Uncategorized
An NYU student wrote ‘F–k Israel’ on a piece of trash. Is that antisemitism or freedom of speech?
(New York Jewish Week) — New York University is investigating a graduate student working at the school library who wrote “Free Palestine” and a profanity on an Israeli mail bag left in the trash.
The university accused Naye Idriss in November 2022 of alleged antisemitism and vandalism, according to her attorney. Idriss was informed that she was being investigated for allegedly violating the non-discrimination policy in the student conduct code.
Dylan Saba, who is representing the student through Palestine Legal, a civil rights group, also said that the university sent an email to library staff saying that there was “an anti-Israel incident.” Another email stated that there was “an alleged antisemitism incident.”
In December, Idriss, who was one of three Arabic language students working at the library, was not rehired with her peers.
Photographs show a bag bearing the logo of Israel’s postal service, with the word “F–k” written next to the word Israel and “Free Palestine” scrawled on the side. The bag appears to have been shipped from an Israeli vendor in July 2022 before being tossed in a recycling bin.
The incident was first reported by the online news publication Electronic Intifada on Monday.
Idriss did not respond to a request for a comment, but NYU spokesperson John Beckman confirmed to the New York Jewish Week that the university is looking into the incident.
“Beyond acknowledging that there was an incident that involved the writing of profanity in the library, and that various appropriate NYU offices have looked into the matter and responded to it, I cannot elaborate because it is NYU’s practice not to comment on the specifics of individual employee or student matters,” Beckman said.
NYU had initially classified the investigation as a student conduct issue, which would not have entitled Idriss to union representation. Because the incident occurred at work, Idriss has the right to have a union representative present in any workplace disciplinary proceeding, Saba told the Electronic Intifada. After the union intervened, the investigation led to a hearing with NYU’s human resources department.
#StudentSpotlight Naye Idriss was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and graduated from @Columbia with a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Literature and Society in May 2020. pic.twitter.com/YdSk8Z8WTG
— NYU Kevorkian Center (@nyukevo) November 23, 2021
“They have not dismissed the antisemitism charge,” Saba said. “They just haven’t moved forward with it.”
He added in written statement to the New York Jewish Week: “This is very clearly an example of repression from NYU in response to continuous pressure from outside Zionist organizations to silence pro-Palestinian political speech.”
Tova Benjamin, a steward and organizer with the Union for Graduate Workers at NYU, also confirmed to the New York Jewish that the union has been representing Idriss during NYU’s investigation, but would not comment any further.
Saba told the New York Jewish Week that the proceeding “has been on pause while the HR process proceeds to a resolution.”
On Monday, the aggressive watchdog group Stop Antisemitism tweeted Idriss’ face and details about her education and place of birth to over 60,000 followers online.
“I hope she gets suspended,”one person commented.
“Throw her azz in jail,” another wrote.
NYU’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life, the campus Hillel, declined to comment.
Jewish groups have complained in the recent past about incidents at NYU they call antisemitic. In 2020, following complaints that NYU hadn’t done enough to prevent “a hostile environment” for Jews on the campus, the U.S. Education Department and NYU reached an agreement under which the university agreed to “bolster our longstanding commitment to opposing and responding to antisemitism,” a university spokesman said at the time.
In April 2022, a pro-Palestinian law student group sent out an email chain saying, among other things, “the Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent.” Like the mailbag incident, the email prompted a debate over what is legitimate and protected criticism of Israel, however harsh, and what constitutes hate speech.
Alex Morey, a lawyer and director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-partisan organization that defends free speech on campus, told the New York Jewish Week that this seems to be the first case he’s seen where “a student is using garbage as their medium of expression.”
“But free speech principles protect all manner of written expression, whether you’re putting your views on a protest sign or a piece of trash,” Morey said.
Morey added that “you can’t vandalize garbage.”
“Vandalism requires damaging someone else’s property, and garbage, by nature, belongs to no one,” Morey said. “When the student took the bag from the trash, it became hers to use as she saw fit. Reportedly, the bag was in a recycling container. She was, arguably, recycling it.”
NYU’s student conduct policy says that the campus community “thrives on debate and dissent,” and that “free inquiry, free expression, and free association enhances academic freedom and intellectual engagement.”
“Any student reading this promise should feel confident expressing even the most controversial views in creative ways on campus,” Morey said.
Still, Morey noted that speech that rises to the level of a threat or discriminatory harassment should be punished, but proving that can have “high legal bars.”
“Simply holding or expressing an anti-Israel view, whether one defines it as antisemitic or not, doesn’t get close to meeting these standards,” Morey said. “In other words: NYU not only allows but encourages students to express all sorts of controversial views on campus, even if some people deem those views antisemitic.’”
—
The post An NYU student wrote ‘F–k Israel’ on a piece of trash. Is that antisemitism or freedom of speech? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Poland Summons Israeli Ambassador Over Yad Vashem Post
Visitors tour an exhibition, ahead of Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Poland summoned Israel’s ambassador on Monday over a tweet from a Holocaust memorial institute that Warsaw said did not make clear that occupying Nazi German forces, and not Polish authorities, made Jews wear star badges during World War II.
Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was protesting against a social media post in which Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial institution to the victims of the Holocaust, wrote that Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear “a distinctive badge to isolate them from the surrounding population.”
He said the post, published on Sunday, should have made clear Poland was “German-occupied” at the time.
“Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of Israel to the foreign ministry,” Sikorski wrote on X.
The Israeli foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yad Vashem had reposted the original tweet saying: “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”
Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Warsaw takes pains to underline that the persecution of Jews on its territory, such as in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was the work of the Nazi German occupiers.
More than three million of Poland‘s 3.2 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany, accounting for about half of the Jews in Europe killed during the Holocaust.
“Yad Vashem presents the historical realities of Nazism and WW2, including countries under German occupation, control or influence. Poland was indeed under German occupation,” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, wrote on X on Monday.
“This is clearly reflected in our material. Any other interpretation misreads our commitment to accuracy.”
Uncategorized
Gaza Truce Progress Slow as Israeli-Hamas Violence Persists
Palestinians walk among piles of rubble and damaged buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Israeli forces killed three Palestinian terrorists in Gaza near the line demarcating areas of Israeli control on Monday, underlining the struggle to broaden a fragile ceasefire deal approved over six weeks ago to global acclaim.
Palestinian medics said Monday’s incidents involved an Israeli drone firing a missile at a group of people east of Khan Younis, killing two and wounding another, and a tank shell killing a person on the eastern side of Gaza City.
Israel’s military said it had fired after identifying what it described as “terrorists” crossing the so-called yellow line and approaching its troops, posing an immediate threat to them.
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Israel signed a truce on Oct. 9 halting two years of devastating warfare but the agreement left the most intractable disputes for further talks, freezing the conflict without resolving it.
Both sides have since accused each other of deadly breaches of existing commitments in the agreement and of pushing back against later steps required by US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza.
The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been described by experts as misleading and unreliable, said on Monday that at least 342 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire since the start of the truce. Israel says three of its soldiers have been killed by militant gunfire in the same period.
Last week, the United Nations Security Council gave formal backing to Trump’s plan, which calls for an interim technocratic Palestinian government in Gaza, overseen by an international “board of peace” and backed by an international security force.
Trump’s plan also requires reform of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank.
NEGOTIATIONS
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who helped the US develop the plan and who Trump has said may join the board of peace, met the PA’s deputy leader Hussein al-Sheikh in the West Bank on Sunday.
Sheikh said in a social media post they had discussed developments following the Security Council resolution and requirements for Palestinian self-determination.
Meanwhile a Hamas delegation in Cairo, led by its exiled chief Khalil al-Hayya, held talks with Egyptian officials on exploring the next phase of the ceasefire, according to Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza.
Qassem acknowledged that the path to the second phase of the ceasefire was complex and said the Islamist group had told Egypt, a mediator in the conflict, that Israeli violations were undermining the agreement.
Agreeing on the make-up and mandate of the international security force has been particularly challenging.
Israel has said the multinational force must disarm Hamas, a step the terrorist group has so far resisted without Palestinian statehood, which Trump’s plan broadly envisages as the ultimate stage but which Israel has ruled out. Qassem said the force must have a role in keeping Israel’s military away from Palestinian civilians.
“There is complete uncertainty; the Americans haven’t put forward a detailed plan. It is unclear what kind of forces, what their tasks are, what their roles are, and where they will be stationed,” said a Palestinian official close to the Cairo talks who spoke on condition that he was not further identified.
“Any deployment of forces without a political track, without an understanding with all Palestinian factions and powers in Gaza, would complicate things even further.”
Uncategorized
The Diplomatic Trojan Horse: How UN Resolution 2803 Quietly Turns the Negev into an International Zone
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
UN Security Council Resolution 2803 looks like the diplomatic victory Israel has been desperate for since the war began. It finally codifies the demilitarization of Gaza, establishes a US-led “Board of Peace” to manage reconstruction, and seemingly ends the chaos of the post-war vacuum. The Prime Minister called it “a secure horizon,” and the White House hailed it as a “new chapter.”
But if you look past the press releases and turn to the technical addendums of the resolution, you will find a definition that threatens to undo 70 years of Israeli sovereignty in the south. For the first time in history, an international resolution has created a legal mechanism that treats sovereign Israeli territory — specifically the Western Negev — as a conditional jurisdiction subject to international oversight.
The devil is in the definitions.
The resolution establishes an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) to police the demilitarization of Gaza. Crucially, the text defines the ISF’s area of operation not just as the Gaza Strip, but as the Strip and “all adjacent logistical corridors, staging grounds, and dual-use infrastructure designated as essential for the stabilization of the primary zone.”
This language is a catastrophe of ambiguity. It does not distinguish between a temporary dirt road paved by the UN and a major Israeli artery like Route 232. It does not distinguish between a UN field hospital and the Soroka Medical Center, should Soroka treat ISF personnel.
By accepting this text without a specific reservation, Israel has allowed the UN to designate parts of the Eshkol, Sdot Negev, and Sha’ar HaNegev regional councils as “adjunct stabilization infrastructure.”
The immediate danger is not that UN peacekeepers will start issuing traffic tickets in Sderot. The danger is a bureaucratic phenomenon known as “jurisdictional creep,” particularly regarding American law. In Washington, geography dictates funding. Under the US Foreign Assistance Act, American aid is subject to rigorous vetting based on where it is spent. Historically, the Green Line was the hard border for these restrictions; funds spent in Tel Aviv were safe, while funds spent in Judea and Samaria were scrutinized.
Resolution 2803 erases that line. Consider the Ashkelon Desalination Plant. Under the humanitarian clauses of the new resolution, Israel is required to pump millions of cubic meters of water into the Gaza “Safe Zones.” Under the definition in the new annex, this makes the Ashkelon plant “dual-use infrastructure essential for stabilization.” Legal analysts in Washington are already warning that this designation could trigger a “neutrality review.” If Israel applies for US guarantees to expand the plant, the State Department could now legally block that funding, arguing that the expansion prejudices the operational balance of the international mission.
Resolution 2803 is effectively the “Area C-ization” of the Negev. It creates a grey zone of sovereignty where the map says Israel, but the regulatory burden implies an international zone. Imagine a scenario six months from now where the IDF needs to pave a new patrol road near Kibbutz Be’eri. European donors to the “Board of Peace” could protest, claiming that the road interferes with a projected “humanitarian corridor” outlined in the UN plan. Because Israel agreed to the resolution’s broad definitions, those donors would have a legal leg to stand on. The construction stops, the lawyers are summoned, and the Negev waits.
The government has a narrow window to fix this before the “Board of Peace” officially convenes in January 2026. Israel must immediately issue a State Interpretative Declaration, a diplomatic tool used to clarify how a state interprets a vague treaty. The Prime Minister must declare that the term “adjacent logistical corridors” refers exclusively to temporal transit rights for specific convoys and confers no territorial jurisdiction whatsoever. Furthermore, Israel must insist that all infrastructure within the 1949 Armistice Lines remains solely under Israeli domestic law and is eligible for unconditional US bilateral cooperation, regardless of its utility to the Gaza reconstruction effort.
The residents of the south have spent the last two years rebuilding their homes from the ashes of October 7. They deserve full, unadulterated sovereignty. They cannot be asked to live in a “stabilization zone” where their water, roads, and security are subject to a UN veto.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx