Right-wing settlers, with the backing of the Israeli government and Israel Defense Forces (IDF), are well on their way toward accomplishing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank — home to some 3 million Palestinians and half a million Zionist settlers. Confirmation of such an impending disaster has recently come from an unlikely source: retired IDF generals and former officers of Mossad, Israel’s main spy agency, who are touring the West Bank.
At the University of Michigan May 2, 2026, commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a short speech in which he celebrated many of those who have fought for social justice at the school. At the end of his remarks, Peterson also praised the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” The backlash was swift. U of M president Domenico Grasso apologized for Peterson’s remarks, and the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets. But leaders of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers, as well as other academics and Jewish groups, quickly spoke out in defense of Peterson. Four of these responses are published in this post.
“Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” an upcoming book by British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, catalogs, in unflinching and exacting detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped Gaza and its surroundings to make these areas unlivable for the Palestinian people. This article, which first appeared in the London Review of Books, is a powerful preview of “Ungrounding.”