The worst thing that ever happened to the Arabs of Palestine was their transformation from a people (a people involved in a land dispute where both sides have plausible claims but that also provides some pretty clear lines as to a possible peaceful settlement) into a Cause.
Once they became a Cause the actual welfare of the people became secondary to the needs and purposes of the Cause—in this case the Cause being a sacred crusade for both the Western Left, who turned against the Jewish state once they allied with America, traded kibbutzum for capitalism and won the 1967 wars (the Left prefers their Jews to be morally pure victims who exist as humanitarian symbols, even if that means they have to suffer the occasional pogrom), which was a toxic combo of Soviet Jew hate and the Western Left replacing the proletariat with "the wretched of the earth", a new sacred victim class that moved the Palestinians to the top of their moral hierarchy; along with the various dictators and theocrats of the Arab world, who fed their populace a steady diet of Jew hate and anti-Israel propaganda, feeding their angry masses a Jewish scapegoat to displace all their rage upon.
This Cause also became a way for the UN to justify its existence and employ many hungry bureaucrats, who are also afflicted with a terrible case of Western White Saviorism and are happy to support and educate a permanently displaced and radicalized population as long as it makes them feel righteous and as long as they can poke a stick in the eye of the Jewish state, which has committed the unforgivable sin of being a nation-state for a single people w a single faith, when their sacred goal is a secular postnational socialist one-world govt (led by them, of course).
But after 50ish years the results are in and are very clear: since becoming a Cause, an object but never a subject, a mule for other peoples’ purposes, the Palestinians are totally devastated, living in rubble and misery. But the Cause has never been as popular! (Maybe that's some new rule or law of political Causes: the more immiserated the people, the better it is for the Cause.) The best thing for the Palestinian people would be for the Western Left to find a new sacred victim to worship and for the UN to move on and end this charade about third-generation "refugees". Until then, I don't see any chance of them taking steps toward the peaceful coexistence that is their only hope if they want their children to have any kind of safe and prosperous future.
You cannot really understand "Palestinian irredentism" without appreciating that, for Palestinians, their conflict is not a matter of geo-politics but of religion. The Palestinian war against the Jews is a religious war. They say it clearly themselves: it is a jihad. From the Palestinian perspective, the Israeli Jews have violated a central principle of Islam: Islamic supremacism. By wishing to government themselves, and by not accepting dhimma third class citizenship under Muslim domination, the Jews are disobediently violating Islam. Palestinians believe that it is their duty as Muslims to put Jews in their place, as subservient to Muslims.
Western liberals have such a crippling blind spot when it comes to faith, the sacred, religion—they really cannot wrap their brains around the idea that many people would prefer to kill and die in the name of their god over a culture of secular individualism and disposable commerce, where god is replaced by Netflix, Prime and Pornhub.
They really seem to believe that everyone wants to be them and wants exactly what they want, that the Taliban etc could be remade into tolerant cosmopolitans if they only received proper (re)education and watched all the right shows with the right DEI messages.
I think there is also some cowardice here: if Western liberals were to admit and confront the fact that Israel is surrounded by bloodthirsty Islamic theocrats (not to mention that we are also importing many of these people to our countries), they would be faced with having to fight them, and rich safe and soft Western liberals have no desire to fight.
Instead the main urge is to treat Israel like a neighbor with some very noisy and destructive children—they want the noise turned down and the violence stopped, it doesn't matter how, so they can get back to eating and watching TV.
As has been said, First the Saturday people, Next the Sunday people. Christians too, in the Muslim view, are supposed to be subordinate dhimma, and they have been very, very disobedient.
One only has to look at India to see their opinions of Hindus, or Myanmar, to see their opinions of Buddhists, or the Xinjiang Province of China to see their opinions of Confucians and others. Islam is an inherently supremacist ideology. And it demands submission of all other groups and belief systems. So it is not just their fellow Abrahamic faiths that Muslims have an issue with. It is literally everyone else on earth. They represent intolerance in the extreme, even to slightly different interpretations of Islam. So...
And if one follows history, one can see that STEM itself is a target of Islam, owing to the work of the so-called second most influential man in Islam, Al Ghazali. So, although this essay might seem slightly off-topic for Heterodox STEM, it really isn't.
Kent: The Palestinian are not the only ones who have resorted to violence. Two Israeli terrorist groups operating during the 1947-8 war ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the region linking Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Future Israeli Prime Minister Begin was a member of one of these groups. Future Prime Minister Sharon allowed Israel's Lebanese allies to slaughter residents of PLO refugee camps near Beirut during Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Radicals from the Israeli Settler movement assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin for engaging in the Oslo Peace Process. That Settler Movement is mostly responsible for the half million Israelis that now live in the West Bank, and most settlements began with an illegal seizure of land by settlers. (IMO, the reason Hamas's October 7 attack was so successful it that he bulk of the Israeli peacetime army was protecting Israeli's now highly intermixed with Palestinians in the West Bank, leaving grossly inadequate number of troops and a wall with surveillance protecting the border with Gaza. But Israeli hasn't held public hearings on this failure, so I'm speculating).
While Israeli terrorism is a tiny fraction of that of the Palestinian terrorists, it should be acknowledged, along with the ongoing theft of land from Palestinian in the West Bank. Many more Palestinians have died than Israelis since the Holocaust, but the reasons for that are complicated.
Frank, nowhere did I suggest that Palestinians were "the only one who have resorted to violence". On the contrary, I emphasized Israel's military superiority (aka threats of violence in peaces, actual violence in war) as the key obstacle to Palestinian reconquest. As for your subsequent comments, I think they underscore the need for good fences that both sides respect.
Kent: No, you never said that the Palestinians were "were the only ones who have resorted to violence", but by failing to discuss Jewish terrorism and the Settler movement, you leave that impression. Note that I carefully acknowledged that Israeli terrorism has been a tiny fraction Palestinian terroism, but the Jews have their homeland in Palestine and the Palestinian do not - because of their terrorism.
Our universities have obvious only taught our students one side of the story. Can you help by only covering the other side?
Your claim that "Our universities have obvious only taught our students one [pro-Israeli] side of the story" is manifestly false, as evidenced both by curricular offerings and campus protests. And I am baffled by your claim that Israel exists thanks to terrorism that by your own account was just a tiny fraction of Palestinian terrorism. How does that work? Imo the more relevant inequalities are Palestinian terrorism < Iran-financed military attacks < IDF.
Palestinians initially were mostly Arabic-speaking peoples living in the Ottoman province of Palestine after the Crusader Kingdoms were destroyed. Less than 10% were Jewish descendants the Roman province of "Judea The Palestinians were naturally upset by the uncontrolled immigration of Jewish Zionists beginning about 150 years ago into the Palestinian Homeland. Palestine was a province of governed by the Ottomans and then by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations) after the Versailles Treaty divided the Ottoman Empire (Our country is highly upset these days by uncontrolled illegal immigration into the US, so the hostile behavior of these Palestinians to this "invasion" was not surprising). Fighting grew between the Arabs and Jews and both groups also fought the British. By the time WWII and the Holocaust ended, and Britain returned its Mandate to the new UN, fully 1/3 of the population was Jewish. Given the need for a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust, the UN (then dominated by European countries who didn't, like most Jews, want a Jewish homeland in Europe) voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
I'd say Philip's 100-year war was inittated by Jewish immigration into Palestine, but in those days strong peoples were still gobbling up weak ones right and left. Even the fairly anti-colonial US had its manifest destiny and fought a bitter guerrilla war in the Philippines to keep control of the territory Spain ceded. However WWI and Wilson's Fourteen Points brought the concept of self determination of peoples to the fore and WWII made decolonization the new standard for civilized nations.
Yes, both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs regard themselves as the biological or spiritual descendants of indigenous settlers, where "indigenous" means either "previously conquered it fair and square" or "moved in without getting killed or run out". Furthermore, in both cases the actual nation-building efforts are quite recent: less than 150 years for Israelis and less than 100 years for Palestinians. with most of the consolidation occurring since 1948.
Kent: The first signs of a Palestinian national identity allegedly began with a revolt against their Ottoman overlords in 1834 that succeeded in gaining control of most of Palestine. I think their period of "self-rule" only lasted months. During the British Mandate, Britain acknowledged the existence of a Jewish Agency, but not of any organization that represented the Palestinian Arabs (even though the British recognized and encouraged local government elsewhere). A Palestinian rebellion against British authority occurred from 1936 to 1939. In 1947-1948, Egypt, Syria and Jordan took control of the Palestinian's fight against new-born Israel, and then kept the Palestinian's land and gave some to Israel after they lost. Yes, you are right that a Palestinian national identify has been slow to develop. That may be because Islam began as both a religion and a government. But the same is true of the Jews, who didn't have a clear national identify until they governed their own territory after 1948.
I appreciate that Arab nationalism was rising in the Levant well before the 1930s but I do not sense it took a particularly separate-Palestine-from-other-Arab countries form until Israel was on the horizon. Pan-Arabism was quite popular in the 1950s and really only died after Nasser's defeat in 1967, Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950 and did not officially relinquish its claim until 1988. The PLO in Black September 1970 did not attempt to separate the West Bank from Jordan but rather to overthrow King Hussein. Even now, Palestinian nationalism is far more ethno-religious than Israeli nationalism, as measured for example by the ratio of Arabs serving in the IDF and Jews serving in Hamas/Hezbollah/PLO.
"But the same is true of the Jews, who didn't have a clear national identify until they governed their own territory after 1948."
The Jews had a national identity when they ruled their own states of Israel and Judah prior to the invasion of the Romans. There was after expulsion from the Holy Land, as sense of being, not just a religion, but a people. The 19th century Zionist movement is definitive proof of a sense of nationhood, even though their territory had been violently taken from them by the Romans and then the Arabs.
Phillip and Kent: If I understand correctly, the Bible teaches that the Jews lost control of the states they once ruled to the Assyrians and others as punishment from God. Very conservative Jewish religious leaders argued that the Jews didn't have a state of their own up to 1900 because they were still too sinful. The Zionists who came to Israel from Europe had abandoned many conservative Jewish practices and a good number were socialists who founded Kibbutzs that became the backbone of the Palmach and the Labor Party that dominated Israeli politics in its early decades. IIRC, this split is the reason that, to this day, religious conservatives are not drafted into the Israeli Army. Refugees arriving later from Muslim countries brought more conservative religious practices. For many years, there were more Jews living in New York City that the new state of Israel. There are just as many Jews today living in Israel as the United States (7M)
It certainly does take a hard core of motivated believer to create a new state, but not a unified people. IIRC about 1/3 of colonists supported the American Independence, a 1/3 were loyalists, and 1/3 were indifferent. Allegedly only 3% were willing to fight. Until the Civil War, the people living in the US saw themselves as Virginians and Pennsylvanians first and Americans second.
You may be reading too much into the lack of unity among Palestinians.
On a relevant note, I noticed the other day that Musk was critical of someone posting about Global Affairs on LinkedIn. I more or less agree with him. Most people are rather apolitical, especially regarding Global Affairs. People who are on LinkedIn are generally there for professional reasons: They prefer communicating about their personal work rather than being distracted by politicizing information.
At this point of time, it seems that Twitter is the best place for those of us who are interested in Global Affairs. Dorian is on it. I'm on it. Come join with a non-anonymous account. It's not as terrifying as the Elites make it seem :)
I agree with most of your comments here, and I very much appreciate that you stand up for Justice! Still, I must respond affirmatively for your introductory questions: I don't think your article is too suitable for our blog.
It's indeed important that Science distance itself out of Global Affairs. Officially, Academics need focus on questions such as the following: How do we improve the study of STEM disciplines at Universities?
So of course, Palestinian terrorists cause horrendous havoc in Israeli towns, and in turn, Palestinian supporters cause modest havoc on American campuses. On this blog, it's better that we focus on the latter issue. Otherwise, if we politicize all Global Affairs, we will be just repeating the idiocies of the Woke Movement.
In summary, I think your article is better suited for journals like Time, Atlantic, etc. After the Black Seventh, there are still too many people who believe in the Oslo Accords: They need wake up of that Delusional Bubble.
Avi, I agree with your summary but since I found no other outlet I am grateful to Dorian for publishing. Fyi, nothing in my Nakba articles was intended to "politicize Global Affairs". On the contrary, I tried to show that what is widely presented as a moral imperative overriding norms of scientific discourse is in fact highly politicized with dubious compassion. While you already realized that, many scientists do not, and consequently support or appease intrusions rather than resist them. I hope my 3000 words were not too distracting and promise to write no more about that here.
Pretty good analysis. Does need a mention of Iran, a deliberate malefactor with the intent of liquidating Israel - and funding and directing that.
This type of analysis is timely because of the huge problems caused by the open borders policies of Biden, Merkel, Blair, Trudeau, ...
The worst thing that ever happened to the Arabs of Palestine was their transformation from a people (a people involved in a land dispute where both sides have plausible claims but that also provides some pretty clear lines as to a possible peaceful settlement) into a Cause.
Once they became a Cause the actual welfare of the people became secondary to the needs and purposes of the Cause—in this case the Cause being a sacred crusade for both the Western Left, who turned against the Jewish state once they allied with America, traded kibbutzum for capitalism and won the 1967 wars (the Left prefers their Jews to be morally pure victims who exist as humanitarian symbols, even if that means they have to suffer the occasional pogrom), which was a toxic combo of Soviet Jew hate and the Western Left replacing the proletariat with "the wretched of the earth", a new sacred victim class that moved the Palestinians to the top of their moral hierarchy; along with the various dictators and theocrats of the Arab world, who fed their populace a steady diet of Jew hate and anti-Israel propaganda, feeding their angry masses a Jewish scapegoat to displace all their rage upon.
This Cause also became a way for the UN to justify its existence and employ many hungry bureaucrats, who are also afflicted with a terrible case of Western White Saviorism and are happy to support and educate a permanently displaced and radicalized population as long as it makes them feel righteous and as long as they can poke a stick in the eye of the Jewish state, which has committed the unforgivable sin of being a nation-state for a single people w a single faith, when their sacred goal is a secular postnational socialist one-world govt (led by them, of course).
But after 50ish years the results are in and are very clear: since becoming a Cause, an object but never a subject, a mule for other peoples’ purposes, the Palestinians are totally devastated, living in rubble and misery. But the Cause has never been as popular! (Maybe that's some new rule or law of political Causes: the more immiserated the people, the better it is for the Cause.) The best thing for the Palestinian people would be for the Western Left to find a new sacred victim to worship and for the UN to move on and end this charade about third-generation "refugees". Until then, I don't see any chance of them taking steps toward the peaceful coexistence that is their only hope if they want their children to have any kind of safe and prosperous future.
Thanks for the great piece!
You cannot really understand "Palestinian irredentism" without appreciating that, for Palestinians, their conflict is not a matter of geo-politics but of religion. The Palestinian war against the Jews is a religious war. They say it clearly themselves: it is a jihad. From the Palestinian perspective, the Israeli Jews have violated a central principle of Islam: Islamic supremacism. By wishing to government themselves, and by not accepting dhimma third class citizenship under Muslim domination, the Jews are disobediently violating Islam. Palestinians believe that it is their duty as Muslims to put Jews in their place, as subservient to Muslims.
Western liberals have such a crippling blind spot when it comes to faith, the sacred, religion—they really cannot wrap their brains around the idea that many people would prefer to kill and die in the name of their god over a culture of secular individualism and disposable commerce, where god is replaced by Netflix, Prime and Pornhub.
They really seem to believe that everyone wants to be them and wants exactly what they want, that the Taliban etc could be remade into tolerant cosmopolitans if they only received proper (re)education and watched all the right shows with the right DEI messages.
I think there is also some cowardice here: if Western liberals were to admit and confront the fact that Israel is surrounded by bloodthirsty Islamic theocrats (not to mention that we are also importing many of these people to our countries), they would be faced with having to fight them, and rich safe and soft Western liberals have no desire to fight.
Instead the main urge is to treat Israel like a neighbor with some very noisy and destructive children—they want the noise turned down and the violence stopped, it doesn't matter how, so they can get back to eating and watching TV.
If you listen to them long enough and carefully enough, the Jews are far from the only target.
As has been said, First the Saturday people, Next the Sunday people. Christians too, in the Muslim view, are supposed to be subordinate dhimma, and they have been very, very disobedient.
One only has to look at India to see their opinions of Hindus, or Myanmar, to see their opinions of Buddhists, or the Xinjiang Province of China to see their opinions of Confucians and others. Islam is an inherently supremacist ideology. And it demands submission of all other groups and belief systems. So it is not just their fellow Abrahamic faiths that Muslims have an issue with. It is literally everyone else on earth. They represent intolerance in the extreme, even to slightly different interpretations of Islam. So...
And if one follows history, one can see that STEM itself is a target of Islam, owing to the work of the so-called second most influential man in Islam, Al Ghazali. So, although this essay might seem slightly off-topic for Heterodox STEM, it really isn't.
Kent: The Palestinian are not the only ones who have resorted to violence. Two Israeli terrorist groups operating during the 1947-8 war ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the region linking Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Future Israeli Prime Minister Begin was a member of one of these groups. Future Prime Minister Sharon allowed Israel's Lebanese allies to slaughter residents of PLO refugee camps near Beirut during Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Radicals from the Israeli Settler movement assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin for engaging in the Oslo Peace Process. That Settler Movement is mostly responsible for the half million Israelis that now live in the West Bank, and most settlements began with an illegal seizure of land by settlers. (IMO, the reason Hamas's October 7 attack was so successful it that he bulk of the Israeli peacetime army was protecting Israeli's now highly intermixed with Palestinians in the West Bank, leaving grossly inadequate number of troops and a wall with surveillance protecting the border with Gaza. But Israeli hasn't held public hearings on this failure, so I'm speculating).
While Israeli terrorism is a tiny fraction of that of the Palestinian terrorists, it should be acknowledged, along with the ongoing theft of land from Palestinian in the West Bank. Many more Palestinians have died than Israelis since the Holocaust, but the reasons for that are complicated.
Respectfully
Frank, nowhere did I suggest that Palestinians were "the only one who have resorted to violence". On the contrary, I emphasized Israel's military superiority (aka threats of violence in peaces, actual violence in war) as the key obstacle to Palestinian reconquest. As for your subsequent comments, I think they underscore the need for good fences that both sides respect.
Kent: No, you never said that the Palestinians were "were the only ones who have resorted to violence", but by failing to discuss Jewish terrorism and the Settler movement, you leave that impression. Note that I carefully acknowledged that Israeli terrorism has been a tiny fraction Palestinian terroism, but the Jews have their homeland in Palestine and the Palestinian do not - because of their terrorism.
Our universities have obvious only taught our students one side of the story. Can you help by only covering the other side?
Your claim that "Our universities have obvious only taught our students one [pro-Israeli] side of the story" is manifestly false, as evidenced both by curricular offerings and campus protests. And I am baffled by your claim that Israel exists thanks to terrorism that by your own account was just a tiny fraction of Palestinian terrorism. How does that work? Imo the more relevant inequalities are Palestinian terrorism < Iran-financed military attacks < IDF.
Yup, in response to the 100 year war by the Muslims against the Jews, some of the Jews organized and fought back. Shocking!
Palestinians initially were mostly Arabic-speaking peoples living in the Ottoman province of Palestine after the Crusader Kingdoms were destroyed. Less than 10% were Jewish descendants the Roman province of "Judea The Palestinians were naturally upset by the uncontrolled immigration of Jewish Zionists beginning about 150 years ago into the Palestinian Homeland. Palestine was a province of governed by the Ottomans and then by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations) after the Versailles Treaty divided the Ottoman Empire (Our country is highly upset these days by uncontrolled illegal immigration into the US, so the hostile behavior of these Palestinians to this "invasion" was not surprising). Fighting grew between the Arabs and Jews and both groups also fought the British. By the time WWII and the Holocaust ended, and Britain returned its Mandate to the new UN, fully 1/3 of the population was Jewish. Given the need for a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust, the UN (then dominated by European countries who didn't, like most Jews, want a Jewish homeland in Europe) voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
I'd say Philip's 100-year war was inittated by Jewish immigration into Palestine, but in those days strong peoples were still gobbling up weak ones right and left. Even the fairly anti-colonial US had its manifest destiny and fought a bitter guerrilla war in the Philippines to keep control of the territory Spain ceded. However WWI and Wilson's Fourteen Points brought the concept of self determination of peoples to the fore and WWII made decolonization the new standard for civilized nations.
Yes, both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs regard themselves as the biological or spiritual descendants of indigenous settlers, where "indigenous" means either "previously conquered it fair and square" or "moved in without getting killed or run out". Furthermore, in both cases the actual nation-building efforts are quite recent: less than 150 years for Israelis and less than 100 years for Palestinians. with most of the consolidation occurring since 1948.
Kent: The first signs of a Palestinian national identity allegedly began with a revolt against their Ottoman overlords in 1834 that succeeded in gaining control of most of Palestine. I think their period of "self-rule" only lasted months. During the British Mandate, Britain acknowledged the existence of a Jewish Agency, but not of any organization that represented the Palestinian Arabs (even though the British recognized and encouraged local government elsewhere). A Palestinian rebellion against British authority occurred from 1936 to 1939. In 1947-1948, Egypt, Syria and Jordan took control of the Palestinian's fight against new-born Israel, and then kept the Palestinian's land and gave some to Israel after they lost. Yes, you are right that a Palestinian national identify has been slow to develop. That may be because Islam began as both a religion and a government. But the same is true of the Jews, who didn't have a clear national identify until they governed their own territory after 1948.
I appreciate that Arab nationalism was rising in the Levant well before the 1930s but I do not sense it took a particularly separate-Palestine-from-other-Arab countries form until Israel was on the horizon. Pan-Arabism was quite popular in the 1950s and really only died after Nasser's defeat in 1967, Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950 and did not officially relinquish its claim until 1988. The PLO in Black September 1970 did not attempt to separate the West Bank from Jordan but rather to overthrow King Hussein. Even now, Palestinian nationalism is far more ethno-religious than Israeli nationalism, as measured for example by the ratio of Arabs serving in the IDF and Jews serving in Hamas/Hezbollah/PLO.
"But the same is true of the Jews, who didn't have a clear national identify until they governed their own territory after 1948."
The Jews had a national identity when they ruled their own states of Israel and Judah prior to the invasion of the Romans. There was after expulsion from the Holy Land, as sense of being, not just a religion, but a people. The 19th century Zionist movement is definitive proof of a sense of nationhood, even though their territory had been violently taken from them by the Romans and then the Arabs.
Phillip and Kent: If I understand correctly, the Bible teaches that the Jews lost control of the states they once ruled to the Assyrians and others as punishment from God. Very conservative Jewish religious leaders argued that the Jews didn't have a state of their own up to 1900 because they were still too sinful. The Zionists who came to Israel from Europe had abandoned many conservative Jewish practices and a good number were socialists who founded Kibbutzs that became the backbone of the Palmach and the Labor Party that dominated Israeli politics in its early decades. IIRC, this split is the reason that, to this day, religious conservatives are not drafted into the Israeli Army. Refugees arriving later from Muslim countries brought more conservative religious practices. For many years, there were more Jews living in New York City that the new state of Israel. There are just as many Jews today living in Israel as the United States (7M)
It certainly does take a hard core of motivated believer to create a new state, but not a unified people. IIRC about 1/3 of colonists supported the American Independence, a 1/3 were loyalists, and 1/3 were indifferent. Allegedly only 3% were willing to fight. Until the Civil War, the people living in the US saw themselves as Virginians and Pennsylvanians first and Americans second.
You may be reading too much into the lack of unity among Palestinians.
May the people of the middle East live in peace!
On a relevant note, I noticed the other day that Musk was critical of someone posting about Global Affairs on LinkedIn. I more or less agree with him. Most people are rather apolitical, especially regarding Global Affairs. People who are on LinkedIn are generally there for professional reasons: They prefer communicating about their personal work rather than being distracted by politicizing information.
At this point of time, it seems that Twitter is the best place for those of us who are interested in Global Affairs. Dorian is on it. I'm on it. Come join with a non-anonymous account. It's not as terrifying as the Elites make it seem :)
I agree with most of your comments here, and I very much appreciate that you stand up for Justice! Still, I must respond affirmatively for your introductory questions: I don't think your article is too suitable for our blog.
It's indeed important that Science distance itself out of Global Affairs. Officially, Academics need focus on questions such as the following: How do we improve the study of STEM disciplines at Universities?
So of course, Palestinian terrorists cause horrendous havoc in Israeli towns, and in turn, Palestinian supporters cause modest havoc on American campuses. On this blog, it's better that we focus on the latter issue. Otherwise, if we politicize all Global Affairs, we will be just repeating the idiocies of the Woke Movement.
In summary, I think your article is better suited for journals like Time, Atlantic, etc. After the Black Seventh, there are still too many people who believe in the Oslo Accords: They need wake up of that Delusional Bubble.
Avi, I agree with your summary but since I found no other outlet I am grateful to Dorian for publishing. Fyi, nothing in my Nakba articles was intended to "politicize Global Affairs". On the contrary, I tried to show that what is widely presented as a moral imperative overriding norms of scientific discourse is in fact highly politicized with dubious compassion. While you already realized that, many scientists do not, and consequently support or appease intrusions rather than resist them. I hope my 3000 words were not too distracting and promise to write no more about that here.