Roundtable: 200 days of genocide and resistance; campuses fight back

Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has now passed 200 days, with no end in sight. Despite suffering and horror beyond description, the resistance on the ground remains determined and strong – denying Israel any strategic achievement.

We were joined by our contributor Abubaker Abed, who described his experience of relentless Israeli bombing close to his home in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza.

Jump to Abubaker Abed’s segment here.

Meanwhile, there is no let up in global solidarity and protest against government and institutional complicity with Israel’s crimes.

Right now, across the United States, students and faculty are facing repression and reprisals, while Congress smears, investigates and threatens them for speaking out and standing up against the genocide.

At New York University, police arrested more than 130 students and faculty late Monday night, in an attack on campus anti-genocide protesters reminiscent of the era of the American war on Vietnam.

Also on Monday, Harvard University ordered members of the campus Palestine Solidarity Committee to “cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term,” or risk permanent expulsion.

Early Wednesday morning, Columbia University administrators threatened another New York Police Department raid and even the National Guard, as Minouche Shafik, the university’s president, presses on with her violent crackdown.

Shafik called the police on her students last week after suspending many of them and expelling them from their housing, prompting the university’s senate to take up a resolution of censure against her that may come to a vote on Wednesday.

We were joined by Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor at Columbia who is one of three faculty members attacked and smeared during congressional testimony by Shafik last week. During the testimony, Shafik engaged in a harsh and bitter attack on Abdou, joining hardline pro-Israel lawmakers in distorting his words and vowing that he would never teach at Columbia again.

Jump to Mohamed Abdou’s segment here.

In our second hour, Jon Elmer guided us through the latest videos from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank as well as a series of operations from southern Lebanon by Hizballah.

Jump to Jon Elmer’s segment here.

Jon, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and I discussed Israel’s threats of a full ground invasion into Rafah and other regional developments.

Jump to the group discussion here.

And I began the program with a news report, including stories by Maureen Clare Murphy on Israel’s use of torture to extract forced confessions against the UN agency for Palestine refugees and the arrest of Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in Jerusalem, and stories by Tamara Nassar on the escalating violence by Israeli forces and Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Jump to the news report here.

These are just some of the many topics we cover on The Electronic Intifada livestream. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

With Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer, Tamara Nassar and Asa Winstanley

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Nora Barrows-Friedman

Nora Barrows-Friedman's picture

Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014).