Month: April 2022

Marching in a recent Ithaca, New York, demonstration in solidarity with Palestine was one of the truly gratifying moments of my life as an internationalist. Organized by Cornell University undergraduates, the protest against Israel’s latest, massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and assault on Palestinians within and beyond Jerusalem proved that even in Ithaca — a sleepy college town in upstate New York — one finds some of the legions of civilians around the world…

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The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks,…

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Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was. Things move fast. So there’s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point…

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Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in a conflict that claimed nearly 250 lives. But the underlying status quo makes another round of fighting all but inevitable, and a fundamental solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems further away than ever. Worse, the long-running American solution for the problem — a US-mediated peace process aimed at creating a “two-state solution,” with an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank existing alongside…

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As the Israel-Gaza war raged, President Joe Biden made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there was a problem. Full-throated support for Israel among Democrats was waning, namely because of progressives. Among the clearest signs were moves in the House and Senate to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, a deal that only weeks earlier Democratic congressional aides said they hadn’t considered controversial or even noteworthy. On May 19, about nine…

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a choice to make. It was mid-May, and in a few days he’d travel to Europe for talks with allies on the Arctic and climate change, and to meet with his Russian counterpart ahead of a presidential-level summit in June. But a fight broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, threatening to explode into a larger, bloodier conflict. Looking at his agenda and the events in the Middle…

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In December 2019, Taiwan‘s government learned that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, China. Because of Taiwan’s proximity to China and the number of back-and-forth flights between the two countries, it was expected to have the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases worldwide. Instead, Taiwan has had one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world. Thanks in part to a sophisticated, digitized health care system and a mandatory two-week…

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Thousands of Haitians have been displaced amid escalating gang violence in the aftermath of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination on July 7. Many of them are expected to seek refuge in the US, but while the Biden administration has taken steps to welcome some, it has threatened others with the prospect of repatriation and shut the door on those arriving via the southern border. In addition to pledging millions of dollars in aid to Haiti,…

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After historic rainfall caused devastating flooding that killed more than 100 people in northwestern Europe and left more than 1,000 missing, officials and scientists aren’t being coy about the main culprit: climate change. In response to footage of the unfolding disaster, German Minister of the Environment Svenja Schulze announced, “These are the harbingers of climate change that have now arrived in Germany.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the flooding “a clear indication…

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The reason we should care about refugees is because they are people. But, unfortunately, for many people that is an insufficient moral claim. Even for the tens of thousands of Afghan people who put their lives in jeopardy working alongside the US military over the past 20 years. So let’s put it another way: Evidence shows that accepting refugees benefits the host country too. That hasn’t stopped some from arguing that refugees are somehow a…

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