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Category: History/Archeology

The not-so-secret history of Netanyahu’s support for Hamas

The not-so-secret history of Netanyahu’s support for Hamas

Ghousoon Bisharat writes: When Israeli historian and human rights activist Adam Raz set out to write “The Road to October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Production of the Endless Conflict and Israel’s Moral Degradation,” he knew he was tackling a blind spot in Israeli public discourse. The vast majority of Israelis, Raz believes, fail to grasp the full extent of Netanyahu’s involvement in bolstering Hamas before the current war, and in perpetuating an unending state of conflict. Raz’s book, released in…

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Undoing the ‘deep state’ means Trump would undo over a century of progress in building a federal government for the people and not just for rich white men

Undoing the ‘deep state’ means Trump would undo over a century of progress in building a federal government for the people and not just for rich white men

By Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston If elected, Donald Trump has vowed to demolish what he calls the “deep state” – a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy. A second Trump administration, running mate JD Vance has said, should fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. Trump has said he would tap the billionare Elon Musk as the hatchet man to lead his proposed government commission on “efficiency” in government. Compared with the other…

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Ilan Pappé: The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism

Ilan Pappé: The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism

  Can Zionism survive the current war in Gaza? Israeli historian Ilan Pappé believes it can’t. In fact, he argues that the liberation of Palestine is an inevitability. Pappé is the author of 24 books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most recently published two books: ‘Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic’ and ‘A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’. This week on The Big Picture Podcast, we sit down with Ilan Pappé to talk about where…

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The West has to believe that democracy will prevail

The West has to believe that democracy will prevail

Anne Applebaum writes: When I began working on the history of the Soviet Union, in the 1990s, survivors and historians alike were free to speak as they wished. Many of them felt as if a new Russia could be constructed on top of the fundamental, historical truths that were emerging. That possibility faded. I can even tell you the exact moment when it finally came to an end: the morning of February 20, 2014, when Russian troops illegally marched across…

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Is Donald Trump, as J.D. Vance once asked, just a ‘cynical asshole’ or ‘America’s Hitler’?

Is Donald Trump, as J.D. Vance once asked, just a ‘cynical asshole’ or ‘America’s Hitler’?

David Runciman writes: On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how…

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‘They’re eating pets’ – another example of U.S. politicians smearing Haiti and Haitian immigrants

‘They’re eating pets’ – another example of U.S. politicians smearing Haiti and Haitian immigrants

By Nathan H. Dize, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance continues to defend the false claim that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been abducting and eating area cats and dogs. That outlandish idea has been thoroughly debunked since former President Donald Trump repeatedly raised it as an anti-immigrant talking point in the Sept. 12, 2024, presidential debate. Trump never mentioned where the migrants allegedly “eating the pets” came from, but many…

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The hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West

The hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West

William Dalrymple writes: In 628 AD, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero. Brahmagupta was born near the Rajasthan hill station of Mount Abu. When he was 30 years old, he wrote a 25-chapter treatise…

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Ilan Pappe: ‘Hope, for me, is the end of Israel and the creation of a free Palestine from the river to the sea’

Ilan Pappe: ‘Hope, for me, is the end of Israel and the creation of a free Palestine from the river to the sea’

  Israeli historian Ilan Pappe launched his new book, “Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic,” on 11 June at an event organised by The Cordoba Foundation, MEMO and One World Publications in London, UK. At the event, Pappe spoke about historical and present antisemites who have supported Zionism.

Why America fell for guns

Why America fell for guns

Megan Kang writes: In 1970, amid a national confrontation with the United States’ gun culture following the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the historian Richard Hofstadter struggled to make sense of how the country had become the ‘only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.’ Writing for the magazine American Heritage, he expressed grave concern for a country ‘afloat with weapons –…

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What Donald Trump doesn’t understand about race in America

What Donald Trump doesn’t understand about race in America

Teresa Wiltz writes: For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds. But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there…

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Kamala Harris embodies the demographic trends that have reshaped America

Kamala Harris embodies the demographic trends that have reshaped America

In 2021, Kim Parker and Amanda Barroso from the Pew Research Center wrote: The swearing-in of Kamala Harris as the vice president of the United States marked several important “firsts”: She became the first female vice president, as well as the first Black person and first Asian American to hold that office. But her ascendance to the second-highest office in the land represented so much more. It held up a mirror to America, revealing how key demographic trends have reshaped…

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Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

Tim Adams writes: A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western…

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America’s unending conflict with itself

America’s unending conflict with itself

Nick Bryant writes: The advice I used to impart to young correspondents arriving at the BBC’s bureau in Washington was to remember that the United States had fought a civil war in the mid-19th century and was still arguing over the terms of a fractious peace. Much like the modern-day phrase “sorry but not sorry,” which is used sarcastically to indicate a lack of remorse, the brief ceremony at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House in April 1865, which brought the armed…

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The Supreme Court is making decisions that flatly contradict the Constitution’s text and ideals

The Supreme Court is making decisions that flatly contradict the Constitution’s text and ideals

Akhil Reed Amar writes: In a quid-pro-quo bribery case—money for a pardon—[Chief Justice John] Roberts apparently would allow evidence of the quid (the money transfer) and evidence of the quo (the fact of a later pardon) but not evidence of the pro: evidence that the pardon was given because of the money, that the pardon was motivated by the money. This is absurd. In the oral argument this past April, one of the Court’s best jurists posed the issue well:…

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What we can learn from an ancient egalitarian civilization in the Indus Valley

What we can learn from an ancient egalitarian civilization in the Indus Valley

Adam S. Green writes: The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite. This defies the longtime theoretical assumption that any complex society must have stratified social relations: that collective action, urbanization, and economic specialization only develop in a very unequal culture that takes direction from the top, and that all social trajectories evolve toward a common and universal outcome, the state. Yet, here…

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