COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— 💧Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Middle East is in flames. Britain is being dragged into an illegal war, the aims of which are entirely unclear, reports Richard Sanders of Double Down News.

“It’s a war of choice, and the man who chose it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, yet again, is the West dancing to Israel’s tune?

“I’ve made a number of videos exposing Israeli crimes. This one is different. It’s directed at conservatives and people generally who support the state of Israel.

“I believe our indulgence of Israel is not just morally wrong. It’s against the interests of the US and the UK and ultimately against the interests of Israel itself.

“It is leading us all to disaster. Palestine is the place you come thundering, crashing into the buffers, the limits of the Western liberal moral imagination.

“The tragedy and complexity of Israel is that it’s both a product of the most unspeakable racism and a cause of it. Zionism was born from the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, from a desire for a safe haven, a territory where Jews would for once be the hosts and not the eternal guests.

“It was framed as a return to a historic biblical homeland. and for its supporters. These two factors give it an entirely different complexion morally from other enterprises where predominantly European populations have settled far-flung parts of the world.

Dispossession and subjugation
“There’s no doubt that the Zionist dream has enormous emotional power. The problem, of course, is the other side of the equation, the people. It was inflicted upon the Palestinians whose experience of dispossession and subjugation was no different from that of countless other peoples subjected to European colonialism.

“In fact, arguably, it’s been considerably worse than many, precisely because of the licence and indulgence granted to the Israeli state.

“Let’s lay out the bold, indisputable facts. In 1948, more than 80 percent of the Palestinian population of what became Israel fled their homes. Now, if you want to believe this was not an act of deliberate ethnic cleansing, fine.

“What’s undeniable is that they were never allowed to return. In 1947, they were there. In 1949, they were not. The granting of the vote to that small fragment of the Palestinian population that remained provided a democratic fig leaf for the new state, one that was blown away once the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967.

The End of Israel                                     Documentary: Double Down News

“There Palestinians have no right to vote for the political entity, the state of Israel that controls their lives. Jewish settlers, on the other hand, occupying the same territory do.

“Even in East Jerusalem, which as far as the Israeli government is concerned has been formally annexed to Israel, Palestinians cannot vote. Political rights depend upon ethnicity. That is not democracy.

“Israel is and has always been a state whose defining feature is that it’s structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. What else does the term a Jewish state mean?

‘Elephant in the room’
“This is the elephant in the room. the simple, blindingly obvious, undeniable fact that the Western political media class has decided that we must never mention or acknowledge, despite the fact that all of the world’s leading human rights organisations, including the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

“Now scour the history of the modern world. No people has ever resigned itself to being second class citizens in their own country. Spend just 10 minutes at a checkpoint in the West Bank and you get it.

“The disfiguring dehumanisation, the humiliation of elderly men and women forced to stand in the sun for hours waiting for 18-year-olds to search them.

“The brutalisation of young men in particular, the daily control of rage that is the lot of every Palestinian. It is simply emotionally, psychologically intolerable.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report.     Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Fiji’s human rights watchdog has warned that the country’s pro-Israel foreign policy and diplomatic engagement works against its international obligations and could be enabling “genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity” in Gaza.

The Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission (FHRADC) released a statement on Tuesday in response to the Fiji government announcing plans to establish a resident embassy for Israel in Suva.

The FHRADC said that the announcement “raises important questions” and is calling on the government to uphold its human rights obligations “in all aspects” of its diplomacy.

As a state party to the Genocide Convention, Fiji is bound by international human rights law and international humanitarian law, the FHRADC said.

It added under the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the country “is obligated to support international efforts to prevent genocide” and ensure those responsible for such crimes are held responsible.

“This includes ensuring that Fiji’s foreign policy and diplomatic relations do not assist, enable, or legitimise conduct by parties or states involved in serious violations of international law.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 said that claims are “plausible” that the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under the Genocide Convention are being “violated . . .  by Israel’s large-scale military operation in Gaza” a position firmly rejected by Israel, which has maintained its actions are necessary for self defence against Hamas.

“The duty to prevent genocide is a jus cogens obligation, a non-derogable principle of international law,” FHRADC commissioner Alefina Vuki said.

Legal responsibility
She said according to international law every state had “the legal responsibility to intervene and prevent the intentional or deliberate destruction of a group of people”, suggesting Fiji had failed to do this.

“No government can ever justify or excuse its failure to carry out this responsibility. States must ensure diplomatic relations that uphold, rather than undermine the duty to prevent genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity,” she said.

Fiji opened its permanent diplomatic post in Jerusalem in September last year.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said at the time that the opening of Fiji’s embassy in Jerusalem “reflects our desire to build bridges — not walls — between nations, cultures, and peoples”.

Fiji is one of a handful of countries to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv, which is controversial.

Diplomatic actions
According to FHRADC, the Fiji government has the “sovereign prerogative to determine bilateral relations”.

However, Vuki said Fiji must ensure that its “diplomatic actions do not violate international norms relating to occupation, self-determination, and the protection of civilian populations”.

“Any strengthening of bilateral relations must be carefully balanced against Fiji’s responsibilities as a member of the international community,” she said.

The FHRADC has offered to provide “independent and technical advice” to support the Fijian government with its foreign policy to keep it aligned to its international human rights commitments.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Both my son Franz and I have been arrested, separately, for suspected thought crimes relating to Palestine and Israel.

We dared to display in public the words, “from the river to the sea”, using or displaying such words now being illegal in Queensland.

I say “thought crimes” because neither of our displays mentioned Palestine or Israel. So obviously they can only conclude we must have been illegally thinking the “wrong thoughts” about this conflict.

For nearly two years a group of us have been gathering weekly outside the office of Boeing in Brisbane, to draw attention to their terrorist activity in making missiles, fighter jets, attack helicopters and other weapons of mass destruction, used in present conflicts, especially the Gaza genocide.

When the Queensland government made it illegal to use the words “From the River to the Sea” in public, I went to the usual Wednesday action with a large placard saying “From the River to the Sea, Brisbane will be Free — of Boeing”.

Eventually police came and arrested me. My arresting officer asked me what the words on the banner meant. I gave him a good rave about Boeing and why we wanted them nowhere in Brisbane, from the river to the sea.

He took a while trying to get me to “incriminate” myself by making reference to Palestine etc. Eventually, after exposing the farcical nature of the law, I was happy do so.

Interrogated by ‘anti-terrorism squad’
He took me to the watchhouse where I was interrogated about my thought crimes by the “Anti-terrorism squad” (that is not a joke by the way).

This gave me a good chance to explain why we wanted Boeing out of Brisbane, and a lot more — about free speech, terrorism, nonviolence, etc. After an hour and a half they let me go.

I go to court on the April 14.

Now, 42 hours later at 7am, the same ever vigilant anti-terrorism squad raided Dorothy Day house of hospitality, with a team of eight officers.

Franz immediately confessed to his thought crimes, and actual crimes of displaying a banner on the side of the house reading, “From the river to the sea — come and get us [Premier] Crisafulli”.

Now I guess it is an exaggeration to call this elite squad “ever vigilant”, as the banner had been on the wall of the house for over a week. And, being on a main road and very visible from said road, there is no telling how many innocent citizens may have been infected by the thought crimes emanating from it.

Once at Dorothy Day house, the police searched all the rooms for? Hmm, illegal thinking maybe.

Phone and laptop confiscated
Anyhow, as I said, Franz broke down and confessed, so they eventually left everyone else alone. They confiscated Franz’s phone and laptop — probably the main reason for the raid.

They also took the banner and the very paints used to commit the crime. I asked Franz if they took the paper placed under the banner during the painting process. But they did not.

Now, they could find out a lot of information from Franz’s phone and laptop. They could find out who were being infected by these thought crimes, and how far they were spreading.

Perhaps they could investigate the words of the songs on Franz’s laptop sung by his church choir, to see if there was anything about rivers or seas. Perhaps, with names and phone numbers of his fellow choir members they could instigate more raids. (I know for a fact some choir members weren’t even born in Australia!)

In the end the police told Franz they would let him know next Tuesday, if or what he would be charged with.

You can read the ABC news report of the raid of Dorothy Day house here. You can also see him interviewed on Brisbane’s Channel Ten news on March 20 (if you can find it — ABC Tiktok video removed).

So there you have it. Another week in the state’s never ending battle against terrorism. Or is it a battle against a few pathetic people who believe they are the ones resisting terrorism?

Is it terrorism to say “from the river to the sea”, or is it terrorism to slaughter tens of thousands of innocents with the help of Boeing, Pine Gap and the Australian government? You decide.

Jim Dowling is a human rights, free speech and anti-war activist from Brisbane, Australia.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, was assassinated in the opening stages of the US-Israeli war against Iran, I didn’t mourn.

Khamenei was not someone who deserved to be mourned notwithstanding my contempt for the increasing use of assassination by aggressor nations; in this case the United States and Israel.

Having said this, had either US President Donald Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu been assassinated I would have “not mourned” them even more.

On the other hand, along with thousands of residents in the Iranian city of Minab a mass funeral, I did privately mourn for the at least 165 schoolgirls and staff killed in the opening hours of the US-Israeli strikes when one of their missiles hit a girls’ elementary school.

Two words distinguish Iran from United States and Israel
Understanding what distinguishes Iran from both the United States and Israel begins with two uncomplimentary words — repression and genocide.

Repression is the action of subduing someone or something by force. This can include suppressing thoughts or desires in people so that they remain unconscious. Iran’s theocratic political system is unquestionably repressive.

If, in some way, you question the regime or the governing values enough there is a high risk of repression. Keep your head down and you are likely to be safe. If not then you are likely to be in danger.

In contrast, genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Genocide a characteristic of Israel and US government policies
Israel’s policy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland now incorporates genocide as the main means of achieving this objective, particularly in Gaza which is there for all to observe.

While Israel is the practitioner of genocide in Gaza, the United States is the enabler and main funder. This is in terms of both funding weapons supplies and political support for Israel’s brutal military occupation of this small remaining piece of Palestinian land.

Without this US support there would be no genocide in Gaza; like the West Bank, just ongoing repression.

While it is right to condemn repressive actions by the Iranian government, it is mindbogglingly immoral for these genocide supporting governments to make any judgment call on Iran, let alone declare war on the country.

Understanding the Islamic Republic
As discussed above, the Islamic Republic is a repressive government towards those who oppose it in some public way. But repression is not its only characteristic.

Iran is a highly diverse nation. While 61 percent of its population are Persian, there are more than 20 ethnic groups in total. Major minority groups include Azeris (16-24 percent), Kurds (7-10 percent), Lurs (2-6 percent), Baloch (2 percent), Arabs (1-3 percent) and Turkmens (2 percent).

As many as 99 percent of Iranians in the Republic are Muslim, predominantly Shia (90-95 percent) with the remainder comprising the Sunni minority.

While the Islamic Republic state is dominated by Shia Islam, there are recognised minority religions which are granted reserved parliamentary seats. These include Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.

An exception is the Baháʼí faith, a world religion was founded in the 19th century mainly in Iran. It may be the second largest non-Muslim religion in the country.

Many Iranian Baháʼí have a previous Muslim background and are subjected to persecution. However, this is an inherited persecution that goes back to the mid-19th century.

Iran is not repressive towards minority ethnic groups because of their ethnicity. Azeris, for example, are not repressed because they are Azeris; only if they “put their heads above the barricades” so to speak.

The same can be said for Sunni Muslims and non-Muslim religions, except for Baháʼí whose repression is historical, predating the Islamic Republic by over a century.

But if the Republic is only seen as despotic, then an entire historical legacy explaining so much more than this is lost.

Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilisations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to the 5th century BC.

In spite of invasions by foreign powers, such as the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, the Iranian national identity was repeatedly asserted and preserved despite several changes in its dynastic empires.

The Pahlavi dynasty legacy
In 1925, Reza Khan established the Pahlavi (and last) dynasty. Following a military coup he became the new dynasty’s first Shah. In 1941, however, he was overthrown with his son Mohammad-Reza  becoming the second and last Pahlavi Shah.

Initially there were hopes of a constitutional monarchy. However, in 1951. Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq got sufficient parliamentary support to nationalise the British-owned oil industry.

In response, Mosaddeq was briefly removed from power in 1952. But, due to a popular uprising in support of him, he was quickly but reluctantly reappointed by the Shah. This enabled Mosaddeq to briefly exile the Shah in 1953 after surviving a subsequent failed military coup.

However, in August 1953, Mosaddeq was deposed by a successful US-supported military coup that was also actively supported by Britain.

The Shah then returned to power ruling Iran as a brutal autocracy with strong US support until the 1979 revolution and the Shah’s final overthrow.

Oil was central to the Shah’s policies. His government entered into agreement with an international consortium of foreign companies which ran the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years, splitting profits 50-50 with Iran. However, Iran was not allowed to audit the companies’ accounts or have members on their board of directors.

The Iran that the Islamic Republic inherited in 1979, on the one hand, had never been colonised; unlike much of Africa and Asia, for example. It had a proud national identity. On the other hand, under the Pahlavi dynasty, particularly in its last 25 years. it had become subservient to the United States and the oil companies.

The Shah’s autocratic regime was overthrown by a powerful mass popular movement. Among the forefront of this unstoppable movement were those that came to lead the new Islamic Republic.

The republic was the consequence of this popular will. While today there is strong internal Iranian opposition to the leadership of the Republic, there is also strong internal support for it

In 1979, Iran’s political system had changed from an autocracy to a theocracy. But there was more to it than this.

The hated legacy, under the last Shah, of the interests of Iranians being subservient to that of US imperialism, was powerful. In no small part this shaped the Islamic Republic’s politics. It was reinforced by US support for Iraq’s protected war against Iran in the 1980s.

Further, whereas the Shah held openly expressed racist views on Arabs, the republic saw it differently.

In particular, it intuitively supported Palestinian self-determination which put it at odds with Zionist Israel.

Iran also empathised with countries with quite different political systems, such as secular Cuba, that had been subjected to continuing US hostility and shared Iran’s antipathy towards US imperialism and supported for Palestine.

While your enemy’s enemy may not be your friend, nevertheless there may be principled shared interests.

Understanding the United States and its imperialism
Imperialism put simply is a policy of extending a powerful country’s economic power, exploitation of, and influence over other countries. Historically this has been through colonisation, invariably by the use of military force.

Historically the biggest imperialist power was the British Empire which, by the early 20^th century, included much of Africa and Asia (and beyond).

The United States is now the world’s strongest imperialist power.

The United States began as an imperialist power in the early 20th century, particularly in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Since the Second World War it has become, by far, the biggest imperial power reinforced by the most powerful military.

Put simply, capitalism is an economic system relentlessly driven by the maximisation of wealth accumulation. Imperialism is the highest and most extensive form of capitalism.

In this context, particularly since 1953, Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was a complicit pawn willingly exploited by US imperialism.

This ended in 1979 by the popular will that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic; something US imperialism has never forgiven and the republic has never forgotten.

In other words, the US-Islamic Republic relationship is a recipe for continuous conflict and has reached its highest point with the current US-Israel initiated war.

False confusing justifications for the US-Israel war
The failure of the United States (and Israel) to acknowledge the above discussed escalating conflict to the point of outright war between them and the Islamic Republic has led to their muddled and changing false justifications for the war.

The truth of the matter is that the war centres on the republic’s firm opposition to US imperialism and support for Palestinian self-determination. The use of deceitful justifications is a public relations attempt to fudge this truth.

One false argument is that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. However, in the short war last June, the US and Israel boasted that they destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.

What is the lie — what they said then or what they now say? More likely it is both. After all Israel is the only country possessing nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Further, unlike Iran, it isn’t a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In fact, there is only one nuclear power in Middle East — Israel. But while Israel is ignored, Iran hypocritically is the focus of deceitful accusations and intense pressure, and now war.

Another false justification is that the US, in particular, wants to save Iranian lives by ending the repression. It is barely worth the time rejecting this claim from supporters and practitioners of genocide.

Further their bombing has already killed more than 1400 Iranians (a reported 30 percent are children) and rising. More than 17,000 have been injured including over 1000 children. Hypocrisy at its peak.

A related occasional justification is restoring democracy. But the Islamic Republic is more democratic than the outright autocracy it replaced and no less democratic than the ruthless US ally Saudi Arabia; admittedly they are both low thresholds.

Perhaps the most damming indictment of the claimed justifications is the recent resignation of Donald Trump’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent.

Explaining this dramatic decision, Kent referred to his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran. These included that, despite Trump’s claims, there was no imminent threat from Iran and that the US was “manipulated” by Israel.

Consequently Kent advised that he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war against Iran. Both optimistically and bravely he urged the President to end it.

In fact, Trump’s disingenuousness and underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance and fightback have made a ceasefire improbable for some time.

Iran already agreed to a ceasefire in June. But the US and Israel broke it even though diplomacy discussions were underway.

US, Israel can’t be trusted
Why would Iran agree to another ceasefire just to give the US and Israel enough time to regroup and start another war against a combative but weakened Iran.

Iran now believes that the US and Israel can’t be trusted and it would be better to try to further weaken them instead. After all, what does Iran have to lose!

Words like reaping and sowing come to mind!

Since the mid-1980s successful New Zealand governments have had an independent foreign policy.

However, especially under the current government, we have drifted back towards being aligned with our former position of being a United States lapdog.

This observable drift was further escalated by the government’s response through Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (in an embarrassingly mashed way) and Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

In summary, while maintaining a loud silence on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran, they condemned Iran’s own bombing response in those neighbouring Arab countries with US military bases.

These US bases would be akin to Iran having its own military bases in Canada and/or Mexico (perhaps Cuba; just saying).

There has been considered media coverage of the government’s response to the war beginning with Bryce Edwards’ Democracy Briefing (March 1): How should NZ respond to the US bombing Iran.

Christopher Luxon fumbles and flounders in toe-cringingly style  

Edwards was followed by two Sam Sachdeva Newsroom articles (March 2 and 3): Trump poses headache for NZ and Luxon’s fumbling, floundering response.

To complete this considered coverage was international relations expert Professor Robert Patman, also in Newsroom (March 3): Risky Iran attack gamble.

However, it took former Prime Minister Helen Clark to demonstrate the type of political leadership we deserved to have (having herself demonstrated this over the disastrous US-led war in Iraq nearly two decades ago).

Her uncompromising criticism of the government’s response included calling it a “disgrace” (March 1): Government response a disgrace.

While Clark didn’t use the term “lapdog” to describe the government’s position, if she had she would have been right.

Repressed by Iranian government – but terrified of regime collapse
The insights of Iranians critical of the Islamic Republic’s repressive nature but even more critical of the US-Israel bombing of Iran are invaluable.

Below is an extract from a Facebook post (March 2) from an Iranian man’s YouTube channel. Consistent with the theme of my comments above, this Iranian expresses the paradox Iranians involuntarily now find themselves in — caught between an internal repressive regime and external narcissistic warmongers.

In his words:

“As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political — it’s existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions.

“Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore — because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed.

“But here’s the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse — because we’ve watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation.

“So no, we don’t trust the US or Israel. Not because we support our regime — but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘”liberated” nations in the Middle East.

“Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation — they’re collapse.

“A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned — too well — what happens when superpowers decide to “help”.

“In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more.”

The final word — and what a word it is
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American author most known for her internationally acclaimed debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. It has been translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries.

In her own courageous and insightful words:

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves.

Nothing you can tell be about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.

That does not mean that I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.

If your vision of liberation is only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.

These words are more than eloquence; more than heart rendering. They convert complexity into simplicity; they are powerful; they speak truth to power.

They deserve to be the last word in this article.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The United States and Fiji have filed separate declarations of intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging the country is committing genocide in Gaza.

While the US explicitly rejects the allegation that Israel is committing genocide, Fiji raises issues about how the 1948 Genocide Convention should be interpreted.

The 34-page Fiji declaration was filed on March 12 and is signed by Ambassador Ilaitia Tamata, Fiji’s Permanent Representative of Fiji to the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, reports The Fiji Times.

In the declaration, Fiji said it was exercising its right under Article 63(2) of the ICJ Statute to intervene as a party to the Convention, arguing that the case raises important questions about how it should be interpreted.

The filing confirms that Fiji has appointed its Permanent Representative to Israel, Ambassador Filipo Tarakinikini, as agent for the proceedings.

The Fiji filing was made alongside separate interventions by Namibia and Hungary, according to a press release issued by the court on Friday, reports Middle East Eye.

All four states submitted declarations under Article 63 of the ICJ statute, which allows countries that are parties to a treaty under dispute to intervene in order to present their interpretation of that treaty.

Iceland, Netherlands also file
Earlier on Thursday, Iceland and the Netherlands also filed declarations under Article 63.

South Africa filed the case in December 2023, accusing Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention through its military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of  October 7 that year.

Pretoria argues that Israel’s conduct — including mass killings, destruction of infrastructure and the imposition of conditions of life threatening the survival of Palestinians in Gaza — amounts to genocide.

Israel denies the accusation and claims its war is justified by considerations of self-defence.

The US submission on Thursday stands out among most interventions for directly defending Israel against the accusation brought by South Africa. Taking sides in a case is highly unconventional under Article 63 submissions.

“It’s very unusual for an intervening state (US) to use language like that,” explained Professor Gerhard Kemp, a scholar of international law.

“States normally stick to the legal issues, which can even be helpful for both sides. But terms like ‘false’ or ‘wrong’ don’t really move the needle,” he told Middle East Eye.

“They are probably aimed at a different audience.”

US argues genocide claim ‘false’
In its declaration, Washington argues that allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza are “false” and urges the court to apply a strict legal threshold when determining genocidal intent.

It says, uncontroversially, that genocide can only be established where there is clear proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Whatever happened to South Africa’s case at the ICJ?

That intent should only be inferred when it is the only reasonable explanation for the conduct in question, it says.

The submission argues that the ICJ must be fully convinced before determining an act is genocide, due to the exceptional gravity of the crime. It also says civilian casualties and destruction during armed conflict do not by themselves prove genocidal intent.

“The United States submits that the Court should maintain its standard for inferring intent. Lowering the standard risks broadening the application of the term ‘genocide’ such that it no longer carries its original weight and meaning, and invites attempts to misuse the Genocide Convention as a gateway for bringing extraneous disputes before the Court,” the US claimed.

Hungary and Fiji’s submissions similarly advance legal arguments that align closely with Israel’s position in the case.

Narrow interpretation
Hungary’s declaration calls for a narrow interpretation of genocide and emphasises that civilian casualties and destruction during armed conflict do not in themselves demonstrate genocidal intent.

Fiji’s intervention likewise urges the court to apply an extremely high evidentiary threshold for genocide, and cautions against relying heavily on reports by international organisations or non-governmental groups when assessing allegations.

By contrast, Namibia’s declaration focuses on a broader interpretation of the Genocide Convention and emphasises how genocidal intent may be inferred from patterns of conduct and cumulative evidence.

Namibia argues that acts such as the denial of humanitarian aid, repeated displacement and deprivation of basic necessities could fall within the Convention’s prohibition on deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a protected group.

Its submission also stresses that genocide can be committed through omissions, including a refusal to allow or facilitate life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians under a state’s control.

Third-state interventions
The new filings add to a rapidly expanding list of states seeking to intervene in the proceedings.

Since April 2024, similar interventions have been submitted by Colombia, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Turkey, Chile, the Maldives, Bolivia, Ireland, Cuba, Belize, Brazil, the Comoros, Belgium and Paraguay in support of the South African argument.

Palestine and Belize have also sought to intervene under Article 62 of the court’s statute, which allows states to apply to participate in proceedings if they believe they have a legal interest that could be affected by the court’s decision.

Under Article 63, intervening states do not become parties to the dispute. Instead, they are permitted to present their interpretation of the treaty at issue — in this case the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The interpretation adopted by the court in its eventual judgment will also be binding on those states.

The case has become one of the most closely watched disputes ever heard by the ICJ and has drawn an unusually large number of third-state interventions, which have reached 22.

The court has already ordered Israel in legally binding provisional measures to take steps to prevent acts that could violate the Genocide Convention and to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Israel ignores court orders
Israel has repeatedly ignored the orders.

A final ruling on whether Israel has breached the Convention is expected in 2028. But it could take longer, depending on the length of hearings and the two parties’ adherence to deadlines.

On Thursday, Israel was scheduled to submit its counter-memorial, or arguments in response to South Africa’s accusations, after several deadline extensions by the court.

The court has yet to announce that Israel has filed its evidence, however.

During its devastating onslaught, Israel has so far killed more than 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children. It has also destroyed most of the enclave’s homes, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, rendering it largely uninhabitable for its 2.3 million civilians.

A UN commission of inquiry concluded last September that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

The UN report’s authors, including legal experts Navi Pillay and Chris Sidoti, told Middle East Eye that the report used evidence and a similar methodology in its analysis to that which will be used by the ICJ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Ramzy Baroud

• Israel’s military strategy has long relied on psychological dominance and deterrence built on overwhelming violence.
• Massacres during the Nakba helped establish fear as a strategic tool to weaken Palestinian resistance.
• Doctrines such as the Dahiya Doctrine and “mowing the grass” reinforced Israel’s image of invincibility.
• The Gaza genocide and regional escalation have severely weakened Israel’s psychological deterrence.
• The war on Iran may accelerate the collapse of Israel’s most important strategic asset: fear.

READ MORE: Hormuz fears spike; Israel kills 19 in Lebanon; Gulf states face Iran raids

Wars are rarely fought only on battlefields. They are also fought in the minds of societies, in the perception of power and vulnerability, and in the political imagination of entire regions.

Israel understood this principle early in its history, and psychological dominance became a central component of its military doctrine.

From the earliest years of the Zionist project, the idea that power must appear overwhelming was openly articulated. In 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that Zionism would only succeed once the indigenous population became convinced that resistance was hopeless.

Only when Palestinians realised they could not defeat the Zionist project, he argued, would they accept its permanence.

The Nakba reflected the logic
The events surrounding the Nakba of 1947–48 reflected this logic. Between 800,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes, as hundreds of villages were destroyed or depopulated.

The expulsions occurred through a combination of direct military assault, forced displacement, and the collapse of Palestinian society under war.

Massacres played a crucial role in spreading fear. The killings at Deir Yassin in April 1948, in which more than 100 civilians were killed by Zionist militias, quickly reverberated across Palestine. But Deir Yassin was only one among many massacres that occurred during that period.

Killings in places such as Lydda, Tantura, Safsaf, and numerous other villages contributed to a climate of terror that accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian communities.

The psychological impact of these events was enormous. News of massacres spread from village to village, convincing many Palestinians that remaining in their homes meant risking annihilation.

The lesson was clear: war could function not only as a tool of conquest but as an instrument of psychological domination.

The Doctrine of Fear
Over time, this approach evolved into a broader strategic culture that emphasised deterrence through overwhelming violence. Israel’s wars were designed not only to defeat enemies militarily but to reinforce a perception that resistance against Israel would always end in devastating consequences.

Israeli leaders have frequently expressed this philosophy openly. In the early years of the state, Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most influential military figures, famously declared that Israelis must be prepared to live by the sword.

The remark captured the belief that Israel’s survival depended on constant readiness to use force and on maintaining a reputation for military ruthlessness.

Decades later, Israeli leaders continued to frame the country’s identity in similar terms. In the mid-2000s, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel as a “villa in the jungle,” a phrase that reflected a worldview in which Israel saw itself as a fortified island of civilisation surrounded by hostile and supposedly barbaric surroundings.

This perception reinforced the idea that Israel must always project overwhelming strength. Any sign of weakness, according to this logic, would invite attack.

The doctrine took more concrete form in the early 21st century. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli strategists articulated what later became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed during the conflict.

The doctrine advocated massive and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure associated with resistance movements.

The purpose was not only to destroy military targets but to inflict such devastation that entire societies would be deterred from supporting resistance groups.

A similar philosophy guided Israel’s repeated wars on Gaza. Israeli strategists began referring to these periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass.” The phrase suggested that Palestinian resistance could never be permanently eliminated but could be periodically weakened through short and devastating military operations designed to restore Israeli deterrence.

For decades, this strategy appeared to work. Israel’s military superiority, combined with unwavering American support, reinforced an image of invincibility that shaped political calculations across the Middle East.

But psychological dominance depends on belief, and belief can erode.

Gaza and the crisis of deterrence
The first major rupture in Israel’s aura of invincibility occurred in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after years of occupation and sustained resistance from Hezbollah. Across the Arab world, the withdrawal was widely interpreted as the first time Israel had been forced to retreat under military pressure.

Israel attempted to restore its dominance in the 2006 Lebanon war, but the outcome again challenged the image of decisive Israeli military superiority. Despite massive bombardment and ground operations, Hezbollah remained intact and continued to launch rockets until the final days of the conflict.

Yet the most profound blow to Israel’s psychological doctrine occurred decades later with the events surrounding October 7 and the war that followed.

Israel’s response to October 7 was the devastating Gaza genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or wounded, and nearly the entire Strip was destroyed,

The scale of violence was unprecedented even by the standards of previous Israeli wars on Gaza. Yet the objective was not merely military retaliation or collective punishment. It was also an attempt to restore the psychological balance that Israel believed had been shattered.

This logic had been expressed years earlier by Israeli leaders. During Israel’s earlier war on Gaza in 2008–09, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni openly suggested that Israel must respond in a way that demonstrates overwhelming force: When Israel is attacked, “it responds by going wild — and this is a good thing”.

In other words, war itself functioned as psychological theatre. But the Gaza genocide produced a very different outcome.

The myth begins to collapse
Modern wars unfold not only through military operations but through images that circulate instantly across the world. During the Gaza genocide, countless videos spread across social media showing Israeli armoured vehicles — including the once-feared Merkava tanks — being struck by relatively simple Palestinian anti-tank weapons.

For generations, Israel’s military power had been associated with technological invincibility. Suddenly, millions of viewers were witnessing something entirely different: a powerful army struggling against resistance fighters operating under siege conditions.

The war on Iran has intensified this psychological transformation.

For decades, Israeli society — and much of the region — believed that Israel’s territory was protected by an almost impenetrable defensive shield. The sight of waves of Iranian missiles striking targets inside Israel has therefore carried enormous symbolic weight.

These images challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in Middle Eastern politics: that Israel is militarily untouchable.

At the same time, other actors are exploiting this shift in perception. Hezbollah continues to maintain significant military capabilities despite repeated Israeli attacks. Palestinian resistance groups remain active despite the devastation of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Ansarallah in Yemen has disrupted shipping routes in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, demonstrating how even non-state actors can reshape strategic realities.

Existential frame
Israeli leaders themselves increasingly frame the current confrontation as existential. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described the war as a struggle for Israel’s survival, echoing earlier language about living by the sword.

Yet the deeper crisis may not be purely military. Israel remains one of the most heavily armed states in the world. But the aura of invincibility that once magnified that power is fading.

Once fear begins to disappear, restoring it becomes extraordinarily difficult.

And that may be the most important consequence of the war on Iran — not the destruction it produces, but the collapse of the psychological doctrine that sustained Israeli power for decades.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, Before the Flood, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include Our Vision for Liberation, My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). This article was first published by The Palestine Chronicle and is republished here with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in The Jerusalem Post today [February 2024]: “‘Antisemitic’ UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel.” We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back against the narrative that to support victims of Israel is to somehow be antisemitic.

Back in November 2023 as the Israeli exterminations of Palestinians were ramping up, I had the privilege to hear and speak to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

She visited Wellington as part of a long-scheduled visit to Australia and New Zealand and spoke to government ministers, relief organisations, journalists and packed halls of citizens who shared a sense of horror at what was playing out in Gaza.

Her speeches were filled with knowledge and forensic clarity, only matched by her decency and sense of humanity — which extended to great courtesy shown to a lone and agitated Israeli supporter at a meeting I attended.

In issuing the banning order, two Israeli ministers stated: “The era of Jews being silent is over. If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the special envoy.”

This is of course a vulgar lie told by ministers actively pursuing genocide. These two indeed aren’t silent: the scream, roar and boom of their shells, missiles and snipers’ bullets have shouted to the world how far the Zionist state has descended into the bowels of depravity.

The Jewish diaspora are anything but silent too — I have been immensely impressed by the courage and persistence of Jewish people worldwide who have shunned the fiction that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. I hear them loud and clear chanting with righteous indignation, “Not in our name!”

Francesca Albanese rejects false accusations            Video: Al Jazeera

Albanese’s riposte
What really steamed the ministers and momentarily deflected their attention from the slaughter of innocents was Albanese’s riposte to a casual lie by French President Emmanuel Macron: “October 7 was the largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”

Albanese responded, quite rightly, surely self-evidently: “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” She also stated her respect for the victims of the attack.

When courageous people are attacked by malign and powerful actors, it takes moral clarity and steely determination to walk into a sea of troubles and oppose the true villains. We all need to do that now — and not remain silent.

In the past couple of months Israel has, with the complicity of the white-dominated Western countries, tried to destroy UNRWA, the primary UN organisation providing relief to the Palestinian people, as they endure this genocidal siege.

Because of Israel’s powerful allies, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has kept mum and ignored the vast number of human rights atrocities committed by Israel. (Editor: The ICC subsequently issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity on 21 November 2024).

The Israelis have also hoicked and spat out their contempt for the International Court of Justice. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir commented, “Hague Smague — The ICJ has only proven what everyone already knew, that it is only seeking to prosecute the Jewish nation”.

Traducing the ICJ in this way is another attempt to gaslight us all. If we can do one decent thing it would be to get our governments to raise their voices in defence of the brutalised and besieged United Nations.

Stuck in settler colonial regime
Albanese told audiences on both sides of the Tasman: “When I speak of human rights, I speak of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are stuck in a settler colonial regime; this is what we have to solve together.”

She went on to say, “ I will always stand with the victim.”

There is good reason to try to silence Francesca Albanese. She is an authority in the detail of the dehumanisation inflicted on the Palestinians. She has seen the daily lack of proportionality, the discourse of genocide, the military and administrative controls, the deprivation of sanitary services, food and medicine, the surveillance technology, the casual killings, the financial chocking of a people, the way the Israelis are eating up Palestine inch by inch as the West looks the other way.

In short, more than most people she understands the structural system of oppression that is denying the Palestinians the right to exist as a people — culturally, economically, politically. She is a humanist and the exact opposite of an antisemite.

Albanese is one of legions of good people besieged by Israel and its allies. The racist white elites in Europe and the USA are more than happy to adopt a definition that conflates anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, using the recently-minted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a tool to silence (that word again) defenders of Palestinian rights.

When the right-wing of UK Labour set to work to oust Jeremy Corbyn, they succeeded, deploying an antisemitic slur. By the time the purge had finished, thousands of Labour progressives had been eliminated from the party membership, including large numbers of Jewish progressives.

The Labour Files, a must-see Al Jazeera documentary, based on a data dump of internal Labour files, uncovered the astonishing statistic that if you were a Jewish member of the UK Labour party you were seven times more likely to be expelled for antisemitism than a non-Jew.

Dustbin of dirty tricks
It’s high time we kick this ghastly trope, this despicable manoeuvre equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism into the dustbin of dirty tricks. Jewish people have suffered persecution for their faith over the centuries. It does their memory a huge disservice — not least because now it is quite clear that genocide is the highest stage of Zionism.

For the record: I have Jewish friends who I invite to read and critique my articles before publication. They are not self-hating Jews, they are not antisemitic, and nor am I. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish people worldwide who are appalled at what is being done in the name of Judaism.

Francesca Albanese said something else memorable that evening: “History is also made of watershed moments, when things change. Let’s make this one of them.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Scoop on 14 February 2024.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon

Many who witnessed the horrific police violence in Sydney’s CBS on the evening of February 9 say they had never seen anything like it before.

After a week of broadcasts of police “kettling”, viciously assaulting and pepper spraying peaceful protesters, the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) announced an independent investigation into the police conduct.

It will examine the policing operation as well as individual cases of unlawful policing.

One of the matters LECC should investigate is which politicians and senior police were involved in organising a massive increase in available police powers shortly before Herzog’s arrival, and what instructions were given to police on the ground about those powers.

The legislation that was used is a little-known act called the Major Events Act 2009, under which the NSW Minister for Tourism, Stephen Kamper, approved a new regulation which transformed Herzog’s visit into a “major event”.

Major Events Act
The objects of the Act are to bring “benefits” to spectators and enhance NSW’s reputation for holding events. The Act grants special powers to plan and regulate major events, including shutting off access to areas, searching people, and using “reasonable force” to compel citizens to comply with directions.

It relieves the state of most liability for damage caused in the exercise of these powers.

The powers have the potential to severely impact the exercise of citizens’ political rights, which is probably why the Act includes a section that a political protest must not be declared a major event. The Act is designed to cover events of a “sporting, cultural or other nature”.

These police powers triggered the lack of restraint witnessed last Monday. This does not mean that police actions were lawful, but that these were the powers under which they thought they were acting.

As one constable who was part of two lines blocking protesters from entering Town Hall Square said when questioned, “I heard something about a major event.”

Court challenge failed
The new regulation was announced on Saturday, February 7, just 48 hours before Herzog arrived.

The Palestinian Action Group (PAG), represented by Hanna Legal, had 24 hours to challenge the regulation.

PAG’s case was that the regulation was “unreasonable”, “disproportionate” and was created for an improper purpose of suppressing protests. Within an hour of NSW Supreme Court Justice Robertson Wright dismissing the challenge, NSW Police were already using the Major Event powers.

Before dismissing the Palestinian Action Group challenge on Monday, Justice Wright said that he found both sides’ arguments persuasive and that it was difficult to decide. But there was no hint of uncertainty in his judgment, which adopted almost all of the NSW government’s case.

The judge, who is near retirement, was described on his appointment as “a soldier, a historian and a gentleman”. His reasons were not published until two days later.

By that time, protesters had been violently flung to the ground while praying, and hundreds had been trapped and assaulted in Town Hall Square. People were blinded or choked with pepper spray. Others had been hospitalised with broken limbs or bleeding wounds.

Journalist and filmmaker James Ricketson, 76, had been injured in an assault by six officers and held in a cell for five hours without water before being released without charge. Videos of NSW police punching people had gone viral around the world.

Premier Chris Minns, Minister for Police Yasmin Catley and Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon defended the police actions as “reasonable” in the circumstances.

Not a political event?
Few would disagree that Herzog’s visit to Australia was the key political event of last week. Yet key to the judgment was Wright’s determination that the Herzog visit wasn’t.

Before he arrived, Herzog defined the purpose of his visit as rebuilding Australia’s relationship with Israel. He brought a top-level delegation from Jewish national institutions with him. This was in evidence before the judge.

Also in evidence was the fact that Chris Sidoti, who had sat on a UN Commission of Inquiry that found Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and that Herzog had incited it, had called for his arrest in Australia.

But Justice Wright found that politics was not a “defining” or “dominant” purpose for the visit and that it was a “cultural event”.

Herzog’s tour did have cultural aspects, such as a trip to Bondi to meet victims of the December massacre and visits to a synagogue and school. But Herzog and Zionist leaders also consistently stressed that an important purpose was to encourage the Australian government to stand with Israel.

The act has never been used for a foreign dignitary visit before or at such short notice.

Until last week, no one would have imagined that this law would be used to enable police violence to be unleashed on peaceful citizens protesting against a controversial visit by a foreign head of state.

But a bright idea by the NSW Police changed this.

Police concerns
As public opposition to Herzog’s visit grew and likewise support for a peaceful march from Town Hall to Parliament House during Herzog’s visit, senior police became concerned that the new anti-protest law passed on December 23 might not be sufficient to stop a big march in Sydney.

The ban over most of the CBD and the Eastern Suburbs was extended on February 2. On the same day, according to evidence tendered in last week’s court case, NSW police advised the government that the Major Events Act, with its extensive powers, could help avoid any risks to Herzog during the visit, advising “Police will be empowered to address any behaviour which poses a security threat or risk to the Presidential Visit.”

It is worth noting that nothing was ever planned at the protest related to a security threat or risk to Herzog. That was also in evidence.

The Cabinet office then prepared a minute setting out arguments, including ones for and against protests, for the Minister for Tourism Kamper to consider before making his decision. He was then told to sign but not date his recommendation, which was agreed to by the NSW Executive Council and gazetted on Friday, February 6.

In arguing that the regulation had been declared for the improper purpose of suppressing protests, PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham relied on the timing of events and material in the Cabinet minute. She also relied on Premier Chris Minns’ media conference on Saturday, February 7, in which he announced the “Major Event”.

Minns talked about 3500 police, fines of more than $5500 for disobeying directions and needing to prevent “the clash of mourners and protesters”. The latter seemed to be an idea of Minns’ own making because there was never any plan for protesters to be near mourners.

Suppressing protests to keep us safe
Justice Wright agreed that it would be improper for the purpose of the regulation to be the suppression of protests. But he found that protests could be suppressed if it was consistent with the goal of facilitating “safety and crowd control” and that there was no intention on the part of the Minister or any other relevant person to “adversely affect any protest or right to protest except to the extent reasonably appropriate to facilitate the conduct of the visit”.

He agreed that there was no evidence that the protest would interfere with the President, but found that it did not matter.

When PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham argued that the powers in the Regulation could lead to unjust treatment of citizens, even those who were not protesters, the judge appeared mildly exasperated.

He assumed that officers act “reasonably”.

That turned out to be wildly optimistic. If the purpose was to keep us all safe, it had the opposite effect.

PAG is considering an appeal. The event is over, but there are many potential cases against the police, and the Act restricts liability and compensation. It might also be possible to raise implications of the Major Events Act on “freedom of expression”, which was not attempted in the short one-day hearing.

A protest was held near Parliament on Friday evening with a speech delivered from her hospital bed by a woman who suffered broken vertebrae: “We will not be silent. He [MInns] needs to take full responsibility for this and the laws that were passed. The police who did it need to take responsibility.”

If the Major Events Act can validly be used in protests, it needs reform. Imagine if the UN decided to hold a major climate conference backed by fossil fuel interests in Sydney? The whole city could be shut down to protesters.

Accountability for this disaster must start at the very top and run through to the police on the ground.

Wendy Bacon is an Australian investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS movement and the Greens. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Protesters have condemned Indonesia’s plan to take part in the International Stabilisaton Force for Gaza as Israel continues to violate the ceasefire on an almost daily basis.

Carrying placards declaring “Break the siege”, “Gaza is not for sale”, “So, when will the Palestinians get to decide their own future” and crosses over the Israeli flag, protesters marched through streets in Jakarta dressed in keffiyeh and Palestinian flags.

Reports from Jakarta say that the country is preparing to send about 8000 troops to Gaza as part of the so-called peacekeeping force.

President Prabowo Subianto is due to join a meeting of what US President Donald Trump calls the “Board of Peace” in Washington on Thursday, reports Al Jazeera.

Indonesia’s involvement is controversial with Prabowo facing mounting criticism for the deployment plans.

Many critics are saying the plan could “sideline” the Palestinians and are accusing Subianto of “serving Israel’s goals”.

He has sought to reassure Muslim leaders that Indonesia would withdraw if Palestinian interests in self-determination are not advanced.

Indonesia peecekeeping force plan                       Video: Al Jazeera

Fiji is also facing controversy over reported plans that it may also be deploying troops for the ISF.

However, Fiji’s Defence Minister Pio Tikoduadua has clarified that Fiji has not yet made any commitment to participate, saying six days ago that the country has only received an invitation, reports Pacnews.

In a statement posted on social media, Tikoduadua stressed that no response had been given at this stage.

“Let me be clear: Fiji has only received an invitation to be part of the Gaza international stabilisation force. We have not yet responded,” he said.

Writing for Asia Pacific Report, former Fiji military officer Jim Sanday who commanded Fijian peacekeeping battalions in Lebanon and Sinai, was highly critical of the proposal, saying its United Nations reputation risked being damaged while being “excluded from decision-making”.

In 2025, Sanday led the National Security and Defence Review (NSDR) and co-authored the National Security Strategy that was approved by Cabinet in June 2025.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has dismissed recent accusations of anti-Semitism against her as “shameful and defamatory” in an interview on France 24. She has also warned that “the plan to fully destroy Gaza continues” and denounced Israeli measures in the West Bank, where “soldiers and settlers are spreading terror”. This is a flashback to her influential mid-2025 speech to the Hague Group in Bogotá declaring a global “revolutionary shift is underway”.

ADDRESS: By Francesca Albanese

I express my appreciation to the governments of Colombia and South Africa for convening this group, and to all members of the Hague Group, its founding members for their principled stance, and the others who are joining. May you keep going and so the strength and effectiveness of your concrete actions.

Thank you also to the Secretariat for its tireless work, and last but not least, the Palestinian experts — individuals and organisations who travelled to Bogotá from occupied Palestine, historical Palestine/Israel and other places of the diaspora/exile, to accompany this process, after providing HG with outstanding, evidence-based briefings.

And of course all of you who are here today.

It is important to be here today, in a moment that may prove historical indeed. There is hope that these two days will move all present to work together to take concrete measures to end the genocide in Gaza and, hopefully, end the erasure of what remains of Palestine — because this is the testing ground for a system where freedom, rights, and justice are made real for all.

This hope, that people like me hold tight, is a discipline. A discipline we all should have.

The occupied Palestinian territory today is a hellscape. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the last UN function — humanitarian aid — in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination.

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing advances through unlawful siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, widespread torture.

Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid — while the majority openly cheers and calls for more — remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom.

The atrocities of the past 21 months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people.

Against this backdrop, it is inconceivable that political forums, from Brussels to NY, are still debating recognition of the State of Palestine — not because it’s unimportant, but because for 35 years states have stalled, refused recognition, pretending to “invest in the PA” while abandoning the Palestinian people to Israel’s relentless, rapacious territorial ambitions and unspeakable crimes.

Francesca Albanese condemns “witch hunt” over doctored video about Israel   Video: Al Jazeera

Meanwhile, political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution: end permanent occupation, apartheid and today genocide. And it is not the law that has failed or faltered — it is political will that has abdicated.

But today, we are also witnessing a rupture. Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation. Even if this is not fully reflected into political agendas (yet), a revolutionary shift is underway — one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course.

And this is why I came to this meeting with a sense of being at a historical turning point — discursively and politically.

First, the narrative is shifting: away from Israel’s endlessly invoked “right to self-defence” and toward the long-denied Palestinian right to self-determination — systematically invisibilised, suppressed and delegitimised for decades.

The weaponisation of antisemitism applied to Palestinian words, and narratives, and the dehumanising use of the terrorism framework for Palestinian action (from armed resistance to the work of NGOs pursuing justice in international arena), has led to a global political paralysis that has been intentional.

It must be redressed. The time is now.

Second, and consequentially, we are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority it pains me that I have yet to see this include European countries. As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolise to many: a sodality of states preaching international law yet guided more by colonial mindset than principle, acting as vassals to the US empire, even as it drags us from war to war, misery to misery and when it comes to Palestine — from silence to complicity.

But the presence of European countries at this meeting shows that a different path is possible. To them I say: the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics. Please, stand with them.

Millions are watching — hoping — for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity, and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us.

Principled states must rise to this moment. It does not need to have a political allegiance, colour, political party flags or ideologies: it needs to be upheld by basic human values. Those which Israel has been mercilessly crushing for 21 months now.

Meanwhile I applaud the calling of this emergency conference in Bogotá to address the unrelenting devastation in Gaza. So it is on this, that focus must be directed.

The measures adopted in January by the Hague Group were symbolically powerful. It was the signal of the discursive and political shift needed. But they are the absolute bare minimum. I implore you to expand your commitment. And to turn that commitment into concrete actions, legislatively, judicially in each of your jurisdictions.

And to consider first and foremost, what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught. For Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, this question is existential. But it really is applicable to the humanity of all of us.

In this context my responsibility here is to recommend to you, uncompromisingly and dispassionately, the cure for the root cause. We are long past dealing with symptoms, the comfort zone of too many these days. And my words will show that what the Hague Group has committed to do and is considering expanding upon, is a small commitment towards what’s just and due based on your obligations under international law.

Obligations, not sympathy, not charity.

Each state immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel. Their military, strategic, political, diplomatic, economic, relations — both imports and exports — and to make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities and other goods, and services providers in the supply chains do the same. Treating the occupation as business as usual translates into supporting or providing aid or assistance to the unlawful presence of Israel in the OPT.

These ties must be terminated as a matter of urgency. I will have the opportunity to elaborate on the technicalities and implications in our further sessions but lets be clear, I mean cutting ties with Israel as a whole. Cutting ties only with the “components” of it in the OPT is not an option.

This is in line with the duty of all states stemming from the July 2024 Advisory Opinion which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s prolonged occupation, which it declared tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid . The General Assembly adopted that opinion.

These findings are more than sufficient for action. Further, it is the state of Israel who is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, so it is the state that must be responsible for its wrongdoings.

As I argued in my last report to the Human Rights Council (HRC), the Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation, and has now turned genocidal. It is impossible to disentangle Israel’s state policies and economy from its longstanding policies and economy of occupation. It has been inseparable for decades.

The longer states and others stay engaged, the more this illegality at its heart is legitimised. This is the complicity. Now that economy has turned genocidal. There is no good Israel, bad Israel.

I ask you to consider this moment as if we were sitting here in the 1990s, discussing the case of apartheid South Africa. Would you have proposed selective sanctions on SA for its conduct in individual Bantustans? Or would you have recognised the state’s criminal system as a whole?

And here, what Israel is doing is worse. This comparison — is a legal and factual assessment supported by international legal proceedings many in this room are part of.

This is what concrete measures mean. Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonor international law.

And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter — not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, made these remarks at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia, on 16 July 2025.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Stuart Rees

The violence surrounding protests against the visit of Israel’s president was not an accident of crowd control. It reflects a deeper political failure – where authority suppresses dissent rather than confronting uncomfortable truths about Gaza, protest rights and democratic responsibility.

In official explanations of violence outside Sydney Town Hall on Monday evening, February  9, it sounds as though police were only trying to maintain public safety through various professional measures taken against the thousands outraged that President Isaac Herzog of Israel, charged with incitement to commit genocide, should be in the country.

Those explanations are false. Behind the extensive police powers to control and suppress protest lies a cancerous-like cowardice, facilitated by a cornered Prime Minister and by an Israeli sympathising, authoritarian NSW Premier.

Cowardice can be nurtured by pleasure in dominating, by fear of losing control, by being frightened to face truths, by deceits in pretending that all is well when it manifestly is not.

Restricting protests in order to stifle concern about slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank, or the PM asking the Australian public to “turn the temperature down” so that justifiable outrage about the Bondi massacres will deflect attention from an ongoing genocide in Palestine, is a cowardly technique.

And the PM is not the worst offender, even though government cowardice began when wedged by the Zionist Federation into supporting their invitation to the Israeli President.

Who runs the show you might ask?

Manhandling people
Suppression-oriented Premier Chris Minns delegates responsibility for his anti-protest laws to the chief of NSW police who is happy to oblige. In and out of uniform, cowards appear as strong men, usually men, who like to manhandle or beat up people.

There is no manliness in the police thuggery witnessed in Sydney streets on Monday.

Facile Premier Minns – or is he just naive – with no recognition of his own hypocrisy, says on Tuesday’s news “NSW police are not punching bags”. His holier than thou stance is shown alongside a man held down by police who are punching him repeatedly in the kidneys.

We then switch to the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, in Federal Parliament describing police action in general, “what the police were trying to do was sensible”.

As if thuggery on one man is insufficient, other police punch Greens MP Abigail Boyd in the head and shoulder, knock her over and are completely indifferent to her explanations of who she was and the civil and legal reasons for her presence at a legitimate, peaceful protest.

Cameras switch to police apparently unaware that their presence increases conflict, comprehending little, annoyed, then angry at the sight Moslem citizens in prayer on public pavements.

Then we witness no rationality, no civility, only the raw emotions of cowards not getting their way. The men kneeling in prayer are seen being picked up, removed and thrown aside. We’ll never know if deep-seated prejudice affected police conduct, but the question should be raised.

Opposition unity
On Tuesday, the mood of thuggery on the streets moved to the House of Representatives when a Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown inquired of the Prime Minister whether the invitation to the President of Israel had undermined the unity of the country, whether the PM would condemn police violence and send Herzog home.

In response, before the Prime Minister could answer, the opposition benches found a unity which had eluded them for months.

United in their apparent support for Israeli slaughter in Gaza, wanting to be seen to be brave in their dislike of protest about Herzog, and apparently unable or unwilling to know much about genocide continuing during a ceasefire, one of the esteemed members of the newly reformed Coalition, was heard to advise colleagues as to how to deal with the Greens MP.

“Rip her apart,” he was reported as saying. It sounds as though this was exactly what he said. Asked by the Speaker to withdraw his comment, the offending MP did so.

But further support for cowardice camouflaged by thuggery was not far away. Keen to revive his image as macho man at large, former Prime Minister Tony Abbot recommended that police accused of punching protesters should receive a commendation and in future be armed with tear gas and be able fire rubber bullets.

Abbot would never regard himself as a coward but when denial of the existence of a genocide, a failure to face truths, is being multiplied by cowardice evident in acceptance of authoritarianism as the way to conduct politics, policing and even techniques for debate, there should be cross party and widespread public concern.

To meet the Prime Minister’s requests to lower the temperature, the country needs to replace the cowardice with sufficient courage to admit the truths about a genocide, the truths about the values of freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Cowardice may be disguised by violence but is demeaning.

Courage is a way to speak truths. Courageous action can be mentally and physically life enhancing, encourages justice, depicts what Bertolt Brecht called “the bread of the people” and in current Australian culture could infect almost everyone and lower the temperature. Try it.

Dr Stuart Rees AM is professor emeritus at the University of Sydney and recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize. This article was first published in Pearls and Irritations: John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal and is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

The violence surrounding protests against the visit of Israel’s president was not an accident of crowd control. It reflects a deeper political failure – where authority suppresses dissent rather than confronting uncomfortable truths about Gaza, protest rights and democratic responsibility.

In official explanations of violence outside Sydney Town Hall on Monday evening, February  9, it sounds as though police were only trying to maintain public safety through various professional measures taken against the thousands outraged that President Isaac Herzog of Israel, charged with incitement to commit genocide, should be in the country.

Those explanations are false. Behind the extensive police powers to control and suppress protest lies a cancerous-like cowardice, facilitated by a cornered Prime Minister and by an Israeli sympathising, authoritarian NSW Premier.

Cowardice can be nurtured by pleasure in dominating, by fear of losing control, by being frightened to face truths, by deceits in pretending that all is well when it manifestly is not.

Restricting protests in order to stifle concern about slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank, or the PM asking the Australian public to “turn the temperature down” so that justifiable outrage about the Bondi massacres will deflect attention from an ongoing genocide in Palestine, is a cowardly technique.

And the PM is not the worst offender, even though government cowardice began when wedged by the Zionist Federation into supporting their invitation to the Israeli President.

Who runs the show you might ask?

Suppression-oriented Premier Chris Minns delegates responsibility for his anti-protest laws to the chief of NSW police who is happy to oblige. In and out of uniform, cowards appear as strong men, usually men, who like to manhandle or beat up people.

There is no manliness in the police thuggery witnessed in Sydney streets on Monday.

Facile Premier Minns – or is he just naive – with no recognition of his own hypocrisy, says on Tuesday’s news “NSW police are not punching bags”. His holier than thou stance is shown alongside a man held down by police who are punching him repeatedly in the kidneys.

We then switch to the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, in Federal Parliament describing police action in general, “what the police were trying to do was sensible”.

As if thuggery on one man is insufficient, other police punch Greens MP Abigail Boyd in the head and shoulder, knock her over and are completely indifferent to her explanations of who she was and the civil and legal reasons for her presence at a legitimate, peaceful protest.

Cameras switch to police apparently unaware that their presence increases conflict, comprehending little, annoyed, then angry at the sight Moslem citizens in prayer on public pavements.

Then we witness no rationality, no civility, only the raw emotions of cowards not getting their way. The men kneeling in prayer are seen being picked up, removed and thrown aside. We’ll never know if deep-seated prejudice affected police conduct, but the question should be raised.

On Tuesday, the mood of thuggery on the streets moved to the House of Representatives when a Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown inquired of the Prime Minister whether the invitation to the President of Israel had undermined the unity of the country, whether the PM would condemn police violence and send Herzog home.

In response, before the Prime Minister could answer, the opposition benches found a unity which had eluded them for months.

United in their apparent support for Israeli slaughter in Gaza, wanting to be seen to be brave in their dislike of protest about Herzog, and apparently unable or unwilling to know much about genocide continuing during a ceasefire, one of the esteemed members of the newly reformed Coalition, was heard to advise colleagues as to how to deal with the Greens MP.

“Rip her apart,” he was reported as saying. It sounds as though this was exactly what he said. Asked by the Speaker to withdraw his comment, the offending MP did so.

But further support for cowardice camouflaged by thuggery was not far away. Keen to revive his image as macho man at large, former Prime Minister Tony Abbot recommended that police accused of punching protesters should receive a commendation and in future be armed with tear gas and be able fire rubber bullets.

Abbot would never regard himself as a coward but when denial of the existence of a genocide, a failure to face truths, is being multiplied by cowardice evident in acceptance of authoritarianism as the way to conduct politics, policing and even techniques for debate, there should be cross party and widespread public concern.

To meet the Prime Minister’s requests to lower the temperature, the country needs to replace the cowardice with sufficient courage to admit the truths about a genocide, the truths about the values of freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Cowardice may be disguised by violence but is demeaning.

Courage is a way to speak truths. Courageous action can be mentally and physically life enhancing, encourages justice, depicts what Bertolt Brecht called “the bread of the people” and in current Australian culture could infect almost everyone and lower the temperature. Try it.

Dr Stuart Rees AM is professor emeritus at the University of Sydney and recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize. This article was first published in Pearls and Irritations: John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal and is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz