ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter.

That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorisation from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defence under Article 51.

They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.

At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran.

One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.

The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”

This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231.

Trump ripped up agreement
It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations.

This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.

It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other 14 Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom.

These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel.

She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.

Truthful voices at UN
The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran.

China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation.

Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation.

The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.

When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government.

When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.

The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 165 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime.

Complicit in war crime
The countries that gave a UN Security Council pass to the United States and Israel for these killings — notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US — are also complicit in this war crime.

This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organisation dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience.

For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world — in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others — honouring the true multipolarity of our world.

Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail.

Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).

The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs.

The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.

US ‘owns Middle East’
Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region.

Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China.

US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.

The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of the Second World War was founded on a simple and profound idea — that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.

The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.

We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population.

World outside US
The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.

Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress.

Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace.

The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defence of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.

A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.

The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine.

Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.

These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

This is a moment of great peril for the small Caribbean nation of Cuba. Nothing less than its sovereignty is on the line as the US drives its knee into the neck of 10 million Cubans by means of a crushing air and sea blockade and a set of secondary sanctions designed to muscle the nations of the world into compliance to the hegemon.

The issues are not particular to Cuba; we are in the midst of a militant US that is determined to assert domination through force.

It was therefore a pleasure to spend time this week with Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Cuba’s Ambassador to New Zealand in Wellington.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gangsters have no time for rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He added: “Jared has been pushing this.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will they do so? Don’t bet on it.

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

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

Truth in world affairs is not a single expert-narrated story.

National Politics

In our ‘official’ ‘United Nations’ world – the world referenced by the expression the international rules-based order – there are about 200 sovereign nation states (ie ‘countries’) which are equal members of the global community of nations. We mean equal in a juridical sense, not an economic or demographic sense; as recognised by ‘one nation, one vote’ in the United Nations General Assembly. Further, in this sanctioned and sanctified view – using the verb ‘sanction’ in its original old-fashioned sense – neither history nor geographical proximity matter; Mexico is as independent of the United States as it is of India.

Before moving on to geopolitics, there are four exceptions allowed within this official view. First is that there are numerous pieces of territory which are understood as too small – in population and/or land area – to be viable independent sovereign nation states. Second, some sovereign nation states – usually neighbours – may form a voluntary Union, whereby certain aspects of their sovereignty are ceded to centralised institutions. Third is that many citizens do not reside in the territories associated with their nationalities. And three exceptions not allowed for, but acknowledged to varying extents: countries that don’t exist but do exist; territories subject to internationally tolerated military occupation; and territories within recognised nation-states pushing for secession, though falling well short of either self-government or union with similarly-placed neighbouring territories.

An example of the first type of exception is Greenland, accounted for as a ‘realm’ territory of Denmark. (Other familiar realm territories are: Cook Islands [in the realm of New Zealand], American Samoa, and New Zealand’s closest foreign neighbour [Norfolk Island, in the realm of Australia].) The second exception is the European Union (noting that, in some circumstances – consider FIFA – the United Kingdom is also a Union of [four] nations). Might Canada join the European Union this century?

The third exception – the diaspora exception – applies to a degree to all nation states; and it applies particularly to New Zealand. New Zealand possibly has more citizens resident outside of New Zealand relative to citizens resident inside New Zealand; at least if we only consider countries with resident populations in excess of one million. Is New Zealand its citizenry or its territory? Given the realities of dual-citizenship, it is probably better defined as its territory along with its residentcitizens and denizens.

The fourth generally accepted exception is territories that are formally non-sovereign. Our example here is Antarctica. We may add the Moon.

Re the unsanctioned exceptions, Taiwan is the obvious example of the first type (other examples include Abkhazia and Somaliland) and Palestine is the obvious example of the second type. For the third (secessionist) type, I would cite Eastern Congo in which substantial domestic forces are in reality more aligned to nearby Kigali than faraway Kinshasa; I would also mention Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to the Rohingya people.

Geopolitics

While the above ‘national politics’ narrative is real and contains a legal structure satisfying to its liberal architects, it is overlaid by an equally real (and quite different) geopolitical layer. Conflicts of big ego and big ideology can neither be understood nor resolved without substantial reference to geopolitics. Geopolitics is tied to both contested histories and geographical proximity. More than anything geopolitics is about empire (formal and informal), the unequal coalitions and powerplays among and between identities of people beyond and within territorial boundaries.

Geopolitics is about the centres of political power – the ‘great powers’ to use an expression from World War One – and their rival claims over the planet and its people. Geopolitical texts commonly refer to cities that are power centres, such as Washington and Berlin, rather than the countries in which those cities are located. Most conflict in the world can only be understood with recourse to geopolitics, which is largely the sociopathic politics of power masquerading as a set of struggles of ‘Good versus Evil’.

At least the president of the United States, DJT, is in a sense more honest than most ‘democratic’ leaders of powerful countries, in that he frames his acquisitive sentiments in the name of America rather than in the name of Good or in the name of God. Coveted Greenland looms larger in geopolitics than in national politics; in national politics it successfully hides in plain sight, as a large appendage of a semi-sovereign nation with a population barely larger than New Zealand.

Greenland: History

Greenland presently – at least formally – lies within the realm of Denmark, noting that ‘realm’ is itself a sanctioned rules-based exception. Denmark, as a member of the European Union, has delegated aspects of its sovereignty; from Copenhagen to Brussels and Paris and Berlin.

The first question to ask about Greenland is: why is it in the possession of the Kingdom of Denmark? Greenland was never conquered or colonised by Danes or by Denmark. Over 1,000 years ago, Greenland was colonised by Norse (ie Norwegian) Vikings. Greenland’s first people were Inuit, and the present population is substantially an Inuit/Norse mix. Around 500 years ago, Norway and Denmark formed a political union – a kingdom in which Denmark was the dominant partner – which lasted around 300 years. In that age of imperialism, Greenland became formally subject to that kingdom. This was a marriage between Denmark and Norway during the constrained period of the Little Ice Age. Greenland was ‘matrimonial property’ in this Union.

In 1814, Norway was passed on to Sweden through the Treaty of Kiel, in an era in which the wife was regarded as the property of the husband. Thus, Denmark formally gained Greenland as part of the divorce settlement. That remains the historical basis for Denmark’s claim over Greenland today. Though we remind ourselves that today’s reality is that Denmark is a somewhat junior partner in the polyamorous European Union. (Would Denmark get to keep Greenland if Denmark was to do a ‘Dexit’? Or would Greenland be passed on to the other husbands and wives?)

Greenland: Geography

Functionally, at least in geo-environmental terms, Greenland is the northern land-analogue of Antarctica. Arctica. While it doesn’t literally cover the North Pole (except that a large sheet of sea-ice extends from northern Greenland), it is near enough; and its land ice-sheet is certainly the northern analogue of the West Antarctica ice sheet. Based on this analogy, Greenland could become subject to a similar extranationalism to that which governs Antarctica. The difference of course is that Antarctica has no formally resident population; almost nobody was born there. The model could be adapted, with authentic Greenlanders becoming limited-power-landlords over an essentially international territory.

When I was a child, it was very common for families to have a globe in their living rooms, somewhere between the mantlepiece and the piano. About 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to have acquired a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world; indeed, a small self-assembly globe. To see Greenland in perspective, it’s necessary to look at a globe. Short of that, see this satellite picture of North America from the Turtle Island page on Wikipedia.

(I was privileged to learn about Turtle Island when I visited Winnipeg in May 2019. When I walked through the Peace Park at The Forks, I learned for the first time about Turtle Island. See on YouTube: Winnipeg – the heart of Turtle Island. [And note this 16 December 2025 BBC story FBI foils New Year’s Eve terror plot across southern California, officials say relating to the Turtle Island Liberation Front.] I have a personal story about Greenland. While never having set foot there, I remember having a window seat flying from London to Los Angeles one October day. I saw the sun set somewhere northwest of Scotland; then a couple of hours later I saw it rise again, from the west, over Greenland. This was only possible because at such polar latitudes, an east-west flight is fast enough to be able to reverse the sunset.)

The map, in correct perspective, very much shows Greenland as a not-very-green part of North America. Its closest neighbour is of course Canada; indeed since 2022 Greenland has shared a land border with Greenland, on Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel, following the resolution of the Whisky War between Canada and Denmark. (It is unknown whether the Kennedy Channel was named after a Canadian fur-trader and politician, or the guy who was United States Secretary of the Navy in 1852 and 1853. If the latter, this might give false credence to DJT’s claim on Greenland for the United States.)

Greenland certainly looks to be geographically American – just as Norfolk Island geographically connects to New Zealand (on the Zealandia continent). But a geographical argument must also based on the connectivity between population centres. The flight distances from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to other capital cities are: Reykjavik, Iceland (1,430 km); Ottawa, Canada (2,560km); Dublin, Ireland (2,800km); Oslo, Norway (3,150km); London, UK (3,250km); Washington DC, US (3,260km); Brussels, EU (3,520km); Copenhagen, Denmark (3,530); Berlin, Germany (3,820); Moscow, Russia (4,630km); Beijing, China (8,400km).

Washington is closer to Nuuk than is Copenhagen. Dublin is the closest EU capital city to Nuuk, and is a more economically connected city to the North Atlantic than is Copenhagen. Brussels, formal capital of the EU is the same distance from Nuuk as is Copenhagen. Berlin, the geopolitical capital of the EU, is nearly 4,000 km from Nuuk (whereas New York, the power capital of the US is less than 3,000km from Nuuk). Moscow and Beijing are both much further from Greenland, have had no geopolitical influence there, and constitute no plausible geopolitical threat; future security issues in Greenland are more likely to emanate from piracy than from power centres in Asia.

While there is no argument in favour of the United States annexing or otherwise acquiring Greenland, the case for European Union control of Greenland is even weaker than that of the United States. The only European countries with credible claims to form a Union with Greenland are Norway and Iceland, on the basis of shared history and shared maritime geography.

Greenland: Demography

Greenland’s population of just under 60,000 is only slightly higher than the populations of the American realm territories of American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands. Guam has three times more people than Greenland. The American Virgin Islands, with 100,000 people, is more populated than Greenland. The largest American realm territory, Puerto Rico, has 300 times as many people as Greenland. Of these ‘countries’, only Puerto Rico is a serious candidate to become the 51st state of the United States. The Virgin Islanders don’t even drive on the same side of the road as the rest of the United States.

I suspect that the DJT vision for Greenland is for it to become something like the former Panama Canal Zone; a former American territory that existed when I sailed through the Panama Canal in 1974. Of course we are aware that DJT would like to re-acquire that Panamanian territory for the United States.

Greenland is different though, in the same way that Antarctica is. It has many potentially valuable mining resources; and it lies on economically significant sea channels which are becoming more navigable thanks to climate change. And it has global environmental values. A collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet would drown all of Manhattan and most of the rest of New York; as well as much of other cities mentioned above such as Dublin, London and Copenhagen.

Greenland as Arctica

Greenland’s people can become landlords – but not landlords with monopoly power – able to procure citizens’ royalties (public property rights) from both extractive industries and the use of its sea-lanes. Greenland requires a Treaty of Nuuk, with a limited concession of sovereignty in return for those benefits; but a concession that leaves property rights in Greenland essentially the same as property rights in Antarctica.

Antarctica today represents geopolitics done quite well.

The Greenland question needs to be addressed. It is not sufficient for it to become a de facto territory of Europe – which eventually means Berlin. And it is too large a landmass to be independent in the way that Iceland is.

Warning

By understanding Greenland essentially as an inhabited Anti-Antarctica – as Arctica – we have to realise that the present United States regime may seek to undermine (literally and metaphorically) current arrangements for Antarctica. And when DJT turns his gaze southwards, he may look upon independent sovereign countries in the South Pacific as parts of his growing fiefdom. The South Pacific is America’s gateway to McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. A number of ‘independent’ and proud countries in the South Pacific – Tonga, for example – already dutifully vote largely according to the United States’ say-so in the United Nations.

If Antarctica becomes a template for Greenland, that’s a definite improvement on the present accidental and unsustainable arrangement; but only if Antarctica’s present governance arrangements are preserved.

Watch what happens if Nasa’s Artemis Program successfully re-lands American men on the Moon. The Washington regime may lay claim to privileged property rights over the Moon – much as Wentworth acquired New Zealand’s South Island in 1839, requiring a treaty (Treaty of Waitangi) to repudiate that claim. If the United States believes it owns the Moon, it may stake a similar claim on Antarctica; and also seek to extend its Pacific realm. Citing America’s security! And breaking the Seventh and Tenth Commandments.

While current American-led geopolitics poses a deeply problematic story for resource-rich and low-populated territories, the expert-led official story of international politics is problematic too. The status-quo is not necessarily the best solution.

*******

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.

A West Papuan advocacy group has condemned Indonesia over taking up the presidency of the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying it was “totally unfit” and the choice  “makes a mockery” of the office.

Indonesia was the sole candidate for the Asia-Pacific bloc at the council (HRC), which also includes China, Japan and South Korea. It was the group’s turn to propose a leader.

Ambassador Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro succeeds Switzerland and will now lead proceedings at the UN forum for a year after his nomination last week.

However, a statement by a senior official of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), interim president Benny Wenda, has challenged the nomination, asking: “How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when they are hiding from the world their 66-year occupation of West Papua, with 500,000 men, women, and children dead?”

“How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when their President is a war criminal who is complicit in genocide in East Timor and West Papua?

President Prabowo Subianto “personally tortured East Timorese men, and presided over indiscriminate massacres of Indigenous people from Kraras to Mapenduma”, claimed Wenda whose allegations have been documented in various human rights reports.

‘No apology’
“He has never apologised or been held accountable for his crimes,” said Wenda.

He said Indonesia had not won the presidency due to its human rights record.

“The position rotates around the world, and Indonesia was the only candidate from the Asia Pacific region to put themselves forward,” Wenda said.

“Nonetheless, this appointment makes a mockery of the UN and its claim to uphold international law and human rights.”

Wenda said 105,000 West Papuans were currently displaced due to Indonesian military operations.

“Indonesia holding the presidency of the HRC in 2026 is akin to apartheid South Africa leading it in 1980.”

Instead of leading the HRC, “Indonesia should be a global pariah,” said Wenda.

Refused to admit UN
“For seven years, they have refused to admit the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights [to the Papuan provinces], ignoring the repeated demand of over 110 countries, including all members of the EU commission, the United States, the Netherlands, and the UK.

“In that time, with West Papua closed to the world, they have launched countless military operations in Papua, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people.”

Indonesia’s Minister for Human Rights is a West Papuan, Natalius Pigai.

Wenda said Pigai had stated that Indonesia would use the HRC position to “counter breaches of international law in Venezuela and elsewhere”.

“What about your own people, Mr Pigai? What about Indonesia’s own back yard?” asked Wenda.

Until the world intervened to stop such “egregious hypocrisy” and recognised the “ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide”, there would “be no peace or justice in the Pacific.”

Principal defender
The UN Human Rights Council is the world’s principal defender of vulnerable people worldwide. This is the first time that an Indonesian diplomat has been elected president of the forum.

After his confirmation last Thursday, Ambassador Suryodipuro said Indonesia had been a strong supporter of the council since it began its work 20 years ago, and of the Geneva forum’s predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.

“Our decision to step forward is rooted in our 1945 constitution and that aligns with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter which mandates Indonesia to contribute to world peace based on independence, peace and social justice,” he told delegates.

At the same meeting, delegates also agreed to the appointment of Ecuadorian candidate Ambassador Marcelo Vázquez Bermúdez as vice-president of the council for 2026.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Civil society forces in Chile are preparing to launch an international campaign to demand the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations.

This is based on Article 6 of the United Nations Charter against the backdrop of what the campaign describes as “continuous and systematic violations” of international law and resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

The official launch of the campaign is due to take place tomorrow during a public event in the capital Santiago while a collection of signatures by electronic petition has already begun.

Campaign data indicated that the petition addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had already exceeded 57,000 signatures, with a goal of quickly reaching 100,000 signatures.

The organisers of the civil society initiative say the rapid response reflects a “broad popular response” to the dire humanitarian situation in Palestine, and embodies “international civil pressure” to get the international system moving after decades of inaction.

At the media event introducing the initiative, lawyer and former Chilean ambassador Nelson Haddad presented the legal framework for the campaign, explaining that Israel had become a “pariah state according to the definitions of international law,” and that it “does not abide by UN resolutions, nor by the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and practises systematic violations that have been ongoing for more than seven decades”.

Campaign organisers say this mechanism has been used in historical moments, such as the Korean War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that activating it now could constitute an “institutional pressure tool” capable of overcoming obstruction within the UN Security Council.

‘Reforming the UN’
The organisers also believe that the goal is not limited to imposing measures against Israel, but extends to “reopening the file of reforming the structure of the United Nations”, restricting the power of the veto, and restoring the principle of legal equality between states in order to limit the ability of one state to “disrupt international justice.”

The petition read as follows:

“We, the undersigned, respectfully but firmly appeal to you to initiate formal procedures to expel the State of Israel from the Organisation, in accordance with Article 6 of the Charter of the United Nations, because of its repeated violations of the principles contained therein.”

The letter continues:

“Emphasising that Israel, through official statements, declares its intention to eliminate the State of Palestine with all its inhabitants, infrastructure, and memory, and accuses every party that criticises its policies of ‘anti-Semitism,’ and practices repression even against Jewish citizens who oppose genocide, thus making its violations extensive, deep, and directed against everyone who disagrees with its orientations.”

The letter describes what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a “complex war crime,” noting that the occupying state is killing “Palestinians with bombs and missiles, destroying medical infrastructure, and exterminating nearly two million people through hunger and thirst”.

‘Starving population, poisoning the land’
Israel is also depriving the population of water, food, and medicine, and destroying and poisoning the land, representing “one of the most serious documented crimes in the modern era”.

The letter adds that the continued dealings of international and academic institutions with Israel are “unjustified and unacceptable”, and that “Israel must be immediately expelled from all international activities, all institutional relations with it must be severed, and a comprehensive arms embargo imposed that contributes to the continuation of the genocide.”

The message concluded by saying: “With Gaza, humanity dies too. We want Palestine to live, for it is the heart of the world.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The United Nations climate conference in Brazil this month finished with an “extremely weak” outcome, according to one Pacific campaigner.

Shiva Gounden, the head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the multilateral process is currently being attacked, which is making it hard to reach a meaningful consensus on decisions.

“The credibility of COPs [Conference of Parties] is dropping somewhat but it can be salvaged if there’s a little bit of political will, that is visionary from across the world,” he said.

“The Pacific has showed leadership in this quite a bit in the last few COPs.”

Gounden said the outcomes of this COP and previous ones mean global temperature rise will not be limited to 1.5C — the threshold climate scientists say is needed to ensure a healthy planet.

“There are parties within the system who are attacking the science and the facts that show that we need to really be lot more ambitious than we are.

“If that continues there will be a lot more faith that’s lost by a lot of people across the world, and that can only be salvaged by political will and the unity of people across the world.”

No explicit cutting of fossil fuels
COP30 finished in Belém, Brazil, with an agreement that does not explicitly mention cutting fossil fuels. This is despite more than 80 countries pushing to advance previous commitments to transition away from oil, coal and gas.

“I feel the [outcome] was extremely weak,” Gounden said.

Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) international policy lead Sindra Sharma said the outcome had not made much progress.

“It feels like just a waste of time to be honest, that we haven’t been able to close the ambition gap in any significant way, when a lot of the two weeks was also spent on reminding us that we are in a really bad place.

“We’re going to overshoot 1.5C and we need to do something about it.”

The meeting did finish a call to a least triple adaptation finance which Sharma said was a good signal.

“But if you look at the language, then it’s actually quite non-committal and weak.”

Based in Türkiye next year
COP31 will take place at the coastal city Antalya, Türkiye, next year and Australia will be president of negotiations in the lead up and at the meeting. It gives Australia significant control over deliberations.

A pre-COP will also be hosted in the Pacific.

Gounden said he hoped the plan would become more clear in the next few months.

“This is a very complicated situation where you’ve got a negotiation president that is actually not a host of the presidency as well as the COP president across the whole year, so all of that stuff still needs to be clear and specified.”

He said three different groupings need to work together to make COP work — Türkiye, Australia and the Pacific.

Sharma said the co-presidency between Australia and Türkiye was unusual.

“There’s going to be a lot of work in terms of the push and pull of how those two presidencies are able to work together.”

Talia’s comments are part of a new report from The Fossil Free Pacific Campaign, which argues Australia is undermining the regional solidarity on climate.

Talia said Australia was a long-time friend of Tuvalu, so it was “heartbreaking to see the Albanese government continue to proactively support the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry”.

“Australia has dramatically increased the amount of energy it generates from clean, renewable sources. But at the same time, coal mines have been extended and the gas industry has been encouraged to continue polluting up to 2070,” Talia said.

“It’s a decision that is hard to reconcile with the government’s own net zero by 2050 target and is incompatible with a viable future for Tuvalu.”

In September, Australia extended the North West Shelf — one of the world’s biggest gas export projects.

The report said Australia’s climate and energy policies are not consistent with the action needed to secure a 1.5C world. It said Australia now had an obligation to align with the International Court of Justice advisory opinion in July which found states could be held legally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Real game changer’
University of Melbourne’s Dr Elizabeth Hicks, a legal academic who was featured in the report, told RNZ Pacific the advisory opinion was a “real game changer” for Australia’s legal obligations.

“We’ve seen that Australian executive government, both under Liberal and Labor, governments continue to approve new fossil fuel projects and industries receive significant subsidies,” Hicks said.

Australia is the leading donor to Pacific Island countries, making up 43 percent of official development finance.

Hicks said that Australia positioned itself as part of the Pacific family, with the nation giving aid and acting as a security partner.

But equally Australia was responsible for the vast majority of emissions coming from the Pacific and had done little to limit fossil fuel expansion, she said.

Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the International Court of Justice to hold each other to account.

The decision by the world’s top court had opened the possibility for countries to sue each other, sje said.

“This is placing Australia, right now in a very uncertain position. It would not be helpful for Australia’s domestic credibility on climate policy, or regionally in the Pacific context, to have proceedings brought against it.”

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s that about?

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

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

Whatever!

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

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

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A national pro-Palestinian advocacy group has accused the New Zealand government of providing political cover and rewarding the Israeli genocide by deploying a “liaison officer” to the US-brokered peace plan for the besieged enclave.

“It’s a knee-jerk reaction for New Zealand to send in the troops to the Middle East to back Israel and the US,” said Maher Nazzal, co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

“A liaison officer deployment is political cover to assist and reward Israel for its
genocide in Gaza. The US makes bombs and bullets for Israel to fire.

“It’s a shameful betrayal of Palestine and the Palestinian steadfastness in the face of unbelievable depravity and cruelty,” Nazzal said in a statement.

He said it was ominous that the liaison officer would be based inside a US military office in Israel.

“Instead, we should be working with the United Nations in the region. Trump plans to perpetuate the Israeli occupation under a figleaf of it being multinational. That is what we are supporting.”

“This is more of the same complicity with the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza,” he said.

‘Joined at hip’
Nazzal said that for two years Foreign Minister Winston Peters had joined New Zealand “at the hip” to a country whose Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] was wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

“There have been no sanctions on Israel, but we frequently impose new sanctions on Russia and Iran,” he said.

“The NZDF was there in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government sent the army up to the Red Sea to fight with the Americans early last year to keep Israeli sea lanes open.”

Nazzal said the government should focus on aid, ensuring Palestinians’ rights and representation, and fact-finding.

“There should be a cross-party Parliamentary fact-finding mission assembled urgently, which could get into Gaza safely before Israel ramps up its murderous assault again.”he said.

“MPs should see for themselves, instead of signing off on a soldier whose job it is to ‘implement’ the Trump plan.”

Jordan rejects US plan
The King of Jordan had recently rejected the US proposal to join in patrolling Gaza to implement Trump’s vision.

“Palestinians have no say in the Trump plan. Trump decides who is going to
implement it. He’s picked Tony Blair,” Nazzal said.

“When he was British Prime Minister, Blair, and US President Bush, invaded Iraq to destroy the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. More than a million Iraqis died.

“In Gaza, more than 20,000 children have now been murdered by Israel in
indiscriminate killing across Gaza.”

“The New Zealand people stand with Palestine – the government stands with Israel.”

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Palestinians in Gaza say they are losing hope in the ceasefire after Israel’s deadliest violation yet killed more than 100 people, mostly women and children, on Wednesday.

Israel’s military carried out another deadly attack in northern Gaza last night, killing two people, despite claiming to resume the fragile ceasefire, which had already been teetering from a wave of deadly bombardment it waged the night before.

US President Donald Trump said the ceasefire was “still strong” while mediator Qatar expressed frustration but said the mediators were looking forward to the next phase of the truce.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.

According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.

Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.

Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.

Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.

FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.

I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.

What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.

On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.

KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …

This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.

If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.

Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.

And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.

Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.

So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.

And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.

This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.

DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.

But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.

These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.

And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.

What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.

I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?

AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.

The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.

And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.

We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.

And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.

But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.

Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.

The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?

Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?

AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.

There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.

Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.

There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.

And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?

How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.

AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.

But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.

And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.

But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.

And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.

There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.

But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.

This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.

AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.

You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.

And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.

But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.

I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.

In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.

And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.

Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.

We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.

This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.

As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.

But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.

Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has “cautiously welcomed” the Gaza ceasefire and proposed exchange of hostages between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas.

At least 7000 Palestinians are being held in detention without trial by Israel while about 20 Israeli soldiers are held by Hamas.

PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said the deal was a reprieve from Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

“It’s been two years of mass bombing and starvation. It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century,” he said in a statement.

“The real tragedy is that the main elements of this ceasefire deal were already agreed to nine months ago in January. Israel was forced to let Palestinians return to Gaza City, and lower the intensity of its attacks.

“Within a few weeks, the Israelis scuttled the agreement, shut off all food and intensified their attacks and are now ethnically re-cleansing Gaza City.

“Expulsion is still the Israeli government’s aim. Netanyahu must be disappointed that Trump is no longer advocating for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, but Netanyahu usually gets his way with Trump in the end.”

Called on support
Nazal said PSNA especially noted that the Hamas acceptance statement called on countries supporting the deal — New Zealand included — to make sure Israel abided by the few specific conditions imposed on the Zionist state in the agreement.

“Israel has broken every peace deal it has ever signed on Palestine, right from occupying more than half of what was allocated by the United Nations as a Palestinian state in 1948,” Nazzal said.

“In the 1993 Oslo peace deal, which the US also brokered, there was meant to be a Palestinian state within five years. Israel made sure this never happened.

“This time, there is no mention of the Occupied West Bank. Nothing about return of refugees. There is no commitment in the Trump deal for a Palestinian state, for Winston Peters to eventually recognise.

“There’s just a vague pathway with no timelines and it’s all conditional on Israeli approval,” Nazzal said.

“So we have a message for Winston Peters, who is demanding PSNA and other protesters applaud the Trump deal as ‘case solved’.

“Ceasefire or not, our campaign to isolate the apartheid state of Israel will continue to grow until all Palestinians are liberated.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand’s foreign minister Winston Peters announced at the United Nations General Assembly that this New Zealand coalition Government will not recognise Palestine as a state – at this time.

Here, it is important to cite New Zealand’s foreign minister in relevant detail.

Winston Peters said at the United Nations General Assembly:

“We think a future generation when Israeli and Palestinian political leadership is an asset, not a liability, and where other situational variables have shifted the current calculus away from conflict and towards peace would be more conducive for recognising Palestinian statehood.

“There in lies our dilemma over any decision to recognise Palestinian Palestinian statehood now because statehood recognition is an instrument for peace as an instrument for peace also does not play because there are no fully legitimate and viable state of Palestine to recognise.

“Palestine does not fully meet the accepted criteria for a state as it does not fully control its own territory or population.

“There is also no obvious link between more of the international community recognised in the state of Palestine and the aimed objective of protecting the two-state solution.

“Indeed, what we have observed since partners pronouncements reveals that recognising Palestine now will likely prove counterproductive.

“That is, Hamas resisting negotiation in the belief that it is winning the global propaganda war while pushing Israel towards even more entrench military positions.

“Recognition at this time we also think is open to political manipulation by both Hamas and Israel. Hamas will seek to portray our recognition of Palestine as a victory as they have already done in response to partner announcements.

“Israel will claim the recognition toward rewards Hamas and that it removes pressure on them to release hostages and agree to a ceasefire,” Winston Peters said. (Ref. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/new-zealand-national-statement-un-general-assembly-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%98leadership-global-affairs-united )

In essence, I argue, that Peters’ speech kicks the problem down the road. He shifts the responsibility for developing a solution to the Gaza atrocities conditionally on to a future generation of leaders. And it fails to acknowledge that at the current rate of mass killings of Palestinian people, there will be no one left to create nor nurture a future generation of Palestinian leadership.

But the statement nuances a shift in New Zealand’s position geopolitically and within the rules-based-order community of nations. The statement will confuse many observers of global politics, not the least among New Zealanders and peoples who sought asylum in New Zealand far from the paces of their birth.

Let’s consider why.

International Law.

The speech will trigger a cringe for millions of New Zealand citizens and permanent residents at realising how this right-leaning nationalistic three-party coalition government has abandoned and failed to reflect their strongly held positions for human rights principles.

It is human rights principles that have long anchored New Zealand as a strong and unshakable advocate for an international rules based order, for international humanitarian rights, for recourse to international law and justice, and signatories to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice.

It was this cumulative support for human rights and justice that compelled New Zealanders to reject the militant wing of Hamas for its atrocities against civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023.

But advocacy for human rights and justice is not a political expression. It isn’t tribal. It isn’t biased in favour of one peoples and not another. Advocacy for human rights and justice is universal and in this sense it is blind to the class or statehood where hate and atrocity originates from.

This is the same universal principle that the International Court of Justice applied when it found there was a prima facie case of genocide being committed by the state of Israel.

It is this same universal principle that the International Criminal Court applied when calling for the arrest of the state of Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to be tried for crimes.

Peters’ speech to the United Nations General Assembly ignored these bodies and only waved a cursory glance at the ongoing murder of innocent children and peoples in Gaza, an apparent systematic act of mass murder, committed against people simply because they are of Palestinian birth. Peters’ speech failed these victims and rejected, by way of omission, their right to justice.

In a sense, this New Zealand coalition government has reflexively returned New Zealand back to that glitch-period where this nation fell estranged from the international common-good, in breach of the Gleneagles Agreement, and refused to cease engagement with Apartheid South Africa by allowing sporting contact with that murderous regime in 1981.

New Zealanders rejected that government in 1984, and today’s abandonment of New Zealand’s long held positions for rights and justice will certainly be a factor in the 2026 general elections.

Multilateralism is founded on rules and laws. Where rogue states abandon the principles that are universally agreed to by the majority, those nation states fail to advocate for the multilateral institutions that they rely on for social, judicial, and economic progress.

Peters, as the envoy for this current New Zealand coalition government cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim to be a voice for multilateralism and justice when he has delivered a decision that stands as contrary to the 81 percent of the United Nations general assembly nations who have announced and demand recognition for the State of Palestine.

Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank have recognised borders. Within those borders reside a peoples that reflect a common culture and a right to self-determination. They have a representative political structure that can engage itself in bilateral and multilateral forum and bodies. It cannot be ignored that it is being prevented from functioning as a state due to the atrocities that have been inflicted upon it by its occupiers.

It is the occupation that must be addressed, and the United Nations General Assembly, by way of a large majority, recognises this fact – ashamedly the New Zealand coalition government and Peters do not.

CANZ bloc and Like Minded Countries

In addition to New Zealand has long contributed to what is called the CANZ bloc at the United Nations.

The CANZ bloc is a group of nations consisting of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It has held together due to these nations sharing common values as ‘like minded countries’.

New Zealanders have long heard their representatives citing allegiance with ‘like minded countries’.

This too has been abandoned by New Zealand at a most important time for multilateralism, a time when supposed ‘like minded countries’ need to band together and present a solid powerful bloc on issues such as Palestine.

This is why Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited New Zealand on the weekend of August 9-10, 2025. Albanese sought the position of New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on whether New Zealand would recognise Palestine as a state in keeping with ‘like minded countries’ Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and France. Luxon couldn’t give him an answer. And New Zealanders were left wondering why.

On this issue, New Zealand will have sent a signal to other nations that it cannot be relied on anymore as a true advocate of peace and justice while it fails to life up to its long-held reputation as an honest broker on the world stage standing up for peace, justice and multilateral progress.

This is a day of shame that has dawned in New Zealand. And millions in this multicultural Pacific nation will feel ashamed that their political representatives have failed not only them, but victims of atrocities all over the world.

Failed Opportunity to Advocate for UN Reform

Peters’ speech before the United Nations General Assembly, while acknowledging the UN needed reform, failed dismally to present a reformist plan that New Zealand would advocate for. It was a glaring omission from a once seasoned politician that made his bones on matters of principle and law.

Peters speech also failed to identify the mechanisms and protocols that exist within the United Nations at this current time; principles like the R2P or responsibility to protect protocols that were advanced after UN observers were prevented from protecting victims of Rwanda genocide decades ago.

The United Nations (UN) Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a global political commitment adopted in 2005 by world leaders to prevent and respond to mass atrocity crimes – namely genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It holds that state sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect populations within their borders; when a state manifestly fails to do so, the international community has a responsibility to act collectively and decisively, in accordance with the UN Charter. 

All Peters and New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials needed to do is indulge themselves for a moment to reflect on this R2P protocol as published by the United Nations office on genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect. (Ref. https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/responsibility-protect/about )

Put simply, within the UN charter there is the framework and mechanism for Peters, as a representative or a once principled nation, to cite and demand be applied to resolving the humanitarian crisis and murder taking place today in Gaza, and indeed in other parts of the world.

And it is this, that illustrates greatest the areas where reform of the United Nations is required and is at a critical juncture.

The United Nations was formed as a body to advocate and restore peace. For decades now, it has shifted its emphasis onto becoming a distributor of assistance and development. This is noble and it is vital in a complex world such as we live in. But it has become moribund where it comes to ensuring a mechanism or framework structured body where nations can cumulatively restore peace and prosperity to nations, peoples, and states that are victims of tyranny.

This is the kernel of need where reformist ideals are developed and implemented. And this was largely ignored by Peters and his coalition government colleagues.

As such, New Zealand faces headwinds. It may now be regarded by our once closest multilateral partners as an unreliable and immoral unjust state that waxes and wanes, dancing on the head of a pin on distorted legalese that offers more smoke and mirrors than principled solutions.

New Zealanders and Palestinian victims deserved to witness the very opposite of what was served up to them today. They deserved to witness a representative and true advocate for – particularly in the case of the Palestinian diaspora here in New Zealand and their dead and dying relatives back in the occupied territories and Gaza – rights to recourse as individuals and as survivors to universally applied justice.

But this current New Zealand government refused them. And as such it has sided with those nations that are a part of the problem manifest in Gaza, rather than being part of the solution.

Doing nothing is complicit.

For more on this issue, see; New Zealand PM Luxon Labelled as Weak and Cowardly After Delaying Decision on Palestine.

*******

The New Zealand Cabinet will today consider whether to formally recognise Palestine as a state – and Palestinian rights advocacy group Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) urges the Government to listen to the views of a vast majority of New Zealanders.

The PSNA anticipates Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, will get instructions from Cabinet on Monday to increase pressure on Israel.

The United Nations General Assembly High Level Leaders Debate starts in New York next Tuesday.

PSNA Co-Chair, John Minto says the government has to have listened to the voice of the people who marched for sanctions against Israel, in Auckland (on Saturday September 13).

“With only limited time to organize, and disruption caused by having to change from the route over the Harbour Bridge at the last moment, 25,000 turned out to object to the government’s passive, and effectively pro-Israel, policies,” John Minto said.

“It’s a turn-out that’s been building, now rapidly, in our protests around the country over the past two years.

“New Zealanders are nearly two to one in favour of sanctions against Israel. Support for accountabilities will have increased significantly since then as Israel’s depravity and cruelty has shown no bounds.”

Minto says foreign minister Peters will be attending potentially one of the most important debates in United Nations history next week.

“The General Assembly has already begun, and on Friday, New Zealand voted along with 141 other countries, for a state of Palestine to be created through Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” John Minto said. “There were only ten votes against, predictably the US and Israel, but a concerning five Pasifika states voted against Palestine as well.”

According to Minto Israel has already made it clear that it has no intention to permit a Palestinian state to emerge, “nor compromise its apartheid system, by allowing equal democratic rights to Palestinians who live under its control and inside its present borders.”

Minto said in announcing its position on Palestine, the government will be sensitive to its reputation in Arab countries.

“Israel has just bombed Qatar, to kill off the prospect of a Hamas agreement on hostage releases.  Qatar is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is led by Saudi Arabia.

“Peters’ cabinet colleague, Todd McClay is in Saudi Arabia this week to talk trade.  McClay will not be wanting to explain to the Saudis, face to face, why Peters was in New York at the same time telling the world about Israel’s so called right to defend itself.”

Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom and other nations have already demanded a ceasefire to hostilities in Palestine’s occupied territories and for Israel to cease the apparent genocide being committed in Gaza.

Minto said: “So far, the UN emphasis has been on two-state outcomes, and how to get rid of Hamas. But the world debate is moving strongly to sanctions.

“Now is the time to move past idle rhetoric, and deliver sanctions, which are the only persuasion Israel will concede to,” John Minto said.

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will address Papua New Guinea’s national Parliament today.

The UN chief is in Papua New Guinea on a four-day official state visit September 2-5.

Prime Minister James Marape has held bilateral discussions with Guterres at his Melanesian House Office in Port Moresby yesterday.

“We remain fully committed to the United Nations Charter and to the principles of peace and cooperation among nations,” Marape said.

Marape said Guterres’ visit during PNG’s 50th anniversary celebrations “is historic” and “affirms our place in the global family of nations and our shared responsibility to work together”.

He also assured the UN boss that his government is committed to implementing the outcome of the Bougainville referendum. Bougainville head to the polls on Thursday to elect their next government.

Guterres said PNG has chosen the path of wisdom and peace when it came to their autonomous region of Bougainville.

He said the way the government has managed the Bougainville referendum demonstrates its commitment to democracy and dialogue.

PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said the country recognises the crucial role of the UN through collective action and cooperation among member states.

“We have always stood firm with our colleague of member nations, as we believe in and will continue to promote bilateralism,” he wrote in a post on his official Facebook page.

“While we also continue to be an active contributor to global dialogue, we continue to support the role of the UN as provider of humanitarian aid, and facilitator of agreements on worldwide issues such as poverty, climate change, and disease,” he added.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

I am alarmed by reports that Filipino journalists were flown in by the Israeli government to participate in what is essentially a whitewashing campaign for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At least two articles, atrocious excuses for journalism, have come out of this trip.One is a piece by Wilson Lee Flores for The Philippine Star, entitled “Israel beyond the headlines: Where ancient stones speak.”

By attempting to divert attention from the massacre of Palestinian civilians to “the Old City’s labyrinthine alleys,” Flores acts as an apologist for war crimes, akin to writing a travel blog about Nazi Germany.

In a Facebook post, Flores further parrots Israel’s propaganda by highlighting how the brutal IDF employs both men and women to carry out atrocities, a cynical weaponisation of “feminism.”

Even more repulsive is the piece from the Daily Tribune about “Gaza’s Fake Famine” from Vernon Velasco. It is a parody of a story, overly simplifying the famine of Gaza to a matter of food truck logistics, and uncritically quoting an IDF Officer.

Fittingly, the article contains three photos of shipping containers but not a single photo of a human being.

This runs counter to facts laid out by UN officials, including Joyce Msuya, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who points out how half a million people face “starvation, destitution, and death”.

‘Moral failure’ over Gaza
A study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet points to the “moral failure” as 1-2 million people live in the most extreme food insecurity level (phase 5 or catastrophe famine) according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This famine unfolds as shameless journalists make food vlogs kilometres away.

The facts are clear. At least 63,000 people have been killed and 150,000 injured, with women and children making up a significant portion of the casualties. The UN has also reported that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population (around 1.9 million people) has been displaced.

Widespread destruction has left over 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, including more than 94 percent of hospitals either damaged or destroyed. No amount of narrative spin or “complexity” can sanitise this genocide.

As we celebrate National Press Freedom Day, I implore friends in the press to not fall for the lies of the murderous Zionist regime.

It would be tragic for journalists to provide cover for a regime that has murdered at least 240 of their peers.

Filipino journalists must shed the unhealthy culture of silence and non-intervention, and not hesitate to criticise errant colleagues.

They must make it clear that these recipients of Zionist gold are a disgrace to Philippine journalism. The Philippine government must look into the activities of the Israeli Embassy and their manipulation of local media narratives to sanitise their genocide.

Filipino journalists must stand in solidarity with their slain colleagues abroad, not with their killers.

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz