International Glance
In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.
Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”
The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.
Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby”
Israel-Gaza live updates: Israel attacks Beirut, targets Hezbollah chief of staff
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials reiterated their intention to block future Palestinian statehood ahead of the United Nations Security Council vote to authorize the U.S. plan for post-war Gaza on Monday.
There are three remaining deceased hostages in Gaza. Israeli authorities have been releasing the bodies of Palestinians in exchange for the return of hostage remains.
The ceasefire is broadly holding in Gaza, with Israeli forces inside the strip having pulled back to the so-called "yellow line." Still, renewed Israeli strikes have killed dozens of Palestinians in the past week.
Elsewhere, Israel is continuing strikes on what it says are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and on Sunday launched an airstrike in the capital Beirut. The Israel Defense Forces is also continuing raids in parts of the occupied West Bank.
South Africa hosts G20 as tensions with U.S. flare amid boycott
The world's biggest economy will be conspicuously absent from a meeting of the globe's 20 richest nations this weekend, as the U.S. boycotts the G20 Leaders' Summit hosted by South Africa.
The Trump administration is snubbing the event over false race-based claims and what it considers the summit's DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion -- agenda. Since returning to office Trump has accused the South African government of confiscating white-owned land and allowing the killing of white Afrikaners.
"You know we have a G20 meeting in South Africa, South Africa shouldn't even be in the Gs anymore, because what happened there is bad," Trump said earlier this month.
The government here has repeatedly tried to correct the U.S. administration, to no avail.
Ramaphosa has kept his cool and was taciturn this week, saying: "Their absence is their loss."
Still, it's a huge blow to South Africa on the global stage.
American who spied for Israel says he met Ambassador Mike Huckabee to 'thank' him for his support
The “main point” of the meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in July, Pollard said, was to “thank” the ambassador for “his efforts on my behalf during my incarceration.”
Pollard, a former American intelligence analyst, spent 30 years in prison on espionage charges after being found to have passed critical security documents to Israeli intelligence in the 1980s. Israel made Pollard a citizen during his lengthy prison term, and he moved there in 2020, five years after his release on probation.
During Pollard’s detention, Huckabee was among several pro-Israeli politicians who advocated for his release, arguing that the sentence was too severe for someone who had been spying for an ally.
Pollard described his meeting as more of a social call and insisted the two didn’t discuss politics or Gaza. But the meeting comes amid a growing list of episodes in which the ambassador, a fierce champion of Israel, has appeared to deviate from official White House policy as the Trump administration deepens its involvement in Middle East diplomacy and peacekeeping.
Israel Kills Over 30 Palestinians in Gaza in One of Bloodiest Assaults of "Ceasefire"
The Israeli military carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Gaza since the “ceasefire” took effect last month, killing over 30 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounding dozens more in a series of airstrikes late Wednesday and early Thursday. The dead and wounded arrived at hospitals in an endless stream, children were covered in dust and blood, men carried small bodies wrapped in shrouds, and wails of grief rose in the air
These horrific scenes, a daily feature of the past two years of Israel’s acute genocidal assault, had returned again. “The war has returned to the Gaza Strip,” Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for the Civil Defense in Gaza, told Drop Site inside a hospital tent at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City as the casualties were being brought in. The wounded arrived every few minutes, brought in by ambulances, cars, motorized rickshas—or carried on foot. The dead were wrapped in blankets and sheets.
Most of the casualties came from multiple Israeli airstrikes targeting a tent encampment sheltering the displaced in Khan Younis that killed 17 people, including five children, and from a pair of airstrikes on a building belonging to the Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Ministry sheltering the displaced that killed 16, including seven children, according to hospital officials.
“What is happening in Gaza is something no mind could have imagined,” Bassal said later in the evening as he knelt in front of the bodies of three young children wrapped in one body bag. “It’s madness. These children are being killed—their only crime is that they are children…So to the world, to the nations, to the mediators, to those who oversaw the ceasefire, to those who contributed to stopping the war—now the occupation returns to kill our children—what are you going to do?” He added, “Who will cry for these children? The entire family is gone. The mother died, the children died, the father died—who will cry for them? The world must understand what is happening in Gaza and the gravity of what is taking place.”
Saudi Arabia releases US retiree jailed over critical tweets
Saudi Arabia has agreed to allow US citizen Saad Almadi to return home to Florida, five months ahead of the scheduled lifting of travel restrictions and a day after Saudi crown prince and prime minister Mohammed bin Salman met Donald Trump at the White House.
Almadi, 75, was sentenced to 19 years of incarceration in the kingdom in 2021 after he wrote 14 tweets critical of the Riyadh government. Two years later, the charges were reduced to so-called “cyber crimes” and he was sentenced to a 30-year ban on leaving Saudi Arabia.
The announcement that Almadi, a dual citizen and retired engineer who had lived in the US since the 1970s, would be free to leave the country came after the US president delivered a speech touting US-Saudi ties, including arms sales and investment deals, during a second day of public events in Washington.
“Our family is overjoyed that, after four long years, our father, Saad Almadi, is finally on his way home to the United States!” the Almadi family said in a statement.
“This day would not have been possible without President Donald Trump and the tireless efforts of his administration. We are deeply grateful to Dr Sebastian Gorka and the team at the national security council, as well as everyone at the state department,” it added.
The statement by Almadi’s son, Ibrahim Almadi, also thanked various non-profit organizations, including the James Foley Fund and Hostages America, and House speaker Mike Johnson for supporting the elder Almadi’s cause. He later posted on X that his father was on his way to the US.
TVNL Comment: Why has Trump ignored the pleas to release the 16 year old American boy accused of throwing a rock to protecct his home from settler attacks in the West Bank?
B’Tselem: Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US
Genocide is a process, not an event. When genocide happens, its roots, and the conditions that allowed it, often become visible only in retrospect. If those conditions remain unchanged and there is no accountability, there’s every reason to believe the violence will return, perhaps even worse, especially if it was never fully halted. This is exactly what we are seeing in the case of Gaza. Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence.
A strange kind of calm has settled over Israel in the weeks since the Gaza ceasefire was declared. The sirens stopped. The hostages who survived the 7 October attack and nearly two years in captivity came home. But this calm – which has not been extended to Gaza, where more than 200 civilians have been killed since the ceasefire supposedly went into effect is built around an unclear plan by Donald Trump that does not address the root causes of the violence, and is merely a mirage. Nothing has changed in the violent political system that Palestinians and Israelis live under. The machinery behind the violence remains intact. The logic of domination still rules.
For nearly two years, Israel waged a campaign in Gaza that meets the clearest definition of genocide: a systematic, often openly declared attempt to destroy a group of people, the Palestinians in Gaza, through killing, starvation, forced displacement, and the destruction of life-sustaining conditions. Genocide is not a metaphor here. It is the only term that fits.
Our organization, B’Tselem, published a report last July titled Our Genocide. We chose this name because we are not observers but part of this horrific story. Israeli and Palestinian researchers, investigators and fieldworkers worked together to document events in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel. Our conclusion confirms what Palestinians and international experts have long said: this is genocide – a direct assault on a population aiming to destroy the group.
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