Weaponized Bananas

Which side were you on in the allergy wars? Over at UCLA, the pro-Palestine protesters have reached peak Angeleno zoomer by figuring out how to be victimized by bananas.

According to Twitter user Linda Mamoun (with video footage to back it up): "There was a protestor in the liberated zone…with a potentially fatal banana allergy. Counterprotestors invaded the encampment and saw all the no bananas warnings. The next day they came back waving bananas like settlers waving machine guns & smeared bananas everywhere."

Yes, just like settlers!

Meanwhile, over on the East Coast, the Columbia protesters have decided that actually they are the ones who need "humanitarian aid."

"They're obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here," said one spokesperson-protester. "Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean, it's crazy to say it because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for."

The protester appears to be referring to the fact that the university has limited meal-hall access and that the protesters were occupying and barricading Hamilton Hall, wanting assurances that the college would not stop deliveries of food from entering.

Crackdown: Now, it's effectively a non-issue: Dozens of protesters were arrested last night as New York Police Department officers entered the building at around 9:30 p.m., called in by President Minouche Shafik. "We regret that protesters have chosen to escalate the situation through their actions," wrote Shafik in a statement. "After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized and blockaded, we were left with no choice."

Shafik also noted, interestingly, that "the group that broke into and occupied the building is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university."

Meanwhile, police cracked down on other protests across the country—like one at Washington University in St. Louis—sometimes using what looks like excessive force. In St. Louis, reports emerged of police beating up a professor from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, named Steve Tamari; Tamari reportedly suffered injuries including a broken hand and ribs.

It's very difficult to sort out all the different threads of this loose campus movement, along with the very different responses from university administrators and local law enforcement. For anyone inclined to forget: speech should be given a wide berth (even that which is ugly and offensive). Campus speech restrictions—to the extent that they ought to be permitted at all—should be content-neutral, a quite legitimate case can be made that tent cities are not permitted by university policies, but nobody should cheer agents of the state exerting more force than is absolutely necessary to break it all up.

Updates from the actual war zone: Hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas keep breaking down.

The U.S. is trying to hastily broker yet another deal as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made sounds indicating that the military will invade Rafah, an area in southern Gaza where some 1 million Palestinians—plus an unknown quantity of Hamas terrorists, in the thousands—are sheltering.

But mediators—Americans, Egyptians, and Qataris—"worry that Hamas appears willing to sacrifice even more Palestinian civilians," according to The New York Times. "[Hamas] officials believe that the deaths in Gaza erode support for Israel around the world." As a result, they're not willing to do very much to prevent an invasion of Rafah and are also resistant to more hostage-for-prisoners deals, including one offered by Israel that would have been imbalanced in Hamas' favor.

Hamas has rejected previous offers, claiming that they cannot meet Israel's demand for 40 living hostages who are female, sick, or elderly, leading many to speculate that Hamas has killed more of the hostages than previously thought. "Throughout the months of negotiations since the last ceasefire Israel has repeatedly asked for a list of the hostages and their conditions," reports CNN. "Hamas has argued that it needs a break in the fighting to be able to track and gather down the hostages, the same argument it made in November before a week-long pause that broke down after Hamas failed to deliver more hostages."

Of the roughly 250 hostages taken on October 7, some 129 are still being held by Hamas, with 33 of those believed to be dead.

One of the Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, appears to be at least responsible in part for the sinking of deals. He has reportedly been negotiating while surrounded by 15 hostages, whom he uses as human shields to prevent Israel from taking him out. (I wonder if he's banana-vulnerable; have we tried that yet?)

Demands for a ceasefire from pro-Palestine activists in the U.S. are fine and good, but they look hollow when it's Hamas that's refusing to agree to a ceasefire or a plan to return the hostages.

Scenes from New York: A meta take that's pretty much spot-on (though that one guy's crop top is beautiful, at least in his own imagination).

QUICK HITS

• "Since 2019, prices for many types of consumer purchases in the U.S. have shot up," reports The Atlantic's Amanda Mull. "On average, goods cost nearly 20 percent more than they did before the pandemic."

• A good point, raised by Just Asking Questions guest Peter Moskos:

• Elon Musk went to China to try to convince regulators to approve his self-driving cars.

• "Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced on Tuesday to four months in prison, a much lighter penalty than other crypto executives have faced since the industry imploded in 2022," reports The New York Times.

• Good observation:

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