What has Israel won exactly, aside from the haunting images of Palestinian youngsters in UN schools, homes and hospitals, mutilated, some silent and others screaming? This is no victory, but a brief illusion of one. As for the long-term repercussions, that is a whole new story. Israeli bombs over Lebanon in 1982 gave rise to Hezbollah, and its war of 2006 turned a small, resisting militant movement into a major powerbroker that will certainly help shape the future of Lebanon. Israel is now doing the same in Gaza. A victory, indeed.  FULL ARTICLE

When Gaza’s electricity is in working order, most Palestinians in the impoverished and overcrowded Strip huddle around their television screens. It’s neither “American Idol” nor “Dancing with the Stars” that brings them together. It’s the news.  FULL ARTICLE

Once again the US blamed Palestinians, and the Hamas “thugs” using words that defy logic, such as “Israel has the right to defend itself.” The statement remains as ludicrous as ever, for a country like Israel with an army that possesses the world’s most lethal weapons, including nuclear arms, cannot possibly feel threatened by an imprisoned population whose only defense mechanism are fertilizer-based homemade rockets. While Israel has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians in Gaza (one thousand on Saturday alone) a handful of Israelis have reportedly died as a direct result of the Palestinian rockets in years. Do numbers matter at all?  FULL ARTICLE

Since the toppling of President Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003, in a well orchestrated – Shakespearean even – series of events, until that fateful Sunday, few have dared to violate the carefully prepared, monotonous media appearances, which often end with a handshake, unconvincing smiles, and the mutter of disgruntled journalists for failing to land a last minute question. FULL ARTICLE

It’s incomprehensible that a region such as the Gaza Strip, so rich with history, so saturated with defiance, can be reduced to a few blurbs, sound bites and reductionist assumptions, convenient but deceptive, vacant of any relevant meaning, or even true analytical value.  The fact is that there is more to the Gaza Strip than 1.5 million hungry Palestinians, who are supposedly paying the price for Hamas’s militancy, or Israel’s ‘collective punishment’, which ever way the media decide to brand the problem.  FULL ARTICLE

The United States, Russia and China are sending a terrible message to the rest of the world by refusing to take part in the historic signing of a treaty that bans the production and use of cluster bombs. In a world that is plagued by war, military occupation and terrorism, the involvement of the great military powers in signing and ratifying the agreement would have signaled – if even symbolically – the willingness of these countries to spare civilians’ unjustifiable deaths and the lasting scars of war. FULL ARTICLE

More than five years have passed since the US occupied Iraq, leaving in its wake a tragedy that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destroyed civil society, thus allowing for the growth of one of the world’s most corrupt political regimes, and introducing the same terrorists to Iraq that the Bush administration vowed to defeat. Nothing has changed since then. The US attacked Iraq for its wealth and the strategic value of controlling such wealth. The Bush administration and their allies have tried many times to distract from this reality, using every political cover and charade imaginable. The facts remain the same, as does the remedy: The US must withdraw from Iraq without delay, allowing Iraqis to pick up the pieces and work out their differences as they have done for millennia. FULL ARTICLE