Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'Gaza'
Daniel has returned home. He had felt a lump in his stomach even before stepping on the plane in Mumbai. He felt sick when he saw all the young boys and girls checking everyone’s identity at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.
Mom, dad, his older sister and younger b...
Have you heard much lately about the 1.5 million Palestinians illegally imprisoned by the Israeli government in the world’s largest open-air Gulag? Their dire living conditions, worsened by a selective Israeli siege limiting the importation of necessities of life – me...
On Sunday it was reported that a young boy had been shot on farmland near the Rafah crossing. The details were unclear. Several colleagues and I traveled to Rafah to find out what happened. After making several inquiries, we entered a Bedouin area several hundred meters n...
Gaza.
I have read several accounts over the last few days of how life in Southern Israel has become unbearable for the people living there. In retaliation for the latest provocation by Israel over 200 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. 11 people wer...
“What have you learned in school today, my son?”
“There was no school today. There is an emergency!”
“And what have you learned from that, my son?”
ACTUALLY, QUITE a lot.
This week’s “round”, as the army likes to call it, foll...
There are few crimes more despicable than stealing your neighbour’s water, and polluting what’s left, then watching him and his children suffer thirst, disease and ruin. Most of us would want nothing to do with the perpetrators of such evil.
British Wat...
The Third Annual BDS Conference opened 17 December at Hebron’s Children’s Happiness Centre, “to expand Palestinian civil society’s active implementation of BDS that is deeply rooted in the Palestinian struggle.” European BNC coordinator Michael Deas affirmed, ...
Amman.
It’s exactly three years ago that the ins and outs of the overpopulated strip were sealed off by the Israeli military just as tightly as the entire “International Community” shut its eyes and ambivalently turned its back on a horrifying massac...
Another mission accomplished, or so it seems. Israeli navy ships have managed to thwart yet another civil society ‘provocation’ (as described by a spokesman for the Israel Embassy in Dublin, Irish Times, November 4).
Thus the 27 activists from nine countries ab...
West Bank.
In the immediate aftermath of the illegal capture of the Freedom Waves flotillas, Israel’s public image has been tarnished, as reports of violence at sea surface to counteract its claims of a peaceful takeover, and as human rights cyber-resist...
Two boats full of courageous passengers were on their way to Gaza when they were intercepted on Friday, November 4, by the Israeli military in international waters. We call the passengers courageous because they sailed from Turkey on November 2 with the knowledge that at ...
Does Israel really care for its returned son, or was he used as a political pawn? As a young soldier returns home to assuage the “righteous indignation” of a nation state, no longer “sensitive [even] to its image of democracy”, one can only agonise...
Alice Walker is Pulitzer Prize winning poet, author and activist. She participated recently in the U.S. Boat to Gaza, which was a part of the Freedom Flotilla, to break the Israeli embargo on the Gaza Strip.
Last year, a flotilla was attacked by Israeli commandos a...
It’s the show that time and the world forgot. It’s called the Occupation and it’s now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day. Diploma...
Among the many shameful and cowardly things that President Barack Obama has and has not done, few can rival his complete unwillingness to express outrage at the Israeli military’s murder of a young American teen executed at close range during the Israeli Defense (sic) F...
Almost all the factual findings, as well as the legal analysis and conclusions of the recently leaked UN Secretary General’s Panel of Inquiry into the “Flotilla Incident” on May 31, 2010 (Palmer/Uribe Panel) directly contradict those of an earlier UN report of the H...
On 2 September Turkey expelled its Israeli ambassador as a first response to Israel’s refusal to apologise for the killing last year of nine Turkish activists by Israeli commandos on a ship trying to breach its naval blockade on Gaza.
The sanction followed th...
A harbor near Athens, aboard the US Audacity of Hope.
July 1, 2011.
The sky is azure blue, not a cloud in sight, a gentle breeze caresses us, the 37 passengers, four crew and 10-12 journalists aboard, the waters of the Aegean sea gently roc...
Had we paid more attention to Sinai in the past 30 years, we wouldn’t be at our wits’ end now, trying to make head or tail of the current situation.
How many years ago did Israel withdraw from Sinai? The answer is: more than we needed to develop the ent...
Israeli writer Uri Avnery recently wrote an article entitled ‘How Godly Are Thy Tents?’, which began with the words, “First of all, a warning.” The reference was made to the tent cities that have sprung up across the country by middle class Israelis demanding chan...
He looks at the camera with bright eyes and the beginning of a smile, wearing a miniature dark blue zipper sweatshirt, the cuffs folded up a bit to make it fit.
I can imagine his mother dressing him that morning, making sure he would be warm enough. I wonder if she...
SINCE THE beginning of the conflict, the extremists of both sides have always played into each other’s hands. The cooperation between them was always much more effective than the ties between the corresponding peace activists.
“Can two walk together, except the...
Just exactly what influence Omar “The Secret Minister” Suleiman retains over the military junta that rules Egypt is a question of utmost importance for those who live on the banks of the Nile River. With a resume including 20 years as head of Egyptian Intellig...
I remember how exhilarated I felt when I was told I was old enough to fast for the month of Ramadan. My feelings had little to do with abstention from food and drink between dawn and sunset each day. For a child, there is little joy in that. The meaning and implications ...
Gaza.
“Complimentary tour of the Rafah tunnels.” I received this offer a few weeks after arriving in Gaza. In a conversation I was having with my colleague, Joe Catron, it came up that a friend of ours from Gaza City had given an open invitatio...