Geography Archives: Israel

“Freedom lies behind a door closed shut,” the great Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi wrote in the last century.  “It can only be knocked down with a bleeding fist.”  More than that is bleeding in the Arab world at the moment. The uprisings we are witnessing in Egypt have been a rude awakening for all those […]

The West has financed dictatorships in the Middle East and Arab World for more than a century. The pro-democracy protests against Western-backed dictatorships in the Arab world have shown, once again, the immense hypocrisy of our rulers.  Which side are the Western governments on — the side of protesters or the side of dictators?  The […]

Egypt is throbbing with resistance.  Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution.  Hundreds of thousands of people — on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million — have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo.  Army […]

3 February 2011 In the battles of yesterday and today, fought bravely by the Egyptian revolutionaries against the militias of the regime, many martyrs fell by the bullets of the thugs.  Now it is clear to all that the regime is maneuvering, on the one hand offering concessions (declaring that Gamal Mubarak will not run, […]

  What explains the diametrically opposed stances of the imperialist powers and corporate media: promoting regime change in Iran while endeavoring to preserve the fundamentals of the regimes, with or without modification, in Egypt and Tunisia?  In part, the increasingly anachronistic legacy of the policy and ideology about Israel developed in the wake of the […]

In 2002 Iran was added to the neoconservative-designed ‘Axis of Evil’ and thus declared ripe for US military intervention. The threat of war in the ‘greatest crisis of modern times’ (John Pilger in the New Statesman, July 12, 2007) was at its height in 2006-2007.  With President Obama assuming office in 2009, a great hope […]

2 February 2011 Every revolution, sooner or later, has to stand on the barricades and fight a counter-revolution.  The scenes today at the Tahrir Square are nothing short of a scene that we imagine from the French revolution: the people holding ground against hordes of militiamen of a dying regime.  Young and old, women and […]

Egypt is a cornerstone in the US plan of control of the planet.  Washington will not tolerate any attempt of Egypt to move out of its total submission, also required by Israel in order to pursue its colonisation of what remains from Palestine.  This is the exclusive target of Washington in its ‘involvement’ in the […]

  “As soon as I saw the defiant tone and substance of Mubarak’s speech, I realized that he is not speaking for himself but for the US/Israeli sponsors. . . .  I just read the speech by Obama: it confirmed my suspicion, that basically Mubarak was permitted by the US to do with the Egyptian […]

GEB Statement on Recent Attacks on Civil Liberties On September 24, 2010, the FBI carried out coordinated raids on the homes and offices of fourteen anti-war activists in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan.  During the raids, the FBI confiscated everything from computers and mailing lists to children’s drawings and photos of Martin Luther King. Ten of […]

Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia.  He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut.  He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals.  His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the […]

  Arab uprisings are taking place with the historical speed of light.  I began writing this piece following the downfall of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and closed with the imminent downfall of the Egyptian one Hosni Mubarak.  The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are not, as some armchair pundits called the Tunisian one, Jasmine Revolutions.  They […]

Tomorrow the Egyptian people will go to the streets en masse to give the final blow to the regime.  The people are talking of a rally of millions, and people have been pouring into Midan Atahrir, Tahrir Square, today and heading towards Cairo from the provinces.  The regime closed all the roads and stopped the […]

  Karl Marx, in his famous treatise on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, pointing out its similarities to the coup undertaken by Napoleon Bonaparte a little over 50 years before, remarked that history has the tendency to repeat itself, ‘the first [time] as tragedy, then as farce’. As with so many other […]

  Amy Goodman: Your feelings today in the midst of this popular rebellion against the Mubarak regime, calling on Mubarak to leave?  Do you agree? Nawal El Saadawi: We are in the streets every day, people, children, old people, including myself.  I am now 80 years of age, suffering of this regime for half a […]

Only a few days after the start of the revolution, the regime is beginning to take desperate measures. Appointing Omar Suleiman as vice president means telling everybody that Hosni Mubarak is over and out and that Gamal Mubarak will never be president. At the same time it means telling the people that Suleiman, the man […]

America’s international standing is under mounting strain on multiple fronts.  Nowhere is this more glaring than in the Middle East, where the balance of influence (and hence power) is shifting away from the United States and toward Iran, Turkey, and their allies.  This trend may, in fact, accelerate as a consequence of ongoing unrest in […]

Mohammed Ezzeldin: We have two main scenarios now regarding the relation between the people and the army.  We have the Tunisian scenario.  There’s a division in the ruling elites, there is division in the regime, so the army will be neutral: the tanks and soldiers and officers in the streets, they are just maintaining the […]

Hope is a powerful feeling, it is contagious, and it tends to increase geometrically.  And hope is exactly what Tunisia gave our Arab people everywhere.  Tunisia the land of the revolution where today three martyrs fell in the Kasbah, is still the inspiration of a whole Nation.  Our great dormant nation, from Rabat to Baghdad. […]

Egypt’s revolution is still cooking, but not boiling yet.  Today the people took to the streets in a fragmented way, after the police heavy-handedly dispersed the crowd yesterday. In Cairo one demonstrator and one police officer died today in the clashes.  That gives an idea of the level of protest; the government is denying this, […]