In 2016, California passed a law mandating that ethnic studies become part of the high-school curriculum, and set a task force to work on developing such a course of study. Three years later, the task force came back with a 600-page document, that helpfully defined ethnic studies as the examination of “people whose cultures, histories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving,” as well as “mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations.”

Last week, the White House announced its plan to resume funding of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—which had ceased in 2018—to the tune of $150 million per year. UNRWA, unlike the UN organization that cares for refugees from every other conflict the world over, does not seek to resettle its charges or to integrate them into the countries where they live, but instead keeps them and their descendants refugees in perpetuity. While the administration justified its decision as “a means to advance a negotiated two-state solution,” Einat Wilf argues that it will do nothing of the sort: