The riveting artistic power of “The Battle of Algiers” rendered Algeria the best-known instance of settler colonialism and armed struggle for decolonization and national independence. The black and white newsreel style of the film and its compelling music uncompromisingly impress on the viewer both the structural and the kinetic violence of the French settler colonial regime and the urban terror unleashed by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1956-57.

A popular reading sees “The Battle of Algiers” simply as a justification of anticolonial armed struggle.

Around 5 pm on Thursday, April 18, 2024, Hebrew University professor and internationally renowned feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested by Israeli police at her home in the Old City of Jerusalem on the charge of incitement to violence.

Photo credit: Netanyhau: is the Obstacle to a (Hostage) Deal. Protesters call for a general strike outside of Tel-Aviv Histadrut union headquarters, April 6, 2024. (Iddo Schejter / The Times of Israel)

Journalists and pundits are assessing what Israel has and hasn’t accomplished as they mark the half-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza.

On March 12 senior administrators at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from teaching. Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian-Israeli and holds the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University and the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is an internationally renowned scholar and specializes in trauma, state crimes, criminology, surveillance, gender violence, and violence against children.

PHOTO: Netanyahu greeting Biden at Ben-Gurion Airport, Oct. 18, 2023. [Brendan Smialowski/AFP]

“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation,” wrote Irfan Galaria in a Los Angeles Times opinion article describing his 10 days volunteering with MedGlobal in the Gaza Strip. Why doesn’t President Biden see what Dr. Galaria along with UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, human rights NGOs, and the International Court of Justice see: plausible evidence of genocide. Or, if he sees it, why does he actively abet it by defunding UNRWA, the largest humanitarian relief operation in the Gaza Strip, while continuing to arm and run international diplomatic interference for Israel?

Photo Credit: Grayscale Media/CARE

Tony Karon and Daniel Levy boldly proclaimed two months ago, “Israel Is Losing This War” (The Nation, Dec. 3, 2023). Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+ and a former senior editor at Time magazine and activist in the South African anti-apartheid movement; Levy is a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians under prime ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. They argue that Israel is seeking an impossible absolute military victory and Hamas is seeking a long-term political victory.

In a wide-ranging interview on Democracy Now! two months later, Levy confirmed and expanded on this judgement. He quoted former Israeli Chief-of Staff and current member of the war cabinet Gadi Eisenkot’s assessment that “complete victory over Hamas is unrealistic” and that “it’s not possible to return the hostages, alive, in the near term, without a deal.” Levy termed US proposals for a post-war arrangement – essentially a recommitment to establish Palestinian Bantustans that would be called a “state” – “magical thinking.”

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest international judicial forum and a branch of the United Nations, issued an interim order directing Israel to take provisional measures in response to South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide. The Court ruled that Israel must refrain from committing genocidal acts of violence covered by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide (referring to the many statements by Israeli officials in command authority expressing apparent genocidal intent), and take immediate measures to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. The Court also ordered Israel to preserve evidence of genocide and to report to the Court within one month on the measures it has taken to carry out its order.

A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of a destroyed building after an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, December 29, 2023. Credit: Fatima Shbair /AP

By now, there has been so much human suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians that it’s a struggle to keep space in our hearts and souls to acknowledge the stories of every individual and family that we can know about as well as the many whose names we may never learn.

Amira Hass has been bravely doing that with her articles in Haaretz. For example, “Israel's Bombs Are Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families in Gaza.”

Perhaps Amira’s article below, reporting on responses to those articles, will be a wakeup call to the American Jewish rabbis, intellectuals, and institutional leaders who have been reluctant to forthrightly criticize Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip. The majority of them, even self-designated liberals and progressives, have been saying that “good Jews” should accept, even if regretfully, that massive deaths and the destruction of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip are required to secure a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. Right-wingers want us, as Amira Hass’s reader does, to revel in it.

On September 12, Israel’s Supreme Court heard arguments for and against petitions from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Movement for Quality Government, and other public watchdog NGOs. The petitioners asked the court to strike down a Basic Law enacted by the Knesset in July that prohibited judicial review of decisions of government officials on the grounds of reasonableness. “Reasonableness” is a British common law doctrine inherited from the Mandate era and incorporated into Israeli jurisprudence.

The case was so momentous that, for the first time ever, all 15 justices sat as a single panel.

art by Shoshke ©

In early August, four Israeli academics affiliated with North American universities initiated a petition entitled “The Elephant in the Room” (full text below) calling on leaders of North American Jewry – foundation leaders, scholars, rabbis, educators – to:

1. Support the Israeli protest movement, yet call on it to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

2. Support human rights organizations which defend Palestinians and provide real-time information on the lived reality of occupation and apartheid.

3. Commit to overhaul educational norms and curricula for Jewish children and youth in order to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present.

4. Demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.