by ZALA

Women in Afghanistan are prisoners in their own homes. This is the story of Marjan, married at 12 to a Taliban fighter

When women describe Afghanistan as hell, you need to understand that they are not exaggerating. For centuries, women in this country have been harassed, tormented and punished in various ways; deprived of their right to education, removed from all social spheres, punished in extrajudicial tribunals, forced marriages and honour killings, and threatened with physical and psychological violence. Afghan society is defiantly patriarchal, blending together bizarre traditions and widespread sexism to create a true hell. In the hellscapes that populate religions, people are condemned for their sins, but in ours women are punished for their innocence.

The participation of women in Afghanistan has always depended on the decisions of men. If a woman wants to enter and secure her place in society, the first obstacle she faces is the closed door of her home, sealed against her by a male member of her family. If some women manage to open this door, the government has made sure to block any avenue of social growth to them. The only thing left for Afghan women to do is to cry behind the closed doors that bar their access to schools, universities, offices or even entertainment venues.

But the occasional permissiveness and overwhelming constraints actioned by these opening and closing doors does not apply to all Afghan women, only to women in the big cities and to women in those provinces experiencing instability in their social status amid the waves of political change in the country. In rural areas, however, centuries of shifts in the country’s political make-up have had no impact whatsoever on many women’s lives. These rural women are neither exposed to nor benefit from any intermittent loosening of social rules, and their lives often remain stagnant. In the remote areas where those women live, women’s issues are resolved by men who rely on tradition. For them, social growth is a strange concept. I am a Pashtun woman from the southeast of Afghanistan, and I want to write about the women of this region, also from the Pashtun tribe, who are facing immense difficulties.

There is a saying in Pashto (language): A woman’s place is either inside the house or in the grave. But this is not merely a simple proverb, it is rather a law that dictates the social role of women among the Pashtun people. It means that a woman has no place outside the walls of her house. She has no right to study and no right to work. Deprived of these fundamental rights, women remain far removed from any kind of participation in society. The confines of their home become their whole world and, in that small space, they continue to suffer all kinds of violence.

In our highly conservative society, especially in Pashtun culture, the birth of a girl is not something joyful, while a baby boy brings great happiness to a family and is celebrated with aerial gunshots so that everyone all around will be informed of the male birth in their house.

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by SIBTAIN NAQVI

Poets today are happy to remain part of a convivial fraternity. With little patronage to compete for and minimal ideological divide, the desire for rhyming ripostes and public put-downs hardly exists. It wasn’t always so. Previously poets were often rivals and lost no opportunity in exchanging barbs couched in deadly but exquisite eloquence.

Muhammed Ibrahim Zauq and Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan, better known as Ghalib, were bitter rivals, for example, and unleashed several lyrical fusillades against each other to win Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s favours. From the days of Ghalib, mushairas (poetry recitals) were not just a platform for dissent against the state, but also opportunities to protest against other members of the poetic community to highlight ideological differences.

Among the more recent examples of such poetic friction was the Bayaad-i-Josh mushaira held on April 13, 1982. Organised by the Anjuman-i-Saadat-i-Amroha at a time of great censorship because of Gen Zia’s dictatorial regime, it was a memorial for Josh Malihabadi, whose death on February 22, 1982 had been ignored by the state. Members of the Amrohvi community in Karachi had the intellectual gravitas to brave the political backlash. The event featured some of the greatest Urdu poets of the time, who were witness to an episode that highlighted the ideological differences of Josh Malihabadi and Hafeez Jalandhari, one a fierce critic of dictators and the other a close supporter.

Josh Malihabadi had immigrated to Pakistan several years after Partition and was never at ease in his new country. He had been a part of India’s intellectual elite, and a darling of the Congress leadership. So iconic was Josh in India that Vijay, the protagonist from Guru Dutt’s cult classic Pyaasa, wants to be a revolutionary poet just like Josh. Vijay snubs the more populist genre of romantic poetry, for which he suffers great hardship.

Despite his position in India, Josh gave in to the entreaties of A.T. Naqvi, commissioner of Karachi, who had told him, “Josh Sahib, you can’t cross a river with your feet anchored in two boats.” Against the advice of Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru, who gave him the option to move back and forth between the two countries, Josh left India thinking that Urdu would be ignored there because of the “narrow-minded nationalism of Hindus.” In 1955, he crossed the border and, soon after, became a fierce critic of the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. For this he faced endless problems, becoming the target of right-wingers while his property was confiscated by the regime. His poetry too did not get the requisite recognition from the state.

On the other side of the political divide were pro-establishment writers and poets, chief among them Hafeez Jalandhari, the poet laureate, who had also penned Pakistan’s national anthem. Their ideological divide was stark. Josh hated the British and sported the Führer’s moustache to remind them of their bête noire. In his poem East India Company Ke Farzandon Se Khitab [Address to the Heirs of the East India Company], Josh had lambasted British hypocrisy and recounted their crimes, from the battle of Plassey in 1757 to hanging the revolutionary Bhagat Singh in 1931. Invoking the powerful imagery of Karbala, he had addressed their apologists:

Mujrimon ke waastay zeba nahin ye shor-o-shain
Kal Yazeed-o-Shimr thhey aur aaj bantay ho Hussain!

[This hue and cry does not suit the defence of criminals/ You who were Yazeed and Shimr yesterday pretend today to be Hussain!]

Like anti-British revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose, who was even willing to ally himself with fascists to gain independence for India, Josh considered the British to be the ultimate enemy and published this poem in 1939 as the British were exploiting India in preparation for World War II.

Meanwhile, Hafeez Jalandhari was using his pen to support the British war effort. During World War II, as the head of the Bureau of Public Information and Song Publicity Organisation at All India Radio, Jalandhari played an important role for British propaganda. According to several accounts, he wrote poems such as Boot to recruit Indian cannon fodder that would eventually die in North Africa and East Asia for their colonial masters:

Idhar pehno ho tooti jooti, udhar pehno ge boot
Bharti ho jao!

[Here you wear a broken slipper, there you will get a fancy boot/ Go join the army!]

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by ROB URIE

The purpose of this essay is to create a broader political dialogue in order to get the US, and with it the world, out of the policy messes that the US is creating. When I speak with my Republican friends, there is widespread agreement regarding what the problems that the US faces are. Differences enter when it comes to solutions. And while there is no claim to Truth here, the left has spent more time considering solutions than the right has.

American political discourse has proceeded in recent decades from the pretense that a political ‘center’ both 1) exists, and 2) represents the policy outcomes that most Americans want. But both political philosophy and basic common sense argue against this interpretation. On the common-sense front, voters have been fleeing both of the uniparty parties to become political Independents for twenty-five years now. There appears to be no way to rid the US of the uniparty. 

On the political philosophy front, the US is, and has long claimed itself to be, the ‘most capitalist nation on the planet.’ Recall that outside of the US and for most of modern history, the ‘left’ has been defined by opposition to capitalism and the ‘right’ has been defined by support for highly concentrated incomes and wealth. Around 1992, US politician Bill Clinton coined the phrase ‘social liberal, fiscal conservative,’ to define the new right-wing in the US that he represented.

The social backdrop in Clinton’s formulation is that fiscal conservatism has characteristics, such as the unquestioned funding of every war that the Western MIC can conjure up while cutting social spending and programs that benefit the rest of us. In other words, fiscal conservatism represents the political precepts of capitalism. Note that this is where Bill Clinton placed himself, through his policies, on the ideological spectrum. On the monarchist right, but with oligarchs instead. 

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by GIDEON LEVY

Germany has betrayed the memory of the Holocaust and its lessons. A country that saw its highest task as not to forget has forgotten. A country that told itself that it would never remain silent is silent. A country that once said “Never Again,” and now: “again,” with arms, with funding, with silence. There is no country that should be better than Germany at “discerning nauseating processes.” Every German knows much more about them than Yair Golan. Here in Israel they are in full swing, yet Germany has not yet recognized them for what they are. It was only recently that it woke up too late and to too little effect.

When Germany sees the Flag March in Jerusalem, it must see Kristallnacht. If it does not see the similarities, it is betraying the memory of the Holocaust. When it looks at Gaza, it must see the concentration camps and ghettos that it built. When it sees hungry Gazans, it must see the wretched survivors of the camps. When it hears the fascist talk of Israeli ministers and other public figures about killing and population transfer, about there being “no innocents” and about killing babies, it must hear the chilling voices from its past, who said the same in German.

It has no right to be silent. It must carry the flag of European resistance to what is happening in the Strip. Yet it continues to lag behind the rest of Europe, however uncomfortably, not only because of its past but also because of its indirect responsibility for the Nakba, which probably would not have happened without the Holocaust. Germany also owes a partial moral debt to the Palestinian people.

The Israeli occupation would not have happened without support from the United States and Germany. Throughout this period, Germany was considered Israel’s second-best friend. It was inclusive and unconditional. Now Germany will pay for its long years of severe self-censorship, during which it was forbidden to criticize Israel, the sacred sacrifice.

Any and all criticism of Israel was labeled antisemitism. The just struggle for Palestinian rights was criminalized. A country where a major media empire still requires its journalists to vow never to cast doubt on Israel’s right to exist as a condition for employment cannot claim to honor freedom of expression. And if Israel’s current policies endanger its existence, shouldn’t they be entitled to criticize it?

In Germany it is difficult, if not impossible, to criticize Israel, whatever it does. This is not friendship, this is enslavement to a past and it must end in the face of what is happening in Gaza. The “special relationship” cannot include a seal of approval for war crimes. Germany has no right to ignore the International Criminal Court, which was established in response to its crimes, by debating when to extend an invitation to an Israeli prime minister who is wanted for war crimes. It has no right to repeat the cliches of the past and place flowers in Yad Vashem, a 90-minute drive from Khan Yunis.

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by AJAMU BARAKA

The real collusion wasn’t between Trump and Putin; it was between intelligence elites and a Democratic establishment.

This piece was originally published in BAR in 2018

“When Trump met with the arch-enemy Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and didn’t declare war on Russia some of the loudest denunciations came from Black liberals.”

Increasing evidence emerges that confirms what ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern suggests was a classic off-the-shelve intelligence operation  initiated during the last year of Obama’s presidency against the Trump campaign by employees of, and others associated with, the CIA, FBI, and the NS. Yet the public is being counseled to ignore possible proof of state misconduct.

The historic and unprecedented timing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment  of twelve Russia military intelligence officers on the eve of Trump’s meeting with Putin, was clearly meant to undercut Trump’s authority. This still did not pique the journalistic curiosity of an ostensibly independent press to at least pretend to question the possible motivation for these indictments at such a specific moment. Instead of critical questions, Democrats, along with the corporate liberal media, flipped the script and suggested that those questioning the allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. elections, which supposedly included the active or tacit support of the Trump campaign, was ipso-facto evidence of one’s disloyalty to the state — if not also complicit with implementing the Russia inspired conspiracy.

This narrative has been set and is meant to be accepted as veracious and impermeable to challenges. Powerful elements of the ruling class, operating with and through the Democratic party in an attempt to secure maximum electoral success, decided that Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia shall be the primary narrative to be utilized by Democrats — from the increasing phony opposition represented by the Sanders wing of the party, to the neoliberal, buck-dancing members of the Congressional Black Caucus. All are expected to fall in line and do the ruling class’s bidding.

“Democrats suggest that those questioning the allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 U.S. elections, are complicit with implementing the Russia inspired conspiracy.”

When Trump met with the arch-enemy Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and didn’t declare war on Russia for conspiring against Clinton, charges of treason were splashed across the headlines and editorial pages of the elite press with some of the loudest denunciations coming from Black liberals.

Not being at war with Russia, at least not in the technical sense, was just one of those inconvenient facts that didn’t need to get in the way of the main objective, which was to smear Trump

And while evidence of collusion continues to surface, it’s actually not between Trump and the Russians, rather it’s between intelligence officials in the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. The latest revelation of this evidence was reported by John Solomon in, “The Hill,  ” a Washington insider publication. According to Solomon, former FBI attorney Lisa Page gave testimony to the House Judiciary committee that seemed to confirm the partisan intentions of Peter Strzok and other high officials in the agency.

Page was one of the authors of the infamous text messages between her and Peter Strzok (the two were also in a personal relationship at the time) while they both worked together at the FBI. The texts soon became the objective of endless speculation ever since they were revealed last summer. Exchanges shared between Strzok and Page during the 2016 campaign season, appear to point to Strzok’ participation in a vast conspiracy to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign and then to undermine his presidency on the unexpected chance of his election.

“There’s no big there there.”

Two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Mueller as special counsel, Strzok, who at that time was the lead investigator on the Russia probe texted, “There’s no big there there.”

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by SEBASTIAN CONTIN TRILLO-FIGUEROA

Lacking the ability to enforce its interests, Europe mustn’t keep subsidizing US arms makers while alienating Chinese markets

In the opening moves of Trump’s second presidency, a pattern has emerged: Washington sets the agenda, Beijing adapts with precision, and Brussels capitulates. What emerges is a bipolar order where Europe has relegated itself to the role of financier and cheerleader.

Trump plays poker, Xi plays go and Europe struggles with simple puzzles. Within five months, Trump secured defense spending commitments previous presidents only theorized about. While China’s rare earth export restrictions forced Washington into rapid recalibration, Europe responded with nothing but hollow laments. The asymmetry reveals everything: One bloc wields leverage, another answers with resolve, and the third writes checks.

Trump’s return exposed the EU’s strategic failures. Instead of setting boundaries or leveraging collective power, leaders defaulted to flattery toward Washington and scapegoating toward Beijing. The ‘antidiplomacy’ weakens the EU on China while offering America servitude without guaranteed returns.

Where Mexico and Canada bargained, Europe genuflected without conditions. Where China retaliated decisively, Europe escalated rhetoric and surrendered substance. The latest example: Four days after Washington conceded to Beijing in a rare earths deal, von der Leyen launched a new offensive against China on the same issue – as if the agreement had never happened.

Timing shouldn’t ruin a well-staged display of servility: Her G7 speech preached toughness while ignoring Europe’s real vulnerabilities. Accusing China of “weaponizing” its dominance while relying on it for 99% of rare earths is like demanding fair play in a knife fight – a measure of how well her de-risking policy proceeds. Apparently, she has yet to grasp what great powers do: They use leverage. Then came the admission: “Donald is right,” showing how Brussels handed over control long ago.

The subsequent defense spending capitulation proved equally abject. Leaders like Merz, Macron, and Sánchez agreed – without any public debate – to raise military spending to 5% of GDP. No questions, no rationale. Trump didn’t need to demand it; they volunteered their own surrender. While European analysts obsess over his populism and threats to democracy, they miss what matters – he’s getting exactly what he wants.

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by SEAN MATHEWS

Israel was running low on Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) interceptors as Iranian ballistic missiles slammed into Israeli cities in June.

The US asked Saudi Arabia to turn over interceptors to help the US ally in need. But Riyadh’s response was “no”, two US officials familiar with the talks told Middle East Eye.

“During the war, we asked everyone to donate,” one official told MEE. “When that didn’t work, we tried deal-making. It wasn’t aimed at one country.”

But Saudi Arabia was well placed to help Israel, and US officials have been keen to emphasise that Iran is a threat to them as well as Israel. 

The US has already deployed air defence systems to the oil-rich Gulf state, which until recently was targeted by Houthi missile and drone attacks.

As Iran and Israel were fighting it out, the kingdom was preparing to receive the first THAAD battery it purchased with its own sovereign funds. In fact, the battery was inaugurated by the Saudi military on 3 July, just nine days after Israel and Iran reached a ceasefire.

Just before the inauguration, US officials were concerned that a massive Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel would drain the US stockpile of interceptors to a “horrendous level”.

Middle East Eye was the first to report that Israel was rapidly depleting the US’s stockpile of ballistic missile interceptors as well as Israel’s arsenal of Arrow interceptors. The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian later confirmed MEE’s report.

The Guardian later reported in July that after the conflict, the US was only left with about 25 percent of the Patriot missile interceptors that planners at the Pentagon assess are needed for all US military operations globally. A US official confirmed that classified number to MEE.

The US also fired the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) mounted on Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers to defend Israel.

Despite Israel’s three-tiered air defence system being backed up by additional American firepower, Iran was able to send missiles into Israeli cities right up until the ceasefire was reached.

The Telegraph reported that Iranian missiles directly hit five Israeli military facilities. 

Analysts say that the American and Israeli air defence systems held up better than some military planners anticipated, given the scale of Iran’s barrages, but the Islamic Republic was able to exploit the system’s weak spot, particularly as the conflict dragged on.

“The weakness is that it is an enterprise where you are at risk of running out of your magazine depth. We only have so many interceptors and the ability to produce them,” Douglas Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, previously told MEE.

Amid the shortage, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that some US officials even discussed taking THAAD interceptors purchased by Saudi Arabia and diverting them to Israel.

One US official confirmed to MEE that the talks took place after Saudi Arabia had rejected polite US overtures and deal-making efforts. 

Both US officials also told MEE that the US asked the United Arab Emirates to share interceptors with Israel. Neither would confirm if any arrived. The UAE was the first non-US country to purchase and operate the THAAD, which it activated in 2016.

Iran’s success breaching Israel’s sophisticated air defences did not go unnoticed in the more lightly defended Gulf states, experts say.

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by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA

A recent paper in Science addresses an intriguing question: Did North America have settled agriculture before the arrival of Europeans? Or were the people in what would come to be known as North America still in the hunter-gatherer stage—unlike Mesoamericans, who had advanced civilisations, such as the Mayans, Aztecs, and the Incas?

The answer is that indigenous populations in North America did have significant agriculture, which “disappeared” only after their encounters with the invading Europeans settling on their lands. Researchers have used Lidar tools to map areas of Michigan associated with the Menominee people, showing that settled agriculture existed not only in the lower latitudes—modern Mexico—but even in the much harsher north, near the Great Lakes bordering Canada.

Recent advances in the use of Lidar technologies—particularly drones, low-cost and lightweight Lidar sensors, and ground-penetrating radar—make it easier to survey both surface and subsurface features. Lidar surveys have led to significant advances in our understanding of the past. This article will look at how new historical knowledge about agriculture in North America informs the debate on the mass death of indigenous people in North America in the early period of European settlement. Was it genocide, or were their weak immune systems to blame? American historians today increasingly, though reluctantly, accept that disease, coupled with direct violence—mass killings and uprooting people from their ancestral lands—caused the massive population decline of the indigenous people.

A significant body of opinion—expressed particularly in popular books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel—ascribes the killing of native peoples primarily to their lack of immunity to diseases brought to by Europeans. This view airbrushes out of history the colonists’ repeated massacres, seizure of native lands and means of sustenance, and continuous displacement of indigenous communities. It depicts the drastic fall in the latter’s population as merely an unfortunate accident of history: “The microbes did it, not us.” As we shall see, this not only contradicts what we know about history, but also about epidemics and immunity: the silent battle between germs and our immune system.

It is here that the actual history of agriculture in the North America becomes significant. The Lidar survey of Michigan brings out the extent of Menominee settlements and their agricultural practices in the Great Lakes area of Michigan. We also know that the Menominee previously occupied a much larger territory, estimated at 10 million acres. Treaties with the US government reduced their land base to only 2.5 percent of their original lands, coinciding with a sharp drop in their population.

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by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

It might not surprise you. But it did surprise me.

When I first heard the Hebrew greeting Shalom aleichem, properly spoken during a visit to Israel a few years ago, I unmistakably heard it as Salaam Alaykum, the Arabic greeting familiar from my childhood in central Kerala, where Muslims, Christians, and Hindus live alongside one another. Salaam Alaykum was a part of the landscape. So when the Jewish organiser of the Indian journalist delegation I was part of in 2018 greeted me with Shalom, I instinctively said I’d heard Salaam. His face paled. He quickly clarified that the two were “very, very different”. I apologised. But the moment stayed with me, how languages and gestures that sound and feel alike can be drawn into the service of separation.

That sense of familiarity strained into estrangement is something many of us recognise while observing West Asia—from India to Africa, or even in the enduring conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Shared pasts are splintered. Common ground becomes contested. It’s not an exaggeration to say that West Asia—to speak from an Asian rather than colonial cartographic vantage—is a geography defined by such paradoxes. Its long, layered histories—histories that could build empathy—are time and again turned into geopolitical weapons. Neighbours become enemies. Cultures are distorted. Loyalties talk economics and business.

Edward Said wrote in Orientalism that the Orient is not just an other, but something systematically othered. His argument still holds. The violence we see today is not a sudden eruption, but a controlled burn, stoked by strategic interests. The West—former colonial powers and the United States foremost among them—remains deeply embedded in the region’s instability for now-explicit reasons. Military bases, oil routes, arms contracts.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine. We know now that the Nakba of 1948—the mass displacement of over 7,00,000 Palestinians—is not past tense. It continues in evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, in the blockades of Gaza, in the fragmented autonomy handed out in place of freedom. The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi calls it a “Hundred Years’ War”. That naming resists the framing of Palestinian struggle as reactive or recent. But even a basic acknowledgment of this history invites suspicion. Sympathy itself is policed—by mass media, social media debates sponsored by the interested parties (read Israel and America). As a colleague reminded me during our trip, strategic realism demands aligning with Israel. The moral cost of that realism is absorbed elsewhere.

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were held up as a turning point. But for many Palestinians, they marked the beginning of a different kind of occupation—managed, administrative, but still fundamentally colonial. The journalist Amira Hass described Oslo as a system “built to maintain Israeli dominance… wrapped in the language of peace”. That framing captures the bind: even the peace process becomes a cover for dispossession.

But this pattern does not begin or end with Israel-Palestine. Wherever power demands control, division is created. We know how the partition of India and Pakistan—executed with imperial haste—transformed neighbours into adversaries. Bangladesh’s emergence in 1971 carried forward the violence embedded in those arbitrary lines. In Rwanda, colonial administrations shaped the categories of Hutu and Tutsi, which later became tools of mass violence. Europe is not immune either. The war in Ukraine reveals how shared histories are twisted into justification for conquest and control.

Why does it keep happening? Because conflict is profitable. Arms are sold, alliances recalibrated, and reconstruction is turned into industry. As a wry saying among foreign correspondents goes, “When armies cross borders, the people in suits count dollars.” In Iraq, Libya, Syria—interventions wear the mask of humanitarian concern, but the calculations are always geopolitical.

So we return to the present, where Israel and Palestine remain locked in a long war of narratives. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by Britain, promised Jews a “national home” in a land already lived in by Palestinians. Europe’s reckoning with its own anti-Semitism was offloaded onto Palestinian soil. The consequences are still unfolding. To name this injustice is not to deny the right of Jewish people to safety, history, or self-determination. But too often, criticism of Israel’s state policies is dismissed as anti-Semitic. The result is a silencing of real debate. And yet, voices within Jewish communities—Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Avraham Burg—have long argued that Israel’s current path betrays the very moral lessons Jewish history has taught. These perspectives rarely influence public discourse.

Violence doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It is taught, constructed, disseminated through media and even inherited. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asked: “Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” That question lingers—urgent, unanswered. Geopolitical shifts have only deepened the crisis. Israel’s strategic partnership with the US, its growing ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia—brokered through American diplomacy—have come at a clear Palestinian cost. These “normalisations” leave Palestinian aspirations outside the room. Dialogue, if it occurs, is already rigged.

Iran is cast as the region’s chief threat. But this too is a simplification. Iran’s actions—especially in Syria—reflect both ambition and anxiety. Isolation, sanctions, and decades of threats have bred aggression. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003, carried out on the fiction of “weapons of mass destruction”, destabilised the entire region. That war not only empowered Iran and created a vacuum for the Islamic State, but also entrenched rivalries that continue to devastate Yemen today.

One of the cruellest truths is that peace in the region might well emerge if foreign powers simply stepped back. But that would mean giving up contracts, leverage, and control. So the cycle remains: crisis is managed, not resolved. For many of us, watching from afar, this can be overwhelming. The news loops between horror and hollow truce. Every new generation is asked to carry forward old wounds. I remember an Israeli journalist in Tel Aviv once told me, “One day, Israelis and Palestinians will realise we have been fighting over a piece of land that will outlive us all.” That day feels distant. With each round of violence, positions harden. Victims become aggressors, and memory becomes ammunition.

So what now? To rephrase Jean-Paul Sartre, are we condemned to helpless observation? Perhaps part of the answer lies in naming what has been concealed. These divisions are not natural. They are constructed. And they benefit a very small group. Even the feeling of helplessness deserves scrutiny. To see and understand, to reject false choices, to affirm dignity over dominance—these are not minor acts. They matter. Supporting Palestine should not require justifying violence. Rejecting anti-Semitism should not mean endorsing occupation. Ethics demand more than allegiance.

What future awaits West Asia under Benjamin Netanyahu’s unrelenting campaigns—in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran? The outlook is grim. And yet history offers small openings. Apartheid fell. European wars found uneasy peace. These shifts came when those in power lost their grip, and when pressure built from below. Until that pressure builds, we watch. And we remember. Not for the spectacle of suffering, but for the people who go through it.

That is why Frontline returns to West Asia in our latest cover. Writers Bashir Ali Abbas, Deepika Saraswat, Anwar Alam, and Amit Baruah trace the region’s power alignments and internal contradictions—not to explain away the violence, but to insist that those most affected by it are not forgotten. For them, and for all of us, Shalom and Salaam must remain more than greetings. They must be the starting point for a future we are still waiting for.

Read the pieces and as always, write back to us with your comments, rejoinders and more!

Wishing you a peaceful week ahead,

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor, Frontline

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