Broken Bangles: The Soul of Humanity is Broken

Benjamin Netanyahu as a Leader The Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attacks has been disproportionate and genocidal. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been held responsible for this unnecessary killing of thousands of Gazan people, though it is a collective decision taken by Israel’s leadership to wage a brutal war until they destroy Hamas completely.  Netanyahu’s public approval has eroded even in Israel. A s a leader and a politician, Netanyahu has navigated through pernicious and tenebrous political waters. He is a fervent follower of a right-wing and liberalism-based world order and a strong believer in military solutions over peace processes and negotiations. People close to him have observed that he believes himself to be “a messiah with a duty to protect Israel”. His one peculiar trait is that he can unflinchingly make unpopular decisions if he believes they are necessary to protect Israel. During his many years in the prime ministership, he has been ...

  Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, one of the few leaders who was left in Gaza to lead the war on the Palestine side. For many in the Western world, Yahya Sinwar will be just a terrorist, and for many in the Middle East, he will remain a hero. It is difficult to answer who he really was amidst the chaos of misinformation and troubled history that has turned this region into a hellhole of violence and mistrust.  Obviously, Sinwar was a strong leader, a man capable of making the hardest of hard decisions, as witnessed in the October 7 attack of Hamas against Israel. The last interview that Sinwar gave to foreign media was with VICE News and journalist Hind Hassan in 2021. Al Jazeera Television has interviewed Hassan in the aftermath of Yahya Sinwar’s assassination.  Hassan remembers Sinwar as a man who unceremoniously walked out of a mosque in Gaza, surrounded by his colleagues, amidst an escalation of the conflict in 2021. She and her TV crew could walk up to ...

  A Case For Refugees We have been witnessing a right-wing surge against accepting refugees. The latest in a series of refugee-related decisions, and the gravest of all rather, Donald Trump and his team have begun random deportations of "illegal" migrants in the name of his 'America first' policy. Yet, the reality constantly signals that all countries must revise their refugee policies generously and prepare to take in as many refugees as possible if we still claim our share of humanity. Understandably, people are afraid of their country taking in refugees in hundreds and thousands. The fear that a huge influx of people outside their cultures into a country might destroy its financial security, reduce their job opportunities, and change the familiar social fabric is real.  This fear fails to consider our long cultural history of accepting people from outside cultures.  Our ancestors, wherever their homeland was, shifted from one place and settled in another for many r...

  Earth Has No Boundaries Earth has no borders except natural barriers, mountains and seas. There are no barriers at all, given the travel technologies we possess.  Surreal the concept of borders is, yet, borders are quite concrete too; they can start wars, prompt mass exodus, and provoke all kinds of tricky emotions like national pride, a sense of belonging, unjustified hostilities, and fear of the other. Many national borders have no physical properties. No one can tell where one country ends and another begins by merely looking at them. For that, one needs maps and soldiers, fences and fear.  They are mostly barren land, rivers and deserts, these national borders that we hold on to at huge prices, costing human lives, diplomacy, weapons, and real money. They deceive you if you look at them for long- so normal, one could even feel tempted to step across. The invisibility of such borders evokes many sociological and philosophical questions. Were There Borders Always? At ...