OPPOSITION TO TOKYO SUMMER OLYMPICS RISES OVER COVID-19 FEARS

YOLANDA BAINES

One of Japan’s largest newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun, published an editorial on Wednesday, May 26 calling on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to reconsider holding the Tokyo Olympics, which is set to commence in less than two months despite rising COVID-19 cases and public opposition.

“It is simply beyond reason to hold the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics this summer,” the editorial stated. “The present situation is nowhere close to making anyone feel safe, and that’s the unfortunate reality.”

This followed a survey done by the publication that found 83% of respondents said the Tokyo Olympics should be postponed or scrapped.

With less than 2% of the population fully vaccinated as of May 24, physicians like Naoto Ueyama, the chairman of the Japan Doctors Union, have warned against holding the Olympics.

“I don’t think they should go ahead while pushing many people into danger or calling on many people to make sacrifices in regard to their lives in order for them to take place,” Ueyama said.

With many of Japan’s prefectures already in a state of emergency, Ueyama stressed the Olympics will further strain Japan’s medical system and possibly introduce new variants of the virus into the Japanese population.

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) remains resolute in going forward with the games. “The advice we have from the [World Health Organization] and all other scientific and medical advice that we have is that—all the measures we have outlined, all of those measures that we are undertaking are satisfactory and will ensure a safe and secure games in terms of health...and that’s the case whether there is a state of emergency or not,” said John Coates, the chairman of the coordination commission.

Similarly, in an interview conducted by CNN, IOC president Thomas Bach echoed that the committee has “put in place comprehensive CEO OF THE TOKYO 2020 TOSHIRO MUTO ATTENDS TOKYO 2020 IOC. NICOLAS DATICHE/POOL PHOTO VIA AP

[COVID-19] countermeasures to ensure that the athletes of the world can come together in a safe environment for everyone.”

In a statement aimed at reassuring the public of Japan, President of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee Seiko Hashimoto expressed that “230 physicians and 310 nurses would be needed daily, and said about 30 hospitals in Tokyo and outside were contacted about caring for Olympic patients.” However, her statement only supports Ueyama’s concerns that the games would burden Japan’s medical system.

Unconvinced by the safety measures taken by organizers, 6,000 members from the Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association demanded the Olympic games be canceled in a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, as reported by AP News. The letter states, “We believe the correct choice is to cancel an event that has the possibility of increasing the numbers of infected people and deaths.”

The New England Journal of Medicine also claimed “the IOC’s determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence...[t]he IOC’s playbooks are not built on scientifically rigorous risk assessment, and they fail to consider the ways in which exposure occurs, the factors that contribute to exposure, and which participants may be at highest risk.”

Undeterred by the pressures to cancel, the IOC is determined to move forward with the games. Even if the host city wanted to cancel, the contract between the IOC and host city “only gives the option for the IOC to cancel, not for the host city.”

“The Olympics are the biggest sporting event on the calendar,” said Professor Jack Anderson, a sports law expert, in a statement to BBC. “There are billions at stake for Japan and the IOC in terms of broadcasting sponsorship. It is a huge event, and there are huge contractual obligations for all sides. It’s probably safe to say that if the Tokyo Olympics is cancelled, it would probably be the biggest insurance pay-out event of its kind, there’s no question about that.”

CS DEPARTMENT STRUGGLES WITH RETENTION AND

DIVERSITY INTIMIDATING EXAMS AND DIFFICULT COURSES ARE HURTING CS’S DIVERSITY

BÉLA KURZENHAUSER

In September 2018, 355 students entered Portland State’s degree program in computer science, located in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science (MCECS), according to student research. By the end of the year, only 243 of them would remain.

Out of the 142 students that departed the college, 31 were female students, which together composed 44% of the program’s entering female cohort that year.

PSU’s computer science (CS) program has long struggled to retain its students’ enrollment. It wasn’t until the 2017–18 academic year that the program finally managed to retain more than half of its entering students, according to student research data. Although COVID-19 has led to a college-wide enrollment epidemic, the CS department’s troubles extend beyond the events of the past year.

While most departments and degrees are separated into lowerdivision and upper-division coursework, the actual distinction between the two divisions largely comes down to student standing or course number. The CS program is unusual, as it is one of the only programs throughout PSU that contains an additional barrier of application between these two divisions.

In order to be accepted into the CS program’s upper division, a selection of mandatory course requirements must be met, as well as passable completion of what the department calls a “proficiency demo.” For transfer students coming in from institutions such as CCC or PCC, the proficiency demo is taken several months before starting their education at PSU, but for ongoing students, the demo is baked directly into the curriculum for CS202, one of the program’s required courses.

The structure of the proficiency demo is a simple one-hour examination, where students are given a single programming prompt and are given an hour to complete the prompt. The demo is designed similarly to the types of questions often seen in job interviews, thus hopefully preparing students for their eventual transition into the industry.

The proficiency demo is still relatively new to the program, having only been first initiated several years back. While many students regard the demo as being effective for learning and testing programming proficiency, its high complexity and erratic difficulty curve make it controversial among the lower-division student body. If students fail the demo, their acceptance into the program can be delayed by an entire term. For students enrolled in a class such as CS202, that can mean having to retake the full class, which can put an undue burden on students’ financial stability and GPA.

“The first proficiency demo I took in CS163 was really rough,” said a student who asked to remain anonymous. “I froze from the pressure, and the thought of having to retake the class from getting a question that I wasn’t prepared for really stressed me out. The anxiety was overwhelming.”

The demo problems range from being very simplistic to sometimes frustratingly complex. Some students have complained that this structure results in an unfair testing environment, where students are tested on an unequal level. Students draw problems randomly, and are allowed to redraw their problem up to two times if they feel that the question they got was too hard. Despite this, students can still get stuck with highlevel questions, and the problem-picking process “only adds more stress to an already stressful situation,” according to the student.

“My proficiency demo question was borderline trivially easy, while some of my classmates, who I considered at the time to be better programmers than myself, had a considerably harder time,” said Blaine Holbert, an alum of the program. “I think that’s exceptionally unfair. Instructors can make the demo seem a lot more daunting than it actually is, which makes students dread it rather than prepare for it.”

The demo’s variable difficulty forces students to study extensively in the weeks or even months leading up to the demos, which can be extremely hard for people who have ongoing responsibilities, such as work or caring for their family. This kind of pressure can heavily affect students who have less access to resources, such as female students or underrepresented or marginalized (URM) students.

“The demos seem to prioritize students who have had more privileges than others,” said Naya Mairena, a sophomore CS student. “I think they weed out students, but not in the way they intend to. I am Latina with an immigrant parent, and I grew up in Rockwood, which is a low-income area in the Portland Metro area. I had to go above and beyond to push myself and find that success.”

Some students feel the department’s silence on its lack of student diversity contradicts PSU’s inclusive mission statement. “I am constantly hearing about how CS and the tech industry lacks diversity, but I don’t see [the department] taking the necessary steps to making CS easily accessible to those who are underrepresented,” Mairena said.

“The racial diversity of the program is embarrassingly dire,” said Sarah Haskew, a graduating senior in the CS program and a student researcher working on compiling data on student retention. “I can say that from the [interviews with students] that students who come from backgrounds underrepresented in computing have a harder time in CS.”

Because of student privacy concerns, it’s difficult for researchers to process data on student demographics without potentially violating confidentiality policies. Haskew, alongside fellow student researchers Alyssa Tamayo, Danielle Beyer and Shawn Spears, ran into particular trouble trying to process data on student racial demographics, since most of the data they were able to access only distinguished between URM and non-URM students. Similarly, despite the fact that Oregon was one of the first states to accept nonbinary gender classification, most of the data received was split into either male, female or undisclosed legal sex.

“It made it so it was only worth it data-wise to focus on comparing binary gender because it’s the only place we had data, which is super frustrating when you give a whole presentation about representation and struggles to faculty and then someone says, ‘I liked your women in CS presentation,’” Haskew said. “It’s hard to evaluate complex data from multiple sources and draw specific conclusions.”

The data also doesn’t include demographics or information about students whose success on the proficiency demo may be dependent on a disability, although the absence of such data is likely due to student protection under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

“I got really sick from my disability during fall term and had to retake 202 in the winter term, and managed to pass with a P/NP grade,” said Sam Zeigler, a sophomore in the program. “I find it incredibly unprofessional how [the department] is running the program. They are being completely elitist and oppressive to many different kinds of students.”

The program’s struggle with diversity is not just seen in student testimonies, but reflected in the department’s data. According to Haskew’s data, the retention rate among female freshmen in the program was as low as 28% in 2016-2017, and while there was an increase in years since, the retention rate for women in 2018–19 was just 56%, compared to 68% for men.

The retention rate of URM students was relatively on par with non-URM students across the past several years, with URM students even having a higher retention rate than non-URM students in some academic years. Despite this, the diversity of the program remains low. In the 2019–20 academic year, 69.52% of

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all entering CS students identified as non-URM, compared to only 30.48% entering URM students.

Gender diversity suffers an even greater gap—in the same academic year, 80% of all entering CS students were male, with an entering female cohort of only 18.41% (the remaining 1.59% of students either identified as gender-nonbinary or didn’t disclose their gender). Between 2014 and 2017, the CS department suffered a retention rate 8–14% lower than the university average, with an even greater disparity when compared to the national university average.

“I hear frequently how the PSU CS department is scratching its head with why it lacks diversity, and the answer is because only the people who can afford to fail can keep trying,” said another student who also requested to stay anonymous. “This means people with money. People with already successful parents who can afford to stimulate their child’s education. People who aren’t relying on grants or the GI bill.”

Additionally, because the proficiency demo is often taken in the second year of a student’s education, failure is more likely to demotivate or encourage students to drop out because they still aren’t very far within their academic career. Many students consider the proficiency demo to be the most challenging requirement in the entire program, which is directly reflected in the program’s retention rate per division.

During the 2017–18 academic year, student retention in the lower division was 69%, with lower-division post-baccalaureate retention at 58% (postbac students also have to take the proficiency demo). In contrast, upper-division retention was 92%, and upper-division postbac retention was 87%. One fact that stands out is that the retention rate for female students in both undergraduate and postbac upper-division courses is higher than the retention rate for male students in the same cohort— the retention rate for female upper-division postbac students was 100% in the 2017–18 academic year.

“When you create a program which relies on successful and wealthy individuals propping people up, there’s no wonder those who have historically had a leg up make up most of the current program,” the anonymous student said. “Why make it harder for people? Why add yet another layer of bureaucracy and red tape to peoples’ lives?”

The growth of CS as a field in the past two decades has resulted in an over-enrollment epidemic for universities throughout the country. While CS undergraduate enrollment has exploded in the past two decades, the number of Ph.D. candidates has stayed the same, resulting in a wealth of new students and not enough professors to teach them. Over-enrollment has led to some colleges holding course lotteries or restricting the number of students who can enter degree programs, according to a 2019 article by The New York Times.

Many of the required courses in PSU’s CS program are offered only once a term, which can result in students not being able to take specific classes until an entire year after they’re suggested to. The lack of course openings often results in seniors filling up classes that are intended for junior students.

“I don’t understand why they’re only offering one section of CS300 [a required class] this fall,” Mairena said. “The classes filled up so fast and some of my peers missed out on being able to take them now.”

According to Ellie Harmon—a senior instructor in the department whose research and teaching focuses primarily on user experience and social and ethical considerations of software engineering—one of the major barriers faced by minority students in computer science is a lack of identification and familiarity with the field, as well as low self-confidence. Harmon notes that STEM professors tend to grade much more harshly than nonSTEM professors, and even though women tend to get higher grades than men in CS coursework, the lack of confidence in female students results in a lower retention rate.

“It’s hard to even get to [students] without genuine interest and a sense of self-efficacy,” Harmon said.

Outside of student research projects and internal work by instructors such as Harmon, MCECS also has the Maseeh College Values Committee, which is dedicated to improving diversity and equity across the entire college, including the numerous engineering departments alongside the CS department. The committee aims to collect student feedback on issues such as department policies or instructor behavior, and then inform college leadership as needed and make potential suggestions for improvement.

“We, as a college, need to come to agreement on what the pressure points are in terms of our community members’ experiences,” said Joyce Pieretti, chair of the committee. “I think as members of the committee, we have a sense of what these concerns may be, but as a college, we have people across the spectrum of awareness, ranging from ‘I didn’t know this was a problem,’ to ‘this is a severe issue we needed to address yesterday.’”

The committee currently consists mostly of faculty members from the engineering department, with no professor representative from the CS faculty. Current CS department chair Mark Jones was the department’s representative prior to his appointment as department chair, but Pieretti said the committee is hoping to secure a CS representative by this fall.

“Improvements in student retention are a high priority of the Maseeh College leadership team, from the dean to department chairs and staff who are focused on student experience,” Jones said. “We have met frequently over the past year to discuss the importance of improving retention of our students and are taking a series of measures to do so.”

According to Jones, one plan to improve student retention is through the development of a hardship fund through philanthropic giving that has already helped multiple students, in addition to a 250% increase in student scholarships. Jones and the department are intent on keeping the proficiency demo as part of the program, but aim to rework the demo and move it into the upper division. Students will take the demo at a later stage in their education, when they hopefully have more programming experience, leaving them more prepared and less stressed for the demo.

“In much the same way that you would check that a music student has some proficiency with their chosen instrument...the proficiency demo plays an important role in our program,” Jones said. “But we also know that the proficiency demo has been a source of stress and anxiety for some students, often because of its prominent place in the criteria for admission to the CS major. After more than a year of deliberations and committee work, the department has developed a new admissions process and some associated curriculum revisions the CS faculty voted to adopt.”

Additional changes will include a modernization of the core degree curriculum, as well as a streamlined admissions process. Jones stated the changes should go into effect starting Fall 2022, pending Faculty Senate approval, and he’s hopeful that the new curriculum and structure will make the program “as open and accessible as possible to anyone who might be interested in exploring [computer science].”

“I think a good place to start is to make our courses more accessible, creating an environment in our department that is more encouraging of opportunities, and finding innovative ways to re-evaluate [the department’s] plan for increasing retention rates,” said Alejandro Castaneda, president of studentrun organization We in Computer Science (WiCS). “The goal isn’t just having marginalized students in our classes, but rather having a college that empowers them and guides them to a successful career.”

WE HAVE A MORAL DUTY TO OPPOSE ISRAELI APARTHEID

MEMBERS OF A JEWISH COMMUNITY JOIN SUPPORTERS OF THE PALESTINIANS DURING THE NATIONAL MARCH FOR PALESTINE. JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP PHOTO

NICK GATLIN

If you’ve been watching international news lately, chances are you’ve caught a glimpse of what’s happening in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We’ve seen video of Palestinians in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah having their homes taken from them by Israeli settlers; over a hundred Palestinian worshippers injured in an Israeli police raid on Al-Aqsa Mosque; and a lopsided fight between the Israeli military and Hamas that ended with at least 12 Israelis killed by Hamas rockets and civil unrest, and 232 Palestinians killed in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli security forces and airstrikes, as of May 17.

You may have also heard of the quality of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from news reports which show more than half of Israelis have received a second COVID-19 vaccine dose, while only 120,000 out of 5.5 million Palestinians have received the same. You may have heard Gaza referred to as an “open-air prison,” where only 4% of fresh water is drinkable, access to electricity is sporadic at best and the movement of people and goods is highly restricted by the Israeli government.

Many people are dissuaded from engaging with the issue of Palestine for fear that it is too complicated to understand. To be fair, the situation of how we got here is politically, historically, and legally complex, as well as extremely emotional for many.

Where things stand now, however, is quite clear.

The state of Israel exerts control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, but it applies the law very differently depending on where one lives and whether one is a Jewish Israeli or a Palestinian. Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem describe Israel’s policy as one of apartheid, and looking at the facts it’s hard to disagree. We have an ethical obligation to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and with Palestine. To do otherwise would be a dereliction of our duty as moral actors.

“THIS IS APARTHEID”

In this article, I will rely largely on two 2021 reports by world renowned human rights organizations Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Jerusalem-based group B’Tselem. These reports, despite any differences they may have between them, agree on one basic fact: Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Before I begin in full, I would like to emphasize that criticism of the state of Israel and its government is not antisemitic. I oppose antisemitism in all its forms; Zionism is a political project that is not, and has never been, synonymous with Judaism.

I’ll start with the April 2021 Human Rights Watch report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” As HRW details, approximately 6.8 million Palestinians and 6.8 million Jewish Israelis live in historic Palestine today—the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This area ecompasses the state of Israel and its official borders, as well as the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel holds effective control over all of these territories, and uses that control to systematically privilege Jewish Israelis over Palestinians in most aspects of life. Based on this reality, HRW determines Israel’s actions “amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Apartheid, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is a system of “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Though the term may evoke memories of South African apartheid, the term applies equally well to the policies of Israel toward Palestinians.

From the beginning, Israel was founded as an explicitly Jewish state, rather than a state for all of its citizens. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence declared the establishment of a Jewish state in “Eretz-Israel”—otherwise known as the broader area from the Jordan River to the Meditteranean Sea, encompassing Palestine.

There is not enough space in this article to fully examine the founding of Israel, but in short: with the foundation of a “Jewish state” in a multiethnic land came disaster for the people who lived there. The “Nakba,” or “the catastrophe,” was the process during 1947-49 in which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland—their towns, villages and cities—to make way for European Jewish settlers who had immigrated to Palestine to found the state of Israel. In the end, only about 150,000 Palestinians remained in the new state of Israel, which took 78% of Palestine’s total land.

To this day, Israel’s Basic Law reaffirms Jewish supremacy in Israel. The 2018 Basic Law: Israel— The Nation-State of the Jewish People, also known as the Nation-State Law, states Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish people,” proclaiming “exercise of the right to national selfdetermination in the state of Israel is unique

WE HAVE A MORAL DUTY TO OPPOSE ISRAELI APARTHEID

WHY YOU SHOULD FIGHT FOR PALESTINIAN LIBERATION, NO MATTER WHO OR WHERE YOU ARE

to the Jewish people.” It also declares a united Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and denotes Hebrew as the sole state language. This discriminatory law explicitly denies even Palestinian citizens of Israel the right to self-determination. This is not “democracy” as I understand it.

Israel has long held a policy of demographic control and Jewish supremacy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2003 during his time as Finance Minister, “If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens,” stating that “If their [Palestinians’] numbers will reach 35-40 percent of the country, then the Jewish state will be annulled.”

If you said the United States had to remain a majority white and Christian nation, and instituted a policy to expel minority populations or relegate them to second-class status; if you said that the right of self-determination was the right of whites alone; I would call you a fascist. Replace “white” with “Jewish,” and you have official Israeli policy.

If you are a Jewish American born in the U.S., you have the right to travel to Israel, live there permanently, and gain automatic citizenship. If, on the other hand, you are a Palestinian born in a country like Lebanon or Jordan—say, if your parents or grandparents moved there as refugees after they were expelled from their homeland—you are barred from both Israel and the OPT, even if you have family there or if you marry a citizen of Israel.

Now I’ll turn to B’Tselem’s report on Israeli apartheid, where they come to much the same conclusions as HRW. It should be noted that they were originally founded as a human rights group focused solely on the West Bank and Gaza; they have since altered their mandate in light of increasingly unified Israli rule from the river to the sea. Here, I’ll recount excerpts from their January 2021 report, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

Again, if you are Jewish, you, your spouse and your descendants are entitled to Israeli citizenship and immigration rights no matter where you live. Jews are even automatically allowed to live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, despite the fact that Israel does not legally own those lands.

In contrast, if you are not Jewish, any rights or privileges you may gain in Israel come almost entirely at the discretion of Israeli officials: The Minister of the Interior inside Israel, and the military in the Occupied Territories. And if you are Palestinian and marry an Israeli citizen, Israeli law bars you from permanent residence or citizenship rights.

To maintain demographic control, Israel tightly regulates the land rights of Palestinians, while giving nearly free reign to Israeli Jews. The Absentee Property Law officially allowed Israel to expropriate vast swaths of land and property from Palestinians who fled or were forced out during the Nakba. Israel has used this land to build hundreds of towns exclusively for Jewish citizens, with only a small exception for the Bedouin people. Per HRW, over 30% of land used for exclusively Jewish settlements was expropriated by the Israeli government from Palestinians who had privately owned it.

Israeli law also allows Jewish towns with “Admissions Committees” to bar Palestinians from living in them, on the basis of the towns’ “special characteristics”: the law allows towns to ban potential inhabitants “unsuitable to the social life of the community…or the social and cultural fabric of the town,” including towns with a “Zionist vision.” We did the same thing in the U.S., when “Sundown Towns” expelled Black residents and mandated a white-only population. Can any reasonable person say this is different?

Palestinian citizens of Israel, as mentioned before, simply do not have the same rights as Jewish Israelis. In 2018, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said, “I think that ‘Judaizing the Galilee’ is not an offensive term,” further stating, “There is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of rights.”

Israeli law violates free speech rights as well; the so-called “Boycott Law” prohibits Israelis from “knowingly publish[ing] a public call for a boycott against the State of Israel.” The “Nakba Law” allows the Minister of Finance to fine any publicly-funded bodies that commemorate “[Israeli] Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning.” This is a blatantly discriminatory law against Palestinian citizens of Israel who wish to remember the forced dispossesion and expulsion of their people. The law also prohibits events that criticize “the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” essentially censoring anti-Zionist activism.

These laws discriminate against Israeli citizens; the situation for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is even more dire. Since 2010, the Israeli military has again begun to enforce the military“Order Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions” from 1967, allowing Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officers near-total control over demonstrations and protests against the Israeli regime in the Occupied Territories. Only Palestinians in the OPT are subject to this order, and they alone are tried under military law; Israeli citizens and nationals from other countries are tried under the Israeli legal system.

Furthermore, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are not allowed to participate in the Israeli political system. Most Palestinians are theoretically allowed to vote in elections for the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous government in the West Bank; but Israel still controls, to quote B’Tselem directly, “immigration, the population registry, planning and land policies, water, communication infrastructure, import and export, and military control over land, sea and air space” in all of the OPT.

It’s time to be unequivocal; this is apartheid. This is not a conflict; it is an asymmetrical assault by a militarized state against a disorganized, disenfranchised people. Israel has pursued, and continues to pursue, a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, expelling them from their home country and segregating them into densely-packed enclaves.

As I said previously, this is only a glancing summary of the full depth of human rights abuses and apartheid in Israel. If you’d like to learn more, I would recommend reading the reports from HRW and B’Tselem in full; read about the history of Palestine from authors such as Nur Masalha in Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History or Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine; read from Palestinian activists such as Edward Said or Noura Erakat; follow Palestinian journalists such as Mohammed El-Kurd; or even take one of the classes offered at PSU about the history of Zionism and the history of Palestine.

Why should we care?

Most people reading this are probably neither Israeli nor Palestinian. So the question is then, “why care?” It’s not our country, after all, and we have our own problems to deal with here.

The simplest answer I can give is this: the struggle for human rights and international liberation is a universal one. Directly or indirectly, we are all affected by injustice everywhere. To quote Eugene Debs, “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

To make it more concrete, the actions of a militarized, discriminatory Israeli state literally coincide with the actions of the United States. According to Amnesty International, U.S. police departments in states across the country have trained with Israeli national police, military and intelligence services, with the two countries sharing policing methods such as “counter-terrorism techniques.” And Israeli police have used tear gas drones since 2018 to put down Palestinian protests from 60 feet in the air—it’s only a matter of time before that kind of tech makes its way here, too.

Several states in the U.S. have passed laws that penalize businesses, organizations or individuals who call for a boycott of Israel or refuse to do business in Israeli settlements. While one such law was recently struck down in Georgia, it is imperative that we fight anti-free speech legislation everywhere. I detailed Western media’s bias against Palestine in a previous article, and it’s our job as journalists to accurately and unwaveringly tell the story of what is happening in Palestine. Further, it’s our job as political and moral actors to use whatever power we have to oppose apartheid and ethnic cleansing, whether it’s done by an enemy or an ally.

Settler colonialism is an international project. Empire is international. Policing, state terror and apartheid are international. The United States doesn’t give Israel about $3 billion a year out of the goodness of our hearts. Israel is a major guarantor of U.S. interests in the Middle East, and there’s no way the U.S. government will renege on its unequivocal support of the state if it threatens our status in the region. The reason why opposing Israeli apartheid is so important is precisely because they are our ally.

WHAT WE CAN DO

One of the most impactful things you can do as an American is to support movements for Palestinian freedom such as BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. BDS aims to financially pressure Israel, to force them to respect human rights, recognize Palestinian sovereignty and comply with international law. BDS is modeled after the anti-apartheid movement against South Africa, and it seeks the same goal: the dismantling of the apartheid regime, and the establishment of a government that respects equal rights for everyone regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

Beyond engaging with BDS, make it a point to keep talking about Israel’s human rights abuses. Keep uplifting Palestinian voices, and don’t back down from your basic principles. I believe that all people have the right to live safely, with equal rights under law, with freedom of movement, expression and association in the land of their birth. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.