No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.

History shows that deterrence often fails and that countries can maneuver themselves into corners where they have no choice but to enter into wars they cannot win, wars of assured self-destruction. Now we are entering an era where nuclear arms control is an open question, nonproliferation has failed, conventional conflicts are spreading, overwrought nationalism is on the rise, the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle. Nuclear war in some form seems to be coming to the neighborhood. There is little sign that changes are being pursued to lower the risk. There is no reason to panic, but Katie, bar the door.

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The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely. In the UK, Fitzcarraldo Editions’ re-issue will be published on November 21, with a new preface by literary critic (and Said’s nephew) Saree Makdisi, plus an added chapter titled “The One-State Solution”, which Said wrote for The New York Times in 1999. For American audiences, Said’s seminal trilogy will be re-printed in new editions by Vintage Books and available imminently.

Edward Said died at 67 in September 2003 after a long battle with leukaemia. He had two children: law professor Wadie Said, and actor, writer, and activist Najla Said. Both were children when The Question of Palestine was published, but they recounted what it was like to grow up in New York with the Palestinian-American Columbia professor, and how his book holds up 45 years later.

“After a year plus of what’s been happening in Gaza and now Lebanon, I think people are going to need more critical knowledge and more of a deeper understanding of what has happened before”, Najla told me. She cited how westerners who start getting interested in Palestine tend to first go for the works publishers tend to promote—books by Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky, or Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Although these are all important works, she said that her father was really the first writer to speak out about all this in English, and readers ought to go to the source material.

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The artist and activist Nan Goldin makes no secret of her views about Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

She has signed high-profile protest letters calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “a genocide.” She has marched with pro-Palestinian protesters and was arrested at a demonstration in New York. In a magazine interview last year, she said she had “been on a cultural boycott of Israel for my whole life.”

So a major exhibition of Goldin’s photo slide shows and films that opened over the weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin seemed like a high-profile anomaly in Germany, where lawmakers have said that support for boycotting Israel is antisemitic, and where artists who have taken positions like Goldin’s have had museum shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks shut down.

But none of those artists were as famous or influential as Goldin, who has been an art-world star for decades.

“If an artist in my position is allowed to express their political stance without being canceled,” she said in a speech at the show’s public opening, “I hope I will be paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored.” Goldin, who is Jewish and American, accused Germans of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and looking away from the horrors unfolding in Gaza, which she repeatedly described as a genocide.

Tension built throughout the 17-minute speech, during which members of the public shouted an anti-Israel slogan, and its conclusion set off a reaction in the museum hall that snowballed in the news media.

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posted by f.sheikh

The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will reverberate through that country, but it also raises questions for the United States.

If the international court believes that Israel may have committed war crimes in Gaza and engaged in a policy of deliberate starvation of civilians, then whose weapons were used? Which country protected Israel in the United Nations and blocked more robust efforts to channel food to starving Gazans? The answer, of course, is the United States.

President Biden in May denounced the I.C.C. prosecutor’s request for warrants and said that “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” But there is a moral equivalence between an American child and an Israeli child and a Palestinian child. They all deserve to be protected. We should not operate as if there is a hierarchy in the value of children’s lives, with some invaluable and others expendable.

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