Middle East

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The brief interlude of the Iranian rocket attack on Israel, in which almost all the projectiles were shot down or intercepted, did nothing to slow the Israeli assault on Gaza. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, no helpful foreign power is intercepting Israeli rockets fired at dense urban neighborhoods with deadly effect. […]

Arms Sales

Gun Culture, Israeli Style

Waging Nonviolence

Mitchell Plitnick ( Waging Nonviolence ) -Firearms are not uncommon in Israel. Armed security guards have long been a routine sight at shopping malls, clubs, and other large gathering spaces that present potential targets for attacks by militants. Police are heavily armed, and off-duty soldiers are constantly seen with their weapons in public as they […]

Israel/ Palestine

Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide

Tomdispatch

By Ellen Cantarow ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, […]

Featured

Netanyahu, Empowered by Biden’s Grant of Impunity, baits Iran into his genocidal Gaza War

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Despite all the hype about Iran’s largely symbolic barrage of over 200 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, unleashed on the thinly populated Negev Desert (where it was mainly Palestinian Bedouins who were put in danger), the military significance of this action was minimal. An Israeli base was hit at […]

Children

Gaza: Israel’s Imposed Starvation deadly for Children

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch – (Beirut, April 9, 2024) – Children in Gaza have been dying from starvation-related complications since the Israeli government began using starvation as a weapon of war, Human Rights Watch said today. Doctors and families in Gaza described children, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, suffering from severe malnutrition and dehydration, […]

Featured

Cracks in Biden’s Zionist Wall: Warren, Powers admit “Genocide, Famine” in Gaza as Israeli Atrocities Continue

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Cracks are showing in the Iron Wall of the Biden administration knee-jerk support for the far-right, extremist Israeli government’s total war on Gaza. US AID Administrator Samantha Power admitted that Israel’s campaign in Gaza has produced a famine. And Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) admitted that Israel is committing a genocide […]

Artificial Intelligence

Gaza Conflict: Israel using AI to identify Human Targets raises Fears Innocents are Targeted

The Conversation

By Elke Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London | – A report by Jerusalem-based investigative journalists published in +972 magazine finds that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying – and potentially misidentifying – tens of thousands of targets in Gaza. This suggests that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. […]

Israel

Are the United States and Israel heading toward a Divorce?

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Critics of Israel once occupied the fringes of the debate in the United States. Then, in 2007, J Street was founded as a loyal opposition to the kind of Israeli politics that received uncritical support from the U.S. mainstream. By organizing “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans” in favor of […]

Central Intelligence Agency

The Origins of the West’s Iran Crisis: Oil, Autocracy and Coup

Marc Martorell Junyent

Review of David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides […]