Described in a blurb as bringing “pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability,” Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim (the blurb continues) “outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury.” The book—to be published this month by Duke University Press—argues that, by making efforts not to kill Palestinian civilians while combating terror, Israel has hit upon a new and creative way to exercise its control over them. Liel Leibovitz writes:

A passionate advocate of BDS who had previously accused Israel of harvesting the organs of Palestinians and who threatened to sue anyone who published her talk at Vassar earlier this year, Puar, [a professor at Rutgers University], is to say the least a controversial figure. But books, even ones written by academics, deserve to be taken on their own merit. And, on its own merit, Puar’s book is an intellectual and moral hoax. . . .

Why would Israel spare the lives of its foes? If it is indeed, as Puar repeatedly argues, a colonialist project, wouldn’t it seek to emulate its predecessors and either destroy the indigenous people it was dispossessing, enslave them as cheap labor, or urge them to assimilate? Security and demographic considerations negate options two and three, which makes it very hard to understand, on Puar’s own terms, why and how Israel benefits from shooting to maim instead of to kill. . . .

“Perhaps differing from earlier colonial and occupation regimes where deprivation was distributed in order to maim yet keep labor alive,” Puar [answers], “there is less need for Palestinian labor, for Palestinian production. Rather, profit is derived from the dismemberment of reproduction, a function of capitalism without labor. . . . This inhuman biopolitics flourishes through and beside human populations—economic life growing without human life.” . . .

You can stand up for logic and argue that this sentence is utter twaddle, using jargon to obfuscate its own admission of ideational bankruptcy. You can stand up for the facts, and argue that a book concerned with wounded Palestinians should at least make some sort of effort to observe Hamas’s well-documented policy of using civilians as human shields. . . . But you’d be missing the point. A book like Puar’s is pure dogma; it believes what it believes, damn nuance, context, or facts.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.