Middle East

Tens of Thousands of Israelis Demonstrate against Netanyahu, Demand Hostage Exchange Deal, New Elections

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that tens of thousands of Israelis rallied Saturday night against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and other cities, including Jerusalem, Beersheba and Haifa. The protesters were responding in part to dueling news releases about the possibility of a breakthrough […]

Displaced and Refugees

Why Scapegoating the UN Relief and Works Agency — Which Helps Palestinians — Must Stop

Al-Shabaka

( Al-Shabakah ) – Shatha Abdulsamad· Informed by the understanding that Palestinian displacement is a combined effect of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and the creation of the State of Israel, to which the UN bore responsibility, the international community recognized that the question of Palestine and the plight of Palestinians refugees warranted special […]

Children

Netanyahu as Lord of the Flies: He has wounded, sickened or starved all 600K Palestinian Children in Rafah

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Catherine Russell, the head of UNICEF, said this week that of the 600,000 children in Rafah, southern Gaza, all of them are either injured, or sick, or malnourished. Much of the Gaza population has been forced south to Rafah by the Israeli military, which had promised them it was a […]

Dissent

Columbia Students are Sick at Heart, just as we were in ’68

Waging Nonviolence

Mark Rudd ( Waging Nonviolence ) – What is the ethical response to witnessing a great moral crime? Turn away and allow oneself to be distracted? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or acknowledge the crime for what it is, and take some sort of action to try to stop it? Students at Columbia in 1968 understood […]

Donald Trump

Top Ways MAGA and Right Wing Zionism Converge, and Why Smotrich is Embracing Trump

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Going back to the late nineteenth century, Zionism has had a complex and storied history, and there have been many strains of the ideology. Some early Zionists did not insist on colonizing Palestine, while others did (and colonizing it was the word they used). All agreed that the Jewish religion […]

Israel/ Palestine

Ukraine, Israel, and the Incoherence of U.S. Foreign Policy

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The process of crafting congressional legislation is often likened to sausage-making. Best not to look behind the scenes at the mechanics of the process, which is a bloody mess. But the analogy is not apt. Sure, sausage-making can be ugly. The end product, however, is presentable and usually […]

Education

The Right is weaponizing Antisemitism to Distract from Israel’s Atrocities and Smear Campus Protests

Tomdispatch

By Helen Benedict ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway. Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in […]

Dissent

I was Arrested at Columbia University in 1968: I am Cheering on the Students of Today

Bob Stein

New York (Special to Informed Comment) – Earlier this week Columbia University started suspending the students who refused to leave the encampment they built to protest Columbia’s support of Israel’s war against Palestinians. The students had responded by occupying Hamilton Hall, mirroring the action that initiated the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War which ended […]

Featured

This is Why the Students are Protesting: Eyes on Israel’s Killing Fields in Gaza

Janelle Carlson

Bayreuth, Germany (Special to Informed Comment- Feature) – Lisa Hajjar has compared what is happening in Gaza to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Yet where she argues that “Unlike the Khmer Rouge, the Israeli government’s exterminationist policy is not fueled by an ideological vision to remake Gaza anew. Total destruction is the goal.” As has […]