Attention to the Unseen

Simon Tisdall writes: In Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, a CIA agent, reckons he has all the answers to conflict in colonial era Vietnam. Pyle’s ignorance, arrogance and dangerous scheming, intended to bring peace, result instead in the deaths of many innocents and ultimately his own. In today’s too-real, nonfiction world, Donald Trump is Pyle. Except he’s The Noisy American. He thinks he’s a great deal-maker. He never stops trumpeting his brilliance. Yet his North Korea “deal of the century”…

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Hoda Matar reports: In the small Syrian village of al-Hamidia, some 50 kilometers southwest of Damascus, most homes, like that of sheep herder Abu Mo’ath, are built from black basalt stone, a hallmark of the region’s volcanic terrain. The air carries a scent of lavender and sage across the secluded rural landscape. But over the past two months, life in the village has come to be defined by military occupation, with Israeli tanks and troops entrenching their presence on newly…

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Julia Davis reports: U.S. President Donald J. Trump stunned the world by offering unprecedented concessions to Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday—seemingly without getting anything in return. Before the formal peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin even started, Trump and members of his administration dismissed the idea that Ukraine could reclaim its territories that Russia currently occupies, slammed the door shut for Kyiv’s hope of NATO membership, and refused to acknowledge Ukraine as an equal member…

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Joshua Leifer writes: Daniella Weiss, the 79-year-old leader of the far-right settler organization Nachala, stepped out of her white Mitsubishi SUV and into the parking lot of the Sderot train station, a mere three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. It was Dec. 26, the second night of Hanukkah, and for weeks Nachala had been aggressively promoting a celebratory “procession to Gaza” and candle-lighting ceremony in a closed military zone by the border. The event was to be the next step…

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Jesse Rosenfeld reports: The circling drones buzz overhead as explosions echo. Bursts of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and fighters from the Palestinian refugee camp ring out. Israeli military jeeps patrol bulldozed roads outside the government hospital. Displaced camp resident, 29 year-old Noureddine Jarbou, sits in the courtyard watching the unending Israeli assault, his catheter bag attached to the side of his wheelchair. Paralyzed from the waist down during an Israeli raid on the camp three years ago and then taken…

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Middle East Eye reports: The architect of Israel’s so-called Generals’ Plan to depopulate northern Gaza has described the country’s war in the enclave as an “absolute failure”. The original plan, also known as the Eiland Plan after its creator Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, was seen by Palestinians and rights groups as part of a long-term project of ethnic cleansing that would result in the restablishment of Jewish settlements in…

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Caroline Rose writes: Many years ago, in Beirut, I learned the first of many lessons about the Assad regime’s constructed counternarcotics narrative — something that simultaneously sustained the regime’s internal power structure and also fueled its very collapse. I was conducting some final fieldwork on a little-known (at least at that time) drug trade in an amphetamine-type stimulant called Captagon, which was quickly gaining popularity in the Middle East. The trip was part of a policy report that was initially…

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