Two weeks ago, Stanford Israel Alliance co-hosted a screening of “Out in the Dark” with the Queer Straight Alliance. Having watched the film and its portrayal of a star-crossed relationship between a gay Palestinian resident of the West Bank and a gay Jewish Israeli and having spent a month in the West Bank primarily with queer Palestinians, the film felt both compelling and violent. What was compelling was the simple human desire to love and be loved, and watching a couple attempt to fight the structural barriers conspiring against them.

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It is easy to see things as black and white (especially things like blackness and whiteness). My pledge for the coming nine weeks is to work against assuming people’s politics based on how I perceive them, to work to use language and ideas that are accessible outside of activist circles and to work to meet people where they are — to figure out where our common ground is.

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This is the third and final piece in a series on life in Israel and Palestine, in conjunction with Israeli Apartheid Week. You can read part one and part two online. “Don’t waste your breath, they won’t do anything anyway.” These were the (translated) words of a 94-year-old woman living in East Jerusalem, whose family…

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The following is an interview I conducted with Palestinian-American activist Fadi Quran on March 2, 2012, following his release from military custody. Quran was arrested on Feb. 24 during a protest in Hebron, West Bank. He was released on Feb. 28 after growing international media and pressure.

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This week marks the ninth annual international Israeli Apartheid Week, which serves to highlight the Israeli state’s systematic discrimination and human rights violations against Palestinians and to build the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to hold Israel accountable to its international humanitarian law obligations. For some, the word apartheid is controversial.…

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The last time I wrote for The Daily was to express my grief over the acquittal of George Zimmerman for his murder of Trayvon Martin. The event that sparks my return to a column is the murder of yet another young black person that has similarly gone unpunished. Last weekend, a Florida jury could not…

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I couldn’t really talk for these 24 hours – not anything more than a few words or phrases.

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I am confident that what we need is a movement of students to fight the colonialism, imperialism and racism that our state perpetrates at such large levels.

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Last week, I joined students across campus and concerned people around the country in a 24-hour solidarity fast with hunger-striking political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

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I have been avoiding writing this column for about three weeks now--and I might avoid getting to the point for a few more sentences. I think I fell back into depression again these last few weeks.

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While I did not experience those things in the first few weeks of the quarter, I am feeling them quite heavily right now--and for reasons that have very little to do with my time in South Africa.

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The Stanford Review took down a reactionary op-ed attacking candidates and communities of color from its website this evening, before republishing it less than an hour later. The piece, “Why You Cannot Vote for SOCC” written by Jason Lupatkin ‘13 and published at some point today, was taken down within an hour of the piece…

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On a systemic and structural level, racism in the United States only exists against non-white people

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Acknowledging my relative class comfort and privilege at home will help me more authentically and meaningfully engage with those around me.

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Just as we have to support Caroline, Dennis, Frank and Tony, we must stand strong as a student body and demand that the university ring true to its values.

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Regardless--and I emphasize regardless--of what narratives one subscribes to about the Palestinian situation, regardless of whether people don’t know much about what’s going on, don’t care, or think it’s too divisive, I ask one very simple question: Why SHOULD we invest in companies that we know cause social harm and violate the most sacrosanct of human rights?

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As it stands, our veneration of the founding figures, documents, institutions, and values as holy blinds us to the structural injustice all around us.

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Why do institutions that enabled structural inequality under slavery, apartheid or Jim Crow remain unchanged after such systems become illegal? How can we expect to eradicate structural inequality when oppressive structures remain firmly intact?

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Why don’t we judge learners not by the tests they were set up to fail, nor the university attainment they were intended never to achieve, but by something else?

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My first two weeks in Cape Town have presented me with a series of messy tensions that I’ll have to navigate over the next few weeks and months.

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Recognizing that not everyone has agreed with me or liked me during this time, I will say that getting people to do so is no longer a goal of mine. What I hope I’ve done over the past 10 weeks is to get people to think critically about some of the following questions:

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At stake in the multibillion-dollar American-Israeli occupation of Palestine are contemporary issues that I and many other Stanford students care about, including the increase of racial profiling, police brutality against nonviolent political dissidents, American immigration policy and the welfare of the global poor.

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Stanford University, the American media and the United States government are all complicit in the atrocities that have developed in the Gaza Strip over the past few days.

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Barack Obama’s reelection is not a political end - nor does it guarantee the beginning of a future that values human rights and social justice.

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