Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
Throwing stones in glass houses
GAVIN O’TOOLE observes that the call for a new international framework for conflict mediation is fatally marred by a partisan position on the Isreali-Gazan conflict
PLACE OF DISCORD: The UN General Assembly has adopted, on October 26 2023, a resolution calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in Gaza and demands a “continuous, sufficient and unhindered” provision of lifesaving supplies and services for civilians trapped inside the enclave
[UN Photo/Evan Schneider]
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
JOHN GREEN relishes the record of a life well lived in the service of the fight for justice and socialism
Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation
Pierre Hazan
Hurst, £18.99
IN 1929 from his fascist cell, Antonio Gramsci described epochal changes as Europe tore itself apart — an old world was dying and a new one was struggling to be born.
It was “a time of monsters,” the Italian Marxist warned, with chilling prescience.
Pierre Hazan uses this metaphor to situate the key dilemmas facing conflict mediators today in a similarly dark landscape in order to ask how they are to fulfil their role in a deeply divided multipolar world where the very idea of an “international community” is redundant.
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RAMZY BAROUD looks at how entire West Bank communities have been shattered, their social and physical fabric deliberately dismantled by Israel to enable its formal annexation
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes, and recommends a a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians
Spain has joined South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel while imposing weapons bans and port restrictions, moves partly driven by trade unions — proving just how effectively civil society can reshape government policy, writes RAMZY BAROUD
