Aijaz Ahmad discusses with Newsclick the current stand-off between the US and Iran after the current round of sanctions that includes Irani Central Bank. He believes that the US policy is regime change and no solution can take place unless other countries such as India, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, China, etc intervene.

 Renowned artist Pushpamala answers questions from ArtAsiaPacific web site on the campaign by certain Indian artists to urge their compatriots to boycott the "Deconstructing India" show in Tel Aviv in April 2012.

Palestine is again in the news, with mass protests and demonstrations on the anniversary of the 1967 War. Eleven people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the border of Syria and five more on the West Bank.

On 4 April 2011, the Israeli-Arab actor, director and film maker Juliano Mer Khamis was shot dead in Jenin, Palestine.

The trajectory of the democratic movement in the Arab world was never going to be straight line with clear goals and objectives. The Arab regimes are not homogeneous; they have medieval Islamist monarchies as in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, secular but completely authoritarian regimes -- both western puppets like Mubarak to anti-west figures such as Bashir al-Assad. Gaddafi falls in a class by himself – originally anti-west but later made up with the west before being discarded and proclaimed an enemy once again.

At Palfest we have come as visitors, well wishers, writers come to a land that is undergoing great difficulty. I thought of the stumps of olive trees, a scarred field glimpsed out of the bus window one morning near Nablus. The Israeli soldiers had cut the trees because they were deemed to be a security risk. Whole families depended on the livelihood from the trees. 

Senior Political Analyst Aijaz Ahmad analyses the uprisings in the Arab world - the regional dynamics, the internal structures, the strategic geopolitics and what these all mean to world polity today.