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The student protests and the Gaza genocide

First published in Canadian Dimension May 1, 2024

Student encampment at Columbia University. Photo courtesy Columbia Students for Justice for Palestine/X.

There are snipers on the roof of the school where I got my MA.

There are police beating students at the school where I got my PhD.

At each school, I studied authoritarian regimes and how they brainwash people into believing that state brutality is not only normal, but deserved.

—Sarah Kenzior, post on X, April 28, 2024

LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?

To some of us of a certain age, 2024 is beginning to have a very 1968 feel about it. I turned 18 in 1968. When the Rolling Stones released “Street Fighting Man” that summer, many in my generation saw it as a call to arms.

The annus mirabilis, annus horribilis began with North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive, which turned the tide of the Vietnam War and galvanized a worldwide anti-war movement. On March 17, mounted police charged down protesters outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in London, England. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, setting off riots in Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and scores of other American cities. In May, student protests paralyzed Paris and triggered a general strike that brought General De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to its knees. On June 4, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. On the night of August 20-21, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, peremptorily ending Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring.

A week later it was the police’s turn to riot at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where they savagely beat anti-war protestors on Michigan Avenue. On October 2, armed forces opened fire on 10,000 demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, killing hundreds of university and high school students. When the Mexico Olympic Games opened ten days later, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in Black Power salutes on the 200-metre medal podium and Czech gymnastics multi-gold medalist Věra Čáslavská turned her head and averted her eyes as the Soviet anthem began to play and the Soviet flag was raised. On October 21, International Anti-War Day, thousands of students occupied Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.

Two weeks later, Richard Nixon, the red-baiting veteran of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) , was elected US president.

Today’s circumstances are not the same, but the déja vu is inescapable. Then as now, the trigger for disorder has been an unpopular foreign war. Then as now, domestic opposition to involvement in that war has been met with widespread repression. Then as now, the repression has exposed power structures that would sooner hide behind bland facades of neoliberal normality. And then as now, young students have been in the vanguard of the protests.

Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was for mine. I’m cheering for the kids.

Do you feel safe sending your child to a school which gives up its students to the police?

On April 17, Columbia University President Baroness Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, formerly vice president at the World Bank, deputy managing director of the IMF, deputy governor of the Bank of England, and president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics, testified before the US House Education and Workforce Committee on “campus antisemitism.”

The committee, whose resident attack dog is New York’s 22nd congressional district representative and aspiring MAGA vice-presidential running mate Elise Stefanik, had previously claimed the scalps of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Harvard University President Claudine Gay.

Magill and Gay’s resignations were quickly hijacked for the Republicans’ wider “war on woke,” and in particular its war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy couldn’t stop himself from saying the quiet bit out loud. “Better late than never,” he crowed. “It was a thinly veiled exercise in race & gender when they selected Claudine Gay”—the first Black president of Harvard and only the second Black woman to head an Ivy League university. Here as elsewhere, charges of antisemitism were a convenient vehicle for advancing—and concealing—other political agendas that have little to do with protecting Jews.

The House antisemitism investigations have been compared, not unreasonably, to HUAC’s witchhunting of “subversives” during the early years of the Cold War. No doubt mindful of Magill and Gay’s fate, Shafik turned out to be a more than friendly witness. She assured the committee that “Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

Conceding that “the events of October 7 brought to the forefront an undercurrent of antisemitism that is a major challenge for universities across the country”—a representation of the situation that has been fiercely contested by participants, who among other things point to the large numbers of Jewish students and faculty taking part in the pro-Palestine protests—Shafik detailed the steps Columbia had taken to combat antisemitism since October 7. The “central challenge,” she said, was “trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination.”

Her opening statement detailed a raft of actions taken with the aim of monitoring, policing, and disciplining protesters, but offered little but platitudes in regard to free speech.

“We restricted access to our campus to those with valid Columbia identification, increased the public safety presence across all of our campuses, brought in external security firms,” Shafik explained. “We updated our policies and procedures … to make it easier to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior, including antisemitic behavior” via “enhanced reporting channels, and supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators.”

On October 12, “we brought law enforcement onto our Morningside Heights campus to ensure the safety of our community at a protest for the first time in more than 50 years”—that is to say, since Columbia was occupied back in 1968 (when the police raid on April 30 resulted in 712 arrests and 148 reports of injuries). Thereafter the university authorities have maintained “regular communication with the New York City Police Department, ensuring they were either present or on standby for all major events, including vigils and demonstrations.”

Shafik was “personally frustrated,” she told the committee, to discover that Columbia’s existing “policies and structures were sometimes unable to meet the moment.” The school’s event policy was hastily rewritten to restrict the places and times that protests would be permitted on campus, require two working day’s notice of intended demonstrations, and set out “a clear procedure for adjudication of alleged violations and consequences for students and student groups who break the rules.”

Following these revisions two student societies, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), were suspended after leading an unauthorized student walkout on November 9, and several students were suspended on March 24 after “an event took place at a campus residential facility that the University had previously barred—twice—from occurring.”

Columbia concurrently established a Task Force on Antisemitism “led by three prominent Jewish members of our faculty,” whose brief was “first, to assess the events and other causes contributing to the pain in Columbia’s Jewish community; second, to review the relevant policies, rules, and practices that affect our campus; and third, to propose other methods to help the entire community understand the effects of antisemitism at Columbia.”

What is claimed to be an internal administration document leaked to SJP suggested that Dean of General Studies (GS) Lisa Rosen-Metsch, one of three members of the Task Force, had not only overseen “a serious and intentional misuse of GS institutional aid, where TAU [Tel Aviv University] Dual BA Program students receive disproportionately higher funds than others, without the required basis of demonstrated financial need,” but also “convened meetings with GS veterans who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), directing them to counter pro-Palestinian student activities and to actively disrupt pro-Palestinian activity on campus.” If the document is genuine these are serious allegations, which undermine any confidence in the impartiality of the Task Force—or of Columbia University.

Notwithstanding Shafik’s acknowledgment—the only one in her entire statement—that “Our Palestinian students and faculty have also been affected as their families and friends suffer through a humanitarian crisis,” no such dedicated task force was set up to address their pain: a pain, it might be conjectured, that went deeper than merely being made to feel uncomfortable in the presence of students protesting the ongoing Israeli actions that were taking the lives and obliterating the homes of their friends and relatives in Gaza. Anti-Palestinian, -Arab, or -Muslim speech and actions were evidently not seen as deserving of comparable attention by the university either then or later.

This is despite the fact that three Palestinian students had been shot in Burlington, Vermont, on November 25, leaving one paralyzed from the chest down after a bullet lodged in his spine—and in full knowledge that several of Columbia’s own students had been sprayed with a noxious chemical substance, possibly Skunk, at a pro-Palestine rally on January 19, sending ten of them to hospital. Former IDF soldiers studying at Columbia were alleged to be involved in this attack.

Despite the deafening chorus from the pro-Israel lobby bemoaning Jewish students across the US being made to feel “unsafe” by protesters demanding Palestinian freedom (as distinct from Israeli sovereignty, as in Likud’s program) from the river to the sea, none—thankfully—have yet been subjected to remotely comparable violence.

Predictably, the Task Force on Antisemitism’s first report “endorsed Columbia’s new Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations” and “also called for stronger enforcement of our policies, a goal toward which we are diligently working.”

Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!

In the early morning hours of April 17, the same day Shafik testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee, students established a Gaza Solidarity Encampment of around 50 tents on the South Lawn of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus in support of “divestment and an end to Columbia’s complicity in genocide.”

The protest was organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a coalition of over 120 groups, including the SJP and JVP, founded in 2016 to “call on the University to divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from the State of Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights through its ongoing system of settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid.”

Dressed in full riot gear, the NYPD cleared the encampment the next day and arrested over 100 people, 108 of whom were charged with trespass. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

It wasn’t the cops that initiated the sweep. Shafik had requested NYPD in writing to remove the students, claiming that “the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present dangerto the substantial functioning of the University.” The formulation I have italicized was likely included to justify Shafik’s acting without the imprimatur of the university’s senate executive committee, which she was statutorily bound to consult in such serious cases.

Protesters block traffic during a pro-Palestinian demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, near the home of Senator Chuck Schumer in Brooklyn, April 23, 2024. Photo by Andres Kudacki/AP.

Columbia and its partner institution Barnard College then summarily suspended three students. Among them was Isra Hirsi, the daughter of congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D–MN05), who is one of a small but growing number of Democratic representatives to have opposed the Biden administration’s continuation of unconditional financial and military support for Israel despite the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It is doubtless pure coincidence that Omar had given Shafik a stiff grilling at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing.

On April 20 Columbia told all the arrested students that they had been suspended, meaning that many would be forced to vacate their student housing. At Barnard, students were given 15 minutes to pack their belongings.

Undeterred, protesters set up camp again on April 22. The following days saw an uneasy standoff, with negotiations between the students and the university authorities taking place against the threat of bringing the cops in again. On April 29, Columbia gave the students an ultimatum. The bold type is the university’s:

Please promptly gather your belongings and leave the encampment. If you voluntarily leave by 2 p.m., identify yourself to a University official, and sign the provided form where you commit to abide by all University policies through June 30, 2025, or the date of the conferral of your degree, whichever is earlier, you will be eligible to complete the remainder of the semester in good standing (and will not be placed on suspension) as long as you adhere to that commitment … If you do not leave by 2 p.m., you will be suspended pending further investigation.


Shafik issued a statement the same day in which the University offered “to develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters”; “to publish a process for students to access a list of Columbia’s direct investment holdings”; “to convene a faculty committee to address academic freedom and to begin a discussion on access and financial barriers to academic programs and global centers”; and “to make investments in health and education in Gaza, including supporting early childhood development and support for displaced scholars.”

These concessions fell far short of the students’ demands, but to wring them at all from an administration whose first response had been to call in the NYPD says much for the power of protest. Shafik remained adamant, however, that “the University will not divest from Israel.”

The 2:00 p.m. deadline passed without the students leaving. On the evening of April 29, Columbia began issuing mass suspensions. Elise Stefanik meantime issued a statement that read:

Columbia has surrendered to the radical pro-Hamas antisemitic mob instead of securing campus and protecting Columbia’s Jewish students. There can be no more extensions or delays. There can be no negotiations with self-proclaimed Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers. 


Overnight, the students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building that had been a centre of the 1968 protests too. They hung a banner out of an upper floor window renaming it Hind’s Hall, in memory of six-year-old Hind Rajab, the little girl who was killed, likely by Israeli tank fire, in Gaza along with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew sent to rescue her after she had endured hours, trapped in a car with her dead relatives, as the sole survivor of an IDF strike.

Though the front pages of the American press have been filled for the last two weeks with breathless accounts of the campus protests, it is easy to lose sight of their objective.

As Maryam, a Barnard College student arrested in the NYPD sweep on April 18 and subsequently suspended (and made homeless) for her part in the encampment, urged on April 22,

I wish people would listen to Columbia student organizers and center Gaza. Our escalation is long overdue and we are escalating for Palestine & nothing else. Please have all eyes on Palestine and do not cease coverage of Gaza whatsoever. 

Israel bombs, NYU pays, how many kids have you killed today?

I have dwelt on Columbia not only because the current campus unrest first came to a head there, but also because both the students’ actions and the administration’s response foreshadowed events across North America and beyond.

The faceoff at Columbia unleashed a tsunami of encampments, occupations, and other forms of protest at dozens—likely by now hundreds—of US universities, ranging from Ivy League schools like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Brown, top private universities like NYU, Emory, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, and large public universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, and the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, to small colleges and working-class campuses like Cal Poly Humbolt.

Per the New York Times the latter school, which is situated in redwood forests 275 miles north of San Francisco, has become “the site of the nation’s most entrenched campus protest. It has gone well beyond the encampments seen on many college quads elsewhere; at Cal Poly Humboldt, protesters took over the power centre of the campus and have rejected increasingly desperate entreaties from officials for them to vacate the premises.”

The movement has since spread to universities in Canada (McGill, Concordia, the University of Ottawa, and UBC), France (Sciences-Po and the Sorbonne), Australia (Universities of Melbourneand Sydney), Italy (Sapienza University in Rome), and the UK (Warwick, UCL). I am proud to say that the first international Gaza solidarity encampment was erected by students and faculty at the University of Alberta, where I taught for 20 years and remain a professor emeritus, on April 22.

Putting a whole new complexion on the hollow and tokenistic land acknowledgments with which McGill, like every other university in Canada, nowadays begins all its official functions, the Traditional Council of the Five Nations Longhouse Confederacy of the Kahnawake Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Nation, upon whose territory McGill University sits, drew unwelcome attention to the enduring connections between settler colonies past and present across the globe.

Noting “the behavior of the european [sic] for the last five hundred years … in their systematic colonial genocide wars upon our Mother Earth and all Original Peoples and our territories here in Turtle Island and abroad, including Palestine,” and tartly observing that “any and all military actions are intrinsic with the more primitive and lower levels of human thought,” the Council stated:

in accordance with the Two Row Wampam Peace Treaty, we grant the full right to those who are occupying McGill and other campuses throughout Turtle Island to be upon the said lands, with the express intent of engaging their administrations to divest from the colonial genocide of israel [sic] upon the Palestinian People and from the war machine in general. 


Many encampments in the US have been violently broken up by police—at the university’s behest. On April 29 the New York Times published an incomplete list of campuses where protestors had been arrested, including Columbia (108 arrests), Yale (60), NYU (“dozens”), USC Los Angeles (93), UT Austin (57), Emerson College in Boston (118), Ohio State University in Columbus (36), Emory (28), Aurora campus in Denver (40), Arizona State University in Tempe (69), Northeastern University in Boston (98), Washington University in St. Louis (100 arrests, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein), and Virginia Tech (91).

Police have since made further arrests at UT Austin, Cal Poly Humbolt, the University of Utah, Virginia Commonwealth University, UNC Chapel Hill, and elsewhere. Raising the spectre of the killing of four students and wounding on nine others by the National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, police snipers were photographed on roofs overlooking demonstrations at Ohio State and Indiana University.

Though nobody has yet been killed, video offers plentiful evidence of vicious policing. There is likely an element of class resentment here, since the protesters have been widely portrayed in the media as spoiled rich brats. Clips from Emory showing philosophy department chair Noëlle McAfee being led away in handcuffs in her own words “like a criminal” and economics professor Caroline Fohlin being thrown to the ground and restrained by burly cops (even as she shouted “I’m a professor!”) went viral on social media. Neither of these academics were involved in the encampment, but they made the mistake of questioning police manhandling of their students.

As with Israel’s targeted killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza on April 1, which momentarily grabbed the attention of Western politicians and media only because six of the victims hailed from Western countries (the IDF had previously killed at least 224 Palestinian humanitarian personnel in Gaza without arousing international indignation), the spectacle of middle-aged, upper-middle-class, professional white women being on the receiving end of police brutality brought home power dynamics that are routinely experienced by Black, brown, and Indigenous minorities on a daily basis but otherwise hidden from sight.

Since we are in Atlanta, Georgia, we might recall the name of another protester, 26-year-old Stop Cop City activist Manuel Terán, into whose head, torso, hands, and legs police pumped at least 57 bullets during a multi-agency “counter-insurgency” raid in January 2023.

This is not the only respect in which events in the US uncannily mirror events in Gaza, opening up power relations to the clarifying light of day.

Say it clear, say it loud, Palestine will make us proud

“It is kind of weird that the biggest story in the US about Israel-Palestine is about college campuses when there are multiple mass graves being uncovered and constant bombardment in Gaza right now,” Benjamin H. Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University posted on Xon April 21.

The American Association of University Professors drew attention to the same jarring contrast in a post juxtaposing the phoney hysteria surrounding US campus protests with the very real scholasticide—the magnitude and systematicity of the horror cry out for the neologism—the IDF has let loose on the Palestinian education system in Gaza:

It’s worth reminding those critical of the student protests raging across the US: Gaza no longer has universities. Every single university in Gaza has been bombed into oblivion. Hundreds of academics, scholars, professors, & students have been killed since Oct. 7.


But if the material fabric of American universities remains intact, give or take the odd broken window or piece of “offensive” graffiti, the same can no longer be said of the cozy, liberal blanket of myth within which they have long nestled.

Columbia may have chairs, lectures, and reading rooms dedicated to the memory of Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar whose Orientalism (1978) was “perhaps the most influential scholarly book of the late twentieth century,” enshrine Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in its core curriculum, and afford postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak the space in which to speak, but when the chips are down the gloves come off.

The administration “deanlets” whose takeover Benjamin Ginsberg warned of a decade ago in his grimly prescient The Fall of the Faculty are now running the university show, and it is clear that their commitment to the humane values of free speech, academic freedom, open intellectual inquiry, and faculty governance that supposedly form the bedrock upon which the modern university is built count for little compared with the next check from a wealthy donor or threat from a rabble-rousing politician.

When New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft pulled support from Columbia because of “the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country” and MAGA Republican Speaker Mike Johnson warned President Biden “Antisemitism is a virus, and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping in, we’re seeing it spread … We have to act” after paying a photo-op visit to Morningside Heights, Columbia students and faculty might have expected some pushback on the part of their president against such slurs.

But no. Minouche went with the flow and abjectly accommodated to the entitlements of power.

In a lengthy open letter published on April 29 in the Boston Review, Robin D.G. Kelley, who is now Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA but who taught at Columbia from 2003-2006, castigates Shafik’s “draconian, unethical, illegal, and dishonest actions toward your own students and faculty.”

“In my nearly forty years as a faculty member,” he says,

I have never seen such brazen cruelty toward students and faculty, such cowardice before what amounts to a right-wing witch hunt, and such blatant dishonesty … In your desperate effort to deflect attacks from the likes of Elise Stefanik, you have abandoned the principles of academic freedom—including our obligation to engage in truthful, accurate, and nuanced discourse—and sacrificed the safety of our colleagues.


“I suspect that your previous executive and managerial posts in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank of England did not prepare you to lead a university,” he acidly goes on. But that is surely why Shafik was hired. “You are keeping no one safe,” Kelley rages, “except for your donors, trustees, and Columbia’s endowment.”

In today’s upside-down Orwellian world, in which politicians gaslight the public into believing that a genocide carried out in plain sight is legitimate self-defense and anybody who suggests otherwise—including Jews—is “antisemitic,” are these not the only people—corporations, in the US, being people too—that really matter? The ones who are used to calling the shots?

The genocide in Gaza and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

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‘Unwavering support’ versus ‘ironclad commitment’—a tale of two strategies

First published in Canadian Dimension October 1, 2024 / 14 min read

The Great Mosque of Gaza in the late nineteenth century. Photo by Maison Bonfils/Library of Congress.

The discrepancy between Western framing of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza has often been noted. In the words of one critic, Kari McKern, writing in July 2024:

In Gaza, Palestinian suffering is often sanitised or contextualised to diminish its horror. When an Israeli airstrike hit a UN school sheltering civilians in July 2024, killing dozens, many Western outlets led with the Israeli military’s claims of militant activity in the area rather than centring the civilian deaths. Meanwhile, Ukrainian civilian casualties are presented as unambiguous tragedies, with individual stories examined and highlighted to evoke empathy. This asymmetry extends to the language used to describe combatants and their actions. Hamas fighters are invariably “terrorists,” while Ukrainian forces are “defenders” or “freedom fighters.” Israel “responds” or “retaliates,” while Russia “invades” or “attacks” …

The human toll in both conflicts is staggering, yet the West’s reaction has been wildly inconsistent. [When] Ukrainian apartment buildings are destroyed Western leaders were quick to decry war crimes. But similar accusations against Israel for its actions in Gaza are absent, muted or included so as to be dismissed entirely. As one Palestinian journalist put it, “Our dead don’t seem to count the same way.”


There is one instance of the West’s double standards, however, that has received little if any comment. Arguably, it is the most important—and revealing—inconsistency of all. It concerns Western, and especially American, policies regarding arms supplies to “allies.”

When US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met in Washington, DC, two weeks ago for “an in-depth discussion on a range of foreign policy issues of mutual interest,” the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza dominated their conversation.

According to the official White House readout of their September 13 meeting, “The two leaders reaffirmed their unwavering support for Ukraine as it continues to defend against Russia’s aggression.” In that connection, they “expressed deep concern about Iran and North Korea’s provision of lethal weapons to Russia and the People’s Republic of China’s support to Russia’s defense industrial base.”

While paying lip-service to “the urgent need for a ceasefire deal that will free the hostages and enable increased relief in Gaza, and the need for Israel to do more to protect civilians and address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza,” the self-appointed leaders of the free world “reiterated … their ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.”

No doubt diplomats can explain the subtle differences between “unwavering support” and “ironclad commitment.” On previous form, they would seem to be considerable.

Unwavering support, or the “slow yes” Ukraine strategy

Kari McKern’s point was nicely illustrated in Keir Starmer’s address to the UN Security Council on September 25.

Directly addressing the Russian representative, he said he deplored the 35,000 Ukrainian civilians killed or injured, the six million forced to flee and the 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022—not to mention “Six hundred thousand Russian soldiers … killed or wounded in this war.”

And for what? The UN charter, which they [Russian representatives] sit here to uphold, speaks of human dignity. Not treating your own citizens as bits of meat to fling into the grinder.


“I think of Yaroslav Bazylevych, whose wife and three daughters were killed earlier this month by a Russian strike on civilians in Lviv,” the British PM went on. “And I wonder how Russia can show its face in this building.”

We must ensure accountability for those violating the UN charter and this council must recommit to the values that it sets out. This should go without saying. Yet, the greatest violation of the charter in a generation has been committed by one of this council’s permanent members.


We have yet to hear Starmer shedding any tears over Israel’s killings of five-year-old Hind Rajab and seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, or the assassination of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was murdered along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister, and four of her children in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his Gaza apartment on December 7—or any criticism of Israel’s condemnation of scores of its own citizens to fiery deaths at IDF hands on October 7 as a result of applying the Hannibal Directive.

The British PM also had little to say about “flagrant violations of the charter” when Israel disregarded four UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions this year, ignored two rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the illegality of its continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories seized during the 1967 Six Day War, and refused to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. But let that pass.

The crucial point, in the present context, is that despite what Starmer (rightly) represents as a blatant act of aggression by Russia—and notwithstanding the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children)”—the West has consistently not provided Ukraine with all the armaments it has requested, nor permitted their unconditional use against Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated pleas that these restrictions harm Ukraine’s ability to defend itself have so far fallen on deaf ears—not least in the US.

Though the line is not always an easy one to draw, the Biden administration has mostly limited its “unwavering support” to provision of defensive weapons for use in fighting within Ukraine or immediately adjacent border areas, and conditioned supplies of arms on their not being used to strike the Russian heartland.

Hardware requested in the course of the war by Ukraine and denied or delayed by Western states includes Patriot air-defence missiles (not supplied by the US until 300 days into the war), US Abrams and German Leopard and Marder tanks, long-range high precision HIMARS artillery, and F-16 fighter jets (which the US embargoed until 29 months after the Russian invasion).

Provision of ATACAMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), which have a range of around 190 miles and could hit many Russian cities, has so far remained a particular no-no.

While the UK now wishes to give Zelensky permission to deploy British-made Storm Shadow long-range ballistic missiles to strike targets deep within Russia, the US, which makes some components for the missiles, has so far refused to entertain this. Despite the urgings of Starmer and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on their recent visits to Washington, at the time of writing the US is continuing to veto Britain’s suggestion.

Criticizing what he calls the Biden administration’s “slow yes” strategy in Time magazine in December 2023, Elliot Ackerman wrote that:

This has led to a kind of phony war, in which the US and NATO cheer Ukraine’s victories and gradually provide Ukraine with high-end weapons, but dole them out slowly and in numbers small enough to allow Ukraine to fight but not to win.


The key considerations behind this strategy, at least as publicly stated by Biden and other American officials, appear to be avoidance of provoking a potentially nuclear escalation, as Putin has threatened, and fear of exacerbating disagreements among NATO European members, whose support for the Ukrainian cause differs widely.

These are eminently reasonable concerns. We might therefore equally reasonably ask: why has similar caution not prevailed when it comes to arming Israel?

Ironclad commitment, or the “we never say no” strategy

While the united Western support for Israeli action that followed Hamas’s attacks of October 7 has slowly fractured as the carnage in Gaza has grown, with Ireland, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, and even France among others becoming more critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian cause—though not of Hamas—Israel’s major Western arms suppliers have stood fast in their commitment to the Jewish state.

The UK and Germany have recently introduced (very) limited restrictions on licenses for arms sales to Israel following the ICJ advisory opinion of July 19 on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories—presumably in the hope that this will protect them against any future charges of complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

A German government spokesman was nonetheless adamant that “There is no ban on arms exports to Israel, and there will be no ban,” while David Lammy assured the UK Parliament that it was “with regret” that “we are announcing the suspension of around 30 export licences to Israel,” affirming once again that “The UK continues to support Israel’s right to self-defence in accordance with international law.” Those 30 licenses represented a mere eight percent of the UK’s total arms sales to Israel.

According to Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Canada officially ceased approving new arms supplies to Israel in March. The details, however, including continuing use of Canadian-made components in US-supplied weapons, remain distinctly murky.

Michael Bueckert, vice president of Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, is one of many who argues that because of lack of clarity and loopholes in the law:

this government is misleading Canadians into thinking that we aren’t exporting weapons to Israel at all. As Canadians increasingly demand that their government impose an arms embargo on Israel, politicians are trying to pretend that the arms trade doesn’t exist.


Most consequentially, the US (which supplies around 70 percent of Israel’s arms imports) has remained determinedly immune to any pressure to restrict or condition these supplies, whether from international bodies like the UN, the ICJ, the ICC, and a raft of human rights and charitable NGOs, or from domestic critics.

I am not just referring here to the usual left-wing suspects like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, or “Squad” members Ilhan Omar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Even the self-described “highest-ranking Jewish elected official in our government, and a staunch defender of Israel,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, warned back on March 14:

If Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition … continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.

The United States’ bond with Israel is unbreakable, but if extremists continue to unduly influence Israeli policy, then the Administration should use the tools at its disposal to make sure our support for Israel is aligned with our broader goal of achieving long-term peace and stability in the region.


While Schumer did not explicitly call for conditioning future US arms supplies on Israel “changing course,” the inference is difficult to avoid.

Despite widespread speculation at the time that “There is a very real chance that the United States will halt the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by month’s end should it fail to dramatically improve the amount of aid entering Gaza, or if it launches a military operation in Rafah without a credible plan for the million-plus Palestinians sheltering there,” the Biden administration instead doubled down on arming the genocide.

On May 8 Biden told CNN that “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem.” The subsequent US suspension of a shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs—its only restriction of arms supplies to date—proved to be short-lived. Israel ignored Biden’s “red line” and launched its bloody assault on Rafah. The US lifted its halt on 500-pound bombs on July 10.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly twice played fast and loose with US law in cases that would have required the US to cease supplying arms to Israel.

In late April, Blinken allegedly ignored misgivings in the State Department over whether Israel’s use of US-supplied arms in Gaza was “consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” and certified Israel’s own assurances as “credible and reliable.” This was required under the Biden administration’s National Security Memorandum (NSM) 20, a measure adopted on February 8 with the declared aim of ensuring accountability.

Around the same time, per a recent scoop in Politico, Blinken was aware of both a US Agency for International Development (USAID) 17-page memo to the State Department claiming that Israel was “subjecting US humanitarian aid destined for Gaza to ‘arbitrary denial, restriction and impediments,’” and emails from the head of the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration which asserted that “Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel.”

Blinken chose to ignore both sets of recommendations, testifying to Congress on May 10 that “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

On July 2, 12 former Biden administration officials who had resigned over US policy toward Gaza issued a joint statement in which they argued that:

America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza.


Ongoing weapons transfers to Israel despite its actions in Gaza, they added, have “put a target on America’s back.”

Notwithstanding the Rafah offensive and other subsequent Israeli atrocities including airstrikes on schools and hospitals, on August 13 the Biden administration approved a further $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, 30 medium range air-to-air missiles, tactical vehicles, 32,739 tank cartridges of 120-mm rounds and 50,400 120-mm high-explosive cartridges for mortars.

America’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel seems unlikely to change whoever wins the November US presidential election. Interviewed on CNN on August 30, the only person standing in the way of a second Donald Trump presidency offered little “joy”—am I the only one who finds this campaign motif obscene in the circumstances?—to Palestinians:

Let me be very clear: I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself. And that’s not going to change …


Asked whether this means there would be “no change in policy in terms of arms and so forth?” Kamala Harris responded: “No, I—we have to get a deal done.”

This refusal to countenance any deviation from Biden’s policy is all the more remarkable given that opinion polls suggest the election is likely to be extremely close.

According to a recent YouGov poll in the crucial swing states of Arizona, Pennylvania, and Georgia, “80% or more of Democrats and Independents support a permanent cease-fire and 60% or more disapprove of more weapons to Israel.” Polls cannot be treated as reliable predictors, but the successes of the “uncommitted” campaign in the Democratic primaries earlier this year suggest that in refusing to reconsider the party position on arms to Israel Harris is risking losing substantial Arab American, Muslim American, and youth support and votes in the swing states where she needs them most.

There could be no more eloquent—or sadder—testimony to the US “ironclad commitment” than the Democrats’ apparent willingness to throw the election to Donald Trump rather than even consider conditioning arms supplies to Israel on its behaving in accordance with international law.

Beyond realpolitik?

The contrast between Western, and especially US, policies on arms supply to Ukraine and Israel, is glaring. It is also difficult to rationally comprehend, let alone morally justify.

While the figures for Ukrainian casualties cited by Keir Starmer in his September 25 address to the UN are undoubtedly horrific, they look positively benign when compared with the casualties in Gaza. In eleven months of war (compared with two years and eight months of war in Ukraine), at least 41,534 Palestinians have been killed and more than 96,092 injured. More than 10,000 are missing, presumed buried under the rubble.

Though Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, even Joe Biden conceded back in March that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed—most of whom are not Hamas” (my emphasis).

Israel has slaughtered nearly 16,500 children in Gaza—surely a more heinous war crime than Russia’s kidnappings of Ukrainian kids. Around 1.9 million people—nearly nine in ten Gazans—have been “displaced,” i.e., forced to flee from their homes, at least once.

In making these comparisons, we need to remember that while the pre-war population of Ukraine was 37.9 million, that of Gaza was a mere 2.3 million.

If ever there was a case for embargoing or at least conditioning arms supplies on purely humanitarian grounds, Gaza provides it. The IDF makes Putin’s butchers of Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria—not to mention Mariupol—look like the most moral army in the world.

Ukraine is facing a genuine existential crisis provoked by an invasion by a great power that possesses the largest nuclear armory on the planet. Should Russia win this war, the implications for European—and Western—security are potentially profound.

By contrast, however appalling (or criminal) the events of October 7 may have been, Israel is confronting what some have likened to a prison breakout by a people whose territories it has been illegally occupying for 67 years, in an area around twice the size of Washington, DC, whose borders it has blockaded since 2007.

Hamas might wish to destroy Israel but it does not remotely have the capacity to do so. October 7 is not evidence of an existential threat to the Israeli state, but of unforgiveable lapses in security while its leaders’ minds were on other things.

The costs to the West of its “ironclad commitment” to Israel far outweigh any benefits. Whatever potential geopolitical, economic, or domestic political advantages may once have been conferred by support for Israel are forever buried in the rubble of Gaza. We are beyond realpolitik, and the world is slowly realizing it.

On September 18 the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted “a historic text demanding that Israel brings to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, no later than 12 months from the adoption of the resolution,” in accord with the ICJ advisory opinion of July 19.

With a recorded vote of 124 nations in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions, the resolution calls for Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank.

The General Assembly further demanded that Israel return land and other “immovable property”, as well as all assets seized since the occupation began in 1967, and all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions.

The resolution also demands Israel allow all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their place of origin and make reparation for the damage caused by its occupation.


Apart from Israel and the US, the opponents of the resolution were Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and the Pacific states of Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Tonga, and Tuvalu—a tiny minority of the international community.

Several European nations, including the UK, Germany, and Italy, abstained, as did Australia, Canada, India—and Ukraine, whose supply of US arms, as we have seen, has always been conditional on doing what Uncle Sam says.

It is noteworthy—and shows how far opinion has shifted over the last eleven months—that supporters of the resolution included Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, and Spain. Most of the BRICS countries, including Russia, China, South Africa, and Brazil, voted in favor of the resolution.

Israel and the United States are increasingly isolated in the court of world opinion.

Yet still the carnage continues and still the arms flow. On September 27, in what may prove to be a cataclysmic escalation of the war to Lebanon, Israel dropped US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Dahiya residential area of Beirut, flattening six apartment blocks and killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Benjamin Netanyahu authorized the strike by telephone from his hotel room in New York, where he was addressing the UN General Assembly and scores of delegates walked out.

The cost of Nasrallah’s scalp was likely several hundred Lebanese civilian lives. The Palestinian journalist got it right. Their dead don’t seem to count the same way.

By on

In memory of Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna

On April 3 the Israeli magazine +972 published an explosive article by Yuval Abraham based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, all of whom have served in the army during the current war on Gaza. Its subject was the use of AI software named “Lavender” to generate targets for bombing. Abraham suggests that much of the death toll from the Israeli assault (which has now passed 33,000) is a result of the IDF treating the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Personally, I wouldn’t blame the killing on the software. The great fear about AI has always been of its escaping human control and taking over, as in the Matrix films. This is wrong. What the obliteration of Gaza has shown is that the greater danger comes when the awesome capabilities of AI are put at the disposal of human beings.

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ …

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics … among the general population … An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. 

The Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets … during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants—and their homes—for possible air strikes.

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.

The Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. 

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” … were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

When it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. 

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people—it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. 

Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

The following was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the UK, on February 14, accompanying several photos of Sidra Hassouna and her family:

This is 7 year old Sidra, the cousin of my wife. The impact of the Israeli missile was so powerful it flung her out, leaving her mutilated body dangling from the ruins of the destroyed building in Rafah 48 hours ago. My wife’s aunt Suzan, her husband Fouzy Hassouna, two of their sons, Muhammad and Karam, Karam’s wife Amouna and her three children (7-year-old twins Sidra and Suzan, and 15-month-old Malik) were all killed. The family had been displaced from the north of Gaza and took shelter in Rafah. We will be relentless until those responsible brought to justice.

All texts, except the last, are quotations from Yuval Abraham’s article “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” You can read more about Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna here and here. 

I took the photographs at Notre Dame de Sénanque abbey in Provence in July 2002.