On Thursday, November 16, I attended a “huelga estudantil” (student strike) held in Madrid, Spain, in support of Palestine. I was amazed to look out at the crowd and see such a diversity of young faces ranging from middle school students to university-age young adults. It was a truly diverse coalition of young people who were all there for the same reason: to condemn the current Israeli assault on Gaza and call for an end to the Israeli occupation. The fact that such a large group of students left their classrooms vacant to take to the streets in support of Palestine gave a strong sense that Gen Z is fiercely challenging the normalization of Israeli oppression.

By Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs

This post is part of our project, Holot: Crossroads of Global Violence. It was originally published by Mondoweiss and is reprinted here with permission of the authors.

The South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee has a habit of speaking in rhetoricals. The effect, however, is that he makes his point quite clearly. This was the case recently at the Palestine Festival of Literature, which travels through Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Speaking on the festival’s last day, Coetzee noticed that “naturally people ask me what I see of South Africa in the present situation in Palestine.”

At first, Coetzee suggested that using the word apartheid to describe the occupation is not a productive step (“it diverts one into an inflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short the opportunities of analysis”). Coetzee then offered a definition of South African apartheid: “Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive, self defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest particular to cement its hold on the land and natural resources.” He continued, “In Jerusalem and the West Bank we see a system of …” and proceeded to read the same definition, ending to applause: “Draw your own conclusions.”

By John Collins

As part of our occasional series of “Interweaving” conversations, I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Somdeep Sen, a Weave News blogger and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, regarding a number of issues related to his field research in Palestine/Israel. Our conversation touched on his experience of the politics of race and violence while in the field as well as his first-hand observations from Jerusalem and the West Bank regarding the current state of Israel's settler-colonial project.