Amnesty International has condemned Israeli authorities over unleashing a series of unlawful measures deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank — including East Jerusalem — and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality.

These decisions since December 2025 represent an unprecedented escalation – in scale and speed – in Israel’s project to expand illegal settlements.

They facilitate the takeover of more Palestinian land, authorise a record number of new settlements, expanding existing ones, and formalise registration of land in the West Bank as Israeli state property.

While successive Israeli governments have pursued policies aimed at expanding settlements and entrenching occupation and apartheid, the latest measures underscore how the current Israeli government has turbocharged these efforts, in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza.

“What we are witnessing is a state, led by a Prime Minister wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, openly gloating about its defiance of international law,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns.

“Despite hundreds of UN resolutions, Advisory Opinions from the International Court of Justice and global condemnation, Israel continues to brazenly expand illegal settlements, entrenching its cruel system of apartheid and destroying Palestinian lives and livelihoods.

“The unconditional support of the USA government, combined with the pervasive lack of international accountability for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, decades of crimes under international law linked to its unlawful occupation and its system of apartheid, has further emboldened Israel to escalate its illegal actions.

‘Formalising land grabs’
“This includes formalising land grabs with full confidence that it will face no consequences.

“The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action.”

— Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns.

“The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action.

“Third states have failed to respect their own legal obligations, refusing to use the tools at their disposal, such as suspension of the EU Israel Association Agreement, to deter Israel from pursuing its unlawful agenda.”

On 10 December 2025, the Israel Land Authority published a tender for 3401 housing units in the E1 area, east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

The plan seeks to expand the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and create a continuum with occupied East Jerusalem.

This would sever the West Bank in two, permanently rupturing urban Palestinian contiguity between Ramallah, occupied East Jerusalem, and Bethlehem.

Forced transfer of Palestinians
Together with the construction of a bypass road which was set to begin this month, this plan will also lead to the forcible transfer of the Palestinian communities living in the area.

While since the 1990s successive Israeli governments have attempted to implement the E1 plan, it remained largely dormant for decades due to international pressure.

Its current advancement with such speed signifies a government that is brazenly pursuing its settlement expansion agenda amidst insufficient international pushback.

Since its occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, Israel has introduced and developed an oppressive administrative and legal architecture of dispossession and control against Palestinians.

The current government has been relentlessly accelerating this project by fast-tracking settlement expansion and land seizures.

On 11 December 2025, Israel’s security cabinet approved plans to establish 19 new settlements, bringing the total number approved by the current coalition government to 68 in just three years and the total number of official settlements to about 210.

About 750,000 Israeli settlers currently live illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Retroactive ‘legalisation’
The new settlements include the retroactive “legalisation” of outposts built in violation of even Israel’s own domestic laws.

Credible media reports indicate at least three of these sites sit upon land from which Palestinian communities, such as Ein Samia and Ras Ein al-Ouja, were recently forcibly transferred following state-backed settler violence.

According to Peace Now, an Israeli organisation monitoring settlement expansion, in 2025 alone, a record 86 outposts were established, primarily “herding” or “farming” outposts” which have significantly contributed to the spike in state-backed settler violence and forcible transfer of Palestinian communities.

Protected by the Israeli military and funded by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, the outposts have turned the lives of Palestinian farmers and shepherds, particularly in Area C, into a “living hell”.

Settlers in the outposts aggressively prevent Palestinian shepherds from accessing their grazing land, depriving them of their main livelihood, as well as seizing land by force, vandalizing property, stealing livestock and attacking Palestinians and their homes.

According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 21 Palestinian communities were fully or partially uprooted in 2025 as a result of state-backed settler violence.

A mother of three from Ras Ein al-Ouja, near Jericho, told Amnesty International: “The fear of attacks forced us to put our children to bed with their shoes on, because we might have to flee at any moment.”

Freezing cold
In January 2026, she and her family were driven out in the freezing cold along with another 122 families — in total more than 600 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from this community.

A declaration by the Israeli civil administration on 5 January 2026 designating 694 dunams of land belonging to the Palestinian towns of Deir Istiya, Bidya and Kafr Thulth in the northern West Bank as “state land”.

This was declared along with a series of measures to expand control over the West Bank announced by Israel’s security cabinet on February 8 to mark a further escalation in Israel’s land grabs.

These measures include repealing Jordanian legislation still in force to allow Israeli settlers to purchase Palestinian land without oversight increasing Israeli civil administrative control over planning and construction in Hebron City and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, as well as granting Israeli authorities new enforcement powers in archaeological sites and in issues related to water and environment in Areas A and B.

On 15 February 2026, the Israeli cabinet issued a decision that amounts to annexation under Israeli law.

It allocated more than 244 million NIS (Israeli shekels) for the establishment of a government mechanism to facilitate land registration in Area C, transferring the powers of land registration from the civil administration to Israel’s Ministry of Justice.

Currently, nearly 58 percent of the land in Area C of the occupied West Bank is unregistered, according to Peace Now.

Seized Palestinian land
Israel has already seized more than half of that area through state land designations.

Palestinians face almost insurmountable hurdles to prove land ownership due to Israel’s archaic interpretation of Ottoman land laws which require Palestinians to provide an array of documents, maps and other records that most Palestinians do not have access to.

“Make no mistake: full annexation is the goal, and Israel has already laid much of the groundwork for achieving it. Ministers in the current Israeli government no longer feel any need to conceal their intentions.”

— Erika Guevara-Rosas

“Land registration is yet another Israeli euphemism for land grabs and dispossession. Make no mistake: full annexation is the goal, and Israel has already laid much of the groundwork for achieving it,” Erika Guevara-Rosas said.

“Ministers in the current Israeli government no longer feel any need to conceal their intentions.

“Israel has totally disregarded its obligations as an Occupying Power towards Palestinian civilians and instead has deliberately and consistently advanced its aggressive annexation agenda, in blatant violation of international law, which categorically prohibits annexation and establishment of settlements in occupied territory.

“These measures are in brazen defiance of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinions of 2004 and 2024, the latter of which unequivocally found Israel’s presence in the OPT to be unlawful.

“A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution set September 2025 as the deadline to end Israel’s unlawful occupation.

“Yet instead of complying, Israel has simply invented new ways to violate international law, further entrenching its unlawful occupation and apartheid — while the international community continues, at best, to pay lip service to Palestinians’ rights and taken no effective action.”

Republished from Amnesty International.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When peace is being designed, Fiji is not invited into the room.

When peace needs enforcing, Fiji is asked to send soldiers.

That uncomfortable reality is exposed by the emergence of US President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” for Gaza.

While New Zealand was formally invited to join the Board — and chose to decline — Fiji was not invited at all.

Yet Fiji has reportedly been asked to contribute troops to a proposed “stabilisation force” linked to Gaza.

The contrast is revealing. It highlights how global security is increasingly organised — and where Fiji is positioned within that order.

The Board of Peace is reportedly structured as an exclusive body with a joining fee of around US$2 billion.

That cost alone places participation far beyond the reach of most developing countries.

For Fiji, whose entire national budget is only a fraction of that amount, membership is not simply impractical; it is structurally impossible.

In this model, peace is something designed by those who can afford entry — a “pay to play” arrangement.

Yet although Fiji cannot afford to “play”, its military presence is required.

The peacekeeping paradox: Respected soldiers, limited voice

For decades, Fijian soldiers have served with distinction in peacekeeping missions under the United Nations flag. Their professionalism, discipline and reliability are widely recognised.

But that reputation now risks confining Fiji to a familiar role: valued for its manpower but excluded from decision-making.

This is not partnership. It is subcontracting.

Fiji should not carry the risks of other people’s decisions without having a voice in them.

New Zealand had a choice. Fiji did not.
New Zealand’s refusal to join Trump’s Board of Peace, underscores the imbalance.

Wellington cited concerns about mandate clarity and alignment with international norms.

New Zealand had the opportunity to make that choice.

Fiji did not.

One country was offered a seat at the table; the other was offered boots on the ground.

For Fiji, this raises serious foreign policy questions.

The issue is not opposition to peacekeeping. The issue is peacekeeping without political voice — being asked to assume risk in missions shaped by others and detached from established multilateral oversight.

Alignment with existing policy
These concerns align closely with Fiji’s National Security and Defence Review (NSDR), which recognises that national security includes the adherence to international law, and the maintenance of trust in Fiji’s external engagements.

Central to the NSDR is the requirement that security commitments be legitimate, transparent and accountable, supported by clear civilian oversight.

Being asked to deploy troops into a stabilisation force designed outside the UN system, while being excluded from the political body determining its mandate, sits way outside those espoused principles.

The moral burden on soldiers and the families
Fiji will bear the operational and political risk but has little influence over strategic direction. Fiji will carry the risks without shaping the outcome.

This puts RFMF soldiers in an unclear and fraught position. They — and their families — are the ones who will carry the risk in this venture. It is a morally and ethically unfair burden for the government to place upon them.

This moment therefore calls for clarity and restraint by the decision makers in Fiji’s Parliament and Cabinet.

The question is not whether Fiji can contribute troops — history shows that it can and has done so with honour.

The question is whether such contributions serve Fiji’s national interest and upholds international legitimacy.

Honouring our legacy
Fiji’s peacekeeping legacy should not be used to justify accepting deployments where authority, accountability and purpose are unclear.

Peacekeeping without representation is not partnership.

Fiji has earned international respect as a contributor to global peace. It should not accept a future in which it is always invited to serve but never invited to decide.

No soldier should be sent into harm’s way without clear purpose, lawful authority, and their nation’s voice at the table.

Jim Sanday was a commissioned military officer in the pre-coup Royal Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) and commanded Fijian peacekeeping battalions in Lebanon and Sinai. In 2025, he led the National Security and Defence Review (NSDR) and co-authored the National Security Strategy that was approved by Cabinet in June 2025. This article was first pubished by the Fiji Sun and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand protesters in Tamaki Makaurau today heralded a global demand for the freedom of thousands of Palestinians who have been unlawfully imprisoned by Israel in its illegal occupation of Palestine.

Today is the Red Ribbon Campaign’s global day of solidarity for Palestinian hostages or political prisoners.

It is the culmination of the Red Ribbon campaign that has been running globally for several weeks.

At the time of the so-called Gaza “ceasefire” declared on October 10, Israel was reported to be holding a record 11,100 Palestinians hostage, mostly innocent and without charge or due process.

In exchange for the final 20 Israeli hostages still alive held by Hamas and other resistance groups at the time of the ceasefire, almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners were freed by Israel.

This leaves more than 9100 prisoners — 400 of them children and 3544 of them held under “administrative detention” — yet to be freed.

Speaking at the solidarity rally in Ta Komititanga Square today, Palestinian academic and theatre practitioner Associate Professor Rand Hazou highlighted how Israel was the only country in the world to detain children under military law and military courts.

Denied access to parents, lawyers
“According to UNICEF, Palestinian child detainees are denied access to their parents and lawyers. They are often arrested in the middle of the night, blindfolded and beaten, threatened with torture and denied food and sleep,” he said.

“Palestinian detainees, including children, are forcibly transferred outside the occupied the Palestinian territory in contravention of Article 4 of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of children and civilian persons at the time of war.”

His comments were greeted with cries of “shame” by the crowd.

Dr Hazou also criticised the practice of mainstream media in referring to the Israeli prisoners being held by the Gaza resistance fighters as “hostages” while the Palestinians were described as “prisoners”.

This was a “quite deliberate” policy by the media to imply innocence of the Israeli hostages, while suggesting guilt by the Palestinian detainees — “who are also actually hostages”.

Former trade union advocate Mike Treen condemned the inhumane practice of administrative detention and blamed it on the British colonial administration for introducing it during the Palestine mandate prior to 1948.

Administrative detention means that those detainees have not been charged with an offence. Some of them have been detained for between one and two years, with the period of time extended repeatedly — and indefinitely — so that prisoners and their families never know when they will be freed.

Persecution of Palestinians
Amnesty International has found that Israel systematically uses administrative detention as a tool to persecute Palestinians.

Treen also condemned the global “billionaire classes” for their exploitation.

“Billionaires monopolise everything they can so that they can extort rents out of us at any price.

“The rich north countries are also the old imperialist countries and we are reverting back from the neocolonial pretence that it doesn’t exist to more open forms of it today.”

Speaking in her personal capacity, Red Ribbon campaigner Audrey van Ryn cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“When people are found guilty of a crime, what usually happens is that they go to court for a trial and a judge will decide how they should be punished,” she said.

Prisoner rights
However, people who were who sent to prison for a crime had rights under the Universal Declaration, including:

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.

Article 11 (1): Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

“Some states abuse these rights of prisoners,” van Ryn said.

“Some states detain people who have not even been charged with an offence. One of these states is Israel.”

Illegal colonisation
According to a Spheres of Influence article about under reported crimes against humanity, “For 77 years, indigenous Palestinians have lived under Israel’s illegal colonisation of their own land, a regime that controls every aspect of their lives.

“One of the occupation’s most brutal tools of control is the mass abduction of Palestinians, where men, women, and children are taken hostage and imprisoned to shatter communities and crush their struggle for freedom.

“Human rights organisations describe these prisons as a ‘grave for the living’.

The first thing some of the recently released Palestinians said was a desperate plea:

“Save what remains of the hostages. If you die once a day, we die a thousand times.”

The article also alleged that since 1948, Israeli occupation forces (IDF) had arrested more than 1 million Palestinians.

“Almost every Palestinian family has lived through the trauma of a loved one kidnapped, interrogated, and disappeared into prison.”

Among high profile cases of injustice against Palestinians are:

• Marwan Barghouti, a popular leader regarded as “Palestine’s Mandela”, who was imprisoned by Israel in 2004 for life on trumped up charges.
• Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is a Palestinian paediiatrician who was born in Jabalia Refugee Camp and became director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. His hospital was bombed in December 2024 and he was seized as a prisoner. He has been held without charge by Israel in Ofer Prison since then, assaulted and tortured.

Red Cross plea to visit jails
Calls have been made by the UN and human rights experts for the release of women, children, and elected representatives, detained for activities resisting the occupation.

Resolutions have also called for allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons.

Earlier today, about 3000 people took part in a rally and march in central Auckland with the theme Toitū te Aroha, a celebration of cultural diversity and immigration.

This was a counter protest to one staged by the Destiny Church with 700 people in Victoria Park condemning immigration, but a police cordon prevented the protesters led by self-styled pastor Brian Tamaki marching on to Auckland Harbour Bridge.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Feckless European leaders like Starmer let Israel and the US tear up international law in Gaza. Now, faced with Greenland and Ukraine, they are suffering from a severe case of buyer’s regret.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

US President Donald Trump has declared the three-month “ceasefire” in Gaza a great success, and now wants to move on to phase two of his so-called “peace plan”.

What does success look like? Israeli soldiers have killed more than 460 Palestinians since October, including at least 100 children.

Israel has levelled another 2500 buildings, the last of the few that were still standing.

And amid a continuing humanitarian catastrophe engineered by Israel through its blockade of food, water, medicines and shelter, at least eight babies are known to have frozen to death as winter temperatures plummet.

Marking the transition to the new phase, Trump announced earlier this month a “Board of Peace” to determine the enclave’s future.

“Peace” here is being used in exactly the same Orwellian sense as “ceasefire”. This is not about ending Gaza’s suffering. It is about creating Big Brother-style narrative control, selling as “peace” the final eradication of Palestinian life in Gaza.

The narrative spin is that, once Hamas is disarmed, the board will take on the job of Gaza’s reconstruction.

Implicit assumption
The implicit assumption is that life will gradually return to normal for the survivors of the two-year genocide Israel has carried out — though no Western leader is acknowledging it as a genocide, or cares to find out how many Palestinians have actually been killed in the onslaught.

But, as we shall see, peace is definitely not what the board is aiming to achieve. This is a cynical exercise in smoke and mirrors.

The term “board” hints not only at Trump’s preference for the language of business over politics. It alludes too to the business opportunities he intends to make from Gaza’s “transformation”.

His plan is to strip the United Nations — and thereby the international community — of any oversight of Gaza’s fate.

We are back to the time of viceroys. Colonialism is again out and proud.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” has much grander ambitions than simply managing Gaza’s takeover. In fact, the enclave and its future is not even mentioned in the board’s so-called “charter” sent out to national capitals.

In a leaked invitation to the president of Argentina, Trump referred to the board as a “bold new approach to resolving global conflicts”.

‘Results-orientated’
The charter says it will be “results-orientated” and have the “the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”.

Some of us have long warned that Israel and the US view the Palestinians as lab rats, both for testing weapons and surveillance technologies and for changing the norms developed after the Second World War to safeguard against the return of fascist, militaristic and expansionist ideologies.

The critical legal and humanitarian architecture put in place in the post-war era included the UN and its various institutions, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Israel and the US stress-tested this system to destruction from the very start of the two-year genocide in Gaza, as Israel carpet-bombed the enclave’s homes, schools, hospitals, government buildings and bakeries.

Trump’s second presidency has pushed this agenda into overdrive.

Only this month the White House announced that the US was pulling out of 66 global organisations and treaties — some half of them affiliated with the UN.

Meanwhile, the judges and prosecutors of the ICC have been under draconian US sanctions for issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The ICJ, which is investigating Israel for genocide, appears to have been cowed into silence.

Dysfunctional world order
Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and his imminent seizure of Greenland are evidence enough that the already dysfunctional, international “rules-based order” is now in tatters. Both the UN and Nato, the West’s so-called “defence” alliance, are on the ropes.

The US president hopes his “Board of Peace” will deliver the knockout blow, supplanting the UN and the system of international law it is there to uphold.

The reconstruction of Gaza may be its first task, but Trump has much larger aspirations.

The board stands at the heart of a new world order being shaped in Trump’s image. Billionaires and their hangers-on will openly decide the fate of weak nations, based on the power elite’s naked, predatory instincts to make money.

In a petulant letter sent to Norway’s prime minister, Trump advised that, after being passed over for the Nobel peace prize: “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” What in that case, one might wonder, is the point of a “Board of Peace”?

The answer is that Orwell’s moment is truly upon us: “War is peace.”

Trump, of course, has sat himself atop this new imperial business venture, an updated East India Company — the gargantuan, militarised corporation licensed by England’s Queen Elizabeth I that went on to pillage much of the globe for more than two centuries, spreading death and misery in its wake.

Trump’s lone veto
As chairman, Trump hand-picks the other members — he is reported to have sent out invitations to some 60 national leaders. He can terminate their participation whenever he sees fit. He decides when the board sits and what it discusses. He alone has a veto.

His term as chair, it seems, may extend even beyond his time as US president.

Members are granted a three-year term. A permanent seat at Trump’s new alternative to the UN Security Council can be bought for $1 billion in “cash funds”.

Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orban was among the first out of the blocks. He was joined by Netanyahu. Other early participants include the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Belarus and Argentina.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin is reported to be considering a place at the top table.

The significance of this is not lost on the diplomatic community. One told Reuters: “It’s a ‘Trump United Nations’ that ignores the fundamentals of the UN charter.”

Similarly, in a desperate attempt to hold the line, the French Foreign Ministry issued a forlorn statement that “reiterates [France’s] attachment to the United Nations charter”.

White House shredder
But the founding UN document, with its formal commitments to non-aggression, self-determination, multilateral obligations and the protection of human rights, has been put through the White House shredder.

Gangsters have no time for rules.

For decades, Israel has been dreaming of this moment: of taking a wrecking ball to the UN and its legal and humanitarian institutions.

With a record number of UN resolutions against it, Israel believes the world body has too often limited its room for manoeuvre. Now it will hope Trump frees it to finish its long-cherished plan of eradicating the Palestinian people from their homeland.

As if in celebration, Israeli bulldozers swept into occupied East Jerusalem to demolish the buildings of Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that has served as the main aid lifeline for Gaza’s people.

Unrwa called Israel’s action an “unprecedented attack” and one that “constitutes a serious violation of international law and the privileges and immunities of the United Nations”.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the “Board of Peace” to raise any objections.

Sidelining of UN
Trump’s sidelining of the UN means its assessments of the realities facing Gaza, after Israel’s two-year campaign of genocidal destruction, can be quietly shunted into the shadows.

Trump has set a five-year timeline for Gaza’s transition. But the figures simply don’t add up.

The world body has warned that, even if Israel stops its blockade tomorrow, it will take decades to reconstruct Gaza, effectively from scratch, to house those of its 2.1 million inhabitants who survive.

According to estimates from the UN Development Programme, on the best-case scenario it could take seven years to clear some 60 million tonnes of rubble. Other surveys by the UN suggest a more realistic timetable of 20 years, with 10 years to clear unexploded ordnance.

The UN’s trade and development arm further warns that Israel has erased 70 years of human development in Gaza, and destroyed nearly 90 percent of cropland, leading to “the worst economic collapse ever recorded”.

Gaza’s schools, universities, hospitals, libraries and government offices are all gone. And Israel’s so-called “Yellow Line” that divides Gaza into two has annexed in all but name almost 60 percent of what was already a tiny territory, one of the most densely populated on the planet.

The fact is that these enormous hurdles to restoring life in Gaza to anything approximating “modernity” barely register in Trump’s peace plan. There is a good reason for that: strip away the fanfare and the plan has nothing substantive to say about the welfare of Gaza’s population.

Gaza’s population ignored
Or to put it more bluntly, Trump’s Gaza’s plan is not interested in Gaza’s population because it does not envision them being present in the enclave for much longer.

Israel’s barely veiled goal over the past two years has been the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The carpet bombing was intended to make the territory entirely uninhabitable.

Trump’s plan does not conflict with that ambition. It complements it. His “Board of Peace” is the means to arrive at the final destination willed by Israel.

The first practical function of the “Board of Peace” will be to entrench the complicity of Western and Arab states in Israel’s eradication of Gaza. None can wriggle out of their responsibility for what follows.

Real decision-making powers, however, will reside not in the Board but in an executive body comprising seven figures close to Trump. The “Board of Peace” will presumably be expected to sign off on — and fund — whatever they decide.

This “Founding Executive Board”, like the “Board of Peace”, will have no Palestinian representatives.

Instead, Palestinians will be present only on a technocratic, dogsbody committee, called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. It will oversee the administration of day-to-day affairs in the so-called Red Zone, where Gaza’s people are penned up, in place of Hamas.

Revamped UN peacekeeping force
Finally an “International Stabilisation Force”, a revamped UN peacekeeping force, will be led by a US major-general, and presumably partner closely with Israel’s genocidal army.

Even assuming that Trump has the Palestinians’ welfare at heart — he doesn’t — no progress can be made by any of these bodies until Israel gives its approval.

In the meantime, their role will be to provide a veneer of legitimacy for further inaction, while more of Gaza’s survivors die from the Stone Age conditions engineered for them by Israel.

Note well the three real power brokers appointed to the “Founding Executive Board”: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Gaza’s fate is effectively in their hands.

It was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and scion of a real estate business family, who way back in February 2024 — long before Trump took office — framed Israel’s genocide in Gaza as “a real-estate dispute”.

It was then that Kushner first publicly floated the idea of developing the enclave into a “very valuable” waterfront property, once it had been “cleaned up”.

Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate mogul and Trump’s special envoy, has spent long months with Kushner — as Israel has been busy clearing out Old Gaza — working on a 40-page prospectus for their proposed New Gaza.

Kushner’s panic
In October, on the US TV news show 60 Minutes, panic was etched on Kushner’s face as Witkoff observed that the pair had been working on a “masterplan” for Gaza’s reconstruction for two years — long before Gaza was levelled by the Israeli military.

He added: “Jared has been pushing this.”

Witkoff’s slip suggested Trump’s team had known from the outset of Israel’s bombing campaign that the intention was to eradicate the whole of Gaza rather than just Hamas. They therefore began working on a business plan to cash in on the carnage.

Through a so-called GREAT Trust — an oh-so-clever acronym for Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation — they have reimagined the enclave as a glitzy seaside resort and a tech hub generating billions of dollars in annual revenue.

A surreal video Trump posted on social media nearly a year ago gave an early idea of what the pair may have in mind. It showed the US president and Netanyahu sipping cocktails on sun loungers in their swimwear amid high rises on Gaza’s ethnically cleansed beachfront.

Gaza’s population — impoverished and malnourished by decades of isolation and blockade, even before the genocide — is viewed as an obstacle to the plan’s realisation.

The enclave’s Palestinians must first be resettled elsewhere, on terms that are as yet unclear, seemingly even to the plan’s formulators.

Misleading Tony Blair
Also popping up on the Executive Board, like a bad penny, is Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who misled Parliament and the public to make the case for joining President George W Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A subsequent, long, violent US-led occupation resulted in the collapse of Iraqi society, a vicious sectarian civil war, the development of an extensive US torture programme, and the deaths of more than a million Iraqis.

Those seem like exactly the kind of qualifications Trump needs from someone overseeing his Gaza plan.

His administration is therefore selling Blair as a safe pair of hands, a statesman apparently well-acquainted with navigating the yawning gap between the imperious demands of Israel and the forlorn hopes of the Palestinian leadership.

Blair’s skill set, we are assured, will be critically important as the board turns its attention to rebuilding Gaza.

In fact, the last person Gaza needs is Blair, as he proved during his disastrous eight-year stint as special envoy to the Middle East, shoe-horned in by the US in 2007 on behalf of a little-missed, defunct international body known as the Quartet.

At the time, most observers mistakenly assumed Blair’s mandate would be to revive a moribund “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians.

Diplomatic pressure avoided
But Blair avoided bringing any diplomatic pressure to bear on Israel and remained silent about what was then a newly instituted blockade of Gaza in 2007 that rapidly eviscerated its economy and left much of its population destitute and poorly fed.

One of his key battles as envoy was lobbying Israel — over the Palestinians’ heads — to let a British-led consortium drill for natural gas in Gaza’s territorial waters, where large reserves are known to exist.

According to reports, he sought to entice Israel into approving a $6 billion deal by promising that the pipeline would head directly to Israel’s port of Ashkelon. Israel would be the only customer permitted to buy the Palestinians’ gas and could therefore dictate the price.

Israel, preferring to maintain its chokehold on Gaza’s people, refused.

Blair claimed he promoted the Gaza gas project at the behest of the Palestinians. But even the supine Palestinian leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, had no love for him.

In 2011, Nabil Shaath, then one of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ most trusted advisers, observed of Blair: “Lately, he talks like an Israeli diplomat, selling their policies. Therefore he is useless to us.”

Another official called him “an obstacle to the realisation of Palestinian statehood”.

No interest in Palestinians
Like Blair, Trump has no interest in the Palestinians ever benefiting from their own resources. But doubtless he will be keen to leverage the former UK prime minister’s “experience” as envoy to assist in plundering its gas fields.

The centrality of Israel to Blair’s moral worldview was underscored in a comment by him in 2011 about the Arab Spring, in which peoples across the Middle East tried to liberate themselves from the toxic grip of tyrants. The former British prime minister chiefly saw these democratic uprisings as likely to “pose a problem for Israel”.

Blair has denied any personal dealings with Kushner and Witkoff’s Gaza Riviera plan — now sometimes referred to as the Sunshine Project — of luxury beachfront resorts and a “smart manufacturing zone” named for billionaire Elon Musk.

But a version leaked last July suggests his fingerprints are all over the plan, including a proposed “voluntary relocation” scheme to buy out Palestinian landowners with minor sums to leave Gaza.

It emerged that two key members of his think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, had been liaising behind the scenes with Israeli businessmen and the Boston Consulting Group on the project.

A statement from the institute welcomed Blair’s role on Trump’s Executive Board, noting: “For Gaza and its people, we want a Gaza which does not reconstruct Gaza as it was but as it could and should be.”

It is hard to believe that Blair’s “should” connotes anything other than Israel’s dream of a Palestinian-free Gaza and Trump’s vision of Gaza as a playground for the rich.

Trumpian world template
The template for a new Trumpian world order is being crafted in Gaza. The US president’s road to the takeover of Venezuela and Greenland is being paved in this tiny Palestinian territory.

Feckless European leaders, like Britain’s Keir Starmer, who helped arm Israel and provided it with diplomatic cover as it levelled the enclave, were the ones who emboldened Trump.

Those now trying to assert the primacy of international law and the “rules-based world order” — whether in Greenland or Ukraine — were the ones who helped Washington destroy that order. They are now suffering from a severe case of buyer’s regret.

They could still stymie Trump’s latest, sinister vanity project by refusing to join the “Board of Peace” and instead defend the United Nations and its legal institutions like the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Will they do so? Don’t bet on it.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission. This article was first published by Middle East Eye.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

In Gaza today, university scholarships have taken on a whole new meaning. No longer are they a step towards self-development, educational attainment or an academic experience in a different country.

For a whole generation of Gazan students, a foreign university scholarship has become a lifeline and one of the few remaining legal escape routes from the besieged territory.

Gaza’s students are not asking each other where they will study or which university programme is best; the question is existential: “Will I even be able to leave?”

In an environment that has become defined by war, trauma and uncertainty, a university education has taken on a whole new meaning, no longer just a human right or tool for building one’s future.

A university education is now a survival strategy.

The reality of higher education under siege
Over two million Palestinians in Gaza continue to live in exceptional circumstances, under an indefinite Israeli blockade interjected over the years by repeated wars and economic collapse.

The most recent war on the territory, which began after 7 October 2023, resulted in the complete destruction of Gaza’s education infrastructure.

While universities continue to operate partially, they do so among power outages, limited resources, damaged laboratories and libraries and poor internet access.

Language centres, where university-age Palestinian students would go to study for IELTS and TOEFL exams, two English proficiency exams for non-native speakers, which are prerequisites for many universities, were either destroyed or shut down as a result of the most recent war.

This has made meeting traditional admission requirements at foreign universities virtually impossible for many students.

“I had been preparing to take my IELTS exam for two years,” 24-year-old computer engineering graduate Samer Labad from Beit Lahia in North Gaza told The New Arab.

“The language centre I was studying at was completely destroyed in the war. Since then, there has been no stable electricity or internet.”

“How can we be required to meet [admissions requirements] when the tools for them no longer exist?”

More than a degree
Despite the difficult circumstances Palestinian students continue to live in, they have not given up on applying for scholarships in foreign universities. In fact, scholarship funding has increased over the last two years.

Since the most recent ceasefire, which went into effect on 10 October 2025, hundreds of Gazan students have continued to apply for scholarships, with 200 being successful so far.

According to international independent educational initiatives, last year, dozens of students successfully left the Strip to enrol and begin their scholarships abroad. This increase in applications for foreign scholarships does not come from a desire to emigrate, but from the search for safety and psychological stability.

Yasser*, a 26-year-old computer science graduate, recently secured a scholarship for his Master’s degree in Germany.

“I did not only apply for this scholarship because of my love for computer science, but because I felt like my life in Gaza is on hold: work, marriage, my future.” he said.

“This scholarship has enabled me to regain a sense of control over my life.”

He added: “How do you explain to university admissions teams that you’re applying not only so you can learn, but so you can live?”

The surge in demand for scholarships post-October 2023
Israel’s most recent war on Gaza changed the relationship between Gaza’s students and foreign university scholarships forever.

Students no longer viewed a foreign scholarship as a future possibility or nice-to-have, but a necessity for survival in an emergency.

Alaa Al-Turk, an accounting graduate from Al-Jalaa in North Gaza, said when Israel’s genocide broke out in October 2023, his plans to apply for a foreign scholarship transformed from being long-term to imminent.

“In October 2023, I felt like time had run out. I thought, ‘Either I get out [of Gaza] now, or I stay in a danger zone indefinitely.’”

Social experts believe this sharp surge in applications for foreign scholarships since October 2023 reflects a shift in the role of education in Gaza, from a natural path to self-development to a means of emergency survival.

Scholarships not only enable young Palestinians to attempt to leave Gaza legally, but psychologically, they are being used as an attempt to regain control over their destinies.

International universities step in
Understanding the exceptional circumstances Palestinian students face, some international universities in the UK, Germany, Italy, Turkïye and some Scandinavian countries have taken steps to facilitate the admission of students from Gaza.

These steps include offering scholarships specifically for Palestinians from Gaza or easing admissions requirements, particularly language requirements. Some have accepted applications from Gazan students without TOEFL and IELTS exams.

“I was so afraid the university would not accept me because I did not have a language certificate,” said 22-year-old English graduate Layan Al Mashharawi from Shuja’iyya in East Gaza.

“They conducted a lengthy interview with me and told me they knew the issue isn’t my language level, but where I live.”

In the UK, the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham and SOAS in London have eased admissions requirements for Palestinian students from Gaza as part of the Chevening Scholarships programme, including relaxing language and document requirements.

In Ireland, universities such as Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin have accepted Palestinian students from Gaza onto their programmes, with special humanitarian and academic arrangements.

The University of the United Arab Emirates offers Palestinian students from Gaza full scholarships.

Independent initiatives such as Scholarships for Ghazza and the Gaza Scholarship Initiative have played a large role in connecting Gazan students with these universities.

A scholarship does not always lead to an exit
Obtaining a foreign scholarship does not automatically mean an exit from Gaza. The bigger challenge is actually leaving the Strip.

Gaza’s border crossings are open only for limited periods, and they are sporadic and irregular. There are complex coordination lists and security approvals, making it a highly stressful process.

Every delay to crossing the border puts Palestinian students at risk of losing their scholarships, and every border closure places them back at square one. Many live for months in a state of limbo, waiting for academic acceptance and geographical isolation.

“I was living between two suitcases,” said political science student Noor Hijazi from Deir-El-Balah in central Gaza.

“One packed and ready for travel, and the other for the life I would have to return to if I failed to leave Gaza. This waiting was more stressful than the studying itself.”

Meanwhile, 27-year-old Master’s student Mahmoud Awad from Khan Younis in South Gaza almost missed the start of his degree.

“The university sent me a starting date three times, and each time I explained to them that the problem wasn’t my visa but my inability to leave Gaza. I was afraid I would lose my scholarship because of something that was beyond my control,” he told The New Arab. 

When university admission becomes a commodity for survival
With the near-total closure of Gaza’s borders and lack of safe and legal routes out of the territory comes the rise of a disturbing new phenomenon: purchasing acceptance into a university programme not for study but to leave the Strip.

It is not a topic students will talk about openly; those who spoke to The New Arab asked to have their identities protected not for fear of legal repercussion, but because of the moral stigma.

Behind this phenomenon lies a reality more complex than mere cheating. It comes with legal and financial risks, and those who benefit are the middlemen.

Twenty-nine-year-old Karim* said: “I wasn’t looking for a university, I was looking for a door. I applied for official scholarships the traditional way and was unsuccessful.

“The waiting was mentally killing me. At the end, I paid for acceptance into a university just so I could leave.”

Another student, 27-year-old Heba* said: ” I knew I might not be able to continue my studies, but staying in Gaza was no longer an option. I wasn’t buying a university education; I was buying a chance at survival.”

Education should not be a corridor to survival
What Gaza’s university-age students are asking for is not emigration, but the ability to choose to study, travel and also return to Gaza without these options being a matter of life and death.

University scholarships should not be a ticket to survival, and education should not become a substitute for the basic human rights of freedom of movement and the right to live with dignity.

Until that happens, for Gaza’s students, foreign scholarships will remain more than an academic opportunity.

*Names changed upon request

Haya Ahmed is a doctor and freelance writer from Gaza. This article was first published by The New Arab.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The recent announcement by Fiji’s Minister of Defence and Veterans Affairs that Fiji will consider contributing troops to a proposed international stabilisation force in Gaza imposes a responsibility on all of us to ask the hard questions before the decision is finalised by Cabinet.

At the outset, let’s all be clear on one thing — Gaza is not a routine peacekeeping environment. It is a highly contested battlespace where the legitimacy, consent, and enforceability of any international force remain uncertain.

Before Fiji government commits its soldiers to Gaza, the public deserves clear answers to a number of questions about the risks such a deployment would pose to those on the ground.

1: Is there genuine consent?
The most fundamental issue is the explicit rejection of the stabilisation force concept by Hamas, the dominant armed actor in Gaza.

Peacekeeping doctrine rests on consent, impartiality, and limited use of force. When one principal party openly rejects a mission, the cornerstone of consent collapses.

Without consent, Fijian soldiers in Gaza will not be seen as neutral interposers. They risk being perceived as a hostile occupying force, regardless of intent.

For troops on the ground, this dramatically elevates the risk.

Patrols, checkpoints, convoys, and static positions become potential targets — not because Fijian and other soldiers in the stabilisation force have failed, but because their presence itself is rejected.

Fiji’s peacekeepers have historically operated where communities accepted their role.

Gaza would represent a fundamentally different operational reality.

2: How clear and limited is the mandate?
Public reporting suggests the proposed force would support public order, protect humanitarian operations, assist in rebuilding Palestinian policing, and potentially contribute to the demilitarisation of armed groups.

Each of these tasks carries different — and escalating — levels of risk.

Protecting aid corridors is one thing. Being perceived as assisting disarmament or security restructuring against the wishes of the dominant armed faction in Gaza, is quite another.

Without a narrow, realistic mandate and clear rules of engagement, Fijian soldiers in Gaza risk mission creep — sliding from stabilisation into enforcement.

History shows that unclear mandates expose peacekeepers to rising hostility while leaving them politically constrained in how they respond.

The Fiji public deserves to know exactly what its soldiers would be authorised — and expected — to do if confronted by armed resistance.

3: Are troops being deployed into an urban conflict?
Gaza is one of the most complex operating environments in the world: dense urban terrain, extensive tunnel networks, armed groups embedded within civilian populations, and a society traumatised by prolonged conflict.

If Hamas and other factions do not accept the force, Fijian soldiers will find themselves operating in conditions closer to low-intensity urban warfare.

In such environments, visibility offers no protection. Uniforms do not deter improvised explosive devices, snipers, or politically motivated attacks.

The Fiji public are entitled to know whether its sons and daughters are being sent to stabilise a peace — or to operate amid an unresolved conflict where peace does not yet exist.

4: What does Fiji’s own experience tell us?
Fiji’s long service with UNIFIL in Lebanon offers an important point of comparison.

Fijian troops operated there with a clear UN mandate, within defined areas of responsibility, and — crucially — with working relationships with local communities that largely accepted their presence. Even then, the environment was never risk-free.

Gaza would be more volatile.

Unlike southern Lebanon, Gaza involves an armed group that openly rejects the very concept of an international force.

That distinction matters profoundly for force protection and operational viability.

5: What is the duty of care?
Ultimately, the central issue is the Fiji government’s duty of care to its soldiers and their families.

Courage is not the same as recklessness.

Pride in service must be matched by a rigorous assessment of the risks; whether the mission is lawful, achievable, adequately resourced and grounded in a good dose of political reality.

Before any deployment, the government owes the public clear answers:

• Is there genuine consent from all major parties on the ground?
• Is the mandate limited, realistic, and enforceable?
• Are the rules of engagement robust enough if consent collapses?
• And is Fiji being asked to stabilise a peace — or to substitute for one that does not yet exist?

Asking these questions is not an act of disloyalty. It is the standard that has protected Fijian soldiers and their reputation in past deployments.

Our peacekeeping legacy was built on disciplined judgment, not on repeating the narrative of The Charge of the Light Brigade — where unquestioned courage and noble intentions led to a fatal advance born of strategic ambiguity, and soldiers paid the price for a lack of clarity.

Fiji’s peacekeeping reputation was earned through disciplined judgment and respect for human life, not by placing soldiers in harm’s way where there is no peace to keep.

Jim Sanday was a commissioned military officer in the pre-coup Royal Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) and commanded Fijian peacekeeping battalions in Lebanon and Sinai. In 2025, he led the National Security and Defence Review (NSDR) and co-authored the National Security Strategy that was approved by Cabinet in June 2025. This article was first pubished by the Fiji Sun and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.

The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people — and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of Western publics that they have been duped.

Here is my first prediction of 2026: this law enforcement role-playing is going to continue even after the Trump administration’s outrageously illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, at the weekend, and Trump’s admission that the US attack was about grabbing the country’s oil.

The path to Caracas — and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Canada, other targets of Donald Trump’s greed — was paved in Gaza.

It is worth standing back, as one year ends and another begins, to consider how we got here, and what lies ahead.

The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals.

Unlike the Hollywood version, neither of these real-world cops is in any way good. But there is a further difference: the spectacle is not intended for those the pair confront. After all, the Palestinians know only too well that they have been suffering for decades under the boot of a lawless, joint US-Israeli criminal enterprise.

No, the intended audience are the onlookers: Western publics.

Ban on aid groups
The US “honest broker” myth should have perished long ago. But somehow it persists, despite the evidence endlessly discrediting it. And that is because Western capitals and Western media keep propping the myth up, treating it as a plausible description of events it simply cannot explain.

Nothing has disrupted the official “policing” storyline in Gaza, supposedly against Hamas “law-breaking”.

It is now echoed in Trump’s outlandish claim that his self-declared oil grab in Venezuela is really about bringing Maduro to justice for supposed drug trafficking — or “narco-terrorism” as the administration prefers to call it.

Why has Gaza dropped off the front pages? Only because the “good cop” declares it has brought hostilities from the “bad cop” to an end.

Last week, Trump publicly applauded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, for sticking to the president’s so-called “peace plan”. “Israel has lived up to the plan, 100 percent,” Trump declared.

The reality, however, is that Israel violated the “ceasefire” nearly 1000 times in the first two months after it was supposed to go into effect, in mid-October. Israel continues to kill and starve the people of Gaza, if at a slower rate.

Last week, Israel announced it was banning 37 humanitarian organisations from Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, which supports one in five emergency hospitals beds in the strip. The group noted that Israel was “cutting off life-saving medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of people”.

The ceasefire is just the latest storyline in a two-year piece of theatre.

Horrifying dream
While Western capitals and the media stubbornly adhere to the good cop, bad cop narrative, Western publics have started waking from it, as if from a bad dream.

The mass demonstrations of two years ago may have gradually shrunk in numbers, but only after western politicians and media waged an aggressive war of attrition and campaign of vilification against them. Public exhaustion has set in.

The cause of the disbelief and anger that spurred millions to take to the streets, and to campuses, remains unaddressed. Western powers are still colluding deeply in Israel’s crimes. The public’s initial outrage has slowly hardened into a burning resentment and disdain towards their own political and media establishments.

That mood intensifies each time western officials, unable to win the argument, resort to force.

Britain illustrates especially starkly the authoritarian, repressive trends visible across the West.

There, protests against genocide have been designated “hate marches”. Slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians are now grounds for arrest for antisemitism. Journalists critical of the government have been arrested or their homes raided.

Support for practical action to stop the genocide, by targeting the weapons factories supplying Israel with killer drones, is now classed as terrorism.

The government is flaunting its indifference – again backed by the media – as anti-genocide activists risk death to protest the outlawing of Palestine Action and their abusive treatment by prison authorities, in the biggest UK hunger strike since the IRA’s nearly half a century ago.

To no effect, a group of United Nations legal experts – called special rapporteurs –expressed grave concern last month at the UK’s flouting of international law in its treatment of the hunger-strikers, who face prolonged detention on remand in violation of British law.

Just before Christmas, the world’s most famous environmental campaigner, Greta Thunberg, was arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police for holding a sign drawing attention to the plight of those prisoners.

This has been a process of escalation, of upping the stakes. First, opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians was conflated with antisemitism. Now opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is conflated with terrorism.

Scrapping jury trials
The task of Western establishments — and their media — has been to shore up a patently duplicitous narrative to excuse their complicity in the Gaza genocide: that the more vocal the criticism of Israel, the more evident the antisemitism.

The implication is clear. The correct response to that genocide is silence.

Ultimately, domestic courts in the UK — led by a judiciary highly unrepresentative of wider British society — are unlikely to hold the line against this all-out assault on law, morality and basic logic.

The test will be a ruling by the High Court, expected soon, on the legality of the British government’s decision to outlaw Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation — the first time a direct-action group has been proscribed in British history.

Worryingly, the judge hearing the case — who, in approving the judicial review, had indicated a degree of scepticism about proscription — was removed from the hearing at the last minute and without explanation. He was replaced by a new panel of three judges who have a track record of demonstrating more deference to the British state.

Ousting the review judge in the appeal against Palestine Action’s proscription, and replacing him with three new judges, is a desperate attempt to create a veneer of judicial authority in support of the actions of Starmer’s outlaw government.

My latest: https://t.co/r84WPOfAT4 pic.twitter.com/ace8CbDIZv

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 26, 2025

The lacuna in this growing domestic architecture of authoritarianism is the right to trial by jury. Unsurprisingly, juries have a tendency to take a far more critical view of the British establishment’s behaviour than the establishment does itself.

For centuries, juries have been a central component of fair trials, and viewed as a fundamental to a justice system capable of limiting state power and governmental overreach.

Now the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced plans to scrap many jury trials — citing the need to address a record backlog of cases, a backlog it is failing to address by properly funding the court system.

Once the principle is conceded, it is surely only a matter of time before all jury trials are eradicated.

Bank accounts frozen
Already, under government direction, judges in political trials — notably in climate protest cases — have been denying defendants the chance to explain their motivations and reasoning to juries.

That is because too often, when presented with information the media has withheld from them, those juries acquit.

Starmer’s government understands that efforts to crush the Palestinian solidarity movement, and chill speech critical of UK complicity in genocide, depend on securing convictions. Juries are an obstacle.

Even so, the government has up its sleeve other punishments — outside the scope of judicial scrutiny — that can be used to penalise pro-Palestinian activism, whether it be efforts to stop Israel’s genocide or to simply ameliorate the suffering of its victims.

Last month it emerged that the National Crime Agency, a body answerable to government ministers, was likely behind efforts to economically intimidate and vilify the wider Palestinian solidarity movement.

The bank accounts of solidarity groups in Manchester and Scotland have been frozen, as part of investigations into Palestine Action, despite neither having an affiliation with the direct-action group.

These underhand, extrajudicial moves by the government hamper efforts to raise or donate money to charities that help feed Palestinians in Gaza, treat the wounded and house those without shelter in the winter.

It is hard to get one’s head round the depravity of these decisions.

Declared non-person
This is far from just a British problem. Other Western states are following suit in a bid not only to rehabilitate the genocidal state of Israel but to erase any perception of their own participation in its crimes.

And the template is being rolled out not just domestically but at the international level too.

While Western states bully their publics into silence on Gaza, international humanitarian institutions have done their best to hold their nerve.

United Nations special rapporteurs — independent legal experts — have issued a series of damning reports on Israel’s genocide and Western complicity.

The US responded last week by slashing $15 billion from its funding of UN humanitarian agencies.

Most visible among the rapporteurs has been the UN’s expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. Washington’s response to her has been illuminating.

In July she was placed on a US Treasury sanctions list normally reserved for those accused of terrorism, drug trafficking or money laundering. Her listing came a few days after she published her report on the collusion of Western corporations in Israel’s genocide.

The US sanctions violate the diplomatic immunity she enjoys as a UN official and make it impossible for her to attend meetings at UN headquarters in New York.

With the US effectively exercising a stranglehold on the international financial system, the sanctions also mean no banks or credit cards will allow her to use their services. She cannot be paid by employers. She cannot book a flight or hotel.

Universities, human rights institutions and charities have cut her adrift for fear of facing reprisals themselves if they continue to have dealings with her.

Her assets in the US have been frozen, including her bank account and an apartment. It is unlikely her new book on Palestine can be distributed in the US.

Effectively, Albanese has been turned into a “non-person”, with the silent consent of Western politicians and media.

ICC sanctioned
The State Department justified the sanctions on the grounds Albanese had recommended that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, ICC judges approved the arrest warrants in November 2024 after the court’s prosecutors amassed evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu and Gallant, chiefly over their imposition of an aid blockade to starve Gaza’s population.

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Trump administration has issued similar sanctions against eight judges at the Hague war crimes court, either for approving those arrest warrants or for authorising an investigation into crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan.

In an executive order announcing the sanctions in February, Trump declared a “national emergency”, saying the court represented an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.

You might imagine that this lawless move against some of the most renowned jurists in the world would have provoked considerable pushback in Europe. You would be wrong. The all-out assault on one of the main pillars of international law has been barely mentioned.

Le Monde broke ranks in November to interview French judge Nicolas Guillou. He detailed the impact since he was sanctioned in August: “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed . . .  Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.”

European banks, fearful of the US Treasury, also closed his accounts, and European companies refuse to provide him with services.

He concluded: “Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement.”

Washington has sanctioned too the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and two of his deputies.

In fact, Khan, a British lawyer, has found himself embroiled in a protracted legal and reputational struggle ever since he submitted the applications in May 2024.

That included threats, reported by Middle East Eye, from the then UK foreign secretary David Cameron that Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.

‘Might is right’ politics
Clearly, Israel and the US are eager to intimidate the court, and ready to destroy it rather than be judged by international law standards and held accountable for their crimes.

But the sanctions have an additional audience: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes referred to as the World Court.

Its panel of 15 judges have issued a series of rulings over the past two years against Israel.

Most explosively, the ICJ ruled in January 2024 that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As a result, the ICJ is currently investigating Israel for this, the ultimate crime.

The wheels of justice turn slowly at the World Court. But its judges are undoubtedly watching the treatment of Albanese and the ICC with alarm.

Like gangsters, Israel and the US are sending a very direct message to each of the ICJ judges: you will be punished too, if you dare to find us guilty.

ICC judge Nicholas Gillou notes that Europe could show solidarity with the victims of these sanctions by invoking what is known as “a blocking statute” – a mechanism that protects EU citizens and companies from the effects of sanctions imposed by third countries.

But any hope that Europe will break ranks with the US and Israel over this naked attack on the two main courts upholding international law — bulwarks against a return to “might is right” global politics — is almost certainly forlorn.

Last month, drawing on the Trump playbook, the European Union imposed economic sanctions on a dozen of its own critics.

Notable was the inclusion of Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss army. His distinguished military career includes leading peacekeeping missions for the UN, including in Rwanda and Sudan, and serving as a Nato senior strategic analyst.

Reputational assassination
Baud was accused of no crime. His offence is being deeply critical of European officials and the strategic coherence of their support for war in Ukraine. Given his military expertise, his analyses are embarrassing European establishments.

The draconian sanctions mean he is effectively imprisoned in Belgium, where he lives. He cannot leave to return to Switzerland. His assets are frozen. He cannot use a bank account and cannot have any kind of economic relations with other citizens of the EU.

Baud cannot appeal the decision or subject it to judicial review. Like Albanese he has been turned into a non-person.

A precedent has thereby been set that means anyone who challenges Western leaders — whether judges, journalists, lawyers, or human rights groups — could similarly end up destitute.

What the US and the EU are rolling out are extrajudicial reputational assassinations and economic incarcerations, as a way to silence critics and watchdogs, that cannot be appealed.

This is a model Israel and its lobbyists in the West have been trialling for years.

The US doxing website Canary Mission, for example, seeks to destroy the careers and livelihoods of students and academics critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, the lawfare group UK Lawyers for Israel is currently under investigation for threatening individuals and groups with vexatious legal actions to pressure them into retracting their solidarity with Palestinians.

Criminals in charge
Washington — the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman — refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside.

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, Fifa, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural “peace prize” — an honour created specifically to stroke his ego.

Though the Nobel Committee could not bring itself to hand the peace prize directly to Trump, its judges did the next best thing. They awarded it to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuela opposition leader who has publicly called on the US to invade her country and seize its resources.

The complete abandonment of long-standing international legal safeguards puts everyone in jeopardy — all the more so when technological developments mean states have near-absolute control over their citizens’ lives, and superpowers can use ever more sophisticated weapons to wreck countries at little cost to themselves in blood or treasure.

But paradoxically, the very act of dismantling the global system of international law is still being dressed up in the garb of law enforcement.

Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is supposedly needed to defeat Hamas’ “illegitimate” rule. The abduction of Maduro from Caracas is sold as the enforcement of drug-trafficking laws.

European leaders’ response to Trump’s crime of aggression against Venezuela signals where things head next.

Britain’s Starmer effectively welcomed Washington’s criminal regime-change operation and threat to occupy Venezuela to control its oil. He said he “shed no tears” for Maduro.

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, Europe’s foreign policy chief, emphasised Maduro’s supposed lack of “legitimacy”.

Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Canada — all in Washington’s sights — should fear that similar “legal” pretexts will be found to justify attacks on their own sovereignty.

Trump’s favourite new catchphrase is that he can do global business “the easy way or the hard way”.

Now, having shredded international law, the “good cop” looks ready to discard an outdated disguise and reveal the serial villain underneath.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye and reepublished from the author’s blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Protesters in Fiji and Aotearoa New Zealand kicked off the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People today as Israel faced global condemnation over more “war crimes” against Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

At least 13 people, including two children, were killed and 25 were wounded as Israel launched another incursion into Syrian territory in the Damascus countryside, according to state media.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned “the criminal attack carried out by an Israeli occupation army patrol in Beit Jinn”.

At Albert Park in Fiji’s capital Suva today, members of Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network (F4PSN) defied police repression and gathered to celebrate Solidarity Day.

They issued a statement declaring:

“On the 48th anniversary of this day, we must be clear: Fiji cannot claim to stand for human rights while aligning itself with GENOCIDE, APARTHEID and OCCUPATION.

“We refuse to let our government speak in our name while supporting systems of colonial oppression.”

Fiji ‘not on side of Palestine justice’
The statement went on to state that in 1977, the UN General Assembly had called for the annual observance of November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

But now, Palestinians faced dispossession, military occupation, forced displacement, and the systematic destruction of their homes and lives.

“The world is watching genocide unfold in Gaza — entire families wiped out, children buried under rubble, hospitals bombed, and civilians starved — while governments continue to fund Israel’s genocidal campaign and shield it from accountability,” the network said.

Fiji was not on the side of justice and humanity, added the network. These were some of the reasons why:

• Fiji has repeatedly abstained or voted against resolutions protecting Palestinian rights at the United Nations, including resolutions calling for humanitarian ceasefires;
• Fiji voted against renewing support for Palestinian refugees under UNRWA;
• Fiji abstained on a resolution supporting a two-state solution;
• Fiji was the only country to publicly support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and land annexation at the International Court of Justice; and
• Fiji has opened an embassy in Jerusalem, in Occupied Palestine.

“This is not foreign policy — this is complicity,” said the network.

“And we say loudly from Fiji: End occupation. End apartheid. End genocide. Free Palestine — from the River to the Sea.”

Powerful speeches in NZ
In New Zealand’s Te Komititanga Square beside Auckland city’s main transport hub, protesters heard several powerful speakers before marching up the Queen Street shopping precinct to Aotea Square and raised the Palestinian flag.

Journalist and videographer Cole Martin, of Aotearoa Christians for Peace in Palestine who recently returned from six months bearing witness in the occupied West Bank, gave a harrowing account of the brutality and cruelty of daily life under Israeli military control.

Describing the illegal destruction of Palestinian homes by Israeli military bulldozers in one village, Martin said: “They [villagers] put up tents. And they Israeli military returned because the tents, they say, didn’t have the correct permits, just like their homes.

“And so they demolished them.

“But when Palestinians apply for permits, they are pretty much never granted them. It is an impossible system.”

Speaking for Amnesty International Aotearoa, people power manager Margaret Taylor described the US President Trump-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza as “dangerous” because it gave the illusion that life in Gaza was returning to normal.

“We here today are aware that the ‘normal’ for the people of Gaza is the ongoing genocide perpetrated against them by Israel.

“Earlier this week Amnesty international again came out saying, ‘yes, it is still genocide’.

“‘It is still genocide. It is still genocide.” It continues unabated.

“We had to do that because world leaders have denied that it is genocide and are using this alleged ceasefire.”

Gaza flotilla plans
Gaza Sumud Flotilla activist Youssef Sammour, who was also rally MC, brought the crow up-to-date with plans for another flotilla to attempt to break the Israeli siege around the Gaza enclave.

About 30 other protests are happening across New Zealand this weekend over the Gaza genocide.

Global news media reports described Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, although little was reported in New Zealand media.

Several Israeli soldiers were also reported wounded in clashes at the town of Beit Jinn.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned “the criminal attack carried out by an Israeli occupation army patrol in Beit Jinn”.

Al Jazeera reports that Israeli military incursions have become more brazen, more frequent and more violent since Israel expanded its occupation of southern Syria.

Several Israeli soldiers were also reported wounded in clashes at the town of Beit Jinn when local people fought back against the Israeli incursion.

Meanwhile, the UN has condemned an incident in Jenin in the occupied West Bank as another “apparent summary execution” and warned that killings in the Occupied West Bank were surging “without accountability”.

Footage from Jenin showed Israeli forces shooting two Palestinian men in the back after  they had raised their hands to surrender. They were unarmed.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A news report highlighting Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown yelling “free beer” at pro-Palestine protesters at an Auckland Council governing body meeting on Tuesday has stirred an angry response over the failure to face up to a serious human rights issue.

Mayor Brown was called a ”shameful man” by protesters after they were refused an opportunity to speak at the meeting over ethical procurement policies in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

At the start of the meeting, the mayor said a request from the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) to speak had been declined, saying the governing body did not have responsibility for Palestine.

A point of order was then raised by Councillor Mike Lee, who questioned the decision and asked for an explanation, said a Stuff news report.

Two other councillors also challenged the mayor, but Brown doubled down on his refusal to allow the PSNA deputation to speak.

When protesters started chanting “free Palestine”, Brown shouted “free beer”.

Brown again reiterated that the governing body did not have responsibility for Palestine, said the Stuff report.

‘Depraved comment’
“It’s hard to know who is more to blame for this story in Stuff,” said PSNA co-chair John Minto to supporters in a social media post.

“Is it Wayne Brown’s depraved comment ‘free beer’ in response to genocide in Gaza or is it the mainstream media which presents such a half-arsed account of our request to speak at the council meeting?”

Minto pointed out that so far the Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington and Palmerston North city councils — as well as Environment Canterbury and Environment Southland — had passed motions to exclude from their procurement policies any company on the United Nations Human Rights Council list of companies building and maintaining illegal Israeli settlements on illegally occupied Palestinian land.

“Brown is happy for Auckland ratepayer money to be spent on companies involved in flagrant violations of international law and is refusing to allow the council to discuss this,” Minto said.

“We will be back.”

Other pro-Palestinian protesters added comments in support.

West Coast environmental activist Peter Lusk wrote: “That’s like the age-old comment ‘get a job’. Such an ignorant man is Wayne Brown.”

Brown lacked ‘compassion’
In a lengthy response, Nancy McShane wrote in part: “I find Mr Brown’s cavalier response of ‘free beer’ entirely inappropriate. It’s a pity he was unable to demonstrate an appropriate level of concern, insight and compassion towards the Palestinian people, and engage constructively with this group of PSNA members who were advocating on their behalf.

“PSNA has worked extremely hard to ensure our local bodies are vigilant in ensuring they are not supporting genocide through poor purchasing choices.

“Aucklanders should be concerned that, unlike many other councils around New Zealand, their own council has refused to even have a discussion on this issue, let alone adopt an ethical, genocide-free procurement policy.

“Once upon a time, our country had a proud reputation as a progressor and defender of human rights. That is rapidly disappearing.

“New Zealanders should think carefully about how this shift away from our foundational values of peace, justice and equality will shape the future of Aotearoa.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack.

Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these Western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalise the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

Do you see what they’re doing here?

The Western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump’s ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it “testing” the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas “testing” the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”.

If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

You don’t hate the mass media enough     Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN calls this the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed. https://t.co/wTSEKzsDCN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2025

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning.

But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing Western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events.

They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, Western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practises the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

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.

New Zealand pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched peacefully on The Warehouse in downtown Auckland today to protest over the sale of products by the genocidal state of Israel.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair Maher Nazzal and fellow protesters delivered a giant letter calling on the management to stop selling SodaStream products.

SodaStream — an Israel-based company since 1978 — is at the centre of the global BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) campaign.

The letter was reluctantly accepted by The Warehouse city branch duty manager Alyce, who needed to take a management phone call before agreeing to take the letter mounted on a board.

“The Warehouse’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes must stop,” said Nazzal in the letter. “I know you will be appalled as we are at Israel’s cruel and depraved war crimes against Palestinians.”

The letter was handed over by a small deputation on behalf of about 200 protesters who stood peacefully by the shop entrance escalator in Elliott Street as they chanted “Blood on your hands” and other condemnation of Israel over the genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 69,000 people, mostly women and children.

The letter addressed to The Warehouse management said that “trading in SodaStream products . . . supports Israel to continue its war crimes against Palestinian people. It encourages Israel to expand its illegal occupation and its genocidal oppression of Palestinians.”

One third of aid trucks
In spite of the so-called “ceasefire” brokered by US President Donald Trump commencing on October 10, only one third of the promised 600 aid trucks a day had been allowed into Gaza.

“Arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But this is not enough,” said the letter, signed by scores of the protesters.

“On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice, in a landmark ruling, declared Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories — the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza strip — is illegal and no one should give ‘aid or assistance’ to Israel in maintaining its illegal occupation.

“However, The Warehouse is giving direct ‘aid and assistance’ to Israel’s racist policies through selling SodaStream. This must stop.

“Since 2005, Palestinian civil society organisations have called for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel, to build international, non-violent pressure on Israel to end its brutal oppression of Palestinians.

“BDS aims to pressure Israel to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, end its apartheid policies towards Palestinians and allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and land in Palestine.

The PSNA letter said the protesters supported BDS against Israel — “just as we supported the international boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s”.

‘New Zealanders support sanctions’
“New Zealanders support sanctions against Israel by the ratio of two to one amongst those who give an opinion. New Zealanders expect The Warehouse to end its collaboration with Israeli apartheid and genocide and swap out of SodaStream for alternative brands,” the letter said.

The Warehouse Group’s says “ethical sourcing” policy was cited in the letter, quoting in part: “Like our customers,  we  care about doing the right thing — not only here in New Zealand but everywhere we operate.

“Our aim is to ensure our customers have confidence  that  our products have been ethically sourced.”

The letter continued: “Selling SodaStream directly violates this policy. So why do The Warehouse and it’s subsidiary, Noel Leeming, continue to sell these products linked to ethnic cleansing and genocide?”

Nasser said PSNA wanted the opportunity to speak with The Warehouse management directly about the stocking of SodaStream and looked forward to hearing from the business.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched on the Warehouse in downtown Auckland today to protest over the sale of products by the genocidal state of Israel. #AsiaPacificReport #TheWarehouse #sodastream #protestletter @BDSmovement @palestine @OnlinePalEng https://t.co/jLbwrcUnLB pic.twitter.com/qY2hMDlrk1

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) November 22, 2025

Earlier, at a rally in Te Komititanga Square several speakers about BDS policies included PSNA secretary Neil Scott and South African-born activist Achmat Esau, who explained how global sanctions had forced the brutal racist minority white regime in his homeland to abandon apartheid and bow to genuine democracy.

Esau recalled how in 1968 white South African Prime Minister John Vorster banned a tour by the England cricket team because it included a mixed-race player, Cape Town-born Basil D’Oliveira.

Boycott of apartheid South Africa
“After this incident, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until the release of political prisoner Nelson Mandela 22 years later.

“The anti-apartheid boycott of the South African regime from the 1960s until the 1980s was instrumental in bringing the racist apartheid regime to its knees,’ Esau said.

He said the success of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was an indicator of how it could also succeed through the BDS movement against apartheid Israel.

“We must draw in the politicians and political parries to isolate, expose and oppose this evil Zionist regime that is guilty of state terrorism.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

UNSC Resolution 2803 is unequivocally rejected. It is a direct contravention of international law itself, imposed by the United States with the full knowledge and collaboration of Arab and Muslim states.

These regimes brutally turned their backs on the Palestinians throughout the genocide, with some actively helping Israel cope with the economic fallout of its multi-frontal wars.

The resolution is a pathetic attempt to achieve through political decree what the US and Israel decisively failed to achieve through brute force and war.

It is doomed to fail, but not before it further exposes the bizarre, corrupted nature of international law under US political hegemony. The very country that has bankrolled and sustained the genocide of the Palestinians is the same country now taking ownership of Gaza’s fate.

It is a sad testimony of current affairs that China and Russia maintained a far stronger, more principled position in support of Palestine than the so-called Arab and Muslim “brothers.”

The time for expecting salvation from Arab and Muslim states is over; enough is enough.

Even more tragic is Russia’s explanation for its abstention as a defence of the Palestinian Authority, while the PA itself welcomed the vote. The word treason is far too kind for this despicable, self-serving leadership.

UNSC Resolution 2803 is unequivocally rejected. It is a direct contravention of international law itself, imposed by the United States with the full knowledge and collaboration of Arab and Muslim states. These regimes brutally turned their backs on the Palestinians throughout the…

— Ramzy Baroud (@RamzyBaroud) November 18, 2025

Recipe for disaster
If implemented and enforced against the will of the Palestinians in Gaza, this resolution is a recipe for disaster: expect mass protests in Gaza, which will inevitably be suppressed by US-led lackeys, working hand-in-glove with Israel, all in the cynical name of enforcing “international law”.

Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about the history of Palestine knows that Res 2803 has hurled us decades back, resurrecting the dark days of the British Mandate over Palestine.

Another historical lesson is due: those who believe they are writing the final, conclusive chapter of Palestine will be shocked and surprised, for they have merely infuriated history.

The story is far from over. The lasting shame is that Arab states are now fully and openly involved in the suppression of the Palestinians.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015) and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

How shall we speak and act now?

For six years, Alternative Jewish Voices has spoken in an aspirational voice. This is intentional. Research shows, the voice that mobilises new political engagement is a voice of moral clarity which invites others to join the work of making a better world.

We ground our voice in facts, and today’s facts are shattering. We share the outrage that we hear. However, outrage alone does not make change. It has to be channeled forward into principled action.

Hope is resistance. AJV met last week to ask where we find that hope now, while grief and anger feel overwhelming.

With unprecedented Western permission and complicity, Israel’s genocide is ongoing. The IDF has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and decimated the built environment of Gaza.

They are queueing up more of the same in the West Bank. The tonnage of IDF poisons will affect generations. Israel has killed 271 and injured 622 Palestinians since the ceasefire.

Gazan Palestinians are living in atrocious conditions as winter closes in. Israel is preventing UN agencies and NGOs from responding, despite the International Court of Justice’s October finding that Israel is obligated to provide for Gazan Palestinians and not to impede others from doing so.

Bombed half a dozen countries
Along the way, Israel has bombed half a dozen countries which are not at war with it.

The silence of governments like ours imagines this dystopia as a new baseline. They will settle for negotiating the speed of Israel’s new crimes against the survivors of Palestine.

We utterly reject their selective amnesia — but each time we call out our complicit government, we need to call them forward and judge them against something better.

We do that by placing the value of human life at the centre of our understanding. People have laboured for a century and a half to embed a rights-based vision of human dignity and equality.

Rights are not an opinion; rights are the basis of international law and institutions. That today’s governments spit on Palestinians’ rights does not invalidate Palestinians’ rights. It raises the stakes.

Now we must fight for the vision even as we wield it.

Our baseline is a world in which people flourish with their basic needs and dignity ensured. We protest the deficits from that standard. We judge Israel and its powerful accomplices against the standard of an accountable, just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.

Daily erosion of our democracy
Even as our allies have taken the step of recognising Palestine, Luxon, Seymour and Peters cosy up to Donald Trump. We are reeling from their daily erosion of our democracy.

Our government’s position on Palestine and the value it places on our own lives follow from a single agenda. This government is harming far more people than it is benefiting. We find hope in the work that brings together a majority for change.

While Palestine has become the cement of a broad global movement, Zionism is shifting. Israel used its years of Zionist-Jewish permission to consolidate new sources of support. It is no longer dependent upon Jewish social licence.

Christian Zionism, long the majority of Zionism, is now an insider shaping American policy. Israel dedicates new budgets to influencing American Christians.

Christian Zionist influence is now being unsettled in turn by the far Right, as Zionism attracts support from the eschatological, racist and fascist extremes. Trump’s MAGA world is grappling with the rise of more radical White racist nationalism. Those extremists are seeking narrative position and influence.

In Aotearoa, Israel’s deputy foreign minister has met with Christian nationalist Brian Tamaki and Alfred Ngaio. There are five rabbis in this country, while 130 Christian Zionist clergy wrote together of their representatives’ time with Winston Peters before Peters declined to recognise Palestine.

In order to lend effective support to the liberation of Palestine, our protest needs to target the evolving structures and financial flows of Aotearoa’s Zionism.

This does not relieve the Zionist-Jewish community of responsibility. Globally, Zionist-Jewish institutions have eagerly wrapped Israel’s violence in the guise of Jewish identity, in order to place Israel’s genocidal actions beyond challenge.

Peace of the graveyard
Aotearoa’s Zionist-Jewish spokespeople still imagine only the peace of the graveyard, after which there might be a nicer Zionism.

A significant segment of Liberal-Zionist Jews seems to have turned against the war — although not against Zionism. That speaks to some capacity for change despite the institutions.

We welcome every effort to end this genocide. However, as principled anti-Zionists our goal is greater than the cessation of firing. In our own community and in Palestine, we must change the conditions that give rise to genocide. We need to decolonise the Jewishness that taught us to stake our future on the oppression and slaughter of others. There is no nicer Zionism.

To realise a liberatory Jewishness, we need new institutions with genuinely new communal leadership. We work for a future without Jewish supremacy or exceptionalism. Two-thirds of Jewish New Yorkers aged 18-44 just voted for Mayor Mamdani in one such act of qualitative, visionary change.

We will not displace this toxic new Right power by emulating their perpetual outrage. That would only turn us into the thing we oppose.

Outrage alone leaves one numb with grief and alienation. It stokes the identity politics which deny that we can live together. It leads to the despair which hardens the status quo.

We will only displace this power with an aspirational, broadly based vision of something better. We learn from the long, great works of our time: the works of peace, Indigenous rights, the common cause of dignified life in the hardest places.

Tangled roots of colonisation
That quality of holistic movement has coalesced around Palestine. We have never heard so many people acknowledge that the change must reach to the tangled roots of colonisation, racism, capitalism and fascism.

AJV brings to this our Jewish inheritance which recognises that social, ecological and material justice are inextricable. Together we will place life and justice at the centre of the work that needs doing, here and there.

In this dark time, hope is resistance and these are our ways forward.

In outrage and in aroha, we are Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa.

Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent. This article was first published by Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices and is republished with permission. The original article can be read here.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

While Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children in the town of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, the news broke in Aotearoa New Zealand that our government had been advised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) in September to recognise a Palestinian State now — before it was too late forever.

“The tide of international thinking on Palestinian statehood has shifted markedly . . .  Israel’s actions are rapidly extinguishing any prospect of realising a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” the draft paper read.

“This leaves recognition of Palestine as the only viable option to maintain New Zealand’s long-standard support for a two-state solution.”

This is what Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour were told by MFAT, but these politicians had predetermined they were going to suck up hard to US President Donald Trump and Israel.

Seymour had to be served and so did Peters, as Luxon did their bidding again.

The way to do it with as little local public backlash and media attention was to say it was “complicated” to the press and the public, to be very secretive and let NZ First staff write a cabinet paper of their own — with a couple of options in it, and then bury the Cabinet outcomes until Peters announced it at the UN General Assembly.

The horror of a nation’s collective groan as Winston Peters read that speech still echoes over this naked complicity with genocide and colonisation, making most people feel wild and revolted, laced with the way they were being ignored and trampled on back here at home.

Disgusting business
The horror of Aotearoa aligning itself with this disgusting business sickens many but it was only The Post which published the news last night because as per usual this sort of thing is never really news in our newsrooms.

How many New Zealanders know how many Palestinians Israel have killed since the ceasefire thanks to our media?

What’s that about?

At least 69,000 killed, including 20,000 children.

RNZ was silent about this but instead published how four bills had passed this week while we were focused on a side show — no not the police scandal, but Te Pāti Māori apparently.

Whatever!

Buried in the fine print was the way Education Minister Erica Stanford had ripped Te Tiriti obligations off school boards and Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill had slipped past its third reading, because there was not much of a headline in that.

The way New Zealand backed Israel over the two-state solution for Palestine has weak leadership stamped all over it — and that is galling but it’s gaslighting the nation to then boast of a win over a photo op with Trump.

Gerard Otto is a digital creator, satirist and independent commentator on politics and the media through his G News column and video reports. This article is an excerpt from a G News commentary and republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

INTERVIEW: The Chris Hedges Report

After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.

In her latest report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web.

This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.

Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel’s funders.

“Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,” Albanese warns.

“Every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.”

The transcript:
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, in her latest report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, calls out the role 63 nations have in sustaining the Israeli genocide. Albanese, who because of sanctions imposed on her by the Trump administration, had to address the UN General Assembly from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, slams what she calls “decades of moral and political failure.”

“Through unlawful actions and deliberate omissions, too many states have harmed, founded and shielded Israel’s militarized apartheid, allowing its settler colonial enterprise to metastasize into genocide, the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine,” she told the UN.

The genocide, she notes, has diplomatic protection in international “fora meant to preserve peace,” military ties ranging from weapons sales to joint trainings that “fed the genocidal machinery,” the unchallenged weaponization of aid, and trade with entities like the European Union, which had sanctioned Russia over Ukraine yet continued doing business with Israel.

The 24-page report details how the “live-streamed atrocity” is facilitated by third states. She excoriates the United States for providing “diplomatic cover” for Israel, using its veto power at the UN Security Council seven times and controlling ceasefire negotiations. Other Western nations, the report noted, collaborate with abstentions, delays and watered-down draft resolutions, providing Israel with weapons, “even as the evidence of genocide … mounted.”

The report chastised the US Congress for passing a $26.4 billion arms package for Israel, although Israel was at the time threatening to invade Rafah in defiance of the Biden administration’s demand that Rafah be spared.

The report also condemns Germany, the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, for weapons shipments that include everything from “frigates to torpedoes,” as well as the United Kingdom, which has allegedly flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since war broke out in October 2023.

At the same time, Arab states have not severed ties with Israel. Egypt, for example, maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing” during the war.

Francesca Albanese talks to Chris Hedges                      Video: The Chris Hedges Report

The Gaza genocide, the report states, “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest.” Her report coincides with the ceasefire that isn’t. More than 300 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire was announced two weeks ago.

The first major ceasefire breach on October 19 led to Israeli air strikes that killed 100 Palestinians and wounded 150 others. Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure daily bombings that obliterate buildings and homes. Shelling and gunfire continue to kill and wound civilians, while drones continue to hover overhead broadcasting ominous threats.

Essential food items, humanitarian aid and medical supplies remain scarce because of the ongoing Israeli siege. And the Israeli army controls more than half of the Gaza Strip, shooting anyone, including families, who come too close to its invisible border known as the “yellow line”.

Joining me to discuss her report, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the complicity of numerous states in sustaining the genocide in Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine.

Before we get into the report, let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening in Gaza. It’s just a complete disconnect between what is described by the international community, i.e. “a ceasefire”, the pace may have slowed down, but nothing’s changed.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, thank you for having me, Chris. I do agree that it seems that there is a complete disconnect between reality and political discourse. Because after the ceasefire, the attention has been forced to shift from Gaza elsewhere.

I do believe, for example, that the increased attention to the catastrophic situation in Sudan, which has been such for years now, all of a sudden is due to the fact that there is a need for, especially from Western countries and the US, Israel and their acolytes to focus on a new emergency.

‘There is the pretence that there is peace, there is no need to protest anymore because finally, there is peace. There is no peace.’

There is the pretence that there is peace, there is no need to protest anymore because finally, there is peace. There is no peace. I mean, the Palestinians have not seen a day of peace because Israel has continued to fire, to use violence against the Palestinians in Gaza. Over 230 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire, 100 of them in one day in 24 hours, including 50 children.

And starvation continues. Yes, there has been an increase in the number of trucks, but far, far below what is needed with much confusion because it’s very hard to deliver aid. All the more, Israel maintains a control over 50 percent of the Gaza Strip while the entire Gaza population is amassed in small portions, guarded portions of the territory.

So there is no peace. Meanwhile, while the Security Council seems to be ready to approve a Security Council resolution that will create a non-acronistic form of tutelage, of trusteeship over Palestine, over Gaza, the West Bank is abandoned to the violence and the ethnic cleansing pushed by armed settlers and soldiers while Israel jails continue to fill up with bodies to torture of adults and children alike. This is the reality in the occupied Palestinian territory today and so it makes absolutely no sense where the political discourse is.

CHRIS HEDGES: Two issues about Gaza. One, of course, Israel has seized over 50% or occupies over 50 percent of Gaza. And as I understand it, they’re not allowing any reconstruction supplies, including cement, in.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: This is also my understanding. They have allowed in food, water and some essential materials needed for hospitals, mainly camp hospitals, tents. But anything related to sustainability is prohibited.

There are many food items that are also prohibited because they are considered luxurious. And the question, Chris, is, and this is why I harbor so much frustration these days toward member states because in the case of genocide, you have heard yourself the argument, well, the recalcitrance of certain states to use the genocide framework saying — and it’s pure nonsense from a legal point of view — but saying, well, the International Court of Justice has not concluded that it’s genocide.

Well, it has concluded already that there is a risk of genocide two years ago, in January, 2024. But however, even when the court does conclude on something relevant like in July, 2024, that the occupation is illegal and must be dismantled totally and unconditionally, this should be the starting point of any peace related or forward-looking discussions.

Instead of deliberating how to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territory, member states continue to maintain dialogue with Israel as Israel has sovereignty over the territory. See, so it’s completely dystopic, the future they are leading Palestinians out of despair into.

But they are also forcing the popular movement, the global movement that has formed made of young people and workers to stop. Because look at what’s happening in France, in Italy, in Germany, in the UK — any kind of attempt at maintaining the light turned on Palestine from Gaza to the West Bank is assaulted. Protests, conferences, there is a very active assault on anything that concerns Palestine.

So this is why I’m saying we are far, far beyond the mismanagement of the lack of understanding, I mean the negligence in approaching the question of Palestine, it’s active complicity to sustain Israel in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

CHRIS HEDGES: Which, as you point out in your report, has been true from the beginning despite a slight change in rhetoric recognising the two-state solution. The UK did this while only cutting back on shipments by 10 percent.

But I want to ask before we get into the report, what do you think Israel’s goal is? Is it just to slow-walk the genocide until it can resume it? Is it to create this appalling, uninhabitable, unlivable ghetto? What do you think Israel’s goal is?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I think that now more than ever it is impossible to separate and distinguish the goals of Israel from the goals of the United States. We tend to have a fragmented view of what happens, analysing for example the relationship between Lebanon and Israel, between Iran and Israel, or between Israel and the Palestinians.

‘One of the things that Palestine has made me realise is the meaning of “Greater Israel” because I do believe that what the current leadership in Israel has in mind and it’s supported by many willing or not in the Israeli society, many who are fine with the erasure of the Palestinians.’

In fact, do, I mean, one of the things that Palestine has made me realise is the meaning of “Greater Israel” because I do believe that what the current leadership in Israel has in mind and it’s supported by many willing or not in the Israeli society, many who are fine with the erasure of the Palestinians.

But there is this idea of Greater Israel and for a long time I have been among those who thought, who were wondering what it is, this “Greater Israel” because of course you look at the map by Israeli leaders in several occasions with this Greater Israel going from the Nile to the Euphrates and you say come on they cannot do that, they cannot occupy Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq.

But then everything changes when you look at it from a non-territorial border expansion perspective. And if you think that in fact domination can be exerted, established, other than by expanding the physical borders and through military occupation, but through domination and financial control, control from outside, power domination, you see that the Greater Israel project has already started and it’s very advanced.

Look at the annihilation of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon. So all those who were historically considered not friends of Israel have been annihilated. And the other Arab countries that remain either do not have the capacity to confront Israel and perish the thought they explored the idea of unity among them or with others. And the others are fine with it.

Ultimately, I think that Greater Israel is the quintessential explanation of the US imperialistic design in that part of the world for which the Palestinians remain a thorn in the side not just for Israel but for the imperialistic project itself because the Palestinians are still there resisting.

They don’t want to go, they don’t want to be tamed, they don’t want to be dominated so they are the last line, the last frontier of resistance, both physically and in the imagination. And therefore, you see, the fierceness against them has scaled up, with the US now getting ready with boots on the ground to get rid of them. This is my interpretation of the general design behind Israel-United States, where Israelis are going to pay a heavy price like many in the region, not just the Palestinians.

CHRIS HEDGES: So you see the imposition of American troops in Gaza as another step forward to the depopulation of Gaza.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, yes, yes, I don’t trust any promise made to the Palestinians either by Israel or by the United States because what I’ve seen over the past two years shows me, demonstrates to all of us in fact, that they don’t care at all about the Palestinians. Otherwise, they would have seen their suffering.

‘The beginning of genocide has changed my perception of the world in a way, for me personally, it’s the end of an era of innocence when I really believed that the United Nations were a place where things could still be advanced in the pursuit of peace.’

It’s just not like people like us who can really divide their life. Is it pre-genocide? Does it happen to you as well? Are you talking of pre-genocide or after genocide? Because in fact, the beginning of genocide has changed my perception of the world in a way, for me personally, it’s the end of an era of innocence when I really believed that the United Nations were a place where things could still be advanced in the pursuit of peace.

Now I don’t think so, which doesn’t mean that I think that the UN is over, but in order not to be over, in order to make sense to the people, it is to be led by dignity, principles like dignity, equality and freedom for all. And we are absolutely far from that today.

CHRIS HEDGES: And what is it that brought you to this decision? Is it the acceptance of this faux ceasefire on the part of the UN, or was it before this moment?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: No, it’s before. It’s before. It’s the fact that for two years most states, primarily in the West, but with the acquiescence of other states in the region have supported the Israeli mantra of “self-defence”.

Sorry, it was a mantra because again, self-defence has a very, I’m not saying that Israel had no right to protect itself. Of course Israel had suffered a ferocious attack on October 7. Some say similar to the attacks it had inflicted on the Palestinians. Others say more brutal, say less brutal. It doesn’t matter.

Israel suffered a horrible, violent attack. Israeli civilians suffered a horrible attack on October 7th. But hey, this didn’t give the possibility to Israel to invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter, meaning the right to wage a war.

This is not legal. And on this I can say I’m surprised by how conservative are member states when it comes to the interpretation of international law, except on this, in the sense that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already set the limits of the right of invoking self-defence for member states.

And it can only be done against states where there is a concrete threat that the state will attack which is not the case here. So yes, Israel could defend itself, but not wage a war. And while the war was clearly identifiable more for its crimes than not its tendency to avoid crimes, member states have continued to say nothing and it was very extreme violence against the Palestinians in Gaza but also against the Palestinians in the West Bank. And for two years they’ve not used their power to stop it.

So I’m convinced that in order to have a political shift vis-à-vis Israel, there must be a political shift at the country level, because governments are completely subdued to the dictates of the US. Of course, if the US wanted, this would stop, but the US with this constellation of figures in the government is not going to stop.

And plus look at how the West in particular has contributed to dehumanise the Palestinians. Even today you hear people saying yes, Palestinians have been killed in these numbers because they’ve been used as human shields when the only evidence that they’ve been used as human shields is against Israel because Israel has used Palestinians as human shields in the West Bank and in Gaza alike.

You see Palestinians have returned to be wrapped into this colonial tropism of them being the savages, the barbarians, in a way, they have brought havoc upon themselves. This is the narrative that the West has used toward the Palestinians. And by doing that, it has created, they have created the fertile ground for Israel’s impunity.

CHRIS HEDGES: Let’s talk about the nations that you single out in your report that have continued to sustain the genocide, either through weapons shipments, but also the commercial interests. I think your previous report talked about the money that was being made off of the genocide. Just lay out the extent of that collaboration and to the extent that you can, the sums of money involved.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, yeah, let me start with introducing generally two components, the military component and the trade and investment ones, which are quite interrelated. And states have, in general, I name 62 states, primarily Western states, but with substantive collaboration of states from the Global South, global majority, including some Arab states.

So they have altogether ignored, obscured and somewhat even profited from Israel’s violations of international law through military and economic channels. So military cooperation through arms trades or intelligence sharing has fueled Israel’s war machine during the occupation, the illegal occupation, and especially during the genocide while the United States and Germany alone have provided about 90 percent of Israel’s arms export.

At least 26 states have supplied or facilitated the transfer of arms or components, while many others have continued to buy weapons tested on the Palestinians. And this is why in my previous report, the ones looking at the private sector, I was shocked to see how much the Israeli stock exchange had gone up during the genocide.

And this is particularly because of a growth in the military industry. On the other hand, there is the trade and investment sector. Both have sustained and profited from Israel’s economy. Think that between 2023, 2024, actually the end of 2022 and 2024, exports of electronics, pharmaceuticals, energy minerals and what is called the dual-use have totaled almost US$500 billion, helping Israel finance its military occupation.

Now one third of this trade is with the European Union while the rest is complemented by North American countries, the US and Canada, who have free trade agreements with Israel and several Arab states that have continued to deepen economic ties.

Only a few states have marginally reduced trade during the genocide, but in general the indirect commercial flows, including with states that have supposedly no diplomatic relations with Israel, have continued undisturbed.

It’s a very grim picture of the reality. But let me add just one extra element. I do believe that in many respects, the problem is ideological. As I said, there is a tendency to treat Ukraine, for example, vis-a-vis Russia, in a very different fashion than Palestine versus Israel. And this is why I think there is an element of Orientalism that accompanies also the tragedy of the Palestinian people.

CHRIS HEDGES: Talk a little bit about the kinds of weapons that have been shipped to Israel. These are, and we should be clear that, of course, the Palestinians do not have a conventional army, don’t have a navy, they don’t have an air force, they don’t have mechanized units, including tanks, they don’t have artillery, and yet the weapons shipments that are coming in are some of the most sophisticated armaments that are used in a conventional war.

And as a leaked Israeli report, I think it was +972, provided, 83 percent of the people killed in Gaza are civilians.

FRANCISCA ALBANESE: Yes, yes. First of all, there are two things that are weapons, what is considered conventional weapons and dual-use. And both should have been suspended according to the decision of the International Court of Justice concerning Israel in the Nicaragua v. Germany case.

Meanwhile, there are two things: there is the transfer of weapons directly to Israel, and this includes aircraft, materials to compose the drones, because Israel doesn’t produce anything on its own, it requires components — artillery shells, for example, cannon ammunition, rifles, anti-tank missiles, bombs.

So these are all things that have been provided primarily by the United States. Germany, which is the second largest arms exporter to Israel has supplied a range of weapons from frigates to torpedoes.

And also, and then there is Italy, which has also provided spare parts for bombs and airplanes and the United Kingdom, who has played a key role in providing intelligence. And there is also the question of the UN. Not everything is easy to track because the United States have traveled … the United States are the prime provider of weapons, also because they are the assembler of the F-35 programme.

So there are 17 or 19 countries which cooperate and all of them say, well, you know, I mean, yes, I know that the F-35 is used in Israel, by Israel, but I only contribute to a small part. I only contribute to the wheels. I only contribute to the wings. I only provide these hooks or this engine.

Well, everything is assembled in the US and then sold or transferred or gifted to Israel. And it’s extremely problematic because this is why I say it’s a collective crime, because no one can assume the responsibility on their own but eventually all together they contribute to make this genocide implicating so many countries.

CHRIS HEDGES: So Francesca, Israel is the ninth largest arms exporter in the world. To what extent do those relationships have? I mean, I think one of the largest purchasers of Israeli drones is India. We’ve seen India shift its position vis-a-vis Palestine.

Historically, it’s always stood with the Palestinian people. That’s no longer true under [Narendra] Modi. To what extent do those ties affect the response by the 63 some states that you write about for collaborating with the genocide.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: So let me first expand on this. Weapon and military technology sale is a core component of Israel’s economy. And since 2024, it has constituted one third of Israeli exports. And of course, there are two elements connected to this, is that these exports enhances Israel’s manufacturing capacity, but also horribly worsens the life of the Palestinians because Israeli military technology is tested on the Palestinians under occupation or other people under other Israeli related military activities.

Now, the fact that the arms export has increased of nearly 20 percent during the genocide, doubling toward Europe. And only the trade with Europe accounts for over 50 percent of Israeli military sales, selling to so many other countries, including in the Global South, the Asia and Pacific states in the Asia-Pacific region account for 23 percent of the purchase, with India being probably the major. But also 12 percent of the weapons tested on the Palestinians are purchased by Arab countries under the Abraham Accords. So what does it tell us?

It explains what you were hinting at in the question, the fact that this is also reflected in the political shift toward Israel that has been recorded at the General Assembly level. If you see how some African countries and Asian countries, including India, are behaving vis-a-vis Israel, it’s 180 degrees turn compared to where they were in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

This is because on the one hand, Israel is embedded in the global economy, but also it’s a global economy that is veering toward ultra liberal, I mean, it’s following ultra-liberalist ideologies and therefore capital and wealth and accumulation of resources, including military power, comes first.

‘It’s very sad, but this is the reality . . . since the end of the Cold War that there has been an increasing globalisation of the system where the common denominator is force.’

It’s very sad, but this is the reality. And it’s important to know because this is a long, as I was hinting before, my sense is that this is a long term trajectory that didn’t start on October 7, 2023. I mean, probably since the end of the Cold War that there has been an increasing globalisation of the system where the common denominator is force.

I mean, there is this, not a common denominator, but the unifying factor for many is force, how the monopoly of force that comes with weapons, capital and algorithms. And yeah, this is where the world is going.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, we’ve seen these weapons systems which of course are tested. They’re sold as bad. say the term is battle tested without naming the Palestinians, but they are sold to Greece to hold back migrants coming from North Africa. They are used along the border in the United States with Mexico.

And it’s not just that these weapons are “battle tested” on the Palestinians and we haven’t even spoken about these huge surveillance systems, but the very methods of control, the way they’re used are exported through military advisors.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Of course, because in fact, the Israeli population is made almost entirely of soldiers. Of course, there are those who do not enlist in the army for religious reasons or because they are contentious objectors, they’re a tiny minority. But the majority of the people of Israelis go through the army.

And then many of them transfer their know-how or what they have been doing into their next career steps. So the fact that Israel, as I was documenting in my previous report, Israel’s startup economy has a huge dark side to the fact that it’s connected to the military industry and to the surveillance industry.

There is a significant body of Israeli citizens who are going around providing advice, intelligence and training in the Global South both to mercenaries and states proper like Morocco. So there is an Israelisation and Palestinianisation of the international relations or rather of the relations between individuals and states.

And I think the interesting thing, this is why I’m saying Palestine is such a revealer, it’s because, as you say, eventually these tools of control and securitisation have concentrated in the hands of those who are fortifying borders at the expense of refugees and migrants.

So it’s really clear what’s happening here. There are oligarchs who are getting richer and richer and more and more protected in their fortresses where the state is providing the fertile ground to have it, but it’s not states that are benefiting from this inequality, because the majority of the people within states, look at the US, but also in Europe, are not benefiting from anything, in fact.

They’re victims. This is why you equally exploit it. This is why I’m saying it’s another degree of suffering, of course, than the Palestinians. But every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, internally as well. I mean, with Sikh farmers who were protesting Modi were out on the roads, suddenly, over their heads were Israeli-made drones dropping tear gas canisters.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, exactly. Drones are one of the most exported devices from Israel’s technology and they are in use by Frontex to surveil the Mediterranean Sea, as you were saying, the US-Mexican border. But more and more, they’re getting into people’s lives.

Also look at the way certain technologies have been perfected across borders. I remember earlier this summer, this is very anecdotal, I’ve not done research on it, but I knew that we were seeing something quite and horribly revolutionary.

This year, this summer during the protests in Serbia, where students and ordinary citizens were taken to the streets against the government and have been protesting for one year now, people in Serbia. I saw the use of these sound weapons, oxygen-fed weapons.

So there are bombs that produce such a pain in the body who finds itself in the wave that it’s excruciating. And then of course people try to flee, but they also lose senses, et cetera. And I’ve seen this in Serbia.

And now I understand that it’s being used in Gaza as well, where the bomb doesn’t produce fire, it produces a movement of air that causes pain to the body and even to internal organs. It’s incredible. And these are weapons that have been perfected through testing here and there, and Serbia keeps on selling and buying military technology to and from Israel.

CHRIS HEDGES: I just want to close with, I mean, I think your reports, the last two reports in particular, show the complete failure on the part of governments as well as corporations to respond legally in terms of their legal obligations to the genocide. What do we do now? What must be done to quote Lenin?

How, because this, as you have pointed out repeatedly, really presages the complete breakdown of the rule of law. What as citizens must we do?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I think that we have passed the alarm area. I mean, we are really in a critical place and I sense it because instead of correcting itself, the system led by governments is accentuating its authoritarian traits. Think of the repressive measures that the UK government is taking against protesters, against civil society, against journalists standing in solidarity with Palestine, for justice in Palestine.

In France and in Italy at the same time, conferences academic freedom is shrinking and in the same days, conferences of reputable historians and military and legal experts have been cancelled owing to the pressure of the pro-genocide groups, pro-Israel groups in their respective countries. People, including in Germany, are being persecuted, including academics, for their own exercise of free speech.

This tells me that there is very little pretense that Western states, so-called liberal democracies, the most attached to this idea of democracy are ready to defend for real. So in this sense, it’s up to us citizens to be vigilant and to make sure that we do not buy products connected or services connected to the legality of the occupation, the apartheid and the genocide.

And there are various organisations that collect lists of companies and entities, including universities that are connected to this unlawful endeavor. BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] is one, don’t buy into the occupation who profits profundo, but also students associations.

‘There is a need to speak about Palestine, to make choices about Palestine and not because everything needs to revolve around Palestine, but because Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go is clearly evident in this.’

And this is something that has taught me, it’s very touching because it’s really the work of students, faculty members and staff that has mapped what each university does. And I think it gives the possibility to act, everyone in our own domain. Then of course there is a need to speak about Palestine, to make choices about Palestine and not because everything needs to revolve around Palestine, but because Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go is clearly evident in this.

But also we need to make sure that businesses divest. Either through our purchase power, people have to step away and stop using platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com. I know that Amazon is very convenient, but guys, we might also return to buy books in libraries, ordering books through libraries.

Of course, not all of us can, but many do, many can. On the way to work, buy a book in a library, order a book in a bookstore. We need to reduce our reliance on the tools that have been used, that have been perfected through the slaughter of the Palestinians. And of course, make government accountable. There are lawyers, associations, and jurists who are taking government officials to court, businesses to court. But again, I do not think that there is one strategy that is going to be the winning one.

It’s the plurality of actions from a plurality of actors that is going to produce results and slow down the genocide and then help dismantle the occupation and the apartheid. It’s a long trajectory and the fight has just started.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you, Francesca, and I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz