Thirty years ago, Philip Roth wrote a profound, funny, disturbing novel about Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism called Operation Shylock.
In this story, an American Jewish writer named Philip Roth discovers that another writer who also calls himself Philip Roth is giving people in Israel fits by preaching “Diasporism” – a doctrine calling on Israel’s Jews to return to the mostly European lands from which they or their parents originally came.
Roth #2 considers Europe and America to be the Jews’ true homelands: places where a humane, creative Jewish culture once flourished, and which are now needed as sanctuaries because of Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians and the Islamic world’s hostility to Israel.
(UN News)* —The last barely functioning hospital in northern Gaza is a “humanitarian disaster zone”, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday [], highlighting the disastrous consequences of ongoing Israeli bombardment for critically ill and injured civilians across the enclave.
(UN News)* — Myanmar is now the world’s largest opium producer, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported on Tuesday [], as the economic and political crisis following the 2021 coup and widening conflict between the military and armed groups continues to drive farmers towards illicit opium poppy production.
The southeast Asian country’s opium output has surpassed that of Afghanistan, where the Taliban imposed a ban on its production in April last year – leading to a 95 per cent fall in cultivation, UNODCsaid.
(UN News)* — Over half a million people have been displaced in Myanmar amid a surge in fighting between the military and armed groups that started in late October and has spread to over two-thirds of the country, the UN humanitarian affairs office reported on Friday [].
Among those fighting the military are a loose coalition of well-armed ethnic militias, as well as the People’s Defence Forces (PDF) – an armed group supporting National Unity Government (NUG) and opposed to the February 2021 military coup, according to media reports.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 