Now you had […] Mohsen Mahdawi, who […] went beyond Mahmoud Khalil. I just listened to a podcast, an interview, he did yesterday, this guy went out of his way to build bridges with the Jewish Zionists on campus! He met with Shai Davidai, the Israeli postdoc or professor—business professor, who was expelled from campus for harassing students and staff. He was literally going around campus harassing students following […] young Muslim women, hijabi women, covered women, harassing them! And for that he was expelled from campus. Mohsen Mahdawi reached out, he said “Shai, let’s sit down for a coffee, let’s talk.”

And […] he talks about […] the importance of bringing Jewish Zionists together with Palestinians to talk about trauma, to talk about healing, to put everything on the table—by the way, a lot of Palestinians would call that normalization—the guy who was accused by Palestinians of normalization, who reaches across the aisle to try and build bridges […] and […] what we have is situation in which the most diplomatic students, the most innocuous speech, the students reaching across the aisles, are being abducted!

The atmosphere where Palestinians are under constant pressure to walk on eggshells is part of the reason why I’ve gone so far as to boldly suggest that anticolonial Jews might be the harshest critics of Zionism. Palestinians like @MohammedTheCommunistPalestinian@hexbear.net are more than welcome to disagree, and we should not decenter their voices even if my general perception is correct, but there is something about the Jewish criticism of Zionism (probably the black sheep effect) that makes the tone hit so differently. You can tell that anticolonial Jews don’t pull any punches when they go so far as to call the ‘State of Israel’ the Fourth Reich. Sadly, it is less safe for their Palestinian siblings to put it so explicitly.