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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 'Israel'
On May 15, the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, its Arab citizens observed a day of mourning for the victims of the Naqba (“catastrophe”) – the mass exodus of half the Palestinian people from the territory which became Israel.
Like every ye...
Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran.
The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun....
One of South Africa’s largest tertiary institutions, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, is a site of multiple controversies, but a near-disaster on Monday deserves more reflection because it points us in a positive direction: away from allying with the Is...
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...
During the middle of May, Zionists celebrate an event that they call the War of Independence.
The same occasion is observed by Palestinians, who call it al-Nakba, meaning the catastrophe, which began with the internal displacement of some 200,000 Palestinians, reac...
Rabin Square in Tel Aviv has seen many demonstrations, but none quite like last Saturday’s.
It has nothing to do with the event which gave the square its name: the huge rally for peace at the end of which Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. It was different in every ...
In the May 3 edition of the International Herald Tribune (but not its domestic sister publication, The New York Times), Raja Shehadeh wrote a personal observation resulting from his experience as a human rights worker in Palestine. Here are two paragraphs from his...
With the 45th anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967 coming early next month, With the 45th anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967 coming early next month, pro-Israel pundits like syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer are again promoti...
A surplus of mediators have been around all the time, including the heavy weight Quartet of the UN, U.S., EU and Russia, as well as heaps of terms of reference of UNSC resolutions, bilateral signed accords and “roadmaps,” in addition to marathon bilateral talks that h...
Be’er-Sheva, Israel.
I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of...
There has always been something stagey and contrived about Israel’s blood-curdling declarations that it is going to bomb Iran, but as a strategy it has worked astonishingly well, at home and abroad. Benjamin Netanyahu has been expert at manipulating Israelis’ ...
THE MASTER magician has drawn another rabbit from his top hat. A real and very lively rabbit.
He has confounded everybody, including the leaders of all parties, the top political pundits and his own cabinet ministers.
He has also shown that in politics, ever...
We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disar...
Israel is currently experiencing the kind of turmoil that may or may not affect its political hierarchy following the next general election. However, there is little reason to believe that any major transformations in the Israeli political landscape could be of benefit to...
Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time. Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2...
Israelis barely had time to absorb the news that they were heading into a summer election when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday pulled the rug from underneath the charade. Rancourous early electioneering had provided cover for a secret agreement between Netanya...
Ramallah.
Following the examples of Khader Adnan and Hana Shalabi, 1,500 Palestinian prisoners have joined a mass hunger strike campaign inside Israeli military prisons. They are calling for an immediate termination of the policy of administrative detentio...
Take this test to find out how much you know about the gradual shift in Israeli political thought over the decades.
Not long after Israel celebrated its 64th Independence Day on April 26, a friend prepared a quiz of sorts. She read out loud political quotes to abou...
GENERALS AND secret police chiefs get together for an attack on the politicians.
In some countries, they arrest the president, occupy government offices and TV stations and annul the constitution. They then publish Communique No. 1, explaining the dire need to save...
[Editors' Note: This piece by Nobel Peace prize winner Mairead Maguire was submitted to the New York Times. They decline to publish it.]
In 2009 Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Liebermann ordered all foreign missions to distribute a 1941 photograph of ...
Israel’s colonization policies are entering an alarming new phase, comparable in historic magnitude to the original plans to colonize Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem following the war of 1967.
On April 24, an Israeli ministerial committee approved three se...
In faraway, frozen Finland – otherwise known as the infirmary of Ramle Prison – the lives of four detainees who have been on a hunger strike for at least 60 days hang in the balance. Nearly 2,000 inmates in the Nafha, Ashkelon, Gilboa and other prisons around ...
Beirut.
The Egyptian people are demanding the return of their sovereignty. According to recent opinion surveys they believe it was partially ceded to Israel by the two post-Nasser dictators, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, at the behest of American admin...
A few days ago, the New York Times ran the following ad in its print edition:
...
I AM an Optimist. Period.
No ifs. No buts. No perhapses.
Maybe it’s genetic. My father was an optimist. Even when, at the age of 45, he had to flee his native Germany to a primitive little country in the Middle East, his spirits remained high. Though he ...