From time to time, I post transcripts I’ve come across of particularly insightful conversations. Here’s one that’s particularly relevant to the US “No Kings” Day protests at the weekend.

Recently, The Conversation hosted a webinar in which executive editor and general manager Beth Daley interviewed John Shattuck, professor of practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Shattuck is the former president of Central European University in Hungary, where he defended academic freedom against a rising authoritarian government. Kaplan is the author of Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves. This interview has been condensed and edited for print.

BETH DALEY: What is an authoritarian regime, and what are their characteristics?

JOHN SHATTUCK: The authoritarian, often referred to as a “king,” is the ideal role from the point of view of the king, but certainly not from the point of view of the people. Authoritarian characteristics include centralised unlimited power, the opposite of democracy; no accountability and no rule of law; no independent courts; no checks and balances on how the king operates; rule by fear and coercion, and when necessary, in order to carry out the king’s orders, rule by by force.

There are no individual rights or civil liberties except those the king decides to allow those who are loyal to him to have, at least until he decides to take them away.

That’s a nutshell informal description of an authoritarian regime. A special threat today is that an authoritarian can emerge from a democratic election, and, indeed, a democratic election can be used to turn a weak democracy into an authoritarian regime.

But when this happens, it opens the door to challenge the authoritarian in a subsequent election if civic activism can defend the electoral process by which the authoritarian was elected.

BD: What are we seeing and not seeing in the US that other countries have gone through in terms of authoritarian government?

OLIVER KAPLAN: I think we are heading toward an autocracy, if not there already. In their 2026 report, the Varieties of Democracy Project writes that the US is no longer a liberal democracy and is moving into “competitive authoritarianism,” marked by executive overreach and erosion of judicial and legislative checks. The report notes that US democracy is being dismantled at a speed that is “unprecedented in modern history”.

We are seeing shifts in terms of concentration of power to the executive branch and a disregard of the rule of law, things like ignoring court orders and difficulty with holding the executive branch accountable. We are also seeing the militariSation of law enforcement, monitoring of US citizens, and what some refer to as the dual state — that the state is working for some people while causing more challenges for or oppressing other people.

One of the things we’re not seeing at full force yet is a complete shutdown of civic space. We’re able to hold this kind of conversation, and people are still able to dialogue and go out on the street.

There are some efforts at curtailing free speech, and I think there’s some self-censorship possibly happening. But there’s still this open space and a powerful mass movement growing in this country.

USA today:

7 million Americans in the streets today protesting for freedom.
3,000 cities and towns. Every single state. “No Kings” protests against the authoritarianism of the Trump. This is one of the largest demonstrations in American history.

pic.twitter.com/cLAwlXK69f

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) March 28, 2026

BD: John, you were on the front lines, particularly in Hungary as the head of Central European University. What did you see there that has parallels today to the US?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There’s certainly a parallel between Hungary and the US, even though the countries are very different in size, history and background. What I saw in Hungary when I became president of Central European University in 2009 was a weak, new democracy that was only established in 1990 after 70 years of fascism and communism.

I was in Hungary from 2009 to 2016 and, despite the differences, I could begin to see some parallels. Many people had grievances in Hungary about how their economy was operating, particularly after the global financial crisis that affected Hungary more than any other Eastern European country.

Then there was an urban-rural divide, the urban elite versus the rural majority in the country.

Along came a cynical populist-nationalist politician, Viktor Orbán. Orbán started manipulating these grievances, and did so to significantly divide Hungarian society. He attacked many of the institutions of democracy, which were increasingly unpopular because of people’s grievances.

He went after elites, and foreigners, and migrants, and the media. And he blamed all of them for the country’s problems. He then was able to ride these grievances into office.

Once in office, Orbán amended the constitution and laws relating to the Parliament. He undermined the independence of the media and the judiciary so as to centralise power. All of this happened while I was running an international university in Budapest, which remained independent because it received no funding from the Hungarian government.

We were able to resist the increasingly authoritarian regime over issues of academic freedom. The government tried to shut down our programmes of migration studies and gender studies, and tried to censor aspects of our history department.

These authoritarian attacks are similar to what we’ve seen happening in the US, and in fact, Viktor Orbán was greatly admired by Donald Trump, and a lot of the playbook that Orban has followed was mirrored in Project 2025 in the US under Trump.

BD: How do communities respond in different ways to authoritarian regimes?

OLIVER KAPLAN: Pro-democracy movements and protection types of movements at the local level often co-occur. For example, in Colombia there have been various leftist movements and political parties that have pushed for greater democratic opening while communities mobilise to keep people safe and help them cope with repressive conditions.

In places like Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, communities built trust and support networks to provide aid, such as for people who needed food assistance. This provides space to independently operate and preserve the community.

The US has parallels, such as innovating early warning networks to get advance notice of risks and threats, by communicating using the Signal app. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villages set up radio networks, and in Ukraine they have sophisticated early warning networks to get word of airstrikes and drone attacks.

Fact-finding and countering stigma are important, and in the US we’re seeing that in the form of the video recording and publicising of harmful actions. This has played out similarly in Syria with fact-finding to protect nongovernment organisations.

There’s also accompaniment where outside actors come in to provide support to communities. Around the world, church organisations play important accompaniment roles. We’re seeing clergy in the US step up and visit places that are at risk.

And then, there are protests, the most visible kind of action. In Minnesota, we’ve seen communities actually setting up community barricades, which has also happened in Mexico, Colombia and Northern Ireland. Communicating the nonviolent nature of these movements is important to avoid any pretext for additional crackdowns.

I think Americans have been taking similar actions to other places around the world in part because there are some similar background conditions: repression and strong social capital networks. Those two things come together to produce these strategies.

BD: Could you speak more about the need to build a clear narrative and a positive one?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There are two basic rules for how to resist authoritarianism that I’ve learned from experience: Build a diverse coalition and develop a unifying theme. You need a diverse coalition in order to appeal to a broad range of the public, and in order to do that, you need agreement on the goal and values of what you’re trying to accomplish.

You need a clear and unifying narrative. The narrative often involves economic issues and issues of corruption, since there’s often a great deal of corruption in authoritarian regimes.

Hungary will have its next parliamentary election in April in which Orbán will seek his fifth term as prime minister. The opposition has developed a broad coalition and a unifying theme, while Orbán is using the centralised instruments of government and media that he controls to try to manipulate public opinion.

The opposition coalition is headed by Peter Magyar, who was once a major supporter of Orbán’s government. Magyar’s name can be magical in Hungary — sort of like a “Joe America” in the US.

With Magyar as its head, the opposition is aiming to peel off supporters of the regime. It’s campaigning on economic grounds, with a positive message and on moderate terms. And most importantly, it includes parties from the left, right and center.

Poland has succeeded in doing what the Hungarian opposition is attempting. It managed to vote out an authoritarian government by putting together a broad coalition to defend the independence of the Polish judiciary. That became a coalition to elect parliamentarians in 2023, and that succeeded in changing the government.

BD: How important is the preexisting social fabric of a community to the success of a protest movement?

JOHN SHATTUCK: It’s important, but complicated. Hungary had a very weak civil society after 70 years of totalitarian fascism and communism. When I was there, the very word to “volunteer,” which we think of as the essence of community action and service, was seen to be a bad word in Hungarian because it was closely associated with collaborating with the regime.

In the US, we’re the opposite in a sense, although the US is now slipping on this. We have a long history of volunteerism, we have all these civil society organisations, we have a tradition of barn raising, people getting together with their neighbours and doing things in their communities. This is very much a part of the American spirit and a core value.

But today, I would say a combination of consumerism and economic individualism coming out of decades of economic deregulation has caused our civil society to fray. But the authoritarian challenge that we face now, and the way in which we are beginning to respond to it, is in fact bringing communities back together again.

I think what happened in Minneapolis is an example of that. And this may reflect a growing capacity to resist an authoritarian regime.

Republished from Robert Reich’s Substack, originally published by The Conversation. Republished under Creative Commons.

Robert Reich is an American professor, writer, former Secretary of Labour, and author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. He is also co-founder of Inequality Media.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

From time to time, I post transcripts I’ve come across of particularly insightful conversations. Here’s one that’s particularly relevant to the US “No Kings” Day protests at the weekend.

Recently, The Conversation hosted a webinar in which executive editor and general manager Beth Daley interviewed John Shattuck, professor of practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Shattuck is the former president of Central European University in Hungary, where he defended academic freedom against a rising authoritarian government. Kaplan is the author of Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves. This interview has been condensed and edited for print.

BETH DALEY: What is an authoritarian regime, and what are their characteristics?

JOHN SHATTUCK: The authoritarian, often referred to as a “king,” is the ideal role from the point of view of the king, but certainly not from the point of view of the people. Authoritarian characteristics include centralised unlimited power, the opposite of democracy; no accountability and no rule of law; no independent courts; no checks and balances on how the king operates; rule by fear and coercion, and when necessary, in order to carry out the king’s orders, rule by by force.

There are no individual rights or civil liberties except those the king decides to allow those who are loyal to him to have, at least until he decides to take them away.

That’s a nutshell informal description of an authoritarian regime. A special threat today is that an authoritarian can emerge from a democratic election, and, indeed, a democratic election can be used to turn a weak democracy into an authoritarian regime.

But when this happens, it opens the door to challenge the authoritarian in a subsequent election if civic activism can defend the electoral process by which the authoritarian was elected.

BD: What are we seeing and not seeing in the US that other countries have gone through in terms of authoritarian government?

OLIVER KAPLAN: I think we are heading toward an autocracy, if not there already. In their 2026 report, the Varieties of Democracy Project writes that the US is no longer a liberal democracy and is moving into “competitive authoritarianism,” marked by executive overreach and erosion of judicial and legislative checks. The report notes that US democracy is being dismantled at a speed that is “unprecedented in modern history”.

We are seeing shifts in terms of concentration of power to the executive branch and a disregard of the rule of law, things like ignoring court orders and difficulty with holding the executive branch accountable. We are also seeing the militariSation of law enforcement, monitoring of US citizens, and what some refer to as the dual state — that the state is working for some people while causing more challenges for or oppressing other people.

One of the things we’re not seeing at full force yet is a complete shutdown of civic space. We’re able to hold this kind of conversation, and people are still able to dialogue and go out on the street.

There are some efforts at curtailing free speech, and I think there’s some self-censorship possibly happening. But there’s still this open space and a powerful mass movement growing in this country.

USA today:

7 million Americans in the streets today protesting for freedom.
3,000 cities and towns. Every single state. “No Kings” protests against the authoritarianism of the Trump. This is one of the largest demonstrations in American history.

pic.twitter.com/cLAwlXK69f

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) March 28, 2026

BD: John, you were on the front lines, particularly in Hungary as the head of Central European University. What did you see there that has parallels today to the US?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There’s certainly a parallel between Hungary and the US, even though the countries are very different in size, history and background. What I saw in Hungary when I became president of Central European University in 2009 was a weak, new democracy that was only established in 1990 after 70 years of fascism and communism.

I was in Hungary from 2009 to 2016 and, despite the differences, I could begin to see some parallels. Many people had grievances in Hungary about how their economy was operating, particularly after the global financial crisis that affected Hungary more than any other Eastern European country.

Then there was an urban-rural divide, the urban elite versus the rural majority in the country.

Along came a cynical populist-nationalist politician, Viktor Orbán. Orbán started manipulating these grievances, and did so to significantly divide Hungarian society. He attacked many of the institutions of democracy, which were increasingly unpopular because of people’s grievances.

He went after elites, and foreigners, and migrants, and the media. And he blamed all of them for the country’s problems. He then was able to ride these grievances into office.

Once in office, Orbán amended the constitution and laws relating to the Parliament. He undermined the independence of the media and the judiciary so as to centralise power. All of this happened while I was running an international university in Budapest, which remained independent because it received no funding from the Hungarian government.

We were able to resist the increasingly authoritarian regime over issues of academic freedom. The government tried to shut down our programmes of migration studies and gender studies, and tried to censor aspects of our history department.

These authoritarian attacks are similar to what we’ve seen happening in the US, and in fact, Viktor Orbán was greatly admired by Donald Trump, and a lot of the playbook that Orban has followed was mirrored in Project 2025 in the US under Trump.

BD: How do communities respond in different ways to authoritarian regimes?

OLIVER KAPLAN: Pro-democracy movements and protection types of movements at the local level often co-occur. For example, in Colombia there have been various leftist movements and political parties that have pushed for greater democratic opening while communities mobilise to keep people safe and help them cope with repressive conditions.

In places like Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, communities built trust and support networks to provide aid, such as for people who needed food assistance. This provides space to independently operate and preserve the community.

The US has parallels, such as innovating early warning networks to get advance notice of risks and threats, by communicating using the Signal app. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villages set up radio networks, and in Ukraine they have sophisticated early warning networks to get word of airstrikes and drone attacks.

Fact-finding and countering stigma are important, and in the US we’re seeing that in the form of the video recording and publicising of harmful actions. This has played out similarly in Syria with fact-finding to protect nongovernment organisations.

There’s also accompaniment where outside actors come in to provide support to communities. Around the world, church organisations play important accompaniment roles. We’re seeing clergy in the US step up and visit places that are at risk.

And then, there are protests, the most visible kind of action. In Minnesota, we’ve seen communities actually setting up community barricades, which has also happened in Mexico, Colombia and Northern Ireland. Communicating the nonviolent nature of these movements is important to avoid any pretext for additional crackdowns.

I think Americans have been taking similar actions to other places around the world in part because there are some similar background conditions: repression and strong social capital networks. Those two things come together to produce these strategies.

BD: Could you speak more about the need to build a clear narrative and a positive one?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There are two basic rules for how to resist authoritarianism that I’ve learned from experience: Build a diverse coalition and develop a unifying theme. You need a diverse coalition in order to appeal to a broad range of the public, and in order to do that, you need agreement on the goal and values of what you’re trying to accomplish.

You need a clear and unifying narrative. The narrative often involves economic issues and issues of corruption, since there’s often a great deal of corruption in authoritarian regimes.

Hungary will have its next parliamentary election in April in which Orbán will seek his fifth term as prime minister. The opposition has developed a broad coalition and a unifying theme, while Orbán is using the centralised instruments of government and media that he controls to try to manipulate public opinion.

The opposition coalition is headed by Peter Magyar, who was once a major supporter of Orbán’s government. Magyar’s name can be magical in Hungary — sort of like a “Joe America” in the US.

With Magyar as its head, the opposition is aiming to peel off supporters of the regime. It’s campaigning on economic grounds, with a positive message and on moderate terms. And most importantly, it includes parties from the left, right and center.

Poland has succeeded in doing what the Hungarian opposition is attempting. It managed to vote out an authoritarian government by putting together a broad coalition to defend the independence of the Polish judiciary. That became a coalition to elect parliamentarians in 2023, and that succeeded in changing the government.

BD: How important is the preexisting social fabric of a community to the success of a protest movement?

JOHN SHATTUCK: It’s important, but complicated. Hungary had a very weak civil society after 70 years of totalitarian fascism and communism. When I was there, the very word to “volunteer,” which we think of as the essence of community action and service, was seen to be a bad word in Hungarian because it was closely associated with collaborating with the regime.

In the US, we’re the opposite in a sense, although the US is now slipping on this. We have a long history of volunteerism, we have all these civil society organisations, we have a tradition of barn raising, people getting together with their neighbours and doing things in their communities. This is very much a part of the American spirit and a core value.

But today, I would say a combination of consumerism and economic individualism coming out of decades of economic deregulation has caused our civil society to fray. But the authoritarian challenge that we face now, and the way in which we are beginning to respond to it, is in fact bringing communities back together again.

I think what happened in Minneapolis is an example of that. And this may reflect a growing capacity to resist an authoritarian regime.

Republished from Robert Reich’s Substack, originally published by The Conversation. Republished under Creative Commons

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Despite differences in their political systems, all three governments follow an approach that prioritises “national morale” and “operational security” over press freedom and the flow of information.

This approach redefines the concept of fake news and extends its authority to managing public sentiment, making coverage more “positive” and “optimistic”.

The goal is unified: to turn media into a state mouthpiece that tells only the official narrative of the war.

The Trump administration’s political pressure
In the US, media restrictions don’t appear as direct bans on journalism, as in more authoritarian systems. Instead, pressure comes through political and regulatory channels, alongside attempts to shape the war narrative against Iran.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters they could lose their licences if they aired what he described as “false news” about the war.

In a post on X on March 14, Carr said stations airing “misleading” information had the opportunity “to correct course” before licence renewal. He added: “The law is clear: broadcast stations must operate in the public interest, or they will lose their licences.”

Later, President Donald Trump said he was extremely pleased to see Carr review licences of “corrupt” and “unpatriotic” news organisations because they “coordinate with Iran” and “should face treason charges”.

Regulatory pressure is accompanied by a political and media campaign to shape a specific image of the war.

Trump attacked major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for reports of damage to US military aircraft at a Saudi base, calling them “degenerate journalism” that wanted the country to “lose the war”.

This pressure has also extended to the military.

At a Pentagon press conference, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth accused the media of downplaying the success of the military campaign against Iran, criticised coverage of operations, suggested alternative headlines for television reports, and named CNN specifically, saying its performance would improve if ownership and management changed.

In an incident bordering on the absurd, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon barred journalists from attending war briefings after Hegseth’s team objected to his appearance in previously taken photos, restricting access to Pentagon photographers.

Nevertheless, pressures did not start with the war on Iran.

In October 2025, the Department of War announced a new policy regulating journalists’ work inside the Pentagon, requiring official approval before publishing any information, even if it was not classified.

The Trump administration justified the restrictions as necessary for national security. Hegseth said access to the Pentagon was “a privilege, not a right,” while Trump argued the limits were needed because the press was “dishonest”.

Measures included removing dedicated offices for some media outlets and replacing them with shared facilities under a new rotation system.

Israel kills three Lebanese journalists                   Video: Al Jazeera

Israel’s approach
In Israel, media restrictions during war take a different form that is based on strict military censorship and obstructing journalists in the field, in addition to targeting media institutions in Iran and Lebanon.

This month, the Israeli military censor issued new instructions to foreign media limiting coverage of rocket attacks within Israel.

These included banning live broadcasts during sirens, forbidding filming missile interceptions or impact sites near security installations, and preventing the publication of exact impact locations or reposting videos from social media without prior approval.

Authorities justified the restrictions as a way to prevent opponents from using media coverage to “improve missile strike accuracy”.

Israeli forces detained CNN Türk reporter Emrah Cakmak and cameraman Khalil Kahraman during a live broadcast from Tel Aviv following an Iranian missile attack, confiscating their phones, camera, and microphone, and accessing a password-protected phone without permission.

The journalists stated that their equipment was not returned.

On the same day, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karai announced stricter measures against foreign media violating military censorship instructions, adopting a policy of “zero tolerance”.

Authorities also detained Turkish journalists Ilyas Efe Ünal and Adam Metan while crossing from Egypt into Israel on March 4. Metan said they were interrogated for about six hours before being released.

The following day, Haifa municipal police attempted to remove international media teams covering war-related events, including CNN, Fox News, BBC, Anadolu Agency, and Al Arabiya, despite journalists following military censorship rules.

Days later, on March 8, Israeli police prevented Al Araby TV correspondent Abdelkader Abdel Halim from continuing coverage in Haifa, with an officer captured on video saying that “filming is prohibited in Haifa.”

Israeli strikes also targeted media institutions in Lebanon and Iran, and have killed five journalists in Lebanon in the past month — three of them (including a woman) just yesterday in a targeted assassination.

According to Reporters Without Borders, two-thirds of all journalists killed around the world last year were by Israel, mostly in Gaza.

Several Lebanese media outlets were hit during Israel’s raids, including Sawt Al-Farah radio in Tyre, Al Nour radio, and Al Manar TV in Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs. And in a separate strike, Saksakiyah media centre in southern Lebanon was also targeted.

In Iran, strikes hit the state-run Radio Dezful offices in Khuzestan, the headquarters of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting in Tehran, a communications centre near the building, as well as the Kurdistan Network TV building in Sanandaj, and the reformist newspaper Sazandegi in Tehran.

Iran’s internet shutdown
If the US uses regulatory tools and Israel relies on military censorship and field restrictions, Iran’s model is based on direct control of information flow. Hours after the US-Israeli aggression began, authorities cut the nationwide internet.

Journalists said the outage hampered communication with sources, sending reports and photos, and verifying field information, while a limited number of users, including state media, retained restricted access through a government-controlled “white internet”.

As the war continued, Tehran tightened legal restrictions on media coverage.

The judiciary criminalised filming or covering US or Israeli strikes in Iran, considering the publication of such material as potential “evidence of cooperation with an enemy“.

Confrontations escalated with calls to target opposition media.

The Tabnak website published an article urging the armed forces to target Iran International TV and suggesting taking action against the channel’s offices and the homes of some staff.

Security agencies carried out a series of arrests in several provinces for sending photos and information about strikes to foreign media, including Iran International, classified by Iran as a “terrorist channel”.

Majdoline Al-Shammouri is a writer based in Beirut. This article was translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari and was first published by The New Arab here.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The West is in turmoil over countries’ top legal minds declaring the US-Israel attack on Iran to be illegal, as China did.

But Israel-friendly Western politicians, including Starmer, von der Leyen, Albanese, and others are desperately blocking their ears as they try to justify actual war crimes.

Here’s what the specialists say:

1. The European Journal of International Law is very clear that “this use of force by the US and Israel is manifestly illegal. It is as plain a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as one could possibly have.”

2. Other top European bodies have agreed. “Trump’s strikes on Iran are an illegal war of choice—and Europeans should say so,” said a report published by the European Council of Foreign Relations.

It said leaders must “communicate clearly that this is a war of choice by America, in contravention of the same UN charter the Europeans have themselves invoked to condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and insist on Greenland’s sovereignty.”

3. Arguably even more telling was a statement from the former legal chief at US Central Command, literally the people who are carrying out the bombings on Iran:

“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the US Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Rachel Van Landingham.

Her entire career has been about establishing the difference between legal and illegal attacks by US Centcom, the people doing the attacking.

4. “Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression” was the title of an essay by Kenneth Roth in the UK Guardian: “Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…”

This is interesting as Roth is best known as the former head of Human Rights Watch, a US foreign policy tool thinly disguised as an NGO (evidence for that is in a separate report).

5. The same argument, with arguably even more fire, is erupting in the UK. Unpopular Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, known for his pro-Trump and pro-Israel positions, is being taken to task by people speaking for the British people, who tend to be anti-war and are generally not fans of Trump.

Jeremy Corbyn, elder statesman of the UK left, described the US-Israel attack as “illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable”.

“Peace and diplomacy was possible,” he added. “Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. This is the behaviour of rogue states — and they have jeopardised the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression.”

6. Even people on Starmer’s own team were clear. Labour MP Emily Thornberry, chairperson of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Press Association: “There is no legal basis for this attack.”

Israel loyalist Starmer pointedly chose not to repeat this point.

7. Patrick Harvie, Scottish parliamentarian, said: “It is part of a pattern of reckless and destructive behaviour from a White House that has shown total contempt for human rights, international law and negotiations… From arming Israel’s genocide against Palestinians to his illegal and immoral coup in Venezuela and his threats against Europe, Trump has acted like a gangster on the world stage.”

8. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a strong backer of the Israeli government, is also in trouble.

Legal experts in Australia have been pointing out the illegality of the attacks on Iran since last year. “Why the US strikes on Iran are illegal and can set a troubling precedent,” was the title of a report by Professor Donald Rothwell of the ANU College of Law, after earlier attacks on Iran.

Many Australians are anti-war, but prominent politicians and the media are pushing a strongly pro-war line.

9. “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventive’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law,” said a statement from two political specialists at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres.

Marko Milanovic, editor of the European Journal of International Law (mentioned above), made the same point. “Even if the broadest possible understanding of anticipatory self-defence was taken as correct, Israel’s use of force against Iran would be illegal,” he said.

10. The point is echoed by multiple experts. “The possibility of acting in self-defence in view of an attack that might be coming is illegal in international law and we’re all very, very clear about that,” said Maria Gavouneli, a professor of international law at Athens University, in an interview with Al-Jazeera.

11. Even in the US, lawmakers on both sides have criticised the attack on Iran as being against the law. Senator Ed Markey called the actions “illegal and unconstitutional”.

12. Former US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declared the attack to be an illegal war, ‘A war that has no domestic or international legal basis. A war that Americans do not support. A war in response to no imminent threat. A pointless war,’ he wrote on X.

Conclusion
Immediately after the US-Israel attack began, China’s Foreign Ministry said it was “a grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security”.

Legal experts across the Western nations agree.

There is no doubt that the US-Israel attacks on Iran are illegal, as numerous voices from around the world are saying.

Equally, there is also no doubt that the pro-Israel Western elite, who dominate politics and the media, will try to cover up this fact: Trump, von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, and others.

Trouble is brewing in the West, as people realise just how controlled their rulers are.

Nury Vittachi is a Sri Lankan-born author based in Hong Kong and an independent writer. This article was first published on his X page.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When it comes to press freedom, he has kept his word, extending the war on the press he launched while running for his first term with grave attacks on access to reliable information worldwide.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which monitors “press freedom predators” worldwide, has compiled a timeline of his administration’s assaults on the media in the past year and warns that he risks sinking to the levels of authoritarian regimes.

President Trump’s hostility towards the media predates his return to the White House in 2025. For the past 10 years, he has labelled journalists and media outlets he disagrees with as “the enemy of the people” and “fake news”.

His attacks coincide with a broader decline in the news media’s public esteem: according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media.

In his second term in office, though, Trump has matched his history of violent rhetoric with a series of concrete actions that have severely damaged freedom of the press in the United States and around the world.

In the past 12 months, he has censored government data, dismantled America’s public broadcasters, weaponised independent government agencies to punish media that criticise his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavored outlets, applied pressure to install cronies to lead others, and more

These actions echo the anti-press measures of the ruthless dictators in the “political” category of the 2025 Press Freedom Predators List, such as President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Similar alarming levels
RSF is concerned that Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics could eventually descend to similarly alarming levels.

The Press Freedom Predators List exposes systemic attempts to silence the free press by highlighting actors who wield an outsized, harmful influence on press freedom in five categories: political, security, legal, economic and social.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr has already made the 2025 list in the “legal” category, while Trump-aligned tech mogul Elon Musk was featured in the “economic” category.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A Palestinian-Australian man has been criminally charged for voicing criticisms of Zionism during a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He could spend months in prison.

The Age reports that restaurant owner Hash Tayeh has been charged with four counts of “using insulting words in public” for repeatedly uttering the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne last year.

According to the The Age’s Chris Vedelago, the punishment for this crime of political speech is “up to two months in prison for a first offence and six months for three or more offences”.

“It is believed to be the first time that potential political speech has been deemed a criminal offence that breached the ‘insulting’ law,” Vedelago reports, adding: “The charges are normally levied for using abusive or obscene language against police officers.”

You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the authoritarian dystopia that Australia has become than a news report about a man getting criminally charged for normal political speech with a law that is normally used to jail people who speak impolitely to the police.

Deeply concerning that @VictoriaPolice is seeking to criminalise political rhetoric. Dangerous.https://t.co/dKNC1E9GqW

— Greg Barns SC (@BarnsGreg) March 8, 2025

These charges for speech crimes against Zionism follow a controversial assertion made last year by Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus:

“The label Zionist is used, not in any way, accurately. When critics use that word, they actually mean Jew. They’re not really saying Zionist, they’re saying Jew because they know that they cannot say Jew, so they say Zionist or words [such as] Zeo or Zio.”

Dreyfus might want to have a chat with outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who just made headlines by proudly proclaiming “I am a Zionist” at his final press conference on Thursday.

Trudeau is not Jewish, nor is genocidal war criminal Joe Biden, who is on record saying on numerous occasions some variation of “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist”.

Not all Jews are Zionists, and most Zionists are not Jewish. Zionism is a political ideology which upholds the Western decision to drop an abusive apartheid ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilisation in historic Palestine and defend it by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary, and the majority of the people you see defending this status quo are Westerners with no connection to the Jewish faith.

The cult of Christian Zionism alone outnumbers the world’s Jewish population by about two to one.

It is therefore wildly incorrect to conflate Zionism with Judaism, and it is also highly immoral. People who do this are assigning all Jews the blame for Israel’s abuses, when the blame actually lies with the state of Israel and its Western backers. As much as Israel apologists shriek and moan about “antisemitism” when they really mean supporting Palestinians, the real antisemitism problem in our society is the way our ruling institutions keep lumping all Jews in with the abuses of a genocidal apartheid state and the Western empire which supports it.

This is why we call out Zionists and not “the Jews”

Zionism is a cancer that is enabled by White Western society because of their love of colonialism and apartheid https://t.co/pwNrVdFiM9

— Revolutionary Blackout🥋 (@SocialistMMA) March 7, 2025

That’s all the imaginary “antisemitism” crisis is, in reality: people conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. If you declare that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and then Zionism starts butchering children by the tens of thousands in a genocidal onslaught, you are naturally going to see a rapid rise in “antisemitism” as you have defined it.

It’s a fallacious narrative used to justify the strangulation of political speech we are seeing today.

We’re seeing that strangulation surge ahead in Australia with the McCarthyite witch hunt against pro-Palestinian voices, and in a decision by Australian universities to espouse a definition of “antisemitism” which is so speech-suppressing that it has been denounced by Amnesty International.

We are also seeing Zionism strangling free speech throughout the Western world. German police are routinely assaulting pro-Palestine demonstrators. Pro-Palestinian journalists are being persecuted with increasing aggression in the UK and throughout Europe.

In the US the Trump administration is working to stomp out pro-Palestine protests on university campuses while using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to shut down all criticism of Israel. https://t.co/JgMKN9f8PK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2025

Almost every day we’re seeing some new escalation in the Western empire’s efforts to stomp out speech that is critical of Israel. Westerners need to understand that we have moved far beyond the point where Israel is a threat only to Middle Eastern lives: it’s a threat to us all, because the Western governments who support it are stomping out our basic freedoms with increasing aggression in order to silence all criticisms of its abuses.

Even if you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel and its Western backers because of their genocidal atrocities in the Middle East, at this point you need to start opposing them out of sheer self-preservation.

This isn’t just about foreigners overseas anymore: it’s about you. Your rights. Your freedom to voice your political opinions.

Zionism is a threat to civil rights everywhere. Zionism threatens us all.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s.

But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South.

This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself.

In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

pic.twitter.com/95GzNiAaqs

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 15, 2025

A version of this in US?
A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks.

They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch.

In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina.

Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organisation and even NATO if it does not do what he says.

He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea).

He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere — i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Dismantling the globalised trade system
Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the World Order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It is as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralysed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it.

That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisers are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but I am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing.

Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

Dotage is on daily public display
That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal.

Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world.

An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It is at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programmes. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order.

Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished from Kiwipolitico with the permission of the author.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Yumna Patel

On September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat shook hands in front of an elated US President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn.

The image capturing that handshake came to be one of the most famous images of all time, representing one of the most defining moments in recent Palestinian history.

It was the day that the Declaration of Principles (DOP), or the first Oslo Agreement (Oslo I) was signed, kicking off the so-called peace process that was meant to culminate with “peace” in the region and resolve the so-called “conflict”.

But the Oslo Accords never actually promised an independent Palestinian state, or even something that remotely resembled it. In reality, it carved the occupied Palestinian territory up into bantustans with limited self-autonomy for Palestinians on a minuscule portion of their homeland.

It paved the way for Israel to swallow up more land, resources, and tighten its grip on the borders and the people living within it.

Even the promises that were made — halts on settlement construction, withdrawal from certain areas of the occupied territory, and the eventual transfer of control of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (PA) — never happened.

Wednesday marked 30 years since the first Oslo Accords were signed. And though final status negotiations have failed repeatedly over the decades, the Oslo Accords have remained in effect, creating a unique situation on the ground for Palestinians.

The PA, which was set up as an interim government, has become permanent, and its leaders have remained unchanged for 17 years. Both the Fatah-dominated PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza have evolved into authoritarian regimes, causing many young Palestinians to declare their governments as “subcontractors of the Israeli occupation”.

In the meantime, Israel has a tighter grip than ever before on Palestinian life and land, with Gaza under tight blockade and the West Bank carved up into small cantons, or apartheid-style “bantustans,” as analysts put it.

With each passing year, the Israeli government has become increasingly right-wing, breaking its own records on violence against Palestinian communities and the construction of illegal settlements deep in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

To say that the reality on the ground is desperate would be an understatement. And many Palestinian youth, who grew up in the shadow of the accords and all its false promises, blame the accords, or “Oslo” as it is locally called, in large part for the situation they find themselves in today.

“Thirty years on, it is doubtful the charade of Oslo can continue much longer; certainly not after apocalyptical fanatics have taken power in Israel and are doubling down on Judaizing every corner of historic Palestine,” wrote Marwan Bishara…
https://t.co/1lZPmQOegL

— Marwan (@marwanbishara) September 14, 2023

Setting the stage
Before that fateful day on the White House lawn in 1993, there was a lot happening for Palestinians both at home and abroad.

From 1987-1993, the Palestinian streets were in upheaval. It had been two decades since Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and Palestinians were fed up.

The First Intifada, or the first Palestinian uprising, took Israel and the world by surprise. A mass civil disobedience campaign swept the country, and turned into years of protests and subsequent repression by the Israelis.

Despite the violence that plagued the Palestinian streets, many Palestinians found themselves hopeful — that by standing up to the occupation, they could change their reality.

Then, in the fall of 1991, the world convened in Madrid for a “peace conference”. Sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union, it was the first time Israel and the Palestinians were to engage in direct negotiations.

The PLO, which is internationally recognised as the representative of the Palestinian people, was operating in exile in Tunisia, and was barred from attending the conference. In its place, a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation was tasked with representing the Palestinian people instead.

Dr Hanan Ashrawi was one of the advisors to the delegation.

“We went with a sense of mission that we are representing a people who have dignity, who have rights, who have courage, who have defied this military occupation. And we are going to present ourselves to the world, and we are going to extract our rights,” Ashrawi told Mondoweiss, reflecting on the moment in history that propelled her onto the global stage.

“So we were confident, and there was a spirit of optimism, maybe naivete, if you will,” she said.

The Madrid conference set the stage for years of peace negotiations facilitated by Washington and Moscow. Despite its flaws, those involved in the Madrid conference, like Ashrawi, seemed hopeful that political negotiations could really lead somewhere.

“That was a period, albeit a short-lived period, of hope, of optimism, of confidence,” Ashrawi said.

“And when we came back, people believed that they could achieve liberation through a political process, but that these were dashed afterwards completely.”

Backchannel negotiations
While public negotiations were being held on the global stage in the months after the Madrid conference, a different set of negotiations were being held behind closed doors between two unlikely partners.

In 1993, in Oslo, Norway, Israel and the PLO engaged in backchannel discussions that resulted in an unprecedented conciliation.

The PLO, a militant liberation organisation, recognised the state of Israel and its “right to exist in peace and security”. In exchange, Israel recognised the PLO as a “representative of the Palestinian people,” falling short of actually recognising the Palestinians’ right to sovereignty.

After months of secret negotiations, and in a shock to many Palestinians, Rabin and Arafat shook hands in September 1993, as the Declaration of Principles (DOP), or first Oslo Accords (Oslo I), were signed.

The move came as a shock to many Palestinians, including those who had been engaging in public peace negotiations for years, and were seemingly unaware of the secret deal that was materialising behind the scenes.

“The signing of the DOP was a real disappointment,” Dr Ashrawi told Mondoweiss. “I wasn’t upset or disturbed because there were backchannel discussions that we weren’t part of, or that it was signed behind our back.

“I said then very openly, that I don’t care who signs it or who negotiate it. I care about what’s in it, what’s in the agreement.”

When Dr Ashrawi saw the agreement, she said she was “extremely disappointed” and concerned over what she described as “built-in flaws,” which she said she felt at the time would end up backfiring on the Palestinians.

“Because [the accords] did not challenge the reality of the occupation, and they did not deal with the real issues, with the core issues, with the causes of the conflict itself. The totality of the Palestinian experience was excluded. The fragmentation was maintained, the phased approach was maintained, the Israeli actual control on the ground was maintained, and all the postponed issues had no guarantees, no oversight.”

Dr Yara Hawari, a political analyst for Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, said the Oslo Accords “were always set up to fail”.

“[They were set up] to make Palestinians lose out on what was supposedly peace negotiations, and so many decades on we’ve seen that actually, it has been complete capitulation for the Palestinian people.”

What did the accords say?
The Oslo Accords were a number of agreements, signed between 1993 and 1995, that laid the foundation for the Oslo process — a so-called peace process that, over the course of five years, was to culminate in a peace treaty that would end the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict”.

So, what exactly did the accords say? And why were they so controversial?

“The Palestinians were told that the Oslo Accords would be a peace process, and that over an interim period, Palestinians would be led to eventual statehood. And it was designed to be a phased process.

“So at each stage, Palestinians would be granted more and more sovereignty,” Dr Hawari said.

“But in reality, what we saw was that the West Bank was completely divided up into bantustans. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank were completely separated from each other, and the Palestinian leadership was turned into this service-functioning body, and Palestinians were deprived of complete autonomy.”

While they outlined economic and security agreements, the creation of the interim Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and limited Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, the accords never actually agreed upon any of the major issues plaguing the Palestinian struggle: the borders of a future state, illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes, and the status of Jerusalem as a future capital.

“The totality of the Palestinian experience was excluded. The fragmentation was maintained, the phased approach was maintained, the Israeli actual control of the ground was maintained, and all the postponed issues had no guarantees, no oversight, no arbitration, and no accountability,” Dr Ashrawi said.

There was never any intention to accept any kind of sovereignty or self-determination for the Palestinians.

The fallout
In the years after the first Declaration of Principles was signed, the new Palestinian Authority went into full swing, forming their new interim government and welcoming back home hundreds of Palestinians who had been living in exile.

But by 1999, when the 5-year-interim period laid out by the accords had ended, little had been accomplished in terms of final status negotiations.

Israel had not followed through on its promise to fully withdraw from certain areas of the West Bank and Gaza, and despite promises to halt settlement construction, Israel was still building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.

And in 2000, spurred on by Ariel Sharon’s inflammatory visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the Second Intifada erupted. Israel’s military forces reoccupied the West Bank, and the next few years were marred by mass killings, arrests, and the construction of an illegal wall that separated families and annexed more Palestinian land.

Whatever fragments had remained of a peace process vanished.

The settlements and shrinking spaces
In the midst of the Second Intifada, America’s attempts to revive a peace process with the Camp David summit in 2000 proved to be futile. And yet, though the peace process was dead in the water, the framework laid out by the Oslo Accords remained in place.

That meant Palestinians were left with a government that was intended to be temporary but with no independent state for that body to govern. And Israel, through military force, still had control over the borders, resources, and effectively, the lives of millions of Palestinians

“The key promise of Oslo was Palestinian statehood, and we know that has obviously not been achieved,” Dr Hawari told Mondoweiss.

“Instead, what we see is these little pockets of false Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank. There were many other promises that were made as well: economic promises, promises to do with control over resources, and actually, none of those have been fulfilled.

“The only people that have won from the accords, or who have actually gained, are the Israeli regime, which now controls the West Bank in its entirety, has Gaza under siege, and basically has looted all of the Palestinian resources.

“And this was laid out in the Oslo Accords.”

In the years following the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinians witnessed their spaces shrinking rapidly, as Israel promoted vast settlement construction deep within the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

Between the signing of the Oslo Accords and the outbreak of the First Intifada, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank increased by almost 100 percent.

In the year 2000, the settler population in the West Bank stood at just over 190,000. Today, that number has surpassed 500,000 settlers, all of whom are living on Palestinian land, in violation of international law.

Including settlers living illegally in East Jerusalem, the settler population in the occupied Palestinian territory has surpassed 700,000.

An increase in settler population, coupled with an extreme right-wing Israeli government, has meant a significant increase in settler violence, with Palestinian civilians on the frontlines.

In the first eight months of 2023, the UN documented more than 700 settler attacks against Palestinians. The attacks have resulted in damage to homes, property, farmland, physical injuries, and even death.

Because of the maps drawn by the Oslo Accords, the PA only has security jurisdiction over 18 percent of the West Bank, meaning that in the event of a settler attack, most Palestinian civilians are left to fend for themselves.

A disillusioned youth
In the wake of the Oslo Accords, a new generation of Palestinians was born that would come to be known as the “Oslo Generation” — whose youth would be defined by false promises and loss of life, land, and the power to choose their own future.

“We witness our own family and friends being killed and arrested on a daily basis. We get humiliated at military checkpoints whenever we’re trying to leave or enter our cities or villages.

“And we witness our people being expelled from their land while more and more settlements are being built in their place,” Zaid Amali, a Palestinian activist in Ramallah, told Mondoweiss.

When asked what he thought of Palestinian and international leaders still promoting a two-state solution and “peace negotiations” on the global stage, Amali responded:

“It may be more convenient for them to stick to that framework, but it’s very unrealistic and naive to still hang on to it because Israel has systematically destroyed the two-state solution.

“And to us as well, it feels insulting and disrespectful to keep talking about this in theory, when in reality, on the ground, it’s the complete opposite of what’s happening.”

In the 30 years since the first accords were signed, the Palestinian Authority, which was intended to be an interim government, has become permanent. And yet, elections have only ever been held twice in 3 decades. Any attempts over the last 16 years at holding elections or reviving reconciliation talks between rival factions have been squandered.

PA leaders in the West Bank and Hamas authorities in Gaza have consolidated power in the hands of a few elites while growing increasingly authoritarian, cracking down on dissent, censoring the media, and jailing and even killing dissidents.

“The way the system became, in a sense, right now is quite disappointing,” Dr Ashrawi told Mondoweiss. Without naming names, Ashrawi continued, “People became more concerned with power, with control, other than with service.

“[They became] more concerned with self-interest, influence, and the trimmings of power rather than the whole idea of contributing and serving the people.”

When asked how things deteriorated into the present-day situation, Dr Ashrawi attributed it to an overall “abuse of power.”

“There were gradually constricting spaces for freedoms and rights that ultimately, now you don’t even have a legislative power. Even the judiciary was subjugated to the executive.

“The executive became concentrated in the hands of the few, and so we have distorted any semblance of democracy that we may have had and that we have tried to establish even under occupation,” she said.

“I don’t blame the occupation for everything. There are things under our control that were abused and distorted.”

The concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian figures like President Mahmoud Abbas has meant that an entire generation, like Zaid Amali, is now nearing or surpassing the age of 30 without ever having participated in a national election.

Amali, 25 years old, said it’s an extremely frustrating reality for young Palestinians like him.

“It’s frustrating because we should be able to elect our own government in a democratic way,” he said.

“This government should reflect our interests and manage the needs of the Palestinian people and represent us in a true way.”

“But on the contrary, it’s actually serving the interest of the few at the expense of the majority in Palestine. And when we talk about Palestinian youth, they do form the majority of the Palestinian population.

“So, for us young Palestinians, it is, again, very frustrating to see that this government is not really working in our interest. But oftentimes, unfortunately, [it is] against us.”

Turning to armed resistance
In 2023, the Palestinians who were born the year the Oslo Accords were signed turned 30. Until today, none have had the opportunity to participate in political life on a national level. Economically, their opportunities are few and far between.

Unemployment in occupied Palestine is close to 25 percent — while in Gaza alone, that number is closer to 50 percent.

All the while, Israel’s grip on Palestinian life grows ever tighter. 2022 and 2023 marked record-breaking years for Israeli violence against Palestinians, as well as settlement expansion. The situation on the ground has grown desperate, causing many young Palestinians to take matters into their own hands.

Since 2022, the West Bank has seen a resurgence in armed resistance, with militias led by Palestinians as young as 18 years old. Many of the armed resistance groups, some of which operate under a banner of unity and defiance of factional rivalries, have seen massive popular support.

But both the Israeli and Palestinian governments have deemed these armed militias as a threat to the status quo cemented after the Oslo Accords. As part of its policy of security coordination with the Israelis, which was outlined in the accords, the PA has in recent months jailed dozens of Palestinian fighters, along with political dissidents, activists, journalists, and university students.

While some fighters have accepted clemency and handed over their weapons willingly, those who haven’t are being hunted down and arrested.

“We don’t know who’s against us, the [Palestinian] Authority or the Israeli army,” one young man in the Jenin refugee camp told Mondoweiss, just days after a visit by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the camp — his first visit in 11 years.

“For four years before my arrest [by the Israelis], I was also wanted by the PA. We don’t feel safe at all with the presence of [the PA].”

“Right now, they are actually working against us,” the young man said, referring to the PA’s arrest campaign targeting fighters in areas like Jenin, as part of an ongoing joint security cooperation effort between the PA and the Israeli government.

“It’s all one operation, one operation with the Israeli military and intelligence. When the army comes to attack us, the PA goes and hides away in their stations.

“They [the PA] are trying to get us to turn ourselves in and hand over our weapons, and give up this cause that we are fighting for. But we won’t give it up, no matter what.”

But the PA’s attempts to curb resistance only seem to be backfiring. Public opinion polls from this year show that 68 percent of Palestinians support armed resistance groups, and close to 90 percent believe the PA has no right to arrest them.

Additionally, more than half of Palestinians believe that the continued existence of the PA serves Israel’s interests, not the interest of the Palestinian people.

“This is a leadership that has led us to a situation where we live in bantustans and essentially in ghettos in the West Bank, Gaza, and colonised Palestine,” Dr Hawari said.

“So we have to reckon with that, and that is internal work that Palestinians have to focus on.

“For us to have a brighter future, we have to take a very good look at our leadership and reassess what we want that leadership to look like.

“Do we want it to be a leadership that capitulates and collaborates with our oppressors? Or do we want a leadership that is revolutionary and centers our freedom in their narrative?”

Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In this the ninth episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning examine why there is a trend toward military dictatorships in North Africa.

And, in particular, Paul and Selwyn analyse the reasons why countries like Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea have all become part of a challenge to a weakened western-led global order.

In this podcast, Paul and Selwyn examine why events in North Africa are connected to authoritarian multipolarity, a realignment of global power that favours the Russian Federation’s Putin regime.

And, within this context, Paul and Selwyn address the complexities of Russian Federation involvement in the African continent – involvement that includes the notorious Wagner mercenary group; Russian state controlled energy giants like Gazprom that act as envoys of the Kremlin; and how Western powers appear unable to address geopolitical and terrorist-caused instability in the region.

The Questions include:

• How and why have Africa’s dictators found a powerful ally in the Kremlin?
• Who benefits from the Russian-North African alliance and what does this association look like?
• Where does all of this leave terrorist groups, such as ISIS, in the region?
• Why has Africa become a divide between liberal democratic and authoritarian power blocs in the emerging multipolar global constellation?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

In this the seventh episode of A View from Afar podcast for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will examine the strengths and weaknesses of democracy around the world.

In particular Paul and Selwyn will consider how and why democracy in many countries around the world is on the slide.

They will examine the causes of democratic backsliding and also test why the erosion of high democratic ideas have, in many cases, popular support.

First, Paul will give us a context, and will define democratic backsliding. He will identify the countries that are decisively eroding their own democracies of principles that were once embraced by both power elites and citizenry.

The Questions:

• Why are we seeing more democratic backsliding in recent times?
• Is it just a political phenomenon or does it extend beyond the political sphere?
• Where has democratic backsliding been most evident?
• What do Chile, Guatemala, Israel and Thailand have in common when it comes to backsliding?
• What is occurring in the United States?
• If a democracy “backslides,” what does it slide into?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

In this the sixth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will present a two-part episode to analyse what to make of New Zealand Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins’ bilateral meetings with People’s Republic of China’s President Xi JinPing and other leaders of the PRC.

In part one, we will also consider how the PRC-NZ trade relationship will be seen in the eyes of New Zealand’s security partners.

Then, in the second half of today’s podcast, Paul and Selwyn will analyse the most recent events in Russia – events that have taken shape since Wagner Commander Yevgeny Prigozhin’s pronounced intent to mobilise his mercenaries against the Russian Federation’s top two military heads, and, while doing so, pronounced that the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine was based on falsehoods.

What should we expect next? What is the real state of Putinism? What do the political and power elites in Russia make of President Vladimir Putin’s handling of the matter?

Weeks prior to this event happening inside Russia, Paul and Selwyn analysed the question: How stable is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power? It’s a question that all those who watch Russian affairs have now been confronted with.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn will unpack the complexity, look at what has changed as opposed to what has been said, and consider the effect Russian instability has on NATO and BRICS aligned states.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Paul and Selwyn deep dive into the battle to control a narrative, waged by all sides in a polarised combative world, and how modern mainstream media institutions, like Radio New Zealand, fall vulnerable in the absence of robust all-sides-considered analysis and debate.

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn analyse how fourth Estate bias, propaganda, and conflict-force fact-vacuums are the challenge of our times in this disinformation age.

Upon this context, Paul and Selwyn consider:

* Why Is the Radio New Zealand sub-editor pro-RU-content debacle symptomatic of a fact-vacuum environment?

* Why is all media vulnerable to disinformation in the absence of robust NATO-Ukraine-Russia analysis?

* What are the unspoken of ‘big picture’ shifts in Russian Federation / Global South relations?

LINKS and REFERENCES:

• https://KiwiPolitico.com
• https://www.dekoder.org/de/person/ekaterina-schulmann-0
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/media/180
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/news-extras/story/2018893905/rnz-editorial-audit
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/491788/nz-entering-ukraine-conflict-at-whim-of-govt-former-labour-general-secretary
• https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-russian-elites-think-putins-war-is-doomed-to-fail

INTERACTION:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

You can continue to interact with this podcast, simply by going to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

INTERACTIVE WEBCAST: Join the LIVE recording of Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning’s podcast A View from Afar at midday Thursday (New Zealand time) and Wednesday 8pm (US EDT).

In this the second episode of A View from Afar podcast for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will analyse the question:

• How stable is Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s regime?

We will look at this question from a number of angles, and, we will reveal shifts within the regime’s control and structure that may surprise many in the West.

In this episode Paul will deep dive into the dynamics between the mercenary Wagner Group’s commander Yevgeny Prigozhin, his relationship with Putin, the Kremlin, and the estrangement from Russia’s military generals and Putin appointees.

We will consider: What is going on here? What is Prigozhin’s end-game? Does he have the support of Putin? Or is that support conditional on successes on the Ukraine conflict frontline?

And Selwyn will dig into the pillars of power in the Russian Federation, in particular:

• Putin as the head of Russia’s personalised autocracy
• The Putin-era Oligarchs
• Russia’s State military
• And the rise of Private armies and militia.

Then Paul will take us, contextually and comparatively, through all of this complexity so we can more accurately assess the big question: How stable is Putin’s regime?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE: Paul and Selwyn invite and encourage you to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

They recommend you do so via EveningReport’s YouTube channel, as Facebook is undergoing significant changes. Here’s the link: Youtube (remember to subscribe to the channel).

You can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Youtube
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

If you miss the LIVE Episode, you can see it as video-on-demand, and earlier episodes too, by checking out EveningReport.nz or, subscribe to the Evening Report podcast here.

RECOGNITION:

The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top  Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication.

Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the censoring of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) as an “assault on press freedom” and an “unacceptable development” amid mounting concern over China’s influence on the media and security.

“The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process,” the IFJ said in a statement.

“The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands.”

The government of the Solomon Islands on August 1 ordered the national radio and television broadcaster SIBC to censor its programmes of anti-government voices.

The Prime Minister and Cabinet Office of the Solomon Islands mandated the SIBC to censor its programmes of perspectives critical of the incumbent government.

According to SIBC staff, the acting chairman of the board, William Parairato, outlined the new guidelines on July 29.

Both news and paid programmes are to be vetted in line with government regulations, as the government attempts to crack down on “disunity”.

SIBC now beholden
Special Secretary to the Prime Minister Albert Kabui indicated that the SIBC would now be beholden to a government-appointed board of directors, who would be appointed solely from the Prime Ministerial office.

The SIBC, which has moved from a state-owned enterprise to receiving all funding from the ruling government, had previously allowed paid programmes to broadcast criticism of the government.

The broadcaster also provided full live coverage of Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s visit to Honiara in June, with coverage funded by the Australian High Commission.

Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavere has been unavailable for comment, as reported by several news organisations.

In recent months the Solomon Islands has further developed existing links to China, which the Australian Broadcaster Corporation argues is indicative of “authoritarian and anti-journalist” developments in Solomon Islands’ leadership.

The IFJ raised concerns surrounding press freedoms in the Solomon Islands during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to the Pacific in May.

Wang Yi’s press tour of the Solomon Islands featured heavily restricted press conferences, with local journalists collectively confined to one question for the nation’s Foreign Minister.

Sourced from an IFJ dispatch.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz