Avi Avidan on The Dawn of Minority Liberation: Israel’s Role in Shattering Sykes-Picot. The artificial borders of the Middle East, drawn a century ago by British and French diplomats in the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, have long suppressed the region’s diverse peoples Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Baloch, and others trapping them in states dominated by Arab…

Full conversation here.

Green MP Sian Berry picks a side. Full text: My cousin Tsachi was taken hostage alive after watching his firstborn daughter murdered in front of him. In captivity he was denied medical care, denied visits from the Red Cross, starved, tortured, and ultimately murdered. His body was returned to us so mutilated that forensics had…

Gritty northern France, that is: none of your fancy Brigitte Bardot/St Tropez stuff. Photographer John Bulmer, at Cafe Royal Books: [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/John Bulmer]

“The Palestine cause has destroyed the Middle East and Lebanon.” Lebanese journalist Tony Boulous at MEMRI TV. “It is clear the Middle East has changed, and if we do not join in, and if we continue to talk about “the Zionist Enemy” and “the brutal imperialist enemy”…these things have become laughable. Concepts like “global imperialism”…

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib talks to a Palestinian economist about the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: Motivated to serve his people and country, the economist shared with me that the World Bank’s James Wolfensohn spent his own money to preserve Gaza’s greenhouses and to implement extensive plans to protect what remained of the infrastructure left behind…

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times interviews the three For Women Scotland campaigners whose case led to the Supreme Court judgment, on biological sex as the criterion for women-only spaces. We won the Supreme Court sex ruling. The PM is subverting it: Susan Smith, 53, a former financial adviser and one of FWS’s three founding…

Can he put a foot right? Starmer again: Sir Keir Starmer nominated a former adviser for a peerage despite knowing he campaigned for a councillor who had been charged with child sex offences. Matthew Doyle, who was the Downing Street director of communications until March, is due to take a seat in the Lords early…

Interviewed in the Times: Lydon is sceptical of the new wave of punk bands. “You could be influenced by my earlier work, but please don’t show any signs of imitating it,” he says. “You have to have your own ideas.” He finds Bob Vylan, the group who chanted, “Death to the IDF,” at Glastonbury, “rather…