World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The theory of an absolute "anti" that corresponds to an absolute "pro" is based on a way of seeing things that sums up the problems of the universe by attributing them to a single cause. However, this theory, which is founded on the view that one side is totally innocent and the other is totally…

The foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan declared that the “security of marine navigation in the Red Sea is indivisible from the national security of the two countries.” The truth is it is indivisible from the security of the entire region and international marine navigation and therefore, the…

As a teenager in the 1980s, I watched the construction of the intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza City, named after one of Gaza’s greatest public figures, and its theater, grand hall, public library, printing press and cultural salon. Students and researchers, scholars…

There resides, in this war on Gaza, a far higher dose of magic than we are used to seeing in wars. Magic, here, refers to the attempt to convince us of things that our conscience and reason could never allow us to accept. It is, in this sense, not like “lying” that falsifies a piece of information…

The most dangerous question of the Gaza war is whether or not Hamas will be destroyed. The reason for the dominance of questions around the fate of the movement is self-evident. It is a party to the war; indeed, it instigated this round. Nonetheless, its fate is not the most consequential question…

French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast. There one afternoon, a 19-year-old rapper who…

Last week, Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian representative to the United Nations, had the opportunity to deliver a statement that gave him the moral high ground. He sharply criticized Washington's opposition to a permanent ceasefire in the war to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip. …

The date: October 23, 1983 The location: Beirut An explosion tore through the city at around 6 am. Ambulances raced to the scene. A suicide bomber had driven his truck into the US marines barracks in the Lebanese capital. The place was turned into rubble and scores of soldiers of the…

One of the first things I asked ChatGPT about, early this year, was myself: “What can you tell me about the writer Vauhini Vara?” It told me I’m a journalist (true, though I’m also a fiction writer), that I was born in California (false) and that I’d won a Gerald Loeb Award and a National Magazine…

Do you know, Mr. President, how many people were killed by Israel in Gaza and who they were? Just to remind you... 20,000 so far... and there is no end in sight. Seven thousand children have gone, not counting the fetuses who died in their mothers' wombs. Young people, adults, elderly people…

The German Heinrich Böll Foundation recently withdrew its funding of the "Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought" because it had been granted to the Russian-American writer of Jewish faith, Masha Gessen, due to an article entitled "In the Shadow of the Holocaust" that she had written for The New…

We go back to the beginning, to before 1982, that is, to the open war across the borders between Lebanon and occupied Palestine, for a complete review of an experience that all Lebanese people, especially southerners, have lived since the launch of the operations of the Palestinian resistance…