Zooming out of the pernicious grip of corporate tech giants and universities alike, faculty members at several US campuses are courageously modeling resistance for their students.

“You do not need to be an expert to put on this webinar. USACBI will provide you with all the resources you need to put together a thoughtful, informed, content-rich 1-hour webinar. There will be a menu of options in our sample curriculum to choose from. And you should create an event that is doable and tailored to needs of your particular campus, time-frame, and political situation and needs.”

The above comes from the Call to Action October 23: We Will Not Be Silenced! Against the Criminalization and Censorship Of Campus Political Speech organized by US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). …

It’s not Israel but Palestine that is the locus of my late aunt Salma’s (also spelled Selma; Arabic: سلمى الماضي) body and soul, of “the real I myself,” as Walt Whitman has it.

So, it was a shock to me to learn that a page called “ מוזיאון הנשים בישראל The Israeli Women Museum” on Facebook shared an announcement of her death in Haifa at the age of 94 that my sister, the writer and publisher Taghreed Najjar, had posted with a brief tribute to her.

In 1948, the year of Palestine’s Nakba, my late aunt Salma, daughter of the al Madi family of Ijzim, Haifa, was a newly-wed young woman of 22 on a trip to Egypt with her husband. I finally got to meet my aunt for the first time in my life in the early 1970s, an occurrence made possible by the monstrous occupation of the West Bank by Israel (prior to 1967, Palestinians in exile in Jordan could not get permits to enter Palestine). Seeing how shocked I was upon experiencing the Hebrew-dized Palestine around me in Haifa, she explained to me how Palestinians had first to throw away Turkish language books in favor of English and now Hebrew. But they kept their Arabic books close to them — under military rule (1948 through1966) and in separate and unequal schools. …

Trump’s most egregious ‘political norms trashing’ is his trashing of the U.S. political norm of bashing, but not actually fatally wounding, what remains of Palestine and Palestinian rights.

Since it became apparent that Trump had lost the 2020 election, the news media has relentlessly focused on two things: Trump’s ongoing legal shenanigans meant to undermine the election itself, and Trump’s final moves meant to “cement” his foreign policies.

Regarding the latter, the New York Times’ Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, for example, intoned:

We also can’t ignore the foreign policy hit parade. Exchanging “beautiful” letters with Kim Jong-un. Taking Vladimir Putin at his word on the question of Russia’s election interference. Strong-arming the president of Ukraine to provide political dirt on the Biden family. Asking Xi Jinping’s help to get re-elected. Calling NATO into question. …

PRESS RELEASE:

Palestine Writes, a virtual and global Festival of Palestinian literature and culture, will take place Dec. 2–6th in a live, on-line format: https://palestinewrites.vfairs.com

Headlining the Festival are luminaries of Palestinian writing in Arabic and English, including literary giants Ibrahim Nasrallah, two-time winner of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel (Katara), and Mahmoud Shukair; acclaimed novelists Hala Alayan and Randa Jarrar, and notable Palestinian visual artists, including Samia Halabi.

Palestine Writes is excited to announce that our keynote event will be a discussion among three legendary writers and champions for universal dignity. …

A.J. Caschetta, whose writing is characterized by a pastiche of falsehoods and innuendos, is a watchdog for Campus Watch (a web-based project headed by anti-Arab propagandist Daniel Pipes that specializes in smearing “unpatriotic” professors, especially anti-Zionists among them). He writes for the American Spectator.

Caschetta is hugely alarmed by the gains being made on social media by the Palestinian liberation movement in all its various manifestations. With every raised pro-Palestinian voice, he gets more frantic and more racist in his vitriol.

He has noticed that the coronavirus restrictions have opened up online opportunities of support for Palestine, as they have indeed done for other causes. Activists for justice are not only meeting on various platforms to organize, but they are also able to reach many more people virtually than they would have done in the pre-pandemic days. And Caschetta is beside himself with hate.

Were they not so pathetic, his attempts to turn this burgeoning strength into something sinister or criminal would be laughable. “BDS organizations have been sucking up bandwidth for many months,” he says, “pursuing their academic boycotts of Israel, comparing it to Apartheid South Africa, and decrying the evils of its colonial settlers.” …

I frequently hear this when I post about Palestine on Facebook: “It is disconcerting how little Americans know about the issues of Palestinians in colonized lands.”

Unfortunately, that’s what happens when “a narrative” takes the place of reality.

The Zionist narrative continues to bulldoze Palestinian roots even though they are deeply-embedded in the soil of Palestine and have long preceded the advent of Zionist settler-colonialism before the First World War.

The bulldozer looms large, both metaphorically and literally, as a tool in Israel’s crimes of altering the Palestinian landscape — from erasing the remains of entire depopulated villages to demolishing Palestinian homes to mowing down the body of a young American activist. …

On social media today, a roller-coaster drama exposing and discrediting Zionist/corporate hypocrisy unfolded. At its center are the indomitable spirits of two Palestinian heroines — a professor at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the poster girl, now woman, of Palestinian militancy.

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi posted an event on Facebook that was to take place today — an open classroom led by herself (AMED Studies) and Professor Tomomi Kinukawa (Women and Gender Studies) “for a historic roundtable conversation with Palestinian feminist, militant, and leader Leila Khaled, followed by Q&A discussion with students, activists, and scholars at 12:30–2:30 pm PST (3:30–5:30 pm New York, and 10:30pm-12:30 am in Palestine and Jordan).” …

Immediately upon hearing the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the first thought that came to my mind involved the anxiety that many other people also exhibited regarding her replacement on the Supreme Court by a haywire president and the inspiring, heroic life she lived in the Netflix documentary.

But then I also remembered this headline from the media script of her life we were served on July 6, 2018: Ruth Bader Ginsburg receives Genesis Lifetime Achievement award in Israel.

This was after Forward (“Jewish, Fearless since 1987”) had reported that “Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman has refused to travel for Israel to accept a $2 million award, citing her ‘Jewish values’ as an imperative to stand up for justice amid an increasingly deadly conflict with the Palestinians.” …