NB: A great scholar, a deeply humane person and an optimist of the spirit. This is sad news, but one must be grateful that she lived a long and fulfilling life. She and her husband Professor Chandler Davis were committed war resisters and anti-imperialist intellectuals. I salute them both; and offer my deepest condolences to… Read More Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94
The confusion has been encouraged over decades by propagandistic journalism…. reporting that refers to the hostility in Israel / Palestine as being between “Jews and Arabs”: a total misnomer… there are “Arab” members of the Jewish faith and Jews who oppose the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” of Israel… Unions should argue for the… Read More Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
There is something about the pro-Palestine anger that isn’t really about Palestine at all, but what the entire state of the Palestinians represents. The protests are increasingly an immersive cathartic state of mourning for all the losses that many have to reconcile themselves with; the weakness and lack of solidarity and compact between a large… Read More As Gaza is bombed and starved, the Arab world watches a relentless injustice
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?
War, we were learning slowly, is a terrible thing that turns men into beasts, women into zombies and children into scarred and introverted human beings for the rest of their lives… Mrinal Pande When in primary school, we did not know or care about the Partition. Why would neighbours suddenly begin resenting each other enough… Read More Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Really?
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
Raz Segal, an Israeli expert in modern genocide, calls Israel’s assault on Gaza a textbook case of “intent to commit genocide” and its rationalization of its violence a “shameful use” of the lessons of the Holocaust. Israeli state exceptionalism and comparisons of its Palestinians victims to “Nazis” are used to “justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow… Read More ‘A textbook case of genocide’: Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal decries Israel’s assault on Gaza
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Biden administration’s foreign policy is a mess and lacks any real consistency. This messiness was on full display in the president’s brief address on Thursday evening, a plea for Congressional funding of both the US struggle to get Russia back out of Ukraine and of support for the extremist… Read More Biden’s Historically Illiterate and Hypocritical Speech on Ukraine and Gaza
The Palestinians in Gaza are bearing the brunt of the Colonial Revenge Genocide. Half of Gaza consists of children, most born after 2006 when Hamas came to power in the Strip through elections insisted upon by George W. Bush. Large numbers of these children are set to be killed, and several hundred already have been,… Read More Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is the latest in a Long History of such Massacres
