"The Israeli army is not killing children because they refuse to be careful, or out of some uncontainable vengeance. They are killing so many children because, as explicitly stated by past and present officials, and as demonstrated by the facts on ground, they intend to.

...

The anger and pain felt by the world for and on behalf of the children often gets attached to the idea of innocence. Children are protected as a category because they are presumed to be innocent of the crimes and misdeeds of adults; more than this, they are somehow presumed to be innocent of our world. This category, as it has been used, fails Palestinian children when applied from the outside to their situation as members of an occupied, besieged population. For Israel, all Palestinian life is terrifying, and killable. Israel has shown the world what every genocide has shown before: that when men are killable, so too are children and women. That is the logic of eliminatory violence, which is what Zionist force enacts: killing, terrorizing, and dominating in order to eliminate Palestinians from their land.

From the perspective of the colonizer, innocence is impossible for colonized children, because innocence would mean innocence of knowledge of the domination that has already conditioned their lives. Think of the young child facing the gun while sheltering in a school, about to be killed, that child’s terror. That terror is not innocent—that is a terror with knowledge, as is the terror of the child watching their father executed or their home collapse. Or the child who knows they can’t travel because of Zionism, that their family are refugees because of Zionism, that they don’t have enough food because of Zionism. This knowledge refutes the kind of unknowing innocence the world seems to require of children: they are already more than that. They are political subjects, subjects with agency and within historical time. Even the babies in the incubator, innocent of language, contain the political potency of time, of the future, and so are made killable."

Following the arrests of hundreds of protesters at Columbia University, students have gathered on campuses across the country demanding that their schools stop doing business with Israel.

In solidarity with these students, we're offering free ebooks on Palestine, mass protests, and student rebellions. 

This is in addition to From The River to the Sea, the free ebook we published alongside Haymarket Books, which is also still available for free.

"Sen. Tom Cotton, last seen demanding U.S. infantry mow down Black Lives Matter protesters, calls for drivers inconvenienced by pro-Palestine demonstrations to "take matters into their own hands." Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of a genocide in progress, compares nonviolent students to Nazis and declaresthat "more has to be done" to silence them. Meanwhile, mass graves are being discovered on the grounds of the Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza that the Israel Defense Forces sacked.

Not a single one of these frauds care for an instant about the safety of Jews, their supposed motivation. Jews are among the protesters. Jewish students protesting at Columbia held shabbos services, even as some of them were locked off campus as threats to the safety of… themselves. "This hits home the absurdity of current discourse," Rabbi Abby Stein posted from the service. To read that absurdity as a text, it is a text that distinguishes Real Jews from Fake Jews through their allegiance to Zionism, in keeping with how similar 19th century European nationalisms distinguish Real Citizens from Conditional Citizens, with the Conditional Citizens' lives being far cheaper, if not forfeit.  But the Zionists do not speak for us Jews, and the louder we anti-Zionist Jews become, the greater their fear, their hatred, and their absurdity. "

"For 77 minutes while a gunman massacred fourth-graders at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school in 2022, members of the Texas Department of Public Safety roamed school hallways. Not once during that time did they attempt to open the doors to the classrooms in which the gunman was killing children and teachers.

On Wednesday, however, the Texas DPS took a different approach to campus safety. Dressed in riot gear, the state police force descended on the University of Texas at Austin, aggressively detaining protesters and tackling a television cameraman at a nonviolent pro-Palestine protest, leading to at least 30 arrests."

...

These escalations against students are a choice. Police can be patient, even passive. The Texas DPS proved that when they loitered outside the ongoing slaughter of grade-schoolers. Indeed, data shows that police are not primarily crime-fighters, devoting a small percentage of their stops to suspected crimes and a much greater percentage to things like racially biased traffic stops. Their work, by the numbers, is foremost the enforcement of order and inequality along race and class lines.

...

“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” the father of a murdered Uvalde child tweeted above footage of Texas DPS officers in riot gear storming toward unarmed students at UT Austin. “But what do I expect….1 AR-15 keeps 376 officers at bay.”

...

The police response on college campuses does little for public safety or protection of Jewish students. Statistically, police have seldom filled this role. The same Texas DPS that made mass arrests at UT Austin on Wednesday also shoved away students who protested a speech by open antisemite Richard Spencer at Texas A&M University in 2016, and handcuffed Uvalde parents who demanded DPS save their children from a school shooting.

...

These students are calling for ceasefire. America’s militarized police forces are bringing the war home.

"We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolitioning racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different.

Rules are rules, and the rules never change."

"Even if for the sake of argument we accept this defense of hypocrisy, it does not apply to Israel. There is no national security reason the United States should support atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians are not a national security threat, and, if only in a pro forma way, presidential administrations of both parties have long been committed to a two-state solution. Images of Palestinians being maimed and killed don’t make the United States stronger. Instead, in very obvious ways, they fuel terrorism and instability in the Middle East and elsewhere. Any real commitment to a liberal international order, even one predicated on American hegemony, would require reining in Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The shielding of Israel from any consequences for its human rights abuses isn’t the familiar hypocrisy of realpolitik. Rather, it’s a curiously gratuitous hypocrisy—a violation of norms done because much of the American political elite regards Israel as a special pet, given a unique impunity.

...

Such an egregious display of favoritism makes clear that the liberal international order means nothing more than a purely selfish assertion of dominance: Washington gets to set the rules and the rest of the world has to simply abide by them. But there’s little reason for the world, especially the countries of the Global South, who don’t enjoy the special protection given to European allies, to submit to this regime. As America and its core allies become a smaller part of the world—in terms of both population and wealth—there’s no reason to think this version of the liberal international order is sustainable. In 1974, China, India, and the rest of developing world made up only 26 percent of the global economy. That number has doubled to 53 percent in 2024. Conversely, the share of First World countries (the United States and its core allies in Europe plus Japan) in the global economy has shrunk from 62 percent to 44 percent. These numbers make clear how precarious any long-run project of American global dominance through sheer force is. 

"A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested.

Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested.

....

The absurdities that follow are almost funny. The University of Austin, the pretend university launched by IDW types like Bari Weiss, is preparing its “Forbidden Courses” for the summer. It stands silently by as the actual University of Texas at Austin is censored, safe in the knowledge that they are regime-approved.

You don’t have to be blind to the real cases of anti-semitism in America to be troubled by accusations of anti-semitism to shut down the most visible protests to a military response that has become increasingly unpopular. The looking glass nature of the argument is reflected back at us: senior Israeli officials who oversaw the destruction of every university campus in Gaza complain that what is going on American campuses is unacceptable. Tarring every objection to Israel as anti-semitism makes it harder to address actual cases of this malign worldview, which unfortunately is not in short supply.

....

But in places where the university administration has not responded aggressively, protest tactics of the kind used in Texas and Columbia have not created unrest. Overwhelmingly, the actual experience of protests on campus has not been one of violence, as Harvard professor Ryan Enos noted:

Some claim that universities are overrun with antisemitic hordes, while others, including myself and my colleagues, have seen only peaceful actions from diverse student protesters, including many Jews, earnestly challenging what they see as a grave violation of human rights. University leaders must be clear about what is happening on our campus, rather than letting social media and opportunistic politicians manufacture narratives.

....

In the long run, student protests are often unpopular in their own era, but have a pretty good track record of being right about major issues of conflict, such as Vietnam, civil rights, apartheid in South Africa, or the war in Iraq. The students in Austin should retain mementoes of their arrests for when the university runs a retrospective event applauding their courage decades from now.

...

Here is a very simple test: The next time you read an opinion piece about protests on campus, ask yourself if the author bothered to engage in the basic question of whether the war should continue, and whether the US government should continue to provide arms for it.

It says something truly profound about the blinkered view of the American pundit class that they only way they can understand a real war is through their own worn culture war framings. They squint just enough to be outraged by the fact that students are protesting but refuse to engage in a discussion of what the students are protesting about.

"The German state is taking extraordinary measures to clamp down on pro-Palestinian activism, including arresting activists in their homes in the middle of the night.

...

Germany functions as an extension of the Israeli apartheid state. Not only does it extrapolate the same propaganda onto Palestinians as Israel, but Germany has also adopted similar tactics of psychological warfare against activists to deter solidarity within the country.

The raids due to social media rings extremely similar to Israel’s “zero tolerance policy” toward social media activity in Palestine, which has led to the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who expressed solidarity or support for the people of Gaza. In a viral video earlier in this war, Israeli police arrested a woman over a Whatsapp post, and in the video she pleads with the officers, and out of fear even retracts her statement by saying, “God protect Israel.” 

Of course, the posts do not pose a threat, neither to Israel nor to Germany. The raids and arrests are meant to instill fear and deter others from participating in protests or speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

...

“The German state is criminalizing and intimidating Jews who stand up against genocide, the ludicrous thing being that the state is selling this as ‘fighting antisemitism,’” the Congress organizers said.

"Then came the bombardment, and the people of Gaza showed the world what the mainstream media could not: wounded civilians, leveled buildings, long lines of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets, bombed-out universities, bombed-out mosques, toddlers trembling in shock and covered in the gray, ashy dust of debris. Stray cats circling corpses, thousands of people taking shelter in hospitals and schools, or walking with all their belongings down “humanitarian corridors” to “safe zones,” which would later be bombed, too. On Instagram, journalists and doctors gave updates to the front-facing camera in English: They are still bombing, the sound of the drone overhead is constant, we cannot sleep, my neighbor’s house was destroyed, we don’t have power, we don’t have food, we don’t have anesthesia, the internet went down but now it’s back up, there’s nowhere to go, I am so traumatized, we are starving, this man is eating grass, there is no bread, please help us, don’t stop posting, please keep posting. A lawyer presenting South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice called it “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.”"

...

It can be difficult for those inundated by Gaza images on social media to remember that wide swaths of the US population have never seen them, and likely never will. .... The mainstream media, by and large, does not show graphic images of Palestinian suffering, if they show images of Palestinian suffering at all.

...

Even as Israeli officials state their genocidal intent on the record, Israeli civilians have accused Gazans of faking the genocide. ...Israel’s social media activity since October 7 has been a crash course in hasbara, Israel’s word for propaganda, or diplomacy, directed at foreign audiences.... There is something uniquely disturbing about this type of cultural production, which feels like it should be satire but is not. It reveals a stunning disregard for life — a perverse, almost gleeful nihilism.

....The smiles are the scariest part. They call to mind the grins of Charles Graner, Lynndie England, and Sabrina Harman posing with their thumbs up next to the tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The only thing scarier than the cheerful expressions of latent aggression are the plain demonstrations of malice: a soldier shooting at the interior wall of an apartment whose walls have been spray-painted with the words LET YOUR VILLAGE BURN. Soldiers lighting food aid on fire. Soldiers destroying a warehouse where aid was stored. A soldier standing beside the exterior wall of a house that is spray-painted with red graffiti: INSTEAD OF ERASING GRAFFITI, LET’S ERASE GAZA.

"Six thousand. Eleven thousand. Twenty thousand. This steady rhythm of fatalities marked the progression of the following pieces, which I wrote  during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip this autumn. The official number of people Israel has killed in Gaza now approaches thirty thousand, but in reality that number has already been surpassed. Israel is killing two hundred and fifty Palestinians per day, ten people per hour, one person every six minutes. Each figure corresponds to a life snuffed out by a merciless killing machine for which killing has become an end in itself."

...

October 25, 2023

Recently, an Australian Palestinian friend of mine was invited to appear on an Australian national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza. His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you condemn Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was one killing per day — yet one killing per day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the prime minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? . . . A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak, which is the tacit assumption that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as other people’s. Questions are framed by the initial Hamas attack on Israeli civilians (the Hamas attack on Israeli military targets and Israel’s belt of fortifications, watchtowers, and prison gates surrounding Gaza goes unnoticed), and any attempt to place it in a wider historical framework gets diverted back to the attack itself: How can you justify it? Why are you trying to explain it instead of condemning it? Why can’t you just denounce the attack? If Palestinian commentators want to be asked about Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians — about the history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that produced the contemporary Gaza Strip and the violence we are witnessing today; about the structural violence of decades of Israeli occupation that cuts farmers off from their fields, teachers from their classrooms, doctors from their patients, and children from their parents — we have to ask to be asked. And even then, the questions don’t come.

I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists from a lot of different media organizations over the past two weeks. With rare exceptions, the pattern is consistent, as it has been for years. I’ve experienced it too. A recent appearance on a major US cable news channel was canceled at the last minute, immediately after I sent in the talking points the producer requested I submit; they clearly weren’t the talking points they had in mind. For years, I was on the list of regular guests for BBC radio and television interviews concerning Palestine — until, during a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I told the interviewer he was asking the wrong questions and that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now. That was my last appearance on the BBC.

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions — or even bullets and machine guns — to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments. Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way. Thirty-six of those babies died as a result. That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics."

"Israel is not just a State, it's a project. It's a settler colonial project. And I do think that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of this project. Because it rests on three pillars.

One is material, of course [...] when you use and index that looks at sustainability of state according to their material capability, Israel is doing well. [...] It does well mainly because of the United States. So this is a condition that can change.

The second pillar is the social coherence of the settler society. We know this coherence is nonexistent anymore. There is a bit of an optical illusion because of the Hamas operation of the 7th of October that created a sense of unity. But it's not going to cover up the fragmentation of the society that we have seen until the 7th of October. It seems that social coherence that is based on hatred of the Arabs and the Palestinians and doesn't have anything else in common, is not very sustainable.

And more importantly than anything else, of course, there is the legitimacy pillar. And Israel enjoys the legitimacy of western governments or governments in the global north. And therefore, there is a sense that it can still be sustainable because of the support of the elites. But it has lost the support of the civil societies.

And this is why probably it's the only state in the world that lobbies for its existence. Not for its policies, not for its better economic performance, but for its very moral justification. And it's losing that battle.

As an historian I can tell you that when projects like settler colonialism are reaching their last phase, unfortunately, this can be quite a long period. It doesn't happen in one day or two days. And the problem is, of course, that they become more brutal and ruthless in that last phase."

Ilan Pappè, excerpt of an interview with Al Jazeera

"Republican politicians openly flouting the rule of law — skirting fraud charges and refusing to provide medical care to pregnant people. While regular people bear the burden of our supposed elected representatives threatening, intimidating, and denying us our rights — whether it’s pregnant people seeking care or students gathering on campus to oppose genocide.

A refrain echoing in my head: You have the right to die if you don’t comply.

That’s the message sent by abortion bans. Stay pregnant or die trying.

It’s also the message sent by state troopers armed to the teeth, mounted on horseback, plowing through peaceful protests. Speak up for what you believe, and risk your life.

You have the right to die, if you don’t comply.

This is modern necropolitics in the United States. Weaponized abortion bans and militarized police responses to peaceful protest serve the same goal: to make the public fearful. To make us compliant with the restriction of our rights and our bodies. To make us second guess the normal, agent decisions we have every right to make — to decide if, when, and how to have children, and to decide if, when, and how to speak up for our beliefs. To make us comfortable and compliant with state-sanctioned death.

Abortion bans and militarized police are agents of terror, both. To resist that terror is an act of incredible bravery.

...

Of course not. But the division between those who have to comply — kids, pregnant people, regular Americans — and those who believe themselves exempt from compliance — men in power, and the insufferable, simpering women who support (and sometimes lead) them — is only becoming more stark.

"What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. 

....

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.

Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.

Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets – this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education."

"Fifty-five years ago, an explosive 34-page pamphlet titled Who Rules Columbia? was published. It’s not remembered by many people today – but it should be. The pamphlet came out just weeks after the historic 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. It brought a sharp power analysis that dissected and mapped out Columbia as a member of the corporate power structure interlocked with war, racism, finance and real estate.

....

What’s less known about the high drama at Columbia is that – amid the uprising and shortly after – a small and plucky group of power researchers worked day and night to put together a stunning analysis that laid bare the corporate-aligned power structure at the core of Columbia’s governance. Who Rules Columbia? showed in painstaking detail how the university’s “rulers” were fully enmeshed within the heights of U.S. capitalism and empire and how these ties shaped everything about the university, from its finances to its academics. In an edgy and accessible way, Who Rules Columbia? connected the dots and illustrated the networks of corporate and militarist power at the university.

“Who Rules Columbia? had an enormous impact,” Mike Locker, one of the pamplet’s co-authors, told LittleSis. “We crystallized how people thought about Columbia University, as a capitalist institution, and not as a school of learning. This was a place to turn out people for the system, to train them to be effective agents of corporate power.” 

...

Who Rules Columbia? mapped out the wealthy, well-connected men who sat on the school’s Board of Trustees. It brought to light the corporate and militarist interests they represented and the networks and institutions through which they wielded power and influence. The pamphlet did not just aim to put a spotlight on power for transparency’s sake. Rather, it aimed to diagnose the university’s core power structure and its inner-workings that generated the issues that were flashpoints of student discontent in the first place – all so that the movement, including protesters at Columbia, could more effectively strategize and organize around those sources of power.

Far from an idyllic place where the life of the mind roamed free, the pamphlet declared that the university existed “to service outside interests which, by controlling Columbia’s finances, effectively control its policy.” These “outside interests” were represented on the Board of Trustees and “organized the university as a “factory” to produce the skilled technicians and management personnel the U.S. industrial and defense apparatus needs.”

In other words, the university was a vehicle for money and power, and this shaped everything about it that students disliked: its hierarchies, land grabs, stifled learning environment, and unaccountable administrators. This university was precisely designed this way to reflect the interest of its trustees whose rule over the university and its finances was shaped by their outside connections to the world of elite power, corporate profits, and war-making.

This was “the crucial issue behind the student rebellion,” said Who Rules Columbia? – the control of the university by outside corporate forces that didn’t prioritize the students and community or the mission of learning. Everything the students were protesting at Columbia grew out of this power structure and the interests and people that composed it.

...

Maybe most of all, Who Rules Columbia? showed that the university was something other than it claimed to be; not a utopian space for pure learning, but a corporate-aligned power structure enabling war and racism, overseen by a small cohort of powerful and influential corporate elites who were upholding and profiting from empire at home and abroad. The university was a hierarchical power structure with trustees who were the “rulers.” The student strike and occupation aimed for a democratic “redistribution of power” by the “ruled” against the campus’s “illegitimate authority.” A different university was possible if that power structure was challenged.

"In May 2023, India and Israel signed a new bilateral agreement to bring forty-two thousand additional Indian laborers to Israel. Modi’s most recent agreement with Netanyahu aims to fast-track current plans even more, lifting restrictions to hasten migrant workers’ entry into Israel. The temporary, low-wage migrants from rural and small-town North India, some of the poorest regions in the country, are desperate for decent employment—so desperate that they’re willing to work for a regime that is actively engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide.” They’re seeking paid work they’ve failed to find within India’s growing but deeply unequal and caste-bound economy. Bilateral deals like the one between India and Israel give off the sheen of newness, appearing to be the products of a twenty-first century age of hypermobile capital. But in fact, the two countries are dusting off a time-worn strategy from the colonial archive: importing and exporting racially marked temporary labor to manage political and economic problems in one fell swoop."

....

Bilateral mobility agreements like the India-Israel deal are nothing new. Across the world, more and more states—Singapore, Bahrain, Canada, and the United States among many others—have begun to employ temporary, closed-term migrant labor programs. In the Middle East, autocratic Gulf states have long relied on such schemes. And in addition to contracting Palestinian labor, Israel has long relied on Thai, Filipino, Nepali, and Indian workers, too. Typically, these states have two goals. On the one hand, they want to preserve the ethnic composition of a privileged national citizenry. On the other, they need large amounts of cheapened laborers, especially in the domestic, construction and retail sectors, to grow. Contract labor schemes have allowed them to do both: with them, states can access a mass supply of workers without having to grant any of them citizenship. Israel, for example, offers five-year, temporary immigration channels for migrant workers, but gives them no option for family reunification or naturalization.

...

The Modi-Netanyahu labor deal has an even older historical predecessor: British indenture. In the nineteenth century, as chattel slavery came to an end in Britain, indentured labor from countries such as India and China was introduced as a more “humane” alternative. The practice was abolished in 1920, but a century later, traces of its institutional legacy live on in migrant labor programs. Indian and other Asian workers were desirable across the Gulf region because they were seen as politically “docile,” a powerful racial trope with particular roots in nineteenth-century indenture practices. They were also desirable because, as sociologist Andrzej Kapiszewski notes, “Asian governments became often involved in the recruitment and placement of their workers, facilitating their smooth flow to the Gulf countries.” The governments of India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, lured by the healthy remittances promised to them, were all too eager to help in the importation of their workers.

...

If modern states have ensured the brutal subjugation of both populations living, and workers laboring, in their borders through colonial means, then the resistance to those tactics must be anticolonial in response.

"SZ: When poor Black people talk about the repression we face, we are not believed unless the courts, or middle-class people like journalists or academics, confirm the truth of what we are saying. The ANC should be using the power of the people to confront the colonial system that continues to terrorize us and vandalize our humanity. Instead, they are using violence to repress the people so that they can benefit from the system. Some people in the ANC feel that for them to be in charge, for them to be leaders, their power must be felt in a physical way: somebody must feel the pinch; there must be fear. This makes them feel better. It stops them from looking at their emptiness. But fear is not respect. There has to be a new kind of politics, a human form of politics."

....

SZ: ... Repression is always a lesson. It is meant to tell us to know our place, and that we should have always known our place. It is meant to teach us that there are limits to what you can say, what you can enjoy, who you can talk to, what you can demand, what value you can give to your life and to the lives of those around you. If you make the mistake of thinking that you are a human being and that you can engage others as human beings—well, then violence is inevitable.

...

SZ: Any individual elected into power is highly likely be co-opted, to be made to join the system. What we have seen with the ANC is that Black people can join the electoral system and give it legitimacy for a few years before people see that it has remained the same. It could be the same if poor people take a place in the system. The system is designed for that.

We have to think about how we put the people in power, not individuals. That’s the question that we have to be battling with, because any individual is likely to be corrupted and changed by the system. It is now clear that we need to talk about the destruction of the capitalist system so that there can be a real reconstruction of a system that places the people—and the humanity and dignity of all people—at the center. We need a new system with a new relation to the world, to the earth, and all its people.

This will take courage—the courage to cross the line. Everyone dies eventually, but what’s the use of being killed slowly while the meaning you have given to your life, the value that you have given it, rots away? If we do not have an honest conversation about healing, about decolonizing the mind, we will continue to live in this violence, in the politic of blood.

Two ongoing digital games bundles are offering more than 200 tabletop RPGs (among video games, soundtracks, books and other goodies) in order to raise money in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Funds. The Palestinian Relief Bundle is being hosted on Itch.io, while the separate TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle is taking place on Tiltify. For $8, the Palestinian Relief Bundle is offering nearly 400 total items, 103 of which are tabletop RPG systems, supplements and adventures. Mapmaking game Ex Novo is joined by the paranormal gunslinging satire FIST: Ultra Edition, along with Takuma Okada’s celebrated solo journaling game Alone on a Journey. Weird and dirty iconoclast game about money, the mind and everything else, Greed by Gormenghast is also on this list and is well worth a look. And if you’d rather keep it cosy and introspective, Cassi Mothwin’s Clean Spirit will get the whole group taking care of their domestic homes. The TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle focuses solely on analogue games, providing nearly 200 tabletop games for $15. A full spreadsheet of the included titles can be viewed here and includes Nevyn Holme’s Gun&Slinger, where one player embodies an occult cowboy while the second plays their sentient, magical gun. Wendi Yu’s Here, There, Be Monsters! approaches monster hunting media from the other side of the camera with a decidedly queer lens and unapologetic politics. Makapatag’s Gubat Banwa is a lush and dynamic collision of wuxia media, fiercely romantic and tragic melodrama all set against the backdrop and folklore of The Philippines.