Tag: Middle East
A Collection of Narratives on the Israel-Hamas War
Plus: What did you learn from the 9/11 attacks and America’s responses to it?
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Many observers are characterizing the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11. On reflection, what
What’s Next in Gaza – The Atlantic
Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of war. Not yet two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is still in a raw, early stage. My colleague Graeme Wood, who arrived in Jerusalem this week, described it to me this way: “Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack on October 7. That manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now
Poland’s Election Is Neither Free nor Fair
State capture is a clean, formal phrase that describes a messy, ugly process. A political party or clique typically consolidates control over a state’s institutions only after years of bad legislation, concentrated propaganda, and many different forms of corruption. In some cases, constitutions have to be broken. Occasionally violence is required. Whole swaths of the public have to be persuaded, bribed, or frightened into going along.
In Poland, this process has been under way for eight years. After the
Saudi Arabia’s bid to become Ukraine war middleman – POLITICO
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Saudi Arabia was dismissed globally as a human rights pariah following the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
But this weekend, the country will burnish its credentials as a peacemaker when it hosts talks on the Ukraine war.
Dozens of national security advisers and senior-ranking officials are descending on the Red Sea city of Jeddah for a meeting that kicks off Friday evening.
The aim is to
Putin rules out rejoining Black Sea grain deal, despite famine fears – POLITICO
Russia will not rejoin a U.N.-brokered pact designed to prevent famines across the developing world as a result of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
Speaking at the Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum in St. Petersburg, Putin again said his government would “refuse to extend” the Black Sea grain deal, which has allowed 32.9 million tons of agricultural products to leave Ukraine’s blockaded ports and reach the global market.
Putin, who accused Western nations of receiving
Inside Belgium’s fight to save its grand prix – POLITICO
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STAVELOT, Belgium — As American greenbacks and Gulf petrodollars pour into Formula 1, little Belgium is fighting to save its iconic motor race.
This Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix at the historic Spa-Francorchamps circuit in the dense Walloon forest — scene of numerous legendary F1 moments — could be one of the last as new owners, moneymen and TV executives steer the traditionally European sport in a new direction.
Luckily
Remembering My Hijacking | The New Yorker
We were flying from Tel Aviv to New York on a September day in 1970. I had turned twelve in June, and my sister Catherine would turn fourteen in December. We were flying alone because our mother lived in Israel and our father lived in America. We boarded at six o’clock in the morning, but instead of landing in New York that evening, we ended up as hostages in a desert in Jordan. Our plane was one among several hijacked
The untold story behind Syria’s White Helmets – POLITICO
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AMSTERDAM — I first met James Le Mesurier in Istanbul. He greeted me at his office, a three-story building in the trendy district of Beyoğlu, along the shores of the Bosphorus Strait. I had traveled to Turkey to meet him, a renowned humanitarian and one of the founders of the White Helmets rescue group in Syria. James had the dignified bearing of a former soldier in the British military,
Fiction: The Third Law of Magic
He spent the night making snow. He packed it tightly into balls of different sizes and stored them in the freezer to keep them stable.
For a long time, he had wanted to make something so simple and natural that no one would suspect concerted thinking had gone into it. He wanted the greatest possible concentration of thought along with the greatest possible efficiency in the execution of that thought.
Turkey’s Earthquake Response Is as Political as the Conditions That Increased The Devastation
When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next. Arpaci’s family has two cars, one belonging to him and one