The Mounting Costs of Enabling Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Since October 7, 2023, around 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, plus over 700 more in the West Bank. Over 1,100 Israelis have been killed, too. These tragedies are a direct consequence of Israel’s illegal, U.S.-backed occupation of Palestinian territory and its war on Gaza, which must both end immediately. From the mass killing and maiming of Palestinian civilians to the forced starvation and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, Palestinians and international experts have warned from the start that Israel is committing a “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza. More

The Immigration State and its Everyday Accomplices

After a year of watching thousands of people suffer a genocide fueled in large part by U.S. dollars and technology, the usual order of life on university campuses has been upended. Students, staff and faculty have protested, picketed, rallied, and exercised a long tradition of “expressive activity” that has come to define the unique space that inhabits university life. To say that this is a novel upsurge would be to ignore the student mobilizations throughout the years, against the massacres in Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa, and racisms past and present in our backyard. Each of these struggles have become part of the glossy photos memorializing universities’ nostalgic past, and seeming proof of their reputations as bastions of free expression, even in the face of government oppression. More

The Agony and Ecstasy of an Empire: The United States in the Middle East

Economic hegemony has been the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf since the end of the Second World War.  America’s “special relationship” with Israel, a term first coined by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, is founded on business.  Economic supremacy was also at the heart of the oil-for-security bargain that the United States sealed with oil-rich Saudi Arabia after World War II.   More