OPEN

6 days ago | openthemagazine.com | Ullekh NP

Features | Web Exclusive Israel and Pakistan both stole crucial centrifuge blueprints from European consortium Urenco, and both helped other countries develop nuclear bombs through illegal sales of design and technology, thus aiding proliferation David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel (seated left) with John F Kennedy, then a congressman (extreme right), in Israel, 1951 (wiki commons) Even as Israel launched military strikes at Iran on June 13 alleging that the latter was in the...

1 week ago | openthemagazine.com | Bhavya Dore

A FEW YEARS AGO, Sam Dalrymple was working on a project exploring the partition experiences of Indians outside of Bengal and Punjab. He met a person from Tripura, and asked about their understanding of this seminal event. “They said, ‘Which partition’?” Dalrymple recalls on a video call from London. “And I was like, ‘What?’ They’re like, ‘Well, you know, we had the 1937 partition from Burma. We had 1947 India- Pakistan.

1 week ago | openthemagazine.com | Swapan Dasgupta

THERE IS ONE THING that experience has taught me about conflicts or even wars in the Middle East or West Asia, as it is now called, post-decolonisation: never try and swim with the tide of conventional wisdom if one of the participants happens to be the tiny state of Israel. In nearly all cases, you are bound to go wrong, horribly wrong. As a precocious kid, I recall following the 1967 Arab-Israel war.

1 week ago | openthemagazine.com | Ullekh NP

Award-winning Haaretz journalist and best-selling author Yossi Melman has made a startling claim likely to provoke the ire of US President Donald Trump’s MAGA base and even a section of Israelis: he believes the US and its Western allies should strike Iran’s nuclear sites without involving Israel. “I prefer the US or a Western military alliance, like NATO, to do it rather than Israel,” he told Open in an interview.

1 week ago | openthemagazine.com | Ullekh NP

Why can’t God talk to world leaders? It’s not just a metaphorical question I am putting before you, dear reader. George Walker Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, both American presidents, had told a Palestinian delegation in 2003, within months of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, that he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, you might point out that it was said at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh where one is in a holiday mood.