Based on my reading of the latest upscaling of US rhetoric, one of the military options being considered by the Israeli-American axis is the nuclear option. Refer Trump says a ‘whole civilization will die tonight’ if deal isn’t reached, One News, 8 April 2026.

The possibility of Netanyahu and Trump thinking this way would reflect a widely-held understanding that World War Two ended not only with the atomic bomb, but because of those nuclear strikes on Japan. In particular, the prevailing American narrative is that Little Boy and Fat Man saved the United States from having to make a ground invasion of Japan.

My sense is that if Israel and/or the United States go for a nuclear strike, soon or sooner, it will be on a city or some other quasi-military site in the northeast of Iran, closer to Afghanistan than to the present Persian Gulf warzone; away from the energy infrastructure of the Gulf.

Not only is the northeast the birthplace of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, it is also the part of Iran which gave least support to President Masoud Pezeshkian in the 2024 presidential election. Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, was elected as a moderniser. In 2024 and 2025 he was committed to evolving Iran away from being a Shia theocracy and towards being a typical BRICS’ middle-range geopolitical power. (See my The Enigma of the Iranian President, Scoop, 27 March 2026.)

If we look at the map here – the second round of the 2024 Iranian presidential election – we see that Pezeshkian’s support was most in the more secular northwest and least in the more Islamist northeast. I suspect that the Axis’ military planning will be to inflict as much damage as possible – in one or a few dramatic strikes – on the present Iranian civilisation which draws heavily on Shia Islam; hence focussing on the Shia heartland.

Finally, here, I draw attention to the movie Don’t Look Up. In that movie, the threat was an asteroid, not a nuclear war. The key theme was the widespread dispassion that prevailed, especially in the mainstream media, towards a known and imminent catastrophe. In the case of a nuclear strike on Iran away from Tehran or the Gulf or the Pakistan border, the present lack of mainstream outrage at the aggressions of the last month will probably continue on and beyond the day after.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

There is a widespread perception in Aotearoa New Zealand that the ‘Gulf States’ are similar, and closely aligned to each other. The States most familiar to New Zealanders are United Arab Emirates (‘Dubai’ to the many New Zealanders who do not appreciate that Dubai is just one of six Emirates) and Qatar.

Further we’ve long-forgotten the dispute which, not-so-long-ago, led to Qatar being isolated by the Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Sunni Arab countries (noting Egypt in particular). This started with the Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict, which in 2017 escalated into the Qatar diplomatic crisis. This conflict related to allegations of inappropriate financial connections between Qatar and Hamas. While apparent resolution took place in 2021, there is now a new division; a division even more opaque to casual western observers, and noting that western observations of other parts of the world are rarely anything other than casual.

In October 2021, the popular government of Sudan (the result of a popular revolution in 2019) was overthrown by the Sudanese Armed Forces. On the eve of the coup, ‘Protestors held signs stating, “the Emirates will not govern us, nor the implementation of Sisi”.’ For Sisi, read Egypt.

Essentially the anti-Qatar nations were developing their interests in the military and economic exploitation of Sudan. Then, in April 2023, the two parties to the 2021 coup – the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces – split in spectacular fashion, creating the present Sudanese Civil War. The UAE backed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), while Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. This is a hideous civil war (see my War in Sudan), with most of the reported atrocities allegedly being committed by the RSF.

This present division of civil-war-sponsorship is compounded by the diverging relationships of these three Arab states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE – with Israel. The Trump-sponsored 2020 Abraham Accords brought Saudi Arabia and UAE (and Bahrain) into line with Egypt as an ally-of-sorts with Israel. According to this Wikipedia account:

“On August 14, 2021, the Associated Press reported that a secret oil deal between Israel and the Emirates, struck in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords, had turned the Israeli resort town of Eilat into a waypoint for Emirati oil headed for Western markets. It was expected to endanger the Red Sea reefs, which host some of the greatest coral diversity on the planet. As Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia also share the gulf’s waters, an ecological disaster was likely to impact their ecosystems.”

Since then, relations between UAE (and Bahrain) and Israel became particularly close. Relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia (and Egypt), on the other hand have soured since the outbreak of the present Sudan war. At the same time, as revealed by Sudan, relations between UAE and these two large Red Sea nations have substantially deteriorated.

That is the backdrop to Iran’s greater hostility, at present, towards the UAE than towards Qatar. Western reports of the present conflict tend to equate Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait as ‘peas in a pod’. The reality is that UAE is a substantial – albeit understated – ally of Israel. (There has been suspicion that UAE has provided substantial secret support for Israel in its recent wars, especially Israel’s genocidal war against Hamas in Gaza. Iran will be well aware of the extent of this UAE-Israel alliance.)

UAE is now in an antagonist relationship with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, it’s now UAE rather than Qatar which is the isolate on the Arabian Peninsula.) In Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia back the SAF. The RSF, on the other hand, is funded and supplied through an opaque deal with UAE; which means that Israel – through its UAE proxy – may in fact be the most important backer of the RSF. And we should note that Israel is, formally, the most important global proxy of the United States; though it may now be that the United States has become Israel’s most important proxy.

(For security reasons, and as a protest against the UAE’s geopolitical cynicism, I decided that I would never again fly to London via the Emirates. Tip for Air New Zealand: put on more flights to Vancouver, and publicise the route to London via Canada.)

Qatar, Hamas, and Israel

The matter of Qatar’s financial connections with Hamas are distinctly murky. I quote here from the ABC (Australian) 60 Minutes documentary Gaza, the Forever War (11 March 2024). The programme features interviews with former senior Israeli political and military personnel.

Excerpt from transcript:

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: It now appears that Netanyahu wanted to sow seeds of division between the hardliners who ruled Gaza and the more conciliatory Palestinian Authority, running the West Bank.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: We did something very, very simple. We did everything in order to make sure that Hamas will go on controlling Gaza and Palestinian Authority will control the West Bank so they will fight each other.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu allowed Qatar to give massive amounts of cash to Hamas in Gaza.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: So what we did with the permission of our prime Minister is to let Qatar to transfer a huge amount of money in cash, probably more than $1.4 billion, and to make sure that they will be able to send people to work in Israel and to achieve or to get intelligence if they need. By doing it, we increase the power of Hamas.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: That served Netanyahu who wanted to avoid any discussion of two state solution.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: So, are you saying Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately boosted Hamas to try to prevent a Palestinian state?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Yeah, sure. He deliberately and systematically even told on record, whoever wants to avoid the threat of a two-state solution has to support my policy of paying protection money to the Hamas.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu maintains the Qatar money was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. Having helped build up Hamas, Netanyahu has vowed to destroy it.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: He fed the beast and it exploded in our face.

The Hexagon Alliance

From Netanyahu says Israel will forge regional alliance to rival ‘radical axes’ (Al Jazeera, 22 Feb 2026) we have: ‘Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, also referred to Greece, Cyprus and other unnamed Arab, African and Asian countries. “In the vision I see before me, we will create an entire system, essentially a hexagon of alliances around or within the Middle East,” Netanyahu said, according to the Times of Israel. “The intention here is to create an axis of nations that see eye to eye on the reality, challenges, and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis”.’

In Will Ethiopia be part of Israel’s ‘hexagon’ alliance rivalling its enemies? (Al Jazeera, 25 Feb 2026): “In December, Israel recognised Somaliland’s statehood, becoming the first country to do so. Months before, there were unconfirmed talks about plans to move displaced Palestinians to Somaliland or to South Sudan, another key Israeli ally in the region. Analysts speculate that countries like South Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, another close friend of Israel, may also recognise Somaliland.”

So the hexagon would appear to be Greece, Cyprus, India, UAE, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a Judeo-Christian heritage, in sharp contract to most of its regional neighbours. (See my reference to Judeo-Christian techno-supremacism in The Greater Evil, Scoop, 2 March 2026.)

Re the “emerging radical Sunni axis”, this article from India – The Hexagon Alliance, by Ayaan Ahmad and Arjun Dev Singh, 26 Feb 2026 – suggests “Sunni-majority states such as Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, alongside Jordan and Iraq”. You would have to add Egypt to that.

In this context, we should note that Israeli politicians have already been talking up Türkiye as the next “threat”. See Turkish ‘threat’ talked up in Israel as Netanyahu focuses on new alliances, Al Jazeera, 23 Feb 2026. And, noting a joint expression of Islamophobia, Modi in Israel: ‘Hexagon’ alliance and the ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism, TRT World, 2 Mar 2026.

And from Is Türkiye Israel’s next target in the Middle East? (Al Jazeera, 21 Sep 2025): “In Washington, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Türkiye could be Israel’s next target and warned that it should not rely on its NATO membership for protection.”

This reflects the significance of Greece and Cyprus within the hexagon. It also points to the United Kingdom, indirectly. Part of the island of Cyprus is British sovereign territory; ie not at all a ‘foreign airbase’. And another part of the island of Cyprus has been a Turkish realm state, albeit unrecognised by the international community (as Somaliland – formally British Somaliland – is also unrecognised).

We may note that the tension between UAE and Saudi Arabia is revealed in Google Maps. Despite there being a long border between the two countries, there is only one road crossing, to the far west of Abu Dhabi. Indeed, Doha in Qatar is closer to that border crossing than is either Dubai or the city of Abu Dhabi. 95% of UAE’s population lives in that country’s northeast corner. Along most of the border, there are parallel roads, but no crossing points. In Saudi Arabia that road is Highway 95. In UAE, its road is labelled ‘Boarder [sic] Patrol Road CIVILIAN VEHICLE PROHIBITED’.

The Yemen and Somaliland affairs

As noted by Al Jazeera: ‘Saudi Arabia is embroiled in an ongoing rift with the United Arab Emirates over how to deal with the conflict in Yemen.’

Yemen is one of those many places that are geopolitically important, but completely off New Zealand’s media radar. Historically Yemen was host to an important Jewish population (Yemenite Jews). Southern Yemen – especially Aden – was, for a century, a critical cog in the British Empire. Post-colonially, Southern Yemen became a ‘radical’ country in the world order, whereas Northern Yemen was a religiously conservative society, the Shia Zaydi Imamate until 1962 and then the Yemen Arab Republic.

In more recent years, that conservative north has become a Shia ‘Iranian proxy’, the ‘Houthis’. And the internationally recognised government of Yemen – operative in the south – has become, in that same sense, a Saudi Arabian proxy regime.

On 2 December 2025, the failed 2025–2026 Southern Yemen campaign began, essentially an attempt by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) to overthrow the Saudi-backed government. It was in the midst of this Israeli-backed campaign that Israel became the first country to recognise Somaliland – close to the geographical Horn of Africa’, and juxtaposed to Aden – as a sovereign state.

This has to be understood in the context of Israel’s Hexagon Alliance; indeed, an attempt to impose UAE/Israeli control over the geopolitically sensitive southern coastline of the Arabian peninsula. From Why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland backfired, (16 Jun 2026) by Abdi Aynte, former minister of planning and international cooperation of Somalia: “By empowering breakaway regions, Israel, with the backing of key regional partners, especially the United Arab Emirates, has sought to reshape the regional order.”

Aynte: “What some experts describe as an ‘Axis of Secession’ is already visible in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Syria. Led by Israel and supported by a network of regional partners, this axis targets countries whose central governments, hollowed out by conflict, exercise only partial control over their territory. The logic is simple: weaken central authority, bolster breakaway regions, and cultivate dependent entities willing to align with Israel and sign onto the Abraham Accords.” Aynte calls these nations “emerging client polities” of Israel, though resistance remains strong in Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.

Beyond these smaller fractured nation states, there are several large nation states in the region which Israel is trying to fracture. While these attempts in Iran are all too visible, a literal smokescreen, quietly Israel is adding Ethiopia – a country with 100,000 people – to its client list. We note that Ethiopia is hosting RSF training camps, further undermining Sudan’s sovereignty. See Reuters: Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say, 10 Feb 2026.

This is not regional geopolitics which New Zealand can naively pretend-away. Aynte adds: “Somaliland’s decision to cultivate ties with Taiwan inevitably drew Beijing’s attention”. “The result [of Israel’s meddling through client third parties] is an increasingly crowded and volatile theatre, where global power rivalries intersect with unresolved local aspirations.” “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, once close partners, are now increasingly at odds, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt have begun coordinating to counter what they view as a destabilising ‘Axis of Secession’.”

And we note “widespread claims that Israel is exploring resettlement of Palestinian refugees from Gaza in Somaliland”. (An echo of Britain’s former plan to settle European Jews in Uganda!)

If we look at a map of the so-called ‘Middle East’ (nobody refers to Near East or Far East anymore!) and paint the hexagon countries in ‘Star-of-David’ blue – including Israel itself and its occupied territories, and including the RSF-controlled parts of Sudan – the obvious missing links are Egypt, Türkiye, and Iran. Hence the present war in Iran, and the concerns already noted re Türkiye. But what about Egypt?

Egypt, Iran and the Bible

Even today, Israel’s reference point is the Old Testament of The Bible. Note Al Jazeera’s Inside Story episode of 2 March 2026, What dangers does the Iran war pose for Israel?, featuring Mitchell Barak, “former speech writer for Israeli PM Ariel Sharon”, noting that Sharon was nicknamed Butcher of Beirut on account of his responsibility for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Interviewer: “Mitchell, I’m going to start things off with you. Please give us a broad brushstroke of how you see things unfolding.”

Barak: “First of all, I’d like to wish a Ramadan Kareem to all of the people watching who are celebrating and commemorating this holiday. It is also a fast day in Israel, the Fast of Esther, which commemorates ironically and interestingly enough the victory of the Jewish people over an evil Persian empire 2,500 years ago.”

He is referring to the Purim holiday. Note, in these Wikipedia references, the references to Amalek, the word that Benjamin Netanyahu invoked to justify the subsequent genocide of Gaza. Refer The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu, ABC24 Jan 2024.

Barak did not go on to answer the “broad brushstroke” question.

Two polities which feature strongly in that biblical narrative are Egypt and (in the guise of Babylon) Persia aka Iran. To fully understand Israel’s agenda today, we really need to see that regime and its cultural acolytes as playing a long game; a very long game. Israel is trying to reverse the wrongs that it believed it suffered, around 2½ to 3 thousand years ago, at the hands of those two ancient civilisations. (The irony is that Israel denied that there was any historical context – not even a day’s historical context – to the ‘blue-sky’ shock events of 7 October 2023.)

Seen in this context, it is credible that the principal target of the Hexagon Alliance is Egypt, not Türkiye.

And, re the current role of the United Arab Emirates in that fraught region, Australia should not provide military support to Israel’s secret ally and proxy. (See Australia to provide military support to Gulf states attacked by Iran, ABC 10 March 2026.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

We keep hearing that Iran is an “evil” regime run by “clerics”. This conflation of an unscientific and emotive concept (‘evil’) with a cultural occupation (‘cleric’) is made in the context of picking on an ethnic or religious group of people as inferior. In this context, ‘cleric’ applies to Shia Islam, a major denomination of one of the world’s major religions. In the context of white supremacism, that word ‘cleric’ – as applied to Shia Islam – could have been ‘negro’.

Iran has been attacked by forces representing Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy; western super-elites who worship at the altar of military and surveillance technology. And the mainstream media within the imperium parrot the talking points of these supremacists; supremacists, seeking a unipolar world order (aka global hegemony) masquerading as capitalist democracy and riding on the coat-tails of progressive liberalism.

The West is as much a theocracy as is the Iranian regime. Only bigger, and vastly more lethal; and prone to excesses of cowardly asymmetric violence. (In the present event, one of the first groups of fatal victims were over 100 schoolgirls in southern Iran; most western media outlets have not even reported this.) As well as being a zero-out-of-ten on the scale of political ethics, the attack on Iran was illegal in both United States and international law. Once again, Congress was bypassed.

Further, we note that Israel is the world’s most secretive nuclear power; without even the semblance of a nuclear energy program that might act as cover for this. Why do we never hear about Israel’s nuclear hammer-in-waiting?

At the head of the attacking forces is an American President playing the role of the useful fool; himself being simultaneously played by, on the one side, the manifestly-evil regime of Benjamin Netanyau, and the forces of the Dark Enlightenment among which Peter Thiel of Palantir – a New Zealand citizen – is prominent.

Secret City, and President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes of Season Two of Secret City, an Australian political thriller. [Secret City finishes on Netflix tomorrow!]

The story, filmed in Canberra and Adelaide in 2018, was about an innocent Australian family killed from the sky by a deliberately misdirected drone attack; an attack like many similar executions of civilians living in northwest Pakistan, as part of a highly secret US/Australian ‘security’ program. A central point of Secret City was to highlight the asymmetry of western sentiment, whereby the deaths of four white Australians elicit 100 times more outrage than 400 similar deaths in or near Pakistan. In the story, the fictitious American company, Trebuchet, served as an equivalent to Palantir. (We note that last month’s mosque bombing in Islamabad was barely reported in the New Zealand media; deeply ironic given the Christchurch attacks on 15 March 2019.)

The end of the last episode of Secret City replayed extracts from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, televised in the United States on 17 January 1961.

Note these excerpts from Eisenhower’s address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Much can be said about President Eisenhower’s tenure in office. I will note just this. It was Eisenhower who was able to settle a cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, after the more-than-two years of extremely bloody stalemate – most of the blood was shed in North Korea – which endured under the previous Truman administration. Technically, that war has not finished. But the cease-fire has held since 1953, for as long as my life, and for longer than the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy an imperial theocracy?

We note that the ‘First Reich’ – labelled well after its existence – was notionally an imperial theocracy; the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806). But, once created, it was not expansionist, rather it was a kind of Roman Catholic caliphate. Philosopher Voltaire claimed that it was neither ‘holy’, ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’; it was essentially a German-led ‘commonwealth’ which made titular reference to the Church in Rome. It is arguable that the European Union is a Fourth Reich which references the First Reich.

The expansionist forces out of Europe, which have made the modern world – the world of the last 500 years – came from elsewhere: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Until the 1990s, those European-sourced forces of dominance were increasingly secular. Whether or not Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy represents a development of these religious traditions, there can be little doubt that world dominance and appeasement is a process of empire-building.

Especially in Washington circles, there was an air of triumphalism around 1990. This was the unipolar moment. Helping to maintain the new unipolar moment, a man called Jeffrey Epstein – an alleged Israeli asset – became a conduit between the Israeli and American administrations in the 1990s. That’s where and when I see the origins of twenty-first century entitled Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. (On Epstein and Israel, see Starmer, Mandelson & Mossad – it’s worse than you think,Double Down News, Feb 2026; and The anatomy of the Epstein network The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb 2026.)

The greatest ever threat to humanity and the rest of the planetary biosphere

As noted, just about everyone in elite western politics and journalism is now, without analysis or knowledge, asserting that Iran is ‘evil’. Maybe. Though this is little more than believer rhetoric; the rhetoric of religious fundamentalists, the rhetoric of inflammation rather than resolution.

If this ‘evil’ moniker is accurate in some objective sense, then Iran – in the present conflict – is the ‘lesser evil’. The greater evil is clearly the philosophy and aggression of the Judeo-Christian techno-supremacists. Further, the appeasement of this greater evil is itself a most unsavoury thing to behold; almost as bad as the greater evil itself.

(On that appeasement, in a news report on Al Jazeera on Sunday [NZ time], Berlin correspondent Dominic Kane noted – with a straight face – that the governments of Britain, France and Germany all condemned “Iran’s retaliation”; and that Spain, in addition, condemned the American and Israeli aggression. Only Spain had the guts to demur from appeasement. One of the most important forms of  media appeasement is the omission of vital information from reports. According to those chairing the ‘Peace talks’ in Geneva, Iran was just about to present an accommodation which came very close to meeting President Trump’s stated demands, and that the aggressors were aware of this. These ‘negotiations’ were not conducted in good faith.)

The nihilistic logical endpoint of Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy is apocalypse. Indeed many of the ‘Christians’ in the Americanised conflation of Israel and Christianity are fully cognisant of, even excited by, the prophecies of the last book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.

Nuclear apocalypse – if or when it happens – will not only destroy humanity. Earth stands to become like Mars or Venus, if humanity ends in this way. In today’s circumstances, would it be acceptable to allow Israel or the United States to acquire nuclear weapons; we accept their weapons because they are already there, and because too many of us prefer hypocrisy over moral consistency.

But the Dark Enlightenment is still a developing supremacist project, embedded into Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. Resistance to it and its premises need not be entirely futile. Worse things happen when good people look away.

PS

New Zealand is scheduled to play Iran in the Football World Cup. How will the politics of Iran’s presence in the World Cup play out, especially given that, in last weekend’s events, Iran was the aggresse, not the aggressor?

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Speakers at a pro-Palestine rally in central Auckland Tamaki Makaurau today were highly critical of the erosion of New Zealand’s once proud nuclear-free and independent foreign policy.

They also warned against being tied into a United States that is pivoting a hostile policy towards China, New Zealand’s major trading partner.

Ironically, just hours after the rally ended news broke of the unprovoked and illegal attack by Israel and the US against Iran barely eight months after a 12-day war last year.

With a theme posing the question “Is New Zealand a peace loving nation or a cog in the US war machine,” the speakers concluded that indeed the Pacific country was a “US war machine cog”.

Physicist Dr Peter Wills, a long-time activist and advocate for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, focused on New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

He said the Five Eyes relationship has superseded ANZUS “or anything else”, saying while  the pact formalised in 1946 used to be intelligence, now it was the name of a five-nation military grouping.

“That’s the Anglo-Saxon countries,” he said. “Us good English-speaking people, you know, the white imperialists and colonialists of the world – the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and little old New Zealand.

“We’re all a part of it.

Eavesdropping on countries
“It used to be an intelligence agreement because they would talk about what they have listened to with other countries by eavesdropping on their radio communications and so on.

“But now everything has become so integrated, they have become the centre of war fighting.”

Explaining further, Dr Wills said: “And so they have this thing that they call C-5, which is command control for communications, computers and cyber.”

He said a top priority project was to make up a globally integrated “all domain” command and control system, which was hoped to be in place for next year.

The project had been discussed in Portsmouth, UK, in May 2024. Its purpose was to track friendly and enemy forces and send orders for attack.

“All domains – navy, land, air and space forces,” said Dr Wills, an honorary professor.

Globally integrated intelligence and military actions could be launched and directed anywhere in the world.

Countering China
It was electronic infrastructure for a superpower confrontation – to “develop a credible and effective combined all-domain command and control capability for operations to counter China”.

For Five Eyes officers overseeing these new digital and AI war-fighting systems at the Portsmouth meeting, a key objective was building the capability for confrontation with China.

“This means NZ following the US into military conflict with China,” Dr Wills said.

“We are involved in GIDE – Global Information Dominance Experiments, a new one is prepared every three months.

“And we will align with whatever is chosen by Five Eyes, either British or American.”

From an American point of view, said Dr Wills, New Zealand was a US ally, eager to play a role, “however small we are, to supporting the US around the globe”.

They also wanted NZ to get rid of its anti-nuclear legislation and return to ANZUS. This was the view of senior military officers and senior foreign affairs and intelligence officials

US ‘instability and bullying’
However, the majority of New Zealanders saw the US as a “source of instability and bullying” of New Zealand over its nuclear stand.

Dr Wills said New Zealand was influenced by the Anglo-American alliance today on many fronts, such as:

• NZ Navy ships transiting “provocatively” through the South China Sea;
• Being pressured to double military spending,;
• Being pressured to join the “anti-China” AUKUS alliance;
• The recent opening of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Wellington; and
• New Zealand playing an increasing role in space warfare.

But Dr Wills warned people “don’t give up – they haven’t won, not even with their arguments”.

He also called on people to become better informed, such as reading Nicky Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars.

NZ’s nuclear-free stance
Other speakers included nuclear-free New Zealand historian and activist Maire Leadbeater, who outlined the early trajectory of the country’s opposition to French nuclear tests in the Pacific by dispatching a frigate to Moruroa, and the campaign to declare New Zealand nuclear-free.

She said New Zealand had led the way in the 1970s and 1980s and could take a principled independent foreign policy stand again.

The rally also invoked the spirit of Kia Ora Gaza co-founder and campaigner Roger Fowler, who died last Saturday and who was farewelled at a “celebration of life” ceremony at Ngā Tapuwae Community Centre in Mangere East on Wednesday.

Veteran Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and his grandson on the saxophone played a rousing rendition of the popular song “We Are All Palestinians”, created by Fowler, and South African-born activist Achmat Esau read out his poem, “Roger, I Did Not Know” in tribute.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It’s time that the nations of the world (or at least the influential western nations) accept the reality that all the lands that constituted 1920-1948 Mandatory Palestine should be formally recognised as a single nation-state; ideally called Palestine Israel or Israel-Palestine, but more realistically called Israel.

In other words, the never-viable notion of a two-nation-state division of ‘Israel’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eretz_Israel) should be dropped as a viable solution in favour of the promotion of a liberal bicultural (or multicultural) nation-state. The role model for change could be South Africa.

Jewish and Non-Jewish intellectuals (such as Hans Kohn, Shlomo Sand and Yanis Varoufakis) – on the political left – have been arguing for this ‘one-state-solution’ for over 100 years. It’s just that their voices have always been deamplified by those on the political centre and the political right. (On the centre, we think of people like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, and their predecessors. On the right, we may consider former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a leader in the 1940s of the openly fascist Lehi, yet a moderate by today’s Israeli political standards.)

Shlomo Sand outlines the history of the arguments for a single ‘binational’ state in his 2024 book Israel-Palestine: Federation or Apartheid? His vision, which is not quite what I favour, emphasises binationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/binationalism), and looks towards these successful liberal examples of bi- or multi- nationalism: Canada, Belgium, Switzerland.

The better framing of this approach, I believe, is biculturalism; though even that is not problem-free, because it is an exclusive concept. What I think would work best for Palestine Israel is also the same as what would work best for Aotearoa New Zealand: multiculturalism with a bicultural (treaty) emphasis. (Ireland could have become something similar, as in Irish rugby; but it went down a failed two-state path, and experienced two substantial civil wars last century.) The ideal is for Palestine Israel to become a liberal democracy in which all people born within its borders become citizens with equal citizenship rights; a nation state which commits to both the domestic and international norms of liberal democracy.

(In a bicultural nation-state, the principal divider is religion; normally people’s religious loyalties are discrete, meaning that being, say, a Muslim or Jew or Christian is mutually exclusive. The word ‘national’ is increasingly used in the 21st century as it was in the 19th century; to refer to a ‘people’ or a ‘race’ rather than to relate to a territory defined by its borders and its sovereign institutions. Ethnicity – the better word is ‘ancestry – is not a discrete concept such as ‘religion’; individual people have multiple ancestries, and should not be required to identify as one over another.)

How can this be achieved?

First, we should note that the status quo in Eretz Israel is at least as unacceptable as Apartheid South Africa was to our world of mostly ‘internationally-civilised’ nation-states. (An internationally civilised state is one that accepts agreed norms in the ways that it relates to other nation states, meaning that it does not indulge in offensive hard-power geopolitics – such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’; and it practises cultural equality. Terrorism is understood as criminality. Such a state does not have to be a ‘democracy’ in the Westminster or American sense; but it should meet open liberal standards in the ways it treats its resident denizens – non-citizens – and it should subscribe to international treaties on matters such as climate sustainability and nuclear energy and election authenticity.)

Second, this desired outcome will not come about by force. The community of liberal nations should simply recognise Eretz Israel as a nation state, based ideally on the prior borders of Mandatory Palestine.

While there should be no demands, such a new nation-state would be risking discriminatory sanctions if it abuses liberal norms; in particular if it implements laws (including civil-marriage laws) that discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, or ancestry. Again, the obvious model is Apartheid South Africa, and the ways that South Africa was excluded from international sport so long as it implemented laws which discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. (Palestinians and many Israelis have Levantine ethnicity. Many Israelis have European, African or Asian co-ethnicity; that non-indigeneity should never be held against them. Nor should the indigeneity of the Palestinians.)

In recognising Eretz Israel as Israel-Palestine (or even just under the name ‘Israel’), a Levantine nation state, Israel’s nuclear status should be addressed and normalised. (Likewise, India and Pakistan should be pressured to join the ‘nuclear club’. One of the most problematic regional asymmetries at present is the advanced nuclear-status of Israel versus the embryonic nuclear status of Iran; Israel at present hides behind its non-membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to make it seem that Iran is a bigger nuclear threat to the world than Israel is.)

Recognition of Eretz Israel as a sovereign nation state, under any name, should come with overt expectations of democracy, amnesty, truth, reconciliation, and press freedom. There should be no formal or informal mechanism of ‘settling scores’, no matter how reprehensible anyone’s past or present behaviour has been. Truth trumps vengeance cloaked as ‘accountability’.

Lebanon was an initially successful, but now largely failed, version of a similar attempt at creating a tolerant multicultural nation state in the Levant. Lebanon’s main problem was its belligerent southern neighbour. Israel-Palestine would not have Israel as a neighbour.

Abandon the naïve two-state solution.

There is no way a Palestinian nation-state can be viable. At the very best it could become like a mini-Pakistan or mini-Bangladesh; and even that would take decades. (And the last Israeli prime minister to formalise a two-state future – Yitzhak Rabin – was assassinated in 1995, having achieved a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.) The two-state-solution agenda seems to be more about deescalating sufficiently for the Palestine issue to disappear from its media prominence; and not at all about ending a forever war which began in 1948.

The present forever war – now in its hottest phase – followed a brutal war for Israeli-Jewish independence and non-Jewish expulsion waged by fascist and non-fascist ‘non-state actors’ from 1939 to 1948 against the British ‘protectors’. That, in turn, followed a prior Palestinian insurrection against the British and the settlers from 1936-1939 (though overshadowed in the international media by the Spanish Civil War), which in its turn followed the 1929 Palestine riots. That’s 96 years of escalating forever violence.

In Summary

Recognise a new expanded state, with or without a new name, but with certain (unenforceable, but well-publicised) expectations. This expectation should be a multi-cultural Levantine sovereign state, embracing adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths (as well as people of other religions, or no religion, as citizens; people born in Israel or Palestine, and documented immigrants): Levantine Jews, Levantine Muslims, Levantine Christians, plus others. All Israelis. And all Palestinians.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Listen to the audio from 3:00 minutes in.

Over the last 24 hours, the atomic control agency IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) formed a view at its UN Geneva meeting, that there was so-called evidence that Iran had ‘undisclosed sites’ where uranium was identified.

Iran disputes this, and suggested today that the IAEA members were wrong.

It appears Israel identified a window of opportunity where it can strike Iran’s nuclear power generation infrastructure, assassinate its nuclear scientists, and destroy other sites that it insists are covert nuclear-development-sites.

But let’s be clear at this moment, it is not proven that Iran has or had a covert uranium enrichment operation in play.

ISRAEL CLAIMS:

Israel claims its attacks on Iran are justified as preemptive defence operations – but we need to understand here… preemptive defence in itself is not legal.

The problem on this aspect is Israel has arguably, long ago, crossed the Rubicon regarding International Law – especially in Gaza and the West Bank. So it’s reasonable to suggest; Israel is not deterred by the possibility of any future recourse being brought upon it by the international community.

CONTEXT:

Iran is believed to be not war-ready. But, Iran will respond. Its Supreme Leader stated it will respond. It remains to be seen how it will respond.

At this moment, there are reports in Israel that over 100 missiles are incoming from Iran to Israel.

We also know, Israel has weakened Hezbollah, especially within Lebanon. The strikes on Beirut earlier this month and prior were designed to weaken Hezbollah.

Further, Syria is in a state of transition.

This is the backdrop to Israel’s window of opportunity.

THE UNITED STATES:

The United States obviously knew a strike was imminent. It pulled non-essential personnel out of neighbouring Iraq and from the general region.

United States President Donald Trump has confirmed that there was communication on this offensive between Israel and the US, in the context of no-surprises.

Trump added that the US would help defend Israel, but it’s unclear what ‘defend’ actually means. The US appears to be waiting to see exactly how Iran responds.

The Trump Administration insists Israel’s decision to strike Iran was unilateral. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said today: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.”

IRAN’S POSITION:

Last Sunday, the Iranian President said Iran was “ready for inspections” but added it is “unacceptable to deprive peoples of access to knowledge, technology and scientific achievements”.

*** Only yesterday Iran’s foreign minister stated that Iran and the US were close to a deal on its nuclear energy ambitions. In a statement he said: “Trump took office saying that Iran should not have nuclear weapons. In fact, this is in line with our own doctrine and could be the main basis for the deal.”

Perhaps Israel saw its window of opportunity narrowing.

Iran insists its nuclear energy programme has been transparent.

BACK-STORY:

In negotiations with United States envoys, Iran has been insisting that it has the right to enrich its uranium but insists this is for efficient energy generation.

Back in May Iran’s foreign minister said: To claim that any country that wants to enrich uranium has non-peaceful purposes is a “deliberate misconception”

He stressed. “There are states that enrich uranium but do not possess nuclear weapons.”

LEAKS ISRAEL GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE:

On June 7, Iran’s Intelligence Minister claimed Iran had acquired trove of Israel Government documents that detailed Israel’s nuclear program.

Iran described the intelligence as “sensitive and strategic” and one of the most significant intelligence leaks in Israel’s history.

The intelligence documents also detailed communications between Israel and the United States, Europe and other countries.

OTHER CONTEXT:

The Russian Federation announced this week that it was willing to assist Iran with its nuclear energy ambitions.

Listen to the audio from 3:00 minutes in.

Over the last 24 hours, the atomic control agency IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) formed a view at its UN Geneva meeting, that there was so-called evidence that Iran had ‘undisclosed sites’ where uranium was identified.

Iran disputes this, and suggested today that the IAEA members were wrong.

It appears Israel identified a window of opportunity where it can strike Iran’s nuclear power generation infrastructure, assassinate its nuclear scientists, and destroy other sites that it insists are covert nuclear-development-sites.

But let’s be clear at this moment, it is not proven that Iran has or had a covert uranium enrichment operation in play.

ISRAEL CLAIMS:

Israel claims its attacks on Iran are justified as preemptive defence operations – but we need to understand here… preemptive defence in itself is not legal.

The problem on this aspect is Israel has arguably, long ago, crossed the Rubicon regarding International Law – especially in Gaza and the West Bank. So it’s reasonable to suggest; Israel is not deterred by the possibility of any future recourse being brought upon it by the international community.

CONTEXT:

Iran is believed to be not war-ready. But, Iran will respond. Its Supreme Leader stated it will respond. It remains to be seen how it will respond.

At this moment, there are reports in Israel that over 100 missiles are incoming from Iran to Israel.

We also know, Israel has weakened Hezbollah, especially within Lebanon. The strikes on Beirut earlier this month and prior were designed to weaken Hezbollah.

Further, Syria is in a state of transition.

This is the backdrop to Israel’s window of opportunity.

THE UNITED STATES:

The United States obviously knew a strike was imminent. It pulled non-essential personnel out of neighbouring Iraq and from the general region.

United States President Donald Trump has confirmed that there was communication on this offensive between Israel and the US, in the context of no-surprises.

Trump added that the US would help defend Israel, but it’s unclear what ‘defend’ actually means. The US appears to be waiting to see exactly how Iran responds.

The Trump Administration insists Israel’s decision to strike Iran was unilateral. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said today: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.”

IRAN’S POSITION:

Last Sunday, the Iranian President said Iran was “ready for inspections” but added it is “unacceptable to deprive peoples of access to knowledge, technology and scientific achievements”.

*** Only yesterday Iran’s foreign minister stated that Iran and the US were close to a deal on its nuclear energy ambitions. In a statement he said: “Trump took office saying that Iran should not have nuclear weapons. In fact, this is in line with our own doctrine and could be the main basis for the deal.”

Perhaps Israel saw its window of opportunity narrowing.

Iran insists its nuclear energy programme has been transparent.

BACK-STORY:

In negotiations with United States envoys, Iran has been insisting that it has the right to enrich its uranium but insists this is for efficient energy generation.

Back in May Iran’s foreign minister said: To claim that any country that wants to enrich uranium has non-peaceful purposes is a “deliberate misconception”

He stressed. “There are states that enrich uranium but do not possess nuclear weapons.”

LEAKS ISRAEL GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE:

On June 7, Iran’s Intelligence Minister claimed Iran had acquired trove of Israel Government documents that detailed Israel’s nuclear program.

Iran described the intelligence as “sensitive and strategic” and one of the most significant intelligence leaks in Israel’s history.

The intelligence documents also detailed communications between Israel and the United States, Europe and other countries.

OTHER CONTEXT:

The Russian Federation announced this week that it was willing to assist Iran with its nuclear energy ambitions.

To understand antisemitism, we need a meaning for ‘semitism’, and another -ism to contextualise semitism.

Literally, semitism means the promotion of the Semitic people, whoever they might be. The most appropriate comparator for ‘semitism’ is ‘hamitism’, relating to the ‘hamites’ or ‘Hamitic people’; analogous to the ‘Semitic people’. These are archaic terms, befitting the nineteenth century pseudo-sciences of eugenics, physiognomy and phrenology; semitism is a bible-derived concept of a preferred race, and of racism.

Our particular interest in 2024 is in two subsets: a racial subset of the Semitic people known as the ‘Jewish People’, or the Jewish ethnos or ‘nation’ (ie where a nation is a ‘people’ rather than a sovereign territory; and a racial subset of the Hamitic people, known today as ‘Palestinians’. Semite is named after Noah’s son ‘Shem’; hamite is named after Hoah’s son ‘Ham’. The biblical ‘curse of Ham’ was invoked in particular with regard to Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the putative father of the Canaanites, especially including today’s Palestinians.

While the Palestinian Arabs have been deemed by some Christians and Jews to belong to a cursed ethnicity, the mythistorical Jewish ethic line – descended from Shem – came to be known as a (or ‘the’) chosen people. Hence semitism (or philosemitism) is the presumption of the exceptionalism of the Jewish ethnicity. Antisemitism, then, can be regarded as a dislike or disapproval of the Jewish ‘race’. (For a few though, antisemitism seems to mean a denial of this presumption of exception.) Likewise, antihamitism, while it could be understood as a denial of the curse, is probably best understood as an analogue of antisemitism; as a dislike of or disapproval of the Palestinian ‘race’. In their most extreme forms, antisemitism and antihamitism are both presumptions in favour of the expulsion or genocide of an ethnic people. Both forms of discriminatory hatred need to be equally condemned.

While there is no scientific evidence that there was ever such a thing as a Jewish race or a Palestinian race, there are Jewish ethnicities (plural). Many people who have taken DNA tests will have some of their ancestry defined as Sephardic Jewish or Ashkenazi Jewish; but never simply ‘Jewish’. (Nobody will have Christian or Muslim as an ‘ethnicity’.) These Jewish ethnicities show in these tests because of widespread historical exclusions, within Jewish communities, of non-Jews as marriage partners; thus these initially religious communities may be classified as ancestral endogamies and, on that basis, as ethnicities. We should not be distracted; Judaism is the foremost (ie progenitor) of the monotheistic religions. Jewishness is a meme, not a gene. A ‘secular Jew’ – or a ‘secular Muslim’ – is an oxymoron; a non-religious adherent to a religion.

Endogamy cultures can be problematic, not so much because of inbreeding within a limited gene pool, but mainly because of the antipathies caused by self-segregation. In some places there has been widespread and mutual self-segregation; the West Russian ‘Pale of (Jewish) Settlement‘ which lasted formally for over a century (until World War 1; and informally for much longer) was one such territory in which endogamy bred hatred and hatred bred endogamy. Reciprocal apartheid. Further, the lands of that former Pale were particularly coveted in the 1930s by the German National Socialists for the realisation of their Lebensraum policy.

Antisemitism as a panoply of Christian Judeophobias

Orthodox Antisemitism

In the years between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Eastern Mediterranean was politically and then culturally, a ‘Hellenic’ (ie Greek) empire; a cultural empire which gained two unofficial capital cities, Byzantium and Alexandria. That empire was Romanised from the first century BCE; ie subject to the political (but not cultural) hegemony of Rome.

Judaism, as the vanguard for monotheism – a novel religio-cultural phenomenon – became a successful proselytising religion, especially within the Hellenic cultural sphere. In say 200 CE, by far the majority of Jews in the world were converts. Judaism’s spiritual home city was Jerusalem, the principal city of Judah/Judea. There were also many Jewish converts in the territories to the north and east of Jerusalem; and there were still rabbinical Jews in Babylon (in modern Iraq), which is where early Jewish intellectuals decamped to after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

With the rise of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century CE, this new aggressive monotheism largely displaced Judaism in the Roman empire; many Eastern Mediterranean Jews either converted to Christianity, or emigrated. Many of the emigrants travelled west; with many migrating Jews converting many of the ‘pagans’ (especially Berbers) of the Western Mediterranean to monotheism. These people, initially mostly in the African ‘Maghreb’, became the Sephardic Jews.

Just as in the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, the new aggressive faith used the rhetoric of cultural-racism against Judaism, the hitherto established faith. Thus Orthodox archbishops such as John Chrysostom of Constantinople waged a vicious rhetorical war against the Jews. (Refer Simon Schama, Story of the Jews, episode 2.) Central themes of this rhetoric were the alleged complicity of the Jewish priesthood in the execution of Jesus Christ (by Christians deifying Jesus, his crucifiers therefore became guilty of deicide); and a greater tolerance for the practice of moneylending, in particular the usurious practice of ‘making money from money’.

In turn, those loyal to Judaism saw the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity as a ‘slippery slope’ away from monotheism; ie, away from the First Commandment of Moses.

Schisms

Christianity may be understood as the first of the great schisms. Islam later became the second schism from the Jewish branch, and Roman Catholicism the second schism of the Christian branch. After that, Protestantism became the great schism from the Catholic branch, during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Just as Calvinism became the most anti-Catholic form of Protestant Christianity around the year 1550, 1,200 years earlier the emerging Greek Christian Orthodoxy (based in Byzantium renamed Constantinople, now Istanbul) became the most virulently anti-Jewish form of Christianity. In contrast, the Islamic schism from Judaism did not promote a hatred of the parent religion. Islam was never antisemitic in the way that Orthodox Christianity was.

The Islamic – or Koranic – variant of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism rapidly proselytised in North Africa and Southwest Asia; this process – both cultural and military – was known as ‘Jihad’. While Islam proved popular, in part because of its tax advantages in Islamised territories, it was tolerant towards monotheistic non-converts; Jews with Muslim overlords generally prospered. (Muslims became known as Ishmaelites, in reference to Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, the mythical father of the Islamised – largely ‘Hamitic’ – races.) Christianity was the least tolerant of the three monotheist branches of biblical Judaism.

The Russian Jews

In the second half of the first millennium, all three monotheisms were seeking converts among bordering polytheist populations. Judaism continued to make progress in two main areas, in addition to the Western Mediterranean. These were Yemen (and subsequently Ethiopia), and Khazaria.

Khazaria (the Khazar Khaganate; see map) was a mixed European and Turkic territory to the north of the Caucasus Mountains, in modern-day southwestern Russia; mountains which include Europe’s highest, Mt Elbrus.) It is this region that gave to people of European ethnicity the label ‘Caucasian‘.)

The Khazar Khaganate dates from 650 CE, and lasted in some form until the early 13th century.

In the eighth century, the Khazarian people – especially the ruling class, realising that it was not a matter of whether to convert to monotheism but to choose which faith to adopt – had three to choose from. Realising that they would have less socio-political autonomy if they adopted either of the two religions on their doorstep, they chose Judaism. As converted Jews, they were deemed subsequently to be descended from Ashkenaz, a son of Noah’s other son Japheth. The Khazarites became  the Ashkenazi Jews (albeit not a popular view within the twentyfirst-century Israeli secular priesthood; refer Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). In the year 1000 CE, for example, this was the most populous Jewish community in the world.

Around the year 1220, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish polities in those steppe-lands were erased by the Mongol invaders. The predominantly Jewish population of Khazaria fled into the emerging Russian territories; Slavic lands whose people were then consolidating their faith as Orthodox Christians. (Religious ‘water’ and ‘oil’ didn’t really mix; there would be minimal assimilation between these two populations.)

In later centuries, these Ashkenazi Jews almost certainly mixed with other Jewish groups who had moved east, especially from the Central Europe. (In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, Eran Elhaik, using DNA analysis, establishes the ethnic predominance of the Khazarites within those Jewish communities of the Pale.)

Catholic Antisemitism

The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and (Roman) Catholic churches was a slow-moving affair, which covered most of the second half of the first millennium CE. By and large, Catholicism acquired the same antisemitism, though developed a greater degree of pragmatism towards Judaism.

Orthodox Christianity and Islam emerged as much bigger geopolitical threats than Judaism to Catholic western Europe. Judaism receded to the periphery of monotheistic West Eurasia (to use the sensible name adopted by James Belich in his 2022 book The World the Plague Made, noting that North and Northeast Africa also belonged to this geopolity).

The basics of the European geopolitical fracture that still stands today were established during the reign of the Frankish emperor, Charlemagne. By the early ninth century, Catholicism prevailed across the entirety of Western and Central Europe. (There were still ‘pagan’ pockets – eg, in Scandinavia; otherwise, the border established by Charlemagne is that of today’s European Union. We note that the Catholic parts of the former Yugoslavia are in the European Union, and the Orthodox and Muslim parts of that former union are not. We also may note that Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are exceptions; they are more Orthodox than Catholic. And we note that the post-Catholic Protestantisation of northern Europe occurred many centuries after Charlemagne.)

Simon Schama (in his Story) notes that Judaism came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; this suggests that the Frankish kingdoms (which became France) had been a significant recipient of the racially diverse Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean. And it suggests that the (still relatively small) Rhineland (western German) population of Jews in Medieval Europe also arrived via that French route.

In the centuries either side of 1000 CE, the fusion of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures seems to have created a synergy, creating a cultural high tide of tolerance and intellectual osmosis. An interesting consequence may have been the emergence of modern banking. Pure banking developed in a Mediterranean world in which money-lending (usuary; charging interest) was prohibited by Christian and Muslims, though was pragmatically tolerated when the money-lenders were Jews. (Early banking was a side-hustle of rich Italian and Spanish merchants, who made written promises – promissory notes – and ‘cleared’ them among each other. They invested the money in their possession – their mercantile profits – to finance ventures; as financier shareholders of each venture, they would take a share of the profits or losses.)

It was Christian Kings and Princes who did much of the borrowing from Jewish moneylenders; these entitled overlords had a propensity to turn to antisemitism when they become insolvent. The Catholic world became especially prickly towards its cultural rivals, including Judaism, in the later decades of the 12th century.

Antisemitism in western Europe seems to have emerged around the same time that Catholic Crusader groups had conquered much of the ‘Holy Lands’ (the Levant; modern Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) from both Muslim and Orthodox overlords. Tolerance and pragmatism towards Jews largely fell apart in Spain, England and France in the twelfth century, leading to expulsions of Jews from those countries; and the boosting of the Rhineland population of Jews. Shama mentions the problem of antisemitism emerging in England during the reign of the Crusader King (Richard ‘Lionheart’; 1189-1199); indeed, Richard’s mother Eleanor had been responsible for expelling Jews from her ancestral territory of Aquitaine. Jews were expelled from Spain in stages from the 12th to the 14th centuries; and from England during the 13th century.

This is about the same time (early twelfth century) as when the Khazarite Jews had to flee (northwest into West Russia) from the Golden Horde established by the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.

Neither Shlomo Sand nor Simon Shama mentioned the terrible atrocities committed upon Jews – especially in western Germany and Switzerland – during the first and biggest round of the Black Death (1348 to 1352; the ‘Plague’). But it’s true. Many Jews were scapegoated and grotesquely murdered; accused of having poisoned the wells in many central European towns.

Christian Poland, which was less affected by the Black Death than Western Europe, gained a reputation for relative tolerance towards Jews. So, it is likely that Eastern and Western Europeans converged in the territories we today call Poland, creating a relatively cosmopolitan population of Jews; Jews who practiced their faith while also mixing more easily with their Catholic (and later Protestant) neighbours; that is, more easily than the larger populations of Jews further east were able to integrate with their Orthodox neighbours.

Protestant Antisemitism (including Christian Zionist Antisemitism)

While the Bible (Old Testament) became more important for Jewish populations in recent centuries, the newer Talmud was a substantially more important text in the practice of Judaism in the medieval period.

It was the Protestant Christians during and after the Reformation who first took to the Bible – both Testaments – as literal statements of history and prophecy. Jews suddenly played an affirmative role as the spiritual and biological ancestors of Christians; of particular importance, they played an important role in Christian prophecy (including apocalyptic prophecy), especially in the momentum to re-establish an ethnoreligious state called ‘Israel’.

Further, Protestantism – especially the more Evangelical forms (eg Calvinism) – was attractive to the expanding Plague-recovery mercantile communities of Northwest Europe. Under the auspices of the reformed Church, the sanctions against usury – sanctions against making money from money – were increasingly downplayed. Christians could do business with Jews again; soon enough though, these two mercantile-religious communities became rivals. While Jews were no longer proselytisers, the mercantile Protestants (especially the Dutch) were eager expansionists, expanding their new capitalist domains throughout the much of the world; although only encroaching on the coastal communities of the Islamic World of the Indian Ocean rim, and of the ‘Far East’.

Protestant antisemitism was born out of capitalist rivalry; and out of the new Christian racial tropes, which facilitated the acceptance of intensely racist forms of slavery. In the nineteenth century – in the era of emerging ethno-nationalism within Europe, and emerging racial supremacism – the Jewish ‘nation’ became a rivalrous irritant to increasingly nationalist Christianity. Further, as Shlomo Sand observed, in Eastern Europe, a more dangerous form of ethno-nationalism emerged; one which built on the original Orthodox tradition of antisemitism. This eastern rivalry had morphed from being mainly religious to mainly ethnic; especially Slavs versus Jews.

To the west of Europe, in the now geopolitically dominant United Kingdom, Christian Zionism became a thing. While (Protestant) Christian Zionism had its roots in the Puritan era of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, by the 1830s the upper crust of even Anglican society wanted Jews to be ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’. Although the United Kingdom elected a Jewish Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli – in the 1860s, this only reinforced latent antisemitism amongst his dour political rivals. (Queen Victoria found Disraeli to be more personable than his political opponents.)

Anyway, through that century, there was increasing (mainly Christian) talk in the United Kingdom and Western Europe about re-establishing a Jewish homeland, though not necessarily in Jewish biblical home-lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The possibility of an expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine emerged, however, as the then overlords of the Levant – the Turkish Ottomans – appeared to be presiding over of a dying empire. The European ‘great powers’ were lining up to divide the ‘Middle East’ – an annoyingly Britocentric term – between them.

This possibility didn’t stop the British ruling-class antisemites from concocting (just after 1900) a plan to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Uganda. While Uganda is a pleasant and fertile territory in Africa, this resettlement proposal tells much about the irredeemable racism of West Europeans towards the presumed ‘inferior’ races; especially but not only Africans. And it shows zero sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities regarding their biblical homeland.

Meanwhile the antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe – mainly in the then Russian Empire – continued as Slavic nationalisms were gaining pace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to their destinations of choice: United States and United Kingdom.

For European Jews, the interwar crisis began in 1924 when the United States closed down their immigration from Europe; and the United Kingdom pretty much did the same thing. The United States’ near-prohibition of Jewish immigration lasted until the mid-1950s. It was only after 1924 that large numbers of Eastern European Jews looked to emigrate to (British Mandatory) Palestine; that’s where British and American immigration policy deflected them to.

Then, in the 1930s, the German National Socialists (Nazis) started both scapegoating their Jewish residents (effectively blaming them for the Great Depression, on account of apparent Jewish overrepresentation in the finance industry) and coveting their lands in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the newly independent Baltic States, and especially Soviet Russia.

The new Jewish residents in British Palestine recreated the segregated lifestyles they had known in Russia, creating much animosity between them and their new Palestinian neighbours. Pretty much by definition, these settlers were Zionists, because they were recreating the biblical promised land of Zion, even though they would rather have gone to the United States. The indigenous Palestinian population resented the new settlers; not because of their ethnicity, but because of their insensitivity and exclusiveness; an insensitivity comparable with many prior experiences of other indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonisation.

Many immigrants from the west Russian territories were Socialist Zionists; indeed, it was that leftish faction which largely ruled modern Israel from its formalisation in 1948 until the mid-1970s. Other interwar settlers included the fascist Zionists of the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. Still others – including the Irgun, which became Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party – were on the less-extreme political right. All of these settler-Zionist factions formed resistance militias that became anti-British (ie anti- the new post-Ottoman overlord of the southern Levant) and (after the 1929 uprising) anti-Palestinian. (Just as Hamas is a resistance militia today.) The anti-Palestinian aspect of this settler militancy became, over time, increasingly racist; it became antihamitic, a racial prejudice as problematic as antisemitism.

Around 1940, the Lehi fascists tried to do a deal with Adolf Hitler. Both the Nazis and the Lehi wanted the European Jews to leave Europe. The Lehi wanted a mass transfer of that population to their new Zion in the Levant. Great Britain, in particular, was in the way. From the British point-of-view, the time to create an exclusively Jewish homeland had passed; the logistics of a mass resettlement programme during World War Two were impossible, and racism had passed its peak in the United Kingdom.

For Hitler, those logistics of a mass transfer to Jews to Palestine were always going to be problematic; exponentially more so once Germany was at war with Britain. Instead, Hitler reconsidered the British antisemitic plan to transfer the European Jews to Africa. After May 1940 there was a pro-Nazi puppet government installed in Southern France – the Vichy regime – which had control over France’s imperial territories. Hitler formulated a plan to settle the Eastern European Jews to Madagascar! While never practical, Winston Churchill certainly made such a transfer quite impossible. The United Kingdom invaded and conquered the Vichy French territory of Madagascar in 1942. (Who said the British military was overstretched in 1942? In that year, Winston Churchill argued that Australian troops should stay in Europe. John Curtin, the new Australian Prime Minister, wanted those soldiers to return home to defend Australia.)

Hitler’s options for the Jews substantially narrowed. His antisemitism and desire for lebensraum had left him committed to the removal of this population, but with no destination to remove them to, and few resources to do the removing. The rest became tragic history – from 1942 to 1945 – of the worst possible kind.

Still – even after the Holocaust – the pro-Israel antisemitic United States denied immigration entry to Jews, except that is for a few handpicked ones. Most holocaust survivors of World War Two were left with only one option; to migrate to British Palestine or (after 1948) to Israel. The Lehi (who fought the British during WW2), the Irgun, and the socialistic Haganah all served as ‘freedom fighters’ from 1946 to 1948. This was a successful militant insurgency. The British departed as soon as the United Nations was formed; they couldn’t wait to leave. The United Kingdom supported the creation of an ethnocratic sovereign state as the eventual solution to its longstanding antisemitic project of resettlement, indeed hoping that large numbers of British-resident Jews would join the refugee Jews in the new state of Israel.

Israel had been a longstanding antisemitic project, with the object of both cleansing Europe of Jews and creating a Europe-ish sovereign state in the ‘Middle East’, a state that would help to project a European-style foreign policy in a region which was set to undergo full decolonisation.

Conclusion

Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state, which – if it wishes not to be a pariah state – must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. It is not exceptional – the rules do not allow for exceptionalism – and the rules do not allow for the new nation to promote an alternative form of racism that’s as bad as antisemitism.

Jews are an ethnically diverse people with a shared cultural heritage; Judaism is a culture rather than a nation. A significant number – though not a majority – of the Jewish people live in the nation-state of Israel, a nation state that’s 76 years-old and counting. It’s a nation which presently pursues a relatively soft form of antihamitic Apartheid within its internationally accepted boundaries, and a much harsher form of antihamitism within its occupied territories. There is a clear analogy between the occupied territories of Palestine today and the occupied (and client) territories of Europe’s belligerent powers in the 1940s.

All nation states’ governments are equally able to be criticised; by those countries’ citizens, by residents and by non-residents. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; it’s criticism of the way that nation-state projects itself across the wider world, and about how it racially and culturally discriminates (sometimes with extreme violence) against people or peoples over which the Israeli authorities have a duty of care.

Past victims of racism have more reason than most to avoid being present perpetrators of racism.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

For example;

In Syria, opposition-baked forces have taken Aleppo city and other strategic centres in an attempt to remove Syria’s authoritarian leader Assad. Assad’s forces are resisting on the ground while Russian air forces attacked the opposition force’s positions. Israel announced it may strike Syria government munitions sites in a move to ensure opposition forces do not take possession of such weaponry.

Meanwhile, fighting has intensified on the Ukraine-Russia frontlines after:

• North Korea deployed a 10,000-strong assistance force to the Kursk region;
• Outgoing US President Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to fire ATTACM missiles deep into Russia;
• Ukraine indeed fired ATTACMs into the Russian motherland and has increased its drone attacks on military targets in cities once regarded as safe from attack.
• Also, and significantly, Russia fired into Dnipro City in Ukraine a hypersonic “experimental” Medium-Range-Ballistic-Missile – and followed up with the biggest barrage of drone and missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the conflict began.

So-called “red-lines” have been crossed and all sides appear determined to take as much territory as possible before US President-Elect Donald Trump is sworn into office in January.

Paul and Selwyn assess what we can expect to witness in the next two months, how other state actors are being drawn into conflict, and what objectives are driving warring sides at flashpoints around the world.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning will analyse how conflicts are expanding, arguably with warring sides taking an opportunity to take as much territory, while a ‘Lame-Duck Window’ exists in the United States.

For example;

In Syria, opposition-baked forces have taken Aleppo city and other strategic centres in an attempt to remove Syria’s authoritarian leader Assad. Assad’s forces are resisting on the ground while Russian air forces attacked the opposition force’s positions. Israel announced it may strike Syria government munitions sites in a move to ensure opposition forces do not take possession of such weaponry.

Meanwhile, fighting has intensified on the Ukraine-Russia frontlines after:

• North Korea deployed a 10,000-strong assistance force to the Kursk region;
• Outgoing US President Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to fire ATTACM missiles deep into Russia;
• Ukraine indeed fired ATTACMs into the Russian motherland and has increased its drone attacks on military targets in cities once regarded as safe from attack.
• Also, and significantly, Russia fired into Dnipro City in Ukraine a hypersonic “experimental” Medium-Range-Ballistic-Missile – and followed up with the biggest barrage of drone and missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the conflict began.

So-called “red-lines” have been crossed and all sides appear determined to take as much territory as possible before US President-Elect Donald Trump is sworn into office in January.

Paul and Selwyn will assess what we can expect to witness in the next two months, how other state actors are being drawn into conflict, and what objectives are driving warring sides at flashpoints around the world.

Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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

A View from Afar – In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning analyse how the state of Israel has gone rogue, attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. At this juncture it is clear this is an intentional attack.

Over the past week Israel Defense Force troops have repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers who were authorised and deployed to the region by the United Nations Security Council.

Also last week; the Government of Israel issued a statement notifying the United Nations Secretary General that he was now banned from Israel and was persona non grata. Within a day of that statement, IDF troops had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in Southern Lebanon.

Since then, the IDF has continued operations that threaten the UN’s presence. And Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now issued a directive to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw from the area north of its borders in Southern Lebanon.

Also, despite the United States Biden Administration cautioning Israel on its attacks on UN personnel, overnight New Zealand time, the United States has deployed 100 US troops on the ground in Israel to operate missile defence systems.

Paul and Selwyn consider:

• Why Israel has begun to attack United Nations peacekeepers in the region?
• Why has the United States deepened its involvement in Israel’s so-called defence?
• What of Hezbollah, Hamas; are their attacks on Israel a defence or an attacking offensive?
• What of Iran, what is its position and will it engage in a full-scale war with Israel and what are the consequences should it do so?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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

In this episode of A View From Afar political scientist Paul Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning I will analyse how the state of Israel has gone rogue, attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.

At this juncture it is clear this is an intentional attack. Over the past week Israel Defense Force troops have repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers who were authorised and deployed to the region by the United Nations Security Council.

Also last week; the Government of Israel issued a statement notifying the United Nations Secretary General that he was now banned from Israel and was persona non grata.

Within a day of that statement, IDF troops had fired on UN peacekeeping positions in Southern Lebanon. Since then, the IDF has continued operations that threaten the UN’s presence.

And Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now issued a directive to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw from the area north of its borders in Southern Lebanon.

Also, despite the United States Biden Administration cautioning Israel on its attacks on UN personnel, overnight New Zealand time, the United States has deployed 100 US troops on the ground in Israel to operate missile defence systems.

It would appear the Biden Administration has allowed Israel’s Government to draw it further into a war justified on defence but is factually a conflict that is clearly disproportional to Israel’s threat.

Atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Gaza continue; and, IDF hostilities continue in the occupied West Bank; missile attacks against civilian areas in Lebanon; and missiles have been fired into Syria over the weekend.

Today, Paul and Selwyn will consider:

* Why Israel has begun to attack United Nations peacekeepers in the region?

* Why has the United Nations deepened its involvement in Israel’s so-called defence?

* What of Hezbollah, Hamas; are their attacks on Israel a defence or an attacking offensive?

* What of Iran, what is its position and will it engage in a full-scale war with Israel and what are the consequences should it do so?

Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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

In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst, Paul G. Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning discuss: The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies.

Paul and Selwyn reveal Israel’s long-form planning that led to it sabotaging hand-held communication devices that Hezbollah used to communicate with.

This episode’s questions include:

• Who was behind the manufacturing of the booby-trapped devices?
• How long has Israel been planning last week’s attack – an attack that saw thousands injured and many killed in Lebanon after Israel remotely pulled the virtual-pin and exploded the devices indiscriminantly?
• And why now? Presumably the devices were also programmed to be tracked. So why did Israel decide to abandon tracking Hezbollah and to attack?
• Was it to cause chaos among its enemies in a preemptive move immediately prior to its widespread bombing and targeting of communities in Lebanon?
• And what of international law? Has Israel gone so far beyond the Rubicon with Gaza that it senses international law no longer applies to Israel?
• And, finally, has the United Nations abandoned its right to protect principles, its peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities in favour of aid, development and an overly bureaucratic institution?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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

In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst, Paul G. Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning will discuss: The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies.

Today, Paul and Selwyn will reveal Israel’s long-form planning that led to it sabotaging hand-held communication devices that Hezbollah used to communicate with.

This episode’s questions will include:

• Who was behind the manufacturing of the booby-trapped devices?
• How long has Israel been planning last week’s attack – an attack that saw thousands injured and many killed in Lebanon after Israel remotely pulled the virtual-pin and exploded the devices indiscriminantly?
• And why now? Presumably the devices were also programmed to be tracked. So why did Israel decide to abandon tracking Hezbollah and to attack?
• Was it to cause chaos among its enemies in a preemptive move immediately prior to its widespread bombing and targeting of communities in Lebanon?
• And what of international law? Has Israel gone so far beyond the Rubicon with Gaza that it senses international law no longer applies to Israel?
• And, finally, has the United Nations abandoned its right to protect principles, its peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities in favour of aid, development and an overly bureaucratic institution?

Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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

In this the tenth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist/analyst Selwyn Manning will examine the current Israel-Palestine Atrocities.

As we prepare for this podcast, representatives of Arab states have presented a united front at the United Nations, criticising the UN Security Council of doing nothing to protect civilians from Israeli bombing and missile attacks on Gazan civilians and locations.

These civilian facilities include Hospitals, schools, residential areas. The targeting of civilians has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people – around one-third of those deaths are children.

Additional to this, Israel has sealed the borders of Gaza while it prevents food, water and medical supplies from reaching civilians – in breach of international law requirements and laws of conflict.

Israel ordered Gazan civilians, who wish to get to safety, to get out of North Gaza and move toward the south, to the border with Egypt. But as people fled south toward what appeared to be safety, Israel bombed the southern Gaza region killing more civilians and sealing off that corridor for others who sought refuge.

As a consequence of the bombing, Egypt responded by sealing the Gaza-Egypt border. Humanitarian aid now sits on trucks, waiting, on the Egypt side of the border, while United Nations officials implore Israel and Egypt to allow medical supplies, food and water to get through to those who are injured and dying.

The Israel Defence Force strikes followed a surprise-attack on Israeli citizens by soldiers operating under the Hamas banner. Civilians were slaughtered and others taken hostage, only to be used as bargaining chips in and leverage against their enemies.

Even Palestinian advocacy groups like the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa suggested that breaches of international humanitarian Law, crimes against civilians, have been committed by those Hamas-aligned fighters. But they are clear, as others are too, that crimes against humanity, war crimes, have been committed by Israel, without consequence, as we all give witness to its response which is disproportionate, brutal, and disregarding of the thousands of Palestinian lives that have already been taken.

That’s the current situation. It is likely to get much worse.

In this episode, our questions will include:

What are the world’s leaders doing to stop the carnage?

Are the world’s nations being drawn into what will be an ever-expanding war?

Are we witnessing the beginning of a war where on one side authoritarian-led states like Russia, Iran, the wider Arab states, and possibly China stand unified against the United States, Britain, Germany, and other so-called liberal democratic allies representing the old world order?

Is what we are witnessing, what happens when a global rules-based order, multilateralism and institutions like the United Nations no longer have influence to prevent war, or restore peace and stability, or assert principles of international justice and enforce the rights of victims to see recourse to the law?

Why has this slaughter become an opportunity for the US and Russia to square-off against each other at the UN Security Council – a body that was once designed to advocate and achieve peace, but has now become a geopolitically divided entity of stalemate and mediocrity?

Eventually, will humanitarianism prevail? Will the world recognise that all people, the elderly, women, children, people of all ethnicities and religions, that they all bleed and die irrespective of their state of origin, when leaders of all sides, while sitting back in their bunkers, unleash weapons designed to kill as many people as is possible?

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn will examine this most grave situation from a geopolitical vantage point. It may appear as dispassionate, and as so even disturbing, but we will take this approach in an attempt to aide an understanding of why this is happening in Gaza and why it is happening now.

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

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

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

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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

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

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

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