Does widespread and uncontrolled use of AI change our relationship with scientific meaning? Or with each other? ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Shifting political conceptions of Israel
From Israel’s creation in 1948 to today, views on the nature of the Jewish state have passed through several stages – but what remains constant is the projection of imperial power in the region, which is the barrier to peace and Palestinian self-determination, writes NICK WRIGHT
EXPULSION: The expulsion of Palestinian women and children from Tantura, a village near Haifa, 1948
The biggest strike in global history is a template for our future. The silence tells you all you need to know, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
KEITH FLETT highlights the inimical role of the strategist who helped shape Tony Blair’s ascent and whose political blueprint continues to echo in the era of Keir Starmer
70 years on from Khruschev’s closed-door address to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s 20th Congress, Kenny Coyle talks to academic and writer RICHARD SAKWA about the significance of this political bombshell, in which Stalin’s ‘cult of personality,’ abuse of power and mass repressions were denounced
Small Prophets finds Mackenzie Crook conjuring tiny prophetic beings from working-class malaise, writes STEPHEN ARNELL
FOLLOWING last weekend’s 100,000-plus Palestine demonstration, the writer Michael Rosen opened up an interesting discussion which challenges the way the Palestine-Israel conflict is seen on the left and beyond.
Challenging the narrative which assumes that Israel’s main sponsors — the United States, the EU and Britain — hold in varying degrees different objectives from the zionist state, he writes: “But objectively, the US (and its allies) have gone beyond being complicit, collaborating, and supplying. The vast tonnage of bombs, the massive use of US aircraft, drones, munitions and high-tech back-up, can, to my mind, only be interpreted as the US (and allies including us) doing this for its own reasons. What is going on is the enactment of US policy.”
The political transformations at the centre of today’s controversies about Israel’s “right to exist” are illustrated by the sharp difference between the politics of the post-war period — when Israel was established by UN decision — and its present-day role as the geographically enhanced extension of US imperial power in the region.
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While David Lammy makes hollow criticisms, RAF Akrotiri conducts five-hour surveillance flights sending targeting data to Israel, reports ALFIE HOWIS
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY