Habib Siddiqui

  The news of the death of former  United States  President  Jimmy Carter  on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100 has ushered in an avalanche of memories in many people in my age group - students of the 1970s who remember his presidency with a mixture of nostalgia, bitter awakening and historic turning points in American and world history.  Carter did not dramatically change my politics. But he did help change the historical course of my homeland,  Iran , and I daresay American history after his troubled one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981.   Both the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979 and the dramatic Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981 happened on Carter's watch. And it was also when I happened to arrive in the US.   I was born and raised in southern Iran, graduated from university in Tehran in 1975, and soon after received a US visa and admission to the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned my doctoral degree in sociology of culture....

  The story of the Israeli war on Gaza can be epitomized in the story of the Israeli war on Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of the Strip. When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which killed thousands. Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024. Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend. Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was supposedly ‘conquered’ earlier, still leading the fight. Be...