Attention to the Unseen

Razia Iqbal writes: History has a striking capacity to intrude on the present day, as it does when I meet Rashid Khalidi. The Palestinian American professor’s retirement from his position as the Edward Said chair of modern Arab history at Columbia University was imminent, and that morning he has received alarming news: a gang of extremist Israeli settlers had stormed a house on Silsila Road in Jerusalem, a property that had been in his family’s possession since the time of…

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  As long as the US extends “total impunity” to Israel, there’s no way to prevent further genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and further bloodshed in Lebanon, argues Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. One of the biggest factors preventing all-out war in the region is Iran’s desire to pursue its own interests and reconcile with the US, according to Iran expert Roxane Farmanfarmanian of Cambridge University. Join Friedman and Farmanfarmanian in their conversation with…

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  We get an update from Lebanon, where the death toll from Israeli airstrikes has risen to over 700 since Monday, following a series of explosions involving pagers and walkie-talkies in Beirut and southern Lebanon last week. The Israeli military reiterated its troops were preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon if tensions continue to escalate. Multiple Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have appeared across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. As the Biden administration claims it’s working toward a ceasefire…

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By Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments…

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Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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