The Nation, November 13, 2025: The international community must decide which principle will prevail: the right of self-determination or the right of conquest [ audio podcast 6 mins.]
Category: Asia
Interview: Gaza now, Trump to meet Putin, and Armenia-Azerbaijan treaty
KTVU August 8, 2025, Bay Area Fox affiliate, about Gaza, a Trump-Putin summit, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan treaty [Zunes’s segment runs 2:00-7:40]
Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Tied to the Abraham Accords?!
The Wyoming Star, Aug. 8, 2025, piece by Joe Yans, quotes Zunes:
But why should a bilateral peace process between two non-Middle Eastern states be co-opted into a framework that was originally designed (at least nominally) to normalize relations between Israel and select Arab states? According to Dr. Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco and Middle Eastern studies program coordinator, this push makes no sense from a foreign policy standpoint.
“This has nothing to do with the Abraham Accords. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan already recognize Israel. There is already extensive cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel in regard to the military, oil, trade, and technology.”
“It is also worth mentioning that the three Arab monarchies that have signed did not make a ‘peace agreement’ with Israel since, except for a small contingent sent by Morocco partway through the October 1973 conflict between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, none of the signatory countries had ever been at war with Israel. None of these countries were threatening Israel, none of them had the capacity to threaten Israel, and Israel’s distance from these countries ranges from 750 to 3,200 miles,” Dr. Zunes explained in a comment to Wyoming Star.
Instead, the Accords offered diplomatic cover for Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories, without demanding any meaningful concessions in return.
Dr. Zunes echoes this statement: “The Abraham Accords perpetuate the myth that the key to Middle East peace is in having autocratic Arab states recognize Israel, not in Israel ending its occupation. There is no mention of the Israeli occupation in the Accords, much less a call for it to end. Indeed, by weakening Arab leverage on Israel by recognizing that government prior to Israel recognizing Palestine, it eases pressure on Israel to make the necessary compromises for peace. For over two decades, every Arab country has been on record supporting normalization of relations with Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Abraham Accords insist that Arab recognition be unilateral in an apparent effort to remove this leverage from the Palestinian side, one of the few routes remaining to the millions of Palestinians suffering under the Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank.”
Was Jimmy Carter Really a Peacemaker?
Fair Observer January 17, 2025, with Claire Whitaker:
Carter earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his post-presidency work, but while in office, he was no peacemaker. Carter’s foreign policy compromised his morals, supported autocratic regimes and failed to combat human rights violations… (source)
The East Timor Model Offers a Way out for Western Sahara and Morocco
Foreign Policy Dec. 9, 2020 – It’s not often that Western Sahara makes international headlines, but in mid-November it did: Nov. 14 marked the tragic—if unsurprising—breakup of a tenuous, 29-year cease-fire in Western Sahara between the occupying Moroccan government and pro-independence fighters. The outbreak of violence is concerning not only because it flew in the face of nearly three decades of relative stasis, but also because Western governments’ reflexive response to the resurgent conflict may be to upend—and thereby hamper and delegitimize for perpetuity over 75 years of established international legal principles…
Remembering Martin Luther King, the Radical for Peace
The Progressive April 3, 2018: King challenged the draining of our national resources for the military, opposed the Vietnam War and other aspects of U.S. foreign policy and questioned an economic system that created enormous poverty amid great wealth. He was assassinated while organizing the Poor People’s March…
In Retrospect: Public Intellectuals and Activists Weigh In on the Tet Offensive 50 Years Later
Truthout January 31, 2018:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. On January 30, 1968, thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers and their Viet Cong support organized a sweeping attack of multiple cities in South Vietnam. The event is said to have reinforced the United States opposition to the Vietnam War. The following is a compilation of thoughts across a diverse spectrum of academics, activists, organizers and progressive thinkers on the significance of this event in history…
The Maldives: a serial coup in progress?
Open Democracy October 15, 2013
Should Britain, the United States and others who claim to be concerned, stand by and allow reactionary forces to stage-manage a phony election, this sends yet another inconsistent and disheartening message to those struggling for peaceful democratic change in the Islamic world and beyond. In the latest episode of what appears to be a serial coup in the Maldives, the country’s Supreme Court… threw out the results of the first round of presidential elections just hours before the scheduled date of the second round in which pro-democracy leader Mohamed Nasheed was expected to win handily…
Apparent Fraud in Maldivian Elections Threatens Prospects for Democracy
Open Democracy, September 7, 2013
Dr. Zunes talks about a number of troubling indicators that major fraud may have occurred in the election held on September 7, which raises questions regarding the integrity of the September 28 runoff…
The ongoing attack on democracy in the Maldives
OpenDemocracy.net, October 11, 2012: Republished by Common Dreams
Western powers which profess to support democratic and accountable governance need to act decisively to prevent this Muslim nation, whose protracted nonviolent freedom struggle was an important precursor for the Arab Spring, to continue its slide back into authoritarianism…
University of California Takes Aim at Human Rights Activists
Truthout, 4 May 2012, by Stephen Zunes.
Also in Rise Up Times and interviewed on The Scott Horton Show. From the Vietnam War to the Central American revolutions to apartheid South Africa to the East Timor occupation to the invasion of Iraq, university campuses have been an important venue for concerned scholars and activists to raise issues regarding human rights, international law and US foreign policy…
Democracy Imperiled in the Maldives
OpenDemocracy, March 8, 2012, Salem News (Oregon), Huffington Post and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC)
Well before the launch of the Arab Spring, the people of the Maldives, a Muslim nation located on a tropical archipelago in the Indian Ocean, were engaged in widespread nonviolent resistance against the 30-year reign of the corrupt and autocratic president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The growing civil insurrection forced the dictator to finally allow for free elections in October 2008, which he lost. This triumph for democracy is now threatened as a result of a coup last month led by allies of the former dictator and hardline Islamists.
US Outrage Over Syria Veto at UN Rife With Hypocrisy
Truthout, February 8, 2012, also by The Israel Palestine Project
Official Washington has been rife with condemnation at the decision by the governments of Russia and China to veto an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing repression in Syria and calling for a halt to violence on all sides; unfettered access for Arab League monitors; and “a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system, in which citizens are equal regardless of their affiliations or ethnicities or beliefs.” Human rights activists were outraged…
Syrian Repression, the Chinese-Russian Veto, and U.S. Hypocrisy
Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, February 7, 2012
Also Eurasia Review, Global Policy Focus, Middle East Spectator, The Indypendent, Democratic Underground, Mulay Smara, Alternatives International Journal and Transnational Blog
Just as France shields Morocco from accountability for its ongoing occupation and repression in Western Sahara, and just as the U.S. shields Israel from having observe international humanitarian law, Russia and China have used their permanent seats on the UN Security Council to protect the Syrian regime from accountability for its savage repression against its own citizens. Although inexcusable, the self-righteous reaction by U.S. officials betrays hypocrisy on a grand scale…
The Killing of Bin Laden and the Threat of Al Qaeda
Huffington Post May 5, 2011
The killing of Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama bin Laden is not likely to have a profound impact… the organization has decentralized in the ten years since the U.S. and allied forces drove them from their sanctuaries in Afghanistan and terrorist cells operate independently… [source].
Obama and the Denial of Genocide
Foreign Policy In Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, March 11, 2010; also Armenian National institute, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, CommonDreams, History of Macedonia, & Huffington Post: The Obama administration, citing its relations with Turkey, has pledged to block the passage in the full House of Representatives of a resolution passed this past Thursday by the Foreign Relations Committee acknowledging the 1915 genocide by the Ottoman Empire of a 1.5 million Armenians. Even though the Obama administration previously refused to acknowledge and even worked to suppress well-documented evidence of recent war crimes by Israel, another key Middle Eastern ally, few believed that the administration would go as far as to effectively deny genocide. [source]
Echoes of Solidarity 20 Years after Tiananmen
Common Dreams June 4, 2009 & HuffingtonPost July 5, 2009:
Twenty years ago today, I was at Camp Thoreau in New York’s Catskill Mountains [with] volunteers huddled around the radio listening to incoming reports of the massacre then unfolding in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Serving as the emcee for the concert that evening, I broke the news to the 300 or so singers, songwriters, and musicians assembled. I looked out upon an audience composed of amazing performing artists – Fred Small, Betsy Rose, Charlie King, Matt Jones, Pat Humphries, and many others – who had spent their lives singing songs about such struggles for freedom and justice. The shock, anger and despair was overwhelming. I reminded that, despite efforts by the corporate media to portray the student movement in China as some kind of campaign against socialism, it was in fact a campaign against the tyranny and injustice of Communist Party rule and for a more just and democratic society, a society where workers and peasants had power in reality, not only in name…
Presentation: Nonviolent Action in the Islamic World
Nonviolent-Conflict.org, March 11, 2010:
Dr. Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, discusses the long history of strategic nonviolent action throughout the Islamic world, in the Middle East and beyond. Based in part on the social contract implied in Islamic teachings which advocate the withdrawal of obedience from unjust authority, nonviolent civil insurrections have played a major role in the struggle for freedom and human rights for more than a century. Dr. Zunes, looks at case studies from Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, Western Sahara, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others…
The Power of Protest in the Maldives
Huffington Post, December 9, 2008, by Stephen Zunes [source]
The recent ousting of the corrupt and autocratic president of the Maldive Islands, Mahmoud Gayoom, marks another victory in the global struggle for rights and democracy. Gayoom was defeated in a nationwide election on 28 October after ruling the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago as his personal fiefdom for more than thirty years.
The U.S. and Georgia
Huffington Post, August 17, 2008, Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus.
[Source] The international condemnation of Russian aggression against Georgia – and the concomitant assaults by Abkhazians and South Ossetians against ethnic Georgians within their territories – is in large part appropriate. But the self-righteous posturing coming out of Washington should be tempered by a sober recognition of the ways in which the United States has contributed to the crisis.