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In this commentary, Samer Alatout offers key insights into this new wave of student mobilization. He details student demands and places them within the historical legacy of US student organizing. He also examines the relationship between university administrators, students, and faculty, and finds hope in the kinship emerging between the latter two groups at this critical moment.
Samer Alatout, Al-Shabaka policy analyst and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joins host Yara Hawari to speak about his experience at a student encampment, where he was assaulted and detained by police. Alatout also touches on the overall significance of the student uprising in the US against the genocide in Gaza.Support the Show.
Israel’s 2023 genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has horrified many around the world and drawn widespread public outcry, with unprecedented levels of solidarity organizing taking place. But as this unparalleled camaraderie has emerged, so too has extraordinary repression at every level. Al-Shabaka spoke with Layla Kattermann of the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) and Diala Shamas of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) for further insight on this suppression of mobilization and methods to resist such efforts to stifle Palestine solidarity.
Consensus-building can be a long and challenging process that requires all stakeholders involved to be committed to reaching an agreement. In the case of the Palestinian liberation project, achieving consensus among the forcibly fragmented Palestinian people is both particularly difficult and of critical importance in order to create a united national movement.
Open-source intelligence is changing the way information is shared across the world. While increasingly credited as a means to expose war crimes and human rights violations, it is also being used as a tool for entrenching state oppression. In this policy brief, US Policy Fellow Tariq Kenney-Shawa examines the revolutionizing technology and offers recommendations for how to harness it for Palestinian liberation.
The Israeli regime’s defenders across the US are ramping up efforts to criminalize the constitutionally protected right to boycott. Beyond violating the rights of Palestine solidarity activists, this threatens to undermine the tenets of a healthy democracy. Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow, Tariq Kenney-Shawa, examines this development and suggests what lawmakers, civil society organizations, and concerned citizens should do to challenge it.
Leadership is a focal point for Palestinians in Gaza who have been living through the division in Palestinian politics since 2007. Palestinian leaders in Fatah and Hamas continue to operate in tandem with the Israeli settler-colonial project to fragment the Palestinian polity, leaving Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere in colonized Palestine little hope for liberation through the political establishment.
The arrival of new digital technologies over the past decade has had critical implications for Palestinian activism. On the one hand, these developments have reinvigorated the Palestinian cause. Indeed, social media platforms have facilitated new channels and modes of social organization, helping Palestinians counter their geographic fragmentation under Israeli apartheid.
Administrative detention is central to the Israeli regime’s attempts to suppress Palestinian mobilization. Al-Shabaka policy analyst Basil Farraj shows how Palestinian administrative detainees have continuously resisted this policy and demanded an end to its widespread and arbitrary use. He offers recommendations to Palestinian civil society organizations, national stakeholders, and solidarity groups for how to support the ongoing Palestinian prison intifada.
A new wave of repressive UK government policies aims to suppress protest and political expression, posing a direct threat to Palestine solidarity work. Al-Shabaka’s senior policy analyst, Yara Hawari, locates this latest crackdown within Britain’s enduring support for Zionism, and shows how only in broad, intersectional alliances can social justice activists effectively repel state-led repression.
Palestinians are experiencing unprecedented global solidarity since the 2021 Unity Intifada, yet their struggle for liberation remains trapped by the post-Oslo framework. Al-Shabaka’s policy analyst, Layth Hanbali, explores the rich history of the popular committees of the 1970s and 1980s to offer recommendations for how Palestinians can reorient their communities and institutions to facilitate the emergence of grassroots, liberationist mobilization.
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Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and policy network, tells the TIME that he agrees that Harris would be unlikely to usher in any significant policy changes. But he notes that her lack of ideological commitment to Israel relative to Biden could make her more open to change in future.
Israel has a history of deploying this tactic to apply pressure on its opponents and act with impunity, experts say. Tariq Kenney-Shawa speaks to Aljazeera English
Israel’s actions across both Gaza and the West Bank seem to point to one conclusion—population expulsion and territorial expansion.
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