FOR THE TLS, I’VE reviewed the journalist Seth Harp’s frustrating, excellent, and excellently frustrating The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces:

His method is seductive. The Fort Bragg Cartel has the slick sheen of the True Crime thriller—propulsive, sinister, twisty. But this is surface, disguise. Really it is an inter…

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FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I’ve reviewed Garrett Graff’s new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. It’s a very handsome and fine-looking book, but its contents—and the form of oral history itself—forbid the kind of clear analysis and condemnation this subject demands:

As soon as the defeat of…

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“I CANNOT TOO STRONGLY state,” Lord Maugham said in 1943, “that delay will mean the escape of the guilty.” There was a sense, at …

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I HAD THE PLEASURE of being interviewed by the good comrades at Jacobin about Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful: Israel’s Extermination of Gaza. In the interview, we talk about the dire situation in Gaza now, and the complete collapse of the public legitimacy of the institutions of international law:

In Blowing Up Everything Is Beautiful: Israel’s Exte…

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IN APRIL, THE ELEVEN members of Mariam al-Najjar’s family still had some canned food. Peas and carrots, boiled with spices. They would eat this makeshift stew with rice, under the tarpaulin of their makeshift home in a makeshift tent city outside Khan Younis. “We can’t get anything that provides any protein or nutrie…

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ON THE EVENING OF Wednesday, August 6th, the good and brave comrades of Na’amod will be hosting a launch for Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful: Israel’s Extermination of Gaza at Kunstraum art gallery in London.

I’ll be reading some of my stuff. Come along. Show your solidarity. Buy a book, even?

Tickets are available here.

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LATE LAST YEAR, WHEN the noose-and-hammer of the Generals’ Plan was at its harshest peak of ruin, the right-wing Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon sent its former editor Hagai Segal into the dust of Shujayya. The only foreign journalists allowed into Gaza are those willing to mop the blood. There Segal, a former terrorist, found an IDF officer (or rather a…

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AT THE KNESSET BACK in April, Bezalel Smotrich was feeling pensive. A surprise, because the simple act of thought often seems dif…

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THE TEAM AT POLITICSJOE were kind enough to invite me on their show to discuss my book Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful, the ou…

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IF THE IRANIAN REGIME has any sense at all, it should build a nuclear weapon as fast as possible. Salvage whatever damage was don…

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FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC, I’ve written about the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, Israel’s new cutout for controlling the distributio…

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THEY TOLD YOU WHAT they were doing while they did it.

No one can hide behind illusion or ignorance. When they speak of Gaza’s ann…

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FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I’ve reviewed the veteran climate campaigner Mark Lynas’ new book Six Minutes to Wi…

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“ALL STATIONS, COMMANDER SPEAKING.” It was the night of February 9th, 2025 and an Israeli officer stood flashlit in the gloom of a manmade wasteland. He addressed his troops, unseen in the dark, by radio. “We’re preparing right now to evacuate,” he instructed, then sprinkled his orders with a pinch of optimistic bloodlust. “We’ll be back here, don’t wor…

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IT TOOK A FEW months, but the clammy corpse of the Democratic Party is animate again. Or perhaps it’s like when you dribble soy sauce on a dead squid. The muscles twitch and give the illusion of being alive. What’s jolted them from their senescence? Not the masked snatch-teams disappearing dissidents from American streets. That barely musters a raised e…

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ON MARCH 17, JOHN Allman Hemingway passed away. He was the last surviving airman of the Battle of Britain. They’re all gone now. Soon every pilot will be gone, along with every trooper and tanker and Wren. One by one they go, to do their dying, to the fate which by luck or accident escaped them e…

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WHEN THE TIME CAME, too many good people gave up too easily. In the doldrums of the Cold War, when the wind seemed to be going out of the revolutionary left, a large number of people who really should’ve known better turned their backs on the movement. They went over to the right, or to human rights, or environmentalism. Everywhere there was a softening…

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I am thrilled and humbled to announce that my next book will be published in April. It is called Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful: Israel’s Extermination of Gaza, and I strongly urge every reader of The Dreadnought to pre-order a copy.

THEY TOLD YOU WHAT THEY WERE DOING WHILE THEY DID IT

“Blow up and flatten everything . . .” These chilling words, said by Amichai Eliyahu, a minister in the Israeli government, have been a message to the world and the people of Gaza: destroying everything—homes, businesses, lives—is justified. Even beautiful.

For fifteen months and in full view of the world, the state of Israel trapped more than two million people in a tiny strip of land and unleashed vengeance on them. The Palestinians endured a nightmare—bombed from the air, targeted by soldiers, their hospitals destroyed—and, as they are cut off from the rest of the world, the nightmare continues.

Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful is a searing indictment of the brutality and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza and the collaboration of powerful nations in their murder. With forensic detail and the forceful arguments of a prosecutor, James Robins details how the ongoing attempt to annihilate Gaza became the major crime of our age—and a turning point.

What happens when the moral regime of international law and human rights that protect the oppressed fails? Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful reveals a bold, radical, and independent new voice that offers a powerful reminder: all crimes cry out for justice, and if that justice fails, the crimes will no doubt happen again.

Pre-orders for Blowing Up Everything is Beautiful are available here.

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ONE WAY TO MARK the combustion and decline of the American empire is to visit the memorial to its greatest president. Make it a bright but bitter day, as it was in the second week of January when I saw for the first time Abe Lincoln enthroned in his immense melancholy. Turn north in lowering light, and between the colonnades is the entire text of his se…

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The Dreadnought returns! Make sure you’re subscribed:

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THREE DAYS REMAIN UNTIL the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas (mediated by the US with late urgency before the Trump administration is installed), and the IDF is using these hours to get in a few last-minute bombing sprees. And while Palestinians might celebrate their impending relief and res…

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