As leftists, our support must go to the revolutionary people struggling for freedom and emancipation. Only through their own collective action can the Syrian people achieve their goals. This concept, which is at the heart of revolutionary politics, faces profound skepticism from some sections of the left. This should not prevent us, however, from building our solidarity on this basis.

Ceasefires in Syria are difficult to arrange and particularly likely to collapse because their successful implementation involves so many parties inside and outside the country who hate and would like to kill each other. All of these powers have their own agendas that may have little to do with the wellbeing of those who want to leave a besieged enclave in safety.

The implication is that, should the Palestinian leadership insist on the settlers being “ethnically cleansed” from their illegal colonies, Israel would be justified in demanding tit-for-tat. If the settlers have to return to Israel, why not a population swap, with Israel’s Palestinian minority forced into the occupied territories?

What makes a war our war? The Iraq Wars. Are wars named only after the home team? The War on Afghanistan. Is its name the measure of who is doing the killing and who the dying? The War on Terror. If the dead die far from where we can see, are we still at war? The War of Terror. Our pilgrimage was hemmed on both sides by carnage.

After diluting a resolution about revoking the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s charitable status strongly endorsed by members in an online poll, May threatened to resign if the party didn’t organize another vote on a BDS resolution members strongly backed in a pre-convention online poll, convention caucus and full convention vote.

In the face of these wild attacks Elizabeth May and the Green leadership needs to stop equivocating on Palestinian rights. Past efforts to mollify the JNF have only emboldened these groups. It is time to show them you won’t be intimidated by respecting the will of the membership and embracing the call for the CRA to revoke the JNF’s charitable status.

The campaign to revoke the JNF’s charitable status serves an important educational purpose. Drawing attention to the organization is a way to discuss the racism intrinsic to Zionism and it also exposes the progressive language that has masked Israeli colonialism. Additionally, the JNF campaign highlights Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.

Yet whether we think of Syria as the paradigm of twenty-first century warfare or the Israeli matrix of control, it is “the people,” or a mobilized segment, that is being victimized. Halper’s book does the best job so far of depicting this new cartography of warfare, and deserves to be widely read and its main theses debated.

Saudi’s royals are afraid of their own military, so keep it feeble and inept aside from the air force. They rely on the National Guard, a Bedouin tribal forces also known as the White Army. In the past, Pakistan was paid to keep 40,000 troops in Saudi to protect the royal family. These soldiers are long gone, but the Saudis are pressing impoverished Pakistan to return its military contingent.

On January 12, Erdoğan made a speech attacking foreign academics who had also signed the petition. He singled out US linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, who he sneeringly invited to Turkey to “see what is taking place in Turkey with his own eyes, not through the eyes of a fifth column”.