The Weekly Dispatch: looking back at the Oslo Accords; suing Columbia University; Benjamin Moser's "Anti-Zionism" & more

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Hello, and welcome to our weekly dispatch. This week we look back at the Oslo Accords, bring news from a lawsuit against Columbia University, preview Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism as well as our usual media round-up and our expanded, global list of Palestine-related events.

In September 1993, and again in 1995, the PLO signed a set of agreements with Israel that were supposed to result in a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” Known as the Oslo Accords, these agreements effectively brought an end to the First Intifada by disarming the PLO and establishing the Palestinian Authority.

From the start, many Palestinians saw through Oslo’s hollow promises of peace and the emptiness of the “two-state solution.” The Oslo Accords fragmented both the land itself and the Palestinian political landscape.

Mahmoud Darwish resigned from the PLO after the signing of the first Oslo Accord in 1993. Soon after, he would write “A Non-Linguistic Dispute with Imru’ al-Qays,” a poem allegorizing the Oslo moment as the end of a decisive chapter in political history. Below you can read an excerpt of the poem, as translated by Sinan Antoon:

Read the rest of “A Non-Linguistic Dispute with Imru’ al-Qays,” along with Sinan Antoon’s commentary on the poem, here.

The latest issue of The Key features an essay by Maryam Alwan, a former student at Columbia University and one of five plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the university for discrimination.

Here’s the first few paragraphs for you:

Maryam Alwan

My four co-plaintiffs are fellow Palestinian students and faculty members of Columbia who suffered egregious harm while on campus as the university stood back and did nothing or in some cases, took unfair action against us. The harms ranged from being disciplined for speaking about Israel’s killing of their family members in Gaza, to being stalked, followed, photographed, recorded, and posted while on campus. Nearly all of us were subjected to systemic doxxing by Columbia affiliates that went uninvestigated, meanwhile each of us was subjected to biased and baseless disciplinary hearings for protected speech by the ironically named Office of Institutional Equity (OIE).

The world watched, fixated for two years as Columbia, Congress, and the Trump administration heavily repressed the anti-genocide student protests on campus – including the historic Gaza Solidarity Encampment. But few seemed to grasp just how severe the persecution of Palestinian and allied students really was.

The public saw the headlines about expulsion, mass suspension, and eviction, but they didn’t see the teenagers given 15 minutes to pack up all their dorm belongings with nowhere to go – their entire futures upended. They may have seen the news of two police raids across separate spring semesters in 2024 and 2025, but they didn’t experience the panic attack from watching the NYPD slam students to the ground in the pouring rain.

This was all presented as necessary for the sake of “protecting Jewish students,” who claimed that protest slogans like “from the river to the sea” made them feel “unsafe”. Palestinian students were threatened with deportation and bodily harm because pro-Israel students said they felt threatened by words. All the news could do was parrot manufactured hysteria about “campus antisemitism”. Meanwhile, it felt like the Palestinian students were being hunted, one by one.

Read the rest of Maryam Alwan’s essay here.

Remember Them: Palestine Scholars Murdered in the Gaza Genocide – Rana Dajani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Mona El-Ghobashy, Miriam R. Lowi, and Judith E. Tucker write about building an archive for the approximately 200 academics and scholars who have been killed by Israel since October 7: “they were the teachers of the rising generation who were to take their places as the writers, theologians, social scientists, engineers, and doctors who would help to weave the social fabric and develop the world of knowledge in Palestine.”

Seven Questions with Karim Kattan – Saleem Haddad interviews Karim Kattan about his writing practices, about the use (or uselessness) of fiction in a time of genocide, and the orientalizing containment of Palestinian writers.

Israeli Election Is a Contest Over How to Continue Gaza Genocide – Yara Hawari reports on the upcoming Israeli elections, in which Gadi Eisenkot, the leading opposition to Netanyahu and the pioneer of the Dahiyeh Doctrine, would stay the course of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Portal of Return – Asma Abu Hasanein writes about the continuities between her grandparents’ experience of the Nakba and her experience in Gaza since October 7: “Now, many of us carry keys of our own. Keys that no longer open doors – for many of those doors no longer exist. Keys to rubble, yet keys we cling to as our grandparents did, because hope survives in the smallest things.”

Palestinians Are Responding to Israel’s Stranglehold on the West Bank Economy by Forgiving Each Other’s Debts En Masse – As Israel's financial strangulation of the Palestinian economy enters its third year, Qassam Muaddi writes, Palestinians are turning to each other — forgiving debts worth millions of shekels in a viral solidarity campaign.

The Ulm 5 Trial Dramatizes Germany’s Complicity with Israel’s Genocide in Gaza – Hebh Jamal reports on the unusually severe charges leveled against five activists accused of destroying equipment at an Elbit factory that manufactures weapons for Israel, and about how their case highlights Germany’s complicity with Israel.

The Far Right’s So-Called Civil War over Israel – Matt Seriff-Cullick argues that the MAGA "civil war" over Israel is in fact a staged antagonism, one that turns anti-imperialist anger into fuel for fascist imperialism."

The West Bank's Long, Deadly History of Israeli Settler Violence – Offering a history of Israeli settler violence, Patrick Strickland shows how the project of settlement and dispossession is part and parcel of the state project of Zionism.

The Jewish Socialists Who Fought the Tsar and Zionism – Daniel Denvir interviews Molly Crabapple about her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country, which tells the story of the Jewish Bund and offers lessons for the struggle against Zionism today.

Jerusalem's Children Ensnared in a Slow Genocide – Bothaina Hamdan writes about children who have been killed by Israeli forces in Jerusalem as proof of the grinding force of state violence

Majd al-Krum: Is Israeli Settler Terrorism Expanding Across the Green Line? – Abed Abou Shhadeh reports on an unprecedented new settlement in Galilee, which represents a new shift in the organizational culture of Israeli settlement policy. 

Texts After the Screaming – Two new poems by Nour Balousha, written from Gaza: “Abandon your places / and your euphemisms. / Do not sympathize. / Do not show pity. / They have killed all of us, / and sat nearby, writing down our names, / so they would remember / how beautiful the party was.”

To All Those We Are Indebted To is a series of four books of paired collaborations that together examine the politics of refusal in Palestine.

A unique, deeply original project with contributions from some of the most exciting writers working today, we are proud to have partnered with Bilnaes Books to offer shipping to readers in the UK and Europe.

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