Maha Nassar provides historical context to the current violence in the densely populated and besieged enclave.   The focus of the conflict in the Middle East has again returned to the Gaza Strip, with Israel’s defense minister ordering a “complete siege” of the Palestinian enclave. Israel’s military operation, which involves extensive bombing of residences, follows a surprise attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas militants …

Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance adamaged by an Israeli airstrike, Oct. 7. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0) As Biden pledges military assistance to Israel and anti-Palestine rhetoric intensifies on Capitol Hill, Jewish Voice for Peace is calling on Americans to pressure lawmakers to help end the air strikes on Gaza. The human rights group Jewish Voice for …

Reoccupying Gaza and finishing off just one Palestinian armed group will not change the strategic reality of the Middle East, as the Israeli government has vowed to do By David Hearst A Palestinian woman comforts her children as they wait at the hospital to be checked in the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on 12 October 2023 …

Israel’s Massive Intelligence Failure The origins of Israel’s intelligence failure on the Hamas attacks can be traced to the decision to rely on AI instead of the contrarian analysis born of the earlier intelligence failure of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As the scope and scale of the Hamas surprise attack on Israel becomes clearer, one question emerges more than …

I was nine years old (1948) when there was HUGE celebration in the Bronx at founding of the state of Israel. No one told me that Arabs had lived on that land for centuries and were displaced by force, tens of thousands of them crammed into postage-stamp-size Gaza, now host to two million Palestinians. The Religious ‘Justification’: Zionist Jews, like the …

If there’s blood on anyone’s hands it’s on those who say “Israel has a right to defend itself”