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Joelle Abi-Rached

@joelleabirached.bsky.social
220 followers 92 following 22 posts

Working on the politics of life and death. Harvard Radcliffe Fellow (2023-2024); Associate Professor of Medicine @AUB; Associate @Harvard (History of Science)

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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
"Once the moral grammar that protects medical spaces begins to erode in one place, its dismantling proceeds elsewhere." Now in Lebanon. @joelleabirached.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
Occupying Hospitals
From Gaza to Minneapolis, attacks on health care turn spaces of refuge into sites of state violence.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands." @joelleabirached.bsky.social on apocalyptic politics and the threat of ethnic cleansing in Southern Lebanon www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...
bostonreview.net
Millenarian Fantasies
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing. @joelleabirached.bsky.social writes from Beirut as bombs rain down once again:
bostonreview.net
Millenarian Fantasies
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
« What we are witnessing, then, is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands… » www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...
bostonreview.net
Millenarian Fantasies
In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
What happens once the destruction of hospitals can be argued for—rationalized, narrated, managed—as legally and morally sanctioned “necessity”? @joelleabirached.bsky.social on healthocide, from Gaza to Minneapolis:
bostonreview.net
Occupying Hospitals
From Gaza to Minneapolis, attacks on health care turn spaces of refuge into sites of state violence.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
dog on the spectrum @sponcon.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
🔥🔥🔥
The point of placing Minnesota alongside Gaza is not to collapse contexts or draw equivalences. It is to trace a dangerously traveling logic and to name a rupture the world is now witnessing: the intensifying unraveling of humanitarian ethics, as health care is increasingly treated as legitimate terrain for state (and non-state) power—whether bombs, apartheid, occupation, or militarized policing—and patients learn that even the hospital and the clinic aren’t safe. Stripped of whatever protective power it once had, medicine becomes another vehicle of complicity in the apparatus of violence.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Deborah Chasman @debchasman.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Alex Pretti's murder struck a nerve in the health care community, not just as a tragic loss of one of their own but as emblematic of the dangers facing workers and the moral basis of medicine itself. @joelleabirached.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/occ...
bostonreview.net
Occupying Hospitals
From Gaza to Minneapolis, attacks on health care turn spaces of refuge into sites of state violence.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
If not now, when? (Hillel the Elder) or when does health and human rights as a field become politically inconvenient? My latest with @eric-reinhart.com on institutional and moral integrity as well as the future of global health. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
thelancet.com
Health, human rights, and the Palestine exception
In December, 2025, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health announced that Mary T Bassett would be stepping down as Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Fr...
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Throughout 2025, our writers delivered fearless analysis and creative resilience—refusing to compromise on fundamental values of justice and humanity in the face of brazen cruelty and democratic decline. Revisit the writing readers turned to the most:
bostonreview.net
Our Most Loved Pieces of 2025 - Boston Review
Revisit the writing from this year that readers turned to the most.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
@joelleabirached.bsky.social on Gaza and the collapse of the liberal international order:
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
Through the disasters of this year, our writers delivered fearless analysis and creative resilience—refusing to compromise on fundamental values of justice and humanity in the face of brazen cruelty and democratic decline. Revisit the writing readers turned to the most:
bostonreview.net
Our Most-Loved Pieces of 2025 - Boston Review
Revisit the writing from this year that readers turned to the most.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
Join us this Tuesday for a book talk with Catherine Conybeare on her beautiful new biography, Augustine the African.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
Join us this Tuesday for a book talk with Catherine Conybeare on her beautiful new biography, Augustine the African.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Congratulations to contributors @joelleabirached.bsky.social and @samklug.bsky.social, whose 2024 essays “The View from Besieged Beirut” & “Who’s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?” are recognized as notable essays in the Best American Essays 2025, edited by Jia Tolentino and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Sarah Richani @srichani.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Thrilled that "Lebanon Anatomy of a Collapse" which I co-edited w @joelleabirached.bsky.social will be published by @hurstpublishers.bsky.social in 2026.The book traces the unravelling of Lebanon including riveting-if unsettling-chapters by inspiring contributors. hurstpublishers.com/book/lebanon-3
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
The Markaz Review مجلة المركز @markaz-review.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
🗣️ [TMR 53 OUT OF OUR MINDS] Joelle Abi-Rached (@joelleabirached.bsky.social) exposes the limits of psychiatry and language to hold Gaza’s trauma—where grief, violence, and survival are inseparable from justice. 🔗 Read: bit.ly/trauma-after-... #TheMarkazReview #TMR53 #OutOfOurMinds
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Deeply honored that my essay “Trauma after Gaza” was selected as the centerpiece of this timely special issue …
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
The Markaz Review مجلة المركز @markaz-review.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
🖋️ Featuring: @warghetti.bsky.social, @joelleabirached.bsky.social, @jordanelgrably.bsky.social, Sara Shamma, @bookfabulous.bsky.social, Malu Halasa, Mohammad Rabie, Real Bakhit, Dina Shehata, Safa Elnaili, Robert Bociaga, @aycacu.bsky.social, @michaelfakhri.bsky.social, and Farah Ahamed.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
The special section from our 50th anniversary issue, The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide, is now online. Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic argument, with @dwaldstreicher.bsky.social, Jennifer Zacharia, and @martinoneill.bsky.social.
bostonreview.net
The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide - Boston Review
Speaking the truth and exposing lies is not enough.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Keegan 🎃sinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
"By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught—financially, materially, and ideologically—Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the rules-based legal order that the West itself developed in the wreckage of World War II" www.bostonreview.net/articles/gaz...
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Warwick Anderson @wombatscholar.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
If you're in Berlin on August 29, come along to the launch (again) of Medicine on a Larger Scale (open access CUP 2025)! #histmed #histstm #sts
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Gaza has become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and of its victims’ recourse to human rights and international law as a final forum of appeal for collective deliverance—the deliverance of the “wretched of the earth,” whoever and wherever they may be. @joelleabirached.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
The word is capacious
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
Our 50th anniversary issue heads to the printer soon. Featuring Robin D. G. Kelley in a special section on the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide, w/ @dwaldstreicher.bsky.social, Jennifer Zacharia, & @martinoneill.bsky.social. To get it, subscribe now (link below):
Boston Review's 50th anniversary issue, featuring Robin D. G. Kelley in a special section on the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Mark Kersten @markkersten.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
"We can’t allow ‘healthocide’ to become the norm, in Gaza or elsewhere" -Andre Picard theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti... I also wrote on attacks on medical facilities👇 There must be consequences: Accountability for war crimes can help stop attacks on hospitals justiceinconflict.org/2025/07/02/t...
theglobeandmail.com
Opinion: Even in war, attacking medical facilities must remain off limits
Disregard for the policy of ‘medical neutrality’ in war – outlined in treaties like the Geneva Conventions - has given rise to a new term: healthocide
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
'Targeting medics and hospitals in acts of war should be called “healthocide”, academics have urged, amid an increase in such attacks in recent years.' Link to original comment in BMJ Global Health: gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...
theguardian.com
‘Healthocide’: experts warn of rise in targeting of health services in conflict
Principle of medical neutrality threatened as doctors and hospitals deliberately attacked, particularly in Gaza
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Historian Charles Rosenberg said a disease “does not exist unless you name it.” By naming this pathology of modern warfare, we aim to rally medicine, social science, education & law to confront its vast toll on human wellbeing. #healthocide #Gaza gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...
gh.bmj.com
Healthocide and medical neutrality: a call for action and reflection
Six million people live in Lebanon, including 1.5 million Syrian and 500 000 Palestinian refugees. Israel has attacked Lebanon multiple times, most recently from 8 October until 27 November 2024, when...
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
It took a year to get this paper out after earlier versions, incl. one in Nov 2023, were rejected without peer review given the astounding silence of US journals. Medical neutrality is collapsing, yet it remains the last shield for health workers in war zones #healthocide gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...
gh.bmj.com
Healthocide and medical neutrality: a call for action and reflection
Six million people live in Lebanon, including 1.5 million Syrian and 500 000 Palestinian refugees. Israel has attacked Lebanon multiple times, most recently from 8 October until 27 November 2024, when...
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Historian Charles Rosenberg said a disease “does not exist unless you name it.” By naming this pathology of modern warfare, we aim to rally medicine, social science, education & law to confront its vast toll on human wellbeing. #healthocide #Gaza gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...
gh.bmj.com
Healthocide and medical neutrality: a call for action and reflection
Six million people live in Lebanon, including 1.5 million Syrian and 500 000 Palestinian refugees. Israel has attacked Lebanon multiple times, most recently from 8 October until 27 November 2024, when...
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
Honoured to see our new BMJ Global Health article on the deliberate destruction of health systems in war — what we call "healthocide" or “sanicidio” in Spanish — profiled today by Agencia SINC, the news agency of the Spanish Foundation for Science & Technology. www.agenciasinc.es/Noticias/Exp...
agenciasinc.es
Expertos proponen denominar ‘sanicidio’ a la destrucción intencionada de la sanidad en guerras
La revista BMJ Global Health ha publicado un artículo de opinión que acuña este término para definir la destrucción intencionada de sistemas sanitarios como táctica de guerra. Los autores denuncian la instrumentalización de la atención médica en conflictos como el de Gaza y piden a la comunidad médica internacional que se pronuncie ante esta forma de violencia.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
“Health” is of Germanic origin and means “whole” ..by “healthocide” we mean the destruction of the right to health and healthcare of an entire population. Gaza today is the paragon of healthocide. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...
theguardian.com
‘Healthocide’: experts warn of rise in targeting of health services in conflict
Principle of medical neutrality threatened as doctors and hospitals deliberately attacked, particularly in Gaza
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
gülebru @gulebru.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
"[Gaza] exposes what is fundamentally wrong today: a persistent inability to recognize every human being as equal and deserving of dignity and life, whatever their beliefs, skin color, or religious affiliation." thank you @joelleabirached.bsky.social for this painful but essential piece
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Ofer Engel @engelo.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
Thank you for telling this story, a forceful yet surgical account that resists simplification while confronting the enormity of the horror.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
• @joelleabirached.bsky.social on Gaza and the discrediting of the liberal international order • @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on Mamdani’s triumph and the future of the Democratic Party • @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social on memoirs of the Arab Jewish world destroyed by colonialism
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
“Gaza has become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and its victims’ recourse to human rights as a final forum for collective deliverance—the deliverance of the wretched of the earth, whoever and wherever they may be. The consequences cannot be overstated.” @joelleabirached.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Deborah Chasman @debchasman.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught so flagrantly, Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the legal order the West itself developed after World War II. @joelleabirached.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/gaz...
bostonreview.net
Gaza and the End of History - Boston Review
The apocalyptic scale of death and destruction lays bare the contradictions at the heart of the liberal international order.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Painful to write—born of disappointment. I call for critical engagement with the West, not bashing its epistemic frameworks: expose its racism and double standards while salvaging and advancing the universal human‑rights framework forged after WWII. Perhaps the baton now rests w/ the ‘Global South.’
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
One word: criminals www.naharnet.com/stories/en/3...
naharnet.com
Hassan Khalil's brother held in fake cancer drugs case
Mohammad Khalil, the brother of Speaker Nabih Berri’s aide MP Ali Hassan Khalil, has been arrested in the case of the fake cancer drugs that have entered the Lebanese market, media reports said. Al-J...
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Disconcerting. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
theguardian.com
More than 160 Gazan medics held in Israeli prisons amid reports of torture
Senior doctors claim they were subjected to months of physical abuse, as UN calls for release of those still detained
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
Now that measles is on the rise again in the US, along with bird flu becoming 'endemic', it is worth pondering the question once again: Do pandemics ever end? www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....
nejm.org
Do Pandemics Ever End? | NEJM
Since pandemics are sociopolitical as well as epidemiologic events, their end is determined not only by epidemiologic criteria but also by social, political, economic, and ethical concerns.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
“Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Virchow
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
When Trump speaks of turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” he draws on a deep reservoir of American imperial myths and reflects the increasingly naked and brazen imperatives of today’s hyper-capitalism. @joelleabirached.bsky.social on the Rivierization of the world:
bostonreview.net
The Rivierization of the World - Boston Review
Trump’s plans for Gaza crystallize the dreams of empire.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
When Trump spoke of turning Gaza into the most beautiful “Riviera of the Middle East,” he was drawing on a deep reservoir of imperial myths and reflecting the increasingly naked and brazen imperatives of today’s hyper-capitalism. @joelleabirached.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
The Rivierization of the World - Boston Review
Trump’s plans for Gaza crystallize the dreams of empire.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
American sociologist George Ritzer once wrote of the “McDonaldization of society,” the process whereby the logic of consumerism became a totalizing form of social control. Now, it seems the “Rivierization of the world” will supplant it. @joelleabirached.bsky.social on Trump’s plans for Gaza:
bostonreview.net
The Rivierization of the World - Boston Review
Trump’s plans for Gaza crystallize the dreams of empire.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
From the editors: introducing TRUMP’S RETURN, our new issue. Featuring @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social @morefius.bsky.social @econmarshall.bsky.social @joelleabirached.bsky.social @mschmitt9.bsky.social @janicefinewjl.bsky.social @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social Noura Erakat, Robin D. G. Kelley, & more
bostonreview.net
From the Editors: Trump’s Return - Boston Review
Introducing our Winter 2025 issue.
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
Brilliant @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social : www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
nybooks.com
Never Again and Again | Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman
a comic
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Joelle Abi-Rached @joelleabirached.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
I wrote this several months ago when Jared Kushner’s unsettling suggestion went largely unnoticed. Now, it’s no longer just a misstep—it’s becoming policy.
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Reposted by Joelle Abi-Rached
Boston Review @bostonreview.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
“Are Gaza and the West Bank merely the targets of a grand real estate project, as Jared Kushner unashamedly confessed during a conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year?” @joelleabirached.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
The View from Besieged Beirut - Boston Review
In the wake of exploding pagers, universalism plunges into the abyss.
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