Behind Trump’s headline diplomacy is a void: core questions on Israeli withdrawal, Hamas disarmament and Gaza’s future governance are postponed or outsourced. This isn’t a peace effort but conflict management, preserving the status quo and leaving Palestinians without a political horizon. — Jack Khoury, Haaretz
On February 7, 2024, a significant group of Israel-based civil society and human rights organizations issued this statement calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
This is a Discussion with Readers column on the character of the October 7 attack on Israel led by Hamas. “I’ve noticed that you keep referring to the Hamas Oct 7 attack as ‘gruesome,’” Meryl Lynn Lombardi wrote. “Why would this be needed in the face of the over 18,000 murdered Palestinians, nothing but genocide and ethnic cleansing. And the wholesale destruction of Gaza.” World-Outlook’s editors explain why they do not think that the attack by Hamas has become less gruesome because Israel — with its exponentially greater military power — has outdone Hamas in barbarity.
This is the second of a two-part essay that appears in the January/February 2024 edition of Against the Current. The author, Alan Wald, is an editor of that publication and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace since 2016. Wald begins his essay as a review of the recently published book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall. From that starting point, he addresses some of the most urgent political issues arising from Israel’s increasingly genocidal assault on Gaza in response to the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas. Wald’s article will be of interest to anyone opposed to the current horror unfolding each day in Gaza as well as those interested in learning more about the history of the issues posed today.
This is the first of a two-part essay that appears in the January/February 2024 edition of Against the Current. The author, Alan Wald, is an editor of that publication and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace since 2016. Wald begins his essay as a review of the recently published book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall. From that starting point, he addresses some of the most urgent political issues arising from Israel’s increasingly genocidal assault on Gaza in response to the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas. Wald’s article will be of interest to anyone opposed to the current horror unfolding each day in Gaza as well as those interested in learning more about the history of the issues posed today.
This is the first of a three-part series. It documents how Israel is carrying out increasingly genocidal attacks and a mass dispossession of Palestinians in Gaza — similar to the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe, that led to Israel’s founding as a colonial settler state.
This “Discussion with Our Readers” column takes up the Jewish question, the history of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination, and the reactionary character of Hamas.
This is an article published in Cuban daily Granma on October 17, 2023. It reports on the Cuban government’s condemnation of the bombing of the Al Ahli hospital in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 500 people. It also reports on the Cuban government’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Israel and the occupied territories.
One might reasonably ask, what is the value of reviewing a brief pamphlet, written over 50 years ago, that its publisher has now taken out of print? The answer is quite a lot — in light of the brutal October 7 Hamas attack that left over 1,000 Jews and others dead, and the murderous Israeli response that has targeted the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. Even the title may strike some as jarring today. The Israeli siege of Gaza, the cutoff of food, water, fuel and other necessities, accompanied by a brutal air war, with a ground invasion apparently imminent, pose the real danger of the survival of the 2+ million residents of Gaza as an immediate concern to humanity. Is the survival of the Jews also posed? This review of the pamphlet, “How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism,” delves into these questions.
This an essay by Fadi Abu Shammalah, the executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centers in the Gaza Strip, written from the the Khan Unis refugee camp in southern Gaza. We are publishing it because it graphically depicts the dire situation the population of the densely populated territory faces, which “threatens Palestinians there with death and destruction that can become genocidal,” as a World-Outlook editorial, titled “Oppose Israel’s War on Palestinians,” pointed out two days ago.
This article was first published June 8, 2021, by GroundUp, a news agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. World-Outlook is reproducing it by permission. The authors, Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, are both former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa.
May 28, 2021—The recent explosion of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and oppression, as well as to legalized discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel, has sparked some solidarity from Israeli Jews. While modest, this response points in the right direction.
May 21, 2021—For the first time in 16 years, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and for an end to Israeli occupation and oppression has exploded again into the center of world politics.