The second annual People’s Conference for Palestine brought 4,500 Palestinian and U.S. student-activists and their allies together in Detroit, focused on the urgent need to stop Israel’s genocide in Palestine and to end the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank.
Columbia University acquiesced to the Trump administration which restores their federal funding and grant money but agreed to punish students exercising their free speech against the genocide in Gaza. In addition, Columbia will have to pay $221 million to the federal government. This “is a disaster for higher education,” says Todd Wolfson, National President of the American Association of University Presidents.
Harvard’s rejection of Trump administration demands has become a focus for resistance. However, the silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza reveals an anti-Palestinian bias at Harvard despite a strong presence of Jewish students and faculty who reject equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Anti-Semitism is being fomented by Trumpism and extreme right-wing parties in Europe. At the same time they attack Palestine solidarity as “anti-Semitic.” Its weaponization endangers Jews, for it obscures the line between false anti-Semitism, and the very real anti-Semitism that exists today and that must be fought.
On March 7, a task force created by Trump’s executive order cut $400 million in grants from Columbia University, accussing it of continued failure to protect Jewish students “from antisemitic harassment”, and of denying them learning opportunities. This is part of an ongoing repression since last spring’s campus protests against Israel war on Gaza.
Who can stop Israel’s genocide against Palestinians? Israel’s citizens need to confront their own rulers for this cycle of madness to end. Those in the U.S. also bear a heavy responsibility, and must pressure the government to stop arming Israel’s genocide.
Dr. Alice Rothchild, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist, received the National Arab-American Museum annual book award for ‘Old Enough to Know’, in which recent immigrant Palestinian children who have been bullied in school, learn the history of Palestine through their grandmother’s stories.
Interviews with several students from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., about the protest encampment there against the genocide in Gaza.
Van Gelder reviews documentary ‘Israelism,’ in which two U.S. Jewish teenagers, filmed over a seven-year period, became disillusioned and then opposed their pro-Israel education. Since Oct. 7, 2023, requests for screenings have risen, despite discrediting, censorship and suppression.
Many thanks to the translator and publisher of the Farsi translation of our “Israel’s war and Hamas attack stoke retrogression”!
جنگ اسراییل و حملهی حماس؛ محرک سیر قهقرایی / فرانکلین دمیتریف / ترجمهی ناصر برین
Luis M. Saenz writing in ‘Trasversales’ argues this is not a war between Israel and Hamas, but a brutal operation by the Netanyahu government against the population of Gaza. Any vision leaving no Palestinians, or no Israelis, in historical Palestine is reactionary. Solidarity with the Palestinian population—which is not solidarity with Hamas—is a duty.
La guerra genocida de Israel sobre Gaza, así como los atroces ataques de Hamás que la provocaron, están llevando al mundo en una dirección reaccionaria y exponiendo la inhumanidad de los poderes dominantes, así como el retroceso de buena parte de la izquierda (Traducción al español del artículo “Israel’s war and Hamas attack stoke retrogression”).
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and the horrendous Hamas attacks that sparked it, are driving the world in a reactionary direction and exposing the inhumanity of the ruling powers—as well as the retrogression of much of the Left.
The way some of the Left glorified the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of mainly civilians by Hamas calls for a deeper examination of the contradictions and retrogression underlying that type of pseudo-revolutionism.
“We’ll be coming for you” begins with the immigrants of color but will not end there.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has allied with the fascist Jewish Strength party, disciples of Meir Kahane. This alliance has crossed a line for many former supporters.
The Oct. 27 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was a modern pogrom, with assault weapons, social media presence, and poisoned roots in the current stage of world counter-revolution represented by Trump, Putin, and their like.
On July 18-19 the Israeli Knesset passed a law creating outrage among Arab and Druze citizens who see it as writing their second-class citizenship into law. It encourages the growth of illegal settlements on the West Bank and the continued dispossession of Palestinians.
Readers’ Views: Marx’s concept of theory; we are not a game; voices from behind bars.
In-person report of the Aug. 13 SlutWalk in Chicago including how it was highjacked by A Wider Bridge and the Chicago Police.
Readers’ Views on Hegel’s dialectic and today’s retrogression; Why read N&L?; La Raza unida; Education and freedom; Racism in Burma and U.S.; Voices from behind the bars
An expansive look at the rise of fascism worldwide beginning in the U.S. with Donald Trump and the U.S. election, and taking in European fascism, and the situations in India, the Philippines, China, Japan and the opposition by rulers worldwide to those fighting for a free existence and new human relations.
Putin found a formula: to participate in genocide while claiming to be fighting “terrorism.” This says everything about the nature of his retrogressive rule, and about the hypocrisy of the U.S. and Europe
From the November-December 2010 News & Letters
From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya
Editor’s note: For the centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya’s birth, we present excerpts from her March 21, 1985, lecture at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, at the opening of a three-month exhibition of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (RDC). The [=>]
The loss of lives and vast destruction visited In Israel’s war on Gaza has surpassed the horror of 2008’s “Operation Cast Lead.” Over 2,000 Palestinians have been killed to date, mostly civilians, including hundreds of children…
From the July-August 2014 issue of News & Letters
Detroit—The United Auto Workers (UAW) union elected Dennis Williams, former UAW secretary-treasurer, as president for a four-year term during the union’s Constitutional Convention held in Detroit on June 4-5. Following his election, Williams pledged to eliminate the existing two-tier wage system that pays new hires [=>]
The new November-December 2013 issue of News & Letters is online.
News & Letters, Vol. 58, No. 6
November – December 2013
Lead
The Syrian Revolution as the test of world politics
On Aug. 21 the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad murdered over a thousand civilians, mostly women and children, with sarin gas in the Damascus suburbs of Eastern Ghouta. [=>]
Los Angeles–On June 14, 1,000 mostly young grocery workers and their supporters gathered and marched for a fair contract at the East Hollywood Vons Supermarket. They represented 60,000 workers of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) at Vons, Ralph and Albertson Supermarkets who have been without a contract for over three months.
Management has demanded [=>]
March 25, 2011, marks the centennial of the Triangle Waist Company factory fire where 149 workers, most of them young Jewish immigrant women, jumped to their death from a ten-story building. The fire doors were locked to keep the women from stealing a bit of cloth or thread; the building had no fire escapes, and [=>]
by Gerry Emmett
Dutch Rightist Geert Wilders, who has also visited New York to attack the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” visited the West Bank settlements last month to declare that Palestinians should leave, to live in Jordan. “There already is a Palestinian state, and that state is Jordan,” he lied. Wilders, who sometimes tries to present [=>]
