Habib Siddiqui

  While eyes remain peeled on Israel’s increasingly violent and expanding campaign in Lebanon, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proving ever more predatory with the Gaza Strip.  With aggrandizing impunity, more territory is being acquired for familiar reasons: Hamas is on the run and needs to be crushed further (the organisation is proving oddly resilient and contradictory to Israeli objectives here); Palestinian autonomy, even in so small an area, would be a future threat to Israel unless heavily invigilated and policed; and, well, there is that old desire to ethnically cleanse the territory. Speaking at a conference on May 28, Netanyahu outlined his plans for further seizures.  “We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the Strip – you know this.  We were at 50, we moved to 60.  My directive is to move to…” (at that point, an enthusiastic voice in the crowd interjected with “100”). ...

  Cultural workers develop their work, in the short and long term, against the background of a terrible world scenario. This, as is hopefully clear, is the case especially in the ‘Middle East’, characterised by an ongoing genocide of a particular ethnic group and a war that can potentially escalate towards WWIII which, if this worse case scenario were to come to pass, may well be ‘the war to end all wars’ and the planet on which it is waged. This situation indeed furnished the global community with a series of pressing challenges. One is to work collectively towards reviving the idea of an ‘Educated Public’ engaging in well informed debate, predicated on reason and feeling, to address questions from all standpoints and not simply ethnocentrically. Ethnocentrism and more precisely Eurocentrism  has been one of the limits of my own formation, including formal education, which, I would like to think, many conscientious people, committed to universal social and ecological...

  Donald Trump did not suddenly become a dove. He did not wake up one morning converted to the wisdom of Quincy Adams, George Kennan, or the old conservative suspicion of crusading wars. When he paused another planned attack on Iran, the public explanation was diplomatic: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates had urged restraint; Pakistan had carried a proposal; talks had become serious enough to justify delay. That explanation is true as far as it goes. It is not enough. The deeper story is that Washington’s military calculus has changed. The old assumption—that Iran could be bombed, contained, humiliated, and then brought quietly to the table—has met the hard surface of reality. American power remains immense. But immensity is not the same as usability. A superpower can destroy a great deal and still fail to produce a political result worth the price. That is what the Iran crisis has exposed. Trump’s hesitation was not merely a bow to Arab pressure. It was an admiss...

  The treatment of the flotilla activists by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was shocking only to those who continue to clothe colonial violence in the soft language of security. There is now a mountain of evidence before humanity: Gaza has become not merely a place under siege but a geography of calculated despair, where starvation and bombardment have been converted into instruments of political management. The activists aboard the flotilla were not armed combatants, nor were they soldiers threatening invasion. They were international volunteers, human rights advocates, doctors, parliamentarians, and organisers attempting to break the siege imposed on Gaza. Their journey was political, moral, and humanitarian. Yet the Israeli state met them with humiliation, detention, and theatrical violence. Ben Gvir understood precisely the symbolic function of his actions. The politics of the Israeli far right is not merely about security; it is about pedagogy. The vio...