial struggles accelerated across the globe, the UWF, like this milieu more broadly, became increasingly fractured, and, in 1951, the group’s centrist leadership expelled its more radical student division. Meanwhile, as an emerging internationalist youth leader who openly criticized American racism, Mokhtefi found herself under FBI surveillance.

Like many young Americans seeking respite from the McCarthy-era US, Mokhtefi moved to Paris—but soon discovered that France was structured by its own pernicious racism. As her illusion of French cosmopolitanism evaporated, Mokhtefi glimpsed an internationalist community in the country’s shadows: a Third World liberation movement that connected the cafés of Paris’s impoverished North African quarters to on-the-ground liberation struggles from Algeria to Vietnam. She returned to internationalist organizing, working as an interpreter and coordinator in a world conference circuit that brought her to gatherings across the globe. Mokhtefi became particularly committed to the Algerian struggle, which by 1954 had hardened into a brutal war with French occupation forces. She worked closely with the Algerian independence movement in exile and eventually took a job back in New York at the movement’s US headquarters.

In 1962, Algerians defeated their colonizers, and a few months later, Mokhtefi set foot in Algiers for the first time. She immersed herself in the dizzying life of the newly independent nation through several government jobs: staffer at the tourist authority; assistant to the presidential press secretary; and, over the course of more than a decade, a series of positions for the Algerian Press Service. Her most fascinating and singular role was a kind of unofficial post: As US dissidents from Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael to psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary sought refuge on Algerian soil, Mokhtefi—the only American in the Algerian government—became their greeter, interpreter, tour guide, fixer, and handler. She developed an especially intense and often challenging relationship with Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, who fled to Algiers in 1969 with his wife, Kathleen Cleaver, the party’s communications secretary, as well as left-wing journalist Robert Scheer; several other high-ranking Panthers followed. In the 1970s, the country took a repressive turn, and, in 1974, she was forced out after refusing to spy on a rival of President Houari Boumédiène. Along with former National Liberation Front (FLN) revolutionary Mokhtar Mokhtefi, whom she later married, Elaine returned to Paris, and finally to New York. In her 2018 memoir Algiers: Third World Capital, Mokhtefi recounts a life and times shot through with high jinks and head-spinning parallaxes at the intersection of global struggles. Her story—which we discussed in an interview at her Upper West Side apartment—helped me understand the kind of careful ingenuity that might, in a different world, be called diplomacy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Ari M. Brostoff: You say in your book that you became “Algerianized” before you had ever been to Algeria. What do you mean by this?

Elaine Mokhtefi: A few months after I arrived in Paris, I went to the May Day Parade, an enormous event that takes place every year. I’d never seen anything like it; I was enthralled. Suddenly, as the parade was ending, thousands of men came running through the streets. They had no signs, no flags. Their arms were splayed. I sensed that something important was happening, but I had no idea what. Then I read an article in France Observateur, a leftist magazine at the time, which explained that these men had been excluded from the parade because they were Algerian. That was a bombshell. I saw Paris differently after that.

Other young people who had come to Paris—and who, like me, thought of Parisians as positive, friendly, amoureux—arrived at a similar realization. There was a street in the Latin Quarter where we often ate; the Tunisian and Algerian restaurants were the most prominent and cheapest, so we gathered there. We began to learn about the political situation in Algeria, and we also became aware of the large community of immigrants living on the outskirts of Paris. They lived in poverty, and their movement was restricted by the French authorities. So all of a sudden I was getting an education. It’s not as though I had been totally innocent before, but now there was specificity.

AMB: In October 1962, after more than a decade of commitment to the Algerian freedom struggle, you went to Algiers. French troops and militias had only just left the country, and independent institutions of governance were very new. Reading your account of this time, I was struck by how quickly you wound up at the center of things and how exciting—I want to say anarchic—even your more bureaucratic positions seemed to be. How did you become so embedded?

EM: I had contacts in Algiers before I arrived. I knew several members of the FLN who had come to New York during the war as part of a delegation dispatched by the Algerian government-in-exile; after independence, they became leaders in the new national government. They helped me find a lovely apartment and a terrific job as a journalist and translator at the Algeria Press Service (APS). I could bring a car from Paris; it was a very comfortable life—and it was very exciting. In the years immediately following independence, the new government encouraged liberation movements—not only in Africa but also in Asia and Latin America—to set up headquarters in Algiers. The government provided them with the means to operate and even trained their freedom fighters in the Algerian army.

And I got to be a part of it. After more than 130 years of French administration, 90% of the Algerian population was illiterate. Even people who had received formal education had little or no administrative work experience: All of those positions had been occupied by French settlers. Algerians were making lots of decisions but often didn’t have the technical skills required to put them into practice. So a lot of improvisation was required. I had only a medium education, but it was sufficient to take on a lot of responsibility.

AMB: As an American in Algiers, you supported the Algerian government in challenging US imperialism around the world, particularly the US military assault in Vietnam. What did this look like from your position?

EM: The Viet Cong had special privileges in Algiers—they were given a house and travel documents—and I became very good friends with their representative, Trân Hoài Nam. He considered me sort of the typical American, and would ask me what I thought of this or that; it was funny. At one point, together with an expatriate American jazz pianist and five or six others, I organized a committee in solidarity with the Vietnamese. We issued a communiqué attacking the United States and I put it on the APS wire so it went out all over the world.

I had a close relationship with the North Koreans, too, and even the Chinese and the Russians invited me over from time to time. It’s strange to look back at that now, but there seemed to be a current of confidence and warmth between all of us who were there working with the liberation movements.

AMB: I was fascinated by your account of these relationships—especially the one between the Panthers and the Algerian government, and how you wound up as a mediator between them. I thought your wildest story was the one about a group of American convicts on the lam who stole a million dollars, hijacked a plane, and landed it in Algiers; they hoped to deliver the stolen money to the Black Panther faction there, and thus establish themselves as political dissidents eligible to receive asylum in Algeria. The Panthers baffled President Houari Boumédiène with the incredible demand that they be allowed to keep the money. I have to say, they come off as acting pretty arrogantly toward their hosts.

EM: It was a very difficult situation. The Panthers had an unnecessarily antagonistic attitude toward the Algerians; they wrote a fiery letter to Boumédiène because he didn’t want to let them keep the money from the hijacking. I was on vacation in Paris at the time with my future husband, but I tried to help: I suggested a compromise in which the money would be given to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Eldridge wasn’t thrilled, but he agreed. I went to a major newspaper in Paris and gave them a press release. But, of course, the Algerians couldn’t accept those terms. Put yourself in Boumédiène’s position: No company anywhere in the world would have let their pilots land on Algerian soil if the government had accepted and then distributed this stolen money. The Algerians were calm and cool throughout. Contrary to what many people have said, they did not kick the Panthers out of the country. [Ed. note: Cleaver and his comrades left gradually over the course of the following years as internal disagreements and financial strain increased among their faction.] And they authorized the air pirates to stay in the country as well.

“The Black Panther team in Algiers worked like a military organization; they wrote down everything they did. They all had roles to play and knew what their roles were.”

I feel I should emphasize more, though, how great the capacity for work was within the Black Panther team in Algiers. They worked like a military organization; they wrote down everything they did. Kathleen gave a report at the end of each day. They all had roles to play and knew what their roles were. It was amazing.

AMB: It’s almost like they were foreign service officers, highly disciplined in relation to their mission but also taking full advantage of a position of impunity. It makes me think of the story you tell about the Panthers’ bid for official recognition—can you talk about that?

EM: The Palestinians and the Vietnamese had embassies in Algiers; the Panthers and all the other liberation organizations had offices. One day, Eldridge invited me to lunch. There was an American who followed us into the restaurant—he had been hanging around, trying to get in with the Panthers. He may or may not have been a federal agent. Eldridge took the man by the neck and threw him out of the restaurant. Then he sat down and told me that he wanted the Panthers to have official status, like an embassy. He said, “Do what you can.”

I contacted Mhamed Yazid, who had been the Minister of Information of the Algerian provisional government in Tunis, and he said he would like to meet the Panthers. Mhamed was from one of the few Algerian families whose members had been well educated under the French. He spoke good English and was proud of it. He invited us to lunch at his family’s home in Blida. We sat in the garden—it was Eldridge and Kathleen and [Black Panther field marshal] Donald Cox and me. Mhamed’s grandmother made couscous with fresh vegetables, and Mhamed told all his American jokes.

We must have passed muster because after the Viet Cong got moved to Embassy Row, their house was given to

the Panthers.

AMB: You wound up in increasingly high-stakes situations, like getting passports doctored in Germany for the purposes of another proposed hijacking scheme, this time involving Eldridge and the West German anti-imperialist Baader-Meinhof Group, who wanted to hijack a plane and demand the release of American, German, and Palestinian political prisoners—

EM: —and I was just a little girl from the United States!

AMB: It seems like you were able to keep your cool even when you were in over your head. Were you scared?

EM: I was a little scared on the trip to Germany—I knew certain organizations were tracking me—but I had to go through with it. I had met so many people in Algeria who had taken such risks, and I felt that I had taken no real risks. I had never picked up a gun or gone to war. All I had to do was pick up the passports and return the passports. [Ed. note: Cleaver pulled out of the hijacking plan while the passport operation was still in progress, and the Baader-Meinhof Group did not carry out the plan under discussion.]

AMB: Where did the Palestinian struggle fit into your world in Algiers? As you’ve said, there were national liberation groups from around the world with a base there, but Palestine in particular always seemed to be in the air.

EM: I think Algerians feel closer to Palestinians than they do to anybody else. They feel that the Palestinian situation is their situation. Palestinian news has always gotten preference in Algerian media. When I worked for the APS’s French-language radio station, I would prepare a 15-minute Sunday morning radio program every week on what the press around the world was saying about Palestine. Representatives from Palestinian organizations were constantly coming through Algeria. I remember in 1967 [during the Six-Day War] you’d walk along the streets of Algiers and people would be crying. I had a boyfriend at the time who came to my house and sat on the couch and just bawled. It was as though Algeria was at war. It’s still like this—you meet any Algerian, and their heart goes out to Palestine.

AMB: Your time in Algeria ended in exile from your adopted home, but your memoir is remarkably lacking in bitterness, and you continued to do political work as a writer and activist, particularly in the Palestinian solidarity movement. Do you have any thoughts on where the inheritance of Third Worldism lives on today?

EM: That’s the kind of question I really can’t deal with. I’m a lowly worker! Sometimes with an idea.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Ari M. Brostoff is a writer in New York and a contributing editor at Jewish Currents.

@AriBrostoff

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/elaine-mokhtefi at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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Anti-Mamdani Letter Draws Support from Liberal Rabbinate

The letter revealed a split between liberal rabbis backing the mayoral nominee and those opposing him over his positions on Israel.

Alex Kane

Zohran Mamdani speaks during the “Mayoral Candidate Forum All Faiths, All Candidates” event at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, June 5th, 2025.

SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News

On October 22nd, a group calling themselves The Jewish Majority published an open letter signed by hundreds of rabbis decrying Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, as well as the broader “political normalization” of anti-Zionist politics in American life. The letter, entitled “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” argued that when figures like Mamdani “refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” they “delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.” It also argued that “Zionism, Israel, [and] Jewish self-determination” are inseparable parts of Jewish identity. The night it was published, Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor and one of Mamdani’s opponents in the mayoral election next week, referenced the letter on the debate stage to bolster his argument that Mamdani would make Jewish New Yorkers unsafe.

The letter—which, by the following week, had garnered the signatures of over 1,100 rabbis and cantors from around the country—amounted to a last-minute effort to highlight Jewish communal concern about Mamdani, who is leading in the polls. The effort appears designed to present a united Jewish voice against candidates like Mamdani, and to counter the sizable minority of Jews who share his politics. Some polls of Jewish views on the mayoral race have found that Mamdani has substantial Jewish support: A Fox News poll published this month found that 38% of Jews will vote for Mamdani, while a July poll put the number of Jewish Mamdani voters at 43%. The Jewish Majority website also targets Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the left-wing Jewish activist organizations that have been most active in the Mamdani campaign, labeling both groups as “fringe.”

The Jewish Majority is led by Jonathan Schulman, an AIPAC alum whose job was to increase synagogues’ involvement in pro-Israel activism. But the letter includes not only AIPAC-affiliated rabbis but also liberal ones, revealing how some liberal rabbis are leaning when confronted with a choice between their progressivism and their Zionism. Signatories to The Jewish Majority letter included at least 65 members of the rabbinic and cantorial cabinet of J Street, the premier liberal Zionist group in the country, which opposes Israel’s occupation and advocates for a two-state solution. Others on the list have expressed opposition to Israel’s use of food as a weapon during its bombardment of Gaza, or Israeli settler evictions of Palestinian families. “Long before this letter, I had been surprised at the number of my colleagues that I saw expressing fear and distrust of [Mamdani] who are otherwise working for justice of a sort that he would completely agree with,” said Ellen Lippmann, the founder and rabbi emerita of the progressive Brooklyn synagogue Kolot Chayeinu, and a Mamdani supporter.

Still, some liberal New York rabbis—such as Angela Buchdahl of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue and Rachel Timoner of Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim—did not sign. In a letter to her congregation, Buchdahl said that “political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country,” and that “it is up to each of us to vote our conscience.” Meanwhile, Sharon Kleinbaum, the former leader of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, is openly backing Mamdani, telling a crowd of 13,000 Mamdani supporters last weekend that while she doesn’t agree with the candidate on everything, she was “grateful to Zohran for his commitment to fight antisemitism, for his commitment to protect all houses of worship, and to take seriously the fear that many Jewish communities live with.” According to Alissa Wise, founder and lead organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, this moment of left ascendancy in city politics set against a backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian executive branch “naturally, makes liberals subject to competing pressures.” She speculated that, in light of fractured Jewish opinion, the liberal Zionist rabbis who didn’t sign the letter “have congregants that they understand they would be excising from their community, and they don’t want to do that.”

The signatories to the anti-Mamdani letter that Jewish Currents interviewed for this article, all members of the J Street rabbinic cabinet or signatories to letters opposing Israeli annexation of the West Bank or settler plans to evict Palestinians, said their opposition to Mamdani came down to his rejection of a Jewish state. “I am opposed to so much of Israel’s ultra-right-wing zealot makeup. But that does not diminish for one minute my support for Israel as an independent Jewish state,” said Bradd Boxman, a Reform rabbi from Parkland, Florida and a member of J Street’s rabbinical council. “Mamdani has made numerous comments that undermine the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland of their own. That crosses a red line.” (Mamdani has repeatedly said that he believes in Israel’s “right to exist” as a state that grants equality to all its citizens and that he does not believe in “any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion.” Israel maintains dozens of laws that discriminate against non-Jewish citizens of the state, and it does not grant voting or civil rights to the Palestinians living under its military occupation.) In a statement, J Street told Jewish Currents that its rabbinic council is “made up of clergy from across the Jewish spectrum, reflecting a wide range of perspectives.” While members are free to advocate on the issues important to them, J Street wrote, “these individual actions do not represent an official position of J Street, which remains neutral in local elections.”

The rabbis also repeatedly brought up what they saw as Mamdani’s endorsement of the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Mamdani has never publicly used the phrase, but when asked during a podcast interview in June about whether it made him uncomfortable, he said he saw the slogan as “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights,” and explained that ”intifada” is the Arabic term for “uprising”—the same word used by the US Holocaust Museum on its Arabic materials about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Jewish leaders and politicians from both parties expressed outrage that Mamdani didn’t condemn the call outright, which they saw as a celebration of the kinds of militant violence against Israeli civilians that characterized the Second Intifada. (The First Intifada was largely associated with acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.) Since the firestorm of criticism, Mamdani has said that he would “discourage” use of the phrase and that he understands that, for some Jews, it is “a reference to bus bombings in Haifa, [and] restaurant attacks in Jerusalem.” Mamdani has also pledged that Zionists would serve in his administration: He has already announced that he plans to retain stalwart Israel supporter Jessica Tisch as NYPD police commissioner, and he has forged a close partnership with City Comptroller Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist. “I cannot imagine that there’s a Jewish leader in New York or elsewhere that has spent as much time in mosques as Zohran has spent with Jews to try to understand who we are in our variety,” said Lippmann.

Still, for Gerald Weider, the rabbi emeritus of the Brooklyn Reform synagogue Congregation Beth Elohim—who signed a letter in 2020 against plans for Israeli settlers to evict a Palestinian family from their East Jerusalem home—Mamdani’s distancing from “globalize the intifada” and his condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. “He discourages the use of that term. The way I read that, that is a wink and a nod to those who use it,” Weider said. “How does that get played out in New York? It is open season on Jews by people who believe in that.” He further added that someone “who has been winked at and nodded at” could “kill” New York Jews. (Weider emphasized that he was only speaking for himself. None of the current rabbis at Congregation Beth Elohim signed the letter, and the synagogue drew protesters earlier this month when Mamdani made a campaign appearance there.)

Weider is one of over 100 signatories who live in New York City, reflecting under 10% of the total, far below the city’s share of the American Jewish population. Palm Springs, California, rabbi Heidi Cohen, a signatory to The Jewish Majority letter who is also in the J Street rabbinical cabinet, said that “it surprises me that there’s such a huge Jewish contingency within New York that supports [Mamdani].” While she and other rabbis Jewish Currents interviewed conceded that some Jews do agree with his positions, they attributed that support, in part, to a lack of education. “Unfortunately, young people are misinformed or completely taken by algorithms that take them to anti-Zionist places without a full story,” said Boxman. They also said some Jews were likely supporting Mamdani not because of agreement with his Israel positions, but because of agreement with his economic policies.

Mamdani’s positions on Israel are not majority views in the American Jewish community, but they are shared by a significant minority—especially among younger Jews. Indeed, 39% of all American Jews—and 50% of Jews between 18 and 34—believe Israel “committed genocide” against Palestinians during its two-year campaign in Gaza, according to a Washington Post poll published earlier this month. Long before images of mass starvation in Gaza hit social media platforms, a 2021 poll conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 25% of respondents—and 38% of Jews under 40—said that “Israel is an apartheid state.” “I read in the letter fear and desperation. They see the polls that show that particularly those in the rising generation are unwilling to stand by Israel as they enact genocide,” said Wise. “We’re in this tug-of-war about what the Jewish future is going to look like.” This tug-of-war is evident in the two left-wing letters that have appeared to counter The Jewish Majority letter since it came out. The letter organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire, alongside JVP, JFREJ, IfNotNow, and the American Council for Judaism decried “attempts by some legacy Jewish institutions to flatten our diverse Jewish communities and silence the mass numbers of progressive and anti-Zionist voices among us who believe that Palestinian and Jewish liberation are interconnected.”

The Jewish Majority’s attack on JVP and JFREJ comes at a moment when particularly the former are in the crosshairs of an emboldened Trump administration; earlier this month, Reuters reported that the White House included JVP on a list of groups it accused of planning demonstrations where alleged incidents of vandalism or violence occurred. The Jewish Majority website also makes the claim that JVP demonstrations are “violent,” and takes aim at both groups’ participation in nonviolent civil disobedience, which they say disrupts civic life and harms “public safety.” Some of the rabbis who signed the letter told Jewish Currents they were not familiar with The Jewish Majority before signing, though Boxman did not fundamentally disagree with the characterization of JVP, saying that “they claim to be a Jewish organization that speaks for Jews, but almost everything they say is very anti-Israel.” Audrey Sasson, the executive director of JFREJ, said that the letter, by “leaning into division, fear, isolation and supremacy,” played into “the MAGA agenda.”

In signing the letter, Mark Hurvitz, a retired pulpit rabbi who lives in Manhattan, said he hoped to share “what some might consider an elders’ perspective,” although he noted the presence of a “good number” of young rabbis on the letter. Wise said that the most relevant divide reflected by the letter is not between generations—she noted the large number of older members of JVP—but between differing values and divisions over what Israel represents. “The liberal Zionist vision of Israel has never, for a moment, been the reality of the Jewish state. There’s a human cost to that political commitment, and it comes on the backs of Palestinians,” she said. She said she saw a parallel with how such rabbis are approaching the New York City mayoral race, in which “they’re willing to sacrifice policies that will fundamentally improve the lives of millions of people in order to protect a vision of a Jewish state that has no basis in reality.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

alexbkane

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/anti-mamdani-letter-draws-support-from-liberal-rabbinate at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

The Myth of Israeli Innovation

Israel has long relied on Western patrons for arms and backing—even as it has cast itself as a security “innovator” the West can’t afford to do without.

Rhys Machold

Israeli soldiers patrol along the destroyed fence near the Gaza Strip, October 17th, 2023.

Eddie Gerald via Alamy

On June 4th, The Times of Israel reported that in 2024, annual Israeli arms exports had reached an all-time high of $14.8 billion, with Europe buying 54% of the weapons. The article noted that Israeli officials had previously been concerned that Western European allies may cancel weapons deals or sanction Israeli manufacturers over the country’s war of extermination in Gaza. Once the record-breaking export figures came out, however, Israel’s war ministry publicly argued the opposite, claiming that the campaign in Gaza was what had led to the spike in exports by demonstrating Israel’s “unprecedented operational achievements” and “combat experience.” In particular, war minister Israel Katz emphasized that the growth in Israeli arms sales was “a direct result of the successes of the [Israeli army] . . . against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the ayatollah regime in Iran, and in other arenas where we operate against Israel’s enemies.”

Katz was not the only one making such statements. Since October 7th, 2023, the narrative of Israel as a powerhouse of “security innovation”—already a core feature of the country’s self-representation for decades—has steadily gone into overdrive. In April, Hadas Lorber, head of the Institute for Applied Research in Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology, told The New York Times that Israel was engaged in “crisis accelerated innovation, much of it AI-powered,” which had “led to game-changing technologies on the battlefield and advantages that proved critical in combat.” In the same month, Rotem Mey-Tal, CEO of the Israeli business management and weapons technology company Robel Innovations, told The Jerusalem Post that whereas “before the war, people were building apps to find parking in Tel Aviv . . . now they’re coming back from reserve duty and building drones, battlefield support systems, and paramedic technologies.” As a result, Mey-Tal noted that seed funding for new defense start-ups had reached $4 million in each round, all thanks to “innovation” propelled by the war on Gaza.

It hasn’t just been Israelis who have advanced the claim that unprecedented Israeli “innovation” is the story of the post-October 7th moment. The narrative has become so pervasive as to be echoed by foreign reporters, corporations, governments, and even critics of the state. A recent New Yorker article, for instance, parroted the idea that “the most prominent real-time laboratory for using AI in warfare is in Israel,” a framing that is ubiquitous across the Western press. American politicians have directly echoed these talking points. “We have seen some of the best innovations coming out of Israel,” Zach Nunn, a Republican congressperson from Iowa, recently said. Nunn, who is currently spearheading a congressional proposal requiring the Pentagon to open a Defense Innovation Unit office in Israel, went on to argue that the US government should focus on how “the best technologies—and candidly the best tactics, techniques and procedures that Israel is literally field testing right now—can be replicated” by American forces. A version of this characterization has also found purchase on the left, with a range of critics arguing that the development of cutting-edge Israeli weapons technologies is a defining feature of this moment. This argument casts Gaza as a “laboratory” for repressive Israeli technology; what is first battle-tested in the Strip, such thinkers argue, later makes its way to places in the West and around the world, helping remake the entire planet in Gaza’s image.

To be sure, Israel has used new technology to deadly effect in the past few years, effectively automating mass aerial bombardment under the guise of precise targeting. But what the ossification of such facts into a “security innovation” narrative obscures is that technological transformation is not the story of Israel’s recent campaigns. This is particularly clear in the case of the Gaza genocide. From North American settlers destroying bison herds to starve Native communities to Germans weaponizing hypothermia, disease, and hard labor in concentration camps in Namibia, perpetrators of genocide have always grasped that mass atrocity can be carried out without highly advanced technologies. Israel is no different in this regard, blending a range of old, crude tactics like building demolitions, sniper attacks, fire, disease, and starvation with AI-driven aerial bombardment and drone warfare to kill and maim tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of Palestinians. Much the same can be said about Israel’s war in Lebanon. Israel was celebrated for its unparalleled technological sophistication, especially after the pager attacks of September 2024. But it’s worth remembering that Hasan Nasrallah was killed not by new, innovative, or even Israeli weapons, but by 2000-pound “dumb” US-made bunker buster bombs that leveled an entire residential block. In this case, it was not Israel’s advanced precision that was notable, but its continued willingness to intentionally target civilian infrastructure with massive, disproportionate force.

What ultimately prevents states from doing what Israel has done in Gaza or Lebanon is not a lack of technological prowess, but of weapons, funding, and political will.

Indeed, most modern states’ militaries would have no difficulty carrying out similar airstrikes on a place like Lebanon, which lacks air defenses, and almost any state could impose an aid blockade and shoot starving people in an occupied enclave such as Gaza. What ultimately prevents other states from doing these things in plain sight, or for such prolonged periods of time and with such intensity, is not a lack of technological prowess, but of weapons, funding, and political will. Looking at matters this way, it becomes clear that Israel’s true “innovation” in this moment is political: the feat of securing unique access to an endless supply of Western weapons, intelligence, and most of all, political backing, all of which have given it a destructive capacity that may truly be unprecedented in modern history.

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid in the post-World War II era—having been granted a staggering $174 billion in American bilateral assistance and military funding since its founding. In the past two years alone, the US spent over $30 billion on military operations supporting Israel, enabling the country to purchase a range of US-made munitions, including bombs, mines, guns, explosives, and aircraft parts. It is these American weapons and weapon parts that have served as the core pillar upholding Israel’s supposedly ingenious military. As conflict studies scholar Tariq Dana notes, for instance, Israel’s “ostensibly domestically-designed Merkava tank incorporates key American-made components like its engine, transmission, and fire control systems,” meaning that Israel cannot sustain the Merkava program without US support. Similarly, the Israeli AI systems that have facilitated the Gaza genocide could not function without foreign capital and assistance from US companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dell. Recent reporting has revealed that Unit 8200 of the Israeli military—which was spotlighted in The New York Times for its innovative, AI-powered assassinations—in fact depended on the aid of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Without Azure, The Guardian notes that Israel would have lacked “sufficient storage space or computing power” to manage its surveillance data on Palestinians. (Microsoft has since suspended Israel’s use of Azure, prompting unease in the Israeli press.)

In addition to providing weapons, Western countries like the US, Britain, and France have also intervened militarily in order to sustain Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its assaults on neighboring countries, most notably by intercepting incoming missiles and drones from Yemen and Iran. Israel, of course, has attributed its relative security from these missiles to its supposedly unparalleled missile defense systems, but what has become ever-more visible over the past 21 months is that it has been US rather than Israeli systems, some operated by US troops, which have shot down many of the incoming projectiles. Such efforts to protect Israel are estimated to have cost the US as much as $3.6 billion between October 2023 and July 2025. This is not counting offensive military support, such as the US launching bombing campaigns in Yemen and Iran, or the UK flying reconnaissance flights for Israel.

Perhaps even more crucially, it has been Western political and legal backing, rather than domestic “security innovation,” that has given Israel the ability to carry out unprecedentedly destructive military campaigns without any interruption. This support is seen in the US’s six vetoes against UN Security Council resolutions calling for permanent ceasefires in Gaza; its refusals to enforce previous ceasefires it brokered in Gaza and Lebanon; its tacit support of Israel repeatedly sabotaging negotiations with Hamas; its attempts (alongside other European states) to challenge the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court in response to legal proceedings against Israeli leaders; its defunding of UNRWA and decimation of Gaza’s humanitarian aid systems—the list goes on. Ultimately, it is this unbridled access to Western largesse and protection that has enabled Israel to hold together any pretence of its own solidity and inevitability.

Accounts of Israel’s autonomous military dominance paradoxically unlocked the very Western investments Israel needed to develop and sustain such dominance.

Zionist mythologies of combat-proven “innovation” profoundly mystify this story of dependence—a pattern that builds on long established precedent. Since its founding, Israel has relied on Western patrons for the necessary resources to sustain its endless aggression, but it has done so while maintaining that the West depends on Israel, an “innovator” that the West cannot afford to do without. Throughout the 20th century, these innovation myths have served to obfuscate, and indeed sustain, the fundamentally dependent nature of the Zionist project. In the 1950s, for instance, the Israelis convinced French officials like General Maurice Challe that they were (in his words) “consummate artists” at managing the unruly Arabs, and that the kibbutz offered the French an alternative “model” for the French pacification of Algeria. In the coming decades, Israel turned to America with similar stories of its supposedly unparalleled martial prowess and its role as a model—for effective counterinsurgency in the post-Vietnam moment, defending against “international terrorism” during the Cold War, and fighting “Islamic” insurgencies after 9/11. In each of these cases, accounts of Israel’s autonomous military dominance paradoxically unlocked the very Western investments Israel needed to develop and sustain such dominance. That dynamic continues to this day, with stories of Israeli AI innovation facilitating the US’s authorization of hundreds of millions of additional dollars in American government funding to Israel. These developments highlight the paradox at the core of Zionist project: namely, that its breathless claims to stand-alone innovation are part of its efforts to further imbricate itself into Western empire.

For those opposed to the ongoing violence in Gaza, then, replacing the narrative of Israeli security innovation with the story of Israeli dependency becomes a crucial task. Such a reframing helps us locate Western power as the true motor powering the Gaza genocide. It also helps us understand that when Israeli technologies, systems, and strategies are used to undermine political movements around the world, they are testaments not to Israeli innovation but to the Western patronage that ultimately underwrites them. Finally, the dependency narrative provides us with openings onto political action against the Gaza genocide as well as the Israeli state more broadly. Because if the Israeli war machine is dependent on Western backers, the sites of intervention become clear: The governments and corporations of the West.

From the beginning, the Zionist colonization of Palestine was dependent on external benefactors. In 1901, Palestinian fellahin (peasants) resisted the attempts of the Jewish Colonization Association to remove them from the land; in response, the Association solicited and received assistance from Ottoman authorities in repressing the fellahin. British Mandatory officials later augmented these dispossession efforts by creating their own on-the-ground police units, some of which joined with Zionist paramilitaries to carry out night raids on Palestinian villages. British military support and knowledge was thus indispensable to the colonization of Palestine and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel; indeed, many of the Zionist paramilitaries that carried out the Nakba were directly trained by British counterinsurgency expert Orde Wingate, a pioneer of the night raids strategy.

Early Zionist ideologues like Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl were all too aware of the centrality of this dependency in realizing their settler colonial mission in Palestine. In 1896, Herzl noted that future Zionists would have to remain “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence” in the face of inevitable resistance from the displaced natives of Palestine. But while Zionist leaders privately acknowledged the reality of their reliance on Western imperial backing, they sought to consolidate it by advancing the opposite public narrative: one of self-sufficiency and innovation. In the run-up to the Nakba, Dwight Eisenhower, then the US army’s chief of staff, recounted a meeting with envoys of the Jabotinsky-founded Hagana paramilitary, whom he knew to be “anxious to secure arms for Israel.” Once face to face, though, the envoys “boastfully claimed that Israel needed nothing but a few defensive arms and they would take care of themselves forever and without help of any kind from the United States.”

In 1896, Herzl noted that future Zionists would have to remain “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence” in the face of inevitable resistance from the displaced natives of Palestine.

Throughout the 1950s, the US—eager to challenge rising pan-Arabism and Soviet influence in the Middle East—did supply Israel with some covert funding for weapons purchases. But Zionist leaders wanted more, relentlessly pushing the US to make Israel a strategic asset in the region (even as they kept their own options open by pursuing a policy of non-identification in the Cold War). These bids for additional Western support came against the backdrop of Israel’s nonstop aggression toward its Arab neighbors leading up to the Sinai War of 1956. The naked belligerence of some of these campaigns alienated Israel’s would-be patrons: For instance, a December 1955 attack that killed more than 50 Syrians compelled the US to keep its military support for Israel covert for several years to come. But Israel’s aggressive posture was also attractive, showing the country to be capable of imposing quick and decisive military defeats on rising Arab nationalist powers.

Ultimately, the perception of Israeli toughness won out, compelling Washington to become increasingly unequivocal in its support. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy finally broke the embargo that had previously blocked overt American arms sales to Israel. Declaring that the US and Israel were in a “special relationship,” Kennedy acceded to Israel’s longstanding request for US Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. This was followed by years of significant US weapons deals, including the Johnson administration’s 1965 decision to supply Israel with 200 Paton tanks and a 1966 deal to sell Israel 48 Skyhawk bombers. Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban welcomed this inflow of American heavy weaponry, calling it “a development of tremendous political value” that “enabled Israel to strive for a continued intensification of the existing US commitments.”

The intensification would come following the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel achieved a swift and decisive military victory over Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. As before, it was European and US materiel and funding that had given Israel the edge in combat, enabling it to easily obliterate the Egyptian air force within just a few hours. Thanks primarily to its French-supplied planes, Israel’s aerial advantage in particular was so overwhelming that one strategic commentator remarked a month after the war that “Arab armor, infantry, and motor columns were sitting ducks for the Israeli air force.” But in the aftermath of the war, Israeli officials retrospectively changed the narrative, now selling 1967 as an unlikely and even “miraculous” feat of Israeli military ingenuity. Officials like then-army chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin began arguing that the war testified to the uniqueness of the Israeli army, which had carried out an air assault with “such accuracy that no one understands how it was done.”

This understanding of 1967 was quickly picked up by strategic affairs publications and the American mainstream press. In the weeks and months that followed, Life magazine released an issue dedicated to “Israel’s Swift Victory” and The Atlantic published a report entitled “Israel’s Swift Sword,” which focused on the question “how did [Israeli forces] do it?” In all cases, American journalists’ answers drew heavily on Israeli sources, leading The Atlantic to claim that Israel’s capacity to win the war stemmed “primarily” from “the brainpower with which this people was endowed . . . channelled for the first time since [Exodus] into the military art in defense of their homeland.” The articles also amplified Israeli talking points disavowing the country’s dependency on the West. While acknowledging that many top Israeli commanders “have studied briefly at the command and staff colleges in France, Britain, and the United States,” for instance, The Atlantic stressed that Israeli officials “unanimously maintain [a] refusal to acknowledge any debt to foreign methods or doctrines and insistence on their independent development.” In these ways, post-1967 media narratives actively cemented a story of Zionist exceptionalism, which, in the words of political scientist Rami Ginat, transformed Israel’s image “from a needy protégé . . . to a strategic asset.”

Post-1967 media narratives actively cemented a story of Zionist exceptionalism, transforming Israel’s image “from a needy protégé . . . to a strategic asset.”

Israel fires on the east bank of the Suez Canal, July 15th, 1967.

Michel Lipchitz/AP

The cover of Life magazine’s June 1967 issue.

The narrative blitz had a strong effect. In the years following 1967, the US finally took up Zionist leaders’ longstanding calls to incorporate Israel as a US strategic asset in the Middle East—a significant upgrade to the Kennedy-era “special relationship” that came with long-term political and military support. By 1969, incoming President Richard Nixon had noted in a memorandum dictated to Henry Kissinger that he did “not want to see Israel go down the drain” and thus sought to make “an absolute commitment” to ensuring that “Israel always has an edge.” Making good on this promise meant a rapid increase in aid: from $360 million in 1968 to approximately $2.2 billion in 1973.

1967 thus represented a high-water mark in Israel’s use of the innovation myth to secure a reliable supply of Western arms and durable geopolitical support. The pattern that Israel established in that year—where it cast a military victory fueled by Western aid as evidence of its own prowess—would repeat over and over in the coming decades. In 1976, for instance, elite Israeli commandos flew to Entebbe, Uganda on a mission to rescue captives from a flight that had been hijacked by Palestinian and German militants. The raid was predicated on Israel’s access to US armaments, especially the four Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft escorted by Phantom fighter jets; the planes were refuelled en route with help from the head of Britain’s MI6. Yet, eliding these critical dependencies, Israel claimed that the raid was evidence of its stand-alone credentials as a world leader in commando raids and hostage rescue operations. Such tellings were immediately valorized in the US press and Hollywood productions, and became further fuel for the self-actualizing narrative of Israel’s military prowess—and, ultimately, a conduit to securing even more aid.

Israel found its American funders willing to buy into this dynamic not only thanks to Cold War strategic calculations, but also because of the ways that post-1967 Israel came to be positioned as a model for the West writ large—particularly against the backdrop of the disastrous US campaign in Vietnam. While “American setbacks in Vietnam no doubt make the idea of guerilla war more popular,” the historian and political commentator Walter Lacquer wrote in a May 1968 article, Israel’s victory in 1967 had shown that “guerilla warfare will not work against Israel,” an argument that clearly offered Israel as a template for Western dominance. As the American Studies scholar Melani McAlister has noted, in such narratives “Israel, or a certain image of Israel, came to function as a stage upon which the war in Vietnam was refought—and this time, won.”

Israeli leaders worked to feed this conception. In the aftermath of the October 1973 Arab–Israeli war, for example, Israel offered its US partners tours of key battle sites in occupied Syria and Egypt in the hopes of teaching them Israeli combat lessons. American generals returned with the impression of Israel as proof of concept that with proper equipment, tactics, and training, conventional military battles remained winnable; within a year, these and other “lessons” from Israel were taught to US troops at Fort Knox. As the Israeli psychology scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi noted in his searing 1987 book The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why, “what Israel offer[ed] the embattled West . . . is the victory of the few over the many . . . The battle cry of Israelis (and other right-wingers around the globe) is, ‘the West can win!’”

This cry resounded louder than ever in a period of renewed crisis for the US following 9/11. As early as September 12th, 2001, Israeli officials were explicitly putting themselves forward as models for the US’s counterterrorism campaigns to come—arguing that Israelis were the first to have experienced so-called global, Islamic terrorism and to demonstrate a record of successfully fighting it. Initially, such claims were narrowly focused on presenting Israel as an expert on airliner hijacking and a progenitor of what came to be known as homeland security. But as US-led quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, recalling past failures in Vietnam, Israel became more broadly representative of an alternative counterinsurgency model—one focused on pacifying unruly populations by asserting total dominance over their built environment (in other words, an urban occupation). In partnership with Israeli think tanks, US strategic forums soon began to echo this fetishization of the “Israel model,” releasing report after report that represented past and present Israeli military operations as the future Western counterinsurgency. “[Israel’s] military actions have been—and are—a laboratory for methods, procedures, tactics, and techniques for the United States, which now faces the same Islamist adversaries across the planet,” one 2007 Hoover Institution report declared, going on to recommend that the US, too, might “capture terrorists for intelligence,” “assassinate diabolical masterminds,” and “target insurgent strongholds” with airstrikes, as Israel did.

“What Israel offers the embattled West is the victory of the few over the many. The battle cry of Israelis is, ‘the West can win!’”

Through such narrative labors did Israel’s image, over the course of several decades, shift from that of a questionable geopolitical investment to that of an utterly indispensable model for the West. Far from being a burden, the country’s history of unending war—when reframed as a story of innovation—could now be plausibly represented as a national asset, allowing it to deepen Western aid flows and court new foreign investments as a “start-up nation.” By 2018, these resources had rendered Israel so seemingly secure that the Israeli army’s chief of staff had declared his country “invincible.”

But this mythology of prowess was spectacularly shattered on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters breached the Israeli siege of Gaza by land, air, and sea in a surprise attack. Israel’s vast infrastructures of fencing, guard towers, and surveillance proved fickle, surprising even leading Palestinian leaders, who recalled how Israeli military units “just evaporated” under attack. Since then, Israel’s military failures have only compounded. The Israeli army may still dominate the skies with American planes, and kill civilians with cheap, consumer-grade Chinese drones, but it has shown itself to be incapable of strategic achievements in ground combat—repeatedly suffering from major operational blunders in Gaza and being forced to constrain its 2024 ground invasion of Lebanon in the face of Hezbollah resistance. These failures have severely damaged the prevailing image of Israel’s sleek martial efficiency, as well as the parallel exceptionalist claim that Israel’s use of high-tech “solutions” for political problems offered a replicable standard for the West.

In response to this PR crisis, Israeli politicians and business leaders have, predictably, tried to return to their standard exceptionalist script of Israeli innovation in the hopes of securing more foreign investments to keep the army (and arms sector) running. In early 2024, the journalist Sophia Goodfriend noted that Israeli military spokespeople were desperately trying to market Israel once again “as a high-tech superpower, talking up the automated weaponry and supercomputing surveillance tech being ‘battle-tested’ in its war on Gaza,” hoping “the same old slogans [could] distract from the fact that Israel is far from achieving its stated goals of eliminating Hamas.” The rising profits of Israel’s weapons industry, Israel’s capacity to continue to forge new deals with US AI giants, and ongoing European investments in the Israeli economy all suggest that this strategy of couching aid-reliance as partnership, dependency as strength, can still work. But in the past two years, the global image of Israel has nevertheless steadily moved into closer alignment with its actual character: A state that is all-too capable of using Western resources to carry out mass slaughter, but that, for all its pretensions to superiority, can never really stand on its own two feet.

For the left, this long history of Israel’s military achievements offers a critical lesson. It suggests that while we need to take seriously the profound hold that Israel currently has over the Middle East, doing so does not require capitulating to the idea of Zionism’s exceptional martial prowess. In addition to being factually incorrect, such a narrative risks projecting upon Israel a technological and military might it does not autonomously possess, while obscuring the true nature of the power that Israel has, in fact, acquired: the Western arms and political backing which enable it to engage in unmitigated mass cruelty.

If Israel is indeed a “dependent empire” rather than a hub of autonomous military innovation, then shaking loose its ties to its benefactors will be key to stopping its violence.

This reframing is not a theoretical matter. Instead, by clarifying the true roots of the destruction in the Middle East today, it directs activists’ attention toward the correct points of intervention. If the vast majority of weapons deployed against the people of Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and most recently Qatar have been US-funded and US-made rather than the result of Israeli innovation, then our energies must be squarely directed toward cutting off this flow of armaments. If, as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese has observed, it is ultimately Western weapons industry oligarchs who are getting rich off Israel’s massacres, then it is their profits that must always be our target. If it is extensive support from European and global allies that has secured the profitability of Israel’s arms industry and aided it in the “collective crime” of genocide, then it is this deep political cover and financial support that must be the focus of our interventions. And if Israel is indeed, in the words of the scholar Saree Makdisi, a “dependent empire” rather than a hub of autonomous military innovation, then shaking loose its ties to its benefactors will be key to stopping its violence.

The post October 7th moment is ripe for such work. Already, under pressure from unprecedented mass mobilizations, some Western leaders are beginning to see Israel as a liability rather than an asset. US naval official James Kilby has voiced concern that defending Israel is depleting US stockpiles of missile defense interceptors at an “alarming rate.” More broadly, the spiking cost of America’s presence in the Middle East has become a growing concern even amongst the American right, at last breaking what Edward Said called “America’s last taboo.” So too in Europe, where record arms and trade relations with Israel are nevertheless accompanied by gestures of militarily distancing from Israel—as evidenced in Spain cutting weapons transfers to Israel, Germany making moves in that direction, and the UK banning Israel from participating in one of its largest arms trade fairs.

In Israel, these developments have alarmed political and corporate leaders, who worry about the growing sense that Israel represents a destabilizing force rather than an innovative one. The threat of Israel’s political isolation turning into material isolation has become so real that Netanyahu has even pretended to embrace the possibility, invoking his predecessors’ professed creed of self-sufficiency to suggest that Israel must now become “Super Sparta”—an island of military and technological competence, dependent on no one. Such narratives may serve to save face in the short run. But history shows us that, despite its constant pretensions to autonomy, Israel cannot withstand any true withdrawal of Western support. Thus, by continuing to insist that Israel is not an indispensable partner offering innovation, but an aid-guzzling colony offering only complicity in genocide, we can take a significant step toward dismantling the political lifelines that sustain it.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Rhys Machold is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. His work explores regimes of power, violence, and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024).

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ANALYSIS | 23 OCT 2025, 8:44 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

The Meaning of Trump’s $10 Million Grant to a Jewish Nonprofit

The administration is boosting an older, neoconservative politics even as US–Israel relations are increasingly contested on the right.

Suzanne Schneider

US and Israeli flags are placed on the road to the new US embassy in Jerusalem, 2018.

Corinna Kern/AP

When the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced on September 15th it was awarding the Tikvah Fund a sum of $10.4 million, the largest grant in the agency’s history, to “combat the recrudescence and normalization of anti-Semitism in American society,” there was an audible groan from many Jewish studies scholars. Coming on the heels of the NEH’s decision last April to cancel over 1,000 grant projects—including, as The Forward reported last spring, multiple awards to Jewish studies scholars and Jewish institutions, with resources for Yiddish language and culture taking a particularly hard hit—the award to Tikvah is particularly notable. As Sam Brody, a professor of religion at the University of Kansas, lamented on Bluesky, “Every Jewish Studies colleague I know who had an NEH grant saw their funding cut earlier this year. Now we know where the money went.”

It’s not surprising that Trump’s NEH would turn away from the breadth of contemporary Jewish studies scholarship and toward the ideologically aligned Tikvah Fund. Founded in 1992 by the financier Zalman Bernstein to support educational projects that comport with its conservative Zionist worldview, the Tikvah Fund is rooted in a belief in the inseparability of American and Israeli interests, the righteous necessity of imperial power, and American exceptionalism, which it traces at least in part to the centrality of Jews to the American story. To promote these ideas, Tikvah has historically bankrolled educational programs and fellowships for students, educators, and professionals. Tikvah has also long supported conservative Jewish media, from Commentary to its in-house publication, Mosaic, as well as a podcast series. More recently, Tikvah launched Emet Classical Academy, a private school for fifth to twelfth graders located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Billed as “America’s First Classical Jewish Prep School,” where students combine the study of Greek, Latin, and assorted “great books” with Hebrew and Judaic studies, Emet avows commitment to “the perpetuation of Jewish, Zionist, and American exceptionalism.”

Tikvah’s commitment to Western civilization and American exceptionalism mirrors the NEH’s new statement of priorities. The agency announced in April 2025 that it would no longer fund projects that “promote extreme ideologies based on race or gender” and instead would award projects that “instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” Tikvah was reportedly invited to apply for the grant by an unnamed official within the NEH, and the funding, according to the press release, will support programs that explore “the influence of Hebraic ideas on Western and American civilization” and the “development of university courses in Jewish humanities, to be offered in partnership with new Western Civilization BA programs.” Taken as a whole, the grant attempts to shore up the beleaguered concept of the “Judeo-Christian,” instilling the dangerous idea that antisemitism is best combatted by leaning upon supposed bonds of civilizational kinship.

This logic—which maintains that antisemitism is wrong because Jews are part of the West, not because it violates the principles of equality upon which this republic is founded—is coherent for a regime that regularly violates the law and fetishizes European ancestry, but for American Jews, the irony is palpable. To the extent that the United States has provided them with an exceptional level of security and freedom, it is on account of the liberal principles that Tikvah not only regards as inapplicable to the land of Israel, but increasingly rejects at home. It is worth recalling that the Tikvah-funded Kohelet Policy Forum (led by Tikvah board member Moshe Koppel) was the leading force behind the Netanyahu’s government so-called judicial reform efforts in 2023. An attempt to undermine the independence of Israel’s judiciary, the reforms represented the culmination of a decades-long assault on the principle of equality before the law. Meanwhile in the US, Tikvah has been cheering the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom, advocating in Mosaic for the use of financial and legal penalties to bring universities to heel—and celebrating their capitulation.

Accordingly, it is possible that there is little to see in the NEH Tikvah grant beyond an administration rewarding a particularly loyal friend with the spoils of public funds, much in the same way that it has inked new defense contracts with Palantir and Anduril. But viewed against the rise of a new generation of America Firsters, Israel skeptics, and antisemites within the MAGA coalition, the decision to single out Tikvah as the recipient of government largesse appears more consequential, given that Tikvah represents an older model of neoconservative Jewish politics in which American imperial power advances shared US-Israeli interests. Seen in this context, the Tikvah grant represents an attempt not just to defund various “woke” academic projects, but to reinscribe Jews in a narrative of American identity and empire that appears increasingly dubious to a new generation of right-wing thinkers and activists, many of whom have coalesced under the National Conservatism movement and its model of ethnonational, rather than imperial, governance. Beyond a pragmatic move to keep a motley crew of coalition partners within the Trumpian fold, the grant suggests an attempt to return the genie of right-wing antisemitism to the bottle after years of railing against globalists engineering the “great replacement.” To ask “Why Tikvah and why now?” helps uncover an emerging fault line within the conservative world over the future of Zionism and the nature of Jewish belonging.

Most observers of the American right, asked to point to the most dynamic institutions in the movement today, would point not to Tikvah but to National Conservatism—though the two do have overlapping lineages. The National Conservatism movement is organized under the umbrella of the Edmund Burke Foundation, established by the American Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony, whose previous ventures include the Tikvah-funded Shalem Center (now College). NatCon, as it is known, has labored to erect an intellectual scaffolding around various forms of right-wing agitation by articulating a political vision that places the ethnonational community at its core. Central to this project is the rejection of liberal principles related to equality and individual rights in favor of a nationalist brand of “collective freedom,” which is equally attentive to enemies without and traitors within. The movement’s key enemies are not just the “woke neo-Marxists” (per Hazony’s characterization) who supposedly control the Democratic Party, but the United Nations, European Union, International Criminal Court, and any other international body that claims the right to police the behavior of sovereign states.

At first glance there may not appear to be much daylight between Tikvah’s orientation and that of National Conservatism. Hazony is also an ardent Zionist who has long argued that the Western political tradition is deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible. As Elisha Kelman has recently written, Hazony claims it is not Locke or Rousseau but “a little-known seventeenth-century Christian Talmudist and constitutional scholar named John Selden [who] is the true intellectual godfather of the American founding.” This view is wholly consonant with the Tikvah Fund’s ideological project, and indeed, one can still study “The Meaning of Jewish Nationalism” with Hazony via lectures he recorded for Tikvah several years ago.

But beyond a shared view of the Western political tradition’s indebtedness to Jewish sources, subtle but important differences abound between Tikvah and National Conservatism. Tikvah upholds a significantly older party line. Within its protected walls, neoconservatives who have otherwise fallen out of favor on the American right can still agitate for war with Iran and conflate American and Israeli interests. Tikvah’s current chairman, Elliott Abrams, is infamous for his role in the Reagan government’s Iran-Contra scandal and his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, during which time he served as the National Security Council’s senior director for Near East and North African affairs. He is also the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, legendary editor-in-chief emeritus of that most neoconservative of outlets, Commentary. It is hard to envision a more representative figure of what Donald Trump called “the so-called nation-builders” and “neocons’” who “wrecked far more nations than they built.” (Despite this ideological bluster, President Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities last June signals that the neocons still have friends in high places.)

For his part, Hazony rejects the neocon project of “spreading democracy” and reshaping the world in the American image. Key to his position is the argument that nationalism and imperialism represent competing political models, with the Greco-Roman tradition serving as a forerunner to the globalist attempt to forge a monoculture—the antithesis of the independent nation-states Hazony claims can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Tikvah, on the other hand, asserts that harmony reigns between Athens and Jerusalem. Jewish nationalism and American empire are understood in terms that are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. While Zionism remains the fund’s most sturdy ideological commitment, Tikvah does not imply that all Jews belong in Israel. Rather, its leadership is committed to American Jewish life as the great facilitator of the Zionist fever dream. In this, it echoes the position of twentieth-century liberal Jews for whom Zionism was crucially important—but for other Jews.

Here we arrive at the most substantive point of disagreement between the two approaches to right-wing Jewish politics: Where, precisely, do Jews belong in a modern political order organized around the nation-state? Though Hazony stops short, at least in his public remarks, of condemning diasporic Jews, everything about his political thought suggests that they are in the wrong place, both physically and spiritually detached from their “real” national home. In particular, he rejects the premise of “credal nations” built around a shared commitment to certain principles rather than ethnic belonging—in other words, the very arrangement that has allowed American Jews to flourish. When J.D. Vance argued that the US is not an idea, but rather a nation bound together by blood, he was merely echoing Hazony’s core theory.

Another point of tension stems from Hazony’s claim that America’s founding fathers made a mistake in following Thomas Jefferson’s doctrine of separation of church and state, as reflected in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Echoing the post-liberal thought of Catholic integralists like Patrick Deneen, Hazony contends that the experience of liberal individualism—each person pursuing their own ends and deciding their own truths—has led to the decay of traditional moral values, particularly the respect for hierarchy and order. The state must therefore forcefully intervene to right the ship by actively cultivating religious virtue among its fallen people. As he writes in Conservatism: A Rediscovery: “In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provisions should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered.” In a footnote to the book, Hazony writes that the conservative intellectual Irving Kristol once told him in private conversation that “only Christians should be able to vote in a Christian majority nation such as America; and that, by the same principle, only Jews should be able to vote in Israel. If someone wanted to be recognized as a member of a certain political community, they should adopt the public religion of the majority.” This idea is presented without comment.

It is these aspects of National Conservatism that most trouble the Tikvah intellectuals. Meir Soloveichik, a rabbi who is chief-of-staff for Tikvah Ideas, the organization’s media wing, wrote a critical review of Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism for Commentary in 2018, notably titled “Saving American Nationalism from the Nationalists.” More recently, Elliott Abrams expressed his discomfort with Hazony’s views in an interview with Kelman, stating that National Conservatism “doesn’t exist in the Jewish world, except as a danger.” He continued, “It reeks of tolerance,” echoing “a kind of antisemitism that is really a return to toleration, in a sense that Jews do a lot of good things, they’re not really Americans.” Abrams was particularly disdainful of “the apparent supposition that America is a Christian country and the government should reflect that.”

Taken to its logical conclusions, National Conservatism not only represents a threat to Jews and other minorities in the United States, but to American support for Zionism as well. For every Oren Cass forcing himself into contortions to defend the “special relationship,” there is a Tucker Carlson wondering why successive US administrations have acquiesced to Israel’s most destructive impulses. (Mosaic’s response: “Tucker Carlson’s Obsession with Jews Reflects a Hostility to America.”) Given the centrality of Zionism to Hazony’s political vision, it is not surprising that earlier National Conservatism conferences largely toed the conventional Republican Party line regarding US-Israel relations. Over the last two years, however, conservative advocates of foreign policy restraint and America First intellectuals have increasingly contested the United States’ deferential relationship toward its “vassal state” (in the words of Steve Bannon). This growing rift was on full display at the recent NatCon conference in Washington, DC, in a debate over the recent Iran–Israel “war” between political scientist Max Abrahms and Curt Mills of The American Conservative. Mills characterized the US-Israel relationship as “perhaps the world-historical case of the tail wagging the dog,” further adding: “Why are these wars our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? . . . In the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelensky but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First—asterisk Israel?”

It is within the context of such advocacy for the uncoupling of American and Israeli interests, and not just growing popular support for the Palestinian cause in the United States, that one should understand Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statement that “We will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” Though he still claims to believe in the free market, the prime minister cautioned that “we may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” The only path forward, he stressed, is “to develop arms industries here— not only research and development, but also the ability to produce what we need”—liberating the state from the vagaries of American politics. For neocons like Abrams, for whom the righteous symbiosis between American and Israeli interests is an article of faith, this possible rupture is precisely what Tikvah must guard against.

Even Hazony, meanwhile, seems anxious about the noxious undercurrents he has helped unleash—in short, that many people on the American right have taken his ethnonationalist ideas too seriously. Most of his opening address at the Washington conference was dedicated to the emerging cracks in the NatCon community, driven in his eyes by conservatives who “used to think that Jews and Christians should be allied to save America, and now they think that, actually . . . they think Jews are a big problem.” His tone was muted, the jubilant energy seen in his prior NatCon addresses nowhere to be found. While acknowledging the need for dialogue and disagreement about Christian–Jewish relations and the role of Israel, he also reminded attendees of the vital need to keep various parts of the coalition intact. “This coalition is broad enough to be able to win the next election, and the next one, and the next one,” but it will crumble if certain members (presumably Jews) are driven out or dishonored. Still, as he told the audience by way of consolation, “Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon you have to love Israel. Nobody ever said to be a good NatCon you had to love Jews.” Seen in this light, perhaps the Tikvah grant can also be understood as a salve for the antisemitism mainstreamed by the American right—one side of the MAGA coalition cleaning up the mess made by its purported partner. Though the NEH’s acting chairman, Michael McDonald, predictably pointed to “the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses” as justification for the grant, rhetorically linking antisemitism to the left, Hazony’s remarks point to growing concern about the discourse authorized by the populist right.

As for Tikvah, the NatCon vision presents a distinctive threat precisely because it is more ideologically coherent: If Israel is the Jewish national home, that’s where Jews should live, and there is no good reason for the United States to get involved in Israel’s wars. Tikvah’s leadership, on the other hand, understands that the material reality of Zionism has always depended on a loyal cadre of diaspora activists, however at odds diaspora may be with the ideological claim that a genuine Jewish life can be lived only in Eretz Yisrael. It is but one of many contradictions that sits at the heart of the Tikvah project, and that not even $10.4 million in government funding will be enough to resolve.

Suzanne Schneider is a historian, writer, and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-meaning-of-trumps-10-million-grant-to-a-jewish-nonprofit at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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Process of Punishment

During my bid for clemency last year, it was clear state officials didn’t care about my rehabilitation—or about helping the victim’s family heal.

Christopher Blackwell

Christopher Blackwell at his clemency hearing, June 13th, 2024.

Still via TVW, Washington's Public Affairs Network website

Nothing I learned in the nearly 23 years I’ve spent incarcerated had prepared me for the three-hour hearing—not the thousands of hours of schooling and self-help programs, nor my work in restorative and transformative justice. When I logged onto Zoom last year on June 13th to appear before the Washington State Clemency & Pardons Board, I didn’t yet know that I was entering one of the toughest encounters of my life.

For those of us incarcerated in Washington, clemency hearings are the main avenue of possible early release. There is only the haziest outline of a standard procedure: The incarcerated person appears in a virtual, publicly accessible hearing before the five-person clemency board. There is no rubric for evaluation; the decision is made purely at the whim of the governor-appointed board members, who, after several hours of asking questions, vote on whether they think the individual deserves clemency. If the majority votes affirmatively, the recommendation proceeds to the governor for his sign-off.

Even before the hearing, the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Tacoma had been at work ensuring the process would not run smoothly. Over the course of a year, the clemency board had proposed dates for my hearing. Again and again, the prosecutors had ensured the hearing was delayed. They needed more time, they said. Or, I didn’t actually deserve a hearing at all because I hadn’t yet completed the mandatory minimum sentence. They spent months stalling, trying to figure out a way to achieve their singular goal: to keep me in prison for two more decades, the remainder of the 45-year sentence I am serving for taking the life of a young man named Joshua in a drug robbery gone terribly wrong.

On June 13th, 2024, my hearing finally took place. Over the course of three grueling hours, the prosecutor assigned to my case and the clemency board members interrogated me and my loved ones. When my wife Chelsea—with whom I co-founded Look2Justice, an education and advocacy organization which aims to transform the criminal legal system—spoke about how my profound regret for the harm I caused has turned me toward a life of careful consideration for the impacts my actions have on others, a board member seemed skeptical, responding by asking her if I get angry. When a mentor testified to my transformation, underscoring how I had left my old destructive social circles and nurtured a community of people committed to mutual accountability, that same board member asked how much time we’d spent together, as if to say: How well do you really know Chris? It did not feel like she was trying to better understand my relationships; it felt like she was trying to discredit them.

Even though my appeal for clemency is supposed to be evaluated based solely on the person I have become, the prosecutor insisted that, regardless of my rehabilitation, it would not be fair for me, a white-passing person, to be released while my Black and brown co-defendants remain in prison. This was hard to hear coming from a white woman who advocates for the incarceration of Black and brown people every day—and whose office was responsible for the extraordinarily harsh sentencing my co-defendants received in the first place.

It was painful to watch my loved ones be treated with such distrust and to hear my co-defendants used as pawns in the prosecutor’s agenda, but by far the most difficult part of the hearing was when my victim’s father spoke. He was hurting deeply. In the more than 20 years since his son’s death, he told us, “Nobody’s helped us. We have been handling this on our own.” The only time anyone from the state system had reached out to the family was to notify them when I was being moved from one facility to the next. The prosecutors, who made such a show of concern for his well-being, had extended nothing but the promise that I might sit in prison for decades. He was frustrated I’d never tried to reach out and explain myself.

But I had reached out. Years earlier, I had written a letter to my victim’s father and his family. I wanted them to know I understood that I’d caused them irreparable grief—and that I would spend the rest of my life in service to others in Joshua’s name. I submitted the letter to the Department of Corrections (DOC) Victim Services Letter Bank, which provides incarcerated people the opportunity to address those they’ve harmed. The DOC never informed the family of the letter.

Now, during the hearing, board members put my victim’s father directly in conversion with me. It wasn’t easy to face a person I had taken so much from—and I know it had to be a thousand times harder for him. After all, this was the first time he had seen me since the day I was sentenced, and without his consent, we were thrust into an unmediated conversation. One of the board members instructed me to tell the father why, after taking his son’s life, I deserved to go home early. My mind was racing. It felt cruel to try to convince him of anything. From my own training as a facilitator in restorative practices, I knew this wasn’t how it was meant to happen. We each should have been offered months of support to prepare us for this encounter. He should have been engaged in extended conversation to be sure he wanted to face me at all. But I had no choice: If I didn’t respond to the board’s request, they were unlikely to recommend that my parole be granted.

Through tears I tried to help my victim’s father understand how sorry I was for taking his son’s life. I pledged that I would never use violence again. I reiterated my dedication to service. That was all I could offer. That’s the thing about taking a human life: You can never give it back. The best you can do is to commit to helping others not to make the mistakes you did.

My victim’s father did not feel that I should be released before serving my full sentence, but he gave me something far more meaningful: his forgiveness. The values he derives from his Christian faith led him to this act of mercy, he explained. I was in awe of his bravery, of the way his faith guided him toward what he believed to be right. Still, I could tell this process had done nothing to support his healing. I yearned to do something about that. I struggled to stay present as the board members continued with their questions until, finally, it came time for them to vote.

One woman said there wasn’t much to think about. In her eyes, I hadn’t done enough time inside. She motioned for a “no” vote. Another board member seconded that motion. I was doing great work from prison, she said. I should just keep doing it there. My heart sank. Just one more “no” and the board would recommend that Governor Inslee deny my petition for release. I had spent the past decade engaged in transforming my life and working to better my communities, but none of that mattered to their decision.

As I waited for the final blow, one of the board members, a former public defender, made a bold statement. Raymond Delos Reyes argued the idea that an arbitrary number in the form of a mandatory minimum sentence—a practice originally instituted by lawmakers in the 1980s to quell public panic about rising crime rates, and which is now widely recognized as harmful—should not prevent me from receiving the board’s endorsement. “We don’t get to put numbers on grief,” Mr. Delos Reyes said. Joshua’s life was infinitely valuable; so, too, he believed, is the human capacity for transformation. He motioned for a “yes” vote! The remaining two board members concurred. The tide had turned. I was going to receive a 3-2 vote. Suddenly, I felt the possibility of returning to my family and all the work I could do in my community. Tears filled my eyes. As I listened to the board members tell me how important it was not to lose sight of this blessing, I couldn’t help but watch the father’s face. Was this whole production making his life even more difficult? Was I causing more trauma? Was there something I could do to help? It was impossible to tell over Zoom.

As soon as the hearing was over, I raced back to my living unit and called my wife. When she picked up the phone, we were both crying. We had fought so hard to get here. We just kept asking each other if this had really happened. After a few minutes we decided to call my lawyer, Jeff Ellis, who had been fighting for me for almost ten years. “We have to do something for the dad,” I told Jeff. “I want to help him heal.” “Let’s get you home, my friend, and we will,” he responded. We all thought my release was imminent. After all, the liberal governor had been consistently following the board’s clemency recommendations, and he was now at the end of his final term, when governors are usually most open to granting clemency without worrying about backlash from voters.

However, in the weeks that followed, the prosecutor reached out to the governor’s office opposing my release. During the hearing, even the prosecutor had admitted that I was accountable, rehabilitated, and remorseful. But she insisted that only one thing mattered in the end: The punishment hadn’t been served. We later learned that she had key connections to get this argument across to Inslee’s team—she and the lawyer in the governor’s office in charge of making the final clemency recommendations had previously been coworkers. I had never had a fair shot. Months after the hearing and on the heels of hundreds of hours of work from my support team fighting the prosecutor’s continued attacks, Jeff received a letter: The governor would not be granting my clemency.

I struggled to grasp who the denial was serving. My co-defendants were not freed by it. My victim’s father was not offered any additional support. In the end, it seems that my denial only served the bureaucratic system that has held me captive since my first encounter with it as a 12-year-old child from an impoverished and over-policed community who was forced, like many, to live in survival mode. Today, as I wait for another chance to go home, I, along with my legal team and others in my support network, are working toward addressing the state failures that shaped my case—advocating not only for myself, but also for my codefendants, who should be at home with their families; for the victim’s loved ones, who deserve robust support in their healing; and for all of those impacted by a system that devalues relationships and thrives on punishment.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Christopher Blackwell is an award-winning journalist currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in Washington State. He is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents and the co-founder and current executive director of Look2Justice.

@ChrisWBlackwell

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/process-of-punishment at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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The Making of a Coal Boycott

Inside the campaign to break the toxic relationship between Colombian mining and Israeli militarism

Andreas Malm and Maxy Guedes

Palestine solidarity demonstration in Bogotá, 2024

Photo courtesy of Helena Müllenbach Martínez

On November 1st, 2023, three weeks into Israel’s war on Gaza, five days after the tanks began rolling into the Strip, the day after over 150 Palestinians were buried under one residential building in Nuseirat—roughly half of the victims being children, many of whom were playing football next to the house when the bombs fell—a distant actor announced its entry into the arena: Sintracarbón, the trade union for coal workers in Colombia. It issued a statement describing what was happening as a “genocide,” and called on the Colombian government to “suspend the shipping of coal to Israel.”

Closer to the bloodshed, Leyla, a Palestinian activist hailing from Gaza and living in Amman who requested a pseudonym, was electrified by the call. She was working for Disrupt Power, a Palestinian militant research collective looking for ways to throw spanners into the killing machine. Coal, she saw, would be the ideal target. “Coal imported to Israel goes straight into its unified electrical grid. It powers the settlements in the West Bank, the artificial intelligence used to bomb Gaza, the military factories, the bases—everything running on electricity,” she told us in a June interview. When Leyla and her colleagues began gathering data, they learned that more than 60% of this coal came from Colombia. They found the ships that transported the coal and the ports where those ships docked. Then, they passed on their research to the Ramallah-based NGO Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD). In the spring of 2024, Amira, a PIPD activist who also requested a pseudonym, left the West Bank on a mission: to help convince the Colombian government to keep its coal away from Israel.

Since the British first occupied Palestine, coal-fueled electricity has been a critical hinge for colonial acceleration in the region. In the early 20th century, Jewish settlements gained privileged access to Palestine’s newly established electrical grid, and by 1948, Jews—the majority of whom were recent settlers—made up one third of the population but consumed 90% of the electricity. All the way into the new millennium, imported coal remained the basis of electrical power generated and dispatched across the lands conquered in 1948 as well as in 1967. In the early 21st century, gas was discovered in the waters of historic Palestine, and Israel quickly ratcheted up extraction as it sought to shift its power plants onto this source. But it was an incomplete success: On the eve of the genocide in Gaza, between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s electricity still came from the combustion of coal—the bulk extracted from lands that have been violently depopulated in Colombia. In 2023, these companies shipped nearly $447 million worth of Colombian coal to Israel, accounting for roughly 5% of the former’s coal exports and almost half of latter’s imports.

This is the reality Amira had in mind as she traveled to Bogotá in early 2024, hoping to get Colombia to end a collaboration that had destroyed many lives on both sides of the Atlantic. She would be addressing a Colombian government that, for the first time in history, was made up of forces of the left. In 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former member of the leftist guerrilla organization 19th of April Movement (M-19), was elected president of Colombia, backed by a panoply of social movements including Sintracarbón and the organized working class, Indigenous groups, and environmental organizations. Petro had campaigned on the idea of a politics of life and a program for remaking the Colombian economy, including, most audaciously, weaning it off fossil fuels. After his victory, the government quickly launched a transitional program, the most radical so far in any fossil fuel-producing country: a complete ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure. Not a single contract would be issued for opening a coal mine, drilling oil, or exploring for gas, opening the possibility that Colombia’s role in fueling the world’s fossil economy might slowly fade away.

On the eve of the genocide in Gaza, between a fifth and a quarter of Israel’s electricity came from the combustion of coal—the bulk extracted from lands that have been violently depopulated in Colombia.

One of the program’s architects was Susana Muhamad, Petro’s first minister of the environment. Muhamad is the face of climate justice and biodiversity protection in Colombia; she is also Palestinian, the granddaughter of an immigrant who fled the threat of conscription into the British army in 1925. Muhamad renewed her ties to Palestine with a 2009 visit to the West Bank. “I had dozens of cousins spread out around Ramallah who were aware of my existence. They kept asking me, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ These family ties sort of transcended time and space,” she told us in April. It was thus to Muhamad that Amira paid a call. They sat down for a coffee, and the activist briefed the minister about her mission. Muhamad was horrified to learn about the critical role Colombian coal was playing in the ongoing genocide: “I said, ‘We have to let President Petro know about this’—and I opened the door for social movements from Palestine to transmit their message directly to the president.” Petro, who has long stood in solidarity with Palestinians, required little persuasion. In June 2024, the president announced that Colombia would halt coal sales to Israel. In August, he tweeted a terse explanation—“Colombian coal is used to make bombs to kill Palestinian children”—alongside a copy of Decree 1047, which put the export prohibition into law.

Petro’s decision to materially divest from Israel’s genocide made waves across the Atlantic. It was the greatest victory to date of the campaign for an energy embargo against Israel, if not the boycott movement as a whole. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas hailed the move, issuing communiques in praise of the Colombian president. For leftists across the globe, Petro’s actions offered a glimpse of true internationalist solidarity with Palestine; here, at last, was a model to follow. As the human rights advocate Rula Jamal wrote in Jacobin, “with Colombia being the largest coal exporter to Israel, this decision is not only a victory in symbolic terms but shows the enormous impact that a wider energy embargo could have in ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” In response to news of the ban, the Israeli Electric Corporation, the state’s largest supplier of electrical power, said that it was negotiating with “alternative suppliers” of energy to “further increase our room for maneuver.” But the reality remained that a choked-off Colombian supply threatened to leave Israel gasping for energy.

As it turned out, however, the extraction feeding the destruction of life and land across Colombia and Palestine would not be so swiftly interrupted. Even after Petro’s ban, Colombian mines were not closed to Israel, and ships continued to leave the ports of Colombia for those of the occupation as coal corporations found a way to evade the law. Decree 1047 would not be the last word on the export, only a preamble.

Traveling through Colombia’s “mining corridor” in the northern region of Cesar this April, we were confronted with huge walls blocking the mines—massive ramparts of stone and slag that the companies have built to keep the wasteland out of sight. But in one spot, a landslide has gouged out a viewpoint over the pit, allowing us to take in the scene: a bowl stretching hundreds of meters into the earth, black terraces coiling up along the sides for the trucks to drive on. Nothing can grow, nothing can live on this land; in the words of the Colombian scholar and activist Felipe Corral Montoya, who accompanied us on the trip, “it is a dead desert.”

Half a century ago, residents tell us, this region was swathed in blue and green. But all of that changed with the arrival of multinational mining corporations. The largest company in the area is Drummond, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. It arrived in Cesar in 1993—and promptly began clearing land by force. The process involved “the deaths of innocent people, rapes, displacements. God knows how many peasants still lay buried around here,” according to a woman in the mining town of La Loma, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Many were forced to sell their land—“they were made to practically give it away,” she explained—and would later be prevented from returning by the fait accompli of their fields having turned into coal rubble. “The coal that comes out of this ground is stained with blood,” she said. Further to the north, the residents of the region of La Guajira suffered the same fate. Here, the Wayuu—an Indigenous people who survived Spanish colonization through a combination of luck, adaptation, diplomacy, and guerrilla warfare—bore the brunt of the terror, facing waves of paramilitary atrocities and mass evictions until the region could boast the largest open-pit mine in Latin America, this one owned by the Anglo-Swiss commodities trader Glencore.

“God knows how many peasants still lay buried around here . . . The coal that comes out of this ground is stained with blood.”

Coal mine in Cesar, April 2025

Maxy Guedes

The mining giants arrived just as Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict between right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerillas was reaching new intensity. The guerrillas’ Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army were born out of peasant revolts against land concentration in the hands of large landowners. Now, these groups took to targeting the coal industry’s infrastructure, blowing up coal trains and kidnapping managers and engineers. In response, Drummond set up a paramilitary force of its own under the umbrella of the existing far-right militia Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). The Alabama company paid hundreds of armed men, provided them with training grounds, and coordinated with them to secure the perimeters of its coal mines. The coal railway, which carried material from mines to the port, was also enveloped in checkpoints; the private guards who manned them could shoot at anyone considered “suspicious.” The paramilitaries referred to their mission as “social cleansing,” a strategy of prompting the population to flee by means of spectacular murders and shrill threats. One gruesome instance of such violence unfolded in 1997, when armed men stormed the Santa Fe estate, shouting: “We are from the AUC and . . . we are going to stay here to carry out social cleansing.” The paramilitaries then summarily killed a 13-year-old boy, after which the residents fled. Their property was declared abandoned and sold at auction; much of it eventually ended up in the hands of Glencore.

By such means was the coal enclave of Colombia constructed. After forcing the exodus of some 300,000 people, several thousand of whom were killed, Glencore and Drummond together took hold of the northern tip of the country. Colombia had already been a paradigmatic case of ecologically unequal exchange, with biophysical matter constantly being drained from the country to feed the world market. The two companies’ conquest consolidated this pattern. Up until the ban, between 90% and 97% of the coal mined in Colombia was exported to other countries, and was much in demand at power plants from the Netherlands to Israel. As one Wayuu woman told the researcher Aviva Chomsky, “neither we nor our animals eat coal, that’s not our life.” Instead, it has ever been “the White Man [who] eats coal.”

Members of the AUC conduct a military drill in the mountains of the southern region of Cauca, 2002.

J. George/AP

In the sacrifice zones that have resulted from this takeover, a litany of woes has unfolded: collapsed agriculture; water shortages arising from the mines’ diversion of dozens of rivers; air pollution that attacks lungs, eyes, and other organs; cracked houses due to underground explosions; animals and people killed by the coal trains. Once contamination reaches intolerable levels, already displaced communities must again be “resettled,” dispossessions that feed extreme poverty in the most unequal country on the continent. Then there is the changing climate. Both Glencore and Drummond have made it onto The Guardian’s list of the 100 companies that have poured most fossil fuels on our planetary fire. “Nowadays the sun is much hotter than it used to be,” says Maria Dolores, the traditional matriarchal authority of a Wayuu community living along the coast of La Guajira. Her son Luis Carlos continues: “When the rains arrive, we are happy, because we can plant crops and the flowers sprout and our animals have water to drink. But nowadays the rains are weak and rare. The desert is closing in on us.”

Israel has deep roots in this story of destructive extraction. Throughout the Colombian armed conflict, Israeli actors helped pave the way for Drummond and Glencore, assisting and equipping the military forces of the right in an extensively documented—and, in Colombia, well-remembered—history of sordid entanglements. As Sintracarbón noted in its first call from November 2023, the coal sent into the furnaces of the genocidal machine today is “linked to the role of Israel in training military and paramilitary groups in the armed conflict our country has suffered.” Others may have bought more coal from Colombia than Israel did, but none had a similar fingerprint on the industry’s bloody takeoff.

Memories of this period inevitably feature a certain Carlos Castaño, the founder of the AUC. In the early 1980s, this young Colombian anti-communist moved to Israel for two years. He took classes in military schools as well as at the Hebrew University. In his autobiography, he described the experience in glowing terms:

I did not only learn about military training in Israel. It was there that I became convinced that it was possible to defeat the guerrillas in Colombia. I began to see how a people could defend itself from the whole world . . . In fact, I copied from the Israelis the idea of autodefensa [self-defence, through the wide distribution of] weapons; every citizen of that country is a potential soldier.

Upon his return home, Castaño rose in the ranks of the paramilitaries and, in 1997, unified them under the command of the AUC, whose members would go on to commit the lion’s share of massacres and mass displacement during the war.

Israel’s input in the armed conflict extends beyond Castaño’s early epiphanies. In the mid-1980s, FARC rebels, together with trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals, formed a political party called Unión Patriótica. The Colombian state responded by physically annihilating the party, killing more than 6,000 members—cadres, mayors, presidential candidates—over two decades. The operation under which the murders happened was designed in part by Rafael Eitan, a Mossad agent and former national security adviser to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. (Sintracarbón referenced this link between the Israeli military and Colombian paramilitaries in its first statement calling for a boycott of coal exports to Israel.) Additionally, the AUC itself received extensive training from Yair Klein, another Israeli veteran and mercenary who also lent his services to the death squads of the Medellín drug cartel. (In 2001, the Colombian government demanded his extradition from Israel, to no avail.) Israel also supplied nearly 40% of the weapons the Colombian army and paramilitaries used to battle the guerrillas: The Hermes drone, first tested on the battlefields of Gaza, was a particular favorite, as was the Galil, an Israeli-made automatic rifle.

There has been a mirror image of these entanglements on the left. In the 1970s, the M-19 guerrilla sent its fighters to train in Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) camps. “During our armed struggle . . . my comrades went to the Sahara and trained with the PLO,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 member still unapologetic about that past, recalled to us in an April interview in the presidential palace—in an office furnished with Marxist books and adorned with a keffiyeh. “Our love for Palestine was born there.” In 1981, M-19 showed its solidarity with the PLO by attacking the Israeli embassy in Bogotá; following the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, the group attacked the embassy a second time.

Others may have bought more coal from Colombia than Israel did, but none had a similar fingerprint on the industry’s bloody takeoff.

The pattern has continued into recent years, with Colombia’s right and left refracting their internal struggles through Israel and Palestine. Petro’s predecessors on the right have stayed firm in their commitment to the former. In 2013, then-president Juan Manuel Santos traveled to Jerusalem to shake hands with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and sign a free trade agreement between the two countries; he was “very proud” when Colombia was called “the Israel of Latin America,” he told Haaretz. Citing the use of Israeli military equipment, Santos—who had been minister of defense at the height of the state’s war against the guerrillas—affirmed to Israeli leaders that “with your technology and our resources, we can create enormous synergy.” The torch was carried forward by Santos’s successor Ivan Duque. In November 2021, Duque paid the usual obsequious visit to Israel, where he inspected a navy drill, praised the free trade agreement, inaugurated the first Colombian “trade and innovation office” outside the country, and conferred with Israeli officials about supposed threats on the Venezuelan border from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Now, with the left-wing, pro-Palestinian side of the armed conflict holding the reins of power, the tables appear to have turned. “They bring death and destruction wherever they go,” an ex-FARC combatant tells us in a class at a popular university in Fonseca, La Guajira, where former guerrilla fighters now channel their Marxist consciousness into projects other than armed struggle—such as the transition away from fossil fuels. The ex-fighter’s “they” was a sweeping reference to the nexus of coal companies, the US, and Israel. In contrast, another course participant emphasized, “we are on the side of those who suffer from war. We are of the people. We support Petro’s decision to stop exporting coal.”

Enforcing that ban has proved more complicated. In August and September 2024, just after Decree 1047, coal exports to Israel plunged to zero. In October of that year, Glencore sent one last ship, then sold the coal mined from La Guajira to other customers. From its assets in South Africa, the commodities trader still transported the fuel to Israel—and one cannot rule out the rerouting of Colombian coal from other ports—but to all appearances, the company adhered to the ban, perhaps worn down by long-standing activist pressure.

Drummond, however, did not continue to oblige. As Petro’s ambitious programs faced resistance from bourgeois forces and the new government found itself spread thin, it was left to activists to serve as watchdogs of the coal companies’ compliance. On site in Bogotá, PIPD tasked Helena Müllenbach Martínez, a Colombian organizer and co-founder of the international Resist Glencore campaign, with monitoring the ban. Together with activists from BDS Colombia, she identified 28 Drummond ships going straight to Hadera and other Israeli ports between October 2024 and April 2025. Where Glencore and Drummond used to share the coal export to Israel, the latter now monopolized it without much ado, seeking not to attract attention to this business any more than to its erstwhile dealings with paramilitaries. A total of one million tons of Colombian coal were thus fed into the grid, roughly two-thirds of the average pre-ban amount. Almost one year after Decree 1047, Drummond’s ships had ensured that Colombia remained the main coal supplier to the occupation.

Almost one year after Decree 1047, Drummond’s ships had ensured that Colombia remained the main coal supplier to the occupation.

The Drummond port outside Santa Marta, 2025

Maxy Guedes

Here, the company was taking advantage not only of the lack of government monitoring but of a loophole in the law itself. According to article three of Decree 1047, the export ban did not apply to contracts signed—as Drummond’s deals with Israel were—before the law came into effect in mid-2024. It was this article the Ministry of Trade cited when PIPD and the Colombian wing of BDS demanded to know why Drummond could get away with flouting the ban. “In a way, the decree contradicts itself. On the one hand, it gives precedence to human rights over private property. On the other, it treats commercial obligations as sacrosanct. So technically, Drummond might not be violating the decree,” Müllenbach Martínez explained to us in a June interview, her frustration palpable.

The motley coalition of actors who had galvanized support for the initial boycott sprung into action again. PIPD passed on the data it had collected about the decree’s subversion to the relevant ministries. On May 28th, the Wayuu Indigenous Guard—an unarmed community protection network—joined various allied groups to block coal mines across Cesar and La Guajira for a day, raising Palestinian flags and calling for a real embargo. Wayuu groups and trade unions also held a series of meetings with government officials to communicate their objections to the ban’s evasion. Sintracarbón, too, released a vehement statement repeating its call to cut off coal to the genocide—this one also signed by the oil workers’ union and the national federation for Indigenous peoples. At its headquarters in La Loma, Drummond felt the heat. The company issued a plea of innocence: “Coal exports to Israel have been done in conformity with the authorization that the National Government gave,” it claimed, pointing to its shipments having been approved by the trade ministry in line with article three.

Before this wave of protest, Petro seemed only dimly aware of this subversion of his decree. “Drummond might be cheating us,” he said in passing during our interview. But now, faced with a public campaign highlighting how Drummond made a mockery of his order, the president re-entered the fray. In mid-July, he wrapped the edifice of the presidential palace in Palestinian flags. On the 23rd of the same month, he delivered another characteristically erudite and rambling speech on the climate catastrophe, homing in on the question of the coal boycott. By now he seemed to be burning with rage. “Am I a shell here, a puppet in a theater they call politics, while real power lies elsewhere? . . . The export of coal to Israel is prohibited—it’s an order from the president of the republic.” He railed against Drummond, for first murdering workers and then flouting a democratic decision, then decried his own former minister of trade, Carlos Reyes—a liberal who “deceived” him by inserting article three into the decree—as “an accomplice to the genocide in Gaza.” He vowed to henceforth allow “not a single ton of coal” to reach Israel, and called on the workers and the Wayuu to block mines and ports if the export continued.

The day after Petro’s address, Drummond sent another vessel, Fortune, from its Colombian port, this one loaded with nearly 100,000 tons bound for Israel. Now Petro lost it. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Colombia, he ordered the navy to intercept any further shipments; should the company try to violate the law of the land by continuing to supply Colombian coal to Israel’s genocide, it would be met with warships. Such an announcement was unprecedented in the history of boycott initiatives, and perhaps in that of relations between states and foreign capital. Müllenbach Martínez welcomed the news. “As long as ships are within Colombian waters, he does have the legal right to send in the navy,” she said. “It’s an incredible thing for other countries to look into, that you can actually do something like this.” Since the order to the navy, PIPD has not registered a single outbound ship. The Drummond port has gone quiet, a decades-long supply to Israel coming to an abrupt halt. More cause for celebration came on August 20th, when the presidential office issued a second decree, number 0949, which canceled Decree 1047’s now-notorious article three and issued an absolute ban on coal exports to Israel. The contracts that Drummond had signed with Israel before 2024—which ran until 2036—all nullified with the stroke of a pen.

In July, Petro ordered his navy to intercept any future shipments to Israel—an announcement unprecedented in the history of boycott initiatives, and perhaps in that of relations between states and foreign capital.

Supporters of President Gustavo Petro display a Palestinian flag as he addresses a rally in Ibague, Colombia, October 3rd, 2025.

Fernando Vergara/AP

But this law is likely to be just another act in a protracted struggle. After Decree 1047, Glencore and Drummond sued the Colombian government 17 times, for millions of dollars in each case, within the framework of free-trade agreements. Now, “there will be even more court cases, because Drummond was counting on another decade of sales and now the contracts have been canceled,” Müllenbach Martínez said. Even more critically, in 2026, Colombia will elect a new president. Polls have indicated that the right or far right is likely to reconquer the palace. A top contender is Vicky Dávila, a media personality aspiring to be the Colombian Jair Bolsonaro or Javier Milei who has attacked Muhamad for being a Palestinian foreigner and Petro for being a terrorist sympathizer. Barely had the ink dried on the presidential paper before conservative parliamentarians and presidential candidates demanded that the Colombian supreme court abrogate Decree 0949. In the assessment of Müllenbach Martínez, “this new decree can be eliminated in 24 hours if they win.”

A Pyrrhic victory it might still be, but the model of the Colombian boycott initiative has been inspiring to many in the movements for Palestine and the climate. “A lot of countries in the Global South were meant to do much more for Palestine, to disrupt the genocidal machine economically. But so far, and we’re in September 2025, it’s only Colombia doing it,” says Mohammed Usrof, a Gazan living in Qatar who has become the face of Palestinian youth at the United Nations Climate Change Conference’s COP summits in recent years. Usrof, who has lost 70 family members to the massacres in Khan Younis, invests considerable hope in the lessons of the Colombian boycott, and he is not alone. Efforts to keep the experiment alive have spread. In the run-up to COP30 in Brazil, the campaign for an energy embargo is focusing on that country, which is nominally committed to both mitigating climate change and ending the genocide but is still a major exporter of oil to Israel. Oil workers’ unions have called on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to follow in the footsteps of Petro. South Africa, with its mixture of judicial vanguardism and uninterrupted coal exports, has become another front for similar protests. Leyla, the activist from Disrupt Power, says that the Colombian ban is ripe for export to such places. It lays out the process—“a trade union which set the ball in motion, and after that, solidarity movements could be mobilized and policymakers lobbied”—and shows that “an energy embargo from below can actually win.”

More abstractly, the episode can be seen as an object lesson in the clash between two dialectics. On the one hand: a dialectics of destruction. Coal from Colombia has energized occupation and genocide in Palestine; Israeli militarism has contributed to displacement and destruction in Colombia; and both together are fueling the ultimate breakdown of the climate. Within this dialectic, as seen from the northern shores of Colombia, the current genocide in Gaza appears like a culmination: The physical annihilation of Palestine is the concentrated exhaust from a world system geared toward the destruction of the many for the benefit of the few. Petro emphasized as much in his July 23rd speech: “What are they doing in Gaza? Showing us how the power of carbon can wipe us all out if we rebel. Mister Carbon is the power of the world . . . We have to destroy Mister Carbon, or else he will destroy us all.”

On the other hand, then, a dialectics of resistance. The coal boycott has come about through a remarkable reciprocity between social movements in Colombia and Palestine and—uniquely—the executive power of the left. Once in the cabinet and the presidential office, Muhamad and Petro were proudly responsive to pressure from extra-parliamentary campaigns, and egged the activists on in turn. The exceptionality of this situation is hard to exaggerate, and the fight to keep it in place is ceaseless when a bourgeois state apparatus works to maintain business as usual and a revanchist right stands ready, preparing to regain full power. Movements have reached for the emergency brake on the coal train; whether they can bring it to a halt remains to be seen.

Andreas Malm is an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His latest book, with Wim Carton, is The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, forthcoming from Verso in October.

Maxy Guedes is a French independent journalist and reporter.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-making-of-a-coal-boycott at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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UPDATED 12 NOV 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

How the Swedish Public Saw Israel/Palestine

Director Göran Hugo Olsson discusses his latest documentary, assembled from three decades of state TV footage.

Mitchell Abidor

Swedish TV reporter Vanna Beckman interviews Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani, representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Courtesy of Icarus Films

Göran Hugo Olsson’s latest documentary, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989, opens with text announcing that the film “does not presume to tell the whole story of the Israel Palestinian conflict,” but aims only “to show how it was presented by the public service in Sweden” during that period. A nearly identical disclaimer prefaces his 2011 film The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, which is likewise constructed from footage filmed by Swedish news crews and broadcast over the state channel that held a monopoly until 1989. (His 2014 documentary Concerning Violence fashions material from the same archive into what postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak, in her introduction to the film, calls “a tribute to and an illustration of” Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth.) These works are thus as much portraits of Swedish society—and the views that emerged from and shaped it—as they are meditations on their subjects.

For American viewers, the range of images and perspectives on display is a dramatic departure from what we’re used to seeing on public and mainstream news networks. Sweden’s neutrality in global conflicts has allowed its journalists to penetrate worlds we’re rarely shown—Concerning Violence features footage from liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique—and the films exhibit a striking openness to anti-imperialist politics. Though they let the material speak for itself, Olsson’s assemblages convey his own anti-colonialism, which dates back to days in his youth spent collecting money for African National Congress during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

In some ways the story in Israel Palestine on Swedish TV is more familiar. The early footage shows Swedish sympathy for a Jewish state emerging from the Holocaust and governed by the Labor Party. The language and imagery of the first decade or so echo Israeli propaganda: the country making the desert bloom while its citizens dance the hora. But as the years pass, Israel’s abandonment of its democratic pretenses is reported in no uncertain terms. Long before the disruption of the Zionist consensus in the US, we see Swedish TV rigorously examining the dispossession and resistance of the Palestinians. Swedes, the film shows us again and again over its three-hour running time, were a privileged people, presented with points of view often suppressed elsewhere in the West.

Ahead of its limited American release earlier this month, I spoke with Olsson about the making of his illuminating new film. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitch Abidor: Have you come up with a name for these types of films, built of footage shot for Swedish TV?

Göran Hugo Olsson: People have labeled me as an “archive filmmaker,” and rightfully so. It was a very conscious decision for me, 15 years ago, to stop filming. I used to film my documentaries, and be a cameraman for others’ as well. But today, I think documentary films are made by filmmakers from the community, from the environments where they take place. I don’t have ownership over an interesting environment or community—but like most other people living in Sweden, I do have ownership over the Swedish broadcast archive, because that stuff was made for me as public service television. I’d watched it even as a kid.

MA: For this new film, what did you go into the archives expecting to see, and what did you end up finding? Was there a difference between the two?

GHO: There wasn’t too much of a difference between what I expected and what I found. But I was impressed by how much coverage they had from this time. It’s a small country, with a population of eight million at the time, and they had three different teams in the Middle East, which is really impressive. This was a monopoly, a public service monopoly, and everybody watched it, no matter their class or education, and they were really committed to making it understandable for everyone. It’s very different from British or French media, where journalists were snobbish and their goal was to impress their colleagues, to make a career. In Sweden, it was very much about people’s education.

MA: The film follows the footage chronologically, so you can see how the point of view on Israel changes. There’s a very clear shift around 1967.

GHO: That’s the story of the film, basically. At first it’s a total love affair. Sweden was very much about the social democratic thing, you know, and the kibbutz thing. These days people tend to forget that Israel was, next to India, the most socialized country in the free world—that all the big companies were government-owned or controlled, and so were interest rates and loans for buildings and homes, even more than in Sweden. For Swedes that was fantastic. And Golda Meir was seen as such a character, a great personality—she was like Marie Curie or something. Everybody admired her.

MA: In 1964 there’s a discussion between a Swedish diplomat, Gunnar Hägglöf, and a professor. And the professor continues with the pro-Israel line with all its mythology, but the diplomat brings up the injustice done to the Palestinians and the plight of the refugees. It’s really striking, because so few people spoke of that then.

GHO: Oh yes, he was very early, but he was not just anybody; he was one of the seven diplomats who founded the UN. What is interesting is that it’s prime time, this famous intellectual talking about the Palestinians.

MA: It’s surprising how Swedish national TV gave voice—or gave screen time—to figures that would never, ever show up on American TV: radical Palestinians like Ghassan Kanafani and Raymonda Tawil, activists like the Jordanian artist Mona Saudi. There’s talk of leftist groups like the anti-Zionist, revolutionary socialist Jews of Matzpen. Over the years the news covered the discrimination against Mizrahi Jews, and you include a long segment with the Israeli Black Panthers. There’s an appearance by Uri Avnery and the sadly forgotten human rights activist Israel Shahak. In this film, as in Concerning Violence, you see a remarkable openness to anti-colonialist perspectives. How did this come about?

GHO: Yeah, I think we have a special case here. Mostly it’s about Sweden being neutral in the Cold War—because of this, Swedish journalists and filmmakers had access to both sides, could go to both North Vietnam and South Vietnam—and being a social democratic and a kind of radical state. But it’s also that Sweden looked upon itself as not a colonialist country. That’s not true—but we’re not a colonial power. So in that way Swedish TV was not like French or British or American media.

MA: There’s a scene from 1973 in which Swedish workers talk about how they’re split 50-50 between the sides they support. Was that really how Swedish society was?

GHO: When that worker said they were split 50-50, I think he meant that all of them are split 50-50 within themselves: They’re saying that people saw that you can see it one way, but you could also see it another way. I grew up in a well-off neighborhood where there was nothing strange about that position. Many people had this box to collect money for, say, an ambulance in Israel. At the same time, the young people in the same household had the Palestinian scarf. People were on both sides all the time.

MA: There’s a scene from 1984 with Meir Kahane where he has the most significant line in the film: He says that there’s a fundamental contradiction between Zionism and democracy. That sums it all up; it totally undermines the whole Zionist enterprise. And today’s Israel is there to confirm it.

GHO: Yes, yes . . . everything he said became reality. Before that he’s justifying violence against what he calls “dirty Arabs.” Today people talk about this as the dehumanization of the Palestinians, and I can’t interpret what’s happening now in any other way. How can young Israelis do what they’re doing to other people, to kids—soldiers laughing when they kill someone—without this dehumanization that’s been going on for so long?

MA: Watching all three of the archive films now, there’s this overwhelming sense that things have either not changed or gotten worse. You watch Concerning Violence, and there’s Robert Mugabe, who’s still there, whereas a great figure like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso was killed a couple years later. You watch The Black Power Mixtape and the injustice of racism remains, but there aren’t leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. And then, of course, the Middle East—there’s nothing that needs to be said. It just gets worse and worse. So working on this film must have been a depressing experience.

GHO: Mitch, it’s so depressing, and I’m so depressed, I’m so in despair. It’s hard for me to talk about. I spent five or six years of my life watching these images every day, and trying to figure it out. When I started the film I knew that something would explode, but I had no idea that it would be of this magnitude, with this much suffering and violence. I’m proud of the work we did with the film. But for me as an individual . . . it did me great harm. I’m not the victim; nobody should feel sorry for me. But it’s unbearable.

Mitchell Abidor, a contributing writer to Jewish Currents, is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. Among his books are a translation of Victor Serge’s Notebooks 1936-1947, May Made Me: An Oral History of My 1968 in France, and I’ll Forget it When I Die, a history of the Bisbee Deportation of 1917. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Liberties, Dissent, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/how-the-swedish-public-saw-israel-palestine at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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The Anti-Soros Strategy at the Heart of Trump’s War on Progressive Nonprofits

Following a report by the Capital Research Center, the administration is investigating the Open Society Foundations as part of a broader crackdown on progressive organizing.

Alex Kane

George Soros of the Open Society Foundation in 2014.

Wiktor Dabkowski/dpa picture alliance/Alamy Live News

On September 15th, five days after a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance guest-hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from his White House office. In his monologue, Vance baselessly blamed leftists for Kirk’s killing and vowed to investigate liberal nonprofits, specifically naming the Open Society Foundations (OSF)—the George Soros-funded philanthropy that gives money to promote democracy and human rights—as one of the White House’s targets. “They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer,” Vance said. “And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family.” Vance’s remarks were part of a campaign initiated by right-wing media outlets, conservative think tanks, and Republican politicians to blame progressive funders for Kirk’s assassination. President Donald Trump himself joined in, telling NBC News that Soros “should be put in jail.”

Two days after Vance’s remarks, the Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative think tank dedicated to investigating progressive philanthropists and advocacy groups, published their own attack on OSF. The report, authored by CRC investigative researcher Ryan Mauro, advances a series of incendiary—and, experts say, dubious and inaccurate—claims about OSF. Many of them center on the allegation that OSF funds “terrorism” through its grants to organizations working on Palestinian human rights, which the report accuses of supporting Palestinian militant groups. Other parts of the report focus on OSF’s funding of domestically focused activist groups that support protests against police brutality and action against fossil fuel companies, which the report attempts to link to criminal violations using vague chains of connection. For instance, it tries to tie the environmental group Sunrise to alleged arson at Atlanta’s “Cop City” police training center, all because Sunrise raised bail money for those arrested for protesting the site. “There’s a lot of baseless claims, and they don’t use facts to back them up,” said Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery, the acting director of the nonprofit-focused resource center Charity & Security Network. In a statement sent to Jewish Currents, OSF said that “the claims in this [CRC] report are false and reckless,” and that they “unequivocally condemn all forms of violence, especially terrorism.” “All our activities are peaceful and lawful, and all our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and be in compliance with the law,” a spokesperson for the organization wrote. (Disclosure: OSF has given grants to Jewish Currents.)

Despite the report’s thinly-sourced claims, Mauro has referred to it as “the smoking gun that we believe that President Trump, if he’s informed of it, can use to go after Soros’ network of hate in various ways”—and has succeeded in his goal of reaching the federal government. The report caught the attention of the Department of Justice last month, when senior department official Aakash Singh instructed multiple US attorneys to draw up plans to investigate OSF on a number of possible charges—including material support for terrorism and arson, according to the New York Times. The DOJ directive cited the CRC report, with Singh requesting that the attorneys determine whether the report’s allegations were enough to justify a criminal investigation. But even the report’s authors say the report does not point to a specific crime: In an October 10th interview with The New York Times, CRC president Scott Walter noted that “they [OSF] have to have funded something bad and they have to have known they were funding something bad [to prove a criminal case]. We actually did not make either of those claims that a prosecutor would need to make.” Still, Walter told the Times that he supported federal prosecutors investigating OSF, saying that attorneys might turn up something his organization had not. A DOJ spokesperson told Jewish Currents the agency does not comment on “potential litigation or investigations,” but added that “if organizations threaten the safety of Americans and violate US law, we will pursue every lawful avenue—investigations and prosecutions to hold them accountable. Terror has no place here.”

The plans to investigate OSF are the latest instance of right-wing targeting of Soros, who for decades has been portrayed by conservatives as a shadowy and nefarious influence on societies around the world. This anti-Soros narrative, which often makes use of antisemitic tropes, has been taken up by authoritarian leaders around the world—from Hungary to India to Turkey. Many of these regimes have portrayed OSF’s funding of pro-democracy groups in their countries as a bid to foment instability, and have used such accusations to justify crackdowns on their opposition. The resulting climate of repression in Hungary and Turkey led OSF to stop its operations in those countries.

This strategy is now being pursued by the Trump administration, forming a key plank of its broader effort to crack down on progressives. In particular, the administration has used the aftermath of Kirk’s killing to push multiple federal agencies to scrutinize and investigate liberal and leftist institutions, including pro-Palestine ones. “There have long been attacks on Soros and Open Society by those who want to shut down the left, and there have long been attacks on the pro-Palestinian movement using false accusations of terrorism as a way to discredit critics of Israeli policy. This report marries those two attacks,” said Emily Tamkin, a global affairs journalist and author of the book The Influence of Soros. In doing so, this strategy seeks to justify the launch of a wide-reaching investigation with chilling consequences for progressives across issues who rely on philanthropists for funding. “The bone-chilling part,” according to Tamkin, “is that the federal government is now taking up this cause.”

In recent months, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly turned to the CRC to amplify their campaign against progressives and the pro-Palestine movement. “Capital Research is a main node in the right-wing network targeting progressive funders—and they’re becoming more and more influential,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, the co-director of Funding Freedom, a group organizing philanthropic support for Palestine. On December 10th, 2024, CRC president Walter gave testimony to the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, where he accused those protesting Israel’s bombardment of having ties to “foreign powers” and of being in thrall to a “violence-soaked ideology.” In March, The New York Times reported that Walter had “briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques” as part of a Trump administration push to investigate Democratic Party-aligned nonprofits. In July, Walter gave testimony again, this time to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, now inveighing against groups that defended immigrants and trans people and criticizing the federal government for awarding such groups grants to provide legal services, job apprenticeship programs, and worker safety training.

But CRC’s influence has reached new heights after the Kirk assassination, as evidenced by the DOJ’s use of the group’s report as the justification for an investigation into OSF. “There is a right-wing movement that has dreamed of smashing these groups for some time, and they see in Trump someone that will let them do so,” said Chip Gibbons, the policy director of the civil liberties group Defending Rights and Dissent.

The CRC report casts disruptive protest as “domestic terrorism,” while simultaneously claiming that OSF is funding grantees that support “terrorism” in Israel/Palestine. “Open Society’s philanthropy blurs into complicity” by “fueling groups that celebrate violent uprisings, train militants, and endorse terrorist movements,” it says. In addition to implying that OSF is violating counter-terrorism laws and calling for federal investigations into its grantees, the report suggests that its findings could be used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke the “tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees.” Further, it offers the administration a list for who to target with such measures—naming dozens of organizations funded by OSF, from the anti-war group Dissenters to the Arab American Association of New York—and alleging that some of the groups have engaged in illegal activity. For instance, it claims that the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance “took part” in a “crime” of “economic sabotage” “by encouraging people to participate in a picket at an Oakland port as part of an effort to prevent the Israeli shipping giant ZIM from docking and unloading goods. (A spokesman for the port told The New York Times the protest was peaceful, consisting of “just a bunch of people holding signs.”) Vilkomerson said the CRC report and associated efforts are part of an effort to create “a fun-house world where standard progressive funding for movements is nefarious, if not criminal, all while right-wing funders like the Koch brothers are beyond reproach.”

Analysts say that the CRC’s focus on OSF’s support for Palestinians appears to be a strategic gambit to use existing counter-terrorism laws to target law-abiding domestic nonprofits. The US government maintains a list of foreign terrorist organizations, which include Palestinian political groups with armed wings; US groups and citizens are legally barred from supporting such entities. After 9/11, laws against providing “material support” for such organizations were used to prosecute and convict those who sent humanitarian aid to Palestinians—most prominently in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which five men were jailed on the charge that they were financing Hamas. Federal prosecutors did not allege that the foundation sent money to support violence, but instead successfully argued to a jury that the Palestinian charities the fund sent money to had helped Hamas win the “hearts and minds” of Palestinians. “The anti-terrorism apparatus built up after 9/11 around foreign terrorist organizations is the easiest legal way to try to pin things on progressive networks,” said Vilkomerson. “They’re clearly trying to jam through as much as they can on the flimsiest of possible pretexts to see what they can get away with.”

The White House is now threatening to use both counter-terrorism laws and the IRS to cripple OSF. On September 25th, Trump issued an executive order directing law enforcement to “investigate” and “disrupt” domestic terrorist organizations, including their funders. And, according to an October 9th Reuters report, the Trump administration is now explicitly aiming to investigate the “financial networks” behind what it calls “domestic terrorism,” planning to “deploy America’s counter-terrorism apparatus”—including the FBI, the DOJ, and the IRS—to do so. The White House also sent Reuters a list of nine organizations it accuses of financing or planning protests where alleged incidents of vandalism or “violence” occurred. OSF is included on that list, alongside Jewish anti-occupation groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), both of which are also named in the CRC report as OSF grantees. “The Trump administration is using the murder of Charlie Kirk to consolidate authoritarian control as much as possible and accelerate the Project Esther playbook, which we understand as a path for dismantling civil society by focusing first on Palestine solidarity organizing,” said Stefanie Fox, executive director of JVP, referring to the Heritage Foundation proposal released ahead of the 2024 election to provide a blueprint for anti-left repression. “Now these tools are deployable against the wider swath of anyone opposed to Trump’s agenda.”

While there is no “domestic terrorism” category that can be used to charge people for federal crimes, Gibbons told Jewish Currents the federal government has nevertheless used the category historically to encompass “activity far beyond just the type of violence one associates with terrorism,” using it to investigate and spy on left-wing movements. For example, in the early 2000s, the FBI used counter-terrorism resources to spy on School of the Americas Watch, a faith-based group dedicated to scrutinizing militarism in Latin America. In 2014, the FBI investigated over a dozen environmental activists after classifying them as national security threats. “By labeling his opponents terrorists—a view clearly shared by many within the counter-terrorism bureaucracy—Trump not only demonizes them, he opens the door for an escalation of spying by the likes of the FBI,” Gibbons said.

For now, it remains to be seen whether the IRS will, in fact, strip the tax-exempt status of OSF or its grantees, or if the DOJ will obtain indictments against the group. But Tamkin noted that the consequences of the terrorism accusations alone are severe. “Of course, it’s scarier if there are indictments and they make good on their threats. But the threat itself is a problem,” she said. “These organizations are one of the checks that we have against aspiring authoritarians. When they are discredited as being threats to the nation, it makes it so much more difficult for them to do their work.” Furthermore, Subramanian-Montgomery warned that while the Trump administration is beginning with OSF, the threat they are posing goes beyond the philanthropy group. “They want to scare many funders across the progressive spectrum away from continuing to support the groups they give money to,” she said. “All of this is being used to kill dissent at every step.”

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

alexbkane

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UPDATED 16 OCT 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity

A journalist captured on a flotilla mission recounts treatment at the hands of the Israeli navy, border police, and prison guards.

Emily Wilder

Passengers on the Conscience perform a drill in case of Israeli military interception on October 2nd.

Emily Wilder

The nearly 100 medical workers, journalists, activists, and crew aboard the Conscience awoke to the alarm on October 8th at 5 am. We had gone to bed with news of an imminent Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement. Our ship, an old repurposed ferry joining the latest wave of the flotilla movement seeking to penetrate Israel’s 16-year naval blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid, was sailing eastward in international waters of the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal over 100 nautical miles from Israeli or Palestinian territory. Over the loudspeaker, the captain alerted everyone to assemble on the deck immediately, as the Israeli military was approaching. I climbed the stairs and attempted to send a message to my editors, which did not deliver, our internet disrupted. We donned our life jackets, dropped our devices overboard into the water, took our seats, and within ten minutes, before we could complete roll call, warships surrounded us and helicopters were upon us, whipping up wind and spray and drowning out our chants of “We are journalists. We are medics.”

Dozens of soldiers rappelled from the helicopters to the upper deck and trained the lasers of their rifle scopes on our torsos. Others pulled themselves from small powerboats up ladders over the sides. They smashed the CCTV cameras and cut the Starlink wires. They brought the captain from the bridge to the deck, and the Conscience began swerving in the water as they took control of its temperamental wheel.

They ordered us out of our seats, to take off our life vests and shoes, to empty our pockets, and to submit to patdowns. The young woman soldier asked me what was dangling from a lanyard around my neck. I told her, “It’s my press pass, I am a journalist, and you have just kidnapped me at sea while doing my job.” She did not respond. We were reseated according to some unspoken rationale, with several of the men, most of them Middle Eastern or North African, zip-tied and separated. One woman demanded to sit with them, which the soldiers allowed. I sat near the captain, who told the soldiers they were breaking the law; they were kidnapping us; we had a right to reach Gaza in safety; the people of Gaza had a right to receive visitors in their waters; they could let us pass and the world would consider them heroes. Meanwhile, a soldier carrying a camera followed us with his lens and taunted us, calling us terrorists.

Most of us were then taken to the dining area below the upper deck, while a handful of others, apparently identified as troublemakers, were kept in another room under close watch. Over the next 12 hours we were held captive by rotations of three or four of the dozens of soldiers on board. Mostly young men, with balaclavas masking all but their eyes, they were fitted with rifles, tasers, cuffs, and other toys, which they played with absentmindedly. The overcrowded room grew hot and rancid as the sun rose in the sky. We were taken to use the bathrooms on the lower level in groups of three to five at a time. One soldier permitted me to grab my notebook and pen from my bag, whose contents had been ransacked and strewn across the floor, on my way back from the bathroom; another later stood over me and demanded I hand it over, which I did—it held a few pages of shorthand. They passed out our food, granola bars and ramen, though many refused to eat, protesting our captors’ show of benevolence.

Some passengers grew ill, including an octogenarian on board. One doctor demanded to treat one of the sick herself, rather than hand him over to the naval unit’s medic, and a soldier stood over her, took out his cuffs, put his hand on her arm, and told her to sit down. They removed one person and zip-tied him to a railing outside the restaurant before disappearing him elsewhere on the boat. Periodically, the soldiers ordered us to stop talking or they would withhold our bathroom breaks. As we became unrulier—whispered conversations and hums of Bella Ciao spreading through the room—one said, “We have been very nice to you so far, we do not want to use violence.” We passed the day in the sweltering discomfort, sitting and dozing against our lifejackets. Always out the portside window I saw a naval frigate in the distance, which I came to learn held another group of flotilla participants, those who had been piloting the eight small sailboats of the Thousand Madleens campaign.

When we arrived at Ashdod port around 7 or 8 pm, the soldiers ordered us to grab our bags and passports and marched us to the gangway to disembark. The last to get off, I watched as one by one my co-passengers were handed by the military to the border police, who pulled them onto land, bent them over, and perp-walked them 30 yards to a floodlit holding area on the asphalt. At my turn, as the two women twisted my arms behind my back and folded me forward, I announced, in case some camera somewhere was rolling, “I’m a journalist, I’m press.” The woman to my left hissed, “We don’t give a fuck,” and the other dug her nails into my scalp and pulled me by my hair across the port. I alerted them my glasses were falling off and they told me to shut the fuck up—though in Hebrew, one said to the other, “Grab her glasses.” They deposited me in the final position of the last row and zip-tied my hands tightly behind my back; those kneeling around me seemed to have their hands free, but others further away, I was later told, were also bound at random or in retaliation.

On my knees, with hands pinned behind me, my fingers and feet quickly grew numb. My press pass still hung around my neck and swayed in the night breeze. Twice one of the officers forced my head down lower, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as they roamed among the rows, shoving others’ heads while casually chatting and laughing. In Hebrew they commented on our appearances, called us Hamas, gestapo, and whores, and joked about our obvious discomfort as people shifted and vocalized in pain. A speaker blasted Israeli pop music. We were kept in these positions for some time, perhaps an hour. I later heard from others that agents had ordered a North African man to say “I love Israel,” and when he responded “I love Palestine,” they kicked him. I also heard that on the port, officers beat at least one other man; pushed over a woman with a prosthetic leg; kept a woman’s hands tied until her skin swelled around the plastic; and took the ailing 82-year-old to the hospital, where, she later told me, an officer hit her in her side, took her pain meds, and told her, “Welcome to hell.”

What followed was a series of degrading and invasive searches of our bodies and possessions. Agents took my camera, e-reader, press pass, highlighted copy of Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, and letter from a friend. One called my Star of David–inspired necklace a swastika. While unpacking all of my clothes, another came upon my Jewish Currents t-shirt, and asked me, “Are you Jewish?” I nodded, and he raised his eyebrows but said nothing else. My handler through the process was a small teenager, who mostly seemed bored; but behind me, a burly officer kept his hand on the neck of a Palestinian American man, forcing his head to remain bowed. I had a brief hearing with an immigration official, during which I was denied a lawyer. I signed a paper waiving my right to see a judge within 72 hours before being deported, as attorneys had previously advised. One agent asked why I had come to Israel, and I responded, “You brought me here,” and he laughed. We were then blindfolded, zip-tied, and loaded onto metal benches in frigid armored buses. We tried to doze for the next several hours on the cold, bumpy ride to Ketziot, a 99-acre prison camp in the Naqab, or Negev, Desert.

At Ketziot, we were separated by gender and placed in cages. One by one, they strip-searched us and put us in gray sweats. Then they marched the women to a massive concrete cell block. On an external wall, someone had fingerpainted a massive Star of David in red. On the interior wall hung an Israeli flag. Above it, a large banner featured a photo of dark silhouettes walking on a dirt road between the rubble of former buildings. An inscription in Arabic read “Gaza al-jadeeda”: “the new Gaza.” We were divided into filthy cells and handed two pieces of bread, our first meal after more than 24 hours, which the five of us in my cell left aside, to be quickly overtaken by ants. We were also each given a pair of underwear, soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. There was a toilet and a sink in a small closet; when we first turned on the faucet, the water flowed from the tap brown.

The following day, we were let out of our cells twice. In the morning, we were taken in groups of four to see immigration judges; ours informed us she had already heard our lawyers’ arguments after members of the Global Sumud Flotilla wave had been captured a week before. In the afternoon, we were grouped by nationality for haphazard and brief visits with our consular representatives—but first, we were made to stand in front of monitors in the cell block’s courtyard playing footage from October 7th on a loop. A shipmate had her fingers up in peace signs in silent defiance, and the guards sent her back to her cell. I asked, “Why can’t she come? She has a right to meet with the consulate.” He responded, “She is provoking me.” They were particularly sensitive to “provocation.” I learned several others had been repeatedly assaulted and kept in solitary confinement. With the US officials, I wrote a message to be shared with my family, and we showed our bruises while recounting our experiences so far. The representatives told us this was the earliest the consulate had been permitted entry to see US citizens from the flotilla, and that we’d likely be getting out in one to two days.

The rest of the day, confined behind a locked iron door with a grated window and a slit for food, we passed the time sleeping on thin brown mattresses, making hairbands from the elastic of the underwear, and braiding each other’s hair. A few of us ate a little but many refused the food passed door to door. We called out to our friends in neighboring cells. Three times I asked for my daily medication and did not receive it. To my knowledge, no one did, except for an elderly woman, after a collective chant from our cells demanding she receive medical attention. I did not see a single Palestinian, but I read the Arabic scrawled on our cell walls. Beside one of the bunks, a previous prisoner had scratched “hon”: “here.”

We were processed for deportation in batches ahead of Trump’s arrival to Jerusalem. After two nights in the camp, the morning of October 10th, I was one of 94 detainees released. We were again loaded into cells on armored buses, this time without blindfolds or zip ties, and driven south to the airport in Eilat. Another series of searches later and we boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul. Some remained in captivity for several more days and reported extreme brutality, including threats of rape. The last got out October 12th. The following day, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement. All flotilla members are now free; over 9,000 Palestinians still remain imprisoned.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Emily Wilder is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/forty-eight-hours-in-israeli-captivity at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 14 OCT 2025, 2:05 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 2 NOV 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

What Israeli “Victory” Looks Like

The Trump deal doesn’t destroy Hamas but it does further Palestinian dispossession.

Peter Beinart

Israeli soldiers on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, October 5th, 2025.

Ariel Schalit/AP Photo

“Yes, we won.” So declared the influential Israeli commentator Amit Segal in a column in Israel Hayom after Israel and Hamas reached a US-brokered ceasefire deal last week.

On the surface, Segal’s confidence appears strange. Yes, the current agreement returns all the remaining hostages—an official war aim, and an achievement that Israelis value immensely. But Israel could have retrieved all the hostages much earlier, when more of them remained alive. “This deal could have been done a long time ago,” writes longtime Israeli hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin, “Hamas agreed to all of the same terms in September 2024.”

Back then, Israel justified its refusal to accept such a deal because it claimed Hamas was not yet “demolished,” which Netanyahu had pledged to do after the October 7th attacks. But if demolishing Hamas means destroying its fighting force, that goal remains unfulfilled today. Israel has killed many Hamas leaders and fighters. But by slaughtering as many as 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, it has also pushed more Palestinians in Gaza to take up arms. As former Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested this January, “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” And even as Israel has destroyed much of Hamas’s arsenal, it has also supplied the group with the components to replenish it. A December 2024 report by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that Hamas has been “recycling unexploded Israeli rockets, bombs, and artillery shells to use as improvised explosive devices and produce new projectiles.” Israel delivered these munitions to Gaza by dropping more bombs there than were dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during World War II. According to the New York Times, the Israeli military also believes that Hamas’s tunnel network has withstood its assault.

In theory, Hamas will surrender its weapons in the third phase of the Trump deal—thus fulfilling Israel’s longstanding demands. But a top Hamas official last week denied that this will happen. It’s not hard to see why. For decades, the Islamist group has attacked its political rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, for abandoning armed resistance while Palestinians remain occupied. It’s unlikely Hamas would abandon that principle now, absent any hint of an acceptable political solution. Even Israeli security experts consider the prospect implausible. Segal himself has declared that “there is no chance” that Hamas will disarm.

So if victory does not mean that Israel has saved as many hostages as possible and if it does not mean that Israel has destroyed or disarmed Hamas, what does Segal mean when he proclaims “we won”? Understanding this statement requires assessing Israeli victory in different terms. In his column, Segal notes that “In the War of Independence, one percent of Israel’s population was killed, yet everyone understood that it ended in victory—a victory that is still celebrated to this day. This war, too, though it has yet to be given a name, will be remembered the same way.” In 1948, Israel’s victory entailed clearing roughly 750,000 Palestinians off their land in order to create a state with a large Jewish majority. This has been Israel’s template ever since: control as much land as possible with as few Palestinians living there as possible. Segal views Israel’s current victory in that light. The Trump deal may not destroy or disarm Hamas, but it will likely fragment Gaza, forcing the Palestinians living there into smaller and less habitable enclaves and leaving more territory in Israel’s hands. For Israel, that’s a dramatic step forward.

Over the last two years, Israel has often signaled its intention to pressure Palestinians in Gaza to leave. According to the Washington Post, within days of October 7th, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu urged Joe Biden to lobby Egypt to open its border and permit a mass influx of refugees from Gaza. That same month, Israel’s intelligence ministry produced a document suggesting that Palestinians in Gaza be evacuated to Egypt’s Sinai desert. When Donald Trump proposed this February that Palestinians leave so that Gaza could be remade as a beachside resort, Netanyahu enthusiastically embraced the idea, and his government began talking with Libya, South Sudan, and Syria about whether they might take Palestinians in.

While the new Trump deal does not propose mass expulsion from Gaza, it furthers that goal by ratifying Israel’s takeover of much of the Strip. Last fall, Segal—who is close to Netanyahu—predicted that if Trump won, Israel might be able to “change the borders of Gaza as a disciplinary act because of what happened on the 7th of October.” That aim now looks within reach. In the deal’s first phase, Israel retains approximately 53% of Gaza. (Some news outlets put the figure as high as 58%.) In the second phase, Israel is expected to withdraw to roughly 40% of the Strip, once an Arab-led stabilization force moves into the territory. Even in the third and final phase, Israel will still maintain direct control of 15% of the territory. But the final withdrawal probably won’t occur. As Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter explained last week, it depends on “the disarming of Hamas and the demilitarization of Gaza. If that does not happen, then this peace plan is not going anywhere.” Given that Israel’s own security experts consider disarmament unlikely, and that the Trump plan so far provides no mechanism for forcing Israel to withdraw, Israel looks poised to occupy at least 40% of the Strip.

The 40% that Israel directly controls is unlikely to contain many Palestinians. The Abu Shabab clan, which Israel has been supporting as an alternative to Hamas, plans to remain in Rafah, which is currently behind Israeli lines. Another anti-Hamas force, based in Khan Yunis, is also reportedly located in the Israeli-held zone. Muhammad Shehada, a Gaza-born political analyst and visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that a few thousand Palestinians civilians live there as well. But Khalil Sayegh, another Gaza-born analyst, told me that Palestinians have been displaced from most of the territory that Israel will now control. And Shehada considers it unlikely that Israel will allow them to return, since it would deem them a security threat. The section of Gaza that Israel retains could thus turn into the equivalent of Area C of the West Bank, a territory in which few Palestinians are permitted to live. It’s unclear if Donald Trump, or another future US president, would allow Israel to build settlements there. But given America’s decades-long failure to prevent settlement building and expansion in the West Bank, it’s a distinct possibility.

Meanwhile, the 60% of Gaza without Israeli troops will likely remain an extremely grim place. It is almost totally destroyed: Israel has razed 90% of Gaza’s homes and 80% of its farmland. The Strip now contains 17,000 unaccompanied children. The United Nations estimates that the last two years have “set back human development in Gaza by as much as 69 years.” Even with additional aid, it may be difficult to provide enough food. As Eyal Weizman, director of the human rights research group Forensic Architecture, points out, under the Trump deal, most of Gaza’s farmland will be in Israel’s hands.

The UN estimates that making Gaza habitable will cost $50 billion dollars and could take at least 15 years. If Gaza’s homes are rebuilt at the rate that followed prior conflicts, the process could stretch into the 22nd century. But under the Trump plan, Israel remains in control of all access points into Gaza, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which means it will determine what goes in and out. Segal predicts that Israel will follow a simple principle: “Reconstruction,” he argues, “will come only in exchange for demilitarization.” Since the latter is unlikely, the former is too.

Israel’s defenders might argue that Israeli forces would willingly leave much of Gaza if Hamas laid down its arms. But resistance organizations rarely disarm before gaining some assurance that their people’s oppression will end. The African National Congress and Irish Republican Army were both adamant that they would only hand over their weapons when a new political system was in sight. And Israel’s actions in the West Bank—where the Palestinian Authority has largely abandoned armed resistance for the past two decades—suggest that Palestinian disarmament does not prevent further dispossession. Last year, Israel expropriated more Palestinian land in the West Bank than it has in any year since it conquered the territory in 1967. The UN estimates that since October 7th, 2023, Israel has pushed more than 10,000 West Bank Palestinians off their land.

So while it may be tempting to believe that Hamas’s disarmament would halt Israel’s takeover of Gaza, it’s more plausible that Israel’s land seizures are part of a historic pattern of dispossession that began long before Hamas was born. Before 1948, Jews owned roughly 7% of the land in Mandatory Palestine. In its War of Independence—which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe—Israel created a state on 78% of the former British colony. It designated most of that new country’s territory—much of it seized from Palestinians—as “state land,” which it overwhelmingly parceled out to Jews. Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has designated at least a quarter of that territory as “state land” as well, and developed it for the benefit of Jewish settlers.

The Trump plan ratifies something similar in Gaza. The Strip, which comprises less than 2% of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, holds roughly 30% of its Palestinian population, largely because so many Palestinians fled there when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. Their descendants will now likely live in an enclave that has not only been reduced to rubble, but as a result of last week’s deal, will be close to half its former size. The message from both Washington and Jerusalem is clear: There is no future for you here. No wonder Amit Segal thinks Israel has won.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.

PeterBeinart

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/what-israeli-victory-looks-like at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

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UPDATED 16 OCT 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

A Time That Refuses to Pass

While the world marks two years since October 7th, 2023, those of us in Gaza have been living inside one long night.

Abdullah Hany Daher

Dusk falls on a makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, October, 6th, 2025.

AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana

Two years have passed since October 7th, 2023. I wrote those words in anticipation of publishing this piece on October 7th, 2025. But that turned out to be impossible. From the night of October 6th until the morning of the 8th, the bombing in Qizan Abu Rashwan, the area south of Khan Younis where my family has been staying, was relentless—so fierce that I could no longer tell the difference between the urge to publish and the urge to survive. A hand cannot tremble and write at the same time.

Yesterday, the world’s calendars turned their neat page to October 7th, yet here in Gaza the clock broke long ago. The world counts these years as complete cycles, files the date under “anniversaries”—broadcasting it in headlines and stamping it onto reports. But here, under the roar of planes, time folds in on itself; each second heavier than a year, each year only another breath of the same unending night. Life for us no longer breaks into seasons. Now survival is our singular measurement. Time: the thread that strings fragments together—days of sleeplessness, hours waiting for water or bread, minutes we believed might be our last.

This land that once held streets and homes is now a blank space dotted with tents. The only shelter as far as the eye can see: thin sheets fragile enough for a stone to pierce. Walls have been replaced with fabric, entire neighborhoods erased. Will children only remember this white city? Will they know that Gaza once had doors and windows, houses brimming with life? What will remain of all that living?

Some moments are etched indelibly in my mind—the last night the lights stayed on, the sound of my mother dissolving salt into a pot of lentils, the shape of the crack in the wall I stared at during an airstrike. Yet, entire weeks have vanished without a trace. Is this what it means to survive: to carry pieces of a life sharper than glass, and yet remain unable to recall whole stretches of time?

Here resistance lives not in slogans or weapons; now, only small acts preserve what meaning remains. My mother bakes bread over an open fire, as if in tending to a single loaf she is guarding life itself. Children draw on scraps of torn paper, trying to salvage their childhoods with each mark. We walk two kilometers with heavy jugs of water to briefly quench our families’ thirst. We wait in line for hours to receive a small pot of rice. Every morning, I make my bed, though I know it may be destroyed at any moment. I cannot control the missiles, but I can ensure this tiny gesture of order. Perhaps, I tell myself, this will be enough to remind me I am still human. These little acts are the pillars holding our lives aloft.

Everything in me testifies to two years of this ongoing night. Fear no longer arrives as a sudden tremor—it has become a thin layer stretched across all of life. A house is bombed beside me and I do not flinch, but when I try to imagine calm, I become frightened; I now know silence as that which might explode at any second. Sleep is rare, exhaustion constant.

Some evenings, we speak of “after the war.” But “after” soon dissolves into questions that answers cannot quell: If the bombing stopped tomorrow and children could return to school, would their childhoods await them? Can a person who lost half his family ever find safety in a rebuilt house? We may hope to reconstruct walls and roofs, but who will return eyes to the blind? Who will bring back the faces burned beyond recognition and restore the light to our dimmed spirits? Even time cannot bring back the dead.

Language, too, has collapsed under the weight of this present that will not pass. I write “We survived,” but the past tense feels insufficient when we don’t know what the next hour will bring. I write “we are fine,” but what can “fine” mean in a land of ruins and tents? Words cannot hold the meanings we ask them to carry. Sometimes silence feels more honest, but this mute truth is heavy—it suffocates—so I write to resist disappearance. I write to leave a trace when everything around me is being rubbed out. My words, a small dam against the current of forgetting. Even if they will not change the world, they keep me from collapsing inside.

As the world professes the passage of two years, we continue to endure this single night without end. We go on—our senses reshaped, our language weary—making the small marks that might offer our last defense against becoming nothing more than a number.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-time-that-refuses-to-pass at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

CONVERSATION | 7 OCT 2025, 5:38 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 OCT 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

“An Elegy for All of Palestine”

The Gazan poet Adel al-Ramadi reflects on making art under genocide.

Maram Faraj

Palestinians walk through dust moments after an Israeli strike in Gaza City, September 15th, 2025.

AP Photo/Yousef Al Zanoun

In early July, the 28-year-old poet Adel al-Ramadi left his home in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City after Israeli forces bombed an adjacent residential block, killing his neighbors in their homes. On his way to the hospital, al-Ramadi—distraught, dressed in a dusty tanktop—improvised a poem into a camera. The shaky video, filmed from a moving vehicle as it passes through rubble, soon went viral on social media. “They want me stripped of flesh, of fat / of bone upon which I stand . . . My shadow overlaps another shadow / Behind me the sea / And all the land is poisoned / So where am I to go? . . . I came to you, my Lord, so how could justice look away? / Oh Lord, we are tired,” al-Ramadi cries. The recording introduced tens of thousands of people to the young poet, who has released three collections since the genocide began: Gray, A Thousand Tyrants and a City, and Under the Influence of Life, all published in Egypt. It caught the attention of Maram Faraj, also a 28-year-old writer from Gaza City, who reached out to al-Ramadi to discuss his poetry and what it means to make art under genocide.

In the weeks since their conversation, Faraj was able to evacuate Gaza—a nearly impossible occurrence, as the Rafah crossing remains closed even to many who need immediate medical care—to begin a master’s program in Ireland. During her first days ever spent outside Gaza, Faraj told me that the distance has already increased her admiration for al-Ramadi and his ability to keep writing. “When I was living there, I thought that this was something normal,” she said. Now that she no longer shares his immediate circumstances, she can see it as anything but: “Imagine someone who would write poetry while being starved, being bombed, being displaced,” she reflected. Over that same period, Israel has fully leveled al-Ramadi’s neighborhood. “The most beloved place to my heart has turned into ashes,” he told Faraj this week. Yet even in the face of this unthinkable loss, he remains committed to his craft, which is inextricable from a commitment to his homeland. His dedication recalls the words of fellow Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023: “Israel wants to sever this relationship between Palestinians and land,” but “literature attaches us back, connects us strongly to Palestine.”

This interview has been translated from Arabic and edited for length and clarity.

— Maya Rosen

Maram Faraj: Living in Gaza, under the long shadow of bombardment, surviving is difficult, let alone writing. How did your poetic career commence?

Adel al-Ramadi: I begin in the name of Allah; in the name of poetry; in the name of love; in the name of the homeland—the homeland which is love and love which is the homeland. I have published three poetry collections during the genocide, written under the shelling, the hunger, the debris, and through injury. I have written during the genocide because I have always written. Like a newborn who breastfeeds without his mother teaching him how to suckle, or a toddler who begins to crawl without his father showing him the motions, that’s how I found myself writing.

MF: Why do you think a community needs poetry and poets, even or especially during a time of genocide? And how have you been able to continue writing amid such horrific conditions?

AR: I have heard it said that “just like the sky needs stars, society needs poets.” I take this to mean not only that poets can provide illumination in the darkness, but also that they can convert their inner solid essence into something that can be shared. Poetry nourishes the soul, just like nutrients nourish the body. Every society needs poets to express its sorrows, dreams, and aspirations.

As a poet loyal to my land, to my people, and to my pen, I try my best to write, no matter the conditions. The poem is the only tool I have with which to help myself and my people. I communicate the suffering of the people—which is also my own suffering—because I feel it’s my responsibility to express this pain.

MF: How has the war affected you, both as a person and as a poet?

AR: The war stripped me of everything. It changed my whole life. My house built of stone became one made of fabric. The war changed the colors that I write with; the suffering is so immense that I cannot write with other colors. The Adel of the past used to write poems about the homeland, love, and philosophy. Now all I write about is war. But of course, despite it all, my soul, my will, and my fingers have not raised the white flag of surrender.

MF: What are specific experiences that have affected you during this war?

AR: There are so many events that I would never have enough time to share them all. But I will tell you about one moment that impacted me a great deal: I was passing by a cemetery when I saw a child whose arms had both been amputated, crying bitterly. So I approached him and asked him why he was crying. He told me that his arms were buried there, and he wished only that the occupation had left him one arm, so at least he could wipe away his tears.

MF: I would like to turn now to the video that circulated widely of the poem you recited upon witnessing the recent bombardment and destruction of an entire residential block in your neighbourhood of Zeitoun. Can you tell me more about how this poem came to be?

AR: I had just witnessed a moment that is only suitable to lament, to elegy, to poetic howl. I saw charred bodies before my eyes—bodies torn apart and blood running like rivers. I witnessed brutality. I still don’t know how these words came out of my mouth. I had a small part of the poem written already, but most of it was improvised in the moment. This poem encapsulates my pain, which is, in turn, my people’s pain. I consider it an elegy for all of Palestine.

MF: We are used to seeing people crying or screaming after witnessing the loss of their loved ones. Your reaction was different; it felt unfamiliar.

AR: In this regard, I feel that I follow in the tradition of our great poets: We need another Samih al-Qasim, another Tawfiq Zayyad, another Mahmoud Darwish. I feel that these poets, along with the people of Gaza, held my hands and told me: Tell our suffering with your words.

MF: Does writing poetry help you live with this suffering, with this sadness?

AR: Poetry is my only rescue boat in the stormy sea of our homeland. Poetry allows me to turn what’s frozen inside of me into liquid. I feel relief when I write a poem, because I can express my inner self and liberate the weight in my heart. I turn my inner sadness into poems.

MF: Which poets have influenced your poetry? I am going to go ahead and guess Mahmoud Darwish.

AR: Of course Mahmoud Darwish! However, he wasn’t the first poet who influenced me; that was Abdel Rahman Shokry. We read his “Ode to the Beloved” in our Arabic language class; it was the first poem I read. From this moment onwards, I felt that poetry has a soul that can ignite my own passion, my own compassion. A poet never writes alone, because he always carries the influence of other poets. When I write, al-Mutanabbi writes with me too, and Nizar Qabbani and Arthur Rimbaud and Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish and Charles Bukowski.

MF: I am curious about the fact that you listed both Arab and non-Arab poets. How do you think about the connections and differences between different poetic traditions?

AR: There are many modern Palestinian poets who have been influenced by the Western tradition: Darwish was greatly influenced by Federico Garcia Lorca, while Qabbani was greatly influenced by Rimbaud. There are differences in style in Arabic poetry: Classical Arabic poetry is traditionally made up of metric verses divided into “sadr,” the first part of the verse, and “ajuz,” the second part of the verse, which operate with a strict rhyme, while Western poetry is mainly written in free verse, not necessarily following internal meter. I tend to write in a mix of classical Arabic style and Western style, and I believe that poets should explore how other cultures and traditions practice poetry; these differences can only strengthen our communities and our poetry.

MF: There are so many poets who have stopped writing during this excruciating time. How are you holding onto your pen?

AR: It’s so easy to surrender to desperation in Gaza, but I am committed to practicing poetry obsessively, to treating it as a necessity, just like a loaf of bread, rather than a luxury or a hobby. If I don’t write, I am a traitor. Indeed, when I don’t write, I feel I have betrayed myself, my dream, my homeland, and my people. I approach poetry as a way of living. I am willing to write while hungry; I am willing to write when I’m injured; I’m willing to write while I’m displaced, grieving, and enraged. And if they cut off my fingers, I will write with my tongue. And if they cut out my tongue, I will write with my eyes. And if they take out my eyes, I will write with my eyelashes.

MF: You write a lot about the beauty of our homeland and your hopes for it, but you also write a lot about our enemies who occupy our lands. What is your message to our enemies?

AR: As a refugee from al-Majdal [a depopulated Palestinian village], I always remind myself that our current travails exist within a historical context. And with that in mind, I dedicate the following message to our occupiers:

“Children of Palestine, young and old! The upright who are steadfast in resisting on their land, who are not blind to the truth and whose conscience defends what is right! Don’t believe that the land wouldn’t be returned. How many soldiers have stepped on its soil, but where are they now? Where’s the rule of the Greeks? Where is the rule of the Tatars? Or that of the Romans or the Persians? Where is the rule of the French and of the English? Where are their soldiers? You will grow up one day and ask: Where is the rule of the Jews? I will return to my land: I will collect my olives and pick my figs; I will drink from the sea of the Galilee and pray in Jerusalem. I will visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Nativity, and I will visit the Soreq caves. I will return one day just like air is inhaled and returns to the lungs and the water to the well.”

MF: You have mentioned in the past that you feel the war has deprived you from writing in the time of “spring” and forced you to write in the time of “autumn.” What do you mean by that?

AR: I am tired of writing in the time of autumn: the war, the suffering, the wounds have worn me out. I want to write in spring: I want to write about love; I want to write about beauty; I want to write about nature and about philosophy, about humanity and about life. I don’t want to be the echo of the sound of a tear. Because of the war and the destruction around me, I have turned from a poet who writes with love and nostalgia into a poet who writes with a knife.

MF: What do you wish for the future?

AR: First of all, I wish for this war to end. And also for this war to spare me. Because when the actual war ends, there’s a possibility that I will not be spared because the war within me has grown more tumultuous and more difficult. Second, I wish to be able to use my words to contribute to the world. How are nations lifted from the debris? In the words of Imam Ghazali: ”If you want to revive a people, then invest in its talents! In contrast, if you want to destroy a people, get rid of its talented thinkers.” I want to devote myself completely to humanity through my words. But to do that I need basic conditions. That is all.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Maram Faraj is a writer from Gaza City.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/an-elegy-for-all-of-palestine at 14 November 2025, 7:22 AM UTC.

COMIC | 7 OCT 2025, 2:08 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 12 NOV 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

Bari Weiss, CBS News, 1965

Eli Valley

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Eli Valley is a Jewish Currents contributing writer. His comics collection Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel, and his new book, Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque, are available from OR Books.

elivalley

Website

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/bari-weiss-cbs-news-1964 at 14 November 2025, 7:23 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 6 OCT 2025, 5:48 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 11 OCT 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

The Recognition Trick

By making Palestinian disarmament a prerequisite for statehood, Western countries are still facilitating Israel’s goals.

Jonathan Shamir

Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour applauds after French President Emmanuel Macron announces that France has formally recognized the Palestinian state, New York, September 22nd.

Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx

On September 22nd, France’s President Emmanuel Macron made an announcement that even last year had seemed off the table: His country would recognize a Palestinian state. “The time has come for peace, because in an instant it may be beyond our grasp,” Macron said in the opening to his speech explaining the move. France was one of 11 nations to recognize a “State of Palestine” at a special United Nations summit in late September, alongside the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other European states. The declarations drew praise from certain quarters: The Palestinian Authority (PA) called them “historic and courageous”; Arab states praised the moves as hastening progress toward peace; and more progressive European governments that already recognized a Palestinian state hailed the announcements for, in the words of Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, “protect[ing] what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is trying to destroy.”

State recognition, however, has never been the core demand of the movement for Palestinian liberation. In fact, in response to the consensus that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Palestinians and those amplifying their message have made a uniform call for an immediate ceasefire, a halt in weapons aid and sales to Israel, and the imposition of sanctions. Absent these concrete measures, critics have argued that recognition is little more than a trick—a sleight-of-hand meant to placate restive Western publics while perpetuating the same conditions that enabled a genocide against the Palestinian people in the first place. Macron, who co-convened the recent UN summit with Saudi Arabia, exemplified this deceptive approach. From the dais in the assembly hall in New York, he recognized Palestine while omitting any mention of cutting off French arms sales to Israel, which have continued unchecked since October 7th. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, similarly, recognized a Palestinian state while leading a government that continues to use workarounds to evade its own partial ban on sending weapons to Israel. Starmer has also met senior Israeli officials on British soil as recently as September 10th, and has led a massive crackdown on solidarity activism by designating the direct action group Palestine Action as a terror organization and arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters. Three of the other countries that recently recognized Palestine—Australia, Canada, and Luxembourg—likewise continue to sell weapons to Israel and refuse to sanction it.

Beyond just letting Western leaders off the hook for abetting genocide, these recognition announcements also impose a set of conditions on the so-called Palestinian state that essentially hollow out the possibility of Palestinian self-determination under the guise of reviving it. This orientation was plain in the New York Declaration, the communique produced by the co-chairs of the French–Saudi UN conference prior to its convening. Even as the document asserted that statehood for Palestinians was “an essential and indispensable component of the achievement of the two-State solution,” it made such recognition contingent upon requirements that burden the new state while favoring its occupier. The document calls on both Israel and Palestine to combat “radicalization, incitement, dehumanization” and “discrimination” in education and public programming, but only Palestine faces such conditions as a requirement for statehood: There is no way to enforce their application on Israel. Even more significantly, the New York Declaration demands that, as a prerequisite to statehood, Hamas disarm and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority under an approach called “One State, One Government, One Law, One Gun.” Other recognition announcements have gone even further by pushing the PA disarm too, and the foreign ministers of 15 Western countries that had either recognized or planned to recognize a Palestinian state hailed the PA for accepting the principle of a demilitarized state from the start.

In enshrining these conditions as part and parcel of their “recognition” of Palestine, Western nations are amplifying the longstanding racist assumption that any actions of an armed Israeli state constitute “self-defense” or “security,” while a Palestinian equivalent will only ever engage in “violence” that must be prevented. This reverse logic holds that it is ultimately Palestinian resistance to colonialism, occupation, and genocide—and not Israeli perpetration of these crimes—that is the primary driver of ongoing instability and violence. The result is the conditioning of Palestinian self-determination on a disarmed and defanged entity that would be sovereign in name only. In a situation of radical asymmetry, and without any external guarantors to step forward in defense of Palestinians, such a state would be helpless in the face of Israeli violence. More broadly, the disarming of rebel groups would strip Palestinians as a whole of any form of deterrence or leverage, guaranteeing the continuation of Israel’s impunity. History testifies to the horrors that can emerge in such a situation: After Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and his armed forces agreed to leave Beirut in 1982, for instance, Israeli-supported Phalangists carried out an infamous massacre of unprotected Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila.

In fact, in disarming Palestinians, the recognition trick may be hastening a concession that Israel has not thus far been able to achieve on the battlefield or through negotiations. Originally, the call for Hamas’s disarmament was rejected as a non-starter in ceasefire talks. But as the unwavering support of the White House has shown Israel that it can dictate the terms of negotiations, Hamas’s disarmament has become a core Israeli sticking point. Such a demand has little precedent in ceasefire talks: The Irish Republican Army, for example, only agreed to disarm gradually and as part of the comprehensive political solution laid out in the Good Friday Agreement, not before. In the same vein, Hamas has maintained that it would be willing to lay down its arms as part of a genuine two-state solution which, in the words of a high-ranking Hamas official last spring, would involve “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees.” But rather than building toward this reality, Western powers have acted to extract the wholesale surrender of Palestinians’ right to self-defence as a prerequisite to any comprehensive solution—essentially throwing the weight of international consensus behind the Israeli position.

Such a recognition sets up a future for the Palestinian territories that appears eerily similar to Israel’s ultimate endgame: fragmented cantons under a compliant local authority that is tasked with administration but stripped of sovereignty, all while Israel retains its demographic and military dominance. The occupied West Bank already offers a grim preview of what this sort of “State of Palestine” would look like. From the Oslo years onward, Israel and its Western allies have used the PA’s lack of sovereignty over its land, borders, and resources, and its dependence on economic aid, as a lever to secure the body’s compliance. As a result, Mahmoud Abbas—the most pliant Palestinian leader in history—has responded to Israel’s displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians, surging settlement expansion, and growing settler and military violence by policing Palestinians instead of their occupiers. In recent years, PA security forces have killed many dissenting Palestinians including, this year, a young female journalist; they have also shut down critical media and crushed non-violent and armed resistance alike. And even this appeasement has only resulted in the tightening of the leash. Today, the main purpose of the PA appears to be to consistently strive to prove that it is not a threat to Israel while simultaneously devaluing Palestinians’ own security—a situation the recent recognition announcements look to continue. Indeed, in his speech at the UN conference last week, delivered via video link after the US revoked his travel visa, Abbas embraced the conditional recognition the West had to offer, called on Hamas to comply, and rushed to embrace a demilitarized state.

The fact that the recent Western recognitions of Palestine facilitate Israeli goals became clearer than ever last week, when US President Donald Trump released his 20-point-plan to end the war on Gaza. Netanyahu has previously protested Western countries’ recognition of Palestine as an “absurd prize for terrorism,” and his American patrons have echoed this rejection. However, Israel and the US’s “peace plan” builds precisely on the conditional recognition framework—calling for Palestinian disarmament, brushing aside any concrete consequences against Israel, and imposing “reforms” on the Palestinian Authority (the only one of these that has any real Palestinian backing is the holding of democratic elections.)

To be sure, the Trump plan goes further than Western states’ conditional recognition announcements by decoupling its conditions from even an elusive offer of statehood and instead making them prerequisites for a ceasefire, while also adding new hurdles (such as allowing Israeli troops to retain security control of Gaza, placing Palestinians under colonial rule by Trump and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and insisting the PA withdraw its cases against Israel at the international courts). These expansive conditions reflect 11th-hour changes Netanyahu reportedly secured to the document, clarifying the extent to which the 20-point-plan is an Israeli one. But not even Netanyahu’s open boasts that Israel set the terms of the plan has been enough to deter Palestine’s new recognizers from embracing it. Despite their show of bucking Netanyahu in the statehood arena, countries like France, the UK, Australia, and Canada have uncritically welcomed the Trump–Netanyahu blueprint of indefinite occupation—clarifying that their recent gestures of recognition are not new steps toward accountability but consistent with their broader pro-Israel politics.

All that said, the recognition that Palestinians are indeed a people and have the right to self-determination does hold some meaning. As a minority of countries like Spain have shown, the recognition of the State of Palestine can be used as a springboard to follow through on commitments with concrete action by ending arms sales or pushing for Israel’s international isolation. For activists in the West, too, advocating on behalf of a sovereign state rather than a stateless people opens up more avenues for legal action. In Britain, for instance, the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act prohibits citizens from serving in armies against “foreign states at peace” with their country. This could mean that British politicians are no longer able to elude questions about prosecuting British dual nationals serving in the Israeli army on the grounds that Palestine is not a state.

But the biggest opening may be a counterintuitive one. From Netanyahu and his likely successor Naftali Bennett to the liberal figureheads Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, the entire Israeli political spectrum has been unanimous in rejecting the new international move for a two-state solution, claiming that recognizing Palestine is a reward for terrorism. Others in the Israeli government want to go further, looking to use Israeli anger at the recognition as a pretext to formalize the de facto annexation of the West Bank. Macron conceded in his UN speech that such annexation would be an “irreversible event” (even as he opted to ignore measures by Israel’s government that have already embarked on this shift). Israel’s brazen rejectionism on this point may thus eventually turn the world’s belated buy-in to the two-state project into an appetite for some kind of alternative.

There are some small stirrings in this direction. It is exceedingly rare for mainstream broadcast news in the West to ever suggest that visions beyond a two-state solution even exist, whether that is a confederation or a one-state solution. But paradoxically, the return to the two-state solution to mainstream political discourse, and Israel’s loud rejection of it, has cracked this wall of silence. Responding to a journalist from Britain’s Channel 4 reading out Netanyahu’s absolute denial of Palestinian self-determination, Jamal Zahalka, a former lawmaker from Israel’s left-wing Arab nationalist party Balad, offered a simple but seductive rebuttal: “If he doesn’t want a Palestinian state, so let’s go for a binational state all over for Palestine-Israel, one state for two people with equal rights for the group and individuals.” As long as people around the world reject a return to the slow violence of apartheid as an acceptable end to the Gaza genocide, and especially if Israel continues on its rejectionist path, one hopes Zahalka’s answer will start to sound less utopian and more common sense.

Jonathan Shamir is contributing writer at Jewish Currents and the former deputy editor of Haaretz.com.

jonathan_shamir

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-recognition-trick at 14 November 2025, 7:23 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 6 OCT 2025, 4:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 OCT 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

Famine’s Long Shadow

Even if food is surged into Gaza today, the history of weaponized mass starvation shows that the social aftershocks will reverberate for generations.

Alex de Waal

Palestinians struggle to access food in the northern Gaza Strip, June 16th, 2025.

Jehad Alshrafi/AP Photo

On August 22nd, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification mechanism, affiliated with the United Nations (UN), reported that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had officially passed the “famine” threshold. The same day, the United States government’s own Famine Early Warning Systems Network quietly confirmed this finding, noting that there was good evidence to believe that in Gaza, “mortality from the interaction of hunger and disease” was at famine levels.

For months, Gaza’s descent into famine had been readily reversible. Shortly after October 7th, 2023, Israel imposed a total blockade on the enclave, and desperate hunger spread through the population. But the opening of aid crossings could rapidly relieve the situation, as became clear in April 2024, when warnings of imminent famine led US President Joe Biden to insist that Israel let more aid in, pulling Gaza back from the brink. In the subsequent months, a further tightening of the siege and continued displacement again brought Gaza close to famine. But the ceasefire this January was able to prevent the worst after the UN and its partner agencies were able to scale up their food distributions to almost 400 sites across Gaza. As a result, when Ramadan began at the end of February, Palestinians were able to break their daily fasts with communal meals at sundown.

Israel again put an end to this reprieve on March 3rd, when it violated the ceasefire and restarted its assault on Gaza, imposing nearly 80 days of total blockade. Afterward, it permitted only a limited aid effort. At that time, resuming the UN-led humanitarian system could still have stopped the onset of full-blown famine, but Israel did not allow this, instead putting a new organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at the forefront of delivering rations. The GHF turned out to be an experiment in mass starvation, running just four ration stations in hard-to-reach locations in military zones. Palestinians trying to get food there must face the dangers of both Israeli military posts and the GHF’s own private security guards, who use live ammunition as a means of crowd control and have already killed more than 1,300 aid-seekers. By July, the worst-case scenario had unfolded, with “catastrophic food insecurity” turning into outright famine.

Even now, the means to end the hunger are readily at hand. The UN and experienced humanitarian agencies have the resources, expertise, and plans to provide food and medicine, and are standing ready just a few miles away. Should Israel give the signal, the basic survival needs of many Palestinians in Gaza could be met within days. But even if food is surged into Gaza today—as it must be—irreparable harms have already been done to those who have endured prolonged starvation. We know from history that a famine’s legacy is generations long, its traumas remaining imprinted on the bodies of the survivors even after sustenance is at hand. In the immediate term, severely acutely malnourished children cannot be saved by food alone—their starvation is so advanced that they need specialized hospital care. In the longer term, children who are malnourished in their first thousand days of life, or in utero, face “potentially irreparable physical and neurocognitive damage,” including increased susceptibility to a range of chronic diseases as adults. The collective harms of famine are no less grave. As humans starve, our bodies seek out and consume every reserve of fat, followed by muscle and essential organs. The drive for food then becomes all-consuming. Hunger overrides social norms as people are forced to scrabble and fight for food. The memoirs of those who have been through starvation—whether during the Great Hunger of Ireland, or the siege of Biafra, Nigeria, or the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero—recount this experience of dehumanization in identical terms. In Survival in Auschwitz, for instance, Primo Levi describes a “way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and throats, without time to breathe” as “‘fressen,’ the way of eating of animals” rather than “‘essen,’ the human way of eating, seated in front of a table, religiously.”

Indeed, because food is not just a source of nutrition but also what binds together families and communities, scholars of mass starvation have long found that wherever famine unfolds, it threatens not just individual lives but also a society’s way of life. The colonial-era anthropologist Audrey Richards describes an “accordion effect” whereby as food becomes scarce, the ambit of social reciprocity contracts. Survivors around the world have vividly catalogued this experience. The Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who lived through the famine of the 1920s, writes that extreme hunger “makes a norm of abnormality,” forcing people to break every social taboo to try to stay alive—eating animal food, stealing from neighbors, and making terrible choices over which child will get food or medicine and which will not. In Lydia Ginzburg’s fictionalized memoir of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the narrator recounts how social norms disappeared from the city as food became all but impossible to find: “Every possible relationship—comradeship, discipleship, friendship, love—fell away like leaves.” In Hungry Bengal, historian Janam Mukherjee explores how the vast toll of the 1943 famine began to dull Bengalis to the suffering of their neighbors. As corpses in the street became a normal sight, Mukherjee writes, “indifference to the fate of the dead began to reign.” People would step over the dead and dying, and funeral rites were reduced to the barest minimum. In the 1970s, after living among the Ik people of Uganda during a famine, the anthropologist Colin Turnbull similarly described how cultural mores were abandoned under the pressures of starvation.

My own 1980s field research on starvation in Darfur, Sudan, echoed these findings. That famine was caused by drought, poverty, and the negligence of the government—sins of omission rather than crimes of commission. Still, about 1 in 20 residents of Darfur perished from hunger and disease. Initially, the social accordion expanded as people provided relief to strangers and called on the generosity of distant relatives, reviving networks of kinship. But as the famine tightened its grip, the accordion contracted. The destitute could find alms only among their immediate family; traders ruthlessly exploited the chance to buy up cheap cattle; wild foods, customarily free for all, were now jealously hoarded; and communities began turning against one another. At the time, I remember an elderly Arab sheikh named Hilal Mohamed telling me how the world he knew, in which camel herders and villagers lived together sharing the land and communities were bound by shared norms, was coming to an end. In his bones he knew what the hunger portended. More than anything else, he understood famine as a loss of dignity, kinship, and livelihoods—the end of a way of life.

Once famine shredded the social fabric, strife and violence followed. In Darfur, while people correctly blamed the government for their starvation—the calamity was popularly called “Nimeiri’s hunger” after the then-president Jaafar Nimeiri—they also nursed grievances against one another. The quotidian cruelties of survival turned farmers against nomads and locals against refugees. Even once the famine was over, those wounds festered, leading to fierce clashes over land. So it came to be that 20 years after the famine upended his clan’s way of life, Hilal Mohamed’s son Musa became the head of the Janjaweed militia, notorious for genocidal massacres in Darfur. This recalled older histories of post-famine violence: Four years after the Bengal famine, for instance, that region too was torn apart by intercommunal riots, a spark for the partition of the subcontinent. Mukherjee connects the two traumas, writing that “these are the signs of a society dehumanized by abounding violence, death, and impunity. These are the signs of an already tortured society.” Mukherjee put his stress on “already,” but it is his word “torture” that is particularly evocative here, helping us make sense of the intentions of the men who make famines.

As the legal scholar Tom Dannenbaum explains, this logic of torture is also at work in siege famines. Israel’s stated justification for starving Palestinians is to besiege Hamas. But it is well established—and a matter of common sense—that in famine it is the men with guns who suffer last. In this sense, siege starvation is a military tactic that selectively targets civilians, beginning with the frail, sick, and poor and expanding from there. This is precisely what we are now seeing in Gaza, where starvation is slowly creeping its way up through the social layers—laborers, artisans, nurses and doctors, middle class people, academics. As hunger spreads, Dannenbaum writes, it pits its “victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love.” In Gaza, this looks like people being reduced to the indignities of begging or scavenging for crumbs in piles of garbage, or selling their last treasured possessions for a meal, or risking their lives in the desperate rush to grab rations from the GHF’s centers, or facing inhuman situations like watching children starve or deciding which patients to apportion scarce medical resources to. When we hear starving Palestinians describe these experiences of profound humiliation, in stories painfully gathered by journalists (who are hungry themselves, and living in fear for their lives), we recognize the unmistakable beginnings of an engineered societal breakdown, whose aftershocks will reverberate long beyond the food shortages from which it springs.

Bread and medicine resolve the immediate harms of famine. Attending to the deeper damage requires a long-term project of societal repair. The imprints of child malnutrition and the traumas of starvation on family and community may never be fully healed, but the place to start is acknowledging the scope of the harms and shaping post-conflict reconstruction around an agenda of restorative justice. Such a program must include lifelong medical care, counseling, and other necessities to build a sense of security, and the rehabilitation of community institutions to revive spaces of mutual support. More broadly, redressing the visceral disempowerment of famine calls for ending the lethal politics that led to the famine in the first place, which—in nations from Ireland to Ukraine to India—has looked like winning independence from a colonial oppressor and attempting to build democracy as a safeguard against a government that could permit mass hunger.

Moreover, famine’s assault on dignity and agency demands that we call to account those who inflicted it. Our images of starvation are usually only of the victims; those who plan and implement it are off-screen, and we describe the outcome without naming the act. But “to starve” is a transitive verb: something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Colonial counterinsurgencies openly used hunger as a weapon; Britain’s campaign in 1950s Malaya was candidly called “Operation Starvation”; France used food denial in Algeria and Indochina; and all the major powers, including the United States, blockaded their enemies, regarding hungry civilians as acceptable in both World Wars and in countries such as Bangladesh during the Cold War. The great powers’ fondness for imposing hunger meant that the prohibition on starvation as an instrument of war was a latecomer to international humanitarian law, formulated only in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. Even afterward, the US regarded hungry Iraqi children as a price worth paying for weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and starvation crimes remained unprosecuted in the tribunals for justice in former Yugoslavia as well as Cambodia. Providing justice to famine survivors will require moving past this unwillingness to enshrine a measure of legal accountability for the harms they have suffered.

Lastly, measures for restorative justice—apologies and reparation, guarantees of non-recurrence, and memorialization—are an obligation if we are to address famine’s generational impacts. This is largely unexplored territory, but there are a few examples to draw from. More than a century after its 1904 genocidal starvation of the Herero and Nama of Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Germany apologized and offered compensation to survivors. And in 1997, more than a hundred years after the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s and after the great-grandchildren of survivors began the first public memorialization of the famine, the British government issued an apology for having “failed [the Irish] people” (although it offered no reparation for its wrongs). These are still the exceptions, however, and man-made famines remain history’s greatest unacknowledged crimes. Even today, a statue of one of the most notorious agents of mass starvation in India, Robert Clive, stands in central London; Russia refuses to admit its responsibility for the Holodomor and has destroyed memorials to its victims when it occupies Ukrainian towns; and Israel, with US backing, continues to starve Palestinians in Gaza, quibbling over details rather than admitting what is in front of all our eyes. The road to truly confronting the deep harms of mass starvation is still long, and the work has hardly begun.

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. Books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (2015), Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (2017), and New Pandemics, Old Politics (2021).

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/famines-long-shadow-gaza-starvation at 14 November 2025, 7:23 AM UTC.

HISTORY | 1 OCT 2025, 6:42 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 OCT 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

A Brief History of Solitary Confinement in America

The use of the punitive tactic exploded a century after US officials had deemed it too torturous.

Christopher Blackwell and Deborah Zalesne with Terry A. Kupers and Kwaneta Harris

A Security Housing Unit solitary confinement cell at Pelican Bay Prison in 2011.

Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo

Solitary Confinement goes by many names—the box, lockup, seg, SHU, Special Management—but the most common term used in penitentiaries across the United States is “the hole.“

When I came into the prison system in 1996, inmates went to the hole for just about anything and everything that security staff didn’t like. The first time I took a trip there I was 19 years old. The jail commander had caught me with a long cord of tightly wound toilet paper. The Owyhee County Jail allowed inmates to smoke cigarettes in the outdoor recreation area. The contraband I was caught with is called a Wick. I’d palm a lit cigarette while returning from a smoke break then hold the hot ember to one end of the toilet paper until it smoldered. The Wick would slowly burn, allowing all of the inmates living in the dorm with me to sneak into the bathroom for a quick puff between smoke breaks.

Since then, I’ve been to the hole for disobedience, battery, positive urine analysis, menacing staff, staff manipulation, group disruption, and investigations more times than I care to count.

As I’ve aged, my trips have become less frequent. I was in my 30s when I finally found myself staying clear of lockup for a year or two at a time. I am currently 46 years old. Two weeks ago, I went to the hole for fighting. Not a wise choice and yes, I am a little too old for such immaturity, however, I was fighting with my celly so off to the hole I went.

When I was younger, I’d have conversations through the ventilation system with neighbors. I’d make toilet paper dice and play solitaire, Yahtzee, or 10,000. Now, all I did was shuffle back and forth while I inched my way through one of the two books I got my hands on the second day I was in there. I unfortunately had neighbors who, for hours a day, chose to talk or yell through the vent. If it isn’t the many voices in the vent, it’s slamming doors, jingling keys, handcuffs, radio traffic, and yelling. Inmates get easily agitated and kick doors. The only break is the two hours in a recreation cage.

–Jason Burdett, Idaho

Solitary confinement was introduced to the United States in the late 1790s, by way of the Maple Street Jail in Philadelphia. A few decades later, in 1826, the practice made its way to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, also known as “Cherry Hill.” In what came to be known as the Cherry Hill or Pennsylvania model, incarcerated persons were confined to their cells and unable to speak or communicate, other than to the warden, who would visit each prisoner daily to talk about his progress. It was a paradigm heavily influenced by the philosophy of local Quakers, who believed that isolating men in cold concrete cells would give them time to reflect, study, and pray, and thus leave their criminal ways behind.

The model was adopted by many prisons in other states, but it was quickly abandoned after just a few years. As jails (short-term facilities typically run by local counties and cities) and prisons (long-term facilities typically run by state or federal governments) became more crowded, incarcerated people were forced to share their cells and the warden could no longer visit daily. More importantly, prison administrators found that the practice did not reform men but instead made them lose their minds. As French magistrate Gustave de Beaumont and diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed during an 1833 visit to the United States, “This experiment, of which such favourable results had been anticipated, proved fatal for the majority of the prisoners. It devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.” The combination of financial burden and adverse health effects led to a consensus among all states that tried the Cherry Hill model between 1830 and 1880 that the practice was a failed experiment that should not be repeated.

Soon after, the US Supreme Court issued its first criticism of solitary confinement. In the 1890 case In re Medley, the Supreme Court declared the punishment to be a form of torture. In that case, between when James Medley allegedly committed a murder and when he was convicted and sentenced to death, Colorado enacted a new law requiring people on death row to spend time in solitary confinement before being executed. The Supreme Court found the new requirement to be “an additional punishment of the most important and painful character,” in violation of ex post facto laws that prevent new punishments from being applied retroactively. Tthe Supreme Court called the practice “too severe,” in part due to the psychological deterioration people suffered:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

Well into the 20th century, the use of solitary confinement continued to diminish. It was not until the 1980s, on the heels of an explosion of the prison population that began the previous decade, that the practice was once again widely implemented. As a 2024 report by the Sentencing Project explains, “The prison expansion that began in 1973 reached its peak in 2009, achieving a seven-fold increase over the intervening years.” The rapid expansion of the prison population since the 1970s can be explained by a confluence of several social conditions. The 1970s were the era of the “war on drugs,” a project of mass criminalization that included mandatory and longer sentencing, particularly impacting lower-income and Black people. Around the same time, as a result of the movement to de-institutionalize people with mental illness, mental health facilities started closing in large numbers—but community mental health clinics never received the resources those reformers had advocated for as an alternative, and adequate psychiatric care became widely unavailable. And with the concurrent emergence of the neoliberal policy paradigm, budgets for social welfare safety net programs were slashed and disadvantaged people found themselves lacking resources to stay afloat.

All of these factors, which reflected and fueled a general “tough on crime” mentality, led to the spike in the prison population, including an unprecedented number of people with serious mental illness. Even as new prisons were rapidly built to accommodate higher incarceration rates and longer sentences, most prisons were plagued by extreme overcrowding. Unlike in the early 19th century, when the need to fit a growing population into small spaces limited the use of enforced isolation, now the uptick in violence and psychiatric breakdowns that resulted from the unsanitary and dangerous conditions turned policymakers back toward the increased use of solitary confinement. To make matters worse, the 1970s and the 1980s saw a shift from a focus on rehabilitation to a focus on managerial control and punishment in prisons. The reduced emphasis on rehabilitation increased the violence—having a large number of idle men on a prison yard creates risky conditions, thereby further driving the trend toward the use of solitary.

As solitary confinement reemerged as a dominant practice, it also became more extreme in both duration and intensity. Beginning in 1972, prolonged solitary began to proliferate as a disciplinary measure with the construction of the “control unit” at the federal penitentiary at Marion in Illinois. A decade later, in 1983, after two prison guards were murdered, prison officials locked down the entirety of Marion indefinitely, instituting a rule requiring incarcerated people to isolate in their cells for 23 hours a day, with no communal yard time; it was the first instance of a supermax prison, an architectural structure—either a cell block or an entire prison—dedicated to solitary confinement, for supposedly the “worst of the worst.”

In 1989, California built Pelican Bay State Prison, one of the first prison units constructed solely to keep individuals in solitary confinement, with no congregate recreation, cafeteria, classrooms, or shops. The prison’s notoriously brutal Security Housing Unit (SHU) is made up of windowless cells that are 7.6 feet × 11.6 feet. (Pelican Bay is the site of legendary 2015 prisoners’ hunger strikes to combat the conditions of solitary.) The 1990s saw the construction of many additional supermax facilities. By 2004, 44 states had super-maximum-security prisons, and in the years that followed, solitary confinement continued to become even more prevalent across the US.

Notably, this expanded use of solitary confinement was largely driven not by legislators, but by corrections officials, who advocated for the practice as a useful tool for combatting overcrowding and violence. However, as Jules Lobel, a human rights activist, law professor, and lead attorney in Ashker v. Governor of California (the successful class-action lawsuit against the prolonged use of solitary in California) has explained, the rise of mass solitary confinement in prisons across the United States was actually tied closely to the need for social control over “turmoil” caused by mass civil rights protests, litigation, and changing societal attitudes toward inequities and racism. According to Lobel, both mass incarceration and mass solitary were fueled by the search for a preventive solution to the possibility of riots or disorder. Lobel noted that the change of Marion’s character to a solitary confinement supermax had been planned before the 1983 violence and was in fact a “response to political non-violent disturbances,” like protests against guard abuses and mistreatment.

As the use of solitary expanded, the legal landscape also shifted. In Hutto v. Finney (1978), the Supreme Court upheld remedial orders placing a maximum limit of 30 days on confinement in solitary, and affirmed the lower court’s findings that conditions in solitary amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. However, in the decades that followed, the Supreme Court began upholding extreme use of solitary. In Rhodes v. Chapman (1981), the Supreme Court notably did not find that a state prison had violated the Eighth Amendment by housing two prisoners in a 63-square-foot cell designed for one person, noting that “the Constitution does not mandate comfortable prisons.” While the case was not about solitary confinement, the precedent was clear: “Restrictive, and even harsh” conditions are “part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society.” In cases like Hewitt v. Helms in 1983, and later Sandin v. Conner in 1995, individuals challenged the procedures by which they were placed in solitary confinement, but the Court consistently found that the individual liberty of incarcerated people was outweighed by institutional interests of prison administrators. In Hewitt, the Court articulated the preventative rationale particularly insidiously, explaining that incarcerated individuals were not owed “the trial-type procedural safeguards suggested by the respondent,” because they would basically hinder the ability of prison administrators to manage their institution.

Tom (who requested we not use his real name for fear of retaliation) has been incarcerated in Washington State since 1981. Having lived through four decades of policy shifts, Tom has seen how those legal decisions play out behind prison walls:

In 1981, solitary was a building notoriously known as “Big Red” (the building was made with red bricks). It was two stories with two tiers on each. The tiers were 24 cells long and cells were open bars, except for ‘A’ tier.

‘A’ tier was different—the first ten cells were isolation cells. They had a wooden facade built over the front. They could only put you there for ten days at a time back then. Those cells were typically kept dark around the clock, completely disorienting the occupants.

They had a more nefarious purpose as well. Since they had this facade, even the person in the next cell was completely isolated from anything outside of their own cell. Twice while I was there, prisoners who had a high-profile relationship with the guards committed suicide in isolation cells. The belief of many was that the guards drugged their food and came in and hanged them while they were unconscious

This belief was confirmed by a friend of mine who had stabbed a guard. They presumably drugged his food one evening but he gave his cake to another guy that night (he wasn’t on ‘A’ tier). Anyway, when they came by to hang him, he was still awake so they aborted. The guy he gave his cake to didn’t wake up until the next evening.

They let guys out for an hour a day, six at a time. Sometimes, seemingly for entertainment, they’d let out guys who were known not to get along at the same time. This resulted in murders, rapes, stabbings, and other incidents of violence.

The thing that was better back then was that guys didn’t have to do ridiculous amounts of time there. Most guys got out in 30–60 days even for such things as fighting guards. Bed space was limited, so the violation had to be real serious.

Today, there is much greater capacity to send people to solitary and no one would claim that they don’t use it. Back in the 1980s, the penitentiary held only 1,400 prisoners and they had fewer than 100 seg beds. Now, they’ve built these control units at every prison in the state.

This article is an excerpt from Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement by Christopher Blackwell and Deborah Zalesne, Copyright © 2025. This text was originally published by Pluto Press and has been reprinted here with permission.

Christopher Blackwell is an award-winning journalist currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in Washington State. He is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents and the co-founder and current executive director of Look2Justice.

@ChrisWBlackwell

Deborah Zalesne is a professor of law at CUNY School of Law and co-director of the Writers Development Program for aspiring incarcerated writers.

@DebbieZalesne

Terry A. Kupers is a psychiatrist with a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, forensics, and social and community psychiatry.

Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse and an incarcerated journalist in Texas who spent over eight years in solitary confinement.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-brief-history-of-solitary-confinement-in-america at 14 November 2025, 7:23 AM UTC.

Table of Contents

Jewish Currents: 2025 Nov 12

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The Olive Harvest Deportations: 2025 Nov 3

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The Event: 2025 Oct 31

Higher Ed's Bad Bargain: 2025 Oct 31

Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: 2025 Oct 31

The Upper Room: 2025 Oct 31

Whose Jewish Dystopia?: 2025 Oct 31

The Dream Logic of Fascism: 2025 Oct 31

Degrees of Separation: 2025 Oct 31

Elaine Mokhtefi: 2025 Oct 31

Anti-Mamdani Letter Draws Support from Liberal Rabbinate: 2025 Oct 30

The Myth of Israeli Innovation: 2025 Oct 27

The Meaning of Trump’s $10 Million Grant to a Jewish Nonprofit: 2025 Oct 23

Process of Punishment : 2025 Oct 21

The Making of a Coal Boycott: 2025 Oct 20

How the Swedish Public Saw Israel/Palestine: 2025 Oct 16

The Anti-Soros Strategy at the Heart of Trump’s War on Progressive Nonprofits: 2025 Oct 15

Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity: 2025 Oct 14

What Israeli “Victory” Looks Like: 2025 Oct 14

A Time That Refuses to Pass: 2025 Oct 8

"An Elegy for All of Palestine": 2025 Oct 7

Bari Weiss, CBS News, 1965: 2025 Oct 7

The Recognition Trick: 2025 Oct 6

Famine's Long Shadow: 2025 Oct 6

A Brief History of Solitary Confinement in America: 2025 Oct 1