20 years ago, I provided thousands of declassified documents toEast Timor’s truth commission, which concluded that US support for Indonesia was indispensable to its invasion, occupation, and genocide. Any sensible interpretation of US Israel would find the same now.

Anyway, here's a great Tom Stevenson piece on Tigray. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

Can't wait to read about the exploits of German feuilletonists at the Venice Biennale as they embark on another punitive expedition against the spectre of the global south

Jon Terry 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇺🇦🇮🇱 Adam Tooze Daniel Zamora Vargas The point is that US deindustrialisation and social crisis started in the ~70s, well before China’s integration into global trading system. After what we call the ‘China shock’, open economies did well if they did pre- and redistribution; US didn’t —>political economy difference.

Valuable account of the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022 by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko. (Given the level of detail, I was a little surprised they don't discuss what on earth happened with Denis Kiryev.)

foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-…

'The effects of this economic settlement are all around us, in the spiralling wealth of financial elites, the dilapidated public realm, unaffordable housing and continued investment in technologies – such as coal-powered generators – that harm us.'

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

theguardian.com/world/2024/apr… -Shahmeer

'Europe must step up to a war footing says leading ammunition group'

A right-wing Israeli mob came to my family’s home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night. I am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home. This happened after Israeli media and German

This is absolutely correct. The idea that Britain's foreign policy is an irrelevance, nothing to see here, is inane. It is conveniently retreated to only in the case of Gaza.

When the German media and political class has a psychotic break, how do you know?

'Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.'

'The Soviet Union had started out as a dictatorship of the proletariat run by intellectuals; what it had become, in the eyes of the children of those intellectuals, was the dictatorship of the former proletarians who remained culturally proletarian'

The New Yorker's @WrightR claims that in Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, etc, Iran has “created its own mini NATO in the Middle East”. Very revealing of how the US establishment sees actual NATO.

This meticulously documented and profoundly shocking London Review of Books longread by Tom Stevenson is essential reading, especially for those last apologists for Israel who still believe the IDF is fighting Hamas in a responsible manner rather than taking a bloody and barbaric revenge on the

Elders in the worst-hit areas draw comparisons with the catastrophe of 1983-85.

The true picture is hard to establish because the gov't has not allowed a gold-standard IPC Classification, having disagreed with the conclusions of the previous one in 2021.

economist.com/middle-east-an…

In 2019, when Donald Trump wanted to withdraw American forces from Syria, Benjamin Netanyahu requested that the US retain its presence at al-Tanf. lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/febr…

Outstanding reporting on UAE assassinations in Yemen, by Nawal Al-maghafi نوال المقحفي youtube.com/watch?v=Z51MTI…

Our new issue 46.03 is now online, featuring:

Rebecca Solnit on losing San Francisco
Tom Stevenson on Operation Iron Swords
@AnnaDella on Enheduana, the first author
Tom Crewe on the gay novel
Jonathan Rée on Alasdair MacIntyre

Read online now at lrb.co.uk