For three beautiful days in Philadelphia, Palestinians celebrated their writing, history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania campus at the second Palestine Writes Literature Festival. For three beautiful days in Philadelphia, Palestinians celebrated their writing, history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania campus at the second Palestine Writes Literature Festival
As I sat watching the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer all I could think of was Edward Said. In his famous essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said argued that there was no way to understand the ideology of Zionism—-the idea of Jewish racial supremacy—without examining the experience of those who suffered from it, namely Palestinians like himself.
If you mention Indiana to someone on the U.S. Left, they are likely to know two things: that Eugene Debs, the one-time leader of the American Socialist Party, was born there; and that Indiana was a birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, these forces fought tooth and nail over the direction of Indiana and American politics: the Socialist Party held an inaugural ratification convention in Indianapolis in 1901, and held its national convention there in 1912, when Debs got more than a million votes running for President.
Faculty at Rutgers University in New Jersey, one of the oldest public universities in the United States, are preparing to strike. Last week two faculty bargaining units, one comprised of full-time faculty and one of part-time, both voted by overwhelming majority in favor of a strike to create a living wage across campus for all teachers; to bring all faculty into the same bargaining unit; to undermine racism and sexism in the University labor hierarchy; and to push back against the University’s corporate, neoliberal agenda: https://rutgersaaup.org/our-members-h…
The two Rutgers Unions, AAUP-AFT, and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, are also practicing what the Union calls “fighting for the common good.” Their demands against the University include a call for a freeze on housing rates on all Rutgers-owned properties, a call for student debt forgiveness, and attention to creation of a “beloved community” in and around Rutgers campuses in the multiracial, working-class cities of New Brunswick, Camden and Newark: https://rutgersaaup.org/take-the-pled…
The recent defeat of a proposed new state constitution by voters in Chile was a setback for Left forces. The Constitution, which would have enshrined new rights for Chile’s multiple indigenous populations, guaranteed national health care, granted rights to the environment, and affirmed gender and sexual self-identification; was the product of Chile’s left-center government which won state elections last year.
The struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israel’s U.S.-backed settler-colonial regime has become a cornerstone of most radical and progressive political platforms. Especially since Palestinian Civil Society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign (BDS) in 2004, modeled closely on the South African campaign to end Apartheid; the broad U.S. and global Left have made the struggle to end Israel’s occupation part of a wider critique of U.S. imperialism.
Yet recent events have challenged the unity and momentum of both the struggle for Palestinian liberation on the Left, and its primary global weapon, the BDS campaign. One of those challenges has come from the reformist wing of the Left, the Democratic Socialists of America. Another, even more potentially threatening to Palestinian liberation unity, has come from within the ranks of the U.S. Arab political class and its institutions.
