By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV Over 5,000 dead. 12,000 wounded. Millions forcibly displaced. Tragic figures from Gaza? Think again: Those are the casualty figures after six months of fighting in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), according to Amnesty International. In July, a mass grave was found containing the bodies… Read More The world is coming apart at the seams
NB: An excellent introduction to a complex issue. This interview with a scholar of Middle Eastern history is also worth listening to: Violence Is Bred by Occupation: Rashid Khalidi on Israel-Gaza. DS ROHINI HENSMAN On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a massive attack on Israeli territory, killing over 1300 people, many of… Read More Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues
On grasping human things in human terms Wilfred M. McClay Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modelled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because… Read More The burden of the humanities
Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right Daniel Callcut Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact… Read More Wrestling with relativism
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians…This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, Israeli PM, Menachem Begin compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin… in October 2015, Netanyahu took this weaponization to… Read More Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust
On 18 October, Brazil proposed a security council resolution calling not even for a ceasefire but merely for “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. The US, in a sole vote, vetoed it. In the US Congress, over a dozen House Democrats signed on to a ceasefire resolution put forward by Cori Bush, the Missouri congresswoman. The Democratic lawmaker… Read More Is the US about to blindly march into yet another catastrophic war?
Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute – MAS – Year: 2023 Today, MAS issued the first edition of the “Economic Summary of the War on Gaza”, monitoring the comprehensively destructive approach adopted by the Israeli military forces in their war on the Gaza Strip. It focuses on Israeli policies and practices that affect the basics of human… Read More Making Gaza Unliveable: Economic dimensions of the war on the Gaza Strip according to international humanitarian law
NB: I am not an admirer of the Saudi regime, which I believe to be a brutal pseudo-religious despotism; but I appreciate this statement by their former intelligence chief. I couldn’t agree with him more. On the West’s shameless hypocrisy and double standards; their irredeemable racism and practice of collective vengeance on subjugated peoples; the… Read More Saudi prince slams Hamas, Israel with India praise: ‘Prefer civil disobedience’
Emma Graham-Harrison, Julian Borger and Ruth Michaelson in Jerusalem For two weeks Israel has pounded Gaza with missiles, as it gathers tanks and troops for a ground invasion with one stated goal, to destroy Hamas. It is a deceptively simple target, one which sounds urgent and necessary to many in a nation profoundly traumatised by the massacres of 7 October,… Read More Peacekeepers, Fatah or anarchy: what would follow an Israeli ‘victory’ in Gaza?
George Monbiot We owe it to humanity to see the rules of war are observed – no matter how tough a test the Israel-Hamas conflict proves George Monbiot For almost 4,000 years, some governments have insisted that if wars must be fought, there should be rules. The first known code, by the Babylonian king Hammurabi,… Read More We owe it to humanity to see the rules of war are observed – no matter how tough a test the Israel-Hamas conflict proves
