Middle East Crisis Webinar
Middle East Crisis Webinar with Dr. Stephen Zunes,Steve Chase and Michael Beer Dec. 6, 2023 [or Audio] Sponsor: Movement for a New Society
Expert Analyst: International Politics, Middle East & Nonviolent Action
Israel and Palestine
Middle East Crisis Webinar with Dr. Stephen Zunes,Steve Chase and Michael Beer Dec. 6, 2023 [or Audio] Sponsor: Movement for a New Society
KPFA and Pacifica affiliates, Nov. 17, 2023 [45 mins. Note Zunes’s segment starts at 9:50, interrupted by a ten-minute Internet gap, after which Zunes returns.]
Truthout, Feb. 27, 2022 and Tikkun March 10, 2022 [source] Part of the decades-long tradition of the U.S. propping up Arab dictatorships that suppress pro-democracy struggles while justifying support for Israel, calling it the region’s “sole democracy.”
KBBF Radio: Zunes on the occupation of Western Sahara and much more, plus Palestine Update and some poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Find more at Western-Sahara.org.
Truthout, February 10, 2022: This is indicative of the Democratic Party’s shift to the right on foreign policy in recent decades…
WRFI February 18, 2022: Amnesty International published the extensive report “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians” which concluded that decades of systematic discrimination and oppression of Palestinians and violation of their rights amounts to the crime of apartheid. We discuss why the…
KZFR public radio, Chico, CA, 11 February 2022 [Audio’s no longer available. Find more at Western-Sahara.org]
Parallaxviews podcast, Feb. 8, 2022. Zunes analysis of the recent Amnesty International report (begins at 1:29:00; also at Amnesty.org) arguing Israel is in engaging in the practice of apartheid against Palestinians, especially in the Occupied Territories. Dr. Zunes will also…
photos of dead Palestinian children on the front page of The New York Times to gripping accounts of people digging through the wreckage of high-rise apartment complexes and office buildings, evidence of last month’s horrific death toll from Israel’s eleven-day bombing campaign was hard to deny.
Jacobin June 14, 2021: The US military spends trillions on death abroad that could be spent on improving life back home…
KPFA FM Radio, June 2, 2021: Zunes’s analysis of the past, present and future of Gaza/Israel
Tikkun: “The extreme disproportionate firepower of the Israelis is really staggering. We’re looking at a 20:1 ratio just in terms of casualties… the U.S. bears special responsibility…”
The Californian: Commentary: As the ceasefire takes hold ending the fighting between Hamas and Israel, central coast voters are raising questions over controversial statements he made.
Foreign Policy In Focus May 26, 2021: The U.S. strident defense of Israel’s recent military onslaught on the Gaza Strip… sounds remarkably similar to that to defend the Assad regime in Syria during their bloody attacks on Aleppo, Idlib, and…
ParallaxViews.podbean.com: We explore recent events involving Israeli airstrikes, the Sheikh Jarrah district of East Jerusalem, Hamas, Gaza, and U.S. foreign policy [and] dive into the Israeli airstrike that took down an Associated Press building… the misuse of antisemitism to stifle…
Truthout, May 3, 2021, by Stephen Zunes [ source] In an apparent response to growing calls for making US aid to the Netanyahu government conditional on Israeli adherence to human rights law, 330 members of the US House of Representatives…
THE WAR BETWEEN Armenia and Azerbaijan this past autumn was an avoidable tragedy.
The disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region has been populated since at least the second century B.C.E. by Armenians, one of the world’s oldest Christian civilizations. The Muslim Azeris and others have lived there and in neighboring areas for centuries as well, and the region was ethnically mixed (albeit majority Armenian) when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Last week, President Trump formally recognized Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara as part of a deal to get Morocco to normalize relations with Israel. But Morocco’s claim on Western Sahara is rejected by the United Nations, the World Court, the African Union and a broad consensus of international legal scholars that consider the region a non-self-governing territory that must be allowed an act of self-determination. This is why no country had formally recognized Morocco’s takeover — until now.
On December 10, the United States became the only country to formally recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara, the former Spanish colony forcibly seized by Moroccan forces in 1975. Trump’s proclamation is directly counter to a series of UN Security Council resolutions and a landmark World Court ruling calling for self-determination.
Late last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. government finds the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign to be inherently “anti-Semitic.” He pledged to “immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw U.S. government support for such groups” and urged all nations to “recognize the BDS movement for the cancer that it is.”