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Jewish Voice For Peace brings you an evening with renowned historian and author Rashid Khalidi in conversation with Katie Halper. Dr. Khalidi will discuss current events in Palestine, his seminal, best-seller book “The 100 Years War on Palestine,” student protests and his decision to retire from Columbia University.

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by VIJAY PRASHAD

The road to Aracataca in northern Colombia runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, and if you travel there in the spring or the autumn, your car will be followed by thousands of yellow butterflies. These phoebis philea flutter along Route 45: a motorway lined with red flowers which leads to the birthplace of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose magnificent Cien años de soledad (1967) remains the most famous literary depiction of this corner of the world. Founded in 1912, Aracataca is a town that seems weighed down by the past. The Zona Bananera in which it sits was long dominated by the United Fruit Company (UFC), which came to the area in the early twentieth century and whose ruined buildings – remnants of a bloody and contested history – are still standing.

When Garcia Márquez was a young boy, he would visit a banana plantation named Yoknapatawpha. The name comes from the Chickasaw word meaning ‘split land’, and was used by William Faulkner for the fictional county in Mississippi where many of his novels are set. Under Faulkner’s influence, Garcia Márquez decided to call his own fictional town Macondo, which is the Bantu word for banana and was the name of another nearby plantation. On my visit to Aracataca on a warm day in July, I can see activity in one place only: the street where Garcia Márquez, or Gabo as he was affectionately known, grew up. Today, the main pride of a city sucked dry by United Fruit is the man who wrote much about its ugliness.

The house where the young Gabo lived with his maternal grandparents was later sold, destroyed, rebuilt, burnt down and then rebuilt again by Garcia Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha Pardo, who tried to remake it exactly as it was during his childhood. By that time, Garcia Márquez had already turned the home into a literary artefact: the items in Cien años’s Buendia household – furniture, nicknacks, books – were all based on his early recollections. In the front garden, a group of schoolchildren are getting a tour. A man dressed in white with yellow butterflies pinned to his shirt is doing a dramatic reading from Cien años. He has a powerful voice, at odds with the gentleness of Garcia Márquez’s prose, and his audience are mesmerised.

He is standing under a large banyan tree, and behind him there is a small hut that once housed two servants of the Garcia Márquez family who came from the Wayuu community of the Guajiros peninsula. They slept on a hammock above a dirt floor. If it rained heavily, they would have to rush to the veranda while the hut was flooded. Garcia Márquez was not evasive about their presence in his childhood – a legacy of Spanish colonialism, which subjugated the people of the hemisphere and reduced them to cheap labour for the criollo settler class from which he came. In his 1957 short story ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo’, the Wayuu servants try to save their furniture from the incessant downpour but find themselves ‘defeated and impotent against the disturbance of nature’, experiencing ‘the cruelty of their frustrated rebellion’. In Cien años, the servants are Visitación and Cataure: the characters who first identify the plague of insomnia – a disease that causes the residents to gradually lose their collective memory.  

As both a jobbing journalist and a man of the left with a deep understanding of Latin American history, Garcia Márquez did not use phrases like ‘frustrated rebellion’ innocently. On the Caribbean Sea, between the two sides of Simón Bolívar’s Grand Colombia – today’s Colombia and Venezuela – lies the peninsula where the Wayuu people waged their tireless struggle against Spanish colonialism, starting in 1701. The Wayuu Rebellion of 1769 saw almost the entire indigenous population join a fierce armed revolt, which prompted the Spanish to dispatch commander José Antonio de Sierra to bring them to heel. Over the next two hundred years, the Wayuu continued to resist the seizure of their lands and the introduction of Christianity before finally succumbing in the early twentieth century, shortly before Garcia Márquez was born. Christian friars created orphanages on the peripheries of the Wayuu territory, including in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and it is likely that the servants in Garcia Márquez’s house came from one of them. It is also likely that they told the young Gabo stories of their rebellious ancestors.

New Left Review for more

by SULEIMAN MOURAD

In the early morning of 27 November, a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hezbollah took effect. Its terms – drastically one-sided, reflecting the superior strength and leverage of the IDF – are as follows:

• The Israeli army agrees to stop its military campaigns in Lebanon and withdraw within sixty days.
• Hezbollah ceases its attacks on Israel and withdraws its fighters to north of the Litani River. Any Hezbollah military bases south of the Litani will be destroyed.
• With logistical and military help from the US and French armies, Lebanon will deploy 10,000 soldiers to secure the area south of the Litani.
• Displaced people can return to their towns.
• Lebanon and Israel commit to the implementation of UN Council Resolution 1701, initially adopted to end the 2006 war, while retaining their mutual right to self-defence.
• In line with the Resolution, the US and UN will mediate negotiations between Lebanon and Israel regarding unresolved issues along the ‘blue line’ (i.e., Israel’s violation of the de facto borders between the two countries).
• The US and France will lead an ‘international campaign’ to support reconstruction and development in Lebanon.

As with previous ceasefires, there are a number of secret clauses agreed by Israel and the US that are probably more meaningful than the official ones. In 2006, Washington was supposed to help enforce Resolution 1701, but instead it stood by as Israel repeatedly flouted its terms – refusing to allow the UN peacekeepers to fulfil their mandate and rejecting any serious presence of the Lebanese army south of the Litani. So Hezbollah eventually returned to the south and rebuilt its military infrastructure there. Will it be any different this time? Less than a week after the agreement, it is estimated that Israel has already violated it on 100 different occasions, carrying out home demolitions near the border, launching repeated air raids, shelling southern towns and villages, firing at returning civilians and flying low-altitude drones over Beirut. Hezbollah has responded with a largely symbolic volley of mortars – but, for now, the group seems willing to tolerate Israel’s continuing aggression rather than return to full-scale hostilities.

This lopsided deal is, perhaps most notably, a sign that Hezbollah has ended its military campaign in support of Palestine. In October 2023, the party declared a ‘unity of fronts’ in solidarity with Hamas and against Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Since then, it has been bruised by the unrelenting conflict: losing its secretary general Hassan Nasrallah and his successor Hashem Safieddine, along with pretty much all of its military top-brass and around 2,000 to 2,500 regular fighters. It is far from defeated; its political cadre remains almost entirely intact. But with the benefit of hindsight, it seems that its leadership overestimated its own strength and underestimated Israel’s dirty war tactics – on full display in its lethal pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

New Left Review for more

by SHIVAN MAHENDRARAJAH

With Israel pushing the US toward a new war against Iran, the IAEA’s anti-Iran resolution has already backfired, undermining Tehran’s new negotiations-friendly administration, and handing a proverbial gift to the nation’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On 21 November, Britain, France, and Germany (the ‘E3’) pushed an anti-Iran resolution before the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA) Board of Governors. It passed, effectively handing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a political presence as they fend off ‘Reformist’ attempts to curb Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

The censure measure

The measure, under authority granted to the IAEA through the ‘NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ was introduced by the E3, backed by the US – and indirectly by Israel, an undeclared nuclear state that remains outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The resolution demanded Iran provide “technically credible explanations for the presence of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at several undeclared locations in Iran.” Tehran’s responses, detailed in IAEA’s 19 November report, are just as unverifiable as comparing the presence of uranium particles to Loch Ness monster sightings.

Nineteen members of IAEA’s Board of Governors voted in favor of the E3 measure, while 12 states abstained. Three countries – Russia, China, and Burkina Faso – voted “no.” Venezuela was unable to vote.

A week before the resolution passed, IAEA chief Dr Rafael Grossi met with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEO). 

Grossi visited two nuclear sites and called Iran’s offer to cap its 60 percent (90 percent is commonly considered weapons-grade) Highly-Enriched Uranium (HEU) stockpile a “concrete step in the right direction,” noting that AEO’s commitment to cap stockpiles could falter “as a result of further developments” – that is, the E3 censure resolution could lead to the Islamic Republic withdrawing its offer.

The Rules-Based International Order®

The E3 and US had no real interest in addressing concerns over Iran’s nuclear program through good faith diplomacy. Instead, the IAEA was used as a political weapon against Iran, a common tactic employed by western-dominated international bodies. 

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO member states called for his arrest. However, when the ICC slapped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the same, US President Joe Biden denounced it as “outrageous,” having said Putin’s arrest warrant was “justified.” France, an ICC member, argued that “Netanyahu is covered by immunity” as a sitting head of government, “because Israel is not a member of the ICC.”

The Cradle for more

by ASHOK GOPAL

This reflective biography of B.R. Ambedkar offers a detailed account of Ambedkar’s life and work. Its strength lies in author Anand Teltumbde’s insightful evaluation. There are shortcomings, but the analysis provides a valuable perspective on Ambedkar’s legacy.

Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar by Anand Teltumbde (2024; Penguin Random House India, 843 pages)

In his posthumously published tome, The Buddha and his Dhamma, B.R. Ambedkar presents his view of the Buddha’s life and his teachings, according to purposes he considers important. In the process, he departs from established narratives and interpretations.

In Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Anand Teltumbde follows the same approach, with one crucial difference. Ambedkar does not criticise the Buddha. Teltumbde, on the other hand, asserts that Ambedkar was wrong on many issues.

But this opinion does not form the bulk of his book. As is the case with Dhamma, Iconoclast is mainly a detailed account of the life of a person and his ideas on several issues. Into this account, Teltumbde inserts evaluative comments.

The comparison of Iconoclast with Dhamma may seem gratuitous, particularly as Teltumbde does not discuss Dhamma at all. The parallel did not strike me either, until I re-read Iconoclast and paused at a question posed by Teltumbde in his preface.

If, he asks, Ambedkar could challenge the “well-entrenched story” of the Buddha by “weighing ‘facts’ on the touchstone of reality” in Dhamma, why could not the same thing be done with the well-established account of Ambedkar’s life and achievements?

By way of an answer, Teltumbde undertakes the daunting task. Anyone who has been following his writings over the past few decades would agree he is eminently qualified for the job.

Fiercely independent, he has been critical of the Indian Right as well as the Left, and all that supposedly falls in the middle. Born in a Dalit family and related to Ambedkar’s family by marriage, he has also written critically about Ambedkar and the politics carried out by people who claim to be his followers.

Driving Teltumbde’s trenchant writings is the conviction that what India needs foremost is a class-based people’s movement, which recognises the reality of caste and seeks to annihilate it. Towards this end, he has worked as an activist and ideologue.

Taking time off from his professional life as a corporate business head and later management academic, he has also done valuable archival work. Before anyone else, he digitised the volumes of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (BAWS) published by the Government of Maharashtra, and made them available online.

Digging into government records and other primary sources, he wrote Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2016), a detailed account of two events that took place in 1927 at Mahad (Maharashtra), marking the beginning of the Ambedkar chalval (movement). Among Teltumbde’s other contributions towards a better understanding of Ambedkar is Myths and Facts: Ambedkar on Muslims (2003), a tract exposing the deliberate misreading of Ambedkar’s Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945) by Hindutvavadis.

Against this background, the publication of Iconoclast is, in itself, a noteworthy event. The book emerged in difficult conditions, which Teltumbde recounts in the preface.

Soon after he began on the project in 2018, the powers that be decided he was an enemy of the nation, to be put behind bars under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Due to fortuitous circumstances, he managed to launch a legal defence before being arrested. A tortuous struggle for anticipatory bail followed.

Much of Iconoclast was written during this period of around 20 months, under the cloud of possibly prolonged imprisonment with the attendant risk of contracting Covid-19 at an advanced age (he is in his early seventies now).

Teltumbde lost the first round of the legal battle, and was taken to Taloja (Navi Mumbai) jail on 14 April 2020, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. He was confined there for 31 months until the Supreme Court ordered his conditional release in November 2022.

During his time in jail, his book project came to a halt. However, he got to review my manuscript of A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, sent to him by the publisher, S Anand of Navayana. (Teltumbde’s comments led me to rewrite some portions and correct a few howlers.)

Teltumbde thought that A Part Apart was the kind of Ambedkar biography he “desired”, but there was a need for a “reflective” biography that would “go beyond a dispassionate life story”. Supplemented with his reflections, such a biography would help “people understand the forces that shaped their lives and enable them to assume agency to rethink their present”.

After his release, he completed Iconoclast according to that scope. Most of the book is a detailed account of Ambedkar’s life and work 1 , drawn mainly from C.B. Khairmode’s 12-volume Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Marathi) and BAWS, but the book’s USP is Teltumbde’s evaluation of Ambedkar, which is spread across several chapters. The gist of his report card is as follows.

The India Forum for more

by JUDY HAIVEN

With all the talk about a ceasefire in Lebanon, the following news about AI (artificial intelligence) may have got lost. The Israelis and their supporters like to laugh about the thousands left severely injured or blinded and the dozens killed in Lebanon in late September when Israel detonated tens of thousands of pagers at one time. Quite a joke! Or when Israel programmed implosions of thousands of walkie-talkies which killed 20 and seriously injured another 450 in Lebanon. Israel suspected the pagers and walkie-talkies belonged to Hizbollah ‘militants’. So were the killings and maimings justified? Really?

And who are the ‘militants’? For example, 7% of Israelis are in the reserves (compared to only 0.5% of US citizens in their own country) and are required to do military service every year. Are the reservists ‘militants’? No one calls Israeli fighters that – but they are. Who says who is a ‘militant’ – obviously the victors in any struggle get to call whom they like ‘militants’?

But were children with pagers in their backpacks, hospital doctors with pagers in their pockets, politicians who had pagers, men on construction sites with walkie-talkies– were they all, ‘militants’? Israel would have us believe they were. But there were thousands of civilian victims of the pager and the walkie-talkie explosions. The Israelis wanted to show us all how clever they were – they can create war and death. Yet they use gallows’ humour to justify their reliance on AI to simultaneously blind and cause children’s and adults’ fingers to be amputated.

Who is a ‘militant’ in Gaza?

Is everyone that Israel targets a ‘militant’? Clearly not. We see that from what happened with the utter destruction of Gaza. Yet Israel insists that every male in Gaza is a ‘militant‘ and a target for death. And what about his family? Are they ‘militants’ too – from babies to school children to the elderly all targets for death? Killing them amounts to war crimes. To kill 100 civilians in an effort to kill one man – does not mean the man is a ‘militant’. Maybe he is just a father or grandfather – killing him is a war crime. If Israel targets any and all men for death, that too is a war crime.

Israel’s war on Gaza, is aided and abetted by AI (artificial intelligence). AI powers three different programs that generate and pinpoint targets for assassination in Gaza.

Right after 7 Oct 2023, Lavender targeted 37,000 Palestinians as suspected ‘militants’ and targeted them and their homes and families for potential air strikes.

Yet Israel insists that every male in Gaza is a ‘militant‘ and a target for death. And what about his family? Are they ‘militants’ too?

Judy Haiven for more

by SOFIAN PHILIP NACEUR

While authorities continue mass deportations to Sudan, a new asylum law could set a precedent in the region

Egypt is currently pressing ahead with the adoption of an asylum law. Although it is unclear whether it will actually be adopted, the situation of people on the move in the country is likely to remain disastrous in either scenario. The regime continues to respond to the arrival of Sudanese refugees with mass deportations to the war-torn country. The EU, meanwhile, is once again expanding its migration and military cooperation with Cairo and backs Egypt’s struggling economy with loans and grants, this time pursued to reduce irregular arrivals of people in Crete but also to keep el-Sisi’s regime in line for its role in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

To the surprise of many observers, the Defence and National Security Committee in Egypt’s House of Representatives,the lower house of parliament,approved a draft asylum bill in late October 2024, followed by the parliament adopting the law only a few weeks later. The government drafted the controversial legislation back in 2023. The text itself, however, remained undisclosed until October.

The draft law paves the way for transferring refugee status determination (RSD) from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to Egypt’s government ? with potentially far-reaching consequences. “It remains unclear how the law will affect asylum procedures in Egypt”, explains Mohamed Lotfy, Director of the Cairo-based human rights organization Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF). “Registration, RSD, and protection are to be transferred from UNHCR to a new governmental Permanent Committee for Refugee Affairs, but there is no clarity at all about how a transition period would look like or what exactly UNHCR’s role would be after the law is adopted”, he told the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Despite Egypt’s ratification of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention in 1981, it is not the Egyptian state but only the Egypt branch of UNHCR that processes asylum applications in the country, grants people a refugee status, issues corresponding IDs, and ? at least on paper ? provides emergency assistance to refugees and asylum seekers. In a 1954 memorandum of understanding with the UNHCR, Egyptian authorities agreed to consider status IDs issued by UNHCR as proof of identity and to refrain from deporting people in the possession of those IDs. Nevertheless, people registered with UNHCR are denied access to education, the public health system and the formal labour market.

In other words: “The government is generally not concerned with the affairs and lives of refugees unless it involves security issues”, reads a paper by the migration researchers Prof. Dr. Gerda Heck and Elena Habersky of the American University in Cairo. If the government’s current draft law is ratified, this would certainly change.

Formalizing Deportation

The bill now grants refugees the right to education and access to the labour market for the very first time. However, “the law appears to prioritize security considerations over refugee protection, potentially undermining the right to asylum”, warns ECRF Director Lotfy. “The text contains broadly worded provisions concerning ‘acts that may affect national security or public order’. This vague language grants excessive discretion to the new committee responsible for determining refugee status, leaving the door open for arbitrary denials”, he explains.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for more

by ANDREW GASE

Is it possible to dig all the way through the Earth to the other side? Anishwar, age 8, India

When I was a kid, I liked to dig holes in my backyard in Cincinnati. My grandfather joked that if I kept digging, I would end up in China.

In fact, if I had been able to dig straight through the planet, I would have come out in the Indian Ocean, about 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) west of Australia. That’s the antipode, or opposite point on Earth’s surface, from my town.

But I only had a garden spade to move the earth. When I hit rock, less than 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, I couldn’t go deeper.

Now, I’m a geophysicist and know a lot more about Earth’s structure. It has three main layers:

• The outer skin, called the crust, is a very thin layer of light rock. Its thickness compared to Earth’s diameter is similar to how thick an apple’s skin is to its diameter. When I dug holes as a kid, I was scratching away at the very top of Earth’s crust.
• The mantle, which lies beneath the crust, is much thicker, like the flesh of the apple. It’s made of strong, heavy rock that flows up to a few inches per year as hotter rock rises away from Earth’s center and cooler rock sinks toward it.
• The core, at Earth’s center, is made of super-hot liquid and solid metal. Temperatures here are 4,500 to 9,300 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 to 5,200 degrees Celsius).

Earth’s outer layers exert pressure on the layers underneath, and these forces increase steadily with depth, just as they do in the ocean – think of how pressure in your ears gets stronger as you dive deeper underwater.

That’s relevant for digging through the Earth, because when a hole is dug or drilled, the walls along the sides of the hole are under tremendous pressure from the overlying rock, and also unstable because there’s empty space next to them. Stronger rocks can support bigger forces, but all rocks can fail if the pressure is great enough.

When digging a pit, one way to prevent the walls from collapsing inward under pressure is to make them less steep, so they slant outward like the sides of a cone. A good rule of thumb is to make the hole three times wider than its depth.

Unstable walls

The deepest open pit in the Earth is the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, which was dug with excavators and explosives in the early 1900s to mine copper ore. The pit of the mine is 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) deep and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide.

Since the mine is more than three times wider than it is deep and the walls are sloped, the pit’s walls are not too steep or unstable. Still, in 2013, one of the slopes collapsed, causing two huge landslides that released 145 million tons of crushed rock to the bottom of the pit. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the landslides caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

The Conversation for more

by CALEB McCULLOUGH, MIA OSMONBEKOV, & AMY SHERMAN

President-elect Trump is promising more government efficiency – but is money really being wasted on cats on treadmills?

As Elon Musk launches the Department of Government Efficiency to recommend spending cuts, he has highlighted examples of what he considers waste.

Musk, the world’s richest person, amplified posts on his X platform that said the United States government funded research on “transgender” monkeys, cats on treadmills and “alcoholic rats” sprayed with bobcat urine.

“Some of this stuff is not merely a waste of money, but outright evil,” Musk wrote on November 13.

“Your tax dollars at ‘work’,” Musk said on November 12 with a laughing emoji with tears.

Musk said he wants the federal government to cut “at least $2 trillion”, or almost 30 percent of what the US government spent in 2024. Trump didn’t specify a target amount for the group led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, but he set July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as a deadline for identifying cuts. The department can make recommendations, but Congress has the ultimate power on spending decisions.

Many federal research projects Musk cited overlap with findings in annual “Festivus” reports about government spending by Republican US Senator Rand Paul, who said Musk and Ramaswamy can use his reports as “inspiration”.

Some projects stretch back decades. For example, one list on X compiled by Dillon Loomis, host of the YouTube show Electrified, called out Department of Agriculture credit card spending on “concert tickets, tattoos, lingerie and car payments”. This came from a 2003 government audit.

Musk boosted another X post by The Redheaded Libertarian that said the government spent $4.5m “to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine” in 2020.

Medical research has long been a bipartisan target for criticism, Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense said.

“Whether tequila makes fish angry, shrimp on a treadmill are two projects that come to mind,” Sewell said. “You comb through the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and other agencies, and there are a lot of weird-sounding studies – at least superficially.”

Many complaints exclude the problems the research is trying to address, which might change how people perceive its value. In the case of these new examples Musk cited, the money went largely to research and academic institutions over several years to study animals to solve health problems in humans.

Al Jazeera for more