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Culture Must Be the Moral Compass That Geopolitics and Economics Will Never Be
The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.
Rather, the transformation of Nazism from a nationalist ideology admired by many Western elites into the universal symbol of evil was a story of narrative engineering and the deliberate construction of collective memory. It is a story that reveals a larger truth: culture has always been the moral compass that geopolitics and economics cannot, and will not, provide on their own.
And at this moment, it is crucial to understand and use the power of culture to shift geopolitics, and not the other way around.
Understanding this history matters today more than ever. Because if it was possible to turn Nazism into the ultimate taboo, it is equally possible to reposition other violent ideologies and state projects—such as Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and settler colonialism—as morally indefensible. But to do so requires acknowledging that cultural reckonings don’t simply arrive; they are made.
Pre-War Ambivalence: When Fascism Was Fashionable
Contrary to the comforting myth that the world naturally recoiled from Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s many influential Americans and Europeans viewed Hitler’s Germany with admiration. American industrialists like Henry Ford openly praised Hitler’s economic management and fierce opposition to communism. Ford even funded antisemitic propaganda through his publication, The Dearborn Independent. British aristocrats, including the Duke of Windsor, flirted with Nazi sympathies, seeing Germany as a model of discipline and order.
It was only when Hitler’s ambitions clashed with the strategic interests of other nations that fascism became intolerable. And even then, many major US and UK companies maintained their business interests with the Nazis, including Ford, IBM, GM (Opel), Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Chase Bank, and of course Coca-Cola, who famously created the brand Fanta so that it could break the boycott and do business with Nazi Germany.
This distinction is critical: condemnation of Nazism began not as a moral imperative, but as a political necessity. Germany’s aggression threatened the European balance of power, British imperial security, and eventually, American economic and military interests. The moral narrative would only come later, after the fighting was over.
It is important to learn from the past and see that only culture can shift perception, and to use culture to shift the economic realities that would otherwise wait to be shaped by politics.
Wartime Shifts: From Enemy State to Symbol of Evil
World War II did not instantly transform public opinion. For many Americans, the war in Europe remained remote until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Even then, the decision to fight Nazi Germany was entangled with power politics: Hitler declared war on the United States first, effectively forcing Roosevelt’s hand.
Nevertheless, the war provided fertile ground for a reframing of Nazism. Wartime propaganda efforts by the Allies recast the Nazi regime as a brutal, alien threat to civilization itself. Hollywood joined in: The Great Dictator (1940) ridiculed Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, while Casablanca (1942) romanticized resistance. Images of goose-stepping soldiers, swastika flags, and shattered cities circulated widely.
As the Allies advanced, they encountered the first concrete evidence of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass graves, and emaciated survivors. Yet even then, much of this evidence remained unknown to the general public. It was only after liberation that the full horror became impossible to ignore.
Post-War Revelation: The Holocaust and the Cultural Break
The turning point came in 1945, with the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trials. The images and testimonies from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen revealed the industrial scale of genocide. Millions murdered with chilling efficiency. A systematic attempt to erase an entire people. For the first time, the abstract notion of “Nazi evil” was grounded in visceral, visual evidence.
Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes this phenomenon as the cultural construction of trauma. Atrocities do not automatically generate collective memory; they must be narrated, documented, and ritualized until they become an inescapable moral reference point. The Nuremberg Trials played this role by broadcasting confessions and evidence to a global audience. Schools, museums, and the press reinforced the narrative: Nazism was not simply defeated; it was unmasked as pure, irredeemable evil.
Cold War Myth-Making: The Free World Versus Fascism
The Cold War further cemented this narrative. To build legitimacy against the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies positioned themselves as the moral victors of World War II, the saviors of Europe from fascism. In reality, many of the same powers—Britain, France, and the United States—continued their own brutal colonial projects and enforced systems of racial hierarchy at home.
But the cultural story was powerful: the West stood for freedom; the Nazis had embodied totalitarian darkness. School textbooks, popular films, and Holocaust memorialization institutionalized this story, forging a shared moral identity that could be contrasted against communist “evil.”
This process was neither accidental nor purely altruistic. It was a strategic use of culture to consolidate power, project moral authority, and deflect scrutiny of the West’s own violence. The lesson is clear: collective memory is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is built, contested, and leveraged.
The Sociological Core: Why Public Opinion Shifts
To understand how an ideology once admired by many became the universal emblem of inhumanity, we must look beyond military defeat. Several mechanisms combined:
Symbolic Association: Nazism transformed from a nationalist experiment into a symbol of mechanized genocide and racial supremacy.
Cultural Trauma: The Holocaust became a shared wound that redefined moral frameworks across the West.
Visual Storytelling: Images and films, rather than mere text, anchored the horror in the public imagination.
State Rebranding: The Allies used anti-Nazism to build a postwar myth of moral superiority, even as they pursued imperial ambitions elsewhere.
These insights are not simply historical trivia. They are a roadmap for how cultural shifts happen—and how they can be deliberately engineered.
Israel, Palestine, and the Next Cultural Reckoning
Today, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—systematic dispossession, apartheid laws, and repeated military assaults—remains largely protected in Western discourse. Politicians insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. Media narratives default to framing the violence as a “conflict” rather than an occupation. Solidarity with Palestinians is often smeared as antisemitism.
Yet history shows that moral consensus is not fixed. With enough sustained exposure, narrative work, and cultural pressure, the global imagination can be reshaped. Just as Nazism’s legitimacy eroded, so too can the idea of Israel as an unassailable “victim-state.”
This is not a call to equate the Holocaust with the Nakba—each is historically distinct. It is, however, an argument that the techniques which made Nazism morally intolerable—trauma visualization, reframing language, relentless storytelling—are tools available to any liberation movement.
Here is how such a transformation could unfold:
1. Narrative Inversion
Israel’s founding story must be contextualized: a state born from the trauma of European antisemitism that, in turn, created the dispossession of another people. Exposing this contradiction—survivors becoming occupiers—breaks the simplistic binary of oppressor and victim.
2. Visual Culture and Testimony
Just as photographs of emaciated bodies in camps forced an awakening, so too can images of bombed Gazan neighborhoods, amputee children, and anguished families. Digital archives and survivor testimonies can anchor these experiences in collective memory.
3. Linguistic Reframing
Terms like “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” and “ethnic cleansing” shift perception from tragic conflict to structural violence. Legal frameworks—UN reports, ICC filings—can fortify these terms with institutional legitimacy.
Bypassing corporate media gatekeepers requires a multi-platform strategy: TikTok clips, Substack essays, livestreamed trials of Israeli policy, viral documentaries. Saturation is what makes denial unsustainable.
5. Global Realignment
Positioning Palestine within global struggles—Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-colonial movements—expands solidarity. When the Global South embraces Palestinian liberation as part of its own decolonization, moral isolation will deepen.
6. Cultural Institutions and Education
Just as Holocaust education became standard in Western curricula, Nakba education can be mainstreamed. Museums, memorials, and fellowships can institutionalize remembrance and scholarship.
7. Policy Pressure and Legal Action
Public consensus is the soil in which policy change grows. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with legal prosecutions of war crimes, transform moral clarity into material consequences.
8. Making Occupation a Liability
When supporting Israel becomes politically and financially risky—akin to defending apartheid South Africa—corporate and governmental alliances will fracture. Reputational risk can be a powerful motivator.
Conclusion: Cultural Reckonings Are Engineered
It was not “natural” for the West to reject Nazism. It took defeat, trauma exposure, and decades of cultural labor to enshrine anti-Nazism as a foundational moral principle. Similarly, it is not inevitable that the world will recognize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as an urgent moral crisis. It will require strategic, sustained, and courageous cultural work.
Culture—more than geopolitics or economics—sets the terms of what is morally acceptable. It is the compass that can point humanity toward justice. But only if we are willing to pick it up and use it.
Keep reading:
Global Echoes of Resistance:
Artists Harnessing Art, Culture, and Ancestry
Samar Younes
{
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"title" : "Culture Must Be the Moral Compass That Geopolitics and Economics Will Never Be",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/culture-must-be-the-moral-compass-that-geopolitics-and-economics-will-never-be",
"date" : "2025-07-15 16:14:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_Opposing_Nazism_1.png",
"excerpt" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.",
"content" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.Rather, the transformation of Nazism from a nationalist ideology admired by many Western elites into the universal symbol of evil was a story of narrative engineering and the deliberate construction of collective memory. It is a story that reveals a larger truth: culture has always been the moral compass that geopolitics and economics cannot, and will not, provide on their own.And at this moment, it is crucial to understand and use the power of culture to shift geopolitics, and not the other way around.Understanding this history matters today more than ever. Because if it was possible to turn Nazism into the ultimate taboo, it is equally possible to reposition other violent ideologies and state projects—such as Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and settler colonialism—as morally indefensible. But to do so requires acknowledging that cultural reckonings don’t simply arrive; they are made.Pre-War Ambivalence: When Fascism Was FashionableContrary to the comforting myth that the world naturally recoiled from Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s many influential Americans and Europeans viewed Hitler’s Germany with admiration. American industrialists like Henry Ford openly praised Hitler’s economic management and fierce opposition to communism. Ford even funded antisemitic propaganda through his publication, The Dearborn Independent. British aristocrats, including the Duke of Windsor, flirted with Nazi sympathies, seeing Germany as a model of discipline and order.It was only when Hitler’s ambitions clashed with the strategic interests of other nations that fascism became intolerable. And even then, many major US and UK companies maintained their business interests with the Nazis, including Ford, IBM, GM (Opel), Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Chase Bank, and of course Coca-Cola, who famously created the brand Fanta so that it could break the boycott and do business with Nazi Germany.This distinction is critical: condemnation of Nazism began not as a moral imperative, but as a political necessity. Germany’s aggression threatened the European balance of power, British imperial security, and eventually, American economic and military interests. The moral narrative would only come later, after the fighting was over.It is important to learn from the past and see that only culture can shift perception, and to use culture to shift the economic realities that would otherwise wait to be shaped by politics.Wartime Shifts: From Enemy State to Symbol of EvilWorld War II did not instantly transform public opinion. For many Americans, the war in Europe remained remote until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Even then, the decision to fight Nazi Germany was entangled with power politics: Hitler declared war on the United States first, effectively forcing Roosevelt’s hand.Nevertheless, the war provided fertile ground for a reframing of Nazism. Wartime propaganda efforts by the Allies recast the Nazi regime as a brutal, alien threat to civilization itself. Hollywood joined in: The Great Dictator (1940) ridiculed Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, while Casablanca (1942) romanticized resistance. Images of goose-stepping soldiers, swastika flags, and shattered cities circulated widely.As the Allies advanced, they encountered the first concrete evidence of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass graves, and emaciated survivors. Yet even then, much of this evidence remained unknown to the general public. It was only after liberation that the full horror became impossible to ignore.Post-War Revelation: The Holocaust and the Cultural BreakThe turning point came in 1945, with the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trials. The images and testimonies from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen revealed the industrial scale of genocide. Millions murdered with chilling efficiency. A systematic attempt to erase an entire people. For the first time, the abstract notion of “Nazi evil” was grounded in visceral, visual evidence.Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes this phenomenon as the cultural construction of trauma. Atrocities do not automatically generate collective memory; they must be narrated, documented, and ritualized until they become an inescapable moral reference point. The Nuremberg Trials played this role by broadcasting confessions and evidence to a global audience. Schools, museums, and the press reinforced the narrative: Nazism was not simply defeated; it was unmasked as pure, irredeemable evil.Cold War Myth-Making: The Free World Versus FascismThe Cold War further cemented this narrative. To build legitimacy against the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies positioned themselves as the moral victors of World War II, the saviors of Europe from fascism. In reality, many of the same powers—Britain, France, and the United States—continued their own brutal colonial projects and enforced systems of racial hierarchy at home.But the cultural story was powerful: the West stood for freedom; the Nazis had embodied totalitarian darkness. School textbooks, popular films, and Holocaust memorialization institutionalized this story, forging a shared moral identity that could be contrasted against communist “evil.”This process was neither accidental nor purely altruistic. It was a strategic use of culture to consolidate power, project moral authority, and deflect scrutiny of the West’s own violence. The lesson is clear: collective memory is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is built, contested, and leveraged.The Sociological Core: Why Public Opinion ShiftsTo understand how an ideology once admired by many became the universal emblem of inhumanity, we must look beyond military defeat. Several mechanisms combined:Symbolic Association: Nazism transformed from a nationalist experiment into a symbol of mechanized genocide and racial supremacy.Cultural Trauma: The Holocaust became a shared wound that redefined moral frameworks across the West.Visual Storytelling: Images and films, rather than mere text, anchored the horror in the public imagination.State Rebranding: The Allies used anti-Nazism to build a postwar myth of moral superiority, even as they pursued imperial ambitions elsewhere.These insights are not simply historical trivia. They are a roadmap for how cultural shifts happen—and how they can be deliberately engineered.Israel, Palestine, and the Next Cultural ReckoningToday, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—systematic dispossession, apartheid laws, and repeated military assaults—remains largely protected in Western discourse. Politicians insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. Media narratives default to framing the violence as a “conflict” rather than an occupation. Solidarity with Palestinians is often smeared as antisemitism.Yet history shows that moral consensus is not fixed. With enough sustained exposure, narrative work, and cultural pressure, the global imagination can be reshaped. Just as Nazism’s legitimacy eroded, so too can the idea of Israel as an unassailable “victim-state.”This is not a call to equate the Holocaust with the Nakba—each is historically distinct. It is, however, an argument that the techniques which made Nazism morally intolerable—trauma visualization, reframing language, relentless storytelling—are tools available to any liberation movement.Here is how such a transformation could unfold:1. Narrative InversionIsrael’s founding story must be contextualized: a state born from the trauma of European antisemitism that, in turn, created the dispossession of another people. Exposing this contradiction—survivors becoming occupiers—breaks the simplistic binary of oppressor and victim.2. Visual Culture and TestimonyJust as photographs of emaciated bodies in camps forced an awakening, so too can images of bombed Gazan neighborhoods, amputee children, and anguished families. Digital archives and survivor testimonies can anchor these experiences in collective memory.3. Linguistic ReframingTerms like “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” and “ethnic cleansing” shift perception from tragic conflict to structural violence. Legal frameworks—UN reports, ICC filings—can fortify these terms with institutional legitimacy.4. Media SaturationBypassing corporate media gatekeepers requires a multi-platform strategy: TikTok clips, Substack essays, livestreamed trials of Israeli policy, viral documentaries. Saturation is what makes denial unsustainable.5. Global RealignmentPositioning Palestine within global struggles—Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-colonial movements—expands solidarity. When the Global South embraces Palestinian liberation as part of its own decolonization, moral isolation will deepen.6. Cultural Institutions and EducationJust as Holocaust education became standard in Western curricula, Nakba education can be mainstreamed. Museums, memorials, and fellowships can institutionalize remembrance and scholarship.7. Policy Pressure and Legal ActionPublic consensus is the soil in which policy change grows. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with legal prosecutions of war crimes, transform moral clarity into material consequences.8. Making Occupation a LiabilityWhen supporting Israel becomes politically and financially risky—akin to defending apartheid South Africa—corporate and governmental alliances will fracture. Reputational risk can be a powerful motivator.Conclusion: Cultural Reckonings Are EngineeredIt was not “natural” for the West to reject Nazism. It took defeat, trauma exposure, and decades of cultural labor to enshrine anti-Nazism as a foundational moral principle. Similarly, it is not inevitable that the world will recognize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as an urgent moral crisis. It will require strategic, sustained, and courageous cultural work.Culture—more than geopolitics or economics—sets the terms of what is morally acceptable. It is the compass that can point humanity toward justice. But only if we are willing to pick it up and use it."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "To Do the Greatest Harm: Cornell University’s Complicity in International Violence & Destruction",
"author" : "Eliza Salamon & MB",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/cornell-complicity",
"date" : "2025-08-20 12:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/greg-daines-A37V-7GyDDg-unsplash.jpg",
"excerpt" : " This independent research shown in this report, show that the US and Israeli military, the largest military and weapons corporations, and technology companies have invested over $180 million in Cornell researchers and departments, mostly from 2023-2024.",
"content" : " This independent research shown in this report, show that the US and Israeli military, the largest military and weapons corporations, and technology companies have invested over $180 million in Cornell researchers and departments, mostly from 2023-2024.Discussion of the military-industrial complex often leaves out its third arm: academia. For many decades, the American defense industry, weapons manufacturers, and universities have collaborated in a profitable pattern that turn students and academics into cogs of the American war machine. 1 2 The Department of Defense (D.o.D.) is the branch of government that distributes taxpayer funds, generally through direct and indirect contracts, to research universities.This report unmasks Cornell University’s participation in this system and its complicity in global violence, destruction, and human rights violations while it enjoys a $10.7b endowment. In particular, our analysis, largely based on Office of Sponsored Research files from 2001-2024, finds that Cornell has been complicit in the U.S.-backed Saudi genocide of Yemen and the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Gaza. This complicity has been established through two forms of collaboration: Direct collaboration, through tens of millions of dollars in funding, with weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel companies. These include companies from which the student undergraduate and graduate bodies have adopted divestment resolutions (BAE Systems, Boeing, Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Technion Institute, and ThyssenKrupp). 3 4 Direct collaboration with Saudi ARAMCO and the Israeli Ministry of Defense (I.M.o.D.), including millions of dollars in funding. In addition, Cornell’s partnership with the Israeli university Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) through the New York City Cornell Tech Campus is uniquely egregious and a direct form of collaboration. 5 Much of the data supporting this has been aggregated into an excel file attached here 6 with the original files. 7 Hundreds of these sponsored research projects are listed in the linked table in addition to D.o.D. work that is included in our larger report. 8 The projects vary in subject from vaccines to cyber to hardware to policy. The table should be treated as a largely representative but incomplete list of Cornell’s involvement with the most prominent weapons manufacturing-related entities.Israeli Funding and Cornell’s Role in Apartheid and GenocideIn 2007, Harold Craighead, Professor in Applied and Engineering Physics, secured $300k from the I.M.o.D. The funded project focused on the development and fabrication of nanodevices. Though we were unable to obtain papers specifically citing this funding other than the official reporting, we present here the most plausible outcome of the proposed research. In 2006, Craighead received a visit from former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres.9 In a discussion with Peres, Craighead mentioned his collaboration with Tel Aviv University (T.A.U). Indeed, in the same year Craighead published a paper in collaboration with employees of T.A.U. focusing on the same topic of nanodevices.10 Military applications of the research include nano-meter scale robotics and biotechnologies along with optics/imaging. In a similar vein, the unaffiliated partnership between Lockheed Martin and Rice University documents other broad military applications of nano-tech.11In 2020, Robert F. Shepherd, an Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, solicited $100k from the I.M.o.D. for elastic metamaterials research. Like Craighead, this funding is not reported in any of Shepherd’s publications, though one can extrapolate on the basis of the research topic as to which papers of his were I.M.o.D. funded. In particular, a paper from 2020 focuses precisely on the use of fluid flow to modulate material shape.12 This field is largely concerned with the manufacturing of materials which can change properties like texture or rigidity as a modulated response. Such applications are useful for the development of robotic components which can manipulate or navigate the environment. In addition, Shepherd’s collaborator at Israeli university Technion, Amir Gat, lists a 2019-2020 $100k funding grant from Maffat (a joint administrative body of the I.M.o.D and the I.D.F.) under the same topic.13 Conference proceedings also fit under the same topic and Shepherd went to Technion to present his work at a conference in 2020.14 15Frank Wise, Professor of Engineering in Applied and Engineering Physics, also solicited $100k from the I.M.o.D. to research high-power lasers. Such terawatt fiber lasers have a variety of applications but are of particular military interest for destroying aircraft or infrastructure without the use of conventional kinetic weapons like missiles. Lockheed Martin, a weapons manufacturer, reports its own interests in high-power lasers and such weapons are already being applied aboard military ships.16 17 18 This funding resulted in a paper on lasers that can be modulated to use various modes of emission.19 Pavel Sidorenko, a post-doc within Wise’s group, is now holding a position at the Technion continuing research on the high-power fiber lasers “which are becoming increasingly important in a variety of fields ranging from military applications to healthcare”.20Qing Zhao, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, also solicited $420k from the I.M.o.D. between 2021 and 2024. Zhao used this funding to research artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms and cites the I.M.o.D. funding in two papers dealing with computer vision and decision-making algorithms.21 22 Focusing on the former, Zhao’s work on computer vision enables cameras to more effectively identify objects, persons and notice patterns.23 Indeed, such computer vision algorithms have been implemented by the Israeli military to identify Palestinians from Gaza at checkpoints targeting forcibly displaced refugees.24Zhao’s work also has applications in the development of efficient autonomous drone swarms, by producing algorithms that lead to effective decision-making.25 Suppose a swarm of drones is navigating an area, each with its own sensors or cameras learning about its environment, then the data has to be processed leading to a decision. Zhao’s work creates an algorithm that processes this information in a centralized way and then makes a decision. This research can be applied to make decisions such as whether or not to kill an individual or bomb a building. Per a Booz Allen Hamilton report, Israel has been to date the first to use machine learning, including drone swarms successfully in military campaigns:“Israel’s victory over Hamas in 2021 was the first war to be won via the asymmetric advantage provided by AI, and the conflict in Gaza that started in 2023 continues to be characterized by AI as well as information warfare in the cognitive domain… Israel became the first country to use true drone swarms, deploying them in its 2021 conflict with Gaza, and is arguably the global leader in this technology because of their implementation of Elbit Systems’ Legion-X, a modular, heterogeneous, multi-domain C2 swarm system”.26 See also.27The use of these machine learning algorithms in Gaza has been documented in +972 magazine with the implementation of algorithms known as The Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy?28On the policy side, Sarah Kreps, Professor in Government, conducts public policy and supply chain studies for the D.o.D. and the Israeli government. In 2024, she published a study on the best surveillance practices for governments to engage in.29 The study was in part funded by the Israel National Cyber Directorate.Given Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, Cornell’s collaboration with Technion University in Israel is another blatant example of its active complicity. With the establishment of the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in NYC in 2012, Cornell has doubled down on its commitment to its Israeli collaborations, despite the efforts of its activist student body and the protest of NYC communities.30 31 At the announcement of the partnership, the Israeli consul expressed the “strategic importance” of the project to change the state’s association with conflict and violence, and instead associate it with innovation.32 Cornell consistently touts its collaboration with Technion in published articles: “The impact of the Technion on Israel’s economy, society and defense is unmatched”.33Further, the word “defense” is often used by weapons manufacturers and governments as a euphemism for offensive capabilities. The Technion has also been instrumental in advancing technological capabilities of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.34 35 36 It also had several programs and scholarships sponsored by weapons manufacturers Rafael and Elbit Systems.37 In addition, Technion has been directly complicit through providing support to the Israeli military.38 As the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (B.D.S.) movement has documented: “Technion has developed a course on marketing the Israeli weapons industry to the international market for export. Technion also has numerous joint academic programs with the Israeli military and developed the remote control capabilities for the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer used by the Israeli military to demolish Palestinian homes—considered collective punishment under international law.”39 40 41 42 Cornell Tech’s council includes Michael Bloomberg who once stated: “I’ll never condition aid to Israel.”43 This may reflect, in part, why Cornell’s leadership has refused to even consider divestment.Saudi Funding and Cornell’s Role in Climate Change and Human Rights AbusesCornell’s complicity with genocidal governments extends further through its substantial relationships with the Saudi government and its institutions. University programs and individual faculty benefit from Saudi funds despite the many violations of human rights carried out by Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi totalitarian Crown Prince and Prime Minister. These include but are not limited to the following: the U.S.-backed genocide in Yemen, the assassination and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the country’s limitless production of fossil fuels, and its persistent crackdowns on its own activists, including feminists. The Yemeni genocide claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians from 2015 to 2022.44 [^45] American-made weapons were used and made the U.S. complicit.45 46 47 48 At no point did Cornell, as an institution, take action to break ties with the Saudi dictatorship. Cornell’s former president Frank H. T. Rhodes served as a trustee at the King Abdullah University of Science Technology along with former M.I.T. president Charles M. Vest.49Over the past few years, faculty have also been subsidized through research funding from Saudi ARAMCO, the majority state-owned petroleum and natural gas company responsible for almost 4.5% of all global CO2 and methane emissions between 1965 and 2017.50 The company has a long history of obstructing action against climate change through aggressive lobbying and funding of Western research, especially at American universities.51 The work financed by Saudi ARAMCO at Cornell is focused on oil refinement and energy generation broadly, a problematic venture, especially considering academia’s knowledge of the human role in perpetuating climate change.Amongst the employees who received funds from ARAMCO are Lawrence Cathles, Lynden Archer and Emmanuel Giannelis, professors in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Materials Science, respectively, who received $1.3m from 2009 to 2011 through the KAUST-Cornell Center for Energy and Sustainability. Despite its name, this center, a collaboration between Cornell and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (K.A.U.S.T.) in Saudi Arabia from 2008-2015, was committed to research on oil and gas production.52 53 Further K.A.U.S.T. funding followed: Giannelis also received $531k between 2012 and 2014. Archer, current Dean of the School of Engineering, received $84k in 2017. In 2023, $250k went to Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Yong Joo and $400k to a professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Geoffrey Coates. Yong Joo also solicited $200k in funding along with Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering Greeshma Gadikota’s $300k in 2024.Collaboration With Weapons ManufacturersIn addition to collaborating with violent regimes, Cornell has received millions of dollars in research funding that have come directly from weapons manufacturers. Publicly available documents dating from 2001 show this funding includes the “primes”54: Lockheed Martin [~$3m], Raytheon [~$6.5m], Boeing [~$1.4m], Northrop Grumman [~$2.3m] and General Dynamics [~$240k]. B.A.E. Systems [~$2.3m], L3Harris [~$1.4m], Shell [$500k], Exxon [~$1.2m], Intel Corporation [~$16.4m], I.B.M. [~$7.2m], M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory [~$250k], Teledyne [~$700k] and others have also given considerable research funding to the Cornell employees.The group of studies are far too extensive to discuss in one document but demonstrate the ultimate functioning of so-called “academic” research. The funding has been for machine learning and artificial intelligence development, software and computer language platforms, silicon chip and battery development, miniature satellites, robotics, data visualization, 3-D rendering and much more. All of these are components that are often declared as being “dual use” but are used by militaries and states well beyond any stated consumer use. As one example, Raytheon has published articles on its web page touting its collaboration with Cornell on gallium-nitride materials and refinement radio-frequency technologies.55These collaborations extend to student life. Cornell has overtly partnered with Lockheed Martin to create a Masters of Engineering program in Systems Engineering.56 On the front page of the program is stated: “Lockheed Martin Employees - Welcome!”. Standards are lowered for Lockheed Martin employees by waiving GRE scores and requiring only one recommendation letter. Similarly, Cornell has an identical partnership with Boeing for a Masters program along with a 5% tuition discount and waiving of application fee.57The university also holds a key laboratory for the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (N.O.R.D.T.E.C.H.) along with a plethora of other universities and weapons manufacturers.58 Though its aims include a wide array of technologies, they are highly focused on the development of computer chips. The basis of the organization is to create a collaborative space between weapons manufacturers, the D.o.D., and academia.The Cornell Tech campus in N.Y.C. also does its own collaborations, including with DefenseArk.59 Through its startup award it has helped sustain autonomous robotics companies like Aatonomy which are looking to do business with the D.o.D.60OutlookIn the midst of foreign catastrophes including the Yemeni genocide, the ongoing Palestinian genocide and the assassination of hundreds of reporters in Gaza, Cornell has never ceased nor paused its collaboration with regimes or the weapons manufacturers supplying them. Not only does this demonstrate its institutional and individual collaboration with actors that consistently violate international law, but also reveals that its professed human values are ultimately hollow calls. In our non-comprehensive analysis of Cornell research funding from 2001-2024, we found that researchers and institutes received hundreds of millions of dollars from the D.o.D, weapons manufacturers, and international governments committing vast human rights violations. Further investigation would also reveal indirect transfers of technology and weaponry from Cornell to U.A.E.’s fueling of the Sudanese genocide by means of weapons manufacturing sales.61Cornell feigns its research to be merely theoretical, non-applied, or done for the sake of “knowledge production.” David Gray Widder, post-doctoral researcher at Cornell Tech has recently written about the impossibility of making a distinction between basic and applied research when such research is funded by entities whose explicit purpose is to enact harm: “this mutual enlistment is crucial to the perpetuation of the military-industrial-commercial-academic complex, and to the technopolitical imaginaries of security through military domination that keep public funds flowing to projects in more efficient killing and destruction”.62Political scientist Neve Gordon and medical anthropologist Guy Shalev published a recent article titled “The Shame of Israeli Medicine”, which concludes that Israeli academics are not doing their part in preventing the genocide and therefore require external pressure and sanctioned from outside Israel. Despite these findings, Cornell Tech’s president Michael Kotlikoff recently stated proudly in a speech that “at Cornell Tech, we have the most intensive and meaningful collaboration with an Israeli university of any institution in this country”.63As Cornell reportedly prepares to reach a $100 million settlement with the Trump administration over allegations of anti-semitism, it draws ever closer to the belly of the beast.64 The Trump administration’s blatant weaponization of anti-semitism is one of its many tactics designed to manufacture consent for its crackdown on higher education and prompt capitulation. With this settlement, Cornell’s alliances with repressive regimes are only continuing to expand. An institution that continues to tie itself to the destruction of international communities can only degrade and devolve into a symbol of oppression.This report finds that Cornell’s purported goals in sustaining human-centred values are not only lacking, but are egregiously contrary to them. On an institutional and individual level, Cornell is intimately complicit in the act of genocide. And though Cornell has its own unique forms of complicity, the academic-military-industrial complex permeates the entire American system of higher education. If these institutions, as they have demonstrated thus far, do not have the moral capacity to make ethical and just decisions, it is the responsibility of students, faculty, staff, and the broader international academic community to put pressure, sanctions, and boycotts on them. Ultimately, the contradictions revealed within academia, both over decades of violent complicity and the ongoing starvation and annihilation of Gaza, make clear the necessity of breaking apart and reshaping an academia divorced from the military, and truly committed to a greater, ethical, and just future. https://universities.icanw.org/ ↩ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-pentagons-quest-for-academic-intelligence-ai/ ↩ https://assembly.cornell.edu/shared-governance/get-involved/input-issues/spring-2024-undergraduate-referendum/submitted?utm_source%3Drss%26utm_medium%3Drss ↩ https://www.instagram.com/p/DI_mRUeOtKr/?img_index%3D3 ↩ https://www.instagram.com/p/DI_mRUeOtKr/?img_index%3D3 ↩ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SbjxsSRFFNKQTe0typvAR3KjKo0IZmdmBTpkMht6Ets/edit?usp%3Dsharing ↩ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S6NHD1w-828udkjH6mfYe0whBGoD0YZg/view?usp%3Ddrive_link ↩ https://antiwar.io/cornell ↩ https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/11/shimon-peres-calls-science-and-technology-key-peace ↩ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp%3D%26arnumber%3D4159973 ↩ https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lockheed-martin-and-rice-partner-nanotech-research ↩ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7071869/%23fn-group1 ↩ https://gat.net.technion.ac.il/files/2019/07/AmirGatResume-1.pdf ↩ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019APS..DFDG23001P/abstract ↩ https://yizhar.net.technion.ac.il/files/2021/09/MSRC2020_booklet.pdf ↩ https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2023-07-28-Lockheed-Martin-to-Scale-Its-Highest-Powered-Laser-to-500-Kilowatts-Power-Level ↩ https://newatlas.com/military/us-navy-uses-ai-train-laser-weapons-against-drones/ ↩ https://newatlas.com/military/us-navy-delivery-tactical-lockheed-martin-laser-weapon/ ↩ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.03571 ↩ https://zuckermanstem.org/scholars/dr-pavel-sidorenko/ ↩ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.08869 ↩ https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/salgia23b/salgia23b.pdf ↩ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.08869 ↩ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/technology/israel-facial-recognition-gaza.html ↩ https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/salgia23b/salgia23b.pdf ↩ https://www.boozallen.com/content/dam/home/docs/natsec/top-ten-emerging-technologies.pdf ↩ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks/ ↩ https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ ↩ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00223433241233960 ↩ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cornell-nyc-techs-alarming-ties-israeli-occupation/ ↩ https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/in-opposition-to-cornell-universitys/ ↩ https://www.jta.org/2011/12/20/ny/israeli-schools-strategic-move ↩ https://tech.cornell.edu/news/israel-cidon-joins-cornell-tech-as-director-of-the-joan-irwin-jacobs-technion-cornell-institute/ ↩ https://ats.org/our-impact/the-technion-protecting-israel-for-100-years/ ↩ https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/07/02/israeli-military-institute-technion-is-at-the-heart-of-the-military-industrial-academic-complex/ ↩ https://ats.org/our-impact/technion-students-paying-it-forward/ ↩ https://bdsmovement.net/news/israeli-universities-attacking-campus-uprisings-uphold-israels-crimes-against-palestinians ↩ https://www.technion.ac.il/en/blog/article/defense-ministers-shield-to-be-awarded-to-the-technion/ ↩ https://www.mitgaisim.idf.il/%25D7%259B%25D7%25AA%25D7%2591%25D7%2595%25D7%25AA/%25D7%25A8%25D7%2590%25D7%25A9%25D7%2599/%25D7%25A2%25D7%25AA%25D7%2595%25D7%2593%25D7%2594/%25D7%25AA%25D7%259B%25D7%25A0%25D7%2599%25D7%25AA-%25D7%25A1%25D7%2599%25D7%259C%25D7%2595%25D7%259F/ ↩ https://materials.technion.ac.il/en/studies/undergraduate-programs/gvishim-program-for-outstanding-academic-idf-reservists ↩ https://www.mitgaisim.idf.il/%25D7%259B%25D7%25AA%25D7%2591%25D7%2595%25D7%25AA/%25D7%25A8%25D7%2590%25D7%25A9%25D7%2599/%25D7%25A2%25D7%25AA%25D7%2595%25D7%2593%25D7%2594/%25D7%25AA%25D7%259B%25D7%25A0%25D7%2599%25D7%25AA-%25D7%25A1%25D7%2599%25D7%259C%25D7%2595%25D7%259F/ ↩ https://www.972mag.com/top-israeli-university-marketing-countys-arms-industry-to-the-world ↩ https://www.timesofisrael.com/bloomberg-to-aipac-ill-never-condition-aid-to-israel-no-matter-whos-pm/ ↩ https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/yemen-genocide-emergency ↩ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-yemen.html ↩ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-raytheon-yemen.html ↩ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/us-war-crimes-yemen-saudi-arabia.html ↩ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/09/world/yemen-airstrikes-intl/ ↩ https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/about/administration/board-trustees ↩ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions ↩ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/climate/saudi-arabia-aramco-oil-solar-climate.html ↩ https://ecommons.cornell.edu/communities/9de3b5de-53b7-4098-a8e9-e611323f790a ↩ https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2008/04/25-million-cu-saudi-link-will-boost-nanoscale-research ↩ https://ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/top-military-electronic-defense-primes-diversify-de-risk-win-dod-pentagon-procurement-budget ↩ https://www.rtx.com/news/news-center/2023/11/16/rtx-and-darpa-to-revolutionize-gallium-nitride-technology-for-improved-radio-freq ↩ ttps://www.engineering.cornell.edu/sys/distance-learning-meng-systems-engineering/corporate-partners/lockheed-martin-employees/ ↩ https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/sys/distance-learning-meng-systems-engineering/corporate-partners/boeing-employees/ ↩ https://www.nordtechub.org/members ↩ https://tech.cornell.edu/news/bridging-academia-and-industry-innovation-meet-cornell-techs-first-venture-fellow/ ↩ https://tech.cornell.edu/news/how-to-easily-make-any-robot-autonomous/ ↩ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/07/arms-sales-uae-00217874 ↩ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17840 ↩ https://president.cornell.edu/speeches-writings/2025-state-of-the-university-address/ ↩ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/cornell-close-to-white-house-settlement-of-up-to-100-million ↩ "
}
,
{
"title" : "Legalized Occupation: Dissecting Israel’s Plan to Seize Gaza",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/legalized-occupation-dissecting-israels-plan-to-seize-gaza",
"date" : "2025-08-09 10:13:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Cover-Legalized_Occupation.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Israel’s newly approved plan to “take control” of Gaza City and other key areas of the enclave is being presented to the world as a security imperative. In reality, it is an extension of a long-standing settler-colonial project—another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.",
"content" : "Israel’s newly approved plan to “take control” of Gaza City and other key areas of the enclave is being presented to the world as a security imperative. In reality, it is an extension of a long-standing settler-colonial project—another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.The language of “control,” “buffer zones,” and “security perimeters” is not neutral. It is a calculated rhetorical strategy designed to obscure the material realities of occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing. This is not a temporary maneuver aimed at stability. It is the consolidation of power through the seizure of land, the dismantling of Palestinian civil society, and the deepening of Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe—all in violation of international law.The Political Calculus Behind the OperationTo understand the decision, we must first acknowledge its political function for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Facing mounting domestic discontent, the collapse of public trust, and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Netanyahu is cornered. His far-right coalition partners demand an uncompromising expansionist agenda, and his own political survival depends on delivering it.Occupation has always been a cornerstone of this political project. By launching a military campaign to seize Gaza’s largest urban center, Netanyahu signals strength to his base while sidestepping accountability for the escalating humanitarian disaster. That disaster is not collateral damage—it is a form of collective punishment meant to force submission. It is also a bargaining chip: an occupied, starved, and displaced population is easier to control and harder to resist.A Continuation of the NakbaThis plan is not an anomaly; it is the latest manifestation of a decades-long pattern. Since the Nakba of 1948, the forced displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of their communities have been central tools of state policy. In Gaza today, we see the same logic: empty the land of its people, destroy the infrastructure of life, and claim it under the guise of security.International law is explicit: annexation through military force is illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Yet, as with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has consistently acted with impunity—shielded by the political, financial, and military backing of powerful allies.The Humanitarian FrontGaza has already been described by UN officials as a “graveyard for children.” The enclave’s population has endured a near-total blockade for 18 years, compounded by repeated bombardments that have destroyed hospitals, schools, and basic infrastructure. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced since the start of this latest escalation. Food insecurity is at catastrophic levels; medical supplies are almost nonexistent.Israel’s seizure of Gaza City—home to hundreds of thousands—will further collapse what remains of civilian life. Humanitarian organizations warn that the move will trigger mass displacement, deepen famine, and cut off the few remaining supply routes. These are not accidental outcomes. They are part of a strategy that weaponizes deprivation as a means of political control.Narrative as a BattlefieldThe battle over Gaza is not only military—it is discursive. The words chosen by political leaders and media outlets shape how the world understands, or misunderstands, what is unfolding. In Netanyahu’s framing, Israel is not occupying Gaza; it is “liberating” it from Hamas. In this telling, Palestinian civilians become invisible, reduced to collateral casualties in a counterterrorism campaign.This is why reframing is crucial. We must reject the sanitized vocabulary of “security zones” and “temporary control” and speak plainly: this is occupation, annexation, and the forcible seizure of Palestinian land. It is not liberation, it is domination. And it is not about peace, it is about power.Global ConnectionsIsrael’s actions in Gaza are not isolated from broader global struggles. From the forced removal of Indigenous peoples in North America to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the tactics of dispossession, militarization, and narrative control follow a familiar pattern. This is why solidarity movements around the world—led by Indigenous, Black, and other colonized peoples—see their own struggles reflected in Palestine’s.The link is not merely symbolic. Israel’s military technology, surveillance systems, and counterinsurgency tactics are exported globally, often marketed as “field-tested” in Gaza and the West Bank. These technologies underpin policing, border control, and repression from Ferguson to Kashmir. In this way, Gaza is both a site of profound local suffering and a laboratory for global authoritarianism.Discrediting the PlanIf the goal is to discredit this plan in the eyes of the international public, the strategy must be twofold: expose contradictions and center Palestinian agency.Expose contradictionsNetanyahu insists Israel does not seek to govern Gaza permanently, yet the seizure of land, establishment of military perimeters, and destruction of civilian infrastructure point toward long-term control.Israel claims to act in self-defense, yet the scale and method of its campaign far exceed any proportional response under international law.Center Palestinian agencyElevate Palestinian voices—journalists, doctors, teachers—who are documenting life under siege.Highlight grassroots forms of resilience and resistance that defy the portrayal of Palestinians as passive victims or inevitable threats.Name the enablersIdentify the governments, corporations, and financial institutions providing material or diplomatic cover for the occupation.Show how this complicity undermines their stated commitments to human rights and international law.Connect to global strugglesFrame Gaza as part of a worldwide resistance to settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and militarized capitalism.Build coalitions across movements to break the isolation that occupation depends upon.Everything Is PoliticalFrom a political-analyst perspective, the key insight is that this is not simply a geopolitical crisis—it is a crisis of narrative. If we accept the occupying power’s framing, we have already conceded the first battle. That is why the work of reframing—naming what is happening, connecting it to historical patterns, and centering the perspectives of the colonized—is not ancillary to the struggle; it is the struggle.In the end, Israel’s plan to seize Gaza is not about security—it is about sovereignty. Not Palestinian sovereignty, but the sovereignty of a state built on the denial of another people’s right to exist on their land. That is the truth the world must see clearly, and that is the truth we must continue to tell, relentlessly, until occupation becomes not a political fact but a historical memory."
}
,
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
]
}
