Standing in rubble
© Omar Ashtawy/APA ImagesPalestinians walk through the rubble of the Tiba Tower after Israeli strikes in Gaza City • September 10, 2025
This week, Israeli ground forces pushed deeper into dense residential areas of Gaza City, forcing families to choose between displacement and death. Tareq Hajjaj spoke to residents there who are refusing to leave: "There's no point in struggling to find a better place in hell," they told him. At the same time, the Israeli government is advancing settlement plans that would dissolve the West Bank as a geographic and political entity.

Benjamin Netanyahu called for Israel to become a self-sufficient "super Sparta" and with a broader defiance of international norms. Abduljawad Omar says Israel is embracing isolation in order to annihilate the Palestinians. And now, after two years of brutality and over 65,000 Palestinians killed, a key United Nations commission concluded that Israel has committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention and urged an arms embargo.

In the United States, political figures are struggling to contain the growing public rejection of Israel's assault on Gaza. At the Democratic National Committee's meeting in Minneapolis, the party's establishment leaned on familiar pressure tactics while grassroots support for Palestinian rights grows within its base.

State power is being wielded against individuals. Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ordered Mahmoud Khalil deported in a decision widely understood as retaliation for his activism, and the University of California, Berkeley, turned over private information of more than 150 students, staff, and faculty to federal authorities.

By now, readers will know about ABC's suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after political pressure from the Trump administration. The First Amendment is under serious attack; there's no question about that. But for those of us laboring in the Palestine solidarity movement, we've long fought censorship and repression. Palestine is the compass.

For decades, the label "antisemitism" has been used to shut down speech and discourse around Palestine. State-imposed censorship has been normalized by applying it to speech focused on Palestinian liberation. And now, it's being turned on everyone to limit speech that the current U.S. government dislikes. This is a clear example of why, as John Pilger said, Palestine is still the issue.