Archives for April 2024

This comics-based opinion was co-authored with artist Maryam Aswad and published by The New Arab.

Step 1: Erase history. Bury any fair and accurate analysis of how today’s violence came to be.

Step 2: Remove all context. Always depict Palestinians as the aggressors. Blame Palestinians for their own oppression.

Step 3: Monopolise the media. Discredit Palestinians and normalise their exclusion – including by threatening, firing, or even killing them.

Step 4: Dehumanise Palestinians. Use words that play into pre-existing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

Step 5: Misinform the public with boldface lies.

Step 6: Weaponise antisemitism. Accuse any Palestinian who tries to tell their story of hating Jews.

Step 7: Co-opt liberal and antiracist language so you appear to be the good guys.

Step 8: Criminalise liberation activities. Punish all Palestinian efforts to claim their rights, including by non-violent means.

Step 9: Repeat sensational Israeli claims without investigating in order to elevate emotion over rationality.

Step 10: Market trauma. Remind Jews of horrible things that have happened in the past so they’ll be scared of peace with Palestinians.

Step 11: Make token gestures to trick people into thinking there is progress towards respect and equality while you protect the status quo.

Step 12: Throughout it all, pretend you are being balanced and fair.

Step 13: Manipulate people into choosing sides as if well-being is mutually exclusive. Hide the fact that a just, political solution will uplift everyone’s rights, security, and dignity, and it offers the only sustainable future.

Step Fourteen: Rinse and repeat

Nora Lester Murad is a writer, educator, and activist. Her young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award, the 2024 Middle East Book Award, a Skipping Stones Honor Award, and was a finalist for the 2024 Jane Addams Peace Association Children’s Book Award. She is a Policy Member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and supports many social justice issues. From a Jewish family, Nora raised three daughters in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband. She now lives in Massachusetts and can be reached through her blog at www.NoraLesterMurad.com

Follow Nora on X: @NoraInPalestine and Instagram: @nora_lester_murad

Maryam Aswad is an Iraqi-Canadian student, teacher, artist, and mathematician at the University of New Hampshire. She grew up first in a war-torn Iraq, then as part of a diverse refugee community in the UAE, and finally immigrated to Canada in high school. Maryam hopes to use her journeyed perspective to view and illustrate the world with both logic and compassion.

Follow Maryam on Instagram: @meryemaswad

Abstract: “The abolitionist thinking, proliferated particularly by U.S. Black feminist radicals in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, exposed police reformism as liberal subterfuge facilitating the expansion of the carceral state. This article utilizes the relationship between police reform and abolition as a prism through which to look at international development aid. If international aid is thought of as a reform effort serving the interests of colonialism, what is the abolitionist approach to international development? This commentary suggests that abolitionist logic grounded in the US-based movement for Black lives can expose international aid reform as a neoliberal tool and simultaneously unmask the potential for a radical vision of development based in a commitment to liberation rather than white/western/northern supremacy. Keywords: abolition, police reform, international development, international aid, colonialism, decolonization, mutual aid, redistribution, reparations.”

This is one of my stranger articles. Writing it made my head hurt! It was informed by my years as an aid accountability activist in Palestine and my experience organizing with the DefundThePolice movement. Read my article in the journal, Decolonial Subversions, main issue, 2023.