As the death toll from a devastating earthquake in Syria and Turkey continues to climb, dozens of the dead have been identified as Palestinian, and thousands of refugees have been newly displaced.

Is it worth leaving Gaza to seek work in foreign countries to build your future if you can’t do this at home?

The Bahrain-Israel deal is significant because the kingdom is a virtual protectorate of the Saudis. There are serious concerns that a Saudi involvement with Israel will only lead to further tightening of measures against the Palestinian cause. And Iran will rise in prestige in Palestinian global affairs.

The corona crisis in Israel has revealed the state’s reliance on secret police, often making errors in identification, and the denial of lifesaving equipment to Palestinians. Here are some heart-breaking examples of what Apartheid looks like at the time of Corona.

Sophia Armen responds to the passage of U.S. resolution HR 296, which recognized the Armenian Genocide, and describes the challenges Armenians face in their struggle for justice. “Our physical erasure from our homeland, is mirrored in discourse,” Armen writes.

The push to acknowledge the genocide on a federal level has hit roadblocks for decades, but recent geopolitical events have forced the issue. On October 29 the House passed H.Res 296, a resolution that recognizes the mass-killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War 1 as a genocide. While the measure passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 405-11, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is facing criticism for simply voting “present.”

Mohammed Shamla, 25, used to call Gaza the “grave of dreams.” Luck was his only hope. Earlier this year he paid a bribe to exit Gaza through Egypt an traveled on to Turkey where he died on April 12 after falling from a balcony while police chased him for allegedly not possessing paperwork to legally be in the country.

Beto O’Rourke says at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that Israeli human rights violations hurt the U.S. “These truths that we hold so dear — that we are all created equal– ‘all of us’ needs to mean, ‘All of us,’ not relationships of convenience for short term security gains but relationships that allow us to continue to be the example for so much of the rest of the world.”

Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince highly praised as a “reformer,” must now answer for the suspected murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NYT columnist Tom Friedman slathered “MBS” with praise less than a year ago, surely in part because of the Crown Prince’s unspoken alliance with Israel against Iran.

The abrupt announcement that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Yemen, the Maldive Islands, and the eastern government in divided Libya have broken all economic and political ties with Qatar has given rise to a tsunami of conjecture, wild speculation, and most of all, to wishful thinking and doomsday worries. Richard Falk untangles the threads of the story so far what it could mean for U.S. foreign policy in the region.