Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Ramzy Baroud
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Irremediable defeat: Israel’s other unwinnable war
Historically, wars tend to unite Israelis, but not any more. It’s not that Israelis do not agree with Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims; they simply do not believe that the prime minister is the man who can win this supposedly existential fight. Netanyahu’s war remains unwinnable simply because wars of liberation,...
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Beyond Political Saviors: The Biden-Trump Quandary
In his 2023 State of the Union address, US President Joe Biden, now 81, made lofty promises about tackling inflation, fighting climate change, reforming immigration policies and working for “more freedom, more dignity and more peace”. The implicit, but always obvious, message that Biden wanted to convey is that only...
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Complicit in genocide: Where Israel gets its weapons from
Over 9,000 Palestinian women have been killed since the start of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Mothers have been the largest civilian population group killed by the occupation state, at an average of 37 per day since 7 October. These statistics, from the Palestinian Health Ministry...
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On keffiyehs and watermelons: the meaning of Palestinian symbols
Those who criticise Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation, whether resistance is armed or otherwise, have little understanding of its psychological ramifications, such as a sense of collective empowerment, honour and hope. However, resistance does not simply mean a rifle or a rocket launcher. They are but two of...
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US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza
When a country’s foreign policy as large and significant as that of the United States is governed by a case of cognitive dissonance, terrible things happen. These terrible things are, in fact, already happening in the Gaza Strip, where well over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded or are...
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Words vs. action: A supplication for Gaza, and humanity
‘All we can do for Gaza is just offer our Du’a.” This is an oft-repeated statement by enraged Arabs and Muslims who feel helpless before the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But is it true that only invocations and supplications are possible, as tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza...
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On solidarity and Kushner’s shame: How Gaza defeated US stratagem, again
Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom. In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’,...
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To save Israel: The US is destroying the international system it once constructed
In a conversation in 2020 with Princeton Professor Emeritus, Richard Falk, he told me that historically, colonised nations that have won the legitimacy war have always won their freedom. Palestine is unlikely to be the exception. The Gaza war, however, is confronting the world with an unprecedented challenge, specifically to...
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Hypocrisy and genocide: how Gaza has exposed the West like never before
The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West. From the day that the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza began, following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its Western allies supposedly...
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United against Israel: Time to end the world’s longest occupation
Left to its own devices, Israel would never grant Palestinians their freedom. In the past, though, some people, whether in ignorance or otherwise, claimed that peace in Palestine can only be achieved through “unconditional negotiations”. This mantra was also championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he cared...
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Netanyahu’s last battle promises no victory, just slaughter in Rafah
The Palestinian city of Rafah is not only older than Israel, it is also as old as civilisation itself. Rafah has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern. As...
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The ‘two-state solution’ is a distraction; the problem is Zionism
The problem in Palestine-Israel is not the absence of a Palestinian state, but Zionism. What is the use of a Palestinian state, if the racist, exclusivist ideology of Zionism continues to define Israel, and impose that definition on the Palestinians? This ideology calls for the racial purity and dominance of...
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‘Breaking the mould’: How Facebook became the NYT of the digital age
“If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long,” famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October 1997. The essay, “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream”, appeared before social media took off to the point that it became...
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The unrepentant West: Olaf Scholz and the right to commit genocide in Gaza
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Washington on an official visit on 8 February aimed at working jointly with the United States to make “sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself.” If such a statement was made soon after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, the...
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Looking at the ‘day after’ the Gaza genocide, the PA has an unpromising future
In the first phase of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, it was clear that the Palestinian Authority was caught off guard. Its leadership neither anticipated that the Gaza Resistance would carry out such an operation as Al-Aqsa Flood, nor did they expect that the Israeli war...
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Breaching the ‘Iron Wall’: How Palestinians crushed Jabotinsky's century-old ideas
It seemed strange, if not out of context, when Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore”. Feiglin’s comments were made on 25 October, less than three weeks following the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Flood operation and the genocidal Israeli war which followed. The...
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What keeps Palestinians strong? History, olive trees and football
Despite the horrific war in Gaza and the unprecedented number of casualties, millions of Palestinians in the Middle East and around the world took a brief respite from their collective pain to watch their national football team make history in Doha. The Palestinian team, also known as Fada’ii — the...
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Europe exposed: Is the EU a direct partner in the Israeli genocide in Gaza?
Europe stayed silent when Israel began pounding the besieged Gaza Strip with the kind of ferocity that could only lead to a genocide. In fact, Europe remained silent when the word ‘genocide’ quickly replaced the earlier reference to the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ which starting on 7 October. Those familiar with Europe’s...
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The genocide in Gaza is an opportunity for Ben-Gvir to get what he wants in the West Bank
If what is currently happening in the Israeli-occupied West Bank took place before 7 October, our attention would have been fixated completely on that part of Palestine. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, has distracted us from the important events underway in the West Bank, which is now...
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John Pilger was a friend of Palestine and all other oppressed people
The only time that I met John Pilger in person was in 2018. I was invited to deliver a speech at the Parliament of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Among the large crowd were many that I knew and respected: a former foreign minister, socially conscious MPs, morally...
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After 100 days and counting, legendary Palestinian resistance will be Netanyahu’s downfall
Rule number one in the “law of holes” is that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Rule number two is that if you are not digging, you are still in a hole. These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days since...
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From Gaza to Congo: Zionism and the unlearned history of genocide
Thousands of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses would probably fail to explain. On 3 January, though, it was revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to...
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As a genocidal maniac, what is Netanyahu’s ultimate goal in the Middle East?
This article was written shortly before Israel assassinated the Deputy Head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Saleh Al-Arouri, in Beirut on 2 January. The assassination is a further illustration of the Israeli government’s desire to escape the consequences of its disastrous war in Gaza, by igniting a regional conflict. The...
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The US will one day pay the price for its unquestioned support for Israel
The Czech writer Franz Kafka said famously, “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.” The same principle, I believe, applies to other powerful feelings, including resentment, hate, anger, even rage. American officials should know this well as...