Palestine – Radio Free

In a Biden-era retread, media push bogus narrative that Trump is helpless to stop Gaza genocide

Adam Johnson — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:03:07 +0000

Once again, US media is helping take pressure off of the White House by parroting US officials and pro-Israel talking heads insisting that the president is more or less helpless to stop anything Israel is doing in the Middle East, up to and including their ongoing mass starvation campaign and genocide in Gaza.

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.”

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26.

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024.

Ravid has emerged again as the most aggressive practitioner of the Fuming/Helpless President routine for the new Trump administration. In just the last two weeks, he has published:

Israel bombs Syrian capital despite U.S. pressure to “stand down” July 16 2025
“He’s a madman”: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes July 20 2025
White House confirms Trump objected to Israeli strikes in Syria July 21 2025
Trump team rethinks Gaza strategy after six months of failure July 26 2025
Trump says kids in Gaza are starving in break with Netanyahu July 29 2025

What Ravid did for Biden he is now doing for Trump, permitting the White House to distance itself from the more extreme and unpopular of Israel’s policies while maintaining the status quo of unfettered material support. Obviously, demand for this genre of low-effort propaganda is far less than it was under Biden, especially when 71 percent of Republicans continue to support Israel’s genocide. But there is a nontrivial faction of MAGA media world—from Tucker Carlson to Theo Von to Dave Smith—that have pushed back on the president’s lockstep support. They have done so for many reasons—principled libertarianism, humanitarian instincts, or, in Tucker’s case, genuine white nationalism—but there’s a modest revolt in the ranks nonetheless, and one that increasingly needs to be damped down by the Trump-aligned Right.

No doubt feeling the heat from this contingent, and recognizing that being associated with countless images of emaciated and maimed children is not good for the brand in general, the White House and zionist groups in their orbit have dusted off the Biden-era playbook of Helpless/Frustrated President and seek to use it to distance Trump from the horrors emanating from Gaza just as the Biden White House did with great success. It’s easy, low effort, panders to antisemitic tropes of our otherwise benevolent leaders being manipulated by a foreign other, and provides what any head of a criminal enterprise seeks: plausible deniability.

… it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

Trump’s passing acknowledgement Monday that there’s mass starvation in Gaza was widely reported as a “break from Netanyahu” despite it being pure rhetoric. “What reporting in Gaza shows amid Trump’s break from Netanyahu on starvation,” NPR tells its listeners. “Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza,” Politico insists. “Trump raises pressure on Netanyahu, Israel,” the Hill reports.

This narrative, born entirely from off-the-cuff comments by Trump, was quickly rejected by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who, it’s worth noting, is playing to a different audience. Huckabee went on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday, and when asked about the supposed “break” with Netanyahu said, “Let me assure you that there is no break between the prime minister of Israel and the president. Their relationship I think to be stronger than it’s ever been. And I think the relationship between the US and Israel is as strong as it has ever been.”

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort.

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was:

Others say the reality of the relationship is far more complex. While the U.S. sells Israel advanced weapons and actively defends it against attacks, no American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message. Netanyahu knows this and operates knowing he can’t really lose U.S. backing for whatever it does. “Every president thinks they have some ability to constrain him and shape him, and they do,” said Philip Gordon, who in the previous administration was national-security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “But in the end, Netanyahu is an experienced, wily actor, and knows he can get away with a lot.”…

But this, of course, is simply argument by tautology: “No American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message” is a moral choice Biden and Trump decided to make, not a law of nature. It’s not imposed upon them by any outside force. They are not “forced” to back Israel anymore than any war criminal is forced to carry out any war crime in the history of war crimes. They support Israel because, despite some bickering around the margins over tactics and PR, they agree with and support what Israel is doing. This basic fact is simply hand-waved away, lampshaded with a throwaway line by friendly reporters about how the US cannot ever possibly condition aid to Israel without any explanation, treated as an unquestioned axiom.

But it’s not. Both Trump and Biden are and were more than capable of “reining in” Israel. They can do so by conditioning military support or cutting it off altogether. But clearly laying out how those conditions would work is awkward and associates the US government, and leadership in both parties, with the 21st century’s most horrific and well documented genocide. A much easier approach, consistent with the increasingly popular Politics of Feigned Helplessness, is to manage perception and use court reporters to wash one’s hands of the consequences of their policies and actions. Actually cutting off Israel is difficult and would require a president who opposes what they’re doing. It’s far easier to paint the most powerful empire in the history of the world as bumbling, out of the loop, getting “played” by a country the size of New Jersey, and ultimately frame the US as a spectator that funds and arms countless war crimes but, somehow, is not responsible for any of them.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan”

Stuart Littlewood — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:58:46 +0000

Public opinion and party pressure have forced Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy to speak warm words about Palestinian statehood. But these guys are a Zionist double-act and will do the Palestinians no favours if they can help it.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

“Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

“However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

“It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

“The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

“It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

“On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

“Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

“Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

“Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

“This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

The post UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Starvation as a Weapon: Chris Hedges on Gaza #politics #palestine

The Intercept — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:26:25 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

Bloodshed at GHF-run Gaza aid sites ‘a great sin’, says former top UN official

APR editor — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:06:16 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

A former senior UN aid official has condemned the bloodshed at the notorious US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid food depots, describing the distribition system as having turned into a “catastrophe”.

The number of aid seekers killed continues to climb daily beyond 1000.

Martin Griffiths, director of Mediation Group International and the former Under Secretary General of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office, said: “I think when many of us saw the first plans of the GHF to launch this operation in Gaza, we were immediately appalled by the way they were proposing to manage it.”

“It was clearly militarised. They’d have their own security contractors,” he told Al Jazeera.

“They’d have [Israeli military] camps placed right beside them. We know now that they are, in fact, under instructions by [the Israeli military].

“All of this is a crime. All of this is a deep betrayal of humanitarian values.

“But what I at least did not sufficiently anticipate was the killing and was the absolutely critical result of this operation, this sole humanitarian operation allowed by Israel in Gaza,” Griffiths added.

“The 1000 killed are an incredible statistic. I had no idea it would go that high and it’s going on daily. It’s not stopping.

“I think it’s a catastrophe more than a disappointment,” he said. “I think it’s a great sin. I think it’s a great crime.”

Humanitarian aid advocate Martin Griffiths . . . We know now that [GHF] are, in fact, under instructions by [the Israeli military]. All of this is a crime.” Image: Wikipedia

Commenting about US envoy Steve Witkoff and US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s planned visit to GHF-run aid distribution sites in Gaza, he said this was “likely to be choreographed”.

However, he acknowledged it was still an “important form of witness”.

“I’m glad that they’re going,” Griffiths said.

“Maybe they will see things that are unexpected. I can’t imagine because we’ve seen so much. But I don’t see it leading to a major change.

“If I was one of the two million Gazans starving to death, this is a day I would like to go to an aid distribution point,” Griffiths added.

“There’s slightly less risk probably than any other day.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NZ ‘lagging behind’ world by failing to recognise Palestinian statehood, says former PM Helen Clark

APR editor — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 19:18:59 +0000

By Craig McCulloch, RNZ News acting political editor

New Zealand is lagging behind the rest of the world through its failure to recognise Palestinian statehood, says Former Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Canada yesterday became the latest country to announce it would formally recognise the state of Palestine when world leaders met at the UN General Assembly in September.

It follows recent similar commitments from the France and the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon suggested the discussion was a distraction and said the immediate focus should be on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But, speaking to RNZ Midday Report, Clark said New Zealand needed to come on board.

“We are watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza. We’re watching starvation. We’re watching famine conditions for many. Many are using the word genocide,” she said.

“If New Zealand can’t act in these circumstances, when can it act?”

Elders call for recognition
“The Elders, a group of world leaders of which Clark is a part, last month issued a call for countries to recognise the state of Palestine, calling it the “beginning, not the end of a political pathway towards lasting peace”.

Clark said the government seemed to be trying avoid the ire of the United States by waiting until the peace process was well underway or nearing its end.

“That is no longer tenable,” she said.

“New Zealand really is lagging behind.”

Even before the recent commitments from France, Canada and the UK, 147 of the UN’s 193 member states had recognised the Palestinian state.

Clark said the hope was that the series of recognitions from major Western states would first shift the US position and then Israel’s.

“When the US moves, Israel eventually jumps because it owes so much to the United States for the support, financial, military and otherwise,” she said.

“At some point, Israel has to smell the coffee.”

Surprised over Peters
Clark said she was “a little surprised” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had not been more forward-leaning given he historically had strongly advocated New Zealand’s even-handed position.

On Wednesday, New Zealand signed a joint statement with 14 other countries expressing a willingness to recognise the State of Palestine as a necessary step towards a two-state solution.

However, later speaking in Parliament, Peters said that was conditional on first seeing progress from Palestine, including representative governance, commitment to non-violence, and security guarantees for Israel.

“If we are to recognise the state of Palestine, New Zealand wants to know that what we are recognising is a legitimate, representative, viable, political entity,” Peters told MPs.

Peters also agreed with a contribution from ACT’s Simon Court that recognising the state of Palestine could be viewed as “a reward [to Hamas] for acts of terrorism” if it was done before Hamas had returned hostages or laid down arms.

Luxon earlier told RNZ New Zealand had long supported the eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate focus should be on getting aid into Gaza rather than “fragmenting and talking about all sorts of other things that are distractions”.

“We need to put the pressure on Israel to get humanitarian assistance unfettered, at scale, at volume, into Gaza,” he told RNZ.

“You can talk about a whole bunch of other things, but for right now, the world needs to focus.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Genocide is Psychopathy

Kim Petersen — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:02:20 +0000

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau declares, “I am a Zionist.”

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a particular group. When it is your country, your troops, your government and its officials committing genocide, many people will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge such a fact. Such is the propagandic effect of patriotism that it erodes critical thought processes and even causes people to overlook extreme evil.

On 28 July 2025, NPR wrote, “Two prominent Israeli rights groups on Monday said their country is committing genocide in Gaza, the first time that local Jewish-led organizations have made such accusations against Israel during nearly 22 months of war.”

The genocide is undeniable as Afkār noted, “Since October 7, 2023, Israeli cabinet ministers, political figures, military officers and media pundits have openly and endlessly incited for the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants.”

Moreover, Israel is trying to spin this genocide as a necessary transfer of the Gazan population: “In recent months, Israel has shifted its messaging on Gaza, acknowledging that it has rendered the territory unlivable and is pushing for the removal of its surviving population. ”

What explains the thinking that leads to the carrying out of such a hideous crime?

Psychopathy is a personality disorder rooted in a lack of empathy and remorse, manipulation, and antisocial behavior. That clearly describes people committing genocide and people aiding and abetting genocide.

Thus, people perpetuating or enabling the commission of a genocide fit the definition of psychopaths.

It is undeniable that Israeli Jews are committing genocide in Palestine. Their prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is therefore a genocidaire and a psychopath, as well as the many supportive establishment types in Israel. (For more on this read Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery) The genocide of Gazans has much support among Jewish Israelis. This begs the question of whether psychopathology is widespread among Israeli Jews?

And, when a state or agency knowingly aids and abets Israeli Jews in committing genocide against the Palestinians, then such complicit governments and responsible authorities ought also to be considered genocidaires and psychopaths. Legally, as well:

… one can be held liable for aiding and abetting genocide, even if one does not share the specific genocidal intent of the principal perpetrator.

The Rome Statute contains a provision about criminal responsibility that is not found in either of the U.N. ad hoc tribunal statutes or the Genocide Convention but which further illuminates the mens rea of genocide. Under Article 30 of the Rome Statute, “knowledge” and “intent” are the two components of mens rea. A person has “intent” when the person “means to engage in the conduct” and “means to cause that consequence or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.” (Grant Dawson and Rachel Boynton, “Reconciling Complicity in Genocide and Aiding and Abetting Genocide in the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Ad Hoc Tribunals,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 21, 2008: 250.)

Consequently, Israel is not alone in executing its genocide of Palestinians. Countries are called upon to “Stop Arming Israel and Abetting Its Crimes.” Among those governments supplying armaments to Israel are the US and Europeans (“How top arms exporters have responded to the war in Gaza,” and that “European countries use 3rd-party countries to keep arming Israel: British journalist,” “Australia,” “Report suggests arms still flow from Canada to Israel despite denials,” “Infrastructure of genocide: the case confronting Dutch support for Israel’s war machine,” etc) giving political cover, the companies seeking profit from the genocide. Hence, their actions reveal them to be genocidaires.

Many of the common people in many of these countries are opposing the genocide-supporting stance of their governments; for example, Sweden, Netherlands, Canada, even in the US, and worldwide. The leaders are out of touch with masses of their citizens.

Therefore, Canada’s Mark Carney, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, and others are joining avowed Zionists Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Are Netanyahu and Trump really the people other country’s “leaders” should follow in making common cause to wipe Palestinians off the map?

Why is this psychopathy exhibited as a common trait among many Western government heads?

Worse, it seems to point to there being something inherently malevolent in the so-called democratic systems of these countries, such that it promotes psychopaths into leadership positions.

The post Genocide is Psychopathy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Canada’s Complicity Laid Bare

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:43:00 +0000

We will not have any form of arms or parts of arms be sent to Gaza, period.
— Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, March 20 2024

It was a cynical lie. Now we have the evidence.

A damning new report from the Arms Embargo Now coalition traces hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made weapons and military tech that continued to reach Israel during its ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza.

Bullets. Explosives. Aircraft parts. High‑end surveillance and targeting systems. All from here — from factories in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, the GTA, Halifax — to the runways and ports in Israel that feed Israel’s war machine.

Most of us already understood this was happening. Individual contracts and bits of evidence kept slipping through the cracks. But every time they did, the government would play whack-a-mole. This report ends that game. We now have ironclad evidence that Canadian weapons never stopped flowing to Israel. It shows a sustained, ongoing pipeline that continues to this day. It also exposes how the government systematically deceived Canadians about arming Israel.

In the frantic first three months after October 7th, the Trudeau government quietly approved a record-breaking number of export permits to Israel. Then you — and tens of thousands of people like you across the country — roared in protest. The pressure worked. By March 2024, then Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly announced a “pause” on new permits. She publicly insisted that no more arms would reach Gaza.

However Joly’s “pause” froze only new licences, leaving every previous permit untouched. Ottawa tried to soothe the public, claiming the ongoing shipments were only for “non-lethal” or “defensive” goods (i.e. Iron Dome parts, bullet-proof vests). In reality, a steady stream of lethal cargo kept moving: bullets, explosives, aircraft and helicopter parts, F-35 targeting tech. All funnelled from 21 suppliers in seven Canadian cities to Israeli arms companies like Elbit Systems.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t some bureaucratic oversight. It is a calculated breach of the Export and Import Permits Act, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the ICJ’s warning not to aid genocide.

Ottawa’s claim that it was no longer arming Israel served as a diplomatic fig leaf: soothing words that hid uninterrupted weapons shipments. This report rips that fig leaf away. The government must now own its complicity and decide — end the exports, or stand exposed before the world.

This report also shows something else: the power of civil society. A small group of researchers — activists with day jobs, family responsibilities, and limited resources — spent hundreds of hours digging through tax records, shipping manifests, flight records, and obscure government PDFs. They followed the paper trail and uncovered the reality that our government was trying to hide.

In the UK, a similar report created a political scandal that is still reverberating. This Canadian report is arguably even more damning and the potential impact is enormous—if we seize this moment.

On Tuesday, CJPME, Independent Jewish Voices, World Beyond War, and the Palestinian Youth Movement held a press conference in Parliament to share the findings. You can watch the recording of the press conference here.

The post Canada’s Complicity Laid Bare first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

As Canada, U.K. & France Move to Recognize Palestine, Two-State Solution Remains Taboo Inside Israel

Democracy Now! — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:53:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Canada, U.K. & France Move to Recognize Palestine, Two-State Solution Remains Taboo Inside Israel

Democracy Now! — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:33:51 +0000

Canada became the latest Western country this week to announce it will recognize the state of Palestine, joining the United Kingdom and France, as well as over 147 other countries that already recognize Palestinian statehood. Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada says that while the recent moves are “largely symbolic” and filled with caveats and loopholes, it shows that global opinion is rapidly shifting. He says that despite Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation over its starvation of Gaza, the only thing that will stop the genocide is if the United States uses its leverage.

“Netanyahu and the Israeli government are terrified of Trump. They don’t want to anger him,” says Shehada. “The only thing it would take is Trump making a phone call to Netanyahu and saying, 'End this now.'”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza

Caitlin Johnstone — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:30:44 +0000

Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion.

The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.

Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.

MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.

As western pundits, politicians, and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?

Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars, plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1949587236434931921

IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.

Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.

The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.

Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.

Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings, wasn’t enough.

Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.

Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.

Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/GozukaraFurkan/status/1949232008216887774

The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins,” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces, wasn’t enough.

IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.

The IDF flying drones, which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them, wasn’t enough.

IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.

Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.

Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/mamoun_linda/status/1949190406211825696

Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.

Using siege warfare to starve Gaza for the previous 22 months deliberately wasn’t enough.

But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.

That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023, like it should have, we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.

https://x.com/d_boeckner/status/1949137485776265514

I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.

But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.

We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.

We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.

We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.

https://x.com/BlakPantherBabe/status/1949834226343293339

The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government, and our world was clearly false.

We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.

Otherwise, we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

The lessons will repeat until they are learned.

We had better start learning them.

The post It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

New Zealand’s shameful role in the 1917 destruction of Gaza

APR editor — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 23:39:58 +0000

As we’ve watched from afar the tragedy unfolding in Gaza over the past 22 months, it’s worth remembering the part New Zealand troops played in setting in motion the cycle of violence that continues today in Palestine and Israel.

HISTORY: By Scott Hamilton

The man in the photo walks down the deserted street, over rubble. On both sides of the street buildings have lost their roofs and walls. A pockmarked minaret totters over the wrecked townscape. The photo is captioned “Ruins of Gaza at the Time of the Great Attack”.

The photo I’m describing wasn’t taken in 2025, but in 1917. Today Gaza is being destroyed by the armies of Israel and Hamas. In 1917 the British and Ottoman empires wrecked the city. New Zealanders played an important role in the destruction.

In 1917 most Gazans lived in village-suburbs interspersed with gardens and orchards. Their houses were made with mud bricks. The highest building in their town was the Great Mosque, whose foundations dated from the 7th century.

The Ottomans had made Gaza into a fortress, and had connected it by rail and road to a series of redoubts further east. These guarded the southern border of the province of Palestine, and were manned by German and Austrian as well as Ottoman troops.

Britain’s new prime minister David Lloyd George was desperate to capture Palestine, in the hope a victory there would shift public attention from the disaster on the western front, where tens of thousands of Britons had died fighting over mud.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, which crossed the Sinai desert to attack Gaza and Palestine, was made up of British, Anzacs, South Africans, West Indians, a volunteer Jewish Legion and Indians.

The Anzac Mounted Division was an essential part of the EEF. Its men rode to battles but fought on foot. Many of them had learned to ride on the farms of their homelands. Some were survivors of Gallipoli, where they had battled without their horses; others had arrived in Egypt after that catastrophe.

Farmland confiscated
Gaza’s suffering began before the British attack. Its defenders confiscated farmland for trenches, and demolished houses to give artillerymen better sight lines. The Great Mosque was seized and turned into an ammunition dump.

Captioned “Gaza Beauty Show”, this photo was likely taken by New Zealander Private Robert Kerr of the Anzac Mounted Rifle Division. Image: NZ Army Museum

It took the British empire three battles to capture Gaza. A photo taken before the second assault shows New Zealanders trying on gas masks. It is captioned “Gaza Beauty Show”. The attackers fired 4000 canisters of asphyxiating gas towards the city. No Gazan had a gas mask.

Before the final assault the city was bombarded for four days by naval guns, artillery and planes. When they finally captured Gaza, the New Zealanders found it empty. Almost the entire population had fled the bombardment; the Ottomans had followed them.

On the day its troops entered Gaza the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which committed it to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1917, though, Jews made up less than a tenth of Palestine’s population.

And Britain had made contradictory promises to Arabs, promising them independence if they rose up against Ottoman rule, and funding an Arab army that had advanced to the edge of Palestine.

There was still another group that wanted Palestine. When the Auckland Mounted Rifles had passed the stone pillar that marked the border between Sinai and Palestine, Henry Mackesy had stopped his men, and prayed to thank god for delivering the “Holy Land” to Britain.

Like New Zealand’s wartime prime minister William Massey, Mackesy was a British Israelite, who believed that Anglo-Saxons were a lost tribe of Israel, and that the British empire was god’s kingdom on earth. For Mackesy and many other Anzacs, Palestine belonged rightfully to Britons, not Jews or Arabs.

Conquerors warned
So many Anzacs wanted to settle in Palestine that Kia ora Coo-ee, their official magazine, had to run an article warning them that conquerors could not legally take locals’ land.

For most Anzacs, the inhabitants of Palestine — the Arabs of the villages and towns, the nomadic Bedouin of the deserts, the small and ancient Jewish communities in towns like Jerusalem — were at best an inconvenience, and at worst a reminder of the decadence and evil condemned in the Old Testament.

New Zealander Alexander McNeur summed up a widespread feeling when he wrote “no wonder the old inhabitants of Palestine had to be destroyed . . . many a chap is disgusted by the people”. (The only Palestinians the Anzacs really liked were the settlers in Zionist colonies, who looked, spoke and acted like Europeans.)

The Anzacs complained about the dirtiness and dishonesty of Palestinians. Many complained they had been cheated by Arab or Jewish traders; others said that Bedouins dug up soldiers’ graves and plundered them.

But the Anzacs themselves had a reputation for taking whatever they could from Palestinians, as well as from Ottoman soldiers. In 1988, Australian veteran Ted O’Brien gave an interview in which he confessed to killing a wounded Ottoman so that he could steal the man’s possessions. Robbing the dead was routine, O’Brien said.

O’Brien added that he and his comrades would immediately kill any Bedouins they found in the desert. Edwin McKay, a member of the Otago section of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, said that theft was a “two-way thing”, with Anzacs and Palestinians preying on each other.

After its defeat of Gaza the Ottoman army began to disintegrate, but as the EEF advanced through Palestine and into Jordan and Syria, it did not always bring peace. Arabs who fought alongside the British imperial forces, hoping for independence, became possessive about the areas they had captured.

Pushed off land
Ottoman deserters became bandits. Bedouins who had been pushed off their land by war raided EEF camps in search of loot. The Jewish Legion clashed with Arabs so often that the EEF commander General Allenby asked the War Office not to send him any more Jews.

The Anzacs’ contempt towards Arabs grew even greater after a calamitous attempt to capture Amman near the end of the war. Rain, cold and tougher-than-expected Ottoman resistance sent the mounted riflemen away with heavy losses.

As they rode towards safety, the Wellington Mounted Rifles entered Ain es Sir, a small village set amid hills and ravines. Villagers opened fire from houses and from nearby ledges, and seven Wellingtonians died. The Anzacs counterattacked Ain es Sir ferociously, shelling the village and killing 38 of its inhabitants. They took no prisoners.

Two members of the Canterbury Mounted Rifles – their exact identities haven’t been established – are flogging Egyptians charged with rioting. Egyptian police are holding the victim down, and other Egyptians are waiting, often in states of undress. 1919. Image: NZ Army Museum

The attack on Amman had made been made in partnership with an Arab force, and the Anzacs seem to have believed that the ambush at Ain es Sir was an act of treachery by their supposed allies.

They do not seem to have known, or cared, that Ain es Sir was not an Arab village. Its inhabitants were Circassians, a Caucasian group that migrated to the Middle East centuries ago.

On the night of December 10, more than a month after the end of the war, the Anzacs’ hatred of Arabs erupted. Hundreds of them were camped outside a village named Surafend, waiting impatiently for a ship to take them home. On the night of December 9 a man entered the tent of a New Zealand soldier named Leslie Lowry. Lowry had been using his kitbag as a pillow. The intruder grabbed it and fled.

Lowry chased the thief across the dunes that separated the Anzac camp from Surafend. The thief turned and fired a pistol. Lowry died three hours later. The next morning Anzacs found Lowry’s blood in the sand. Footprints led from the stain towards Surafend.

Surafend attacked
On December 10, up to 200 Anzacs and a few Scots smashed through the fence that surrounded Surafend. They beat and stabbed scores of male inhabitants of the village, leaving between 40 and 120 dead and many more wounded, then set fire to the Arabs’ homes.

A nearby Bedouin encampment was also set ablaze. Ted O’Brien was one of the raiders. He and his comrades had “done their blocks”. They “all went for” the Arabs with “the bayonet”. “It was a godawful thing,” O’Brien remembered.

New Zealander Ted Andrews explained that the massacre was not just about Lowry’s murder. “The treacherous ambush at Ain es Sir was still fresh in the minds of New Zealand troops,” he wrote, ignoring the fact that the men of Surafend had nothing to do with that village.

Andrews said that victims at Surafend were castrated. Some historians have dismissed this claim, but American scholar Edward Woodfin has shown that castration and humiliation of the dead were being practised in 1918 by the Indian members of the Egypt Expeditionary Force, with whom the Anzacs were friendly.

Most historians say that children, women and old men were removed from Surafend before the slaughter, but they ignore the testimony of Australian John Doran, who was at the Anzacs’ medical station the night of the massacre. Doran said that women and children appeared there with burns and bullet wounds.

The Jewish soldier Roman Freulich said that Australians had fired a machine gun at the Bedouin encampment on the night of December 10. Freulich also reported that the members of the Jewish Legion were excited by the massacre — they hated Arabs even more than the Anzacs — and that they used what he called “the Australian method” on a group of Bedouin civilians shortly after. Freulich said that he and his comrades sealed off a Bedouin camp and stabbed the men with bayonets.

Caption reads “ruins of Gaza at the time of the Great Attack”. Image: Library of Congress

No one prosecuted
Although the Anzacs’ commander General Allenby condemned the attackers, calling them “cowards and murderers”, no one was ever prosecuted for the massacre at Surafend. In 2009, the New Zealand television programme Sunday ran a story on the massacre.

Sunday’s team visited the site of Surafend, which has now been covered by an Israeli town, interviewed an old man who remembered the massacre, and asked why New Zealand had never apologised for the crime. The question is just as pertinent now.

When we look back from 2025 to the destruction of Gaza and the rest of the Palestine campaign, we can see that New Zealand troops played a part in setting in motion the cycle of violence that continues today in Palestine and Israel.

Scott Hamilton is the author of two great modern works of sociology and place, Ghost South Road (Titus Books, 2018), and Searching for Ata’a (Bridget Williams, 2017). He writes the blog Reading the Maps and is currently working on a book about sorcery and sorcery-related violence in Melanesia as part of his ongoing exploration of Pasifika arts and colonial Pākehā histories. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Activist who helped film ‘No Other Land’ shot and killed by Israeli settler

Sharon Zhang — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:26:31 +0000

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 28, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Palestinian activist who helped film the No Other Land documentary highlighting Israel’s violent occupation of the West Bank, Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday, according to one of the film’s directors.

Israeli co-filmmaker Yuval Abraham posted about Hadalin’s death on social media on Monday. “An Israeli settler just shot [Hathaleen] in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta,” Abraham wrote. About an hour later, Abraham wrote that Hathaleen had succumbed to the shooting. “[Awdah] just died. Murdered,” said Abraham.

“I can hardly believe it. My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time,” said Basel Adra, activist and Palestinian co-director of No Other Land.

Accompanying Abraham’s post was a video of the settler angrily facing a group, wielding a handgun. He waves the gun around, firing it, and keeping his hand on the trigger as he paces and angrily pushes those trying to confront him.

Hathaleen was previously targeted by the U.S. government. Last month, he flew to the U.S. to do a speaking tour with his cousin, Eid Hathaleen, to speak in synagogues and churches. However, U.S. authorities detained and deported them upon arrival at the San Francisco airport.

He had previously reported about Israeli settler violence, and was a leader in his community advocating against Israel’s occupation of his village, Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta.

Wafa reported that two Palestinians had been injured in Umm al-Khair by Israeli settlers, who invaded the village with a bulldozer in an attack on Monday evening.

Palestinian activist Issa Amro, from Hebron, mourned the loss of Hathaleen.

“Israeli settlers have murdered our beloved hero, Awdah Hathaleen, from the Um Al-Khair community in Masafer Yatta,” Amro wrote on social media. “Awdah stood with dignity and courage against oppression. His loss is a deep wound to our hearts and our struggle for justice. May he rest in peace. We will never forget him.”

To know Awda Hathaleen is to love him.

Awda Hathaleen was an activist and a resident in Umm al-Khair, an indigenous Bedouin Palestinian community in the South Hebron Hills within the occupied West Bank. He was an English teacher and activist. Awda has always been a pillar… pic.twitter.com/3Pf5Q8CxFA
— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) July 28, 2025

Abraham said that local residents identified Hathaleen’s killer as Yinon Levi, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Levi was sanctioned by the Treasury Department under the Biden administration in April 2024, with officials saying that he “regularly led groups of violent extremists” in assaults on Palestinian and Bedouin communities in the West Bank. He was also sanctioned by the European Union around the same time.

President Donald Trump lifted the U.S. sanction on Levi and other Israeli settlers and settler groups on his first day in office this January. Even before that, however, the Biden administration’s and other international authorities’ sanctions on Israeli settlers were criticized as weak and ineffective, with Israeli leaders who are backing and often funding settler groups going unpunished.

In fact, Levi told The Associated Press last June that he only felt the financial impact of sanctions for a few weeks after banks froze his accounts. His community raised thousands of dollars for him, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key architect of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, pledged to intervene to personally help take care of sanctioned settlers. The bank, which was supposed to freeze his assets, slowly lifted restrictions until he was able to access his money for whatever he wanted again.

“America thought it would weaken us, and in the end, they made us stronger,” Levi said at the time. Indeed, The Associated Press reported that local rights groups and settlers said that the sanctions only emboldened them.

This is just the latest settler attack on someone involved in making No Other Land. In March, just weeks after the documentary won an Oscar, an Israeli settler mob attacked and beat Palestinian filmmaker and activist Hamdan Ballal, in his home village of Susiya in Masafer Yatta. While he was in an ambulance to be treated for his injuries, Israeli soldiers invaded the vehicle and took him into custody. He emerged, bloody and bruised, saying that he has faced increased violence from settlers due to his role in making the film.

Israeli settlers and soldiers have intensified their violence in Masafer Yatta since the film won an Oscar, and Israeli authorities have now ordered a large swath of the region to be turned into a live-fire zone — effectively ordering the forcible transfer of over 1,200 Palestinians living in the region. Palestinians in the region report that Israel’s demolition of their homes is being fast-tracked by authorities.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls Detained & Beaten by IDF, But US Media Ignores It

Mike Elk — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:30:08 +0000

This week, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) boarded the Handala, a ship associated with the Flotilla Freedom Coalition, that was attempting to reach Gaza with supplies for starving Palestinians. The IDF detained 20 activists, who had their hands held up, in graphic images that the Freedom Flotilla Coalition captured.

Among those on the ship was Chris Smalls, who gained fame when he led a successful union drive at Amazon in Staten Island in 2022. Not only was Smalls detained, but he was physically beaten by the IDF. He was the only Black member on the Handala.

“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, U.S. human rights defender, Christian Smalls, was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals,” wrote the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on Instagram. “They choked him and kicked him, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back”.

Despite Smalls having been profiled by every major media outlet in the U.S. when he successfully led the union drive at Amazon, not a single major media outlet has covered his beating at the hands of the IDF.

In 2022, The New York Times even ran a Style section profile on his fashion choices among more than a dozen pieces that they ran on his organizing efforts, but the paper has not said anything about the beating of a high-profile labor activist at the hands of the IDF. Only three smaller, left-leaning outlets, Zeteo, The Grio, and Jezebel, covered it.

“This totally makes sense,” wrote University of New Brunswick Professor Nathan Kalman-Lamb on Bluesky. “A notable public figure in the US (Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls) is illegally arrested by Israel and subjected to severe physical violence while on a hunger strike… and not one US media outlet of any type has decided that is news.”

This article is a cross-post from Payday Report and is a developing story. Payday Report will update it as more information becomes available.

You can donate to help Payday Report Cover Labor Activists for a Free Palestine.

The post Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls Detained & Beaten by IDF, But US Media Ignores It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Elk.

When Israelis Call It Out: Finding Genocide in Gaza

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:00:52 +0000

It’s been almost an article of faith among Israeli officials: the state they represent is incapable of genocide, their actions always spurred by the noblest, necessary motivations of self-defence against satanic enemies who wish genocide upon Jews. Over time, as Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov writes, “Ethical concerns and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews.”

This form of reasoning, known otherwise as “Holocaust-ism” or “Shoah-tiyut”, is a moral conceit left bare in the war of annihilation being waged in Gaza against the Palestinian populace. Israeli human rights groups have taken note of this, despite the drained reserves of empathy evident in Israel proper. (A Pew Research Center poll conducted last month found that a mere 16% of Jewish Israelis thought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians was possible.)

In its latest report pointedly titled Our Genocide, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem offers a blunt assessment: “Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The infliction of genocide, the organisation acknowledges, is a matter of “multiple and parallel practices” applied over a period of time, with killing being merely one component. Living conditions can be destroyed, concentration camps and zones created, populations expelled, and policies to systematically prevent reproduction enacted. “Accordingly, genocidal acts are various actions intended to bring about the destruction of a distinct group, as part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by a ruling authority.”

Our Genocide suggests that certain conditions often precede the sparking of a genocide. Israel’s relations with Palestinians had been characterised by “broader patterns of settler-colonialism”, with the intention of ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians – economically, politically, socially, and culturally.”

B’Tselem draws upon three crucial elements centred on ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians”: “life under an apartheid regime that imposes separation, demographic engineering, and ethnic cleansing; systemic and institutionalized use of violence against Palestinians, while the perpetrators enjoy impunity; and institutionalized mechanisms of dehumanization and framing Palestinians as an existential threat.” The attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militant groups on October 7, 2023 was a violent event that created a “sense of existential threat among the perpetrating group” enabling the “ruling system to carry out genocide.” As B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak notes, this sense of threat was promoted by an “extremist, far-right messianic government” to pursue “an agenda of destruction and expulsion.”

Israeli policy in the Strip since October 2023 could not be rationalised as a focused, targeted attempt to destroy the rule of Hamas or its military efficacy. “Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature and assault in Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout.” Ditto Israeli military officers of all ranks. Gaza’s residents had been dehumanized, with many Jewish-Israelis believing “that their lives are of negligible value compared to Israel’s national goals, if not worthless altogether.”

The report also notes the use of certain terminology that haunts the literature of genocidal euphemism: the creation of “humanitarian zones” that would still be bombed despite supposedly providing protection for displaced civilians; the use of “kill zones” by the Israeli military and the absence of any standardized rules of engagement through the Strip, often “determined at the discretion of commanders on the ground or based on arbitrary criteria.”

Wishing to be comprehensive, the authors of the report do not ignore Israel’s actions in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Airstrikes have regularly taken place against refugee camps in the northern part of the territory since October 2023. Even more lethal open-fire policies have been used in the West Bank, with the use of kill zones suggesting “the broader ‘Gazafication’ of Israel’s methods of warfare.”

Another group, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), has also published a legal-medical appraisal on the intentional destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, finding that the Israeli campaign in Gaza “constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.” The evidence examined by the group “shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival.” The evolving nature of the campaign suggested a “deliberate progression” from the initial bombing and the forced evacuation of hospitals in the northern part of the Strip to the calculated collapse of the healthcare system across the entire enclave. The dismantling of the health system involved rendering hospitals “non-functional”, the blocking of medical evaluations, and the elimination of such vital services as trauma care, surgery, dialysis, and maternal health.

Added to this has been the direct targeting of health care workers, involving the death and detention of over 1,800 members, “including many senior specialists”, and the deliberate restriction of humanitarian relief through militarized distribution points that pose lethal risks to aid recipients. “This coordinated assault has produced a cascading failure of health and humanitarian infrastructure, compounded by policies leading to starvation, disease, and the breakdown of sanitation, housing, and education systems.”

PHRI contends that, at the very least, three core elements of Article II of the Genocide Convention are met: the killing of members of a group (identified by nationality, ethnicity, race or religion); causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group and deliberately inflicting on the group those conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.

In accepting that genocide is being perpetrated against the Palestinians, Our Genocide makes that most pertinent of points: the dry legal analysis of genocide tends to be distanced from a historical perspective. “The legal definition is narrow, having been shaped in large part by the political interests of the states whose representatives drafted it.” The high threshold of identifying genocide, and the international jurisprudence on the subject, had produced a disturbing paradox: genocide tends to be recognised “only after a significant portion of the targeted group has already been destroyed and the group as such has suffered irreparable harm.” The thrust of these clarion calls from B’Tselem and PHRI is urgently clear: end this state of affairs before the Palestinians become yet another historical victim of such harm.

The post When Israelis Call It Out: Finding Genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Fiji ‘failing’ the Gaza genocide and humanity test, says rights group

APR editor — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 09:25:45 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has sharply criticised the Fiji government’s stance over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, saying it “starkly contrasts” with the United Nations and international community’s condemnation as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace.

In a statement today, the NGO Coalition said that the way the government was responding to the genocide and war crimes in Gaza would set a precedent for how it would deal with crises and conflict in future.

It would be a marker for human rights responses both at home and the rest of the world.

“We are now seeing whether our country will be a force that works to uphold human rights and international law, or one that tramples on them whenever convenient,” the statement said.

“Fiji’s position on the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinians starkly contrasts with the values of justice, freedom, and international law that the Fijian people hold dear.

“The genocide and colonial occupation have been widely recognised by the international community, including the United Nations, as a violation of international law and an impediment to peace and the self-determination of the Palestinian people.”

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognise the state of Palestine — the first of G7 countries to do so — at the UN general Assembly in September.

142 countries recognise Palestine
At least 142 countries out of the 193 members of the UN currently recognise or plan to recognise a Palestinian state, including European Union members Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia.

However, several powerful Western countries have refused to do so, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

At the UN this week, Saudi Arabia and France opened a three-day conference with the goal of recognising Palestinian statehood as part of a peaceful settlement to end the war in Gaza.

Last year, Fiji’s coalition government submitted a written statement in support of the Israeli genocidal occupation of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, noted the NGO coalition.

Last month, Fiji’s coalition government again voted against a UN General Assembly resolution that demanded an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Also recently, the Fiji government approved the allocation of $1.12 million to establish an embassy “in the genocidal terror state of Israel as Fijians grapple with urgent issues, including poverty, violence against women and girls, deteriorating water and health infrastructure, drug use, high rates of HIV, poor educational outcomes, climate change, and unfair wages for workers”.

Met with ‘indifference’
The NGO coalition said that it had made repeated requests to the Fiji government to “do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel”.

“We have been calling upon the Fiji government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes,” the statement said.

“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing.

“We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.”

Instead, said the NGO statement, Fiji leaders had met with Israeli government representatives and declared support for a country “committing the most heinous crimes” recognised in international law.

“Fijian leaders and the Fiji government should not be supporting Israel or setting up an embassy in Israel while Israel continues to bomb refugee tents, kill journalists and medics, and block the delivery of humanitarian aid to a population under relentless siege.

“No politician in Fiji can claim ignorance of what is happening.”

62,000 Palestinians killed
More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war on Gaza, most of them women and children.

“Many more have been maimed, traumatised, and displaced. Starvation is being used by Israel as weapon to kill babies and children.

“Hospitals, churches, mosques,, refugee camps, schools, universities, residential neighbourhoods, water and food facilities have been destroyed.

“History will judge how we respond as Fijians to this moment.

“Our rich cultural heritage and shared values teach us the importance of always standing up for what is right, even when it is not popular or convenient.”

Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Programme, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.

Also, Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.

The NGO coalition said it stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people out of a shared belief in humanity, justice, and the inalienable human rights of every individual.

“Silence is not an option,” it added.

Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network said it supported this NGO coalition statement.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

How Israel became the symbol of Brazil’s Evangelical and far-right movements

Michael Fox — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 20:21:19 +0000

Support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians has become a critical political dividing line, not just in the United States, but in countries around the globe. At a recent pro-Donald Trump rally in São Paulo, Brazil, for instance, a protester waving an Israeli flag fought with a man in a Palestinian shirt. In this on-the-ground report, Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox shows how Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is playing out in South America’s largest country.

Additional resources:

Michael Fox, Brazil on Fire podcast

Filming / Post-Production: Michael Fox

Transcript

Before, During, and After Savagery

Kim Petersen — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:11:21 +0000

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jew; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.”

— James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again” (September 29, 1979). Quoted in Hamid Dabashi, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket Books, 2025): 159.

Baldwin’s assessment is shared by many others, such as Noam Chomsky, who discussed in his book (The Fateful Triangle, 1999 edition) Israel’s role as a “strategic asset.” (p. 69, 70, 103, 137) However, others, such as Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone countered that assessment in a 2024 article, “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East.” They write:

But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.

If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.

We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?

Bricmont and Johnstone attribute the unstinting US support of Israel as being influenced by money injected into the US political arena by the Jewish lobby, in particular AIPAC.

The question of which side leads in determining US support for Israel is debatable. What is indisputable is that the US and Israel are in lockstep despite all the violations of international law by Israel (US is a serial violator of international law, as well), despite several massacres carried out by Israel, and despite the mightily ramped up genocide being perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians currently.

Genocide and the understanding of what unleashes the bloodshirtiest of human actions is the subject of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, scheduled for release by Haymarket Books on 30 September — while the savagery is ongoing. The urgency for a worldwide response calls for informing those unaware or those insouciant to the Jewish Israeli genocide that is being perpetrated on Palestine (It is not just a genocide in Gaza, as a 1 July 2025 Al Jazeera headline makes clear: “Israel has killed 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023.”). After Savagery, however, is not just about the genocide in Gaza, it is about why some humans commit genocide. So After Savagery is also about “before savagery.” What are the conditions that lead to savagery today. And most importantly, how genocide can be prevented from happening.

Dabashi quotes many sources to attest to the genocide that is happening now in Palestine.

“What we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz,” says the Burmese genocide expert and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Maung Zarni. “This is a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” he further explains. (154-155)

Asked to describe what he witnessed in Gaza, Dr. Perlmutter replied, “All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—forty mission trips, thirty years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.” And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.” (103-104)

“Yes, it is genocide,” has affirmed Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust history at the department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” (142)

Dabashi traces the roots of Zionism to a longstanding settler-European colonialism. And the author lays bare the insidiousness of Zionism and how this racism impacted Palestinians:

Today, the birth of Palestine as a “question” rather than a nation-state marks precisely the birth of Palestine as a constellation of refugee camps. The land was stolen from Palestinians, the state stealing the land was a European settler colony garrison state that rules over Palestinians with cruelty, the rules for the inscription of life were dictated to Palestinians in draconian terms, and the camps as the fourth inseparable element are precisely where generations of Palestinians are born and raised, before being killed by the Israeli military. (127-128)

Part of this racism towards Muslims, of which the majority of Palestinians are, is the use of term “Muselmann.” Writes Dabashi, “This is perhaps a mini encyclopedia of European ignorance, Islamophobia and antisemitism all wrapped up in an attempt to unpack the word ‘Muselmann,’ but in fact loading it with more racist dimensions.” (120) And the new Muselmann, is the Palestinian, “the Untestifiable, the human animal, as Israeli warlords have said.” (xxvi)

Zionist Israel and its racism and discrimination is compellingly described. My colleague B.J. Sabri and I needed no convincing of Israeli racism.¹

And this racism, not exclusive to Israeli Jews, points to “what ultimately matters for the world at large is the categorical inability to fathom a Palestinian as a human being.” (96) Thus, “Witnessing this savagery in Gaza, we can clearly link the Jewish Holocaust to the Palestinian genocide, and see genocidal Zionism as the logical colonial extension of European fascism.” (xv)

Before Savagery

Many personages appear in After Savagery, such as, to name a few, Sven Lindqvist, Frantz Fanon, Joseph Conrad, and James Baldwin who opposed racism; Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, Ghassan Kanafani and his Danish wife Anni Kanafani (née Høver), Mario Rizzi, Mahmoud Darwish who spoke to the beauty of Orientalism and Arab culture; others such as Ilan Pappe and UN special rappateur Francesca Albanese who denounce unflinchingly the depredations of Israeli Jews against Palestinians. Dabashi delves deeply into the Eurocentric perspective on colonialism, borne of Western philosophy and figures like Immanuel Kant, Hegel Heidegger, and others who thinking was impoverished by being shackled by their own racism.

Dabashi writes:

“According to Hegel, Africans, or any other people, can only become civilized to the degree and so far as they abandoned their own cultures and convert to Christianity, founding a state according to Christian principles.” (91)

How are “we” to escape the indoctrination of feted philosophers and the inculcation of Western thought? How do “we” humanize Palestinians? The mere fact that the humanity of Palestinians requires affirmation for so many people points to the pervasiveness of racist Eurocentric narratives.

After the unbridled savagery in Gaza, it is not only European philosophy that reaches its ignoble ends. We need equally to think of the modes of knowledge production about Gaza itself, about Palestine, as the simulacrum of the world outside the purview of the discredited Eurocentric imagination. We no longer need to worry about the critique of Orientalism. We need to think of how to produce knowledge about Gaza and Palestine and the rest of the world. We need to reverse the anthropological gaze, to produce an anthropology of Zionism and Western Philosophy. (105)

The book covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into ontology, epistemology, semantics, literature, art, filmmaking, poetry, politics, religion, exilism, and — especially — philosophy. After Savagery is not focused solely on the here and now of what is transpiring in historical Palestine. The book goes into the history, background, and philosophy that enables genocide. The book is scholarly and is well footnoted. If that is what the reader is looking for, then Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery is well worth the read.

NOTE:

The post Before, During, and After Savagery first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, Defining Israeli Zionist Racism, Dissident Voice: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Iran’s plan to abandon GPS is more about a looming new ‘tech cold war’

APR editor — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:36:31 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Jasim Al-Azzawi

For the past few years, governments across the world have paid close attention to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There, it is said, we see the first glimpses of what warfare of the future will look like, not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of new technologies and tactics.

Most recently, the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran demonstrated not just new strategies of drone deployment and infiltration but also new vulnerabilities. During the 12-day conflict, Iran and vessels in the waters of the Gulf experienced repeated disruptions of GPS signal.

This clearly worried the Iranian authorities who, after the end of the war, began to look for alternatives.

“At times, disruptions are created on this [GPS] system by internal systems, and this very issue has pushed us toward alternative options like BeiDou,” Ehsan Chitsaz, deputy communications minister, told Iranian media in mid-July. He added that the government was developing a plan to switch transportation, agriculture and the internet from GPS to BeiDou.

Iran’s decision to explore adopting China’s navigation satellite system may appear at first glance to be merely a tactical manoeuvre. Yet, its implications are far more profound. This move is yet another indication of a major global realignment.

For decades, the West, and the US in particular, have dominated the world’s technological infrastructure from computer operating systems and the internet to telecommunications and satellite networks.

This has left much of the world dependent on an infrastructure it cannot match or challenge. This dependency can easily become vulnerability. Since 2013, whistleblowers and media investigations have revealed how various Western technologies and schemes have enabled illicit surveillance and data gathering on a global scale — something that has worried governments around the world.

Clear message
Iran’s possible shift to BeiDou sends a clear message to other nations grappling with the delicate balance between technological convenience and strategic self-defence: The era of blind, naive dependence on US-controlled infrastructure is rapidly coming to an end. Nations can no longer afford to have their military capabilities and vital digital sovereignty tied to the satellite grid of a superpower they cannot trust.

This sentiment is one of the driving forces behind the creation of national or regional satellite navigation systems, from Europe’s Galileo to Russia’s GLONASS, each vying for a share of the global positioning market and offering a perceived guarantee of sovereign control.

GPS was not the only vulnerability Iran encountered during the US-Israeli attacks. The Israeli army was able to assassinate a number of nuclear scientists and senior commanders in the Iranian security and military forces. The fact that Israel was able to obtain their exact locations raised fears that it was able to infiltrate telecommunications and trace people via their phones.

On June 17 as the conflict was still raging, the Iranian authorities urged the Iranian people to stop using the messaging app WhatsApp and delete it from their phones, saying it was gathering user information to send to Israel.

Whether this appeal was linked to the assassinations of the senior officials is unclear, but Iranian mistrust of the app run by US-based corporation Meta is not without merit.

Cybersecurity experts have long been sceptical about the security of the app. Recently, media reports have revealed that the artificial intelligence software Israel uses to target Palestinians in Gaza is reportedly fed data from social media.

Furthermore, shortly after the end of the attacks on Iran, the US House of Representatives moved to ban WhatsApp from official devices.

Western platforms not trusted
For Iran and other countries around the world, the implications are clear: Western platforms can no longer be trusted as mere conduits for communication; they are now seen as tools in a broader digital intelligence war.

Tehran has already been developing its own intranet system, the National Information Network, which gives more control over internet use to state authorities. Moving forward, Iran will likely expand this process and possibly try to emulate China’s Great Firewall.

By seeking to break with Western-dominated infrastructure, Tehran is definitively aligning itself with a growing sphere of influence that fundamentally challenges Western dominance. This partnership transcends simple transactional exchanges as China offers Iran tools essential for genuine digital and strategic independence.

The broader context for this is China’s colossal Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While often framed as an infrastructure and trade project, BRI has always been about much more than roads and ports. It is an ambitious blueprint for building an alternative global order.

Iran — strategically positioned and a key energy supplier — is becoming an increasingly important partner in this expansive vision.

What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new powerful tech bloc — one that inextricably unites digital infrastructure with a shared sense of political defiance. Countries weary of the West’s double standards, unilateral sanctions and overwhelming digital hegemony will increasingly find both comfort and significant leverage in Beijing’s expanding clout.

This accelerating shift heralds the dawn of a new “tech cold war”, a low-temperature confrontation in which nations will increasingly choose their critical infrastructure, from navigation and communications to data flows and financial payment systems, not primarily based on technological superiority or comprehensive global coverage but increasingly on political allegiance and perceived security.

As more and more countries follow suit, the Western technological advantage will begin to shrink in real time, resulting in redesigned international power dynamics.

Jasim Al-Azzawi is an analyst, news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor. He has presented a weekly show called Inside Iraq.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Dystopian Killing Fields and Starvation in Gaza

Binoy Kampmark — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 07:32:58 +0000

Starvation as a way of life. Starvation as a way of death. Starvation as policy, justification and vengeance. As the state of Israel hums along frittering, scratching and violating international human rights conventions, the chroniclers are kept busy on the morgue’s relentlessly growing inventory and peace’s loss. Of late, a vast number of humanitarian organisations have decided to express their collective outrage in a statement at what is happening in Gaza.

The statement as run by Doctors Without Borders on July 23 is stark: “As the Israel government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families. With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste before their eyes.” Two months after the implementation of the controlled aid scheme by Israel, utilising the grotesquely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, over 100 organisations were “sounding the alarm and urging governments to act: open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege; and agree to a ceasefire now.”

Outside Gaza, and even within the Strip, abundant supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sat untouched. Humanitarian organisations had been prevented from accessing them. “The Government of Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death.” A paltry figure of 28 trucks a day were being allowed into the Strip.

The relevant gore is recounted: massacres at food sites in the Gaza Strip are impossible to ignore; the figures from the UN suggest that 875 Palestinians had been slaughtered while seeking sustenance as of July 13. The frequency of these “flour massacres” is also receiving comment from those in the employ of the operation being run by GHF, policed by private contractors and the IDF. Retired US special forces officer Anthony Aguilar, who resigned from working with the GHF, told the BBC that he had “witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at crowds of Palestinians.” During his entire career, he had never seen such “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”

The NGO statement goes on to note the rise of cases of acute malnutrition, most prevalent among children and the elderly. (The World Food Programme has warned that one in three Gazans do not eat for days at a time, with 90,000 women and children requiring treatment.) “Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.”

In the face of this, international law’s decrees appear like the neglected statues of a distant land. The three sets of Provisional Measures Orders from the International Court of Justice, handed down since 2024, have warned Israel to observe its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention and address the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. In its modifying order of provisional measures handed down on March 28, 2024, the ICJ instructed Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza”. These include the provision of “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care” and “increasing the capacity of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.

The latest concession from Israel to deal with this engineered humanitarian catastrophe is a promise to open humanitarian corridors to permit UN convoys into the Strip. In addition to that, COGAT, the Israeli military agency overseeing humanitarian affairs in Gaza, has announced that Jordan and the United Arab Emirates will be permitted to parachute humanitarian aid to those in Gaza. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has made a small team of British military planners and logisticians available to assist Jordan in this endeavour. On July 27, the IDF also released a statement claiming it had made the first airdrop including “seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar, and canned food”. These efforts, in their practical futility, are a reiteration of the humanitarian airdrops conducted by the US military and Jordan’s air force in March last year.

These drops will do little to alter the cruel, strangulating model of aid delivery in place, emboldening the fittest recipients capable of outpacing their adversaries. Those recipients will also be fortunate not to be injured or killed by the dropped packages, instances of which were recorded in March last year. “Why use airdrops,” asks Juliette Touma, chief spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, “when you can drive hundreds of trucks through the borders?” Using trucks was “much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper.” Precisely why using them is so unappealing to the IDF.

Instead of focusing on isolating Israel, its allies prefer piecemeal approaches that prolong the suffering of the Palestinians. Measures such as those announced by Starmer to “evacuate children from Gaza who need medical assistance, bringing them to the UK for specialist and medical treatment” only serve to encourage the Israeli war machine. The aid drops serve to do much the same. The objective is one of inflicting a sufficient degree of harm that will encourage the eventual depopulation of the enclave. Israel’s allies, with intentional or unintentional complicity, will clean up.

The post Dystopian Killing Fields and Starvation in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

‘We pose no threat – our aim is to break the siege’: Tan Safi on joining the Handala Gaza flotilla

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 22:16:47 +0000

No New Zealanders were on board the Handala in the latest arrest and abductions of Freedom Flotilla crew on humanitarian siege-busting missions to Gaza. However, two Australians were and one talks to The New Arab just before the attack on Saturday.

INTERVIEW: By Sebastian Shehadi

The Handala, a 1968 Norwegian trawler repurposed by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), set sail for Gaza from southern Italy on July 20, carrying around 21 people and a cargo of food, medical kits, baby formula, water desalination units and more.

The ship is named after the iconic Palestinian cartoon figure, Handala, who symbolises Palestinian identity, resilience and the ongoing struggle against displacement and occupation.

Just hours before departure, the crew uncovered deliberate sabotage: a rope tightly bound around the propeller and a sulfuric acid swap mistaken for water, leading to chemical burns in two people.

Despite this alarming start, the mission continued, echoing the defiance of past flotilla efforts such as the interception of the Madleen in June and the Israeli drone strike on the Conscience in May.

However, contact with the vessel was reported lost on July 24, with coalition officials warning that communications have been jammed and drones have been seen near the ship, raising concerns about interception or further hostile action.

The mission resumed following the brief two-hour communications blackout. “Connection has now been re-established. ‘Handala’ is continuing its mission and is currently less than 349 nautical miles from Gaza,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) announced on Telegram on July 25.

Then on Saturday, the Israeli military attacked the ship and violently detained and “abducted” the entire crew and issued a statement saying they were “safe” and on their way to Israel.

‘Handala’ was illegally boarded by Israel military in international waters, around 40 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza.

Before interception the 21 crew made this statement: if attacked they will join the global hunger strike for Gaza.

Call your governments now and hold them… pic.twitter.com/QbqUaduXG1

— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) July 27, 2025

The New Arab spoke to one of Handala’s crew, Lebanese-Australian filmmaker, human rights activist and journalist Tan Safi, before the arrest to find out more about the mission and why she chose to be on board this mission:

The New Arab: How’s the mood on the ship at the moment?
Tan Safi: The morale of everyone at the moment is high, as everyone is happy to be here. Of course, different emotions come up, and we talk them out, but as a collective, we’re all looking out for one another. Everyone is very caring and kind.

We are a group of 21 people from 10 different countries. We have a very proud grandmother, as well as MPs, nurses, a human rights lawyer, a comedian, an actor, human rights activists and more. We’re from many different walks of life, and we pose absolutely no threat to anyone.

We’re simply trying to challenge something illegal. Like previous Freedom Flotilla actions, we will be sailing through international waters into Palestinian territorial waters.

Australian Handala crew member Tan Safi . . . “Back in 2010, we sent a flotilla that was caught in a deadly raid. The Israelis came in a helicopter, boarded the ship and killed nine people instantaneously, while another person died from a coma years later.” Image: FFC

How are you preparing for the very real threat of Israeli violence?
Back in 2010, we sent a flotilla that was caught in a deadly raid. The Israelis came in a helicopter, boarded the ship and killed nine people instantaneously, while another person died from a coma years later.

So we know very well that Israel poses a real threat.

More importantly, we’ve seen what they’re capable of over the last two years. The most horrific things imaginable. Israeli soldiers are committing endless crimes against Gazan children, and then going into the homes of the Palestinians they’ve murdered and taking selfies in women’s lingerie. We know what they’re capable of.

Any interception of our vessel would violate international maritime law. The ICJ [International Court of Justice] itself ordered Israel not to interfere with any delivery of international aid. Of course, we know that Israel gets to exist in this world by hopping over international law, without any accountability, without any real sanctions.

In terms of processing, what might happen to me? I’ve had to do it time and time again whenever I’ve joined FFC missions over the last two years. I’ve had to say goodbye to my friends and family, but also try to keep them reassured.

Sometimes I feel like I’m lying, to be honest. I tell them that “everything will be okay”. But it’s psychologically impossible to explain.

Are you worried that Handala is less protected than the last ship, Madleen, which had the global media attention (and protection) of having Greta Thunberg on board?

A Gaza Freedom Flotilla Instagram poster. Image: Instagram/@loremresists

No matter how many Instagram followers you have, your life is just as important as the next person’s. We have people on this boat who have Instagram. We have people who do.

The lives of all these people are as valuable as everyone else’s. I would just try to focus on the fact that we’re all human beings, just as every Palestinian in Gaza is. I’m more worried that Israel’s violence will expand until it’s too late, and people wish that they had done more. The time is now.

What is your message to global or Australian leaders?
I’m Lebanese, but I grew up in so-called Australia, a country that has such a dark history. What our politicians forget is that so-called Australia was not theirs to begin with. Australia was, and will always be, Aboriginal land. They can try to hide their dark truths, just like Israel used to as well. But the truth will become exposed in time.

To this day, Aboriginal people are abused and discriminated against by the state. My message to Australia’s leadership is: how can you watch tens of thousands of men, women and children being slaughtered and still be enabling Israel’s siege and genocide?

The Australian embassy in Israel sent me a message urging me to “please reconsider your decision to join a humanitarian aid trip to Gaza”. If they’re so concerned about the two Australians on this boat, I would urge them to be more concerned with the millions of Palestinians who are suffering daily.

The Palestinian cartoon character Handala . . . reimagined with deliberate starvation by the Israeli military forces. Image: X/@RimaHas

Can you tell us more about daily life and organisation on the ship?
We all put our hands up to volunteer for various tasks throughout the day. Some of us are more skilled in certain areas than others. For example, we have someone here from France who is a nurse, and they’re helping anyone who is feeling sick.

We have the proud grandmother, Vigdis from Norway, who loves to cook. And then someone will put their hand up to do the dishes. No one is too good to clean the toilets.

We’re all helping out to keep this ship organised. We also do shifts, helping out with the crew when needed. No one is sitting around. And if someone is, it’s because it’s really hot or the seas are rough.

What do you hope Handala will achieve, beyond potentially breaking the siege?
I hope this action will encourage all forms of solidarity and, more importantly, inspire direct action. I know that protests and non-direct actions serve a purpose, but we have talked and talked and talked at length. I don’t know how people are finding the strength.

Sometimes when I’m asked to talk at events, I just don’t know what to say, because if you need me to explain this, maybe you will never understand.

But what we clearly need to do is disrupt the financial flow that enables and fuels this genocide. The BDS movement is huge. People used to look down on it and question its efficacy. But now we’re able to quantify that it’s actually affecting real, big business.

I’ve always been advocating for that and asking people to be aware of the companies they consume from, such as Unilever, Nestle and Coke. This is having a real impact on these companies that are profiteering from unethical practices to begin with, that extends far beyond the genocide in Gaza.

Direct action could also involve blockading shipments of weapons from ports and docks, as seen in Greece. It’s amazing to see more countries step up. However, we often see a lot of lip service as well. It takes everyday people to actually stand up and say: “I’m able-bodied. I’m sick to my stomach. I’m gonna listen to my instinct and explore other options”.

If protesting is not working, explore other options. If there is no direct action group, create one. All it takes is one person to begin.

Are there any final or other messages you’d like to convey?
The Handala ship is the 37th boat from the FFC to travel to Gaza. There are thousands of people behind each of these journeys who make these voyages happen.

The FFC has existed for as many years as Israel’s siege on Gaza has. The FFC exists only because of Israel’s illegal siege.

We are people from around the world who are united in our shared consciousness and care for Palestine. We pose no threat. I’m looking at a bunch of toys and baby formula. We have as much food as we can carry, but our main goal is to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza because you need to fix a problem at the root of the cause.

Track the Handala’s journey here

Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman. This article was first published by The New Arab. Follow Shehadi on X: @seblebanon

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Debunking the theological gaslighting of Israel-supporting Imams

APR editor — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:32:02 +0000

Muslims, and the global community, must rally around the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights: to exist, to return home, and to live free from occupation.

ANALYSIS: By Shadee ElMasry

In our world today, one would be hard-pressed to find a reputable, well-known scholar or group of scholars who support Israel. Of course, the keywords here are “well-known” and “reputable”, after a “misguided” delegation of European Imams travelled to Israel to placate the Israeli occupation and sponsor the genocide of the Palestinian people.

It is increasingly common to find these figures, Muslim apologists for Israel, who have breached the Islamic tenet of standing against injustice, laundering their authority to provide cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity against their brothers and sisters in Palestine and across the wider Arab world.

We live in a world of shameless opportunism, where the poisoned fruit of “normalising” relations with the Israeli occupation is weighed against moral conviction and our duty to stand with the afflicted Palestinians.

A few weeks ago, this tradeoff played out across our screens.

The delegation’s visit, which included 15 European Imams, was led by the controversial Hassen Chalghoumi (known for supporting Nicolas Sarkozy’s burqa ban) and involved meetings with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who has been accused of inciting genocide.

Clearly, their consciences weren’t troubled by the catastrophic famine now gripping Gaza, a “hell on earth” where women and children are killed for scrambling to get flour, and men are killed without rhyme or reason.

I, like many companions across mosques and online feeds, was dumbfounded by the delegation’s complicity. This visit happened at a time when we as Muslims, and the global community, must rally around the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights: to exist, to return home, and to live free from occupation, especially as they face an existential threat.

Delegation swiftly denounced
The delegation was swiftly denounced. Al-Azhar University stressed that they “do not represent Islam and Muslims.” Worshippers walked out of UK mosques. A Dutch Imam was suspended.

But this isn’t just about them. We need to ask how this happened and ensure it does not repeat with us. As one scholar said, if an Imam sees the community fall into usury, then gives his Friday sermon on adultery, the Imam has betrayed his congregation.

The same is the case with Muslim apologists for Israel.

To understand their motives, we must examine three theological “traps” these figures use to justify their support for Israel, or at least the very least, their silence over Palestine. The first of which is the “Greater Good Trap”.

They claim that “speaking up against Israel will result in more harm than good”. But only the Prophet Muhammad’s silence constitutes tacit approval. Their reasoning doesn’t hold up.

A weak-willed person will always accept this reasoning because it allows them to have their proverbial cake and eat it: they gain spiritual cover for remaining silent. As we’ve seen, the scholar will say: “Yes, I can speak, but then our school will get shut down, or we’ll lose funding. For the sake of the greater good, I must remain silent.”

Israel, I’m sure, is delighted by this self-censorship. But we should also ask how it is that so many non-scholars, non-Muslims, and non-Arabs are speaking the truth about the Gaza genocide, while Islamic scholars remain silent.

It raises eyebrows, at the very least.

‘Pure theology’ trap
The second trap is the “Pure Theology” trap. Here, the scholar says: “Sound belief is the most important thing. How can we support the Palestinians when they resort to armed conflict? Their theology is flawed. I prioritise the truth, what’s wrong with that?”

But what they overlook is that falsehood has degrees. It is foolish to denounce one error while ignoring a greater one.

To attack a people’s doctrinal shortcomings while staying silent on their oppression is not principled; it is a failure to understand the fiqh of priorities.

This trap lies in misplacing truths: loudly condemning the religious mistakes of Israel’s victims while conveniently forgetting the far graver injustice of Israel itself and the violent context that brought it into being.

The final, and most sophisticated, trap that Muslim apologists for Israel use is metaphysical: they attempt to misdirect Muslims to a higher order of spiritual thought about the Divine will.

They ask what sounds like a noble question: “Why is Allah doing this to us? It must be because of our sins. Israel is merely a tool God is using to punish us or purify us.”

But the catch here is that the spiritual angle often (but not always) becomes a cover for pacifism. These figures that travelled to Israel, for instance, actively promote inaction. They showed no emotion, no voice, when witnessing the oppression of their own; only when it came to their sponsors did they find something to say.

Suffer in silence
The idea here is to suffer in silence, to clothe disengagement in the language of spiritual endurance.

In the end, this is precisely what Israel and its supporters want: to keep the spotlight off themselves. Any diversion, theological or otherwise, is welcome. As we know, the oppressor laughs at those who fixate on what is bad while ignoring what is worse. And that is the danger behind all three traps.

Yet despite these efforts, something far more powerful holds. The drive within the hearts and minds of Muslims to carry the burden of the Palestinian people, to speak their truth and fight for their freedom has not been extinguished.

It is sustained by faith, shared memory, and the belief that justice is not a slogan but a sacred duty. We ask Allah for continued guidance and protection, and the strength to continue this noble and just cause. Ameen.

Dr Shadee Elmasry has taught at several universities in the United States. Currently, he serves as scholar in residence at the New Brunswick Islamic Center in New Jersey. He is also the founder and head of Safina Society, an institution dedicated to the cause of traditional Islamic education in the West. This article was first published by The New Arab.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Gaza condemns Israeli ‘piracy’ over storming of Handala aid ship

APR editor — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 06:23:02 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

The Gaza Government Media Office has condemned “in the strongest terms” Israel’s storming of the Handala aid ship, calling it an act of “maritime piracy”, reports Al Jazeera.

“This blatant aggression represents a flagrant violation of international law and maritime navigation rules,” the office said in a statement.

“It reaffirms once again that the [illegal Israeli] occupation acts as a thuggish force outside the law, targeting every humanitarian initiative seeking to rescue more than 2.4 million besieged and starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The office also called on the international community, including the United Nations and rights groups, “to take an urgent and firm stance against this aggression and to work to secure international protection for the convoys”.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed in a statement today that the Israeli navy had intercepted the Gaza-bound Handala, and it was now heading towards Israel.

“The Israeli navy has stopped the vessel Navarn from illegally entering the maritime zone of the coast of Gaza,” said the statement, using the aid ship’s original name.

“The vessel is safely making its way to the shores of Israel,” it added. “All passengers are safe.”

Freedom Flotilla slams ‘abductions’
A statement by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition accused Israel military of “abducting” the 21 crew members of the Handala, saying the ship had been “violently intercepted by the Israeli military in international waters about 40 nautical miles from Gaza.

“At 23:43 EEST Palestine time, the Occupation cut the cameras on board Handala and we have lost all communication with our ship.

“The unarmed boat was carrying life-saving supplies when it was boarded by Israeli forces, its passengers abducted, and its cargo seized.

“The interception occurred in international waters outside Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, in violation of international maritime law.”

The Handala carried a shipment of critical humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza, including baby formula, diapers, food, and medicine, the statement said.

“All cargo was non-military, civilian, and intended for direct distribution to a population facing deliberate starvation and medical collapse under Israel’s illegal blockade.”

The Handala carried 21 civilians representing 12 countries, including parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists, labour organisers, environmentalists, and other human rights defenders.

Seized crew members, journalists
The seized crew includes:

United States: Christian Smalls — Amazon Labor Union founder; Huwaida Arraf — Human rights attorney (Palestine/US); Jacob Berger — Jewish-American activist; Bob Suberi — Jewish US war veteran; Braedon Peluso — sailor and direct action activist; Dr Frank Romano — International lawyer and actor (France/US).

France: Emma Fourreau — MEP and activist (France/Sweden); Gabrielle Cathala — Parliamentarian and former humanitarian worker; Justine Kempf — nurse, Médecins du Monde; Ange Sahuquet — engineer and human rights activist.

Italy: Antonio Mazzeo — teacher, peace researcher, journalist; Antonio “Tony” La Picirella — climate and social justice organiser.

Spain: Santiago González Vallejo — economist and activist; Sergio Toribio — engineer and environmentalist.

Australia: Robert Martin — human rights activist; Tania “Tan” Safi — Journalist and organiser of Lebanese descent.

Norway: Vigdis Bjorvand — 70-year-old lifelong justice activist.

United Kingdom/France: Chloé Fiona Ludden — former UN staff and scientist.

Tunisia: Hatem Aouini — Trade unionist and internationalist activist.

The two journalists on board:

Morocco: Mohamed El Bakkali — senior journalist with Al Jazeera (based in Paris).

Iraq/United States: Waad Al Musa — cameraman and field reporter with Al Jazeera.

The attack on Handala is the third violent act by Israeli forces against Freedom Flotilla missions this year alone, said the statement.

“It follows the drone bombing of the civilian aid ship Conscience in European waters in May, which injured four people and disabled the vessel, and the illegal seizure of the Madleen in June, where Israeli forces abducted 12 civilians, including a Member of the European Parliament.

“Shortly before their abduction, the Handala‘s crew affirmed that they would be hunger-striking if detained by Israeli forces and not accepting any food from the Israeli Occupation Forces.”

Israeli officials have ignored the International Court of Justice’s binding orders that require the facilitation of humanitarian access to Gaza.

The continued attacks on peaceful civilian missions represent a grave violation of international law, said the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

Kia Ora Gaza support for Handala
In Auckland, Kia Ora Gaza spokesperson Roger Fowler, who is recovering from cancer treatment, said in a statement:

“Kia Ora Gaza is a longtime member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and supports the current Handala civil mission to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza and end Israel’s campaign to wipe out the Palestinian population.

“All governments must urgently take strong effective action to stop the genocide and occupation and end all complicity with Israel. There are no Kiwis on the Handala which was intercepted under an enforced communications blackout today.”

Activists on board the Handala aid ship before leaving Italy’s Gallipoli Port on July 20, 2025. Image: Valeria Ferraro/Anadolu

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Debunking Israeli Propaganda in Times of Genocide

Paul de Rooij — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:02:39 +0000

We live in interesting but brutal times. It is evident that myths are biting the dust with long held narratives dissolving when exposed to the harsh and bloody reality. Nowhere is this more evident than with all the myths that propped up Israel for many decades. Israel was portrayed as a fragile yet resilient little country living in a “bad neighbourhood.” But now, given Israel’s incessant wars, much of this mythology is being jettisoned; it is no longer needed when arrogance, hubris and sadism drive the Israeli ethos. The image of the little David is giving way to a vengeful genocidal creature infused with a dash of the Old Testament….

Below is a discussion of some of the collapsing myths. Myths are built on narratives which in turn are built on descriptive words. Much of the discussion centres around clarifying the deceptive nature of words, which in turn will expose the false narratives.

Rabble really

The army is venerated in Israel, and a lot of effort is put into glorifying the military; there are festivals with singers, balloons, and blue and white pom-poms galore.¹ American Jewish girls go giddy when meeting the tanned and smiling soldiers. Of course, if one glorifies the military, then all the units can only be “élite”; even the lowliest soldier is given a sergeant rank; and of course they must be “the most moral ” in the world. It is also known by its incongruous acronym: IDF.

Contrast the glamorous image of the Israeli military with its actions in Gaza, West Bank and beyond. Israeli snipers are targeting children – extra-points for pregnant women (you can even purchase a T-shirt with “one shot, two kills ” logo on it). Soldiers are cheering when blowing up hospitals, universities, mosques, schools,…. it is no secret, it is all visible in Telegram videos or on Al_Jazeera’s newscasts. To make matters worse, GHF, the so-called Israeli “humanitarian ” group, dispenses food and water in Gaza today in such a way as to concentrate refugees, and then target them.² Soldiers are looting everywhere, and even one unit has been set up with the express intention of looting areas they’ve conquered. Looting is tolerated throughout, and even made part of its tactics on the ground.³

The Israeli military is engaged in genocide and doesn’t hide the fact. Groups of soldiers engaged in ecstatic dancing chanting “death to the Amalek ” – a biblical term for the one to be killed en masse; including women and children.⁴ Early in October 2023, the Israeli military put a 95-year-old veteran of the infamous 1948 massacres on tour to lecture the soldiers. Dressed in a military uniform, he engaged in some motivational speeches: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”⁵ The pronouncements made by the military official rabbis are even worse. And one cannot forget (former Minister of Defence) Yoav Gallant’s statement: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”⁶

The Israeli airforce regularly drops huge bombs in the middle of densely populated refugee camps. According to Euromed, the total number of bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to all the bombs dropped on several of the major cities during WWII. And in order not to waste bombs, Israeli warplanes which couldn’t drop their ordnance in Iran during the June 2025 attack were instructed to bomb Gaza. Israelis also never miss an opportunity to profit from such events; Israelis flock to the border area to sit on sofas to witness the bombing spectacle. These war tourists have to pay extra for a cappuccino.

Israeli sadism only escalates; everyday there must be a new turn of the screw – it is not satisfied with merely bombing or shooting civilians. The latest Israeli military order is that from now on Palestinians will not be allowed to bathe in the sea.⁷ Israeli snipers, warships… will target civilians entering the sea. One Telegram video shows a gleeful Israeli soldier using mortar bombs to target civilians sitting on a beach.

The Israeli military used to be well organised and soldiers operated on the basis of strict orders. Today, the ethical rot has set in at all levels. Officers and lower soldiers alike murder, steal, torture everywhere. Soldiers perpetrate heinous crimes in full camera view, yet the perpetrators expect full impunity.

Simply put: the Israeli military can no longer be referred to as an army, but it must be described for what it actually is: a criminal rabble.

Israeli way of war

Israelis like to say that they “live in a bad neighbourhood.” In fact, it is so bad that Israel has bombed most of its neighbouring countries numerous times and attempted to murder most of the leadership in those countries.⁸ “Decapitation strikes” are deemed a great success and yet another proof of the Israeli cunning and prowess. Another target are the potential or actual negotiators. The Israeli military has murdered several negotiators in Lebanon, Gaza, Tehran (Ismael Haniyeh), and during the June 2025 attack against Iran the lead negotiator with the Americans was also murdered. And then Israel declares “ceasefires ” that impose conditions on the victims, but Israel continues to murder and bomb – there have been over 1,000 violations of the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon. Drones and warplanes fly overhead without regard to any declared ceasefire. Maybe all this is not surprising given the official Israeli (especially Netanyahu’s) disdain for “peace” which is considered to be a dirty word; they prefer “conflict management.” Ceasefires are merely meant to provide time for the Israeli military to reorganise and then bomb and murder in their “business as usual” fashion.

The Israeli military’s brutality even gets pompous sounding names like the Dahiya Doctrine. This refers to the levelling of the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut 2006 – it is a disproportionate level of violence “in response” to Hezbollah daring to resist the Israeli attack. And of course, Israelis justify this by seeking to reestablish “deterrence” which is yet another fraudulent military concept.⁹ But then the Israeli military applies other fraudulent and morally reprehensible doctrines, e.g., the Hannibal directive. This directive orders the Israeli military to kill Israeli Jews who may have been captured by Palestinians or other enemies. Officials prefer to kill Israelis rather than to have them taken as hostages. In fact, about half of the Israeli civilians killed on 7 October 2023 were killed by the Israeli military.¹⁰

The Israeli military justifies its actions because it is “at war.” The resistance in Gaza has no tanks, airplanes, etc. Thus the best equipped army in the world is attacking a mostly defenceless population; maybe it is a bit of a stretch to call this a “war.” Norman Finkelstein, the great historian, once made the same point and suggested that the Israeli “mowing the lawn ” attacks should be referred to as “massacres.” That is a rather more accurate and succinct descriptor; in the current historical context “genocidal actions” is perhaps more accurate.

Squatters really

A mythology surrounding the early Israeli colonists became pervasive early on. The brave sun tanned pioneers were “making the desert bloom”¹¹ conveying the notion that they were just taking over empty and unproductive land. The word that went along with this myth was that the Jewish interlopers were “settlers ” – another rather neutral word that has no association with the native population they came to displace. For some time while communal living had romantic appeal, settlers lived in kibbutzim. Young Europeans would flock to experience this only to find out a less glamorous picture often involving corruption and sexual abuse.¹²

After the 1940s, the program of ethnic cleansing saw hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages razed to the ground or simply taken over. Many Israelis took over houses and even helped themselves to furniture, carpets, etc. The takeover of houses is an on-going project with zealot usurpers using advanced mapping technology to target houses, especially in East Jerusalem. While a Palestinian family is out of a house doing normal daily chores, they find upon their return that their house has been taken over, and it is impossible to eject the squatters because the police sides with the latter.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a wave of land confiscation in the West Bank, and the building of “settlements ” on top of hills. The real zealots went to Al Khalil/Hebron to take over houses, hotels, and other buildings.¹³ They even set about closing off streets so they could go undisturbed to the Ibrahimi mosque which also had been usurped by the zealots. The zealots’ aim is to constantly steal houses, and to make the life of ordinary Palestinians intolerable.

Other settlements were built as suburbs of Jerusalem or as cities with all the amenities provided at subsidised rates. Purpose-built “apartheid” roads connected these developments to the main Israeli cities, but also were meant to sever the links between Palestinian communities. And although the residents of such places are portrayed as mere suburbanites, they often clash with Palestinians when they seek to annex more land. Although annexation is such a neutral word, it hides the violence dispensed by the suburbanites to achieve their aims. The Jews recently arrived from Venezuela sought to expand the borders of their development and requested the zealots to do the dirty violent work.¹⁴ The condition for this assistance was that new arrivals would also participate in the violent eviction and usurpation of the neighbouring Palestinian land. Even the “suburbanites ” participate in violence; the soldiers are on standby to protect the usurpers.

It is important to avoid propaganda-tainted language, and to use words that clearly describe a reality and associated power relationships. For this reason many words cry out for an alternative description. The word “settler” demands a more accurate substitution, and the word “squatter” would certainly be a more suitable and accurate descriptor. It is time to stop calling the armed violent young men who harass and brutalise Palestinians in the West Bank “settlers”!

Where has “proper” gone?

Israel always has been a country with flexible and expanding borders. Yet, when it suited them, they would make a distinction between “Israel proper” and the occupied areas. The implication was that there could be negotiations regarding the occupied areas, there couldn’t possibly be negotiations about anything in Israel proper – this was conceded land, and there was nothing to talk about. And the “proper” areas expanded! After the wars of 1948, 1967, 2006… the borders of Israel “proper” expanded to incorporate newly stolen land.¹⁵ What the current batch of wars have revealed is that there is no more talk about “Israel proper”, and the reason for that is that Israel is expanding at present – stealing land in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. While the borders keep expanding, the “proper” hasn’t incorporated the newly usurped land.

A feature of the “Israel proper” concept is that Israel desires to have buffer zones or no-man’s land between its “recognised” borders and its neighbours. But the buffer zones have to be on Lebanese or Syrian soil; the buffer is never on the Israeli side. The Israeli military has created a no-man’s land on the border with Gaza, but all the bulldozed land and acreage sprayed with herbicide is on the Palestinian side of the military-imposed border. And if the UN feels that it needs to conduct some face-saving military patrols, then the UN can defend Israel by sitting in the Lebanese “buffer zone”; UNIFIL shouldn’t even dream of sitting right on the border or having its soldiers cross into Israel for some R&R.

Never again?

All western societies have been indoctrinated with holocaust mythology; one constant refrain has been “never again”. Fair enough. But if any lessons were learnt then this slogan should apply to all; it should read Never again for Everybody. The Gazan population certainly should not be the victim of genocide today – yet there is no doubt that that is exactly what is going on. A brief perusal of the so-called “holocaust studies centres” around the world reveal that they have been silent during this period – they are immersed in studying the 1940s; there seem to be no lessons for the current situation. One such centre features a large “Find memory; Find humanity” slogan on its website, yet (July 2025) has absolutely nothing to say about the genocide in Gaza. It is all about selective memory and humanity.

Pogroms were violent attacks against a religious or ethnic group in the Russian Empire and usually depicted as criminal in nature. Yet today young armed Israeli Jews regularly invade Palestinian villages and towns and brutalise or murder the native population. If violence was deemed intolerable in the past, then why the silence about the ongoing pogroms in the West Bank today?

Careful what you wish for

Several so-called influencers, the contemptible creatures appearing on TikTok/Instagram, etc., called for genocide in Gaza. One of the influencers went so far as to state that if there were a button to get rid of all the Palestinians, he would press the button.¹⁶The calls for genocide are also commonly found at the podium of the Knesset. The wife of an Israeli soldier, hysterically shouted from podium not to let the sacrifice of her husband’s effort (having to work overtime) be wasted, and thus “don’t stop before…” the Israeli army exterminates all Palestinians.¹⁷

Israeli society is rather warped, and it is constantly polled about all sorts of unusual issues. One of the recent questions was “are Palestinian children in Gaza innocent?” 75% of the respondents said “no.” In one motivational speech given to the soldiers about to invade Gaza, a high ranking officer also stated “the children are not innocent” – this follows Deuteronomy’s edict to kill the women and the children.

After the first hearing about Gaza was held at the ICJ (26 January 2024) at a demonstration in London, dozens of counter-demonstrators wearing Israeli flag capes were chanting “no ceasefire.” By this time several hospitals and universities had already been destroyed. Is this what the counter-demonstrators wished to continue?

Maybe a thought experiment will demonstrate the extreme hypocrisy of these influencers and counter-demonstrators. Imagine that a Palestinian influencer were to ask for a button get rid of all Israeli Jews, or that a Palestinian politician were to utter a similar statement. What do you think the reaction would be? The ultimate hypocrisy is for Jews who bow to the mere mention of the holocaust to call for genocide against Palestinians.

While the London police did nothing to suppress the counter-demonstrators yelling support for the genocide, they do actively suppress pro-Palestinian statements against the genocide! In a recent video, the police in Scotland are even tearing down Palestinian flags.¹⁸ And in the US, Trump is actually suppressing all protests and commentary against Israeli brutality by labelling it as antisemitism.

My holy vs. your holy

About one thousand mosques and several churches have been obliterated since 2023.¹⁹ Some of the mosques/churches were centuries old and could be deemed cultural heritage sites – of course, they didn’t receive a UNESCO label because Israel blocked such designations.²⁰ The media tends to ignore the destruction of mosques or refers to Israeli justifications for their destruction. The few christian churches bombed in Gaza did elicit mention, and after the bombing of a Catholic church even Pope Leo XIV stated that “he was deeply saddened…” by the loss of life.²¹ What makes the Pope’s comment memorable is the fact that he didn’t mention that it was Israel that bombed the church. Anonymous bombs just seem to fall out of the sky.

While the intentional destruction of Palestinian holy sites or mosques doesn’t seem to merit any mention, when a synagogue is damaged this elicits a major outcry. But to highlight the double standard, the establishment of a synagogue, or purportedly finding a reference to a Tomb or mere place of sojourn by a well known rabbi, then Israeli Jews consider this to be a claim to the land. Thus an enterprising religious scholar found a reference to a Tomb of Rabbi Ashi in Lebanon, then this became a land claim.²² Israelis grab any justification to steal yet more land however flimsy the claim to the land may be.

Mind their comfort please

The many wars that Israel has waged recently have outraged many around the world giving rise to demonstrations and the like. Yet, the frequent media concern is with the “comfort ” of Jews witnessing the demonstrations! Although Israel is conducting a genocide, Jews should feel comfortable and not reminded of sordid events. Even a bake sale meant to raise funds for Gaza was deemed to interfere with Jewish comfort.²³ Did white South Africans living in Europe object to anti-apartheid demonstrations on the basis that it made them feel uncomfortable? Fat chance! However, in the current context several governments have appointed “anti-semitism ambassadors ” who will work to ban demonstrations or manifestations of support for the Palestinians. Maybe a case can be made that supporters of the Israeli genocide in Gaza or the unprovoked attack against Iran should be made to feel uncomfortable.

Western values and Israel

Much is made of “western values” purportedly freedom of speech, association, respect for the rule of law, and respecting immigrants. These values are what makes Europe a “garden” and everywhere else a “jungle.”²⁴ These values have also been used to justify the continued EU assistance to Ukraine, and thus war. Russia has invariably been castigated for not observing “western norms.” But, when it comes to genocidal Israel and its violent tendencies, the same insufferable politicians are silent or connive to send weapons and assistance to Israel.

Europe is meant to absorb huge migrant flows, yet Israel imposes a discriminatory migrant policy – only Jews need to apply. Israel’s incessant wars are creating migrant flows that inevitably end in Europe, and no European official seems willing to point this out. What we witness instead is that European officials travel to Egypt to offer enticements for Egypt to absorb Palestinian refugees; a few years ago the same gang offered several billion Euros to Erdogan to reduce the Syrian and Iraqi migrant flows.

Myopic history

Reading the mainstream media one would get the impression that Palestinian history started on 7 October 2023. Everything before that doesn’t seem to merit mentioning. All the “mowing the lawn” military operations aren’t a thing of the past, they are in a memory hole. The Goldstone report documenting the mass crimes committed in 2009 is also in the memory hole. Of course, it is too much to expect the mainstream media to even mention relevant history that goes back a few more years. The media don’t report on the caged nature of Gaza, surrounded by razor wire and watchtowers. And as Dov Weissglas, the advisor to Ariel Sharon, stated the residents of Gaza would be kept “on a diet” – that is, Israeli bureaucrats would calculate the minimum caloric intake needed to survive, and they would allow just this amount of aid to trickle into Gaza.

Watch our words!

While it is important to use accurate words to describe Israeli state policy, it is also important for pro-Palestinian activists to change the words they use to refer to the current reality. One finds that the word “occupation” is used often to describe the Israeli military, and even to the extent that it is used as a synonym. Similarly, the “apartheid” descriptor is used without much reflection, e.g., apartheid wall, apartheid roads, etc. Both occupation and apartheid indicate a co-existence with the native population. Apartheid meant coexisting economically, but living separately – there was an interaction between blacks and whites. The word occupation suggests that it is temporary, and that interaction is possible. But the genocide in Gaza indicates that Israel prefers erasing the Palestinians, and that way ending the occupation. The three strategists drawing up the path of the wall built in the West Bank were explicit about the temporary nature of the structure. It would remain in place to control the Palestinian population, but they foresaw that the wall will be removed once the Palestinian population has been expelled.

There is another problem with the word “apartheid.” While much effort was placed to declare that Israel was guilty of the “crime of apartheid,” it only referred to the “occupied territories.” The third class status of Palestinians living in Israel was unmentionable to those drawing up the legal case. Apartheid was deemed a crime on one side of the line, but just fine on the other side (in “Israel proper”).

Worse than 1960s apartheid in South Africa

The so-called West slowly adopted some sanctions and divestment of South Africa beginning in the 1970s; the public had engaged in some form of boycott of South African products before that. Ronnie Kasrils, the great anti-apartheid fighter and member of the African National Congress, stated that the situation now for the Palestinians is worse than that experienced by the black population at the height of the oppressive apartheid years. While Western countries grudgingly sanctioned and divested from South Africa, one wonders when will there be some official opposition to Israel’s genocidal actions.

Tough times for the propagandists

The Israelis and their supporters spent much effort painting Israel as a valiant little country trying to become a success story surrounded by hostile neighbours. Israelis were portrayed as pioneers thriving despite the odds. The propagandists working for Israel had appropriated victimhood, and justified Israel’s actions as “self defence.” Alas, all this mythology has been ruined because Israeli officialdom chose to wage wars, expel the native population, commit genocide in Gaza, attack Iran, attack Yemen, and steal yet more land from its neighbours. It requires more than lipstick to doll up this pig. Today Israeli propaganda relies on threats, and strong armed techniques to censor and muzzle dissent. Much of this is done by control over the media which seems to work in tandem with Israeli propagandists. Student protestors are threatened and even imprisoned; conscientious journalists are fired….

For all moral world citizens, the task is to oppose all the ghastly things Israel does every day, to reject their sorry justifications ( “self defence”); reject the portrayal of Israel’s proclaimed enemies (demonising Hamas, and the Palestinians in general); reject the portrayal of the Israeli military (why should anyone want to be an “ally” of this country?), reject Israel as a ethnocracy where rights and status are determined by whether or not one is Jewish (reject “Jewish democracy” if it excludes or discriminates against segment of the population; it is not much different from “white democracy” during South Africa’s apartheid years). In many ways, if one appeals to “western values”, the mantra often repeated by western officialdom, then one must also be willing to judge Israeli’s actions and institutions by the same standard. Just because Israel holds a gay pride parade doesn’t make them a beacon of shared values. Our opposition can start with acts as simple as challenging the manager of our local supermarket why they stock Israeli avocados and oranges; indeed, the boycott against apartheid in South Africa started by boycotting their oranges. But these are small steps when bolder action is needed – it is long overdue.

Notes:

The post Debunking Israeli Propaganda in Times of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen’s Israelism shows this cultural phenomenon.

2 Nir Hasson, Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg, “’It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid,” Haaretz, 27 June 2025.

3 MEE Staff, “Report reveals vast loot Israeli soldiers took from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria,” Middle East Eye, 28 February 2025. And Oren Ziv, “Rugs, cosmetics, motorbikes: Israeli soldiers are looting Gaza homes en masse,” +972 Magazine, 20 February 2024.

4 Evidence presented in January 2024 at the ICJ.

5 Rayhan Uddin, “Israel-Palestine war: Israeli veteran, 95, rallies troops to ‘erase’ Palestinian children”, Middle East Eye, 14 October 2023.

6 For a collection of genocidal statements made by Israeli officials or members of the Knesset see: “Specific Intent of Genocide: Statements made by Israeli officials indicating their clear intent to exterminate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” Euromed, 21 Oct 2024. A much longer list could be obtained by quoting influential rabbis in Israel.

7 Nagham Zbeedat, “’Are They Going to Ban the Air Next?’ | IDF Reiterates Ban on Gazans Entering the Sea, Last Remaining Source of Relief for Many Palestinians”, Haaretz, 13 July 2025.

8 At last count ten countries in the area had been bombed; the most recent ones are Iran and Yemen. Imagine if, say, Belgium, didn’t get along with its neighbours, and set about bombing them to the same extent – this would require bombing all of Europe.

9 The great scientist and organiser of Peace Studies programs, Anatol Rapoport, stated that the notion of deterrence is a sham because it fails due to a fallacy of composition (post hoc, propter ergo hoc). Deterrence is like the talisman effect. That is, a man was wearing a large talisman, and had this exchange with his friend:
“why are you wearing that talisman?”
“it is to keep the elephants at bay!”
“But I see no elephants.”
“You see, the talisman works!”

10 Yaniv Kubovich, “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, Haaretz, 7 July 2024. Subtitle: “there was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information: Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well.”

11 The “making the desert bloom” sham is wonderfully exposed in Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan’s “Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel”, 2003.

12 The late Israel Shahak exposed the kibbutz sham. He revealed in one of his lectures the exploitative nature of the kibbutz, the fact Palestinian labourers wouldn’t be hired, and the sexual harassment of the volunteers. Often the kibbutzim were built on stolen Palestinian land.

13 One should read about rabbi Moshe Levinger and his zealot followers to appreciate the level of brutality involved in stealing Palestinian land.

14 Article in Haaretz, but unfortunately the link to the article has expired.

15 When the Israel-Hezbollah 2006 war ended, Israeli engineering units moved the razor wire fences several hundred meters into Lebanese territory. A few days later a United Nations surveyor entered the coordinates of the fence to demarcate the newly UN approved border – it is called the Blue Line.

16 Here is one example, “Two Nice Jewish Boys” advocating for genocide in Gaza.

17 t.me/mintpress_news/7228

18 Craig Murray, “The Big Chill,” Craig Murray’s website, 17 July 2025. View the video at the bottom of the article.

19 Indlieb Farazi Saber, “A ‘cultural genocide’: Which of Gaza’s heritage sites have been destroyed?”, Al Jazeera, 14 January 2024.

20 UNESCO members who vote for the heritage site designations must be UN-states, and since the Palestinians aren’t a state, they have no standing at the UNESCO deliberations. There have been appeals to include the Church of the Nativity, Al Aqsa mosque, and a few others, but they all were blocked by the Israelis. Source: UNESCO official talking at SOAS, a university in London.

21 Ayah El-Khaldi, “Pope Leo under fire for ‘vague’ statement on Israel’s bombing of Gaza Catholic church”, Middle East Eye, 18 July 2025.

22 “Israeli settlers storm purported rabbi’s shrine in Lebanon”, Middle East Eye, 7 March 2025.

23 James Crisp, Bake sales for Gaza could stoke Jew hatred, EU warns
Fundraisers for Gaza make ‘Jews feel uncomfortable’, says Europe’s anti-Semitism tsar, 14 July 2025.

24 Just to borrow from a statement made by Josep Borrell, the former Foreign Minister of the EU.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul de Rooij.

Handala freedom ship loaded with Gaza aid bracing for Israeli forces

Pacific Media Watch — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 11:40:50 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

An activist on board the Handala, a Gaza Freedom Flotilla ship carrying aid to the besieged enclave in a bid to break Israel’s blockade, says the crew are preparing themselves for the possibility of Israeli forces storming the vessel.

Jacob Berger, an actor from the US, made the comments to Al Jazeera Arabic from on board the Handala, which set sail from Gallipoli, Italy last Sunday.

The ship is currently off the coast of Egypt in international waters on its route to Gaza.

READ MORE: The Freedom Flotilla Coalition web page

The Handala is the latest ship sent by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) in its mission to break Israel’s Gaza blockade amid the devastating starvation regime imposed on the terrotory by Israeli forces.

The FFC’s previous mission ended when its ship, the Madleen, was intercepted by the Israeli military, who boarded the vessel and arrested the activists on board illegally in international waters on June 9.

The Handala’s live location tracker shows it is nearing the area where the Madleen was intercepted by Israel.

Earlier, Al Jazeera reported that 16 Israeli military drones had been spotted flying near the vessel overnight.

In a message via Instagram, another crew member, Thiago Avila, said that the Handala mission was about to cross the location — around 110 nautical miles — “where we were intercepted one month ago with the Madleen trying to break the siege of Gaza and create a humanitarian sea corridor that could stop famine”.

Avila added that Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had already warned that he intended to “commit another war crime tonight [by] kidnapping our participants and illegally stopping a humanitarian mission heading to Gaza despite the strict prohibition from the International Court of Justice on its provisional rulings.”

The Freedom Flotilla ship Handala . . . reports 16 drones – some in pairs – flying over the aid vessel as it nears Gaza. Image: @yenisafakenglish screenshot APR

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Gaza: Global community must act amid reports of starvation of journalists, says IPI

Pacific Media Watch — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:07:41 +0000

By Jamie Wiseman

The International Press Institute (IPI) has joined calls for urgent action to halt the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza as global news organisations warn that their journalists there are experiencing starvation.

Israel must immediately allow life-saving food aid to reach journalists and other civilians in Gaza, IPI said in a statement today.

“The international community must also put effective pressure on Israel to allow all journalists to enter and exit the territory and to document the ongoing catastrophe,”it said.

In an unprecedented joint statement this week, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC News, and Reuters — four of the world’s leading news agencies — said their journalists on the ground “are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.

The news outlets added: “Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.”

Separately, Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that journalists on the ground “now find themselves fighting for their own survival” due to mass starvation.

Harrowing accounts
AFP and Al Jazeera journalists shared harrowing accounts of conditions on the ground.

One AFP photographer was quoted as saying, “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.”

Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent said he was “drowning in hunger”.

In an interview with NPR, AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said that the news agency had been working to evacuate its remaining contributors from Gaza, which requires Israeli permission.

The dramatic warnings come as more than 100 international humanitarian organisations said that mass starvation in Gaza was now threatening the lives of humanitarian aid workers themselves, while the civilian death toll continues to rise.

Gaza under siege — a journalist reports on daily survival Video: Al Jazeera

Meanwhile, Israel continues to refuse to allow international reporters into Gaza to report and cover the war and humanitarian situation independently, obstructing the free flow of news and limiting coverage of the humanitarian crisis.

The ongoing conflict has taken a devastating toll on journalists and media outlets in Gaza.

Highest media death toll
Since October 2023, at least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza — Al Jazeera puts the figure as at least 230 — the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, according to monitoring by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

This is the largest number of journalists to be killed in any armed conflict in this span of time.

Independent investigations such as those conducted by Forbidden Stories have found more than a dozen cases in which journalists were intentionally targeted and killed by the Israeli military — which constitutes a war crime under international law.

IPI has made repeated calls, in conjunction with its partners, urging the international community to take immediate measures to protect journalists and allow unimpeded access to the strip from international media.

Today, IPI has strongly and urgently reiterated these calls, as humanitarian conditions in Gaza rapidly deteriorate and as journalists and other civilians face man-made starvation.

The international community must use all diplomatic means at its disposal to pressure Israel to ensure the safe flow of food aid to journalists and other civilians, said IPI in a statement.

“The response by the international community in this critical moment could be the difference between life and death. There is no more time to lose,” IPI said.

RSF warnings over Gaza
In Paris, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports that for nearly two years it has warned about the precarious conditions faced by journalists in Gaza — which are deteriorating day by day.

Over the past 20 months in Gaza, more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army, including at least 46 slain while doing their job,” RSF said today in a statement.

“In addition to bombs, forced displacement, and dire humanitarian conditions, Gaza’s journalists, who are the only ones able to document what is happening in the besieged and closed-off enclave, can no longer find food,” the statement said.

“In response to this catastrophe, RSF reiterates its call to open up Gaza to foreign journalists and lift the blockade, in a joint appeal with over 200 media outlets and organisations from around the world.”

Jamie Wiseman is a journalist of the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza

Gideon Polya — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:32:38 +0000

Over 23 horrific months the people of Gaza (47% children before the present Gaza Massacre) have suffered bombing, shooting, burying under rubble, near-total devastation of homes and infrastructure, and substantial deprivation from water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The mass murder of 680,000 Gazans by violence and imposed deprivation has now transmuted to man-made famine and mass starvation that has galvanized the global conscience.

As estimated from data published by a succession of expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet, 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths that is under-reported 10 fold by Western Mainstream media. In impoverished countries about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of under-5 year old infants (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country). It is estimated that the 680,000 dead Gazans (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included 380,000 under-5 year old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men (Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025 ).

Now the surviving Gazans are suffering man-made famine and mass starvation while the world looks on. This crime has been perpetrated many times in history, notably in the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in 1942-1945 for strategic reasons in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha by the British under fervent Zionist Winston Churchill with food-denying Australian complicity) (for details of this and some 70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities see Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial & the crisis in biological sustainability”).

The World’s major powers must (a) order Apartheid Israel to immediately leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), (b) immediately provide life-sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as demanded of any Occupier for its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” by Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and (c) immediately impose rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters, notably the US and neo-Nazi Germany, until reparations and war crimes trials are delivered.

28 countries (all European except for Japan) have issued a statement demanding aid to Gaza, an immediate end to the killing and condemning the Zionist Israeli-imposed killing, deprivation, starving and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine. Words are cheap but something is better than nothing. Of these 28 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) only 9 actually recognize the State of Palestine (Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, and Spain). France will recognize Palestine at the September UN General Assembly.

Notably absent from this list of 28 concerned countries were the Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, neo-Nazi Germany and the perpetrator, nuclear terrorist and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel itself. The US has supplied most of Israel’s weaponry, supplied the bombs and bullets that have killed 28% of Gaza’s pre-war population, and vetoed any action by the UN Security Council. Neo-Nazi Germany has supplied 30% of Israel’s weapons imports and like the US, the UK and Australia has a rotten record of persecuting humanitarians demanding human rights for Palestinians.

Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways but has merely applied sanctions against 2 far-right Israeli extremist politicians – something is better than nothing. The Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, UK, German and Australian Governments assiduously refrained from criticizing Apartheid Israel for the nearly 2 years of the Gaza Massacre and actively sought to hide the horrors of the Gaza Genocide by hysterical and false campaigns alleging “antisemitism” by anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians demanding equal and full human rights for the sorely oppressed Palestinians.

Australians are repeatedly told by Zionists and the fervently pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government and Coalition Opposition that there has been an asserted increase in “antisemitism” in Australia. A Jewish Zionist “Antisemitism Envoy” and a Christian Egyptian Australian “Islamophobia Envoy” were appointed to inform the government. Antisemitism occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and anti-Arab anti-Semitism (including Islamophobia) but these 3 key terms (and indeed about 80 related terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “[Antisemitism] Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism” sent to the Australian Government.

I individually addressed the following Letter to major Mainstream Australian media under the Subject heading “Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews” and copied it to all Federal and Victorian State MPs (however, it was not published and the Silence has been Deafening in Australia):

Dear Editor,

For 3 decades I have been researching “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” of subjugated peoples in the global South due to European-imposed war and hegemony, with the findings reported in a thousand huge and exhaustively referenced articles and 9 huge books (this including massively updating editions). However Google the phrase “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” and you will find that the West simply doesn’t want to know, even though UN demographic data show that 1,500 million people have died avoidably from deprivation since 1950, 70% of them under-5 infants.

Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicate that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths. In Australia (as well as the US and UK) this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive “antisemitism hysteria” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia. Also ignored by Mainstream Australian media and politicians are 30 ways Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews (anti-Zionist Jews) is entrenched in Zionist-perverted Australia (cc Mps).

Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya

The post The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

Leaked document reveals proposed law revisions in NZ, as Western defence of Zionist genocide threatens Pacific

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:41:20 +0000

SPECIAL REPORT: By Mick Hall

A leaked document has revealed secretive plans to revise terror laws in New Zealand so that people can be charged over statements deemed to constitute material support for a proscribed organisation.

It shows the government also wants to widen the criteria for proscribing organisations to include groups that are judged to “facilitate” or “promote and encourage” terrorist acts.

The changes would see the South Pacific nation falling in line with increasingly repressive Western countries like the UK, where scores of independent journalists and anti-genocide protesters have been arrested and charged under terrorism laws in recent months.

The consultation document, handed over to the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties (NZCCL), reveals the government has been in contact with a small number of unnamed groups this year over plans to legally redefine what material support involves, so that public statements or gestures involving insignia like flags can lead to charges if construed as support for proscribed groups.

As part of a proposal to revise the Terrorism Suppression Act, the document suggests the process for designating organisations as terror groups should be changed by “expanding the threshold to enable more modern types of entities to be designated, such as those that ‘facilitate’ or ‘promote and encourage’ terrorist acts”.

The Ministry of Justice has been contacted in an attempt to ascertain which groups it has been consulting with and why it believed the changes were necessary.

NZCCL chairman Thomas Beagle told Mick Hall In Context his group was concerned the proposed changes were a further attempt to limit the rights of New Zealanders to engage in political protest.

‘What’s going on?’
“When you look at the proposal to expand the Terrorism Suppression Act, alongside the Police and IPCA conspiring to propose a law change to ban political protest without government permission, you really have to wonder what’s going on,” he said.

A report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) in February proposed to give police the right to ban protests if they believed there was a high chance of public disorder and threats to public safety.

That would potentially mean bans on Palestinian solidarity protests if far right counter protestErs posed a threat of violent confrontation.

The stand-alone legislation would put New Zealand in line with other Five Eyes and NATO-aligned security jurisdictions such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Beagle points out proposed changes to terror laws would suppress freedom of speech and further undermine freedom of assembly and the right to protest.

“We’ve seen what’s happening with the state’s abuse of terrorism suppression laws in the UK and are horrified that they have sunk so far and so quickly,” he said.

More than 100 people were arrested across the UK on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action, a non-violent protest group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government earlier this month.

Arrests in social media clips
Social media clips showed pensioners aggressively arrested while attending rallies in Liverpool, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Truro over the weekend.

Independent journalists and academics have also faced state repression under the UK’s Terrorism Act.

Among those targeted was Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley, who had his home raided and devices seized in October last year as part of the opaque counter-terror drive “Operation Incessantness”.

Independent journalist Asa Winstanley . . . his home was raided and devices seized in October last year as part of “Operation Incessantness”. Image: R Witts Photography/mickhall.substack.com

In May, the country’s Central Criminal Court ruled the raid was unlawful.

Journalist Richard Medhurst has had a terror investigation hanging over his head since being detained at Heathrow Airport in August last year and charged under section 8 of the Terrorism Act. Activist and independent journalist Sarah Wilkinson had her house raided in the same month.

Others have faced similar intimidation and threats of jail. In November 2024, Jewish academic Haim Bresheeth was charged after police alleged he had expressed support for a “proscribed organisation” during a speech outside the London residence of the Israeli ambassador to the UK.

Meanwhile, dozens of members of Palestine Action are in jail facing terror charges. The vast majority are being held on remand where they may wait two years before going to trial — a common state tactic to take activists off the street and incarcerate them, knowing the chances of conviction are slim when they eventually go to court.

‘Targeted amendments’
The document says the New Zealand government wants to progress “targeted amendments” to the Act, creating or amending offences “to capture contemporary behaviours and activities of concern” like “public expressions of support for a terrorist act or designated entities, for example by showing insignia or distributing propaganda or instructional material.”

Protesters highlight the proscription of Palestine Action outside the British Embassy at The Hague on July 20. No arrests were made following 80 arrests by Dutch police the week before. Image: Defend Our Juries/mickhall.substack.com

It suggests that the existing process for proscribing an organisation is slow and cumbersome, noting that: “Specific provisions need to be followed to designate entities not on a UN list, but the decision-making process is lengthy and the designation period is short. This impacts timely decision-making and the usefulness of designation as a tool to prevent terrorism.”

It proposes to improve “the timeliness of the process, by considering changes to who the decision-maker is” and extending the renewal period from three to five years.

The document suggests consulting the Attorney-General over designation-related decisions to ensure legal requirements are met may not be required and questions whether the designation process requiring the Prime Minister to review decisions twice is necessary. It asks whether others, like the Foreign Minister, should be involved in the decision-making process.

Beagle believes the secretive proposals pose a threat to New Zealand’s liberal democracy.

“Political protest is an important part of New Zealand’s history,” he said.

“Whether it’s the environment, worker’s rights, feminism, Māori issues, homosexual law reform or any number of other issues, political protest has had a big part in forming what Aotearoa New Zealand is today.

Protected under Bill of Rights
“It’s a right protected by New Zealand’s Bill of Rights and is a critical part of being a functioning democracy.”

The terror laws revision forms part of a wider trend of legislating to close down dissent over New Zealand’s foreign policy, now closely aligned with NATO and US interests.

The government is also widening the definition of foreign interference in a way that could see people who “should have known” that they were being used by a foreign state to undermine New Zealand’s interests prosecuted.

The Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill, which passed its first reading in Parliament on November 19, would criminalise the act of foreign interference, while also increasing powers of unwarranted searches by authorities.

The Bill is effectively a reintroduction of the country’s old colonial sedition laws inherited from Britain, the broadness of the law having allowed it to be used against communists, trade unionists and indigenous rights activists.

Republished from Mick Hall in Context on Substack with permisson.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Israel is changing the legal system governing the West Bank to accelerate annexation: report

Jeff Wright — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:33:43 +0000

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel is accelerating its efforts to cement its permanent control over the West Bank through a number of sweeping legal and institutional changes, according to a new report from Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

The 87-page report, Legal Structures of Distinction, Separation, and Territorial Domination, describes the ways in which the Netanyahu government is rapidly building on a long-standing legal matrix that further threatens Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

“These developments are not something new to us,” Dr. Suhad Bishara, Legal Director of Adalah and lead author of the report, told Mondoweiss. “All eyes are on Gaza, justifiably so,” she said. “However… it is important to highlight the intensity of the structural changes that have taken place since the current government took over in December 2022.”

“What is happening in the West Bank is dangerously fast-forwarding annexation policies in a blatant violation of international law,” Bishara said. “Israel is intensifying measures to change the status of the West Bank, the status of many Palestinians living in Area C who are subject to intensified displacement induced by settler violence and Israeli policies.” She said, “This is in addition to settler expansion and further restrictions on Palestinian development in the area.”

Thoroughly researched and footnoted, the report documents how the current extremist government has built on what Adalah describes as “foundational mechanisms through which Israel has entrenched a land regime that facilitates territorial domination and racial segregation.”

Area C comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and is under full Israeli military control.

Here are the mechanisms of territorial domination Adalah examines in these areas.

Civilian governance for Israeli settlers; military rule over Palestinians

Beginning in the late 1970s, Israel abandoned its security-based justifications for approving settlements and adopted a policy based on civil, not military grounds. The report describes how, soon after, the Civil Administration — the Israeli body governing the West Bank — was established to formalize the division between military and civilian affairs.

As a result, “Israel has steadily transferred governance over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from military to civilian control, entrenching permanent territorial dominance and greatly expanding the settlement enterprise,” according to the report.

Most recently, structural reforms — such as the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich to serve as both Finance Minister and a Minister in the Defense Ministry — have resulted in increasing legal authority for the pro-settler civil servants working with Smotrich in the West Bank. These reforms have cemented the two distinct legal structures that govern life in Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements: the former, in which the military rules, and the latter, administered according to Israeli law.

1. Administration by local authorities

Adalah’s report dives into the weeds as it describes one of the more concerning mechanisms that reveals Israel’s intent to annex the whole of the West Bank. Having transitioned the settlements from military administration to civilian rule — and having handed over significant legal and administrative decision-making to pro-settler civil servants — Israel can argue that the settlements operate now under Israeli sovereignty. But applying Israeli law in occupied territory, Adalah maintains, is a violation of international human rights law and constitutes “a measure of de facto annexation.”

2. Financial incentives for settlements

Readers of the report won’t be surprised to learn that, as Adalah writes, “Israeli settlements receive extensive financial benefits through direct government subsidies, preferential policies, and financial incentives… [covering] multiple sectors, including land allocation, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture.”

Still, it is remarkable—as documented in the Adalah report—how in contravention of international law, Israel continues each year to pour billions of shekels into the development of settlements in the West Bank. Readers of the report will learn of “the legal mechanisms behind these incentives and how Israeli law facilitates their distribution.”

3. Declaring State land

According to Adalah, Israel’s designation of State Land in the West Bank is “the primary legal mechanism through which Israeli authorities have taken possession of Palestinian land since the late 1970s.” Those already familiar with Israel’s use of this means of de facto annexation will be surprised by the extraordinary amount of Palestinian land so designated. The report includes information obtained by Peace Now through a Freedom of Information Act request that shows a shocking fact: in under a one-year period, Israel has designated more Palestinian land as State Land than it had in an 18-year period.

From 1998 to 2016, just over 21,000 dunams were declared as State Land. But in just over nine months (from the end of February 2024 through early December 2024), over 24,200 dunams were declared as State Land. This acceleration is historically unprecedented.

The planning system in Area C

Adalah includes an entire section on the legal and structural framework in place in Area C to further expand Israel’s settlement project, fulfilling one of the Netanyahu government’s guiding principles shared the day before his swearing-in as Prime Minister in December 2022: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” promising to expand settlements throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank.

Paralleling the judgments of the ICJ, UN experts, and international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights groups, the report ends by listing the five international crimes that Adalah finds Israel guilt of: violations of International Humanitarian Law; the deepening of the illegal mechanism of de facto annexation; the denial of Palestinian people’s right to self-determination; the deepening of the apartheid system in the occupied Palestinian territory; and the commission of war crimes and crimes of aggression on the part of Israel.

The most recent newsletter from Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO, describes Israel’s expanding control over illegally annexed East Jerusalem. Asked to comment, Tess Miller, Public Outreach staff at Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples” in Hebrew) told Mondoweiss that “the mechanisms of displacement that we monitor and advocate against within Jerusalem are not separate from the mechanisms seen today in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“What we are witnessing,” Miller said, “time after time, place after place, is violent control granted to those willing to advance the state’s agenda of expanding Jewish presence and diminishing Palestinian presence.” Ir Amim’s newsletter documents home demolitions, evictions, and starkly discriminatory housing and land confiscation policies.

“Together,” Miller said, “they all contribute to the accelerating erasure of the Palestinian people from their own cities, neighborhoods, and lands — enabled by the complicity of an increasingly radicalized Israeli public and the international community’s persistent refusal to take meaningful action.”

According to Adalah’s Dr. Bishara, it is hoped that the Adalah report, read by advocates for Palestinian rights, stakeholders, and states alike, “will generate international pressure against these long-term changes in the West Bank that violate international law and threaten the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jeff Wright.

Palestinians fight for survival is at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism: An interview with Prof. David Klein

Rick Sterling — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 12:00:42 +0000

Q: How long did you teach mathematics at Cal State University, Northridge?

DK: I was there for a little more than three decades. Before that, I taught at UCLA and USC, and before that at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, I got into some trouble. I was arrested for taking over a U.S. Senator’s office along with half a dozen Quakers in protest of weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. I also had a little run-in with the Ku Klux Klan and was sued by right-wing Central American students for bringing in speakers they didn’t like. They sued me for “mental anguish”. Of course, the suit was thrown out of court, but it was a distraction. So, when I got the position at CSUN, I was very happy to get a permanent position there.

Q: So “mental anguish” …. that’s a recurring theme of the critics.

DK: Yes, it’s one of their tools. Claiming to feel bad about what we talk about.

Q: How did you become interested in Israel-Palestine?

DK: Well, it was kind of gradual. When I was a kid, I was very pro-Israel. And then in college, I started to have doubts and talked to more people. And the more I learned, the more obvious it was that this was a settler colonial state that was engaged in pretty much what the United States did to the Native Americans. And then there was a real spike in my understanding and activity with the 2009 “Cast Lead” assault on Gaza by Israel. That really increased my activism. It was just a new level of outrage that I and many people felt.

Q: I understand you didn’t talk about politics in your mathematics classes, but that you were otherwise active. What did you do, and what attacks or censorship did you experience?

DK: That’s right. I was careful not to bring it up in my classes since it didn’t really have direct relevance. But I was the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine and for the Student Green Party and a few other student groups. So, I created a webpage, a BDS resource webpage on the university server from my faculty webpage. Then, I wrote an open letter that was signed by many CSU faculty, administrators, and students to the chancellor of the entire CSU system, demanding that CSU end the study abroad program in Israel for a variety of reasons.

That got some news coverage and brought a lot of attention to my website. So, that was the start of a lot of attacks.

There were hundreds of calls to my university president that I be fired. There were some threats, some kind of death threats. There were some threats to the administration to withhold financial contributions. There was just lots of slander. Some of it came from the campus itself, but it was mostly outside from the Zionist Organization of America, a group called AMCHA, and other groups. And then there were some politicians who joined in the attacks. The local congressman, Brad Sherman, and a California assembly member, Bob Blumenfield, who later became a city council member.

An Israeli-supported law firm pressured then Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute me. And they separately asked the Los Angeles City attorney to do that. But those requests came to nothing. Still, I was required to produce massive amounts of emails, anything regarding Israel-Palestine, and regarding logistical planning to bring in guest speakers Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein. These threats and demands went on and on for a long time. And on my website, I posted a page of the threats, the nasty comments, and the calls for my removal. They were signed by doctors and other professionals, but used really low-level language. The ugliness that it brought out was amazing.

Q: So you were part of organizing and hosting famous academics such as Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe. How did those visits go, and what were the results?

DK: The Norman Finkelstein visit lasted a week. He gave three lectures, and there was a group of us who wanted to hire him at CSUN after he lost tenure at DePaul University. And so that included 30 faculty members from various departments, including the science departments and social studies, social science departments, and a wide range. And it was going well. We got the approval of a department that wanted to hire him, the journalism department, and it went up to the top, and we were all set to go. And then, at the last minute, it was vetoed by the campus president. Norman asked me to write an article about the whole thing, which I did.

The visit of Ilan Pappe came later in 2012. We had to have campus police escorts because of the threats. But he was very persuasive and compelling. Both of these guests were. The students were very engaged and it went well.

Q: I know that there was a big campaign to prevent the tour by Ilan Pappe, but ultimately, the presidents of several CSU universities defended his right to speak. Is that correct?

DK: Three of the campus presidents wrote a letter defending academic freedom. It was an open letter, but it went to the chancellor of the entire CSU system. The visits went smoothly logistically because of that. And it was pretty rare that campus presidents would stand up for academic freedom and freedom of speech for speakers like Ilan Pappe, who very strongly promotes Palestinian human rights.

Q: You’ve been an active supporter of the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Why do you think this is important?

DK: It’s an important part of the general Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Academics and culture are very important within Israel. And so this particular aspect of BDS lends what we think is special leverage to isolate the Zionist state because of its actions. Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the persecution and genocide of Palestinians. Maya Wind’s new book, “Towers of Ivory and Steel”, documents that very clearly. Focusing on academics is very pertinent to what’s going on. And the cultural boycott has a very large impact. Everybody recognizes when a famous artist, a singer, or a musician refuses to go to Israel and states the reasons.

Q: But critics of Israel and supporters of BDS are under attack. Do you think the censorship and attacks are the same as in the past? Or is it getting worse?

DK: It’s getting much worse. The accusation of anti-semitism has been weaponized. Students, teachers, and professors are facing frivolous lawsuits. Students are facing expulsions. Faculty are facing job loss. Both are facing arrests and deportations for opposing genocide because it might hurt the feelings of the killers. Zionist students and outside advocates of genocide claim to feel unsafe because of demonstrations against Israel’s genocide. And they call human rights activists “anti-semitic”. Even the Jewish activists. And so it’s much more intense now than in the past. They were just sort of getting warmed up on people like me, and now they’ve really sharpened their knives.

Q: Do you have any strategy suggestions for campus activists who oppose the genocide happening in Gaza?

DK: Yes. I think we would do well to be less defensive and go on the offense. Pleading academic freedom and denying that we’re anti-semites is not really going very far. I think we need to move in the direction of accusing the accusers. Israeli soldiers are intentionally killing babies and children, shooting boys in their testicles, torturing doctors to death, and more broadly, carrying out the extermination of the entire Palestinian people. These are the worst of the worst. And we need to point to them, not just defend ourselves from their empty accusations.

By defining opposition to genocide as antisemitic, they’ve turned antisemitism into a virtue. Hitler could have only dreamed of this kind of linguistic transformation. And in this sense, the Zionists are the biggest antisemites on the planet. They’re the worst of humanity. So I think that the least vulnerable among us should take the lead, especially US-born tenured professors.

And we should focus on where the real power is. For K-12 schools, it is the school boards. But for almost all colleges and universities in the United States, whether they’re public or private, the board of trustees is the institution’s highest decision-making or governance body.

Members of the board are typically very rich. They have a lot of political power within the country, not just in universities. To give one example, Miriam Adelson is on the USC Board of Trustees. Miriam Adelson was married to the late Sheldon Adelson. He was a very rich billionaire. Both of them are rich billionaires. And Miriam Adelson’s Foundation contributes $200 million each year to Israel. And she was one of the biggest Trump donors as well. So, there are a lot of university trustees like that. They come from weapons manufacturers, the oil and gas industry, and other major corporations. And they’re overwhelmingly Zionist.

University presidents, who appear to be in charge of their campuses, serve at the pleasure of the boards and can be hired and fired at the whim of these boards of trustees. So the boards of trustees are the real power at universities. They are behind the persecution of opponents of genocide. The college presidents who do cave in to the Zionist censors should face no-confidence votes from their faculty senate on campus. But, there really hasn’t been enough focus on the boards of trustees. And I think that’s the next step. There are a number of people who are coming to the same conclusion on campuses and universities.

A lot of research would be involved to find out who these people are, what their background is, expose them to the public, and show what they’re doing, and try to get them kicked out. Replace them with decent human beings. It’s like you’re either for genocide or against it. If you don’t care, that doesn’t say much good about you. So being anti genocide is the minimal criterion for human decency. After all, if they’re going after and attacking people who are trying to stop a genocide, that makes them horrible human beings, and they shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Q: Do you have any final comments?

DK: I think the importance of the Palestinians’ fight for survival can hardly be overstated. Their struggle is not only for themselves, but it’s at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism. And that includes the climate catastrophe, because global fascism can only accelerate planetary suicide.

David Klein is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).

The post Palestinians fight for survival is at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism: An interview with Prof. David Klein first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

Israel waging ‘horror show’ starvation campaign in Gaza, says UN chief

APR editor — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:30:28 +0000

This is Democracy Now!. I’m Amy Goodman.

More than 100 humanitarian groups are demanding action to end Israel’s siege of Gaza, warning mass starvation is spreading across the Palestinian territory.

The NGOs, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, warn, “illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.”

Their warning came as the Palestinian Ministry of Health said the number of starvation-related deaths has climbed to at least 111 people.

This is Ghada al-Fayoumi, a displaced Palestinian mother of seven in Gaza City.

GHADA AL-FAYOUMI: “[translated] My children wake up sick every day. What do I do? I get saline solution for them. What can I do?

“There’s no food, no bread, no drinks, no rice, no sugar, no cooking oil, no bulgur, nothing. There is no kind of any food available to us at all.”

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of antiwar protesters marched on Tuesday in Tel Aviv outside Israel’s military headquarters, demanding an end to Israel’s assault and a lifting of the Gaza siege. This is Israeli peace activist Alon-Lee Green with the group Standing Together.

ALON-LEE GREEN: “We are marching now in Tel Aviv, holding bags of flour and the pictures of these children that have been starved to death by our government and our army.

“We demand to stop the starvation in Gaza. We demand to stop the annihilation of Gaza. We demand to stop the daily killing of children and innocent people in Gaza.

“This cannot go on. We are Israelis, and this does not serve us. This only serves the Messianic people that lead us.”

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the World Health Organisation has released a video showing the Israeli military attacking WHO facilities in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah. A WHO spokesperson condemned the attack, called for the immediate release of a staff member abducted by Israeli forces.

TARIK JAŠAREVIĆ: “Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot and screened at gunpoint.

“Two WHO staff and two family members were detained.”

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, health officials in Gaza say Israeli attacks over the past day killed more than 70 people, including five more people seeking food at militarised aid sites. Amid growing outrage worldwide, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday the situation in Gaza right now is a “horror show”.

UN SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: “We need look no further than the horror show in Gaza, with a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.

“Malnourishment is soaring. Starvation is knocking on every door.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. He is a professor of law at University of Oregon, where he leads the Food Resiliency Project.

Israel waging ‘fastest starvation campaign’ in modern history Video: Democracy Now!

Dr Michael Fakhri, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can respond to what’s happening right now, the images of dying infants starving to death, the numbers now at over 100, people dropping in the streets, reporters saying they can’t go on?

Agence France-Presse’s union talked about they have had reporters killed in conflict, they have had reporters disappeared, injured, but they have not had this situation before with their reporters starving to death.

DR MICHAEL FAKHRI: Amy, the word “horror” — I mean, we’re running out of words of what to say. And the reason it’s horrific is it was preventable. We saw this coming. We’ve seen this coming for 20 months.

Israel announced its starvation campaign back in October 2023. And then again, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on March 1 that nothing was to enter Gaza. And that’s what happened for 78 days. No food, no water, no fuel, no medicine entered Gaza.

And then they built these militarised aid sites that are used to humiliate, weaken and kill the Palestinians. So, what makes this horrific is it has been preventable, it was predictable. And again, this is the fastest famine we’ve seen, the fastest starvation campaign we’ve seen in modern history.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what needs to be done at this point and the responsibility of the occupying power? Israel is occupying Gaza right now. What it means to have to protect the population it occupies?

DR FAKHRI: The International Court of Justice outlined Israel’s duties in its decisions over the last year. So, what Israel has an obligation to do is, first, end its illegal occupation immediately. This came from the court itself.

Second, it must allow humanitarian relief to enter with no restrictions. And this hasn’t been happening. So, usually, we would turn to the Security Council to authorise peacekeepers or something similar to assist.

But predictably, again, the United States keeps vetoing anything to do with a ceasefire. When the Security Council is in a deadlock because of a veto, the General Assembly, the UN General Assembly, has the authority to call for peacekeepers to accompany humanitarian convoys to enter into Gaza and to end Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: People actually protested outside the house of UN Secretary-General António Guterres yesterday. People protested all over the world yesterday against the Palestinians being starved and bombed to death. Those in front of the UN Secretary-General’s house said they don’t dispute that he has raised this issue almost every day, but they say he can do more.

Finally, Michael Fakhri, what does the UN need to do — the US, Israel, the world?

DR FAKHRI: So, as I mentioned, first and foremost, they can authorise peacekeepers to enter to stop the starvation. But, second, they need to create consequences.

The world has a duty to prevent this starvation. The world has a duty to prevent and end this genocide. And as a result, then, what the world can do is impose sanctions.

And again, this is supported by the International Court of Justice. The world needs to impose wide-scale sanctions against the state of Israel to force it to end the starvation and genocide of civilians, of Palestinian civilians in Gaza today.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaking to us from Eugene, Oregon.

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Chris Smalls: Sabotage attempts and death threats won’t stop Gaza Freedom Flotilla

Maximillian Alvarez — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:47:40 +0000

More than a hundred aid organizations warned Wednesday that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza, as Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians reaches an unspeakable turning point. As the crisis of humanity deepens, another Gaza Freedom Flotilla has set sail in the hopes of breaking Israel’s blockade and bringing life-saving supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. Calling from the Handala ship while en route to Gaza, American labor organizer Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks with TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez about the threats and sabotage attempts the Freedom Flotilla has already faced on its journey—and why that won’t deter the crew from their humanitarian mission.

Additional resources:

Chris Smalls X account and Instagram
Gaza Freedom Flotilla linktree
Ann Wright, Common Dreams, “Despite 2 sabotage attempts, the Gaza Flotilla Ship Handala sails onward”
Marium Ali, Al Jazeera, “Freedom Flotillas: A history of attempts to break Israel’s siege of Gaza”

Credits:

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

Yes, goddamnit, it’s genocide!: A conversation with Norman Solomon

Marc Steiner — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:03:11 +0000

“With only rare exceptions,” Norman Solomon writes, “US news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.” How did we end up in this Orwellian situation, where the reality of genocide is so thoroughly denied by pundits and politicians even as that genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes? How do we combat this level of inhumane violence and propaganda? Solomon, co-founder of Roots Action, joins The Marc Steiner Show for an urgent discussion about Israel’s manufactured genocide of Palestinians and how the media manufactures consent to, at best, hide and, at worst, justify Israel’s heinous actions.

Guests:

Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

Additional resources:

Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “In too much of the US, Israel’s Gaza genocide has been made invisible”
Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani? Billionaires”
Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Bombing Iran Is part of the USA’s repetition compulsion for war, war, war”

Credits:

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

Trump’s Latin American Policies Go South

John Perry and Roger D. Harris — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:00:03 +0000

With the Trump imperium passing the half-year mark, the posture of the US empire is ever clearer. Whether animated by “America First” or globalism, the objective remains “full spectrum dominance.” And now with the neocon capture of the Democrats, there are no guardrails from the so-called opposition party.

Call it the “new cold war,” the “beginning of World War III,” or – in Trump’s words – “endless war,” this is the era that the world has entered. The US/Zionist war against Iran has paused, but no one has any illusions that it is over. And it won’t likely be resolved until one side decisively and totally prevails. Ditto for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Likely the same with Palestine, where the barbarity of war worsened to genocide. Meanwhile, since Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” the empire is building up for war with China.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the empire’s war on the world assumes a hybrid form. The carnage is less apparent because the weapons take the form of “soft power” – sanctions, tariffs, and deportations. These can have the same lethal consequences as bombs, only less overt.

Making the world unsafe for socialism

Some Western leftists vilify the defensive measures that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua must take to protect themselves from the empire’s regime-change schemes. In contrast, Washington clearly understands that these countries pose “threats of a good example” to the empire. Each subsequent US president, from Obama on, has certified them as “extraordinary threats to US national security.” Accordingly, they are targeted with the harshest coercive measures.

In this war of attrition, historian Isaac Saney uses the example of Cuba to show how any misstep by the revolutionary government or societal deficiency is exaggerated and weaponized. The empire’s siege, he explains, is not merely an attempt to destabilize the economy but is a deliberate strategy of suffocation. The empire aims to instigate internal discontent, distort people’s perception of the government, and ultimately erode social gains.

While Cuba is affected the worst by the hybrid war, both Venezuela and Nicaragua have also been damaged. All three countries have seen the “humanitarian parole” for their migrants in the US come to an end. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was also withdrawn for Venezuelans and Nicaraguans. The strain of returning migrants, along with cuts in the remittances they had sent (amounting to a quarter of Nicaragua’s GDP), further impacts their respective economies.

Higher-than-average tariffs are threatened on Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exports to the US, together with severe restrictions on Caracas’s oil exports. Meanwhile, the screws have been tightened on the six-decade US blockade of Cuba with disastrous humanitarian consequences.

However, all three countries are fighting back. They are forming new trade alliances with China and elsewhere. Providing relief to Cuba, Mexico has supplied oil, and China is installing solar panel farms to address the now-daily power outages. High levels of food security in Venezuela and Nicaragua have strengthened their ability to resist US sanctions, while Caracas successfully defeated one of Washington’s harshest migration measures by securing the release of 252 of its citizens who had been incarcerated in El Salvador’s torturous CECOT prison.

Venezuela’s US-backed far-right opposition is in disarray. The first Trump administration had recognized the “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó, followed by the Biden administration declaring Edmundo González the winner of Venezuela’s last presidential election. But the current Trump administration has yet to back González, de facto recognizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is also reeling from a side-effect of Trump’s harsh treatment of migrants – many are returning voluntarily to a country claimed by the opposition to be “unsafe,” while US Homeland Security has even extolled their home country’s recent achievements. And some of Trump’s prominent Cuban-American supporters are now questioning his “maximum pressure” campaign for going too far.

Troubled waters for the Pink Tide

The current progressive wave, the so-called Pink Tide, was initiated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. His MORENA Party successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won by an even greater margin in 2024. Mexico’s first woman president has proven to be perhaps the world’s most dignified and capable sparring partner with the buffoon in the White House, who has threatened tariffs, deportations, military interdictions, and more on his southern neighbor.

Left-leaning presidents Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia are limited to a single term. Both have faced opposition-aligned legislatures and deep-rooted reactionary power blocs. Chilean Communist Party candidate Jeanette Jara is favored to advance to the second-round presidential election in November 2025, but will face a challenging final round if the right unifies, as is likely, around an extremist candidate.

As the first non-rightist in Colombia’s history, Petro has had a tumultuous presidential tenure. He credibly accuses his former foreign minister of colluding with the US to overthrow him. However, the presidency could well revert to the right in the May 2026 elections.

Boric, Petro, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met in July as the region’s center-left presidents, with an agenda of dealing with Trump, promoting multilateralism, and (we can assume) keeping their distance from the region’s more left-wing governments.

With shaky popularity ratings, Lula will likely run for reelection in October 2026. As head of the region’s largest economy, Lula plays a world leadership role, chairing three global summits in a year. Yet, with less than a majority legislative backing, Lula has triangulated between Washington and the Global South, often capitulating to US interests (as in his veto of BRICS membership for Nicaragua and Venezuela). Regardless, Trump is threatening Brazil with a crippling 50% export tariff and is blatantly interfering in the trial of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, accused of insurrection. So far, Trump’s actions have backfired, arousing anger among Brazilians. Lula commented that Trump was “not elected to be emperor of the world.”

In 2021, Honduran President Xiomara Castro took over a narcostate subservient to Washington and has tried to push the envelope to the left. Being constitutionally restricted to one term, Castro hands the Libre party candidacy in November’s election to former defense minister Rixi Moncada, who faces a tough contest with persistent US interference.

Bolivia’s ruling Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) Party is embroiled in a self-destructive internal conflict between former President Evo Morales and his former protégé and current President, Luis Arce. The energized Bolivian right wing is spoiling for the August 17^th presidential election.

Israeli infiltration accompanies US military penetration

Analyst Joe Emersberger notes: “Today, all geopolitics relates back to Gaza where the imperial order has been unmasked like never before.” Defying Washington, the Hague Group met in Colombia for an emergency summit on Gaza to “take collective action grounded in international law.” On July 16, regional states – Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – endorsed the pledge to take measures in support of Palestine, with others likely to follow. Brazil will join South Africa’s ICJ complaint against Israel.

At the other end of the political spectrum are self-described “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and confederates Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador. As well as cozying up to Trump, they devotedly support Israel, which has been instrumental in enabling the most brutal reactionaries in the region. Noboa duly tells Israel’s Netanyahu that they “share the same enemies.”

In February, the US Southern Command warned: “Time is not on our side.” The perceived danger is “methodical incursion” into our “neighborhood” by both Russia and China. Indeed, China has become the region’s second-largest trading partner after the US, and even right-wing governments are reluctant to jeopardize their relations with Beijing. The empire’s solution is to “redouble our efforts to nest military engagement,” using humanitarian assistance as “an essential soft power tool.”

Picking up where Biden left off, Trump has furthered US military penetration, notably in Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, Panama, and Argentina. The pandemic of narcotics trafficking, itself a product of US-induced demand, has been a Trojan Horse for militarist US intervention in Haiti, Ecuador, Peru, and threatened in Mexico.

In Panama, President José Mulino’s obeisance to Trump’s ambitions to control the Panama Canal and reduce China’s influence provoked massive protests. Trump’s collaboration in the genocide of Palestinians motivated Petro to declare that Colombia must leave the NATO alliance and keep its distance from “militaries that drop bombs on children.” Colombia had been collaborating with NATO since 2013 and became the only Latin American global partner in 2017.

Despite Trump’s bluster – what the Financial Times calls “imperial incontinence” – his administration has produced mixed results. While rightist political movements have basked in Trump’s fitful praise, his escalating coercion provokes resentment against Yankee influence. Resistance is growing, with new alliances bypassing Washington. As the empire’s grip tightens, so too does the resolve of those determined to break free from it.

The post Trump’s Latin American Policies Go South first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry and Roger D. Harris.

Gaza – an open question for NZ’s foreign minister Winston Peters

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:48:33 +0000

OPEN QUESTION: By Bryan Bruce

Dear Rt Hon Winston Peters,

There was a time when New Zealanders stood up for what was morally right. There are memorials around our country for those who died fighting fascism, we wrote parts of the UN Charter of Human Rights, we took an anti-nuclear stance in 1984, and three years prior to that, many of us stood against apartheid in South Africa by boycotting South African products and actively protesting against the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour.

To call out the Israeli government for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza is not to be antisemitic. Nor is it to be pro- Hamas. It is to simply to be pro-human.

While acknowledging the peace and humanitarian initiatives on the Foreign Affairs website, I note there is no calling out of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that cannot be denied is happening in Gaza.

The Israeli government is systematically demolishing whole towns and cities — including churches, mosques, even removing trees and vegetation — to deprive the Palestinian people the opportunity to return to their homeland; and there have been constant blocks to humanitarian aid as part of a policy forced starvation.

There is no doubt crimes against international law have been committed, which is why the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, for alleged crimes against humanity.

So, my question to you is: why are you not pictured standing in this photograph (below) alongside the representatives from 33 nations at the July 16 2025 Gaza emergency conference in Bogotá?

The nations that took part in the Gaza emergency summit in were:

Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Colombia, South Africa, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Algeria, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, China, Djibouti, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Representatives from 33 nations at the July 16 2025 Gaza emergency conference in Bogotá. Image: bryanbruce.substack.com

Is your policy simply to fall in behind the USA denying there is genocide and ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza?

If not, are you prepared to endorse the six coordinated diplomatic, legal and economic measures already signed up to by 12 of the participating countries in the Bogetà summit, to restrain Israel’s assault on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and defend international law at large?

Remaining countries, which could still include New Zealand, have a deadline of September 20, to coincide with the 80th UN General Assembly, for additional states to join them.

The 6 agreed measures are:
Prevent the provision or transfer of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel.

Prevent the transit, docking, and servicing of vessels at any port
in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel

Prevent the carriage of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel on vessels bearing our flag . . . and ensure full accountability, including de-flagging, for non-compliance with this prohibition.

Commence an urgent review of all public contracts, to prevent public institutions and funds from supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territory and entrenching its unlawful presence.

Comply with obligations to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law, through robust, impartial and independent investigations and prosecutions at national or international levels, to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes.

Support universal jurisdiction mandates, as and where applicable in national legal frameworks and judiciaries, to ensure justice for victims of international crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

In addition, are you prepared to specifically support the enforcement of the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and forced starvation, in a war that has left more than 211,000 Palestinians, including many children, dead, maimed, or missing since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry? (That’s a figure that is approximately the entire population of Hamiton and Rotorua).

What then is the NZ government’s policy? Are we going to support International Law and call out the Israeli government’s acts of genocide in Gaza, or not?

Yours sincerely,

Bryan Bruce
Investigative documentary maker, journalist and podcaster.
Auckland.

Bryan Bruce is a New Zealand investigative journalist and documentary maker. Republished from Bruce’s substack page.