Navtej Sarna

Israel – What Went Wrong? By Omer Bartov Fern Press / Penguin Random House India, 243 pp., Rs 999 (PB) ISBN 978-1-911-71770-6 For decades, the cause of Palestinian statehood had turned and twisted in limbo while Israel’s control over historical Palestine steadily strengthened. The “peace process” was on death watch. Jewish settlements in the West Bank expanded aggressively, leaving place only for Palestinian Bantustans; Gaza, under Israeli siege, resembled a crammed, open-air

Donald Trump’s teflon is wearing thin. He’s at 33 per cent approval, the lowest of his second term; his disapproval ratings are 64 per cent, just lower than Richard Nixon’s at the time of his resignation. With the mid-terms around the corner, alarm bells are ringing. A Trump endorsement, as recent primaries show, is no longer a coronation but the cold kiss of death. Shenanigans no longer pass for governance: Americans are tiring of bluster, lies, cronyism, vanity projects and

Ruskin Bond wrote in his 1991 essay—and eponymous book—that Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. Saddened by what creeping modernisation was doing to the idyllic Dehradun of his youth—the town of “green hedges and grey heads”—he clung to the faint hope offered by surviving old trees: these trees, hoped Mr Bond, would preserve the past, be repositories of memory in the face of indiscriminate development. The wise chronicler of the Mussoorie hills was only consoling himself. Even in

Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist ruler for over four decades, trusted nobody. Not the Soviets, not the Chinese, not the Yugoslavs, and certainly not his own people. Albania, already a mountain fastness, was turned into an ideological one during the Cold War. Europe’s most isolated country, primed to frustrate invaders since the Ottoman times, peered nervously at the world from behind self-imposed walls. Its coastline bristled with military installations, tunnels disappeared i

When walking in Bhutan, there are few sights more uplifting than that of Buddhist prayer flags crackling in the high wind against a spotless blue sky. Or of a prayer wheel turning slowly to the sound of a bell, propelled by a mountain stream. Or of a chorten (the Himalayan word for a stupa), often just a simple pile of earth and stones, daubed white and a dark red, that one can find scattered around pilgrim paths or on windswept mountain passes. Sometime the chorten is a towe

When I attended the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in 2018, President Donald Trump gave it a miss. Nothing personal between us. Just that the presidential skin, though younger, was even thinner than it is now. In fact, Trump did not attend any WHCA dinner during his first term, unwilling to exchange champagne toasts with networks that he regularly slammed and sued. In the event, the 2018 dinner was a disappointment. The comedian Michelle Wolf laboured t

Distance lends perspective. Without doubt, the Fortunate Four flying on Artemis II must be getting this perspective as, at the time of writing, they travel to the far side of the moon, further than any man has been before. Without doubt too, they must be thanking the countless stars around them, that at least for 10 days, they were able to leave this miserable world as it commits suicide, murder and mindless destruction, all at once. From the Artemis window, they would have c

Some photographs become iconic images. Incontrovertible evidence of crime, sworn witnesses to tragedy. In the early days of the US-Israel onslaught on Iran, one such image has already transfixed itself on the global mind. This photograph shows over a 100 graves being dug in the southern Iranian town of Minab, small graves placed in neat, orderly rows—appropriately so. For the bodies they are waiting to receive are also of small schoolgirls, used to dressing neatly for school

There are good reasons to take a close look at US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s Munich speech, delivered two weeks before the attack on Iran. It provides some explanation for President Trump’s roller coaster approach to international relations. Secondly, it is a window into the mind of Trump’s top diplomat, supposedly a saner MAGA voice, and a hopeful for the next Republican nomination. The speech, which evoked a collective sigh of relief — and a standing ovation — is pack