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Baselines

Trump’s second term has begun with a whirlwind of iconoclastic pronouncements and an opening to Moscow that has sent European rulers into ideological crisis. An American-policy aide-mémoire offers baseline metrics for the ruptures—and continuities—ahead.

Taxonomies of Hunger

Death by hunger stalks millions in the Sahel and Horn of Africa—the upshot of West-led political and economic processes as much as climate change and war. Yet only a few instances can pass the demanding criteria for famine set by the humanitarian technocrats of the international bodies charged with its alleviation.

Leaving Zion

The rejection of Israel’s hegemony by a new generation of Jewish Americans—and their radical critique of its revenge war on Gaza—have altered the political-intellectual terrain in the US. Arielle Angel, editor in chief at Jewish Currents, discusses the journal’s role in this rupture with the Zionist establishment.

The Neck and The Sword

Rashid Khalidi and Tariq Ali discuss the political and intellectual history of the Palestinian national movement, its fraught entanglement with neighbouring Arab regimes, the realities of the ‘peace process’, Israel’s grip on the Biden Administration and the strategic calculations—or miscalculations—of Hamas.

Gaza and New York

America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?

Chosen Nations

Nick Burns on Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism. An Israeli conservative defends the differentials of national states against the universalizing ethic of US and EU imperialism.

Remaking Ramallah

From Arafat’s pharaonic tomb and Dubai-style luxury apartments to sweltering refugee camps and landless, beleaguered villages: greater Ramallah as synecdoche for post-Oslo Palestine—and triumph for Israel’s fragmentation strategy.

Lessons for Eavesdroppers

Nancy Hawker on Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic. Language as an instrument for the reproduction of the securitized state.

The House of Zion

The fate of the Palestinians and the fortunes of Israel, after fifty years of occupation, and American and European collusion with it. Realities behind the official tropes decorating a ‘two-state solution’, and hesitations of nascent debate over a single state in the territory once ruled as a mandate by Britain.

New Jerusalem

Dysfunctions and divisions of Israel’s largest city. Yonatan Mendel diagnoses the incoherent urbanism produced by its history of occupation and segregation, and by the vast, settlement-driven distension of its boundaries after 1967.

Post-post-Zionism?

The elisions and occlusions of three recent works on the character—past, present and future—of Israel and its occupation regime. Behind Deleuzian explorations of a ‘control system’ or reconstructions of ‘pioneer’ discourse, attempts to insulate Zionism and its founding myths from examination of their settler-colonial origins.

In Defence of Liberal Zionism

In a critical engagement with Gabriel Piterberg’s Returns of Zionism, Zeev Sternhell questions its account of Jewish nationalism’s origins and trajectory, offering a different picture rooted in the turbulent contingencies of 19th-century Europe and the war of 1947–49.

Settlers and their States

Responding to Sternhell, Gabriel Piterberg insists on Israel’s comparability to other settler-colonial projects—as well as on the specificities, historical and ideological, of the Zionist enterprise.

Converts to Colonizers?

Gabriel Piterberg on Shlomo Sand, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?. Heterodox attempt to refute Israel’s founding myths of historical exile.

Zion’s Rebel Daughter

Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.

Offshore Zionism

How a militarized alliance of state-subsidized software firms, real-estate developers and captive Orthodox labour is forging the path of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories. Call for a cyber community boycott to support Palestinian farmers and Israeli oppositionists in their fight against it.

Zionist Realities: Debating Israel–Palestine

A critical examination of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution. Israeli opinion, IDF interests in the Occupied Territories and brute facts of Palestinian defeat weighed against prospects for an equitable outcome. No alternative to the bantustans?

The Secular Solution: Debating Israel–Palestine

Responding to Peled, Tilley details the entrenchment—political, economic, ideological—of the Israeli settlement grid, to insist that the two-state solution is dead. A single de-confessionalized democracy as the only feasible option, in face of a morally and socially unsustainable status quo.

Palestinian Defiance

The Ramallah doctor and activist, general secretary of the Al Mubadara coalition, on struggles against the Israeli Occupation, from the popular movement of the first Intifada to the tactical errors of the second, via the disaster of Oslo. As Abu Mazen is levered into place, what alternatives can combat both IDF stranglehold and the flyblown Palestinian Authority?

Profits or Glory?

The Israeli business class’s recipe for a New Middle East—their leader-ship and high-tech sector, fertilized by Gulf oil money and low-cost Arab labour—was premised on a Palestinian settlement, bitterly opposed by an ethno-nationalist Jewish working class. How did Sharon break the deadlock?

On Ethnic Cleansing

Interview with the path-breaking historian of the Nakba, who bluntly defends the centrality of ethnic cleansing to the Zionist project. A glaring light on the realities of Israeli state-building, with or without the mask of ‘peace process’.

Mizrahi Wanderings

Nancy Hawker on Samir Naqqash, Shlomo Alkurdi wa ana wa alzaman. Conditions of exile, from Sablakh, Baghdad and Tehran to Tel Aviv, in the latest fiction from one of Israel’s foremost Arab-language novelists.

Remembering Edward Said

The physical and moral courage of a unique writer, and fighter—leading Arab intellectual, unconforming cultural theorist, champion of the Palestinian cause in the heartland of Israeli overseas power.

From Barak to the Road Map

Baruch Kimmerling on Ran Edelist, Ehud Barak: Fighting the Demons. Israel’s killer general and his legacy, as Camp David morphs into the Road Map.

Hannah Arendt in Tel Aviv

Gabriel Piterberg on Idith Zertal, Death and the Nation. The uses of the Shoah in the official construction of memory in Israel, amid the specif icities of time in the history of Zionism.

Lessons in Urbicide

Slicing through the alleys and markets of the West Bank, Israeli bulldozers as the cutting edge of today’s counter-insurgency tactics—the destruction of houses, camps and townships as condition of political and ethnic sweeps.

Postcards from Palestine

Gabriel Piterberg on Daniel Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation. Imaginations of the Dome of the Rock and Wailing Wall under the British Mandate, and their political decontextualization today.

Ramallah Days

Social tensions explode on the main streets of Arafat’s seat of power as the Palestinian Authority elite turns its back on the deprivations of the refugees. The pressure-cooker of the West Bank under Israeli terror.

The Desertions of Arafat

As pressures mount upon the Palestinians and Israel continues its drive to put down the second Intifada, what kind of leadership does the PNA provide? Excoriating its irresponsibility and corruption, Edward Said issues a call for Arafat’s departure.

Erasing the Palestinians

How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing.

Israel’s Peace Camp

An oppositional intelligentsia at one with officialdom—so long as it wears the colours of Labour. An Israeli poet looks at the sanctimonies and sycophancies of a peace camp for foreign consumption.

Redividing Palestine?

Schemes for partition of the Holy Land have always been the fruit of manipulation and violence. What would an equitable division of the area between rival communities look like?

Scurrying Towards Bethlehem

Behind the second Intifada lies a century of conflict in Palestine. What are its roots, and what are its prospects? The Oslo Accords, the Israeli landscape and the Arab world.

America’s Last Taboo

The Palestinian uprising and the blackout of its human and geographical realities by the US media. Edward Said looks at the power of the Zionist lobby in American public life, and warns of the fatal blindness of the PLO and Arab world towards it.

The Education of Edward Said

Michael Gilsenan on Edward Said, Out of Place. At the unsettled origins of Orientalism—memoirs of gilded dispossession in a colonial Middle East.

Securing Occupation: The Real Meaning of the Wye River Memorandum

“As a formal document, the Wye River Memorandum breaks no new ground.Its stated purpose is merely to reaffirm and ‘facilitate implementation’ of ‘prior agreements’.Nonetheless, the Memorandum illuminates the process set in motion at Oslo and dispels lingering illusions.In these remarks, I will first sketch the crucial historical background, . . .” read more

Whither the 'Peace Process'?

“Since the signing of the September 1993 Oslo I agreement, the Israel-Palestine ‘peace process’ has been punctuated by a series of dramatic developments. The purpose of this article is to assess their significance. I will first examine the September 1995 Oslo II agreement, the definitive document for the . . .” read more

On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Salman Rushdie

“Salman Rushdie: The purpose of this evening is to talk about Edward’s new book, After the Last Sky. First I would like briefly to introduce Edward—although, judging by the number of people who have come and are unable to get in, that may hardly be necessary. For . . .” read more

Introduction to Kannafani

“World attention was riveted on the Palestinian liberation movement in September 1970 when the hijacking of four jet-planes and the holding of their passengers as hostages was shortly followed by the outbreak of civil war in Jordan, These developments gave the Palestinian struggle greater publicity than it had . . .” read more

On the PFLP and the September Crisis

“The Popular Front is best known in the non-Arab world for its hijackings in September 1970. A lot of criticisms of the hijackings have been made. Some of these are bourgeois criticisms. But there are two others which I would like to pose here. The first criticism has . . .” read more

The Class Nature of Israeli Society

“Israeli society, like all other class societies, contains conflicting social interests—class interests which give rise to an internal class struggle. Yet Israeli society as a whole has been engaged, for the last fifty years, in a continuous external conflict: the conflict between Zionism and the Arab world, particularly . . .” read more

The Palestine Problem: Zionism and Imperialism in the Middle East

“The Palestinian struggle can only be understood within the wider framework of the revolution in the Middle East as a whole, an area which is closely linked to the world imperialist system. It has been the fate of this part of the world to suffer from not one, . . .” read more

Comment on Trabulsi

“Anyone who has written an article as rich in information and insight as Fawwaz Trabulsi earns the reader’s gratitude. The only reason for the following critical comments is that the goal the author set himself, that of providing a ‘Marxist-Leninist framework’ for understanding the Palestine liberation struggle, is . . .” read more

On the Israeli-Arab War

“As an introduction, could you sum up your general view of the Israeli-Arab war?” read more