Expert Analyst: International Politics, Middle East & Nonviolent Action
The Progressive, December 5, 2024 by Stephen Zunes:Examines Washington’s hysterical and dishonest reaction to the International Criminal Court’s indictments of two Israeli leaders for war crimes [Source]
The Progressive October 2, 2024 … the Biden Administration is largely backing Israel’s Orwellian strategy in Lebanon: “escalate to de-escalate.” The upsurge in violence followed the controlled explosions detonated by Israel of pagers and walkie-talkies… killed dozens of people—including children…
The Progressive, July 26, 2024: While her Senate record was hawkish, Harris has signaled she’d make justice for Palestinians a higher priority than Biden… [source]
The Progressive June 5, 2024Zunes warns how Biden’s Gaza policy and the repression against student protests is creating a political environment similar to 1968, in which alienating young and minority voters could dampen voter.
The Progressive May 17, 2024: Broadening the federal definition of antisemitism is a disingenuous attempt to quash dissent…
The Progressive May 15, 2024: During the wave of campus protests opposing the U.S.-backed war on Gaza and calling for divestment from Israel, students weren’t the only ones facing arrest…
The Progressive, May 1, 2024: Unlike apartheid-era South Africa, many universities aren’t even recognizing Israel’s human rights abuses. A wave of sit-ins and encampments have swept college and university campuses… led—as in past anti-war campus protests in 1968—by Columbia University.…
The Progressive magazine April 17, 2024: Zunes’ analysis of the recent Israeli-Iranian confrontation and the US role [source]
The Progressive April 8, 2024 The Biden Administration is trying to seem like they’re working to end to the fighting when they are not [source]
In August 2019, thousands of refugees, prisoners, and families of ISIS fighters crowded into an encampment in the border town of Baghuz in eastern Syria, one of the last territories controlled by the so-called Islamic State. The United States, supported on the ground by an allied Kurdish and Arab militia, launched a massive air assault on the enclave.
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.”
President Donald Trump’s refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power has raised concerns that the Republicans may try to steal the 2020 Presidential Election. If Trump and his Republican allies attempt to invalidate the election results, would enough Americans be able to mobilize to stop it?
The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, which could result in the eventual reversal of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, has brought this contentious issue to the forefront of the 2020 election campaign.
The assertions being repeated today seem based on apparently groundless claims from twelve years ago by the same people who said Iraq possessed weapons, weapons programs, and weapons systems that were such a grave threat that they ignited the U.S.-Iraq war.
Three previous U.S. administrations all ignored the gross power asymmetry between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers—an imbalance compounded by the fact that as the chief mediator in negotiations, the U.S. is also the primary military, economic, and diplomatic supporter of the occupying power.
It is shocking that it has taken this long for even one house of the U.S. Congress to recognize this historic tragedy. Somehow it is always a “bad time” to upset the government of Turkey.
The Trump Administration has imposed sanctions against more than 1,000 Iranian entities, including Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, targeting almost every significant sector of that nation’s economy. But recently it reversed course, backing off its threat to sanction a top Iranian diplomat, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in response to concerns that it would foreclose any diplomatic recourse…..
The White House has ordered an aircraft carrier strike group off the coast of Iran and a fleet of bombers have flown to U.S. air bases near that country, while preliminary plans are apparently underway to send 120,000 U.S. troops to the region.
There is little question that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is bad news. Some of its units have engaged in severe repression of nonviolent dissidents, supported Assad’s brutal counter-insurgency operations in Syria, backed hardline Islamist militia in several foreign countries, and more.