+ This week’s Israeli seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank is the largest land grab in the more than three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords. First, the lands were declared “closed military zones,” then the Netanyahu government reassigned them as “state […]
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As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.
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“You do a massacre in an isolated rural village where no one will ever know about it” Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia I’m not going to mince words. Prabowo Subianto must be one of the evilest men who ever stained this bumi manusia (earth of humankind), to cite the title of the marvellous, novel by […]
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In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
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In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
Defenders of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” had their hands full last month, particularly when it came to freedom of the press, a cornerstone of genuine democracies. On May 5, Al Jazeera reported that its offices in East Jerusalem — internationally recognized Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — were raided and shut down by Israeli police following the banning of the news network by the Israeli government. Al Jazeera continues to operate in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but is still barred from reporting or broadcasting in Israel proper. Then, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that Israeli authorities had confiscated AP’s equipment in Southern Israel, despite the news agency submitting to Israeli military censorship. AP’s equipment was eventually returned, but only after the United States’ government intervened on behalf of the US company. Across the border, in the Gaza Strip, the situation for journalists was much more dire. Among the more than 37,266 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide, as reported by Al Jazeera, were at least 103 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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“Why am I finding it difficult to give honest feedback to a poem when I don’t face the same problem with an academic essay?” The question comes from Keshav at the end of a workshop – why this difference, why this hesitation about the articulation of our response to the creative but not the critical? […]
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Anyone who knows Benjamin Netanyahu, and Joe Biden has for nearly 50 years, could see it coming. Sooner or later he was bound to bite the hand that feeds him. Bite it hard enough to draw blood, confident that not only could he get away with it but that he’d get more food as a […]
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After reading a recent update on the consequences of firing up the fossil fuels, a longtime correspondent told me, “I look at my grandchild, age 5, and think about her early death.” The rest of the story is that grandparents have been getting their own lives cut short in heatwaves which have, by the way, […]
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“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. “I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who […]
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Jonathan Cott has written about the meaning of those stories and rhymes we consider to be for children. He has also written about the childlike nature of certain rock and pop songs, especially certain songs by The Beatles and Donovan. He has interviewed artists, musicians, writers and others from Chinua Achebe to John Lennon and many more. His works refer to everyone from Carl Jung to Tony Bennett; Rollo May to the Old Testament; Greg Bateson to Gaston Bachelard. At times, his ability to connect seemingly disparate phenomena is mind-blowing. Other time, one nods their head knowingly at a reference that they might have often considered just to see it verified via Cott’s quotation and argument tying the two things together. Some might consider his considerations too fanciful while others might see them as so simply obvious they wonder why he bothered to even write them down.
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Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.
It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?
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Since 1897, Zionism has been the religious and political impetus behind what is now the nation-state of Israel, which, like the United States, is settled on the lives, land, and cultures of millions of Indigenous peoples. Although today’s Israel began as a refuge for European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Zionism long ago broke out of its moral constraints to become a formidable geopolitical force that demands study. Which is why, in late 2023 America, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism was created. And why, because the Institute is fundamentally antizionist, it’s under attack for antisemitism.
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Whoops, they did it again. Only this time it was no “tragic mistake.” There were no apologies. Indeed, the IDF claimed the bombing was a “precision strike.” The target? An UNRWA school in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in central Gaza, which was being used as a shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinian families. The victims: at least 40 killed, 14 of them children and 9 women. Another 75 were wounded, including 23 children and 18 women. The weapon? A US-made GBU 39, the same bombs used to kill 45 people at the Tel al-Sultan tent encampment outside Rafah last week.
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Image by Hany Osman.
As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well.
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Forgotten in the mainstream media’s coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza—if it was ever known by the correspondents—is the long history of Netanyahu and Likud in the creation and support of Hamas. Despite the flood of reports and commentaries in the mainstream media no mention is ever made of Israeli’s complicity in creating and […]
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On Tuesday, Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest, after charging that Biden’s State Department falsified a report on whether Israel was restricting the flow of humanitarian goods into Gaza. Gilbert had been one of the Department’s experts helping to assemble the NSM-20 report to Congress assessing Israel’s compliance with US law in its military operations in Gaza. But she charges the report was removed from the experts before it was completed and its conclusions adulterated by the leadership of the department.
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Image by Marcel Strauß.
As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.
For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.
Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out.
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Image by Ed Rampell.
From The New York Post to The Wall Street Journal, right-wing pundits have lined up to malign students across the United States who have rightfully criticized their schools for supporting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. As the genocide continues to unfold — claiming the lives of 35,562 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing — students, faculty and staff have brought overdue scrutiny to the complicity of their universities, whose endowments are altogether valued at more than $839 billion per the National Association of College and University Business Officers and invested extensively in the Israeli economy, including weapons manufacturers profiting directly from Palestinian death. Rather than accept that students oppose their tuition dollars being spent to kill Palestinians, right-wing pundits have instead accused them of being “paid protesters” in the employ of philanthropist George Soros.
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This was the week of rebukes for Israel: On Monday, the ICC requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, on Wednesday three European nations, Ireland, Spain and Norway, recognized Palestinian statehood and on Friday the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah, open the border crossings for humanitarian aid and allow international investigators into Gaza. Has the international community finally run out of patience with Israeli intransigence?
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When I was a young child, I would sometimes stay a weekend in the summer holidays with my cousins – who were of a similar age – on their farm. I grew up in north London: all concrete and cars, and fumes and arcades, and long black railings and grey school playgrounds, and rising tower blocks […]
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Image by Jon Tyson.
I am beyond tired of writing and reading about Trump, his minions Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and the evils they plan to inflict upon the world. Reading or watching the news is a daily exercise in dread, self-torment, and exhaustion. The return of spring notwithstanding, things are grim these days. The Trumpist menace seems of a piece with a far-right axis on the march in India, Russia, Israel, China, and Hungary. Of course, it’s futile to wring one’s hands and lament Trumpian aspirations to authoritarianism without taking concrete action to prevent them. Yet despite nearly eight years of experience confronting the Trumpian specter, the answer to the traditional, eminently practical leftist question “What is to be done?” remains elusive, and the sense of burnout and political defeat—with the concomitant, complicated welter of emotions —is a specter difficult to vanquish.
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Ilan Pappé is 70 years old. He’s Jewish. His parents fled persecution in Hitler’s Germany. He’s an Israeli and served in the IDF. He hasn’t been radicalized by TikTok. He is, in fact, one of Israel’s most celebrated historians. None of that stopped Pappé from being detained by Biden’s TSA in Detroit, interrogated by the agents from the Department of Homeland Security about whether he’s a supporter of Hamas, and having his phone data copied. This crackdown isn’t about protecting Jews or Israelis or preserving the exceptional nature of the Holocaust.
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USC Pro-Palestine encampment, YouTube screengrab.
The encampments have gone. Tall metal riot fences ring USC. Underpaid security hovers nervously at metal detectors. They paw through your bag when you enter, past the receipts, gum, phone, AirPods, and the overdue library book you never even opened. They’re searching for something. A tent? A Palestinian flag? A keffiyeh? A signed declaration of your commitment against genocide? What they are searching for is unclear, and it’s apparent they themselves don’t even know. The result is not the point; the display is. Like most college campuses, USC is invested in the performative, the circus act in all its summer and acrobatics and glory, something to distract us, for the moment, from the mundanity of reality. The mundanity that college campuses are really just another business: meaningless, archaic, and invested only in its commodification and profit.
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China has considerable appeal in the Pacific as it offers market and donation benefits that are unencumbered by the regulatory millstones of Western countries, which are also offering deals like Australia’s “Step Up” initiative and development aid, and the US “Pacific Partnership Strategy” on diplomatic engagement and security. These projects have bigger geopolitical agendas than aid projects and are mainly concerned with countering China and undermining Pacific Island autonomy by setting up a donor-recipient dynamic.
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By Friday, at least 110,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee Rafah, which is now under bombardment. Many of them have already been displaced two or three times. But all of them know nowhere is safe in Gaza now. There’s no refuge, no place free of bombs and tank shellings and sniper fire, no tent camp or temporary shelter with a reliable source of water or working toilets or beds or food, no mosque to pray in as death hovers all around.
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In November of last year, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) over its illegal approval of a wastewater disposal pipeline that would service STAMP. According to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, the USFWS approved the Genesee County Economic Development Center’s (GCEDC) construction of the 9.5-mile pipeline without conducting a sufficient environmental review and without a government-to-government consultation with the Nation—in direct violation of their sovereign rights.
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Had she not been murdered in Rafah protecting Palestinian homes from demolition, Rachel Corrie could have become the mother of today’s protesters on US campuses. They’re certainly the inheritors of her fierce moral spirit and unflinching courage…
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One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!
Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?
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It isn’t easy, being a liberal mainstream reporter these days, what with big news stories about “the Israel-Hamas war” passing you by, as you wrestle fecklessly with your two major journalistic goals: (a) to objectively document evil by exposing corruption; and (b) to keep your job and get everybody to like you. I’ve investigated pro-Palestine […]
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