Palestine Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

Genocide

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Reflections of a genocide survivor

June 24, 2025 • by Anonymous

As a genocide survivor who had relocated to New York from an open-air prison in Gaza in August 2024, I wondered what it would mean to be a Palestinian from the perspective of Palestinian Americans. Was there a space in America that kept them connected with their Palestinian identity? Where was ...

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Activism

Voting While Uncommitted

Sustained collective action is not incompatible with the singular act of voting

October 31, 2024 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I have never subscribed to the idea that citizens who refuse to vote for a Democratic candidate in a tight race are somehow morally responsible for the election of a Republican, however bad that Republican might be. If we are serious about liberal democracy, then we must recognize that every citizen ...

Middle East & North Africa

From the River to the Sea, There Is Space for Many Different Interpretations

Labeling the slogan “antisemitic” is a powerful tool used by Israel to deny the existence of the Palestinian people

April 9, 2024 • by Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg

It is often maintained that the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case....

From the River to the Sea, There Is Space for Many Different Interpretations

Colonization

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our funding

February 13, 2024 • by Stephen Zacks

Whether or not it sways Netanyahu, we should certainly withhold military funding now and make our support contingent on clearly stated humanitarian objectives and an ultimate governing framework that conforms to our ideas of justice....

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

Middle East & North Africa

The War Between Israel and Hamas Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game

We need to acknowledge the universal experience of shared human suffering

October 25, 2023 • by Ilan Zvi Baron

Exploring the zero-sum game of rhetoric surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its dire consequences. Amid the polarizing narratives, a call for acknowledging shared human suffering and rethinking the discourse to avoid a path that exults in death. ...

The War Between Israel and Hamas Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game

Middle East & North Africa

Have We Scholars of Anti-Semitism Failed to Facilitate Empathy for Its Victims?

What we can learn from scholars of anti-Black racism

October 18, 2023 • by Magda Teter

For almost a century, most of us have focused on dissecting anti-Semitic ideas and ideologies. But—with the very important exception of those studying the Holocaust—we have not paid enough attention to the impact these ideas, images, and actions have on Jews as human beings....

Have We Scholars of Anti-Semitism Failed to Facilitate Empathy for Its Victims?

Middle East & North Africa

Sleepwalkers

We are once again proving ourselves to be the dupes of violence

October 18, 2023 • by James Dodd

My deepest fear—and not only for Israel and Palestine, but for many other parts of the world where political responsibility is being undermined by the narcotics of outrage and resentment—is that our political life is currently locked in a downward spiral thanks to which options appear to be more and ...

Activism

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war

October 16, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

For a long time many civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, have suffered, as their leaders have failed to bring about a civil, peaceful, and at least modestly just end to a long and violent conflict. I feel for them all, and particularly for the children who have grown up knowing nothing ...

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Film & Performing Arts

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching Fauda

The elision of the difference between Jews and Israel is one of the tragedies of the Middle East conflict

March 20, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

In Fauda, the Palestinians are often driven more by personal pathology than an outrage at historic injustice....

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching <em>Fauda</em>

Middle East & North Africa

Israel on the Brink

We just had a warning, a taste of what the future looks like short of post-ethnic politics in our post-two-state era

May 27, 2021 • by Omri Boehm and Arvid Jurjaks

_____ Arvid Jurjaks: I want to start at the current political situation in Israel with Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett being asked to form a government. How much chance do they have to succeed on this, you think? Omri Boehm: I think it's pretty clear that Yair Lapid has no chance, because Bennett, ...

Imaginal Politics

The Peace that Kills

Notes from the launch of the Trump & Netanyahu ‘peace plan’

February 13, 2020 • by Antti Tarvainen

If they can afford it, the Palestinians won't have to pretend to be working with the US anymore. Perhaps the security and economic deals related to the Oslo Accords framework can now be abandoned and this, yet another-peace-that-kills, rejected. It is a fool’s hope, but there might thus be a ...