Last week, I was writing about how sordid, sad and nauseating politics have become in Turkey, and elsewhere too.
A few days later, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, who has been sanctioned by the United States and subjected to relentless attacks by Israel, came to Oxford. Students began queuing an hour before her talk. The line grew and grew, like a beanstalk towards humanity, spilling out of the auditorium, down the stairs leading to it, and all the way to the entrance of the Middle East Centre building.
I have not seen such an outpouring of admiration and affection for a speaker at St Antony’s, Oxford’s most international, busy and public-facing college, in more than a decade. Perhaps Noura Erakat, the international lawyer and Palestinian activist, received a similarly warm reception a couple of years ago. At that talk, the Middle East Centre’s director, the historian Eugene Rogan, remark…
