Farrah Akbik learned the story of Palestine from a friend’s family who lived it firsthand when they were forced out of Safed in 1948, and still had the key to their house hanging on the wall of their small apartment in Damascus. “There is an ongoing system of Apartheid designed specifically to push more and more Palestinians out of their rightful homes and ancestral lands, and to populate them with settlers. More injustice, more people on the roads of exodus carrying yet more keys. The apathy I read, see and hear around me is baffling, but maybe if they had sat in that kitchen with Abu Khaldoon and heard him retell his journey I would like to think that even the most indifferent of hearts would have been stirred.”

Dropping bombs on the Middle East is a rite of passage for modern Presidents and last week Joe Biden officially joined the club.

An ICC investigation of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians is an instance of long, long overdue justice, of leveling the playing field to some degree. Why? Because while Israel is by no means the world’s worst malefactor, it is definitely the world’s most lavishly indulged one.

“This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East.” said Rep. Ro Khanna. “There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization….I spoke against endless war with Trump, and I will speak out against it when we have a Democratic President.”

While Israel sends its vaccines abroad, and coordinates the purchase of vaccines to Syria, the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are still being left out of the state’s inoculation plans.

December 17 marked ten years since Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunis, set himself on fire in an act of defiance and desperation that triggered what would become known as the Arab Spring. Over the course of the last decade we have witnessed revolutions sweep the Middle East and North Africa, but we have also witnessed the sheer might and terror of counter-revolution as well. What are the lessons from the Arab Spring?

The export of wines from the Golan Heights to Dubai marks Trump’s legacy in the region: perceived legitimacy for the occupation and expanded markets for settlement businesses.

Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen, two Republican neoconservatives, endorse Joe Biden saying he will foster bipartisan support for Israel. And don’t worry about the Iran deal. Biden can’t easily return to the deal, Edelman assures a “Jews for Biden” event, because Trump has now set the terms and Dem leaders including Schumer and Menendez don’t like the deal.

James Zogby writes, “The second decade of the 21st century began with two traumatic events that would transform the Middle East. In fact, although the seeds had been planted years earlier, 2011 proved to be a watershed year for the people of the region.”

The New York Times gives Paul Wolfowitz a platform to criticize Trump on the withdrawal from Syria, and the fight against ISIS, without saying a word about the roots of ISIS in the destruction that his project of invading Iraq wrought throughout the region. Wolfowitz should be on trial for major war crimes, Helena Cobban writes, not featured in the New York Times.