The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran”.

Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the White House office he holds.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of 30 years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across 18 months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers.

• READ MORE: Iranians cautiously optimistic about thorny deal with US
• Other US-Iran peace deal reports

He doesn’t need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

Rubio:

Doing a deal with Iran is not easy. I said it yesterday, I’ll repeat it again today.

We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed, and its decisions are governed, by Shia clerics, radical Shia clerics.

These people make policy decisions on the basis of pure… pic.twitter.com/2Xz26wbzui

— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 16, 2026

When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote.

Detail at his fingertips
Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.

This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.

Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.

And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength.

He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history.

The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.

Revealing Washington’s incapacity
What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.

The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.

In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War.

That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.

The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

AMY GOODMAN: In Britain, Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party following growing pressure from within the Labour Party to step down.

Starmer spoke earlier on Monday:

PRIME MINISTER KEIR STARMER: The chance to change the lives of millions of people for the better, that’s what I came into politics for.

Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told time and time again that my party was finished, that we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible.

But we proved those people wrong, because we changed our party, ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defenCe and national security, and becoming a party that once again stood proudly with, not against, our national flag.

AMY GOODMAN: Starmer’s election as prime minister in 2024 ended more than a decade of Conservative rule in the UK. But during his time in office, he has faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures and a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as well as his crackdown on Palestinian solidarity protesters.

Starmer’s announcement paves the way for Britain to have its seventh leader in 10 years. Former Manchester mayor, newly elected Labour MP Andy Burnham, is widely expected to become the next prime minister.

However, some leaders of the British left have warned Burnham may do little to shift from Starmer’s policies. British MP Jeremy Corbyn, who led the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, said Burnham’s, quote, “basic economic strategy and views seem to me to be accepting too much of the austerity we’ve had imposed on us,” and added in an interview with Sky News that Burnham, “doesn’t appear to be doing anything different internationally,” referring to Britain’s supply of weapons to Israel for its war on Gaza and beyond.

We’re joined now in Paris, France, by Geoffrey Robertson, renowned human rights lawyer, founding head of Doughty Street Chambers, Europe’s largest human rights law practice. He has been widely described as a mentor to Starmer, who worked at the law firm for nearly two decades. Geoffrey Robertson is also a former UN judge who ran the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone. His most recent book is titled World of War Crimes: Eyeless in Gaza … and Beyond.

Geoffrey Robertson, before we ask you about Britain’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists, the so-called “Elbit 4”, we want to get your response to the announcement by the prime minister that he is stepping down.

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, there is a connection, you know. I advised him over the weekend that if he had the numbers — or, if he didn’t have the numbers, he should do a deal with Burnham, who is the obvious favorite to succeed him, because he’s a bit more charismatic than Keir, who’s a bit dull for the public taste.

But if he didn’t have the numbers, he shouldn’t resign, but rather do a deal with Burnham that he became his foreign minister, because Keir Starmer, in my view, has been absolutely brilliant as prime minister dealing with foreign affairs, most importantly, of course, dealing with Donald Trump. And he has not conceded to Trump.

He has not joined in the illegality of the invasion of Iran, as Trump was insisting. He’s kept the distance and kept Britain out of the war crimes that Trump has tried to pull it into. So, for that reason, I hope he stays on in that capacity, but we don’t know.

If he had the numbers, I advised him to make a speech accepting that he made several mistakes, which he has. He has, for example, in relation to the left. And the leftwing of the Labour Party is, if you like, the beating heart of the party. They don’t know or don’t accept the need ever for economic austerity, but they have got the heart and soul of what is traditionally the Labour Party.

And they were upset by his support for Israel. In particular, they were upset by his prohibition on any protest from Palestine Action, a group that protests about Israeli attacks on Palestine. And he had them banned and had — over 3000 people are now awaiting trial for holding up banners saying that they support Palestine Action.

So, that kind of thing lost him popularity in the Labour Party. It was his attack on the left, his fraying out of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, who led it for several years, and Keir was one of the ministers. That just wasn’t seen as just.

So, if he moved a little more to the left, and — he may well have kept the party onside, but I think he really lost support in the party because he was perceived as too rightwing for it and because he was too boring. He lacked charisma.

Everyone went around saying this, from a party whose most uncharismatic leader was Clement Attlee, just after war, had no charisma whatsoever, but did the great thing that Britain now boasts of, like the National Health Service, and so forth.

So, it’s sad that charisma is now a quality for leading the Labour Party, but there it is.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been fierce in criticising governments like the US and Britain, as well, for its approach to Israel and Palestine, and you specifically talk about what’s happened to Palestine Action.

Last week, four Palestine Action activists in Britain were sentenced as “terrorists” over their involvement in a 2024 protest and raid on a factory operated by one of Israel’s largest arms manufacturers, Elbit Systems. In May, the four activists, known as the Elbit 4, were found guilty of criminal damage for destroying property at the Elbit facility.

But unbeknown to lawyers or the jury, the judge in the case added a terrorism component to the case months earlier. It’s the first time a judge has issued terrorism sentencing enhancements on people who were not actually charged with or convicted of terrorism.

Their prison sentences range from four to over seven years. They must also legally register to a law enforcement terrorist surveillance system for 15 years following their release from prison.

Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media in response: “This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process.”

So, Geoffrey Robertson, you just wrote a piece for the new magazine The Key, headlined “Punishing Protest as Terrorism.” Can you explain the significance of what happened in this case, and put it in the context of your new book, World of War Crimes: Eyeless in Gaza … and Beyond?

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, it goes like this. For several centuries, Britain’s democracy has been affected, influenced, improved by protest, protests for the vote. The vote for women came about because of quite violent protests, and the vote generally. I mean, we could go back and look at the way protest movements of one sort or another, particularly in America, were actually led by people who were devoted democrats.

And now we have a situation where, thanks to a law passed by the Conservative government, not by Labour, recently, a few years ago, that sentencing cases where you have quite ordinary crimes that protesters often commit, like criminal damage, usually dealt with by a fine or an 18-month sentence, if the damage was bad, is now — can be coupled by the judge — not the jury, but the judge can, if he decides in his own mind that they’re terrorists, he can make them go to prison for a lot longer, be labelled as terrorists, be discriminated against in prison.

All sorts of bad things can happen to these young, usually, and sincere, but maybe headstrong, protesters, because although they’re — all they want to do is to change the attitude of the British government, which was very slow in complaining about the massive killings in Gaza. That’s all they want to do, and yet that is a ground this judge the other day, dealing with four protesters who smashed up a little bit of Elbit, the drone manufacturers — this judge secretly decided that they were terrorists, and so could do all those harsh things to them.

And that, I think, is one matter which needs to be sorted, because we have Mr. Vance coming over and telling us how we get things wrong, and this would be a good example of because it’s quite contrary to our idea of justice that anyone should be sent to prison for long periods and have all this discrimination against them, when they haven’t been convicted by a jury.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to end by naming the Elbit 4, as they are known, and who they are: Leona Kamio, 30 years old, a nursery school teacher; Samuel Corner, 23, and Fatema Rajwani, 21, students; and Charlotte Head, 30, a domestic abuse case worker.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

An Israeli cabinet minister has named the new Middle East on live radio —  and he named it in alarm.

What Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli called the “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis” is not a threat. It is the architecture of a new regional order.

And once you see its logic, you cannot unsee it. Here is what it means — and what it means for America.

• READ MORE: Lim Tean: Why standing on the wrong side of history cost Germany its UNSC seat
• Other Lim Tean articles

❝What we are witnessing is the rise of a new axis❞

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli says Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis ‘is worrying’, linking three countries to recent US-Iran deal https://t.co/53i0KcwcAR pic.twitter.com/iOVMd6kEDI

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) June 17, 2026

The confession in the alarm
When Amichai Chikli went on Israel’s 103 FM radio this week to warn of the rise of a “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis,” he wasn’t making a prediction. He was issuing a confession.

An adversary’s alarm is always the most reliable confirmation that a structural shift has occurred — and what Chikli named in anxiety, we must now examine with clarity.

The old Middle East is gone. What is rising in its place is an architecture that no Western foreign policy establishment has yet fully reckoned with — one in which American primacy has been displaced, Israeli military dominance has been exposed as insufficient, and the two great Indigenous powers of the region, Iran and Türkiye, are emerging as the twin poles of a new order.

The moment the Old Order broke
The proximate event was the US-Iran framework agreement — now signed and in force. Trump signing it at the Palace of Versailles during dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday evening, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signing from Tehran.

But the manner of its emergence is as consequential as its content.

Washington and Tehran reached their temporary truce on April 8 through Pakistani mediation. The framework itself was shaped by Pakistan, Qatar, and Türkiye — playing, as one account noted, “different but complementary roles.”

Qatar hosted senior Iranian officials and maintained communication channels. Türkiye provided consistent diplomatic backing and called repeatedly for a negotiated resolution. Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was the crucial bridge, maintaining simultaneous contacts with both Washington and Tehran.

Notice who was absent from this architecture — Israel. Notice who else was absent — the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. These are the three traditional American-anchored Gulf states that for three decades defined the regional order alongside Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself admitted the scale of his marginalisation. At his first press conference in three months, he conceded he did not know what was actually written in the agreement.

The leader of the Middle East’s most powerful military, possessor of an undeclared nuclear arsenal, was reduced to a bystander while the region’s future was negotiated without him.

Trump, at the G7 summit in France, publicly described Netanyahu as “crazy” and said “without me, there would be no Israel.” Strip away the Trumpian grandiosity and a devastating strategic truth remains: Israel’s security has never rested on its own foundations, but on American patronage. And that patronage is being fundamentally recalibrated.

For American readers, this demands a moment of honest reflection. The United States spent trillions of dollars and decades of strategic energy constructing a Middle Eastern order anchored on Israeli military dominance and Gulf monarchy stability. That order has not been dismantled by an adversary’s military victory. It has been quietly superseded — by diplomacy conducted through channels America did not control, by actors America did not invite, producing an outcome America did not architect. That is a more profound kind of displacement than defeat in battle.

The dual-hegemon architecture
What is emerging is not a successor Pax — not Chinese, not Russian, not any external power’s regional order. It is something rarer and more durable: a regional order anchored by Indigenous great powers.

Iran and Turkey are the twin poles. Between them they possess the military depth, the demographic weight, the geographic centrality, and the independent foreign policy capacity that no other regional actor can match. Iran controls the eastern arc — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen — through its network of allied movements and state relationships.

Türkiye commands the northern tier, projects power into Syria, maintains NATO membership as a strategic hedge, and has emerged as the region’s most consequential diplomatic broker.

This is not a partnership moving in perfect harmony. Türkiye and Iran are rival civilisational powers with a long history of strategic friction. The more precise framework is managed bipolarity — two hegemons who converge sufficiently on the containment of Israeli expansionism to cooperate diplomatically, while competing for influence across the Arab world’s contested spaces.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his country’s position unambiguous. Speaking to Parliament, he declared that Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where it threatened Türkiye directly, and called Israel the single biggest obstacle to regional peace.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in Moscow — a symbolically charged backdrop — welcomed the US-Iran agreement but crucially called for it to evolve into “a structural and lasting security architecture rather than a temporary period of calm”.

That phrase is the key to understanding Ankara’s ambition. Turkey is not interested in episodic crisis management. It is seeking to institutionalise a new regional order in which it is a permanent rule-setter — the Ottoman inheritance reframed for the 21st century.

Iran, militarily weakened by the six-week Israeli offensive but diplomatically rehabilitated by the agreement, emerges in a paradoxical position of strength. It has traded military confrontation for international legitimacy, secured the rehabilitation of its economy, and — crucially — retained its regional network intact. The agreement has not dismantled Iranian power projection. It has brought Iran back into the international system while leaving its strategic depth untouched.

Pakistan: The nuclear keystone
The actor most consistently underestimated in Western analysis is Pakistan — and yet Pakistan may be the keystone of the entire new architecture.

Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. Its Army Chief personally bridged Washington and Tehran to produce the April 8 truce. It sits at the heart of the Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan diplomatic axis. And it has recently formalised a defence pact with Saudi Arabia.

That last point demands careful attention — and contains a particular irony for American readers.

Saudi Arabia’s strategic anxiety is acute. If American primacy in the region is receding, Riyadh needs an alternative security guarantee. It needs, specifically, nuclear cover. China has been proposed as one possible guarantor. But Pakistan is the more structurally coherent answer — and the answer whose historical roots run deepest.

Saudi money was instrumental in funding Pakistan’s nuclear programme during the 1970s and 1980s. This was never a secret in strategic circles. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s original conception of an “Islamic bomb” was always partly conceived with the broader Muslim world — and implicitly with Saudi Arabia — in mind. The recent Saudi-Pakistan defence pact is not a bilateral footnote. It is the formal institutionalisation of a security relationship whose nuclear dimension has always been implicit.

Here is the American irony: Washington funded, armed, and sustained Pakistan through decades of the Cold War and the War on Terror. American taxpayers financed the Pakistani military establishment that built the Islamic world’s first nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal may now serve as the instrument by which Saudi Arabia quietly exits the American security umbrella — replacing it with an Islamic solidarity framework that carries far greater domestic legitimacy in Riyadh than any guarantee from Washington ever did.

History has a sharp sense of irony. America built the tools of its own displacement.

Lebanon: The proving ground
Lebanon is not a footnote to this architectural shift. It is its most immediate and visible proving ground — the theatre where the transition from old order to new is being tested in real time.

Israel’s continued strikes on south Lebanon, even after the US-Iran framework was announced, reveal the central tension of this transitional moment. Netanyahu, sidelined from the deal and facing devastating domestic criticism, is using Lebanon as the one theatre where he can still project agency. But in doing so, he is accelerating precisely the dynamic that isolates Israel further from the emerging order.

Erdoğan’s response was explicit and historically significant: Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where they threatened Türkiye directly, with Ankara’s security now tied to its two neighbouring countries. That is an extraordinary statement from a NATO member — effectively drawing a Turkish strategic red line over Lebanese and Syrian territory.

Under the old American-anchored order, no such red line existed. Lebanon was perpetually sacrificed, a weak state with no regional protector capable of imposing real costs on Israeli operations. That calculus has now changed.

Hezbollah emerges weakened militarily but strategically sheltered. Iran’s diplomatic rehabilitation does not require Hezbollah’s disarmament — it requires Lebanon’s stabilisation as a buffer state within the New Order. The agreement creates pressure for a ceasefire, not for the dismantling of the network that gives Iran its Lebanese strategic depth.

For Israel, this is the core dilemma: military operations in Lebanon that once carried manageable costs now risk triggering a broader regional response that the new architecture makes structurally coherent for the first time.

The coming reckoning: Bahrain, UAE and the Abraham Accords
The states facing the most acute strategic exposure in the new architecture are Bahrain and the UAE — the two Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords most deeply integrated into the Israeli-American axis.

They signed those accords in 2020 premised on a specific geopolitical bet: that American military primacy was durable, that Israeli military dominance was unassailable, and that normalisation with Tel Aviv was the winning ticket to regional security and economic modernisation.

Every one of those premises has now been shaken to its foundation.

American primacy has visibly receded — demonstrated not by any declaration, but by the simple fact that the most consequential regional agreement in a generation was negotiated without Washington in the lead role, and with Washington explicitly sidelining Israel from the process. Israeli military might, while still formidable, has been shown to have strategic limits.

And normalisation with Israel now carries reputational and security costs that were never priced into the original Abraham Accords calculation.

Bahrain and the UAE possess sovereign wealth, infrastructure, and relationships that retain value in any regional configuration. But they are now exposed on multiple flanks simultaneously — caught between an American patron recalibrating its commitments, an Israeli partner increasingly isolated from the new regional consensus, and an emerging order being constructed around axes from which they were conspicuously absent.

Their most likely path is quiet hedging rather than dramatic realignment. Expect both states to begin softening their public identification with Israeli positions, to deepen economic ties with Türkiye and expand back-channel contacts with Tehran, and to use their sovereign wealth funds as instruments of strategic repositioning — investments that signal accommodation with the New Order without requiring a formal rupture with Washington.

Abu Dhabi in particular, will seek to be useful to all sides simultaneously. But the window for comfortable hedging is narrowing. The longer Bahrain and the UAE remain identified with a receding order, the less leverage they will carry when they eventually seek terms with the one that is rising.

Oman and Qatar occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Oman’s historic role as a quiet back-channel to Iran — it was instrumental in facilitating the early Obama-era nuclear conversations that eventually produced the JCPOA — gives it standing and credibility in the New Order. Qatar’s role in the current mediation, hosting senior Iranian officials and explicitly supporting Pakistani-led diplomacy, has purchased it significant goodwill from Tehran. Both states will navigate the transition with relative comfort.

Saudi Arabia’s inevitable pivot
Saudi Arabia’s position is the most consequential and the most delicate of all.

MBS built his regional vision on three pillars: American security guarantees, economic modernisation through Vision 2030 anchored in Western and Israeli-adjacent investment, and a forthcoming normalisation with Israel that was to be the capstone of the Abraham Accords architecture. That capstone now looks not merely delayed but structurally implausible.

The pivot toward Iran and the new regional order is not a choice Riyadh makes from strength. It is a response to the collapse of the strategic alternative. The 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement was the first clear signal. The new architecture now accelerating around the Iran-Türkiye axis makes the logic of that pivot not merely rational but increasingly urgent.

Saudi Arabia cannot indefinitely maintain a posture of confrontation with Iran while its American patron visibly disengages, while the new regional order is being built by actors — Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar — with whom Riyadh has workable and historically deep relationships, and while its own population’s Islamic solidarity instincts run counter to alignment with an Israel conducting military campaigns across the Muslim world.

The Pakistani nuclear umbrella is what makes this pivot strategically viable without strategic nakedness. It allows Riyadh to reduce its dependence on American extended deterrence without being exposed — and to do so through an Islamic solidarity framework that carries profound domestic legitimacy in a way that a Chinese or Russian guarantee never could.

A Saudi Arabia sheltered by Pakistani nuclear deterrence, reconciled with Iran, and aligned with the Turkey-Qatar axis is a Saudi Arabia that has successfully navigated the transition without catastrophic rupture with anyone.

The pivot will not be announced with fanfare. It will happen gradually — through accumulating diplomatic signals, quiet investment reorientations, and careful distancing from Israeli positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader regional conflict. By the time it is fully visible to Western analysts, it will already be irreversible.

Conclusion: Reading the tide
What Amichai Chikli named in alarm this week, we should name with analytical precision: the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order anchored by Indigenous power, shaped by Islamic solidarity and civilisational assertion, and no longer organised around American primacy or Israeli military dominance.

Iran and Turkey will not always agree. Their rivalry is ancient and will resurface across multiple theatres. But on the foundational question of this historical moment — that the old externally-imposed order must be replaced by one reflecting the region’s own balance of forces — they are aligned.

And that alignment, backstopped by Pakistan’s nuclear capability, lubricated by Qatar’s financial diplomacy, and increasingly accommodated by a pivoting Saudi Arabia, is sufficient to constitute a genuinely new architecture.

For America, the lesson is not that it has been defeated. It is that it has been superseded — which is a more permanent condition. The tools America built, the relationships America cultivated, the arsenals America funded across decades of Cold War and counter-terrorism strategy, have been repurposed by actors pursuing their own civilisational interests.

That is not a betrayal. It is simply how history works when the tide turns.

The states that bet on the Old Order — Bahrain, UAE, and above all Israel — now face a reckoning whose full dimensions are only beginning to become visible. The states that positioned themselves wisely — Türkiye, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and soon Saudi Arabia — will shape what comes next.

History rewards those who read the tide correctly. The tide has turned. The only remaining question is who moves with it — and who insists on standing still as the water rises.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

The Free Press, an American news organisation founded by the Zionist editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, and now owned by David Ellison, reported recently that the Trump administration had launched an investigation into Trita Parsi, one of America’s most prominent critics of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The aim is to revoke his legal permanent residency, which he has held for some 15 years — and deport him.

In the wake of the article, the US State Department took the unusual step of denying that any such investigation exists; the article came after pro-Israel activist Laura Loomer has repeatedly pressured the Trump administration to deport Parsi, suggesting that the lobby is trying to produce an investigation where none exists.

• READ MORE: Trita Parsi on the US-Iran peace deal and being threatened with deportation
• US, Iran set to hold talks in Switzerland; Israel kills 16 in Lebanon
• Other Trita Parsi articles
• Other Gaza, Iran and Lebanon reports

That The Free Press would participate in this campaign is as shameful as it is expected. Anyone who supports an actual free press must speak out now.

The attack on Trita Parsi, co-founder of the think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a well-respected and widely known advocate for a more restrained American foreign policy, is intended to stifle dissent.

If this debacle in Iran taught us anything, it should be that launching a new war without public debate portends catastrophe. Trita Parsi’s critics are calling him an enemy of the United States, but if the country had listened to him, we would be much better off today.

Best of being American
Trita truly represents the best of what it means to be an American with his courage to speak the truth no matter whether that truth is popular in the moment.

But it doesn’t even matter if he was right. In America, we believe freedom of speech is sacrosanct.

At Drop Site News, the American Conservative, and Breaking Points, we don’t agree on everything, but we do agree that without freedom of expression, without the freedom to criticize our government, all the other freedoms will fall by the wayside.

Trita Parsi on the deportation threat.                     Video: Democracy Now!

We stand with Trita Parsi and we hope you will too. Even if you don’t agree with what he says, we must defend his right to say it.

Petitions are already circulating with tens of thousands of signatures demanding that Parsi be deported.

No sentiment could be less American. But freedom can’t rest on the paper it is written on.

We as a people, right, left, and center, must insist it remain in force.

Republished from Drop Site News.

• The petition against deporting Trita Parsi

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The United States and Iran have officially signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran. The signing came a day ahead of schedule. President Trump signed the agreement at a dinner at the Palace of Versailles hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the agreement in Tehran.

The 14-point agreement calls for an immediate end to fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon; the full resumption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; the lifting of the US blockade; the easing of sanctions on Iran; the unfreezing of Iranian assets; and a $300 billion investment fund to rebuild Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: But the deal also leaves many major questions unresolved about Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, said, “Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it ​was not even comparable,” he said.

Just hours before signing the deal, President Trump spoke at the G7 summit and issued a new threat to Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head. If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Vali Nasr, an Iranian American professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He recently co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs headlined “Iran’s New Grand Strategy: How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East.”

He is also author of the book Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.

Professor Nasr, it’s great to have you back. If you can start off by responding to this memorandum of understanding that President Trump signed in Versailles, obviously meant to bring us back to the end of World War I? The Iranian President, of course, signed remotely.

But talk about the significance of what we have finally learned are the 14 points.

VALI NASR: Thank you very much for having me back.

I think, first of all, the most important part is that President Trump decided to sign this himself rather than have Vice-President JD Vance do it, which then now means that he basically owns this document. I think it’s important in the sense that it ends this war. It closes the parenthesis on a hundred days of both hot war and economic war that has devastated the global economy.

At face value, and the way in which the political commentary, particularly in the West and the United States, is interpreting it, is that this is a major strategic setback for the United States. The US started this war with the belief that it would destroy the Islamic Republic within days. President Trump demanded the utter surrender for Iran.

And now he has to settle for an agreement.

And the way this agreement reads, it looks like that the United States is more eager for this war to end than Iran is. The United States has given Iran a great deal of economic incentive in order to agree to sign this agreement, end the war, and then agree to negotiate over the larger issues which supposedly caused the war in the first place.

And also, it’s very clear that in Iran, they’re very triumphant. They think this is a big victory for them, not only that they survived the war, but that they forced the President to sign this agreement.

And more importantly, everything the President said yesterday was breaking taboos: Iran can have enrichment; Iran can have missiles; Israel cannot destroy buildings in Lebanon at will, or should not; and that Iran is entitled to have its own frozen assets taken back — given back to the country.

Trump’s war on Iran ends with a triumphant Tehran      Video: Democracy Now

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could comment, Professor Nasr, on the fact that Lebanon figures in the very first point of this memorandum, and the fact you’ve called this agreement a success for Iran because it’s created, as you said, a fissure between the US and Israel? If you could elaborate on that, and what you see as the risks, given that Israel had — was not consulted on this agreement, and it’s very unclear that it will go along with it?

VALI NASR: Well, first of all, the war was a moment of triumph for Israel, because it convinced the United States to basically go to war to realise what is essentially, and at its core, Israel’s strategic aims, which was the destruction of the Islamic Republic through military means.

The war did not pan out the way that President Trump understood it would, and that already was a fissure. Now, the president trying to get out of this war the best he can has led him down a path that accepts the continued existence of the Islamic Republic, giving money to the Islamic Republic, talking to the Islamic Republic, all of which are basically strategic setbacks for Israel, and particularly for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And Iran is actually asking for a price for accommodating President Trump, and the price that Iran is asking is deliberately trying to expand that fissure between the US and Israel. But Iran, by insisting that Israel needs to back away from its maximal position on Lebanon and settle for a ceasefire now, and perhaps, as Iran is demanding, even leave south Lebanon, essentially, first of all, asserts the fact that Iran is coming out of this war believing that it has more leverage than before it went into this war.

It also creates greater tension between Washington and Tel Aviv. And so, the Iranians are playing this in a very important way for them.

But also, we have to think that one outcome of this war is friction between Israel and the United States, period, because the Israeli strategy of deploying the US to destroy Iran has backfired, and ultimately there will be a reckoning in the US as to why did we go into this war, what were the premises of thinking that it would be successful, and who is responsible.

And even though it’s not said loudly, it’s very clear, in the undertone of what President Trump says, that he’s lost trust in what Prime Minister Netanyahu tells him, and that he’s somewhat angry because he’s receiving blowback for a war that was, essentially, an Israeli strategic agenda, and now he has to carry the political cost of it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Nasr, I want to ask about this piece that you co-wrote with Narges Bajoghli, “Iran’s New Grand Strategy,” in which you detail the changes that have taken place within Iran from last year, the first US-Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025, to now, when this invasion took place, February 26. You say the Iranian state underwent something of a transformation. You write, “More institutional change took place in those eight months than in the previous ten years combined.” If you could elaborate?

VALI NASR: Well, in Évian [France], President Trump kept saying multiple times that there has been regime change in Iran and a more pragmatic leadership has taken over. Setting aside the second part of his statement, that whether it’s pragmatic or not, there definitely has been regime change. I mean, Israel and the United States, between the June 2025 war and this recent war, have killed more than 130 Iranian leaders.

And by doing so, they’ve eliminated a whole class of the country’s leadership, which has been replaced by a new generation that has come up through the ranks, generation that has been born in Iran after the revolution, the generation that was born not as revolutionaries that were fighting against a state, but actually as children of that state and in a bureaucracy, in a system that took place.

They have a different attitude towards statecraft, towards how to manage the country, and particularly how to manage the war. I mean, one of the things that surprised the United States in this war is the aggressiveness of the new Iranian leadership. The President, as he referred yesterday multiple times, killed General Soleimani, put maximum-pressure sanctions on Iran, bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

And what he got from the previous leadership in Iran was a tepid, conservative, restrained answer. Now he’s facing a leadership that doesn’t answer the same way. It answers very, very aggressively, and, therefore, was able to turn the tables on the United States by closing the Strait of Hormuz, by attacking American bases.

In addition, one of the big surprises of this war is how quickly Iran reorganised itself between finding itself on the defensive in June, and then facing a massive social uprising in Iran in January, that it was compelled to suppress very bloodily and brutally, and led to the conclusion around the world that the Iranian regime was really, really weak.

How is it that this really, really weak regime, at war with its own people, and having just suffered massive bombardment in June, was able to reorganise itself to survive a very direct, massive attack by the world’s premier military superpower and the Middle East’s most powerful military. And not only survive it, but actually come out of the war with strategic wins, like the control of the Strait of Hormuz, like a chokehold on the global economy, and force the American President into retreat to settle for far less than what he had thought?

So, if we take stock of this, regardless of whether you like the Islamic Republic or not, or how heinous they’ve been with their own people, you have to account for the fact that Iran, Iran’s new leadership, achieved the feat of reorganising the state, reorganising their military, managing their economy in a way to be able to achieve what they did in the eight months between the two wars and then during the course of the hundred-day war.

AMY GOODMAN: You write that the view now from Tehran is that, “the United States’ decade-long containment of Iran has come to an end. The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor.”

As we begin to wrap up, Professor Nasr, if you can explain that shifting geopolitics and how exactly what Trump has achieved, what is the difference between February 27, before Israel and the US attacked, and now?

VALI NASR: What Trump has achieved is to end Iran’s containment. First of all, Iran destroyed about 16 to 17 US bases, some of them completely. So, it ended, if you would, the military encirclement of Iran. It created doubt in the mind of the Gulf countries about the wisdom of partnering with the United States in containing Iran.

I think yesterday in Évian the President made clear that even the sanctions regime against Iran is going to come down. So, economic and military containment of Iran is gone.

During this war, both in the Middle East and globally, the United States’ standing has been diminished. It has lost strategic ground. This was very evident in the president’s visit to China. So, multipolarity is a big winner against the President, who asserted American domination around the world but tried to show it in a war with what he thought was a second-rate, third-rate military and a country on the verge of collapse, has come up short.

So, he has been cut at the knees, if you would. And what will come, obviously, is a greater assertion of power by various regions of the world, by China and Russia, and the United States that will find it more and more difficult to compel the rest of the world to basically follow the US lead.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished under Creative Commons.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Israel’s ambassador to Australia has looked at Australian citizens who say they were beaten, tortured and raped, and called them frauds.

Sit with that. A foreign envoy, on Australian soil, telling Australian women that their rape and torture is a performance.

Ambassador Hillel Newman and his embassy say there is no credible evidence, brand the 11 Australians professional provocateurs, and say the allegations are already proven false. To the survivors’ families, the embassy said its forces treated detainees with great sensitivity.

• READ MORE: A world first: Australia will now investigate Israel over Gaza flotilla brutality
• ‘You’re a liar! You’re a liar!’ NZ foreign minister Peters insults Gaza flotilla torture survivor in Parliament
• ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists

On ABC radio, Newman called the AFP investigation a mistake and warned that if he decided it was a witch hunt, he was not sure how Israel would respond.

How dare he? How dare a foreign ambassador stand in this country and tell Australian women that what was done to them never happened? How dare he reduce Juliet Lamont to a propagandist before one piece of evidence has been tested? A woman who says she was beaten, cable-tied and raped, who has the medical record of a fractured coccyx.

That is not diplomacy. It is

the demonisation of rape victims by the representative of the state they are accusing.

Understand who else he is calling a liar. Penny Wong, the Foreign Minister of Australia, sat with these survivors and told the country she believes them, calling their treatment horrific and unacceptable.

Anne Aly, a minister of the Crown, was also there. So was a senior DFAT official, and a Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.

By Lamont’s account, every woman in that room believed her, thanked her, and told her she was brave.

So when Newman says the survivors are lying,

he is saying the Foreign Minister of Australia is lying.

He is saying a minister of the Crown is a fool and the federal police are running a witch hunt against the truth. A foreign ambassador has called the senior leadership of the Australian government dupes for daring to believe Australian women.

No contest of the facts
Newman has not contested one allegation with one fact. No ship log. No operational order. No footage. No medical record.

He confirms no request for further footage has even been answered, and says Israel alone will decide whether the AFP is worthy of seeing it. The accused wants to vet his own investigators while branding the victims liars.

That is not a government with nothing to hide.

It is one that has decided contempt is cheaper than cooperation.

Now watch who sprinted to stand beside him. The Australian Jewish Association, the word “Australian” sitting right there in its name and never meaning less.

Confronted with Australians who say they were raped in Israeli custody, the AJA did not call for Israel to be investigated, did not demand it hand over the evidence, and did not stand behind a single Australian woman.

Instead, its chief executive, Robert Gregory, wrote to the AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, demanding the flotilla participants, the Australian citizens, be investigated.

Read that twice, because it is grotesque.

An outfit waving the Australian flag asked Australian police to hunt Australian rape complainants on behalf of the foreign government accused of raping them, and called it “patriotism”.

So drop the pretence and ask where its loyalty lies. Not with the women. Not with the law. Not with the country whose name it wears like a costume. It lies with Israel, and only Israel.

Given a clean choice between abused Australians and the power that abused them, it chose the power and reached for the nearest Australian institution to use as a weapon against Australians.

Juliet Lamont was raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers. this is her story, told by Andrew Brown. #gaza #flotilla #auspol #IDFhttps://t.co/cDagAsu0gK

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) June 11, 2026

Murdoch’s complicity
Then there is Sky News. Handed a story about Australian women alleging rape and torture, the Murdoch network did not interview the survivors, did not put Penny Wong on air, and did not call the AFP.

It handed the microphone to the AJA and let Gregory’s demand to investigate the victims run as the story.

Faced with tortured Australians on one side and the lobby smearing them on the other, Sky knew exactly whose talking points to broadcast. That is not journalism. It is a foreign state’s propaganda, laundered through an Australian network and sold to Australians as though the victims were the villains.

Three voices, one message. A foreign ambassador, a lobby cosplaying as Australian, and a network that has forgotten which country it broadcasts in, all telling this nation that its tortured citizens are liars and that the people who really need investigating are the Australians who came home with broken bones.

There is a word for siding with a foreign power against your own abused citizens. It is not patriotism. It is the opposite. How un-Australian can you be?

This is the same Israeli government whose minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, sanctioned by Australia, filmed the detained Australians and captioned it “welcome to Israel”.

France and Italy have opened war crimes proceedings. Canada has demanded an independent investigation. The survivors have lodged sworn affidavits with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The answers from Newman, the AJA, and Sky News are identical.

Deny everything. Smear the witnesses. Investigate the victims. Protect the state.

So hand it over. Every report, every order, every communication, every witness, every second of footage. If Israel has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear.

Its ambassador says the survivors are lying. The survivors, and the Foreign Minister who believes them, say otherwise. The evidence will decide.

The world is watching. So are Australians. The time for denials is ending. The time for evidence has arrived.

Something significant and revelatory just happened in the New Zealand Parliament. I was present at today’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting when things kicked off between the Foreign Minister and humanitarian aid activist Hāhona Ormsby, one of the New Zealanders who survived kidnapping and beatings by Israeli forces in May.

Despite the presence of many well-known pro-Palestinian activists, there was no security in the room when things turned spicy. By the time security raced into the room the minister had lost all composure and repeatedly shouted at Ormsby, “You’re a liar!”

Ormsby may have breached parliamentary rules when he rose to challenge Winston Peters but he felt it was a price worth paying.

• READ MORE: ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• A world first: Australia will now investigate Israel over Gaza flotilla brutality
• France opens ‘war crimes’ probe into Israel’s treatment of Gaza activists
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists
• The Global Sumud Aotearoa dossier answering Israeli claims
• ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare

“Is it New Zealand First, Winston? Or is it Israel First? Ormsby shot at the minister, leader of the New Zealand First Party. Turning to see the speaker, Peters appeared to recognise the tattooed face (mata ora) of Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto).

The chair tried to shut things down but Ormsby continued, “Are you going to sanction Israel? Are we going to investigate Israel for the people on the fleet that were brutally beaten and tortured?”

When Ormsby identified himself as one of the activists who had been held captive and severely beaten by the Israelis, Peters shouted, “Get out of here! You’re a liar!”

Another activist shot back: “You’re a war criminal.”

A priceless moment
This was a priceless moment because it revealed something enormously important: Peters believes what Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli ambassador are saying and denies the evidence of 430 activists who were kidnapped and taken to Israel in May.

Some were hospitalised immediately on arriving in Türkiye. Winston takes the word of indicted war criminals in preference to medical examiners and lawyers who attended the activists on arrival in Türkiye.

Denying his own lying eyes, he waves away the black eyes, broken noses, deep wounds and other clearly visible injuries. Peters said there was “no evidence of brutality”.

Above all, he is calling fine New Zealanders, several of whom I know and respect, liars. He is calling Samuel Leason, Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Rana Hamida, Julien Blondel, Sean Janssen and Hāhona Ormsby liars on the word of a state that invented a new form of lying — hasbara — a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to frame their genocidal violence as self-defence.

By impugning the good name of some of our finest citizens Winston Peters betrays his duty to defend New Zealand and puts at risk Kiwis who continue their non-violent campaign to open a humanitarian corridor to the suffering people of Palestine.

Meanwhile, even Australia has, on instruction from Winston’s counterpart Penny Wong, launched an investigation into testimonies of rape and torture by Australian members of the Global Sumud Flotilla.

France, Italy, Poland, Türkiye and others have launched investigations over crimes including unlawful interception and piracy, rape and other sexual violence, torture, systematic abuse and illegal detention.

Countries such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have issued stinging rebukes. Malaysia is taking Israel to the International Court of Justice over the kidnapping and violence dished out to their citizens.

Surprise for Global Sumud Delegation
Just the day before, to the surprise of the Global Sumud Delegation, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs (after having done absolutely nothing since Israeli forces attacked the flotilla in international waters) sent them an email offering to pass on any information about mistreatment to the Israelis.

It triggered suspicion as to motives. Today’s exchange reveals that MFAT and its minister had already made up their minds.

Rana Hamida of Global Sumud Aotearoa said: “Knowing we were coming to Wellington, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent us an email yesterday asking us to provide information on what happened to our activists. The message was that they would put this to the Israelis — in other words: they will leave it to Israel to be both the criminal and the judge. That’s not good enough.”

I tell Hāhona Ormsby’s story in detail in “He’s Māori!” Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the gruesome Israeli prison system”.

‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters #asiapacificreport #globalsumudflotilla @gbsumudflotilla #KiaOraGaza @1ElegantFriends #Israeliabuse #israelitorture #HumanRightsMatter https://t.co/ox6qZMhwLh pic.twitter.com/OVVWfYIPeC

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 18, 2026

Ormsby’s action today in a parliamentary select committee clearly breached rules. It was, however, acting in the long tradition of those who have the courage to oppose complicity with tyranny and oppression.

As such, he stands in the company of the great Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, my friend and former CIA veteran Ray McGovern, Greta Thunberg and so many others who have raised their citizen voices in the halls of power and calmly accepted the indignity of being frog-marched out of buildings for doing so.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and he hosts solidarity.co.nz

Two days ago, I wrote an article and posted on FaceBook describing the US-Iran ceasefire as a surrender document. That article has since been viewed more than 4.5 million times, liked 56,000 times, and shared more than 11,000 times.

The response confirmed what many already sensed but could not yet prove: that something was deeply wrong with the terms America had accepted.

Now, with the full text of the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding obtained by Al Arabiya English, we no longer have to speculate. The document speaks for itself — and it confirms everything I said.

• READ MORE: Trump, Pezeshkian sign US-Iran MoU to end war, both sides confirm
• Other War on Iran reports

As a lawyer, I have spent a 35 year career parsing legal language with precision. Reading this MOU, my conclusion is unequivocal: this is not a peace agreement between equals.

This is a surrender document. The Americans did not want the world to see this text, and reading it, it is not difficult to understand why.

I will now explain in detail why that is so. Let me set out all 14 clauses in full, and then explain what they mean.

The 14 clauses of the Iran MOU:

1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.
2. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.
3. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual h a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.
4. Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States will lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.
5. Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralisation of mines by Iran.
6. The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.
7. The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral US sanctions, both primary and secondary.
8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran’s nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.
9. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear programme, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.
10. The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the United States Treasury Department will issue waivers for exports of Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products and their derivatives, and all related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.
11. The United States undertakes that, in light of the progress of negotiations towards a final agreement, frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available. These funds, whether held in the master account or transferred, will be used for any final beneficiary payment determined by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will be fully available for use. The United States undertakes to issue all necessary permits and licenses on this basis.
12. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that an implementation mechanism will be established to oversee the successful implementation of and future commitment to the Final Agreement.
13. Following the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and upon receipt of assurances regarding the commencement of implementation of Articles 4, 5, 10, and 11 of this Memorandum of Understanding, and the continued implementation of these steps, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States will enter into negotiations for a Final Agreement solely with respect to the remaining Articles.
14. The final agreement will be approved through a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.

Why this is a surrender document — and worse than Obama’s JCPOA:
Reading this MOU as a lawyer, the conclusion is clear beyond peradventure. Let me explain why, point by devastating point:

First: The $300 billion.
Clause 6 commits the United States and its regional partners to finance Iran’s rehabilitation and economic development to the tune of at least $300 billion. Let us call this what it is — reparations. The victor does not pay the defeated party $300 billion. The party that initiated a war, prosecuted it, and lost pays the winner. The Obama JCPOA involved releasing approximately $100–150 billion in frozen Iranian assets — money that was already Iran’s. This MOU commits the United States to generating $300 billion in fresh financing for Iranian development. Trump went to war and came back owing Iran more than twice what Obama ever conceded.

Second: The Strait of Hormuz remains in Iranian hands.
Clause 5 requires Iran to clear its own mines and restore shipping — a technical concession that actually confirms something extraordinary: Iran controls the waterway. The MOU contains not a single provision preventing Iran from later imposing transit fees, “environmental levies,” or “navigational service charges” on vessels passing through. It is tolls under a different name. The Strait of Hormuz, the jugular vein of global energy supply, remains firmly within Iran’s sovereign grip. The United States went to war and lost the Strait, which had been open to the world before then.

Third: The nuclear question is left wide open — and Trump’s bombast about Iran’s enriched uranium is flatly contradicted by the text.
This is perhaps the most legally significant point of all. Clause 8 states that Iran “reiterates” it will never produce nuclear weapons. The word “reiterates” is not accidental — it is a diplomatic term of art meaning Iran is simply repeating a prior position, not making a fresh, legally binding, verifiable commitment. There is no dismantlement of centrifuges. No reduction in enrichment levels. No breakout timeline. No snap inspections. The fate of enriched material is merely deferred to the final agreement. Compare this to the JCPOA, which at least imposed specific caps on enrichment, reduced Iran’s stockpile by 98 percent, limited centrifuges, and established a 15-year timeline with IAEA verification. This MOU gives America nothing comparable.

Trump has boasted publicly that under this deal, America will be able to seize and destroy Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. This is pure fantasy. Read Clause 8 again: the fate of enriched material is to be “adequately addressed in a final agreement”. That is all. There is no mechanism for seizure, no timeline for removal, no verification procedure, and no enforcement clause. The enriched uranium remains in Iran’s possession, on Iranian soil, under Iranian control — today, tomorrow, and until such time as a final agreement is reached, if one ever is. Indeed, Clause 8 explicitly acknowledges “Iran’s nuclear needs,” a formulation that implicitly recognises Iran’s right to continue developing its nuclear programme as it sees fit. Far from constraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions, this MOU hands Iran enormous residual power over the direction and pace of its own nuclear development. The deal does not strip Iran of its nuclear leverage — it leaves that leverage entirely intact while America pays the bills.

I make no judgment on whether Iran should or should not possess nuclear weapons — my longstanding view has always been that if Iran is not to have them, Israel, which possesses an undeclared arsenal, should not have them either.

But the point is this: it is pure hyperbole for Trump to claim that under this deal Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons. The MOU does not prevent it. And given that the Iranian President Pezeskian, in a recent call with the Pakistani Prime Minister, reportedly threatened to detonate a nuclear device if America remained intransigent — and given that Pakistan has given assurances to Turkey of nuclear cover in the event of an Israeli threat — who is to say a similar assurance will not be extended to Iran by Pakistan, China, Russia, or North Korea? The MOU provides no answer.

Fourth: The sequencing reveals everything.
Clause 13 is perhaps the most telling of all. It provides that Iran and the United States will enter final agreement negotiations only after America has commenced implementation of Articles 4, 5, 10, and 11 — meaning the naval blockade is lifted, frozen assets are released, oil export waivers are issued, and shipping is restored — all before a final deal is concluded. America gives first. Iran negotiates later. This is the logic not of a victor extracting concessions, but of a supplicant purchasing the right to sit at the table.

The bottom line
Donald Trump launched military strikes on Iran, deployed carrier battle groups, imposed a naval blockade, and subjected Iranian infrastructure to sustained bombardment. He did so with maximalist rhetoric about preventing Iran from ever obtaining nuclear weapons and forcing Iran’s unconditional surrender. The MOU he has now signed delivers: a $300 billion development commitment, no structural nuclear dismantlement, Iranian retention of effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, immediate American concessions before final negotiations even begin, and a nuclear clause so weak that the word “reiterates” does all the work of what should have been a cast-iron prohibition.

Obama’s JCPOA, whatever its imperfections, at least contained specific, measurable nuclear rollbacks, independent verification mechanisms, and phased sanction relief tied to verified Iranian compliance. This MOU contains none of that structural architecture.

Trump tore up the JCPOA calling it the worst deal in history. He then went to war. And he came home with something worse.

And here is a modest suggestion for the occasion. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles — a document that imposed such punishing reparations and national humiliation on Germany that it gave rise to Adolf Hitler and delivered the world into the catastrophe of the Second World War.

President Macron is now set to dine President Trump in that same Hall of Mirrors during the G7 summit. How fitting it would be — how perfectly, poetically fitting — if Trump were to stay on and sign the final MOU with Iran on June 19 in that very same Hall. After all, a room that once witnessed one great power reduce another to humiliating reparations is precisely the right setting for a document in which the self-proclaimed world’s greatest dealmaker has somehow managed to be the one paying them.

The mirrors — 357 in total, at least, would reflect the moment with perfect clarity.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war — often referred to as the Six-Day War — not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza — levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population — is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” — the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.

Washington and other Western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing — wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation
The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” — or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state.

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — the 22 percent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants.

Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said.

Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” Israel was imposing there.

The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested, by depriving the population of essentials like water. “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”

In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment.

They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade — a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Targeting innocents
The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.

Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.

As the newspaper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”

Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task — as in 1948 — was to prevent their return.

Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli Parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.

Here is one soldier’s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography:

We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children.

In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.

Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown Israel trying to conceal its crimes by secretly bulldozing its civilian victims into mass graves in violation of international law.

It did so, for example, when troops massacred Palestinians seeking aid a year ago, and again when soldiers executed 15 Palestinian emergency workers in an ambush on ambulances in March 2025.

Another soldier troubled by the 1967 shoot-to-kill policy recalled a conversation with his commander: “I asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too? The answer I received was: Don’t be a girl.”

There is nothing exceptional about this. Israel is known to have killed more than 1000 babies in Gaza under the age of one since 7 October 2023, not all of them anonymously in strikes from the air.

The Israeli military allowed a group of five premature babies in al-Nasser hospital to die and decompose in their incubators after its soldiers took over the building in late 2023.

Israeli commanders also knew that the first to die from a blockade of aid would be the most vulnerable. Babies froze or starved to death as the population was deprived of shelter, baby formula and food, with their mothers lacking sufficient nutrition to produce milk.

As Soldier 2 noted, Israeli military doctrine encourages soldiers to stop seeing Palestinians, even Palestinian babies, as “human”. Their lives are considered worthless.

Past familiar
Israeli soldiers murdered another Palestinian baby last week in the West Bank, after they ambushed a car driven by a lecturer from Bethlehem university, Fahd Abu Haikal, in the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is under particularly brutal occupation.

One of the soldiers fired into the car, as it was slowing to a halt, from only a few metres away, from where he must have been able to see the passengers inside. The bullet killed Abu Haikal’s seventh-month-old baby, Sam, and wounded his wife, who was holding the infant.

Abu Haikal’s 11-year-old son, also in the car, watched his baby brother bleed to death.

Israeli soldiers have been murdering Palestinian babies for decades. Yet none of it has roused an ounce of the outrage uniformly expressed by Western media and politicians at Israel’s entirely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 babies on 7 October 2023.

In fact, only one Israeli baby was killed that day: nine-month-old Mila Cohen, who, like Sam Abu Haikal, was shot in her mother’s arms.

Israel’s 1967 campaign of expulsions in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it done on the spur of the moment. According to Haaretz, the policy had been carefully planned many years in advance.

Since 1948, Israel had been waiting for a moment to carry out additional expulsions and seize the last parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories it had been denied for the completion of its violent settler colonial project.

The 1967 war — against Egypt, Syria and Jordan — provided the pretext.

Ishai Amrami, a senior battalion commander in that war, later admitted: “This thing, which I experienced first hand, was an attempt at massive population transfer.”

As Haaretz observes: “The Palestinians were mere bystanders in this story. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians residing in the West Bank did not take part in the war, and that it was not their war. Nevertheless, they were the ones who paid its price.”

Israel began the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, as it had done after 1948, so there would be no homes for Palestinians to return to. But as Haaretz notes, Israel became a victim of its own rapid military success.

“This was one of the rare instances in the history of the conflict where Israel was forced to back down due to heavy international pressure.”

It hardly needs pointing out that, unlike 1967, such international pressure has been sorely missing over the past three years. The new cast of Western leaders, like Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, once a noted human rights lawyer, have justified Israel’s explicitly exterminationist agenda against the Palestinians of Gaza, terming it “self-defence”.

Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s Western leaders and their media chose to buy Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed — as well as providing the weapons and intelligence — to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their assistance.

Buoyed by this impunity, Israel has tried to spread the destruction further afield, with limited success in Iran and much greater success in south Lebanon.

As Western politicians and media happily forget Gaza, Israel keeps up the relentless pressure and misery there. A so-called “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli military control over the destroyed enclave, an area off-limits to Palestinians, has gradually expanded from half the land to 70 percent.

The people of Gaza are quite literally being squeezed out of the ruins of their homeland, as Israel scrambles to find a third country — Egypt, or perhaps Somaliland — willing to take them in.

Excising context
As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

Which is precisely why Western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present — in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.

Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response — and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that — to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.

An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.

The October 2023 Hamas attack was not a turning-point or a rupture, as it is so often presented in the West.

In 1967 — that is, 56 years before the Hamas attack — Eshkol advised that unforeseen events might accelerate Israel’s stealthy programme of ethnic cleansing. A moment might arrive in the future — what he called an “unexpected luxury solution” — when Israel could rapidly realise its dream of a Palestinian-free Palestine.

“Perhaps we can expect another war, and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a type of ‘luxury,’ an unexpected solution,” he explained to the cabinet.

With the missing context added, as Israel’s Haaretz has done with its new article, the story is transformed.

The events of 7 October 2023 look less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-roll-of-the-dice response to decades of Israeli atrocities designed to make conditions for Palestinians so miserable — through pauperisation, confinement, starvation, and murder — that they either flee their homeland or die in situ.

With the missing context added, Israel’s supposed “retaliation” in Gaza — its genocidal rampage — looks like what it actually is: a continuation of its eight-decade ethnic cleansing campaign.

In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son in 1937, 11 years before Israel’s creation: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.”

In a diary entry during the mass expulsions of 1948, Ben-Gurion summarised the mood among his generals: “If we accuse a family — we need to harm them without mercy. Women and children without mercy. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction. During the operation, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

The goal was the weaponisation of fear, making Palestinians too terrified to remain in their homeland.

Mordechai Maklef, a senior commander in the fledgling Israeli army, noted two years later, in 1950, the logic behind Israel’s policy: “It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in the Galilee without terror.”

Even if we ignore Palestinian accounts from those times, the small sections of the Israeli archives that have so far been opened to Israeli historians document massacres and systematic rapes of Palestinians in 1948.

In recent Israeli films such as Tantura — the village where a terrible massacre of Palestinians was carried out — old men who served as Israeli soldiers at the time confirm the archival documents, recounting how they personally witnessed Palestinian girls being raped.

Tantura trailer.           Video: Journeyman Pictures

Let us note that weaponised rape continues to this day — in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls Israel’s “network of torture camps”.

These rapes — now often using dogs specially trained for the purpose — are so widespread that they have become impossible to conceal. They have even come, very belatedly, to the attention of mainstream media like The New York Times, provoking a cacophony of protest and threats from Netanyahu to sue.

So routine is the sexual abuse of those Israel detains that international peace activists suffered systematic rapes when hundreds of them were seized last month in international waters off Cyprus, as they began their journey to Gaza to break Israel’s genocidal blockade.

Israel wants the fear to spread, from Palestine itself to anyone who wishes to show solidarity with its people.

Western politicians and the media have barely referred to these horrific crimes against their own citizens. Why? Because to acknowledge those crimes would be to concede that even worse atrocities are being meted out to Palestinians under Israeli rule.

Prisons of complicity
Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it.

If Western publics knew what has really been happening to Palestinians for 80-plus years — first, from the Zionist movement and then from the Israeli state — they might swell further the ranks of the protest marches, making these demonstrations politically impossible to ignore.

If Westerners knew what has really been happening to Palestinians, they might join activists who have been trying to incapacitate Israeli weapons factories, like Elbit Systems, operating quite openly in Western countries such as Britain. They might, as a result, manage to smash the supply of drones and other weapons being used to massacre the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

Instead of thousands, there might be tens or hundreds of thousands of people willing to hold up a placard in the UK opposing genocide, and be arrested as a “terrorism supporter”, overwhelming the prison system and making a mockery of Britain’s supposed “justice” system.

Armed with knowledge rather dulled by ignorance, more Westerners might board boats, amassing an armada that it would be impossible for the Western media to disregard.

But most critically of all, were the real context understood — were Israel’s decades-long pattern of murdering, raping, and expelling Palestinians known — Western publics might wake up to the fact that their political and media class are not moral actors. They are not upholding the values of a superior civilisation. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.

They are imposters. Or more accurately, they are working within political and financial structures that make it impossible to tell truths that would rock a system of power in the West that enriches a tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel industries.

That system of power drives some Palestinians into an early grave, and others into concentration camps, or exile, or penury.

Meanwhile, it drives us in the West into prisons without physical walls — prisons either of ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and impotence.

Either way, like Soldier 1, we find our humanity deadened. Our hearts are hardened or broken. The challenge we face is the same as the Palestinians — to find a path out of our confinement.

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

In 1904, a British geographer named Halford Mackinder stood before the Royal Geographical Society in London and delivered what would become the most prophetic warning in the history of geopolitics:

“Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

Mackinder’s insight was deceptively simple. The world’s greatest landmass — Eurasia and Africa combined, what he called the World Island — contained resources, populations and industrial potential that dwarfed anything that maritime powers could master.

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The only thing preventing a land-based power from dominating was geography. The Heartland — that vast Central Asian interior was inaccessible to navies. No fleet could project power into the steppe.

But railways could unlock it.

Mackinder was watching Tsarist Russia’s railways push southward through Central Asia and issuing a warning to Britain: if any single power ever consolidated the Heartland by rail, British naval supremacy would become irrelevant.

The world’s oceans, which made Britain great, would become a moat around a fortress someone else owned.

Britain took the warning seriously.

Keeping Eurasia divided
America, inheriting Britain’s role as the guardian of the maritime order, built its entire grand strategy around preventing exactly this — keeping Eurasia divided — contested, and dependent on American-controlled sea lanes.

For 70 years, it worked.

Xian. The ancient capital of China. The city where the original Silk Road began 2000 years ago, where camel caravans loaded with silk, spices, and porcelain departed westward into the vast Central Asian steppe, threading through kingdoms and deserts toward Isfahan in Persia.

Today, freight trains depart from Xian’s modern logistics terminals heading in the same direction. Not on camels. Not in weeks. In 14 days — 10,400 km threading through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan before arriving in Tehran.

History doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes with astonishing precision.

Since the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran, something remarkable has happened on that Xian-Tehran rail corridor.

Train schedules have increased by 300 percent weekly.

Bypassing the US and its Strait if Hormuz blockade         Video: BeyondTheBuild

China is simply ‘going around’
Think about what that means. America’s naval assets — the most powerful maritime force in human history — are positioned around the Strait of Hormuz, squeezing Iran’s maritime trade. The blockade is real. The pressure is real.

And China is simply going around it.

Not through diplomatic protest. Not through UN resolutions. Through railways threading through the Heartland — through exactly the geography that Mackinder identified as impervious to naval power 120 years ago.

Every freight train that departs Xian is a Mackinderian argument made in steel and diesel. American carrier groups cannot follow it. American sanctions cannot easily interdict it.

American naval supremacy, the foundation of the post-war international order, is geographically irrelevant to a train crossing Kazakhstan.

This isn’t improvisation. China didn’t build this corridor in response to the current crisis. It built it years in advance — patiently, methodically, as part of the Belt and Road initiative — precisely because Chinese strategists understood that America’s ultimate weapon was control of sea lanes.

The answer to sea lane control is to not need the sea lanes.

Belt and Road strategy
The Xian-Tehran railway passes through four Central Asian republics — all former Soviet states that Russia once controlled, that America tried to court after 1991, and that China has now quietly bound into its infrastructure network through investment, loans and railway agreements.

The April 2024 four-party tariff agreement between China, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan established unified tariffs and guaranteed transit times. The corridor was operationalised before the crisis that would make it indispensable.

That is strategic foresight of a very high order.

What China has done with Belt and Road is achieve what Mackinder feared most — Heartland consolidation — not through military conquest but through commerce.

The Central Asian republics are now threaded into China’s logistics networks. Iran is bound to China through a 25 year comprehensive cooperation agreement.

Russia, weakened by Ukraine, watches Chinese influence expand into its former backyard with limited ability to resist. The Heartland — from Xian to Tehran, from the Caspian to the Pamirs, is quietly reorganising around Chinese economic gravity.

Shift in world power balance
Mackinder warned that this moment, if it ever came, would represent a fundamental shift in the balance of world power. He wasn’t wrong about much.

America’s blockade of Hormuz operates on a 20th century assumption — that controlling the maritime chokepoint controls the relationship. That assumption holds when there is no alternative. It weakens precisely as alternatives are built.

Iran’s trade with China — its economic lifeline — is increasingly flowing overland. The railway that cannot be blockaded is running at 300 percent of its pre-war schedule. China and Iran are simultaneously accelerating the electrification of Iranian rail infrastructure, deepening the corridor’s capacity further.

Russia completed its first freight run to Tehran through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in November 2025. The overland architecture is not just surviving the blockade — it is being reinforced by it.

This is what strategic infrastructure looks long when it was designed with exactly this contingency in mind.

Mackinder died in 1947, just as America was assuming Britain’s mantle as the world’s pre-eminent maritime power. He spent his final years anxious that the lesson of the Heartland had not been properly absorbed.

Standing in Xian today, watching freight trains loaded with Chinese goods depart for Tehran through four Central Asian republics, along a route that American naval power cannot touch — one suspects that he would feel a complicated mixture of vindication and dread.

The railway is 10,400 km long.

It is also in a very real sense, the distance between the world America built and the world that is coming.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

COMMENTARY: By May Pik

The Israeli narrative is mostly told through the perspective of Zionist talking points, making it uncomprehensible as to how a people that went through genocide can turn into the perpetrators of another.

Today, I want to tell another narrative — the story of brainwash and indoctrination I was exposed to growing up in Israel. I want to be clear that I do not in any way excuse the people of Israel for their part and responsibility.

Yes, I was indoctrinated, used and manipulated by my country and its government, but I also had the obligation to question my upbringing, to think for myself, to break away, speak out and stand for justice.

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That remains my obligation, and that is why I wanted to speak here today. This knowledge can make us better prepared in fighting against Zionists and their ambassadors.

Looking back I can see how my history was heavily tied to Zionism, yet growing up I didn’t know what the word Zionism meant. My maternal grandmother, named Ziona (from the word Zion), arrived in Palestine in 1933 on a ship as a nine-month-old baby.

My maternal grandfather grew up in Jerusalem to a religious family, going seven generations, but converted to Zionism and joined the notorious “Stern Gang”, a Jewish terrorist group, at age 16.

My mother was born in 1957 and grew up in a poor developing town in the desert, to a patriotic, proud family. She met my dad, a new immigrant from South Africa, a young Zionist eager to start a new life away from apartheid — a bit ironic.

They met as two young 20-year-olds in the beautiful village of Ayn Hawd, a Palestinian village which was ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, and was turned into a bohemian village for Jewish artists.

Jerusalem neighbourhood
After my parents divorced, my father went to live in villages on the margins of the West Bank which I did not know were illegal settlements. And I, as a six-year old girl, went on to live with my mother in Gilo, a Jerusalem neighbourhood, built in the 1970s as part of the never-ending illegal expansion of Jerusalem into 1967-occupied Palestinian land.

My high school, overlooking the ancient city walls, used to be a primary school for Palestinian children before 1948. I remember the lone large olive tree at the entry to the school — a lasting monument to a story that nobody told me.

As a child I learned at school how we, Jewish people throughout history were faced with existential threats. Every April, the Passover texts reminded us of our escape from the evil pharaoh in Egypt.

Every May a two-minute siren marked the Holocaust memorial day, followed a week later with another siren blasting in memory of fallen soldiers of the IDF, ending with military parades and huge firework displays celebrating our long awaited Independence Day.

An unspoken but felt thread connected the victimhood of the Nazi death camps to the deaths of Jewish soldiers in the battlefields of Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, and to the redemption in the form of the Jewish state.

This repeating cycle of memorial days traumatised and retraumatised us, from kindergarten age to old age, with horrific stories and pictures of starving children in concentration camps and of young innocent-looking men who lost their lives in battle, making sure the lesson is well learned and never forgotten.

Memorial day ceremonies at school were rehearsed weeks prior, perfecting the right tone of voice as we recited the same poems and songs, as a rite of passage.

Sad patriotic songs
All radio stations played sad patriotic songs, TV programmes were dedicated to the memories of those who were sacrificed. Everyone dressed in white shirts and blue pants, the colors of our flag.

When the sirens sounded, everybody in the streets, everywhere in the country, stood still with bowed heads, sharing the grief of our victimhood in pride.

History lessons taught us that Palestine was a big desert with few scattered “Arab” villages.

But the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” did not exist in the Israeli vocabulary, (it still doesn’t). Instead they were all just “Arabs”, with no distinct Palestinian nation, history, or language.

Arabs that have many other Arabic-speaking countries nearby to migrate to, if they only chose to let us Jews have our one and only promised land and country.

Growing up as an Israeli child I was never told about the Nakba, I never even heard the word. I wasn’t told about the expulsions, the massacres and the facts of the occupation.

To Israelis, 1948 was a story of a heroic war, of one small Jewish army, against five big Arab armies, where only through our brilliant ingenuity we managed to defeat the Arabs and win our country.

Atrocities quietly buried
We were taught that Palestinians voluntarily ran away from their homes. Nobody told me that the pine trees were planted to cover the evidence, that the maps were re-drawn, the names changed, atrocities quietly buried. It was a methodical campaign of erasure that was invisible and very effective.

Today I find it hard to grapple with the countless lies I was taught as “facts” by my parents, teachers, and elders. Lies such as “we [the Israelis] want peace — they [the Arabs] want to throw us to the sea”, “they attack, we defend ourselves”, and “We are civilised, they are barbaric and primitive”. Lies were repeated and implied in every aspect of our culture, in literature, cinema, newspapers, popular music.

It was the narrative told day in and day out, generation after generation.

I recall, as a child, my best friend’s father shouting in front of the TV news — “Death to Arabs!” a slogan written as graffiti on street walls.

As a teen growing up in Jerusalem during the period of the second Intifada, life was filled with fear and suspicion, with no context given to bombs exploding in buses and cafes, with no understanding of the reality Palestinians were facing under the brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, without mentioning the death toll on the other side — 10 times higher.

Again we were the victims, the only victims, of senseless barbarism or of acts of religious fanatics, in a vacuum of history and reality.

At age 16 I received my first order to appear for military selection where we were sorted based on motivation and test scores.

Legally mandatory
I wasn’t sure I wanted to join the army, but it was legally mandatory, and while there were loopholes, the social repercussions for evading service were serious, and for my family, like most families, it went without saying that I would go. It was every citizen’s basic moral obligation.

So at age 18 just two months after graduating from high school, I was conscripted into the IDF. Entering the admission base as an individual and leaving on a bus-to-bootcamp, near Gaza, as a number.

Yelled at and abused by commanders from the very first moment, forced into immediate unquestioning obedience to any command, no matter how absurd. This training was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin of a young person’s empathy and independent thinking, if there was any left.

The bootcamp lasted a month, at the end, a swearing-in ceremony, having to proclaim to devote all our strength and even to sacrifice our life to preserving the State of Israel and its freedom.

I ended up serving at the Heritage Unit of the Ordnance Corps, but in reality, my role in the army consisted mainly of making coffee for arrogant officers, while trying my best to do as little as I could and get as many sick leaves as possible.

This was a typical army service for Israeli women. I hated wearing the uniform, resented being the property of the state — as we were explicitly told we were — and was disgusted by the chauvinistic demeaning attitudes so commonplace in the army.

I was not yet aware of the bigger picture, I only knew I despised this system for what it was doing to me. After two miserable and depressing years it was finally my last day of service. I didn’t even return to the base to say goodbye as was customary, I wanted nothing to do with it.

Nihilistic Tel Aviv lifestyle
For the next few years while getting my degree, I immersed myself in a nihilistic Tel Aviv lifestyle of not caring about anything other than my own little bubble. I resented the society I was part of, that was rude, arrogant, and full of open contempt for humanistic values.

A society where people don’t want to know what’s happening just a few kilometers away, in fact they don’t even want to know what’s happening to their nextdoor neighbour.

Glimpses of reality on the other side of the fence pierced my bubble from time to time like the eerie soundtrack in the film The Zone of Interest. There was a horrible reality just a few kilometers away and it wasn’t long before my bubble would finally burst.

It was only in my mid-20s, when I met Rod, who later became my dear husband, that I summoned the courage to start challenging my upbringing. To finally begin to see what was always in front of my eyes.

It was very hard to come to terms with. Rod once said it was like waking up and realising you have been sleeping all your life, and everything you thought existed was in ruins, everything collapses. I was left with nothing. I always believed we — the people around me, my parents, teachers, neighbours, friends — were the good ones, that we were all seeking peace, that the only problem was that the Palestinians were sabotaging it.

That all the wars were imposed on us. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

Undoing years of indoctrination took effort and time. There was a part of me that fought against it and another part that pushed me to carry on learning. The pull towards escapism was strong, but reality kept calling on me not to run away.

Coming to terms
The process of coming to terms with the facts took many years with different layers to peel off, some a lot harder to let go of. The crimes of the Nakba were a lot harder to admit than the crimes of 1967.

So-called leftists in Israel distance themselves from rightwing settlers living in the 1967 Occupied Territories and admit that settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are barriers to peace — but they would never question Jews living in stolen houses in Jaffa, Jerusalem or Haifa — the parts of Israel that are considered “legal” by the United Nations.

It took me, too, a much longer time to see the entirety of the land as Palestinian land. It was hard to admit to myself that, no matter where I lived in Israel, I was a settler colonialist too. That despite my family being “good” Israelis, they were still all Zionist, still sent their kids to serve in the army, still believed in our God-given right to steal other people’s land, control and subjugate other people for the sake of our so-called safety. It was built into our DNA.

With my awakening however, came the price. I no longer felt I had a homeland, I was now disgusted by the Independence Day celebrations. Memorial days seemed highly cynical, the places I used to love were now haunted by knowledge of the past.

A beach I fondly remembered from my childhood was the site of the atrocious Tantura massacre. My best friend’s partner, an army pilot, was now not a hero but a murderer, who took part in bombing families in Gaza. And so many other friends and family members that participated and supported it.

In my family, Passover eve was annually celebrated in an uncle’s house in a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. I was now confronted with the irony of celebrating freedom while putting Palestinians under curfews and closures.

At the same time, Israeli society was becoming increasingly militant, racist and intolerant.

Confronting hostile responses
Confronting family members with my opinions was met with hostile responses. At one point it was suggested I go to live in Gaza. At work, I overheard my bosses, jovial at the news of a Palestinian family set on fire by settlers.

It was becoming increasingly unbearable, I felt like I was suffocating. And then in 2014, Gaza was getting “mowed down” once more. Again thousands of innocent people were being bombed by the state I was part of.

The racist rhetoric by politicians, media and the public was getting more and more explicit, critical voices were more and more censored and crushed, and it was suggested to Rod he may lose his job at the hospital if he continued to express his views on social media.

We decided to leave. We were now parents, and we were sickened at the thought of our son growing up in a place like that. Even though it was the only country we knew as home.

In my first years in New Zealand, I didn’t want to think about Israel. Sometimes it entered my dreams, usually bad ones. Sometimes songs in Hebrew that we played at home and that I used to love, would remind me of everything I ran away from.

Ties to family dwindled to almost nonexistent. I thought I was done with it, but it came back to find me. On October 7, 2023, I woke up to the news reporting of the attacks.

Within a few minutes of letting the news sink in, I looked up at Rod and I said: “They let it happen”. I remembered the military term “Quality Terror attack” — a terror attack that is big enough to give the pretext for a major pre-planned military attack on the Palestinians. It was clear that a huge massacre was going to happen, the poor people of Gaza, I knew, stood no chance.

Death toll climbed
As weeks turned into months and years, the death toll climbed from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands, with images of utter destruction, limbless, parentless children, the starvation that was so reminiscent of the Holocaust, I realised this is Israel’s “final solution”. Gaza was turned from a concentration camp into an extermination camp.

Evidence to the sick society were the countless social media posts of gleeful IDF soldiers, as they slaughter, burn, blow up, steal, and then ridicule, laugh, and joke. This disgrace, side by side with the self-righteous sanctimonious moral bullshit I grew up on, in my native tongue, repeated mindlessly by family members, past friends, then in English in Western media, offering moral cover.

I was sick to my stomach and deeply ashamed. The question “where are you from” became more dreaded than ever. But while I was shocked by the genocide, I was not surprised: I understood that this was the natural conclusion of the racist ethnic cleansing project called Israel.

As years went on I came to learn more about the colonial roots of the evil I knew from Palestine. I read about tactics the British had used in their colonies, so strikingly similar. In fact, it was the British Major-General Orde Wingate who taught the British tactics to the Jewish militias in the 1930s. Moshe Sharet, a general in 1948, said, “He [Wingate] taught us everything we know”. Martial law, the taking over of homes, administrative detentions, torture, land confiscations.

Our world today is still guided by the core beliefs and values learned and internalised over centuries of European white supremacy, with their so-called higher sense of morals giving them the right to dominate lesser races, to plunder the world and enslave its indigenous populations.

These racist sentiments did not vanish with the breakdowns of the old empires. They permeate, brew and simmer under the surface all the time.

Winston Churchill once said: “I do not admit … for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.”

‘Outpost of civilisation’
Echoing this was Theodor Herzl, the father of the Jewish Zionism, who said in 1896 that the Jewish state would be “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.

Just this month [May] the Minister of Regional Development, Shane Jones, said that New Zealand’s new trade agreement with India would lead to a “butter chicken tsunami coming to NZ”.

Indoctrinated for generations; we hardly question the West’s morals, of who is virtuous and who is a savage. Who gets to control and subjugate, who has to submit, who is allowed to defend himself, who is denied the right to resist.

This sickness, these notions, are what allowed the genocide in Gaza to unfold. And it is this beast, this inhumane system built for the exploitation for profit for the few and the so-called reasoning of supremacy that justifies it, that we need to eradicate in order to create true social equality, to free all of us, and free Palestine.

I still have hope when I see the brave flotillas sailing to Gaza.

I still have hope when masses of people go out to the street all around the world.

I still have hope when dock workers refuse to load weapons destined for Gaza.

I still have hope thanks to all of you here today. Let’s carry on in spirit of Sumud.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

Republished with permission.

Germany learnt to its huge cost and embarrassment last week that supporting Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East leads only to opprobrium from the international community.

A country which had been a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for decades lost in its bid for re-election to Portugal and Austria.

It is a great setback for Germany which aspires one day to be a permanent member.

• READ MORE: Did Germany lose its UNSC seat because of support for Israel?
• Germany’s UN defeat: What went wrong?
• Why Germany wants a seat at the UN Security Council
• Other Palestine at UN reports

Germany may not want to admit it, but the defeat was in every way tied to its unstinting support for Israeli genocidal operations and policies in Gaza.

If America is Israel’s staunchest supporter, then Germany comes second.

A “universal morality” has enveloped the world. It is a morality that does not condone genocide or the stealing of other peoples’ lands, as Israel has done for decades.

It is a morality which demands the creation of a Palestinian State so that the Palestinians are not refugees in their homeland.

Lesson to Israel supporters
Let Germany’s defeat be a lesson to all those nations who support Israel. Don’t be foolish and stand on the wrong side of history.

Germany built its postwar identity on Never Again. It atoned. It paid reparations. It taught its children the truth. For that, it deserves credit.

But atonement is not a blank cheque.

The Holocaust was more than 80 years ago. The sins of fathers cannot be visited upon their children forever — and acknowledging past wrongs cannot become the excuse for ignoring present ones.

That isn’t moral courage. That is moral cowardice in a noble disguise.

Gaza is burning. Lebanon was devastated. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has spoken. And Germany looks away.

Did support for Israel cost Germany a UN Security Council seat?   Video: DW News

Routine rotating seat
For decades, Germany secured its rotating seat on the UN Security Council as a matter of routine.

Last Thursday, for the first time ever, it lost — humiliated at the UN General Assembly by nations that saw through the pretence.

France, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Canada and Australia have found their backbone and recognised Palestinian statehood. Germany could not.

Never again was supposed to mean never again — for anyone.

• In addition to the five permanent members — the US, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom — there are 10 non-permanent members who rotate every two years. Since 1987, Germany, one of the world’s most economically powerful countries, had been elected to the body every eight years. That streak is now over.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal

Walking into Palestine is not just a journey across geography, it is a confrontation with memory, identity, and everything you were told, and everything you discover for yourself.

The first thing that stays with you is the wall. It does not feel like a distant structure you read about in reports; it rises suddenly into your view, stretching across the landscape like a scar that refuses to fade. Concrete slabs stacked high, covered in layers of paint, messages, names, grief, humour, and resistance. It divides not only land, but daily life.

On one side, movement feels controlled, measured, observed. On the other, life continues stubbornly, beautifully, and painfully.

The borders are not just lines on a map. They are checkpoints, gates, pauses in time. You wait. You are asked. You move forward or you don’t. People pass through them with a kind of practised patience that comes only from living a life where waiting is normal. And yet, even there, you see dignity in the eyes, in the silence, in the quiet determination to continue.

But Palestine is not defined by its restrictions.

It is defined by its people.

People who greet you as if you have always belonged there. People who carry history in their voices without needing to announce it. People who laugh in ways that refuse to be diminished. There is warmth that does not depend on comfort — it exists even in hardship.

You hear stories in taxis, in shops, at doorways, in fields. Stories of loss, yes, but also of endurance, education, love, and return.

And then there are the trees.

Olive trees are older than nations. Their trunks twisted like they have been holding secrets for centuries. Some stand alone on rocky hillsides, others form quiet groves that feel almost sacred. They do not move quickly. They do not need to. They belong in a way that cannot be negotiated. Each tree feels like a witness.

The rocks are everywhere grey, pale, sharp, ancient. They shape the hills, the terraces, the pathways. They feel like the bones of the land itself, exposed and unhidden. And between them, the soil dry in some places, fertile in others holds both struggle and promise.

And the sand… especially when the wind carries it. It softens everything. It moves across roads, settles on stone, touches skin without asking permission. It reminds you that land is never still. It remembers everything that passes over it.

To visit Palestine is to realise that it is not a place that can be reduced to headlines or borders or walls. It is a living presence, layered, wounded, resilient, and deeply human. It stays with you long after you leave, not as a memory you can place neatly in the past, but as something that continues to speak inside you.

Maher Nazzal is an activist, advocate and digital creator for a Free Palestine. He is a spokesperson for Palestine Forum of New Zealand and former co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published on Nazzal’s Facebook page and is republished with permission.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran — one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression — was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv?

Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades, might Israel’s real fear be that a stronger Iran would undermine its unique leverage over Washington, threatening its status as the region’s sole — and unmonitored — nuclear power?

Might large parts of the globe be facing economic meltdown simply so that Israel can remain the Middle East’s top dog — an unaccountable apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinian people and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon?

• READ MORE: US bombs Iran’s Qeshm, Goruk; Kuwait reports ‘hostile’ missile attacks
• Other Jonathan Cook articles

We got a definitive answer last week, care of The New York Times. It is an uncompromising yes to all of these questions.

The newspaper reported that Netanyahu not only mis-sold Trump on the idea of quick regime change in Iran following a short “shock and awe” bombing campaign. He also identified to the White House who was going to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.

Extraordinarily, according to The Times, Netanyahu named the man for the job as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The aim at the start of the air campaign was for Israel to kill Khamenei, then liberate Ahmadinejad from house arrest by striking the guards who were confining him.

Presumably, Ahmadinejad was then supposed to storm the citadel and seize the keys to the palace. But only Khamenei’s assassination went according to plan.

Ahmadinejad, who had reportedly been consulted on the scheme beforehand, is believed to have been injured in the Israeli strike near his home. He got cold feet, possibly suspecting he was being set up for assassination too, and went into hiding. His current whereabouts and medical condition are unknown.

Ultimate bogeyman
Neither US nor Israeli officials would comment to The Times on the alleged regime-change plot, a scheme that the newspaper called “audacious”. That is the understatement of all understatements.

The idea that Ahmadinejad had the popular support, let alone the religious authority and military muscle behind him, to take on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s crack military force responsible for protecting the clerical regime, is for the birds.

That anyone in the White House took this plan seriously, let alone acted on it, is a genuinely staggering notion. But the proposition that Ahmadinejad could retake the reins of power in Iran is possibly the least preposterous part of the scheme.

Fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei

While younger readers may not recognise Ahmadinejad’s name, everyone else should. He made headlines on an almost weekly basis during much of his eight-year presidency, starting in 2005. Why? Because Israel turned him into the ultimate bogeyman.

After neighbouring Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was toppled and executed in 2006, following an illegal invasion by the US and Britain, Ahmadinejad was hyped as the new implacable threat to regional peace.

Claims about Ahmadinejad first breathed an illusory substance into Israel’s now-unchallenged script that a supposedly fanatical, deranged Iran would leave no stone unturned in seeking to destroy Israel. Ahmadinejad, we were told time and again, was seeking to pursue a nuclear bomb — even after Khamenei had issued a religious edict in 2003 strictly banning its development.

In 2006, Ehud Olmert, then the Israeli prime minister, warned the world that Ahmadinejad was a “psychopath of the worst kind”, adding: “He speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation.”

Olmert was echoing a panic-inducing campaign led by Netanyahu, then Israel’s opposition leader, that Iran needed to be attacked immediately to save Israel and the world.

“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” Netanyahu told a meeting of American Jewish leaders that same year. “And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.”

Of Ahmadinejad, he said: “Believe him and stop him… He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.”

Under Ahmadinejad, Iran was supposedly hellbent on destroying Israel, turning it into a giant Auschwitz. Also in 2006, Netanyahu told Israeli Army Radio: “Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran’s tour of destruction.”

Ahmadinejad was so unhinged, Netanyahu said, that he would not stop at Israel’s eradication: “Iran is developing ballistic missiles that would reach America, and now they prepare missiles with an adequate range to cover the whole of Europe.”

‘Genocidal intent’
A short time later, Israel’s fear-mongering operation reached a crescendo in London.

Netanyahu told members of the British Parliament that Ahmadinejad had to be urgently brought before the International Criminal Court — the war crimes court in The Hague — for his “messianic apocalyptic view of the world”.

Irony of ironies, Netanyahu — who 20 years later is a fugitive from that same court, accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza — emphasised Ahmadinejad’s supposed genocidal intent towards Israel.

“In the 1930s, too, no one believed that Hitler was capable of taking action because he didn’t explicitly talk about wiping out the Jewish people,” Netanyahu told British MPs. “In contrast, the Iranian president publicly announces his intentions and no one is trying to stop him.”

Michael Gove, a former Conservative cabinet minister who chaired the meeting, enthusiastically agreed, ignoring a confounding fact: that thousands of Jews have lived peacefully in Iran for centuries.

Gove told the meeting that Ahmadinejad’s “rhetoric is more than worrying, but tantamount to an incitement of genocide”.

Gove’s concern about genocide has not subsequently extended to Gaza. He has repeatedly denounced anyone, including legal experts and Holocaust scholars, who has noted Israel’s genocide there.

In the midst of the mass slaughter in Gaza, Gove even called for the Israeli military to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Smoke and mirrors
Two decades ago, the message from Netanyahu was clear: Ahmadinejad was so rabidly antisemitic that he deserved to be compared to Hitler.

Ahmadinejad was so eager to pursue a nuclear weapons programme that he was prepared to defy the country’s supreme religious leader. He was so mentally unstable that he was ready to use those weapons to exterminate Israel, even though such a move would ensure a retaliatory nuclear counter-strike on his own country.

Lest we forget, Ahmadinejad had a reputation for such ruthless crackdowns on political opponents that Amnesty International noted in 2014 that his rule had “sounded the death knell for academic freedom in Iran”.

Yet, fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei, Iran’s most influential opponent of nuclear weapons.

The New York Times reports that in recent years, there were strong suspicions inside Iran that Israel, Britain and the US were cultivating ties with Ahmadinejad and those around him — suspicions that now seem to be confirmed by Israel’s apparent regime-change plan.

The newspaper further reports that Ahmadinejad had recently travelled to both Guatemala and Hungary, countries with very close ties to Israel.

Does any of this make sense? And yet for Western media, the fact that Netanyahu was championing Ahmadinejad as Iran’s saviour, and that the US administration wholeheartedly bought into this idea, is little more than “surprising”.

In truth, it wrecks Israel’s entire narrative about Iran. It is a telling reminder of the yawning gap between what we have been told about Iran for decades, and what has actually been going on.

Image and reality bear almost no resemblance to each other. This has all been smoke and mirrors.

‘Wiped off the map’
In my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, I pointed out that nothing Israel was telling us about its Middle Eastern rival could be accepted at face value — least of all Israel’s assertion that Ahmadinejad was a Jew-hating “new Hitler”.

Many of the claims promoted 20 years ago by Israel about Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intent stemmed from a mistranslation of a speech in which the Iranian leader had quoted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

According to Western politicians and media, Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” — widely portrayed as an ambition to launch a nuclear strike on Israel.

The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly – just as it should be now

In fact, Ahmadinejad had been repeating Khomeini’s observation that Israel could not survive indefinitely in the form of an illegitimate Jewish supremacist state oppressing another people. He was pointing out that Israel’s days as a racist state were numbered, just as apartheid South Africa’s had been.

The sentiment behind Khomeini’s statement should be much clearer in the present circumstances, when it is Israel, not Iran, that has been busy wiping people off the map — in Gaza and southern Lebanon.

Similarly, Israel and its Western allies made a great deal of noise in 2006 when Ahmadinejad called what was widely misrepresented as a “Holocaust denial” conference in Tehran. In fact, Ahmadinejad had organised what was intended to be a provocative — and to some, offensive — stunt to challenge Western taboos about Israel and underscore the West’s hypocrisy towards Muslims.

Ahmadinejad’s point was twofold: firstly, if Muslims are not entitled to have their beliefs and sensitivities respected by Westerners — as evidenced by the 2005 “Danish cartoon affair” and the “free speech” defence for presenting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad — why should Westerners expect their own sensitivities about Israel and the Holocaust to be exempt from challenge?

He also wanted to dissect the Western belief that someone else, the Palestinian people, should pay a heavy price, including decades of dispossession and abuse, for the West’s crimes against Europe’s Jews.

Horror show
The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly — just as it should be now, two decades later, were Western journalists doing their job rather than acting as stenographers for Israel and the White House.

The lies, now as then, serve the same end: to justify crushing Iran — then through sanctions, later through the addition of illegal bombing — so that Israel’s right to trample over the lives of people across the region without consequence can be protected.

Iran, now refusing to release its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and the global supply of oil, is demanding that the price include an end to US backing for the Israeli-directed horror show in the Middle East.

Like a spoiled toddler, Trump is thrashing around — while cashing in on the volatility of the oil markets — trying to impose the old rules, when the terms of the confrontation are no longer under his exclusive control.

His latest tantrum — one cooked up in Tel Aviv as much as Washington — is that most Arab states, including Iran’s neighbours in the Gulf, be forced to sign the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel. This is being presented as the framework for a regional “peace deal” involving Iran.

In truth, it is the very opposite.

The accords are designed to cement Israel’s status as the Middle East’s top dog, subordinating Arab states’ interests to Israel’s, and thereby isolating Iran in the region and leaving the Palestinian people and Lebanon to a genocidal Israel’s mercy.

This is another swindle, like Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which dresses up US and Israeli criminal aggression and genocide as “peacemaking”.

What the past 20 years of lies and misdirections have sought to hide is a simple fact: it is not Tehran that is led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington.

Since the pair launched their criminal war of aggression against Iran three months ago, Tehran has shown restraint, acted with caution, and displayed a willingness to negotiate in good faith. Too bad there are no responsible adults on the other side with whom it can make a deal.

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

There was only one moment when I was interviewing him last week that Mousa Taher broke down and cried. It was a surprising, pivotal moment in the interview.

He had just made it back to Aotearoa New Zealand from Israeli detention. Of course, we covered the ordeal — the beatings, the death threats, the scare tactics with dogs, etc — that he and 430 other Global Sumud activists from 60 countries had been subjected to over four days from their interception in international waters to their release and flight to safety in Tűrkiye.

Near the end of the interview I asked him, “What do you think is going through the minds of our leaders — Christopher Luxon [Prime Minister] and Winston Peters [Foreign Minister] — that they choose to align themselves, not with you and the Palestinians, but with the Israeli regime that is committing genocide?”

• READ MORE: ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

For a moment his head went down and then he said: “Honestly, it’s a bit of a touchy subject for me, Eugene.” And then he cried.

“On my way back I almost mourned the death of my country. I’m a proud Kiwi. My grandfather George Whale, fought for New Zealand in the Second World War. From my Pakeha (non-indigenous Māori) side, you learn about the nuclear-free New Zealand movement, you learn about the anti-Apartheid Springbok Tour protests, you learn about the attack and sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, you learn about New Zealand being the first country to give women the vote.

“You think your country is special, and has a sense of justice, a sense of doing what’s right, and standing up to the giants even if that’s going to cost us.  I just don’t know where that place is anymore.

Mousa’s comment about mourning for our country brought to mind Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton’s 1948 novel about Apartheid South Africa — a country that was fractured along racial and political lines, one where the ruling group had sunk into a moral abyss, resolutely cleaving to an abhorrent vision of the world.  New Zealand, like most Western countries, stood with white South Africa through long decades. We mobilised and eventually changed that.

Endless wars of aggression
New Zealand’s close alignment with both Israel and the US in their endless wars of aggression may sit badly with many New Zealanders but, to date, the pushback has been insufficiently powerful, the mobilisation of citizens too small to effect a fundamental change in the country’s foreign policy settings.

This November’s general election, coming just four days after the US mid-terms, will be instructive and crucial.

Mousa Taher had two gruelling encounters with the Israeli occupation forces in the past month. It speaks to his commitment, his sense of sumud (steadfastness) that he signed up for a second sailing with the flotilla in May.

This was just weeks after being captured by the Israelis in international waters off Crete. That time he got off relatively lightly compared to the severe beating dished out to some of his comrades, including New Zealander Julien Blondel.

The Turkish government laid on flights from Crete for a couple of hundred activists, taking them to Istanbul. New Zealand offered zero support.

“At that point I was kind of done. ‘I’ve done my dash here.  I miss my family, and I think I’m ready to go home’.” But then his friend Bianca, a Kiwi-Australian said she would stay and join the next flotilla attempting to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza.

“Wow, she’s a soldier, mate.  I just completely changed my mind. I thought: ‘If there’s a chance to go and to finish this mission, I’m in’.”

Hugged the Turkish coast
Mousa, a “backyard” mechanic, spent May working on boats, training and getting everything ready to sail again. Sailing from Marmaris, Tűrkiye, they initially hugged the Turkish coast and were treated to wonderful experiences including a village turning out en masse and preparing a feast for the Sumud activists.

Not long after passing Cyprus, still over 400km from Israeli waters, the flotilla was intercepted and a four-day ordeal began. It was quickly clear the Israelis tactics were hardening, perhaps out of a sense of impunity after governments like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK turned a blind eye and deaf ears to the mistreatment of their own citizens last time.

Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos, weapons trained on the humanitarian activists, took control of Kasr-i Sadabad, the vessel Mousa was sailing on. He and another activist, also of Palestinian descent, were made to strip to their underpants in front of everyone. “It was kind of weird.”

The crew was then transferred to a prison ship which sailed for Ashdod, Israel.  Without cause, they were tasered.

“They knew me by name this time. They blindfolded all of us, zip-tied all of us. They zip tied my legs, not anybody else’s — and my hands very tightly. ‘Don’t you ever fucking come back here, Mousa.  It’s your second time. We’ve seen the messages you sent to your kids.

“‘You’re saying you’re scared for your life — that means you want to kill yourself, you’re going to suicide bomb. You’re a terrorist!’ They’d stand on my hands, stand on my face, kick me in the face.”

“They were complete sadists. They were enjoying it, mate. When he put his boot on my face, I couldn’t quite see because of the blindfold, but I could feel he was posing. They were laughing and having this conversation, like it wasn’t a serious thing that they were doing.”

More tasers, kicks, punches
After they got to Ashdod, it got worse. More tasers, more kicks, punches, stripping and humiliating, menacing with dogs, stress positions, the craft of sadism.  Later he learnt of the sexual violence the Israelis committed on many comrades, male and female.

All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of states committing sexual violence in conflict zones.  I have written about the deliberate sexual depravity that is now standard in the Israeli gulag, home to thousands of Palestinian hostages abandoned by our governments.  Some Zionist Israelis openly admit that rape is an Israeli weapon of war.

France, Italy, Türkiye, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Libya, and several other countries have condemned the violence. Malaysia has announced it is preparing to take a case to the International Court of Justice over the kidnapping and torture of Sumud activists.

Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin has sent a letter to the European Council using the treatment of the Sumud flotilla to demand the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

New Zealand’s PM, as usual, is missing in action.

I spent a long time talking with Mousa Taher.  Like all the many Sumud people I have dealt with, he is the soul of decency and humanity.  And courage.  I won’t recount his full story but Mousa Taher has been through the fires of hell — the Israeli prison system.

His torment was relatively brief — four days — compared to the endless agony of thousands of Palestinian souls caught in the torment that Israel inflicts and which New Zealand, Australia and all the other state sponsors of genocide facilitate every day.

Last word to Alan Paton
I’ll give the last word to Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country. I address it to all the people who have not stepped forward and joined the struggle for Palestine, who have not stepped forward to reshape our foreign policy and move New Zealand towards peace and independence, who have not raised their voices to reject hostile military alliances and America’s endless wars of aggression.

Without necessarily taking the same risks, we all need to be more like Mousa Taher, Hāhona Ormsby, Julien Blondel, Jay O’Connor, Rana Hamida, Samuel Leason, Sean Janssen, and all the wonderful activists of the Global Sumud organisation like my friend Eloiza Montana.

Alan Paton: “To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one’s responsibility as a human being.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

I interviewed several of the New Zealanders who, as members of the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, were taken hostage by the Israelis in international waters near Cyprus last week and moved to Israel.

The sadism and savagery of their mistreatment — clearly designed to intimidate and stop further attempts to open a humanitarian corridor — gave them a small taste of the network of torture camps that hold thousands of Palestinians in captivity suggestive of Dante’s Inferno.

Their ordeal lasted only four days. Repeatedly kicked, punched, sexually humiliated and beaten unconscious, the cruellest blow was that their own government refused to stand up for them.

• READ MORE: Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

Of the 430 activists from 60 countries, there were several who were raped and many who will carry injuries for the rest of their lives.

This is Hāhona Ormsby’s story:
Itamar Ben-Gvir himself spat at Hāhona Ormsby. Many will recall the footage of the Israeli National Security Minister swaggering among the zip-tied Global Sumud activists last week, each of whom was forced face down before him.

Sadists like doing this sort of thing. It recalled the dreadful footage from last year of him intimidating the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

Hāhona was being moved through a huge tent. He passed a table where Ben-Gvir was drinking a can of Coke. The minister looked up and saw a man with a facial tattoo. Recognising an Indigenous person, he spat at him!  “It landed on my t-shirt,” Ormsby told me.

“As soon as he spat at me — and I don’t know if the soldier did it to impress Ben-Gvir — but the soldier with me punched me in the back of the head.”

Hāhona Ormsby is Ngāti Maniapoto, a member of a major tribal federation in New Zealand.  He is one of the nicest, most decent people you could possibly meet. His mataora (tattoo) is both sacred and traditional. Earlier that day it had already drawn unwelcome attention.

“He’s a Māori! He’s a Māori!” a female soldier shouted, pointing at Ormsby.  She may have recognised this if she was one of thousands of Israeli soldiers who holiday in New Zealand every year. Our government welcomes them, no questions asked.

Few Palestinian refugees are ever allowed entry.

Personal ‘minder’
As with each activist, Hāhona was provided a personal “minder” soon after he arrived in Ashdod, Israel.

“A soldier came and lifted me up by my zip ties. He pulled down his mask and said, ‘Look into my eyes. I am the craziest motherfucker here. I will hurt you every minute you are with me’.” And that is how the nightmare started.

Throughout the day the New Zealand citizen was intermittently punched, kicked, kneed in the groin, body slammed, stripped naked, and repeatedly hauled up by the plastic zip ties that bound his wrists together.

Several of the captives told me how incredibly tight and painful these zip ties were and how they feared long-term nerve damage.

“The whole time I looked at that soldier I was thinking, ‘I know you kill children, I know you kill women, I know you are that evil,”  Evil. That word has come up several times in my conversations with the activists who got this taste, this small intimate encounter with the genocide.

Hāhona thought of his good friend, fellow Kiwi Julien Blondel who was savagely beaten a couple of weeks earlier. “I felt his wairua (spirit), his brokenness and I now understood that brokenness. That sense of lostness.”

Forced head down for long periods in stress positions, receiving random kicks and body slams throughout the day, he was also menaced by close encounters with dogs. “If you do not stop lying to me, I’m going to lock you in that cell with these dogs!” he was told when an interrogator said he didn’t believe he was a teacher.

Hāhona thought of his whānau, his extended family. He remembered they had urged him to come home after he made it to Türkiye after an earlier interception, an earlier ordeal in April.

“But I thought: my comrades, they were going on and I had to stand with them.”

Beaten unconscious
At one point his “minder” beat him unconscious. The Kiwi citizen was kicked hard in the groin and that night had blood in his urine. “The whole night I thought about the Palestinians and what they are going through. If the Israelis do this to a New Zealander imagine what the Palestinians are going through.”

To me, listening to this, I recognised true courage, true humanity, the kind we seldom encounter and should always revere.

Listening to Hāhona Ormsby I recalled my Catholic upbringing and the words of John 15: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Ormsby and all those other activists joined the flotilla not out of hatred for Israel but out of love for suffering humanity, for their brothers and sisters in Palestine. They represent the very best of us.

Another man who professes to be a Christian is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Christopher Luxon. For me, his variant bends towards Hell and Israel; our government being a stalwart ally of the Israelis.  The Israeli Ambassador is being called in by the ministry of foreign affairs for what, Ormsby says, is likely “a slap with a wet bus ticket” over the state terrorist attack on New Zealand citizens.

Our government offered no material support to the Sumud activists after the recent ordeals our citizens were subjected to. They issued no warnings to the Israelis to respect our citizens, providing the IDF with a free pass to abuse New Zealanders in captivity.

And, my god, they did. The first duty of a leader is to protect citizens. All this comes in a week that saw Israel added to the United Nations blacklist of nations committing sexual violence in conflict zones.

I won’t repeat all the grim details of what Hāhona went through. Let us just say it was a huge relief when, four days after his capture aboard the Al Tira (named, as all the Sumud boats were, after a Palestinian village that had been erased by the Israeli occupation), Hāhona was transferred to the airport where they boarded planes provided by the Turkish government.

Turkish delight!
Ormsby had his first food in four days on that plane — Turkish delight! On the tarmac at Istanbul they were welcomed by top Turkish politicians and Foreign Ministry staff, a crowd of supporters, media and a fleet of buses and ambulances to shuttle those who needed it to hospital, others to medical checks, forensic interviews to record their testimony, psychological evaluations and eventually a banquet and accommodation provided by the government.

It is worth noting that no officials welcomed them when they returned to New Zealand. No media was there to interview them. It reminded me of the similarly shameful way New Zealanders who fought Franco’s Fascists in Spain in the 1930s were treated on their return, prior to the Second World War.

It’s our collective job to make sure this extraordinary story is shared and remembered — and that we draw the necessary lessons from it.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

The humiliating defeat of Israel and the United States in their war on Iran, along with the savagery of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are ushering in a new world order.

This order is one where voices of reason and stability emanate not from the West — which spent tens of billions of dollars sustaining Israel’s genocide — but from the Global South, including China.

It is an order where alliances are being rapidly reconfigured to protect countries from a rogue American state that lashes out like a wounded beast, as it spirals toward terminal decline.

• READ MORE: Tehran, Trump yet to comment on plan for 60-day US, Iran truce extension
• Gaza’s Board of Peace ‘a fiction’ run by the Trump administration
• Other Gaza, Iran reports

The end of the US Empire, led by an impetuous and clueless President Donald Trump, is irreversible. The US has lost its sixth war in the Middle East in 25 years. Iran’s power has been enhanced not only because it — along with Oman — controls the Strait of Hormuz — where roughly 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and 20 percent of the world’s seaborne liquified natural gas pass through — but because it has delivered a stark message, with its drones and missiles, to US allies and bases in the region, while sending the global economy into a tailspin.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who reportedly lured Trump into the war with Alice-in-Wonderland visions of easy regime change in Iran following the decapitation strikes against the country on February 28, 2026, which included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other political and military figures, along with 168 school children and their teachers — may strike Iran again.

They are desperate. But a renewed bombing of Iran will not work. Iran’s mosaic defence strategy ensures all political and military commanders are easily replaced.

Iran can strangle the world economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It can accelerate the pain by getting its Yemeni allies — Ansar Allah — to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, just as they did to Israel-bound ships when defending Palestinians after October 7.

A complete blockade
This could result in a complete blockade. Saudi Arabia, with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait open, is able to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and export five million barrels a day through its pipeline to tankers in the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

If a ceasefire between the US and Iran is not reached soon, the global economy will crash, perhaps within weeks. The US and its allies, such as Japan, have released some of their extensive strategic oil reserves, however they will not be able to cushion markets indefinitely.

Stockpiles in America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve are near their lowest in more than 40 years. Once these reserves are depleted, the price of fuel will skyrocket. If a barrel of oil shoots up to $200, the price at the pump could climb as high as $10 per gallon. This, coupled with shortages of other petroleum-based products, along with nitrogen fertiliser, aluminum, and helium — an indispensable element in the production of MRI machines and semiconductors — are already shutting down vital industries and driving up prices on basic commodities.

The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilisers alone — which are produced in the Persian Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz — if the war continues. This will mean a steep rise in the price of food.

Trump is like a dog being pushed unwillingly into a crate. When it appears a deal with Iran is close, he snarls and barks, sabotaging the proposed 30-to-60-day ceasefire agreement.

Netanyahu’s apoplectic fits about any agreement that would halt Israeli attacks against Lebanon, along with the potential release of some of Iran’s estimated $100 billion in frozen assets, spurs Trump’s momentary defiance.

Clock is ticking
But the clock is ticking. There is little time left. And the longer Trump waits, the worse it will get. Neither Trump, nor Netanyahu, are the masters of this game. Iran holds the cards.

Israel’s dream of formalising its hegemony over the Middle East, codified in the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term — which normalised relations between Israel and regional states — is dead. This war and the genocide in Gaza killed it.

Trump is attempting to revive them by inserting them into a deal to end the war on Iran. He has demanded states previously uninvolved with the Abraham Accords, such as Pakistan and eventually, Iran, sign up to normalise relations with Israel.

Pakistan — the only state to publicly respond — rejected the invitation due to what it called a clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies”. Every other state Trump appealed to reacted with bewildered silence.

Iran demands the removal of sanctions and an end to the naval blockade — which the Central Intelligence Agency concluded Iran can endure for months before it experiences severe economic hardship — in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The proposed agreement makes no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which US military and intelligence officials believe remains at 70 percent pre-war levels, according to The New York Times.

Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar — a lead negotiator with Hamas — are the new powerbrokers in the region.

Pakistan not only signed a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia in 2025, it deployed troops, jets and air defence systems to the Gulf dictatorship in April. It has also been hosting ceasefire talks between Trump’s Dumb and Dumber duo of lead negotiators — his feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner, Steve Witkoff.

Prestige, power of China
The war has enhanced the prestige and power of China, which compared to Washington is seen globally as embodying rational, prudent and stable leadership. Iran, in a sign of the new global order, permits Chinese and Pakistani tankers, along with other ships not allied with Israel and the US, to travel through the Strait.

Israel, unable to convince the US to do its dirty work of bombing Iran into a failed state, will, I expect, strike out with renewed fury against Gaza, perhaps occupying the remaining 30 percent of what is left of the besieged territory.

It will continue its Gaza-like policy of turning every structure south of Lebanon’s Litani River into rubble, which it bombs daily despite Iran stating that attacks on Lebanon violate the current ceasefire agreement.

Trump’s savagery and bluster — he threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” after reports of Oman jointly charging tolls with Iran for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz — cannot mask the impotence of the US. The refusal by America’s allies to heed Trump’s call to help him reopen the Strait, along with the economic misery visited on nations struggling to cope with shortages and the rising costs of energy and fertiliser supplies, are stark evidence of Washington’s pariah status.

Empires, blinded by the myth of their own omnipotence and military superiority, blunder at the final stages into conflicts with little understanding of where they are headed. They alienate their allies. They stumble from one military fiasco to the next, as the US has done for over two decades in the Middle East.

The British Empire in 1956, already in precipitous decline, was humiliated when it conspired with France and Israel to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised. The US forced all three countries to halt the invasion. Britain’s pound sterling gave way to the petrodollar. It signaled the last chapter of the British Empire.

The war on Iran is Washington’s Suez Crisis.

This may not be the end of the American Empire, but it is the beginning of the end.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused the Israeli army and internal security agency Shin Bet of repeatedly perpetrating inhumane acts against Palestinian journalists from Gaza.

The Paris-based global media freedom monitoring and advocacy movement says it has interviewed five Gazan journalists who were imprisoned in Israel after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.

They described targeted arrests, interrogations related to their work, torture and brutal abuse at the hands of their Israeli captors.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza journalists media freedom reports

The journalists include Alaa al-Sarraj, a cameraman for the Ain Media production company; Diaa al-Kahlout, local bureau chief of the Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed; Shady Abu Sedo, a cameraman with the Palestine Today television channel; and Emad al-Ifranji, the local editor of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds.

The fifth journalist requested anonymity for fear of Israeli army reprisals.

They were all initially imprisoned at Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel, about 30 km from the Gaza Strip, which has been denounced by Israeli and international human rights organisations as a torture camp.

“The facts reported here are damning for the Israeli authorities, including the Israeli army, Shin Bet and judiciary,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk

“They arrested these journalists knowing their profession and, in some cases, because of it.

“The work of these journalists was used as grounds for interrogation amounting to torture, during arbitrary detention legalised by judges. These repeated acts speak to a systematic persecution of journalists in Palestine aimed at preventing media coverage of human rights violations by the Israeli state.

“RSF continues to demand the immediate release of all Palestinian journalists arbitrarily detained by Israel.”

RSF reports:

The time when Palestine Today cameraman Shady Abu Sedo was reporting now seems like a distant memory. In fact, he was last reporting as recently as 18 March 2024. He had gone to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to interview victims of the Israeli bombings, launched five months earlier in retaliation for the attacks by Hamas’s armed wing on 7 October 2023.

Arrested by soldiers after identifying himself as a journalist, he was held for 572 days, initially at the Sde Teiman military base, located 30 kms from the Gaza Strip in the Negev desert, and then in Ofer and Ketziot-Al Naqab prisons.

At the end of these 19 months of torture, deprivation, interrogations and violence, some of it related to his profession, he remains, at 36, scarred by psychological trauma and physical aftereffects that prevent him from returning to work.

“Since you left your camera at Al-Shifa Hospital, I’m going to gouge your eye out,” one of his captors told him, referring to the location of his arrest, before beating him repeatedly in the face.

His right eye has not regained its sight. The scabies he contracted in prison continues to plague him, and he now suffers from epilepsy, insomnia and anorexia.

“After the scenes I have witnessed, I can no longer stay at home within four walls, nor look at the sky without having a fit. If I don’t take sedatives, I suddenly start screaming,” he says.

He was released on 11 October 2025.

None of the five journalists interviewed by RSF was able to resume working as a journalist after their release. When not the result of serious physical and psychological injuries inflicted during their detention, Israeli army destruction has been to blame.

After his release, Shady Abu Sedo did not find his home, which had been hit by Israeli aircraft.

“I lost my house, my car, and all my reporting equipment worth more than $50,000 [about 43,000 euros],” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was detained for 692 days, from 16 November 2023 to 11 October 2025.

“But I could start again from scratch,” said the 35-year-old employee of the Ain Media production company, whose entire archive of reports was destroyed. Two of its journalists were killed by the Israel army, while another is imprisoned and two have been missing since 7 October 2023.

Waving his press card
Like Shady Abu Sedo, the four other media professionals interviewed by RSF said they explicitly told the Israeli army that they were journalists — whose work must be protected in war zones under international law — at the time of their arrest in the Gaza Strip.

Alaa al-Sarraj was arrested on 16 November 2023 at the Netzarim checkpoint, which the Israeli army set up on Salah al-Din Road to screen the population in the centre of the besieged territory.

“I was interrogated there, I confirmed that I was a journalist, and it was on that basis that I was arrested,” he said.

The following month, Diaa al-Kahlout, then director of the Gaza bureau of the Qatar-based international daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (“The New Arab in English”), even brandished his press card while repeatedly stating his profession to the Israeli soldiers who arrested him on 7 December 2023, in Beit Lahya, in the northern Gaza Strip.

“It doesn’t matter,” one of them reportedly told him, before he found himself among a group of several hundred captive men, stripped naked and bound, as evidenced by a video filmed by an Israeli soldier.

Throughout his arrest and subsequent transfer, the journalist, then aged 37, was beaten and interrogated by the soldiers escorting him, as well as by an officer who claimed to belong to Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.

They questioned him about his articles, his alleged ties to Hamas members, and the owner of his media outlet.

When he tried to explain, a soldier gagged him with tape.

“I lost all hope,” he recalls, at that moment, the last before being “thrown into a truck” and forcibly taken into Israeli territory.

“I know you, you’re a journalist”
Now aged 57, Emad al-Ifranji, the Gaza director of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, had no need to introduce himself. He was immediately identified by the Israeli soldier who arrested him on the night of 18 March 2024 at Al-Shifa Hospital, where he had gone to get electricity and an internet connection for work.

“I know you, you’re a veteran journalist,” the soldier reportedly told him.

“I replied that it was true,” Emad al-Ifranji said. “He dragged me roughly out of the outpatient clinic building, and that’s when the ordeal began.”

From Sde Teiman to Ofer, Ketziot and Nafah
This descent into Israeli prison hell began inside the barracks at Sde Teiman.

“From there, you lose your name and become just a number,” said Emad al-Ifranji, who, like Shady Abu Sedo, was held for 572 days.

At the mercy of their captors, the journalists reported having been subjected to violence, humiliation and deprivation. Their accounts share a common thread: terror at the random beatings they endured while constantly blindfolded.

The resulting fractures were systematically left untreated, leading to painful and often irreversible complications. The limited food and sleep they were allowed barely kept them alive to endure the blows and insults of gleeful soldiers. Some witnessed fellow prisoners being murdered and one raped by a dog.

After Sde Teiman, four of the journalists interviewed were taken to Ofer prison, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where a military unit has been established for prisoners from Gaza, and to Ketziot-Al Naqab prison, near the Egyptian Sinai, preceded, in Alaa al-Sarraj’s case, by Nafha prison in the southern Negev.

Violations and ill-treatment of prisoners continued to be the norm there. Only Diaa al-Kahlout was released after 33 days of violence and cruel and inhumane treatment endured on the Israeli military base.

Aman and Shin Bet interrogations
Those who emerged from Sde Teiman speak of a machinery designed to “subjugate men,” said one of the five surviving journalists.

The brutal interrogations, which are a crucial part of the torture machine, subject journalists to special treatment. For example, Shady Abu Sedo, before being handed over to the officer who injured his right eye, was tied for hours to the “fridge,” a cell measuring two metres by one metre equipped with air conditioning that “bites you to the bone.”

He said he was then interrogated specifically about his work by an officer with the military intelligence agency Aman: Had he filmed in the northern Gaza Strip? Was he there reporting on 7 October 2023? Did he know any journalists who had covered the attacks by Hamas fighters?

“I killed all the journalists, and those I couldn’t kill, I brought them here,” Shady Abu Sedo quotes his interrogator as saying. He was then imprisoned for several days in the “disco,” a building in Sde Teiman designed to wear prisoners down by means of powerful speakers that continuously blast music.

Another journalist interviewed by RSF was also subjected to this torture.

While almost all the detainees at Sde Teiman underwent such interrogations, particularly regarding the fate of Israeli hostages, reporters were subjected to “technical questions focused on journalistic work in the Gaza Strip,” said Alaa al-Sarraj, who was questioned about his academic background and professional network, including doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, politicians, political organisations and his colleagues in Gaza.

“They also asked me what you might call strategic questions,” he said.

Emad al-Ifranji and Diaa al-Kahlout, who held positions of responsibility within their media outlets, were subjected to no fewer than four extremely violent interrogations at the hands of Aman and the Shin Bet, a sign of the special attention paid to journalists in an attempt to obtain information deemed tactical by the Israeli authorities in the context of the conflict.

In March 2024, during the first weeks of his imprisonment in Sde Teiman, Emad al-Ifranji was questioned twice, in separate interrogations about 10 days apart, about his interview 13 years before with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, who was wanted by the Israeli army, which regarded him as the organiser of the 7 October 2023 attacks.  Sinwar was killed for this on 16 October 2024.

Regarded by Israel’s justice system as ‘unlawful combatants’
Judges at the Beersheva court have given a veneer of legality to the prolonged detention of civilians identified by Israeli intelligence as journalists.

In a series of expedited hearings conducted via videoconference or telephone, and without legal representation, the Southern District Court of Israel — which has jurisdiction under a 2002 law on “illegal combatants,” revised after 7 October 2023 and applicable to the thousands of detainees in Gaza — has repeatedly approved their continued indefinite detention.

“The assumption is that if a detainee meets the definition of a journalist, this fact is brought to the court’s attention; however, we do not hold specific information to that effect,” Israel’s justice ministry said.

As in the case of its use against journalists, this law, based on a term that is “undefined and is therefore open to abuse and inconsistent with the principle of legality,” according to a 2007 UN report, makes it possible to “to justify arresting all these thousands of detainees from Gaza and keeping them based on secret information for indefinite periods,” said a lawyer specialising in the Israeli prison system for Palestinians.

Four soldiers had laser sights trained on Emad al-Ifranji’s face during his initial court hearing, although the Justice Ministry later claimed to have “no knowledge” of this.

The hearing lasted less than five minutes, but he managed to remind the court that he was “protected under international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Addressing a judge in Beersheba via webcam, Shady Abu Sedo asked, “How can I be an illegal fighter? I’m a journalist.”

The judge’s response was categorical: “You belong to the Palestinian terrorist press.”

A few days before their release, these journalists were summoned by Israeli military intelligence, which routinely subjects detainees to a final act of intimidation. Some of them report having been explicitly warned against resuming their work.

Contacted by RSF regarding the accounts of their imprisonment provided by these five journalists, the Israeli army claimed that it “does not intentionally harm journalists” and that, despite the mounting evidence, it “rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including journalists.”

Shin Bet did not respond to RSF’s questions.

According to RSF data, 19 Palestinian journalists are currently detained arbitrarily by the Israeli authorities. Two of them, like the sources cited in this article, were captured in the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023.

They are Hani Issa, editor-in-chief of Quds Net, and Amjad Arafat, a reporter for the Ain Media production company.

Ali Samoudi, a leading Palestinian journalist and veteran reporter based in Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank, was released on 30 April 2026, after a year of wrongful imprisonment.

On the day of his release, he reported that he lost nearly 60 kilos while held, blaming the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of Israeli authorities.

• Israel is ranked 116th and Palestine 156th out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

In my view, the greatest source of instability in the Middle East today is the increasingly aggressive and expansionary posture of Israel, backed unconditionally by America.

Continuous wars, occupations, strikes across sovereign states, and the unresolved Palestinian tragedy have pushed the region toward perpetual conflict.

Why do you think that Israel does not want Lebanon to be part of any peace settlement in the Iran war? Because, having swallowed Palestine, it now wants a fractured Lebanon which it can also absorb as part of Greater Israel in due course.

• READ MORE: US-built ‘torture ship’ and US funding played role in kidnapping, torture of Gaza flotilla crews
• Other Gaza and Iran reports

This pernicious desire to devour much of the Middle East is a very real threat, and not some fanciful theory as many Israeli apologists have claimed.

It is no different to Hitler’s idea of Lebensraum (living space) — which describes a central goal of Nazi ideology: expanding German territory, especially eastward into Eastern Europe, to provide land, resources, and food for what the Nazis considered the “Master race”.

Hitler argued in his satanic Mein Kampf that Germany needed more territory to become a great power. Expansion should happen mainly in Eastern Europe. Slavic peoples were racially inferior.

Under this worldview, countries such as Poland, Ukraine and parts of the Soviet Union were seen not as sovereign societies but as territories to be conquered and colonised by Germans.

Operation Barbarossa
Lebensraum was the reason why Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union.

Do you see the similarity between Hitler’s rhetoric and what the war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his bunch of racist and right-wing lunatics such as Itamar Ben-Givr and Bezalel Smotrich advocate?

They see the Palestinians and the Arabs as inferior, and they are on an urgent quest to reclaim the lands which the Jews claim that God promised them in the Bible. Land which only the “chosen people” have a right to, they say.

They are aided in this fanatical quest by disgraceful American politicians such as Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. These are corrupt politicians who are deeply in the pockets of the Israeli lobby and Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who built Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Miriam Adelson gave $200 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign and forced Marco Rubio upon Trump as the Secretary of State. These people swear allegiance to Israel and not America.

I am being entirely fair in my comment because Ted Cruz said his first loyalty was to Israel. Imagine this coming from a US senator and former Presidential candidate. If anyone should be tried for treason, it is him.

And Mike Huckabee, who is now American ambassador to Israel, told Tucker Carlson, it was no bad thing if Israel occupied all the land between the Euphrates and the Nile. So he is fine with Israel conquering Arab lands.

Realistic regional counterbalance
The only realistic regional counterbalance may be a strategic understanding between Turkey and Iran — two ancient civilisational states with the scale, military strength, and geopolitical weight to prevent total regional domination by the genocidal Israeli state.

It is encouraging that countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar have resisted the intense Trump pressure to simply fall into line behind the Abraham Accords without meaningful progress on the Palestinian question.

In my view, there can be no genuine or lasting peace in the Middle East until a viable Palestinian state comes into existence, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Any recognition of Israel by Iran and the Arab world (minus the two Israeli stooges — UAE and Bahrain) must be tied to justice, sovereignty, and a durable political settlement for the Palestinian people.

Many have pooh-poohed the idea of the two-state solution, saying the Americans and Israelis would never allow it.

Well, guess what? The situation has changed and these two warmongers have been soundly defeated by Iran.

The regional equation has changed. America has lost its regional dominance in the Middle East. Support for Israel among the American public has collapsed.

The two-state solution is now not just a possibility, it can become the probability.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon

Sheina Gutnick, whose father Reuben Morrison was killed in the Bondi Massacre, was the first witness at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. She shared her “lived experience” of antisemitism, including fears for her children’s future.

Gutnick is the public affairs officer for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) in Australia, a role she took on in April.

In her statement in evidence at the Royal Commission, she describes CAM as undertaking “civic education, grassroots activism and policy advocacy to combat antisemitism”. She told the commission that her job includes monitoring hundreds of antisemitic comments, including on CAM’s websites.

• READ MORE: Other Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion reports

Counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Zelie Heger SC, assured Gutnick that her recommendations and those of CAM would be taken seriously.

At the time she gave evidence, Gutnick and her CAM team had been campaigning with The Daily Telegraph (DT) for weeks to pressure City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore to cancel a council venue booking by Stop the War on Palestine (SWOP) for a discussion about a proposed ban on the slogan “Globalise the Intifada”.

CAM demanded Lord Mayor Moore cancel the group’s council booking. They falsely accused the group of being Hamas supporters who wanted to kill Jews, and linked them to the Bondi massacre.

Despite the pressure, Moore initially held firm in favour of the right to peaceful assembly and protest.

However, on the eve of her appearance at the Royal Commission, Gutnick and other victims of the Bondi terrorist attack published an open letter in the DT,

which increased the pressure on Moore.

They called the SWOP event a “hate-fest” that would encourage violence and “undermine the core Australian values of fairness, community and mateship”.

Early the following evening, Lord Mayor Moore caved and instructed council to cancel the booking. She explained her position in a media release that positioned antisemitism alongside Islamophobia and racism and stressed her support for protest and inclusivity.

She linked her backdown to her concern that holding the event in the early stages of the Royal Commission could contribute to “hostility and fear”. Moore blamed the media for its “discourse of division that has heightened tensions more than any small community event could”.

SWOP moved their meeting to an inner-city park.

CAM grassroots activists were also busy organising a rally with far-right activists in Inner Sydney to be held on May 5.

Combat Antisemitism Movement
CAM is a global movement based in the United States that claims to have 3.5 million supporters. It has close links with the Israeli state. Its CEO, Sascha Roytmann is based in Tel Aviv and was previously head of the New Media Desk at the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit of the IDF.

CAM’s Advisory Board chair is former Deputy PM of Israel, Natan Sharansky, who considers branding Israel as an apartheid state to be a “modern form of antisemitism rhetoric”.

The International Court of Justice and major international and Israeli human rights organisations have found that

Israel is an apartheid state.

Australia is just one of 60 countries where CAM uses tactics including social media, lobbying politicians and convening conferences to relentlessly pursue its goal of entrenching the IHRA definition of antisemitism into policy at all levels of government, including outlawing BDS campaigns.

CAM’s outreach officer is Trump supporter EJ Kemball, who is a far-right Christian and has substantial experience lobbying for Israel. He sees his mission as building CAM’s support among Christian Zionists. A security and intelligence expert, he was previously the director of US operations for the Israel Allies Foundation.

CAM Australia reflects this US pattern by forming a pro-Israel rightwing coalition with the Christian group Never Again is Now (NAIN). It aims to

discredit and dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement and promote a culture based on ‘Judeo-Christian’ values.

CAM and NAIN have worked together since 2024. Last year, NAIN partnered with CAM in its first national conference for Australian mayors in a luxury hotel on the Gold Coast.

Another conference is planned in Sydney for November. Their latest joint activity was a rally held the day after Gutnick gave her evidence. The context for the rally was Premier Chris Minns’ plan to ban the slogan “Globalise the Intifada”.

‘Judeo-Christian’ Sydney rally
Following Clover Moore’s backdown, CAM and Never Again were jubilant about their “win” but still had Moore in their sights. They moved their rally to City of Sydney land at Sydney Park. MWM was present at the gathering, attended by about 50 people and about 20 police. Regular early evening runners were surprised to find illuminated screens and a small crowd draped in Israeli and Australian flags in a shadowy corner of Sydney Park.

The key message was a nationalistic call to defend so-called “Judeo-Christian” values. Pro-Palestinian protesters, including Moore herself, were labelled as terrorism supporters. Speakers included militant pro-Israel activists and One Nation, anti-immigration and Islamophobic crusaders.

The MC was “Colesy”, a Pauline Hanson fan who is vehemently anti-immigration.

“Intifada comes for all of our families, our sons, and our daughters. Police, media, politicians, you can stop it tonight. Call it what it is. We’ve seen it in Bondi. We don’t need to see any more. It’s time to cancel it. Remove it. Get rid of the cancer, and let us live in peace,” he demanded.

“Trombone Tone”, an evangelical Christian and One Nation campaigner, set the tone with “Waltzing Matilda”. He blamed the Bondi massacre on importing a “bunch of Islamists … and now we’ve got this,” he said, pointing to a photoshopped image of protesters at the Opera House.

CAM was represented by Ofir Birenbaum, who first came to MWM’s notice as an organiser for astroturfing groups Better Council and Better Australia. He recently settled a case against the Cairo Takeaway cafe in Enmore, Sydney.

Birenbaum recounted his own youth in Israel, blaming violence and restrictions on Palestinian movements on the Intifada.

According to Birenbaum, the cancellation of the SWOP meeting was a win but only a start: “That’s what happened when we stopped asking for permission and started demanding accountability. And this is what happens when you finally stand up to bullies, because that’s what they are, nothing less.”

He then attacked Clover Moore, absurdly suggesting she had “taken the side” of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by joining the 2025 March on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Ali B and Michael Gensher
Never Again Is Now promoted Ali Beikzadeh (Ali B), an anti-Islam Royalist Iranian who continued the attack on Moore for “standing right next to a bloody portrait of Khamenei on the Harbour Bridge and having the audacity to suggest I’m proud of myself for attending the Harbour Bridge march.”

This was another lie, as Moore did not stand next to a portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In fact, a photo was taken of a single placard of the Iranian Supreme Leader positioned behind Moore and other community leaders.

Ali B also threatened activists: “You know who you are …. if you continue with your ways, we will continue exposing you all one by one, and let me be absolutely clear about this. None of you deserves to be living in Australia, on Australian soil if you continue to entertain this nonsense …  Let’s cut the shit. Now, anybody who entertains this notion

they are directly to blame for what happened in Bondi.”

Another speaker was Michael Gensher, who is a director of the Australian branch of Stand with Us, which builds connections with Israel and fights antisemitism. Last year, he organised visits to Australian universities by Israel Defense Force (IDF) reservists who served during the war in Gaza, featuring “immersive experiences” to build “social cohesion”.

CAM and NAIN and their right-wing collaborators @aus4civilisation attracted thousands of likes across their social media platforms.

CAM CEO Sacha Roytman, who was monitoring the event in Tel Aviv, reported that the billboards were moved overnight to the Park where SWOP held its rally. His post falsely suggested that SWOP was calling for “murdering Jews in Australia.”

CAM has called on the City of Sydney to adopt the IHRA definition and review its hiring policies to prohibit any similar meetings in the future.

Meanwhile, it announced that, after conducting roundtables with politicians and community leaders, it has prepared a comprehensive submission to the Royal Commission supporting tough measures to quash activity perceived as antisemitic.

Its submission commits CAM to continuing to work with “interfaith partners and community leaders across Australia to advance genuine social cohesion”.

If the CAM rally at Sydney Park is anything to go by, social cohesion is not where it’s heading.

As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable.

This role goes beyond the US State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information; it includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured.

It also includes the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.

• READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla urges probe of US complicity in members’ abduction and torture by Israel
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture

The US-funded ‘torture ship’
The vessel at the centre of many severe abuses, including systematic torture and sexual assault, was a converted naval landing craft that participants have come to call the “torture ship”.

The vessel is the INS Nahshon, built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding (a subsidiary of Bollinger Shipyards) and fully financed under the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.

Delivered to the occupation navy in 2023, this ship was used as a floating prison during the illegal April 29 and 30 interceptions off the coast of Crete, where at least 30 participants were injured severely enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.

Brutality inside ‘The beating container’
During the vessel’s deployment, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container.

Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalised each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” said humanitarian activist Yassine Benjelloun, who was also tasered multiple times.

“What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Megan Marie Dominguez, a US activist, was thrown into the “beating container”, struck with sufficient force to render her nearly unconscious, then passed to a second set of soldiers armed with tasers and what she describes as “other toys to beat people up with.”

Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on board, described a medical situation unprecedented in her professional experience.

She documented:

• 35 participants with fractures, including broken ribs, shoulder dislocations, and humerus fractures.
• Severe head injuries, concussions, and eye/ear trauma.
• At least two individuals forcibly injected with unidentified substances that left them drowsy and disoriented.
• 14 cases of sexual assault, as well as the systematic, deliberate removal of Muslim women’s hijabs.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” said Dr Jihan. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and the most horrible feeling that I have.

“It was so devastating.”

Dr Jihan: ‘I was punched, kicked and choked” by the Israeli military Video: News Straits Times

American munitions used against civilians
The weapons deployed on board were also American-made. Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI).

These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.

A structural policy of complicity — the weapons.
The ship. The diplomatic silence. None of this was accidental. Former US State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest over US arms transfers to Israel, is unequivocal:

“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorised by law.

“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.

“When this sale was authorised, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform. The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 [in which 10 Turkish people were killed by Israeli forces], but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse — whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

This is not an isolated incident or the failure of a single administration; it is a structural, bipartisan commitment by the United States government to prioritise its strategic relations above the protection of its own citizens and its own laws.

By using a separately constructed, “broken” vetting process, the State Department routinely circumvents the 1997 Leahy Law, which strictly prohibits US military assistance to foreign units credibly accused of gross human rights violations like torture and rape.

While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away.

Demands to the United States government
The israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons.

The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access.

The Global Sumud Flotilla calls on the United States government to take immediate action:

• Open immediate hearings into the deployment of FMF-funded military assets, including INS Nahshon, against US citizens.
• Suspend all arms transfers to the israeli regime pending that investigation.
• Enforce the Leahy Law without exemption or special processes for the regime.
• Provide a full accounting of every consular and distress request filed by families of detained participants that was dismissed or ignored.
• Investigate the use of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) munitions, produced under Department of Defense (DOD) contracts, against unarmed civilian humanitarians.
• End unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.

For more than two decades, Iran’s nuclear programme has been subject to intense international scrutiny, sanctions and diplomatic negotiations.

By contrast, while Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, an assertion it has consistently refused to deny or confirm, it faces little to almost no international pressure for transparency.

Over the past 10 months, Israel and the United States have waged two wars on Iran, arguing without evidence that the country was on the verge of having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon.

• READ MORE: US drone shot down as tensions surge during peace talks
• Netanyahu: Wanted on an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes since 2024
• Other US war/ceasefire on Iran reports

These wars — the 12-day conflict in June last year and the recent month of fighting this year — have killed more than 3375 Iranians and plunged the world into an unprecedented energy crisis.

This imbalance has prompted complaints by Iran of double standards, as well as by proponents of nuclear non-proliferation worldwide.

The difference between the treatment of Iran and Israel is not only evident in international law frameworks such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but also reflected in geopolitics and global power dynamics, observers say.

So, what do we know about Israel’s nuclear arsenal, the scrutiny and debate around Iran’s nuclear programme, and why critics argue a double standard is at play when it comes to the threat posed by these two longtime foes?

What do we know about Israel’s nuclear weapons?
It is an “open secret” that Israel is the only country in the Middle East which possesses nuclear weapons, despite it maintaining a decades-long opacity about the issue, observers say.

When pressed on whether his country possessed nuclear capability or nuclear weapons during a 2018 exchange with former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We have always said that we won’t be the first to introduce it, and we haven’t introduced it … It’s as good an answer as you will get.”

Despite Israel’s lack of transparency about its nuclear programme, experts say the origins of it date back to the 1950s under founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, when Israel began developing nuclear capabilities with foreign assistance, notably from France.

The Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert has long been suspected of producing plutonium for weapons. According to experts, Israel possesses an estimated 80 to 200 nuclear warheads, though exact figures remain unknown.

In 1986, Israel’s policy of secrecy was dealt a serious blow when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, disclosed information and photographs from the reactor to the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times newspaper.

He was later abducted by Israeli agents, tried in secret and spent 18 years in prison.

Adding to the fog over its nuclear capabilities is Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT, which came into force in 1970, meaning it is not subject to the same international inspections as member states.

The NPT is a global agreement designed to curb the spread of nuclear weapons, commit to nuclear disarmament, and encourage the peaceful use of nuclear energy. A total of 191 United Nations member states are signatories to the treaty, including Israel’s longtime adversary, Iran.

Israel’s policy serves multiple purposes, according to analyst Shawn Rostker.

“The logic is fairly straightforward: Ambiguity is meant to preserve deterrence while avoiding some of the diplomatic, legal and political costs that would come with an open declaration, especially given that Israel is not a party to the NPT and continues to sit outside that framework,” Rostker, an Astra fellow with the Constellation Institute, told Al Jazeera.

The analyst said Israel was unlikely to join the NPT in the near future.

“Israel’s position has been tied for decades to its regional security environment, and there is little sign that it sees strategic benefit in giving up ambiguity or joining the NPT,” Rostker said.

“A real shift would probably require a much broader regional security arrangement, potentially tied to a Middle East WMD-free zone or a major change in the threat environment, not outside pressure alone,” he added.

What do we know about Iran’s nuclear programme?
Iran’s nuclear programme began in the 1950s under former leader Reza Shah Pahlavi, with US support, but expanded significantly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Iran, which remains a signatory to the NPT, has consistently maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, such as energy production and medical use.

In 1974, it signed a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and in the decades since then, both under the former shah and under the Islamic Republic, it has been regularly monitored by the UN agency.

Iran also joined the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 along with the US and other nations, under which Iran agreed to restrict the enrichment of uranium and to be subject to inspections by the IAEA.

Key provisions of that agreement included:

• Capping uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent for 15 years, levels unsuitable for nuclear weapons
• Reducing centrifuge numbers
• Allowing extensive monitoring by international inspectors, such as the IAEA, including 25 years of monitoring of Iran’s uranium mills and mines

Also under the JCPOA, inspectors from the IAEA — who had already been in Iran monitoring its nuclear programme — began daily inspections of the country’s facilities to ensure that Tehran stuck by its commitments.

It did, they found.

The US, under President Donald Trump, withdrew from the agreement in 2018, despite the IAEA saying Iran had complied with the agreement up to that point.

Iran nevertheless continued to adhere to its JCPOA commitments for one year after the US exited the deal, according to the IAEA, before restarting heightened levels of enrichment.

Indeed, the US argument for why Iran represents a nuclear weapons threat — that it holds 400kg of 60 percent enriched uranium — is based on an IAEA report from 2025, underscoring how the UN agency has far greater visibility into Iran’s nuclear programme than the world has into Israel’s.

Uranium needs to be enriched to levels higher than 90 percent for it to become weapons-grade. The removal of this 60 percent-enriched uranium has been one of the US’s key demands during talks with Iran.

While the US and Israel have targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities during the 12-day war in 2025 and the most recent strikes this year and claim to have destroyed a large part of them, this map shows what we know of the positions of Iran’s nuclear facilities up to this year:

What proof is there that Iran has the capacity to build nuclear weapons?
While Israel and the US have claimed for some time that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons, they have not offered any meaningful proof.

In fact, in March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, then US director of national intelligence (she has since resigned), testified to Congress that the US “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.

Iran has long maintained that it has no plans to build a nuclear weapon. In 2003, then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli attacks on Tehran on February 28, publicly announced prohibiting the pursuit of such a weapon, saying it was against Islamic law.

After the US and Israel launched their latest war on Iran on February 28, Gabbard, in a new testimony before Congress, said the US intelligence community did not believe that Iran had resumed its nuclear programme after the bombings of June 2025.

Are different standards being applied to Israel and Iran over nuclear weapons?
Palestinian analyst Ahmed Najar is one of many experts who say there is “clearly a double standard” in how Israel’s nuclear programme is treated compared with Iran’s, arguing that politics rather than international norms is what drives this.

In his view, Israel has been granted an exemption from the global non-proliferation regime because of its role as a Western-aligned power in the Middle East, while Iran’s status as a perceived “foe” invites maximum pressure.

“In that sense, international norms are applied selectively — rigorously enforced in some cases, and quietly set aside in others.”

Beyond the political double standard, Najar argues that Israel’s longstanding policy of “nuclear ambiguity” raises deeper concerns about transparency amid the “opacity of Israel’s nuclear doctrine itself”.

“There is ambiguity not only around capability, but around thresholds for use — and that exists without the accountability mechanisms applied elsewhere,” he added.

Najar said he is pessimistic about the prospects of any change to this approach, without a “broader transformation” of international politics and power dynamics.

“As long as strategic interests take precedence over consistent application of international law, Israel’s nuclear posture is likely to remain largely shielded from scrutiny,” he said.

Usaid Siddiqui is a reporter with the Al Jazeera Live News team, writing news and features with a focus on foreign policy issues across several regions including South Asia, the Middle East and the United States. He has a Masters in International Relations from the University of Sussex. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

The empire’s war on activism and journalism continues to escalate as the Trump administration targets leftwing streamer Hasan Piker and antiwar activist Medea Benjamin for the “crime” of bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba.

This is yet another act of aggression in the same onslaught that has seen inconvenient truth-telling and expressions of moral clarity attacked and undermined throughout the Western world at every juncture in recent years.

It is not separate from the persecution of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

It is not separate from the steadily increasing escalations of internet censorship we’ve seen in the wake of Gaza, Ukraine, covid, January 6, the 2016 US presidential election, and any other excuse the imperial narrative managers could find.

Taking medical supplies to pediatric hospitals in Cuba is now a crime? Saving the lives of babies is a crime? This administration is beyond grotesque. https://t.co/xsvQGEYzb8

— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) May 24, 2026

It is not separate from the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizens for criticising the state of Israel.

It is not separate from the efforts to stomp out pro-Palestine protests and university campus demonstrations.

It is not separate from the arrests of activists in the UK on terrorism charges for saying the words “I support Palestine Action”.

It is not separate from activists facing criminal charges for saying “From the river to the sea” in parts of Australia and Germany.

It is not separate from imperial efforts to crack down on BDS activism and outlaw boycotts of Israeli products.

It is not separate from Israel’s ban on foreign press from entering Gaza, nor is it separate from Israel’s systematic extermination of Palestinian journalists within Gaza.

It is not separate from the artificially manufactured hysteria about “antisemitism” in Western society and the efforts of Western governments to silence criticism of Israel in the name of protecting Jews.

It is not separate from Israel’s massive increase in its hasbara budget this year and the armies of paid trolls we’ve seen swarming online discourse.

It is not separate from the nonstop barrage of imperial propaganda we see every day from the plutocratic press justifying every war and slandering every dissident.

It is not separate from the way imperial oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison buy up news outlets like The Washington Post and CBS and social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter in order to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts, and votes.

It is not separate from the way tech platforms have been manipulating algorithms to hide dissident sources of information from the public and using bogus “fact checking” firms to suppress unauthorised facts.

It is not separate from government secrecy measures which forbid the public from knowing what their rulers are doing, and which aggressively punish anyone who tries to reveal inconvenient facts.

the american govt would rather try to criminalize delivering aid to a country we’ve starved, than punish the epstein class. https://t.co/h19HPsOc9m

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) May 24, 2026

The empire is waging a relentless war on intellectual clarity and on moral clarity, because truth and morality are its enemies.

They do not want us to have unobstructed vision, lucid minds, functioning empathy centers and well-formed consciences, because if we did, we would instantly dismantle the empire brick by brick.

This is why they go after anyone who tries to expand the consciousness of Western society using activism and journalism. In an empire built on lies and fuelled by human blood, telling the truth is seen as treason and doing the right thing is seen as insurrection.

The only sane response to such a dystopian situation is to join in the revolution. Help spread unauthorised ideas and information. Take action to spread awareness of the abusive nature of the empire. They’re trying to keep it all in the dark, so we need to bring it all into the light.

They wouldn’t be fighting so hard to suppress truth and compassion if it didn’t present an immediate existential threat to their power structure.

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

ANALYSIS: By Professor Stuart Rees

If bullies notice that no one intervenes to stop their behaviour, they may interpret such non-intervention as permission to continue bullying.

For years, the same process has operated in relation to the thuggery of Israel’s Netanyahu government, and in that respect, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s abuse of detainees from the Gaza international aid flotilla was no surprise.

Suddenly, even the Australian government — and New Zealand — condemned the abuse meted out to hundreds of humanitarian activists, but that condemnation was too little too late.

• READ MORE: Uncertainty persists as Trump says Iran deal not ‘fully negotiated’
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

The first measure concerns politicians’ and journalists’ reluctance to question Israeli spokespersons’ claims that they and their army operate according to the highest moral standards.

The second concerns the failure to hold Israel accountable to the rules of international law.

This culture of non-accountability, coupled with acceptance of Israel’s false claims, reappeared when 430 sailors from 40 different countries were taken into Israel’s detention, forced to kneel with their hands zip-tied behind their backs while the Israeli national anthem played and Ben-Gvir taunted them.

On ABC television’s 7:30 Report, the Israeli Ambassador to Australia repeated that Israeli forces had boarded the flotilla with “great sensitivity”. He assured listeners there would be no ill-treatment of the detainees.

Litany of Israeli lies
His claims followed a litany of lies.

In the Gaza slaughter, Israeli military spokespersons insisted they would not harm civilians, Palestinians were allegedly not short of food, and the bombing of hospitals, schools and so-called safe houses was justified by claims that these were all sites of Hamas operations.

The adjective ‘Hamas’ is used to stigmatise anyone who opposes Israeli actions.

Ben-Gvir and others labelled participants in the humanitarian aid flotilla “Hamas terrorist supporters”. This all-purpose label apparently explains terrorism, but even regarding a slaughter of innocents in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon, few politicians have asked, “whose terrorism are you referring to?”

Government-sanctioned brutality
Israeli officials claimed that no flotilla detainees were harmed, but a video showed detainees being abused in Israeli captivity, and returning Australian detainees reported experiences of violence and sexual abuse.

The Israeli legal rights centre Adalah reported “systemic violations of due process and widespread physical and psychological abuse by Israeli authorities”.

The same organisation said, “at least three people [from the flotilla] required hospitalisation due to injuries such as rib fractures and breathing difficulties”, each incident raising questions about the Israeli Australian Ambassador’s assertion that Israeli forces showed “great sensitivity”.

It is predictable that governments would be reluctant to ask whether Israel’s attacks on the international aid flotilla could be justified in international law.

In relation to other Israeli killing sprees, governments have treated international law as of no consequence.

The 1948 Genocide Convention identified genocide as a crime and obliged signatory governments to prevent such actions and to punish perpetrators. These obligations have been ignored. Neither has action been taken to obey the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 ruling that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal and should end immediately.

Israel insists that theirs is a lawful blockade of Gaza, but Western governments, having never used their navies to escort small boat flotillas to the shores of Gaza, have colluded with this claim.

Under what circumstances can a country that illegally occupies another’s waters be entitled to enforce a blockade?

The United Nations has described the Israeli blockade of Gaza as a “direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law”. Don Rothwell, professor of international law at the Australian National University (ANU), concludes “there has been no legal basis for Israel to enforce a blockade off the coast of Cyprus (within 200 miles of Gaza), yet under international law an exception to a blockade exists for the provision of humanitarian aid to a civilian population”.

Western facilitators
Ben-Gvir’s bullying had been practised for years, but who cared if it was exercised at the expense of Palestinians?

Now, however, international human rights activists have been abused. In response, previously silent commentators have rediscovered their principles and expressed outrage.

The chances of that outrage leading to a revival of respect for international law appear to depend on governments admitting that

the Ben-Gvir abuse was a feature of overall Israeli state violence towards Palestinians,

a policy facilitated by Western democracies.

Ben-Gvir’s treatment of the flotilla detainees was the tip of an iceberg. The UN’s February 2026 Report concluded that the Israeli prison system had degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published its 2026 paper, “Welcome to Hell: the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps.”

Abuse of Palestinians, mostly in secret, had been reported but elicited nothing like the outrage expressed about the treatment of the flotilla crews.

The UN reported that as minister responsible for Israeli prisons, Ben-Gvir had institutionalised torture, collective punishment and dehumanising conditions. Abuse of detainees included rape with bottles, metal rods, and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.

Courage betrayed
In total contrast to that bestiality, 430 courageous individuals sailed to Gaza, motivated by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and by feeling betrayed by governments that had not intervened in the genocide in Palestine and stayed silent when Israeli forces boarded the flotilla.

Parents of those detainees have condemned governments for a failure to intervene.

But a failure to stop ethnic cleansing, stealing of lands and eventually a genocide had been underway for years, long before October 2023. Throughout those decades, the victims were a stigmatised “other”, so international humanitarian law could be ignored, and Israel and the US were given assurance that murder and mayhem in Palestine and Lebanon should continue.

Ben-Gvir noticed governments’ collusion with slaughter in Gaza and would have taken silence about the boarding of the flotilla as similar to Western collusion with death and destruction in Gaza, and with silence about the extent of cruelty in Israeli prisons.

Abuse of the gutsy flotilla crews has prompted outrage, but that protest has been far too little and far too late.

In 2015, the John Key government announced a cooperation agreement that would see NZ Aid pay for Cuban doctors to be taught English in New Zealand before their deployment to the Pacific Islands as part of the communist island’s Medical Brigades.

Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that has been under continuous US economic sanctions since 1962, has sent more than 400,000 healthcare professionals to 155 countries over the last six and a half decades.

Since 1960, when an earthquake devastated Valdivia in Chile, Cuban doctors have been on the frontlines of medical emergencies around the globe.

• READ MORE: Other Cuban reports

They were there for the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in South Africa for the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and Italy during the outbreak of covid.

In any given year the country has had more health professionals working in aid programmes abroad than the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK combined.

The National government and Cuba were unlikely bedfellows. The conservative party’s founding constitution in 1936 committed it to combating communism and socialism.

But the communist nation’s medical assistance programme has been a spectacular success when it comes to providing healthcare to those most in need, and the cooperation agreement was a concrete acknowledgement of that.

Soft power, hard currency
Cuba’s overseas doctors programme is both an exercise in what is sometimes called soft power and a source of desperately needed hard currency.

Economists are divided over whether the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege” but there’s no debate over the power it gives the US government to inflict economic devastation on its perceived enemies.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet published an article that found that economic sanctions — the majority being unilateral imposed by the US — had caused more than 560,000 deaths every year between 2010 – 2021.

In total, the study attributes 38 million deaths – half of them children – to sanctions since 1970.

No country on earth has been under US sanctions for longer than Cuba. A 1958 arms embargo was expanded to include all goods four years later.

The laws and regulations governing the embargo have been described as the “oldest and most comprehensive US economic sanctions against any country in the world.”

Cuba not only survived those sanctions, but its commitment to investing in healthcare at home saw it achieve lower infant mortality rates over a sustained period than the US, while matching it for life expectancy.

Massively impressive
To describe that as impressive is to massively understate the achievement. Life expectancy and low infant mortality normally correlate very closely with a country’s relative wealth.

The US’s GDP per capita has been about eight times that of Cuba for decades.

During the Cold War, trade with the communist bloc helped insulate Cuba from the full impacts of the embargo. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the island nation facing catastrophic shortages of oil, food and basic goods.

A deal struck between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, in 2000, to swap Venezuelan oil for Cuban medical professionals was critical to the island nation surviving the crippling US sanctions regime.

That ended with the US’s imposition of a maritime blockade of Venezuela following its “arrest” — kidnapping is a more accurate term — of its president, Nicolas Maduro, in January of this year.

The longest running US sanctions regime in history has become a near total siege resulting in a devastating health crisis.

The UN reports that more than 100,000 patients are awaiting surgeries due to power outages.

“Shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine and medical supplies are severely disrupting emergency care, blood banks, laboratories, immunisation programmes and maternal and child health services.”

Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours have forced hospitals to suspend non-emergency operations. There’s no fuel for ambulances or private cars, so people struggle to get to health services even in an emergency.

Infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1000 live births. At least half of those deaths are directly attributable to US sanctions.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Cuba a “severe national security threat” due to its military ties to China and Russia. (The US has around 800 military bases in 80 different countries. Neither China nor Russia has a base in Cuba although both are said to have spy facilities — presumably not unlike the ones the US has in New Zealand and Australia.)

And in an effort to illustrate the “heinous nature” of the Cuban government, the US last week issued an arrest warrant for its former Defence Minister, 94-year-old Raul Castro, for the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes off the coast of Cuba.

The planes were flown by the Brothers of the Rescue, a group that both rescued Cubans attempting to flee the island and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana.

The then President, Fidel Castro, declared the planes a threat to Cuba’s national security.

Many would take issue with that claim, but it is surely as credible as the US claim that the 57 boats it has sunk in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean since September last year, killing 194 people, were a threat to US national security.

The US accuses Cuba of human rights abuses, including those of medical brigade doctors who it says are victims of human trafficking and forced labour.

This would make Cuban doctors, surely, the only victims of forced labour anywhere to be given a free tertiary education before being trafficked to jobs paying significantly more than if they stayed at home.

(The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated that around 800,000 prisoners in the US produce more than $11 billion in goods while being paid just pennies an hour.)

None of the US’s explanations/accusations can be taken seriously. So, what else could be driving the ramping up of its decades old campaign to topple the Cuban government?

Noam Chomsky called it “the threat of the good example.” A poor country showing it’s possible to redistribute resources and defy Western dominance is simply unacceptable and must be crushed.

One showing that, for a fraction of the cost of what most Western countries spend on “defence,” it can be a superpower in the supply of medical assistance to the Global South is it seems doubly unacceptable.

And then there’s the threat to the bottom-line of US corporations.

ExxonMobil is currently before the courts seeking $1 billion in compensation for the nationalisation of its refineries in 1959.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a US company — Havana Docks Corporation — that claims its waterfront property had been seized by the Cuban government in 1960. It will likely open the floodgates to similar claims.

In 1971, the government commission that first certified that the Havana Dock Corporation’s property had been unlawfully confiscated did the same for 6000 other companies with “legitimate” claims to property worth a combined $1.9 billion ($9.3 billion in today’s term).

Every year for the last three decades, New Zealand and Australia have joined a large majority of UN General Assembly member states in voting for a non-binding resolution demanding an end to the US blockade. (Last year’s vote was opposed by the US, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine.)

But as that blockade is being tightened to the point of catastrophe, and with the US threating an armed invasion both governments have remained mute.

It’s shameful. Doubly so given that New Zealand’s last National government acknowledged Cuba’s contribution to the alleviation of suffering caused by poverty and scarcity with its cooperation agreement.

The people of Cuba are now suffering unprecedented poverty brought on by scarcity due to an entirely man-made disaster. We know who the culprits are, but not only do our governments remain silent, they continue to be slavishly committed to military cooperation and integration with one of the world’s leading enablers and purveyors of violence.

• Our governments may be silent but civil society isn’t. Here’s a link to an international petition and a NZ one. To keep up with what’s happening in Cuba and solidarity actions in Aotearoa follow the New Zealand Cuba Friendship Society on Facebook.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on his Substack Towards Democracy.

It’s a sign of Israel’s swaggering sense of impunity, and of the grotesque depravity at the heart of their notions of supremacy, that their soldiers and those in charge of them thought that they could get away with inflicting severe physical abuse on the 430 members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, from 45 countries, who were illegally intercepted at sea, in international waters, and then, over two days, were abused on Israeli ships located nearby.

They were then illegally brought to Israel to face further abuse under the watch of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the terrorist thug serving as the Minister of National Security, who caused global outrage when he posted a video of himself and his soldiers bullying and humiliating detained activists in his custody.

As Reuters reported in an article entitled, “Freed Gaza flotilla activists allege Israeli abuse including rape”, the flotilla’s organisers said that activists released from Israeli custody after being detained “were subjected to abuse, with several hospitalised with injuries, and at least 15 reporting sexual assaults, including rape.”

• READ MORE: ‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo’: The unsalvageable depravity of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians
• Flotilla activists tasered, sedated, sexually assaulted – Israeli prison service claims brutal abuse ‘justified’
• ‘It’s worse for Palestinians,’ says Australian flotilla activist about Israeli torture
• Shameen Suleman: Outrage over the flotilla activists but where were they for Palestinians?
• Israel’s $700m Hasbara fiasco – how Ben-Gvir’s flotilla abuse video stirred backlash
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

A spokesperson for the Israeli Prison Service stated, “The allegations raised are false and entirely without factual basis”, and Reuters noted that it “was not able to verify them independently”, but why would anyone believe the Israelis, when so many of those released were photographed with visible signs of abuse, including severe bruising, and what appear to be burn marks?

Because the Israelis lied about the evident signs of physical abuse, why is it plausible to suggest that claims of sexual assault, and even of rape, are somehow implausible?

Both have been reported widely in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, and have even been celebrated in the case of five soldiers caught on video raping a Palestinian prisoner in the notorious Sde Teiman prison, who later had to be treated for the most severe internal injuries.

Why, we have to ask, did those directing the soldiers think that they would get away with their actions, when it was obvious that, on their release, the detained activists would be able to publicly show the signs of the abuse to which they were subjected, and, very possibly, would be able to undergo medical examinations to verify the claims by some that they were subjected to sexual assault and rape?

As Reuters described it, “A German Foreign Ministry ⁠spokesperson said consular officials who met German activists on their arrival in Istanbul reported that a number had injuries and were undergoing medical checks”, and stated, “We naturally expect a full explanation, as some of the allegations that have been made are serious.”

Prosecutors investigate kidnapping, torture crimes
In Italy, meanwhile, prosecutors in Rome “are investigating ​the possible crimes of kidnapping, torture and sexual assault and will hear testimony from activists who have returned to Italy over the coming days”, according to an Italian ​legal source.

As Reuters explained, the organisers of the Global Sumud Flotilla “had documented at least 15 cases of sexual abuse, with the worst occurring on one Israeli landing ​craft which had been converted into a makeshift prison with barbed wire and shipping containers”.

There, according to the organisers, they “were thrown into the containers and beaten over the head and ribs.” They also reportedly “suffered multiple cases of sexual abuse, including ‘humiliating strip searches, sexual taunting, groping and pulling of genitals’”, and there were “multiple accounts of rape.”

“At least 12 sexual assaults have been documented on that vessel alone, including anal rape and forcible penetration by a handgun”, the group added.

Sabrina Charik, who helped organise the return of 37 French citizens from the flotilla, told Reuters that “five French participants had been hospitalised in Turkey, some with broken ribs or fractured vertebrae”, and that some of them “had made detailed accusations of sexual violence, ⁠including of rape.”

Reuters explained how Mi Hoa Lee, an activist from Spain, “​said she was forced into the darkened container on the ship, according to a video interview included with the flotilla’s statement.” She said, “Four men started beating me in the face against the wall, and I fell down and then stood up again, again ‌to the floor, ⁠stood up again, and they started tasering me for more than one minute.

In the video, she “point[ed] to her ribcage, hips and back where she said they applied the taser.”

“Then”, she added, “they kept beating me until I almost lost consciousness.”

Two ‘prison ships’
Ilaria Mancosu, an Italian activist, told Reuters that “the flotilla members were removed from their boats to two so-called prison ships”, and that “those put on one of the ships suffered more violence than the other.”

As she described it, “They were locked in a container and beaten by five soldiers, suffering fractures to the ribs and arms. Some had serious injuries to their eyes and ears caused by tasers.”

She added that “they spent two days on the prison ships with no ​running water and used cardboard and plastic to keep warm ​at night, since they had no blankets and ⁠were stripped of most of their clothes.

Once on land they were made to kneel for several hours and kicked and shoved if they moved or spoke. They were then taken to a prison where they were moved from room to room periodically to keep them from sleeping.”

According to Reuters, the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that he had been in touch with all his EU counterparts “so that there may be a quick ​decision to impose sanctions” on Itamar Ben-Gvir

But the problem with this is that, while Ben-Gvir was swaggeringly and demonstrably the face of this abuse, he is not a rogue element or a “bad apple” but an Israeli government minister who is openly showing the world not only how Israel treats Palestinians, but how, given a chance, it treats anyone, anywhere who opposes its genocidal supremacism in any way.

Andy Worthington is an UK investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. He is an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror”. This commentary was first published on his Facebook page.

Britain. France. Canada. Italy. Spain. Belgium. The Netherlands. Poland. Australia. New Zealand . . .  The European Union. The United Nations . . .

Suddenly they have found outrage because international activists aboard the flotilla were humiliated, abused and tortured by Israeli war criminals under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s prison system.

Ambassadors are being summoned. Statements are being released. Diplomats are demanding “clarifications”.

But where have these governments been while Palestinians endured this for years?

Palestinian journalist Sami Al-Sa’i described being raped by Israeli prison guards while blindfolded and handcuffed, left bleeding on the floor as guards laughed and discussed filming the assault.

As a reminder once again, this is the report prepared by Nicolas Kristof from The New York Times, in which I was one of the speakers talking about my own experience, having been raped by members of the Israeli Prison Service during my detention… https://t.co/TQiqu8GQI2

— سامي السّاعي (@SamiAssai) May 22, 2026

Other former detainees described rape with objects, attacks involving dogs, electrocution, starvation and repeated torture inside Israeli detention facilities. Human rights organisations, UN experts and former detainees have all warned that this abuse is systematic, organised and protected from accountability.

Where were these governments when Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was abducted, tortured, sexually abused and ultimately murdered in israeli custody, with his body still withheld from his family? Where are they while Dr Hussam Abu Safiya and Palestinian medical workers remain detained, abused and denied proper medical treatment?

And now the world acts shocked because foreign activists were finally subjected to a fraction of what Palestinians have endured for decades.

In 2010, israeli forces attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla trying to break the siege on Gaza, killing nine activists before a tenth later died from his injuries.

The world condemned it, statements were made, outrage came and went, yet Palestinians remained trapped under siege while Israeli war criminals continued receiving arms, protection and political cover from Western governments.

To the people aboard the flotilla who were tortured, humiliated and abused while trying to break the siege on Gaza and deliver aid to starving civilians: may you recover safely and may your courage wake people up.

The world saw what happened to you. Palestinians have been screaming about these crimes for years. Credit to @thiagoavila for continuing to expose what so many tried to ignore.

Warning: distressful content!

Those genocidal maniacs RAPED humanitarian activist trying to take food and medicine to children in Gaza! And the worst is that even this they escalate to much worse forms with the 9000 Palestinians in israeli dungeons (almost 400 children)! pic.twitter.com/a0yuMuilvQ

— Thiago Ávila (@thiagoavilabr) May 21, 2026

Summoning ambassadors is not enough. Condemnations are not enough. Expel them. Sanction them. Stop arming them. Stop protecting Israeli war criminals while criminalising activists who try to stop weapons reaching them.

While Western governments choose silence, the British state chooses to criminalise, arrest and persecute activists, journalists, doctors, teachers and humanitarians for standing with Palestine. @Majstar7, @swilkinsonbc, Junaid Mayet, @KarakDesi and thousands more whose only “crime” was refusing to stay silent while Palestinians were slaughtered, starved and abused in plain sight.

My activism is for people. I oppose dehumanisation, torture, rape, abuse and the killing of civilians, no matter who the victim is.

But Palestinians have been subjected to all of this in plain sight while the world chose silence.

Shameen Suleman is a journalist for MENA Uncensored.

A video posted by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in which he is seen taunting abducted flotilla activists who sought to break the siege on Gaza, has triggered a backlash and dealt a huge blow to Israel’s multimillion-dollar public relations campaign, known as “Hasbara”.

The footage, posted on the social media platform X, showed Ben-Gvir gloating as activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla — including three New Zealanders — knelt on the floor, blindfolded, with their hands bound at the Port of Ashdod.

Israeli naval forces had intercepted the flotilla’s vessels in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, illegally abducting 430 participants.

• READ MORE: Israel deports hundreds of Gaza aid flotilla activists amid global outcry
• Spanish MEP accuses EU of failure to act over Israeli ‘kidnapping, hijacking’ of Gaza flotilla activists
• Peters condemns Israeli minister over flotilla video as 3 Kiwis detained
• Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

Among them, at least 87 launched a hunger strike in solidarity with the more than 9500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The images of activists being dragged across the floor prompted several countries — including Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain — to summon Israeli ambassadors, condemning the “unacceptable” treatment and violation of human dignity.

The collapse of the ‘Hasbara’ illusion
Experts argue that the frantic damage control by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered the rapid deportation of the activists, stems not from moral outrage over the abuses, but from the catastrophic damage done to Israel’s global image.

“Netanyahu was dismayed not by Ben Gvir’s actions, but the fact he filmed and broadcasted them to appeal to his electorate ahead of the upcoming elections.

Netanyahu himself, like Ben Gvir, called the members of the Gaza flotilla terrorist supporters. The term terrorist has now… pic.twitter.com/ITdcIRZD2E

— State of Palestine (@Palestine_UN) May 21, 2026

For decades, Israel has relied on “Hasbara” — a Hebrew term translating to “explanation” — a propaganda campaign to justify its policies and military actions against Palestinians to the international community.

Fathi Nimer, a Palestine policy fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, told Al Jazeera that Hasbara is essentially state propaganda designed to “beautify the image of the occupation” by tailoring specific narratives to different global audiences.

“The fundamental assumption of Hasbara is that Israel is always right, but the world simply doesn’t understand,” Nimer said. He noted that due to Israel’s deepening isolation following its war on Gaza, the state’s Hasbara budget is projected to leap from roughly $15 million in 2023 to an unprecedented $700 million by 2026.

Yet, Ben-Gvir’s brazen video dismantled this heavily funded narrative in an instant.

Global outrage over Israeli minister’s treatment of abuse       Video: Al Jazeera

“The Israeli leadership is treating this as a public relations crisis, not a moral one,” Nimer explained. “For Netanyahu, the sin was not the torture or humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world.

“Ben-Gvir, however, does not care about Israel’s external image; he performs these abuses for his domestic right-wing base, confident that Israel will face no material consequences.”

Mtanes Shehadeh, an academic and expert on Israeli affairs, echoed this assessment. “The core problem for Israel is that this video transmitted its true reality to the entire world,” he told Al Jazeera.

“It provided the globe with live, irrefutable evidence that structural violence and a disregard for human rights are foundational to the current Israeli establishment.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir is not an anomaly in Israeli society. Hell, he’s not even an anomaly in the Israeli cabinet.

Here’s Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev, also bragging about torturing the activists who tried to bring aid to Gaza.

The entire barrel is rotten to the core. https://t.co/JYahRlhQ0x pic.twitter.com/naNAnvGhzt

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) May 21, 2026

US double standards and ‘pro-terror’ sanctions
The diplomatic fallout also laid bare the glaring contradictions in United States policy.

Following the video’s release, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee criticised Ben-Gvir, stating the minister had “betrayed the dignity of his nation”. However, critics were quick to point out that Huckabee’s condemnation rang hollow, as it focused entirely on the indignity of the broadcast rather than the human rights violations committed.

Furthermore, Huckabee’s remarks came just a day after the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on four organisers of the Global Sumud Flotilla, labelling the humanitarian mission a “pro-terror flotilla” in support of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

The US sanctions targeted activists from the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad and the Palestinian prisoners’ solidarity network, Samidoun.

Analysts highlight this as a stark double standard. While the US administration quickly moved to sanction humanitarian flotilla organisers, Palestinian civil society groups and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors, it has consistently shielded far-right Israeli ministers like Ben-Gvir from accountability, even lifting prior sanctions on violent Israeli settlers.

A microcosm of Palestinian suffering
For Palestinians, the humiliation endured by the European and international activists is merely a glimpse into a much darker, systemic reality.

Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, said the bound and blindfolded activists represented a “microcosm” of what Palestinian prisoners endured daily.

“This scene expresses the fascism of the entire Israeli government, not just Ben-Gvir,” Barghouti said. “If the government genuinely opposed these practices, they would have fired him immediately.

“Instead, their audacity has reached the point of pirating ships in international waters.”

Human rights groups estimate that nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, amid widespread reports of starvation, severe beatings and medical neglect.

Luisa Morgantini, former vice president of the European Parliament, said the standard diplomatic response of summoning ambassadors is woefully inadequate.

“It is a shame how our governments have behaved. They are complicit,” Morgantini said, calling on European nations to suspend their association agreements with Israel, halt arms sales, and actively back the ICC’s arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.

The ‘hammer’ and the flotillas
Despite the military interceptions and the US sanctions, activists and analysts agree that the flotilla campaigns, which began in 2009 in response to Israeli land, sea and air blockades, have succeeded in exposing the limits of Israeli force.

Nimer cited the American psychologist Abraham Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

“This is the only way the Israeli military knows how to act — through brute force and piracy,” Nimer said.

“The role of Hasbara was to rationalise this brutality for global consumption. But as the flotillas continue to challenge the blockade, they accumulate small victories and deeply accelerate Israel’s popular global isolation, proving that the multimillion-dollar propaganda machine can no longer hide the reality on the ground.”

Mohammad Mansour is a special correspondent of the Doha-based Al Jazeera global television network.

New Zealand’s government is increasingly eager to promote the buy-in of Pacific nations for closer Defence Force integration in the region, amid concerns about militarisation of the region.

The security environment has been shifting rapidly, and regional defence is becoming more complex, leaving Pacific Islanders wondering if their “Ocean of Peace” is slipping out of their grasp.

In recent months, the defence and police forces of Australia and New Zealand have been increasing cooperation with counterparts in Pacific countries — including Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu — in efforts to combat transnational crime, especially the illicit drug trade.

• READ MORE: Other NZ defence policy reports

But as a number of Pacific Island countries weigh up signing major bilateral treaties or agreements with the likes of Australia, China and the United States, New Zealand has been steadily pushing Pacific regional defence cooperation on a number of fronts.

The communiqué from last October’s South Pacific Defence Ministers Meeting (SPDMM) in Chile is instructive.

The SPDMM — which involves New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Fiji, France, Papua New Guinea and Tonga — notes the leadership role New Zealand has taken on better coordinating regional defence architecture.

The member countries agreed to push for a defence advisor from their collective to be embedded in the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), whose secretary-general Baron Waqa attended the Chile meeting and appeared to support closer integration.

While the advisor position is yet to be established, the SPDMM is surging ahead with a range of new regional defence initiatives, including developing the Pacific Response Group, under which defence personnel from Australia, Fiji, France, New Zealand and PNG work together to support coordinated humanitarian assistance and disaster relief responses across the Pacific.

Social licence
A briefing from the March joint meeting of the Defence and Foreign ministers of Australia and New Zealand, emphasised how they aim to promote “the sense of integration through Pacific defence forces’ and to “enhance the sense of Pacific forces meeting Pacific security needs”.

It also highlighted a keenness to “get more links between SPDMM and PIF so that these voices are heard directly by the region”.

“The briefings reveal New Zealand’s role in integrating and aligning Pacific defence forces alongside a considerable anxiety about regional social licence,” Pacific historian Marco de Jong said.

He said the language being used “speaks to a programme of influence and public relations, calibrated to downplay criticism that New Zealand is contributing to the militarisation of the Pacific”.

A representative with Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, Maureen Penjueli, who is also a long time advocate for Indigenous rights in the region, said there had been a lack of consultation with the wider Pacific Islands region about the new defence tack.

“We’ve seen so much occupation by those in the defence interests area. For example, the Australian National Security College takes a very primary seat at the Pacific Islands Forum on security. We’ve got competing interests, which is the Fusion Centre that’s in Vanuatu,” Penjueli said.

“When you add more and more players to this regional architecture that already has enough players on defence and security, it complicates the governance structure in a way. Who does it respond to? Who is it answerable to?

“It does not go through the rigour of national consultations, consultations with civil society around some of these bigger significant shifts around defence and security.”

Long-standing partner
New Zealand is a long-standing contributor to Pacific regional initiatives, and its Defence Force is well valued in the region, especially in responding to disasters, humanitarian needs, transnational crime and maritime security threats, and also including in training support.

New Zealand’s Defence Minister Chris Penk, who replaced Judith Collins in the role since March’s 2+2 Ministerial Meeting with Australia, said that New Zealand always sought to adapt its work with Pacific partners to their context, culture and operational needs.

He told RNZ Pacific that in order to support closer cooperation between Pacific militaries, members were also looking at a SPDMM Status of Forces Agreement.

“This would provide a common legal framework for personnel to deploy into each other’s countries more easily, strengthening our collective ability to respond to maritime security challenges as well as humanitarian and disaster relief events.”

Asked if New Zealand is contributing to militarisation of the Pacific Islands, Penk said Pacific partners had warmly welcomed the country’s continued presence and partnership in the region

“The New Zealand Defence Force contributes to regional responses where it is agreed that defence force personnel and assets should be involved, including humanitarian assistance, maritime domain awareness, fisheries patrols, and search and rescue operations.

“As a Pacific military, we are proud to work alongside our Pacific partners to help respond to the challenges facing our region.”

‘Ocean of Peace’
Penjueli warned that militarisation of the region was escalating against the wishes of most Pacific Islands people.

Making things more complicated, she said, was the growing number of security treaties and agreements that Island countries were being drawn to.

She said they were no longer just about defence or security inter-operability, and often included development and economic dimensions, arrangements that “entangled” Pacific countries into wide ranging commitments beyond traditional military and security ties.

Penjueli worried that the interests of the Island countries themselves were more than ever being buried under broader geopolitical jostling.

“We were told that this is to ready the region in an anticipation, to contain China, and we’re told that this is about the drug trade and the drug war that’s taking place.

“Yet for the Pacific, climate change or the climate crisis, remains our significant issue around security. So, I think the agendas are very different.”

At their last leaders summit, PIF countries signed up to the Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration, formally committing the region to peace, sovereignty, and climate justice.

However, Penjueli said being a true ocean of peace required demilitarisation and de-escalation — something which she suggested was not the direction that the defence-oriented governments of the region were heading in.

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

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the US Capitol.

Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)

Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.

• READ MORE: Trump says Iran attack held off upon Gulf states’ request
• Republican Thomas Massie who stood up to Trump defeated in Kentucky primary
• Other Donald Trump reports

Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose US military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticise Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.

Trump is marshaling the full force of his MAGA machine — spending more than $30 million on a House Republican primary — to purge another of his political enemies from the Republican House. Even Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth is flying to Kentucky to campaign for Massie’s challenger.

It’s all seen as an investment in intimidating and disciplining Republican office-holders who might otherwise think of straying.

Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.

The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.

In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:

“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution.

“And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.

As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

Former generations of Republican politicians had principles, beliefs, ideals. They thought the federal government too large. Or believed it spent too much money. Or was too lenient on criminals. Or was too eager to support the civil rights of Black people. Or any number of issues with which Democrats disagreed.

Today’s Republican Party no longer has any purpose other than achieving whatever Trump wants, which is mainly to make Trump richer and more powerful. The GOP is now Trump’s; it is no longer America’s.

Today’s Republican voters, by contrast, are showing increasing frustration with Trump. Those who think of themselves as traditional Republicans don’t like Trump’s expansive use of federal power. Those who are fiscally conservative, like Thomas Massie, are upset by Trump’s wanton spending, tax cuts, and soaring debt.

“America-first” Republican voters are concerned about Trump’s intrusions into Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. And they want the rest of the Epstein files released.

Yet for elected Republicans, survival now depends on personal loyalty to Trump.

All of which raises a fundamental question: Has the official Republican Party — now nearly purged of anyone willing to reflect the concerns of Republican voters rather than Trump’s will — become complicit in Trump’s criminality? Is it aiding and abetting Trump’s lawlessness?

A case can be made that the official Republican Party is indeed complicit.

For Trump, the first and most basic sign of loyalty to him — and therefore survival as a politician in Trump’s Republican Party — is a willingness to publicly proclaim as truth what we know to be two big lies: that Trump won the 2020 election, and that he did not seek to overturn its results by illegal means. As a result, almost all congressional Republicans are now election deniers.

Trump has also made it clear that loyalty to him bars any criticism of his unlawful immigration dragnet, which has so far resulted in the murders of three US citizens by ICE agents and the detention and deportation, without a hearing, of people suspected of being in the US illegally.

To Trump, loyalty requires full support of his foreign policy — including the abduction of a foreign leader, an undeclared war with Iran, and the killing on the high seas of people only suspected of smuggling drugs, in violation of international law.

Loyalty also demands unquestioned support for other of his lawless acts — using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, building a mammoth White House ballroom, issuing no-bid contracts to his friends, promoting his family’s businesses and implementing policies favorable to them, accepting gifts from foreign powers, and defying court orders.

Is it fair to conclude from all of this that today’s official Republican Party — the people who are in office because Trump has put them there, or who maintain their office because they back whatever Trump wants — has in effect become a criminal organisation, analogous to the mafia or a drug cartel, whose members are blindly loyal to their criminal bosses?

Robert Reich is a US professor, former Secretary of Labor, co-founder of Inequality Media and writes at robertreich.substack.com

ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran.

Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner.

Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

• READ MORE: Iran says talks ongoing through Pakistan with a focus on ending war
• Israeli forces storm Gaza-bound aid flotilla off Cyprus
• Other Gaza and Iran “ceasefire” reports

We should first recognise that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit– the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed.

As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realise that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hardliners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness.

Vindicated assessment
In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.

Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.

First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon.

At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures.

Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use.

Logic straightforward
The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.

Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.

Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.

Trita Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish political analyst and foreign policy scholar specialising in Middle East geopolitics and US-Iran relations. He is the co-founder and executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Republished with permission.

The eighth floor of the Tempo building in Jakarta became the setting for a gathering rich with meaning.

What brought together community leaders, politicians, academics, religious figures, journalists, and the family of the late Thom Beanal was not merely a book launch. It was an earnest attempt to revisit the essence of struggle, leadership, and hope for the land of Papua.

The event, which took the form of a discussion and review of a three-volume book series on Thom Beanal, opened with greetings in multiple traditions — from an Amungme war cry to salutations representing all major tribes in Papua.

• READ MORE:  Tom Beanal, the true indigenous of Papua
• ‘They’re wiping us out’ – church leader warns about young West Papuans killed in escalating conflict
• Papuan women ‘living in fear’ condemn military violence
• Other West Papua reports

That gesture alone reflected the very spirit of the man being honoured: a leader who embraced diversity and respected every single man and woman.

The gathering coincided with three historic moments, making it even more significant.

First, it marked exactly 27 years since Thom Beanal, standing before President B. J. Habibie, boldly expressed the heartfelt desire of his people. With courage and clarity, he called for recognition as a nation that wanted to cooperate honestly, peacefully, and democratically.

Second, the event served as a memorial, three years after Beanal’s passing — a man who left a deep imprint on the struggle of Indigenous Papuans.

Third, it celebrated the culmination of two years of work by a writing team, resulting in a trilogy that chronicles the journey of a lay pastor, a tribal chief, and what many now call a “father” to the indigenous Papuan.

From lay pastor to Indigenous defender
Thom Beanal was no ordinary leader. Born on 11 July 1947 into the Amungme tribe in Timika, he completed his education from primary school to a Catholic theological academy, then served as a catechist teacher in Wamena and Paniai and as a lay pastor in several parishes.

Yet behind his calming smile and disciplined demeanour lay a profoundly thoughtful mind.

Witnessing firsthand the human rights abuses and ecological destruction caused by PT Freeport Indonesia, Beanal resigned from his pastoral duties. He felt a more urgent calling: to defend indigenous communities whose lands and lives were being uprooted.

In 1994, he founded LEMASA, the Amungme Traditional Deliberative Council, as a vehicle for indigenous advocacy. Two years later, he took an audacious step — suing Freeport in a New Orleans court. That legal action set a precedent: for the first time, a Papuan had dared to take on a multinational giant on foreign soil.

His fight did not stop there. Beanal went on to push for a one percent allocation of mining revenue for affected communities. Although limited in scope, that achievement brought a measure of justice to people who, for decades, had borne the negative impacts of mining without enjoying the wealth of their own land.

Reform era and a unique role
Entering the reform era, Beanal’s role expanded. Together with other Papuan figures and students, he helped establish FORERI, a forum that channelled Papuan aspirations during the early wave of reform.

When the Papuan Council (Dewan Papua) was formed in 2000, he served as its vice chairman. He later became chairman of the Papuan Traditional Council from 2002 to 2007. Remarkably, President Abdurrahman Wahid — known as Gus Dur, a leader with genuine concern for justice in Papua — appointed Beanal as a commissioner of PT Freeport Indonesia.

Serving until 2018, Beanal found himself in a unique position: an indigenous rights fighter sitting on the board of the very company he had long opposed.

Yet despite those strategic roles, speakers at the book launch event described Thom Beanal as a humble man, disciplined and rich in metaphor. He never offered instant answers.

Instead, he opened spaces for collective reason to search for truth. In every balance of history, he arrived precisely when the Papuan people were not in a good state. And sadly, three years after his passing, the reality facing Papua remains far from encouraging.

A grim reality for Papua today
The presentations at the Tempo building painted a grim picture. Terms like genocide, ecocide, and ethnocide were mentioned as ongoing threats to Indigenous life. Papua’s gold and other natural resources, it was argued, remain mortgaged until 2061 under a contract deemed uncivilised because it ignores the basic rights of the customary landowners.

Suffering, the speakers said, is still the daily bread of Papuans. It is against this backdrop that the three books on Thom Beanal were written — not to lament the past, but to read the present clearly and to weave solutions for the future.

The 47 contributors to the third volume, divided into six sections, provided reflections and testimonies that enrich the books. They came from diverse backgrounds: family members, prominent figures of the Amungme tribe, academics, activists, and religious leaders.

The head of the writing team, Markus Haluk, expressed his highest appreciation to everyone who supported the two year process. Moral support and advice from religious, traditional, and political leaders were cited as a key source of strength.

Special thanks were directed to the book’s reviewers, including Dr Budi Hernawan, Dr Suraya Afiff, Yorrys Raweyai, Inayah Wahid, and Emanuel Gobay, for their critical engagement with the content.

Six strategic demands for the future
More than a launch, the event became a platform for six strategic recommendations and hopes. First, the books should serve as historical source material and references for young Papuans and the wider public. The concern that the struggles of national figures might vanish with time underscores why documentation and dissemination are so urgent.

Without conscious efforts to write and spread the stories of past heroes, dark chapters could repeat, and the sacrifices of predecessors might become meaningless.

Second, the book launch was not meant to be a time for complaining or blaming one another. Instead, it is time to speak honestly about Papua’s current realities and then collectively formulate comprehensive, strategic solutions.

This constructive mindset is a legacy of Beanal’s way of thinking — seeing problems as challenges to be solved, not excuses for despair.

Third, participants were called to continue the prophetic voice exemplified by several great figures. Mentioned were bishops such as Monsignor Staverman, Monsignor Monninghoff, Monsignor Laba Ladjar, Monsignor John Philip Saklil, Father Neles Tebay, Monsignor Yanuarius You, and Monsignor Bernardus Baru OSA.

Among executive leaders, two presidents known for their deep concern for Papua — B. J. Habibie and Gus Dur — were hailed as models of dignified, peaceful struggle. The goal is noble: to save the people, culture, and natural world of Papua, which remains the last remaining lung of the Asia Pacific region. Achieving this requires genuine solidarity across sectors and religions.

Fourth, a firm call was directed at the Indonesian government, especially President Prabowo Subianto and relevant ministers: stop the mortgaging of Papua’s natural wealth, stop the gold theft, and stop the destruction of the universe that is the Papuan people’s home.

The contract binding Papua until 2061 is seen as a form of structural injustice that must be corrected. Rejection of all forms of natural resource pledging for the benefit of a few — especially to foreign parties — was voiced loudly before dozens of attendees.

Fifth, recognition of and respect for the rights of the Papuan people over politics, land, natural resources, and human dignity are non negotiable demands. The threats of genocide, ethnocide, and structural violence must be halted immediately. The absence of genuine recognition of these basic rights has been the root of decades of conflict and suffering in the land of Papua.

Sixth, and perhaps most fundamental, is the call to build honest, peaceful, and democratic negotiations between the Papuan people and the Indonesian government. This is not a new idea. It is precisely what Thom Beanal himself voiced when he stood at the State Palace on 26 February 1999.

He laid before the president the sincere desire of his people, offering equal dialogue based on honesty and peace. Twenty seven years later, the same call must be repeated — proof that a massive homework assignment still lies before the Indonesian government.

Continuing the struggle, not grieving
The subsequent discussion session opened the floor for strategic ideas from participants. The emphasis was that this gathering was not for grieving or lamenting fate, but for continuing the struggle. Attendees were encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and contribute according to their capacities.

An academic might contribute through critical research, a journalist through balanced and in-depth reporting, a politician through pro-people policy advocacy, a religious leader through moral and spiritual reinforcement, and an artist through works that raise awareness.

The event closed with a beautiful, touching metaphor drawn from Thom Beanal himself. He once reflected on the rain that welcomed his funeral in Timika. In his poetic logic, he hoped that the words spoken by those who continue his struggle would water the still thirsty soil of the fight.

The land of Papua, with all its natural wealth and cultural diversity, has long been like an arid field waiting for the rain of justice, recognition, and respect from the wider Indonesians.

A test of national commitment
The gathering at the Tempo building ultimately served as a test of Indonesia’s national commitment. Do we truly want to learn from a figure like Thom Beanal? Can we draw wisdom from the journey of a lay pastor who left his religious duties to pursue social justice? Do we have the courage to admit that for decades, systematic structural injustice has occurred in Papua?

And most importantly, do we possess the political will to stop all forms of exploitation and violence, and to build equal, dignified dialogue?

The trilogy on Thom Beanal, launched that day, is not merely a collection of stories from the past. It is a mirror for understanding today’s reality, and a compass for stepping into the future. It is a document of courage from a child of the nation who chose not to remain silent, despite great risks.

It is a legacy for young Papuans so they do not lose their historical roots, and for young Indonesians outside Papua, so they do not lose empathy and a sense of justice.

In the end, the gathering affirmed that Thom Beanal’s struggle is unfinished. His legacy still needs many hands to carry it forward. Amid threats of genocide, ecocide, and various forms of structural violence, prophetic voices like those modelled by the bishops, priests, and presidents who dared to side with justice are still desperately needed.

Will the Indonesian government listen? Will today’s leaders — including President Prabowo Subianto and his ministers — respond to the call to stop mortgaging natural wealth and to start honest, democratic negotiations? These questions still hang in Jakarta’s hot air, while in Timika, the rain may continue to fall, waiting for the words that can water the still thirsty land.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

The Solomon Islands has entered a new political era. In a historic morning at Parliament House yesterday, Matthew Cooper Wale was elected as the nation’s new Prime Minister.

His victory marks the culmination of a dramatic week in Honiara and signals a potential shift in both the country’s internal management and its place on the global stage.

Wale, the longtime Leader of the Opposition, defeated former Foreign Minister Peter Shanel Agovaka in a secret ballot, winning 26 votes to 22.

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The result was greeted with cheers from supporters gathered outside Parliament, Honiara and around the country, as the 57-year-old leader prepared to take the oath of office before Governor-General Sir David Tiva Kapu.

The road to victory
The path to the premiership was anything but simple. Just eight days ago, the previous government led by Jeremiah Manele collapsed after losing a motion of no-confidence.

For years, Matthew Wale has been the most prominent voice of dissent in the Solomon Islands, often coming close to the top job but never quite reaching it. After falling short in the 2019 and 2024 leadership votes, many viewed Wale as the perpetual runner-up.

However, today’s result proves that his persistence and his message of “breaking the shackles” finally resonated with a majority of his fellow Members of Parliament.

In his first address following the announcement, Prime Minister-elect Wale was humble but realistic.

“We take the government at a difficult time,” Wale told the press. “Change is coming. These changes are necessary, and they may be painful. I ask that you join your government in putting your hand to the plough.”

Profile of a leader
Who is Matthew Wale? Born on 13 June 1968, in Ambu Village, Malaita Province, Matthew Cooper Wale is a seasoned veteran of the Pacific political landscape. Before entering the world of policy and Parliament, he was an accountant — a background that many believe informs his disciplined approach to the national budget.

Wale first entered Parliament in 2008 during a byelection for the Aoke/Langalanga constituency. He quickly made a name for himself as a fiery and articulate speaker. Unlike many politicians who stay in the background, Wale has never been afraid of a verbal scrap on the floor of Parliament.

Over the past 18 years, he has served in various roles, but he is best known for leading the Solomon Islands Democratic Party (SIDP) and acting as the primary check on the power of former Prime Ministers Manasseh Sogavare and Jeremiah Manele.

In late 2024, he was even awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his long service to the public and political life of the country, a testament to his standing both at home and within the Commonwealth.

A vision of ‘economic liberation’
What does a Matthew Wale government look like? Throughout his career, Wale has championed a few core beliefs that he calls his “pillars of change”, “anti-corruption and “elite capture”.

Wale’s most frequent target is what he calls “elite capture” — the idea that a small group of powerful people in Honiara control most of the country’s wealth. He has promised to dismantle these systems to ensure resources reach the rural provinces.

Education and health: A vocal advocate for the “ordinary family”, Wale has consistently pushed for increased funding for hospitals and free, high-quality education. He believes that a nation cannot flourish if its citizens are not healthy and skilled.

Political stability: To end the cycle of “grasshopping” (where MPs switch parties for personal gain), Wale has signaled he will seek to strengthen laws that keep political parties disciplined and accountable.

The ‘China question’ and global relations: Perhaps the most watched aspect of Wale’s new leadership will be his foreign policy. For years, Wale was a staunch critic of the 2022 security pact signed with China, warning that it could “jeopardise” relationships with traditional partners like Australia and the United States.

Tone has evolved
However, as a pragmatist, Wale’s tone has evolved. While he is expected to rebalance the nation’s relationships — likely warming ties with Canberra and Washington — he has acknowledged that Chinese infrastructure is now a reality in the Solomon Islands.

He is unlikely to tear up existing agreements overnight, but observers expect a more “balanced” approach that prioritises Solomon Islands’ sovereignty above all else.

As the sun sets on the nation today, the atmosphere is one of cautious optimism. The challenges facing Prime Minister Wale are immense: a struggling economy, high cost of living, and a deeply divided Parliament.

But for today, the man who spent nearly two decades in the wings finally has the chance to lead. Matthew Wale’s message to the people is clear: the road ahead will be hard, but the destination — a fairer, more transparent Solomon Islands — is worth the effort.

The “Hapi Isles” are watching, and the world is, too.

Campion Ohasio is a Solomon Islands-based self-taught visual artist, graphic designer, and prominent political cartoonist known for capturing South Pacific social issues. He gained early recognition in the 1990s for his work on Uni Tavur at the University of Papua New Guinea and later as a editor for the Solomons Voice. This commentary is republished with the author’s permission.

When the Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders released their annual World Press Freedom Index dossier online three days before World Press Freedom Day, journalists in the Asia-Pacific region were quick to check out their ranking.

Overall the prognosis wasn’t very flattering. No country in the region was ranked in the top 20 of the 180 countries surveyed, and even New Zealand, which has traditionally done well in the past – including even being in the top 10 a few years ago — had continued its downhill slide.

“New Zealand (22nd) remains the region’s model for press freedom, despite slipping six places,” said the World Press Freedom Index report. “Other Asia-Pacific democracies, such as Taiwan (28th), Timor-Leste (30th) and Australia (33rd), face real challenges to upholding the right to reliable information, yet continue to offer broadly protective environments.

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• The 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index

“They stand as exceptions in a region where press freedom is being steadily eroded.”

Fiji scored a remarkable 16-place climb to 24th, just two places behind New Zealand, after the scrapping of the draconian Media Industry Development Act in 2023, but this was certainly no grounds to be complacent.

Responding to the rankings and after a woman journalist in Tonga was threatened at gunpoint at Kele’a Voice FM radio station by a jailed-for-life drug gangster’s hooded henchman in Tonga, Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) president Kalafi Moala (himself Tongan and a doyen of Pacific media) declared:

Tongan armed threat against journalist troubles Pacific media freedom

“Threats against press freedom are unfortunately ongoing in the Pacific. The incident in Tonga demonstrates that the enemies of press freedom can come from anywhere — not always the government or those in power, but anyone averse to truth and transparency.

“Whether it is in Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, French Polynesia or anywhere else in the Pacific, media freedom must be protected, advocated for and exercised to the fullest.”

Smear. Kill. Repeat: The constant horror for journalists in Gaza     Video: Al Jazeera

Deafening silence on Gaza
But for all the lively debate and responses across the Asia-Pacific to this year’s Press Freedom Index results, there was a deafening silence and lack of collegial concern from New Zealand to Taiwan about the elephant in the global media freedom room: the unprecedented and chilling wholesale assassinations of Palestinian (and now Lebanese) journalists by the Israeli military forces.

Many of them were targeted and murdered for doing their jobs.

And those still surviving have been risking their lives (and those of their families) day and night while truth-telling to the world with extraordinary courage.

“Under Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), journalists on ‘dangerous professional missions in armed conflict’ must be treated as civilians. It is one of the clearest protections in international law,” write Majdolin Hasan and Wadih Sabbagh of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN).

“Yet in Gaza, their cameras and press vests have become targets.”

Statistics on this Israeli bloodlust are varied, depending on the source and methodology and criteria in compiling the information. According to the latest figures on the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Gaza database, 264 journalists have been killed, 174 wounded and 107 imprisoned. These figures include war-related killings of journalists and media workers in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran and Israel.

“By silencing the press, Israel is silencing those who document and bear witness to what human rights groups and UN experts agree is a genocide. CPJ calls on the international community to hold Israel to account for its unlawful attacks on journalists; ensure international media is given immediate, independent access to Gaza; and open humanitarian corridors for journalists.”

Death toll even higher
Some media counts put the death toll even higher. A United Nations human rights web page, for example, cites UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk saying in a statement to mark World Press Freedom Day that the situation for journalists in Gaza is a “death trap”.

“Israel’s war in Gaza has become a death trap for the media. My office has verified the killing of nearly 300 journalists since October 2023, with many more injured,” Türk said.

He urged States to investigate all violations against media workers and expressed alarm at the lack of accountability for killings of journalists.

“This year alone, at least 14 journalists have been killed. Over the past 20 years, only around one in 10 killings has led to full accountability,” Türk said.

In January 2024, I wrote an article for Declassified Australia that was already an “early warning” indicator of the growing death toll among Palestinian journalists. My earlier media freedom articles had frequently dealt with the Philippines, which used to be among the worst countries for the killing of journalists.

In the article, “Silencing the messenger”, I also warned against the growing censorship in what was already emerging as the greatest moral issue of our times: “Western journalists taking a stand against their media outlets’ biased coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza are being targeted with career threats and even dismissal. But their colleagues in Palestine are suffering a worse fate.”

I called on journalists to make a stand for truth-telling and in solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza.

Shameful NZ silence
Yet while the silence in the Pacific is perhaps not surprising given the conflicted collaboration of several governments, such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea, on the wrong side of history, in New Zealand it is shameful. At least in Australia, there has been a strong pushback by journalists against the bias in the mainstream, and one independent publication, Crikey, has been publishing a “register” of journalists who have been on paid junkets to Israel and are regarded as potentially compromised.

Media editor Daanyal Saeed wrote: “It’s become clear that a number of Australian politicians and journalists have been on organised tours to the Middle East — many of them sponsored by pro-Israel lobby groups and interest organisations.”

A similar grooming of New Zealand journalists has also been carried out by pro-Israel lobby groups’ “sponsorship” in recent years, but no media has published a comprehensive list.

Is this “captive journalists” phenomena one of the factors for the perceived bias of much of the New Zealand media? John Minto, national campaigns coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), the largest and most visible advocacy and protest group in the country, agrees: “The large number of journalists here, who should know better, who have taken all expenses paid trips to Israel are part of Israel’s building of a propaganda base.

“Another important factor is the long history of false smears of antisemitism against anyone criticising Israel. Editors think twice about reporting anything showing Israel in a bad light.

“Just last week an RNZ journalist talked on radio about an interview she had done with UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, and that the interview would be heard on the Nine to Noon show early the following week. The interview was then advertised to be broadcast on the Monday morning but then never appeared on the programme.

“Pressure from the anti-Palestinian racists in the pro-Israel lobby is the only sensible explanation. Most likely it will simply be buried — along with what’s left of RNZ’s journalistic integrity.”

Limited independent reportage
It needs to be realised too that New Zealand media has a limited independent “international” reportage tradition in contrast to Australia and many other countries. What international coverage with a New Zealand perspective that did exist, largely disappeared after the closure of the country’s only independent news agency, the 131-year-old NZ Press Association cooperative. This shut down in 2011.

Minto blames the narrow range of international news as another factor in why New Zealand media seems so slanted.

“The media industry here takes its overseas content solely from Western news sources such as AP [Associated Press, American], Reuters and the BBC [both British-based] alongside UK and US newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post and Daily Telegraph. It is packaged by Israeli sympathisers embedded in senior positions across these outlets and the inevitable result is a stream of pro-Israeli propaganda rather than balanced and accurate journalism.

“The recent analysis by The Intercept underscores this built-in bias in favour of Israel and against Palestinians.”

The Pacific Journalism Review also ran a special edition in July 2024 focused on systemic bias in the New Zealand and some international media. The provocative title theme was “Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive?” and it was aimed at alerting journalists that declining credibility was at stake over this critical moral issue of our times.

Maher Nazzal, a Palestinian New Zealander who is a community advocate and chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, echoes this view.

“Much of the New Zealand media coverage on Palestine has been shaped through Western political narratives and reliance on international wire services that often frame events primarily through an Israeli lens,” he says. “This has contributed to the dehumanisation or invisibility of Palestinian voices, including journalists working under unimaginable conditions in Gaza.”

Courage and professionalism
A good point. The courage and professionalism of Gaza journalists has been widely acknowledged around the globe, including their collectively winning the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 2024, yet NZ journalists seem to be reluctant to recognise this, let alone give statements of solidarity. Why?|

“What Gaza journalists have shown over the past 19 months is extraordinary courage and professionalism,” says Nazzal. “Many continued reporting while displaced, grieving family members, facing starvation, or living under bombardment.

“Some paid with their lives simply for documenting the truth. Their work has become one of the few direct windows into what is happening on the ground.

“Unfortunately, solidarity from many mainstream media institutions in New Zealand has been limited. There appears to be hesitation, fear of controversy, or political sensitivity around speaking openly on Palestine compared with other global conflicts.

“This silence itself becomes part of the problem.”

An independent New Zealand journalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for two periods during the Israeli war on Gaza — in 2024 for two months and again last year – is also unimpressed with the local reportage.

Video and photojournalist Cole Martin from Ōtautahi Christchurch believes there is a serious lack of understanding in New Zealand media of the context of the structural and institutional violence towards the Palestinians.

“It is a media scene in Aotearoa that repeats very harmful and inaccurate narratives,” Martin says.

“Also, there is this idea to be unbiased and neutral in a conflict, both perspectives must have equal legitimacy.”

Israel regularly condemned
Reporters Without Borders has regularly condemned Israel for refusing to allow journalists from international media into Gaza, except on rare occasions embedded with Israeli military — they saw merely what Tel Aviv wanted them to see.

RSF has joined unsuccessful legal proceedings led by the Foreign Press Association (FPA) at Israel’s Supreme Court to challenge the ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza. It has also file multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) calling for investigations into war crimes against journalists.

Minto believes New Zealand journalism is generally embedded with the “built-in bias of Western media” and with very few exceptions local journalists “are as complicit as journalists overseas”.

“I’m the first to admit it’s not easy for journalists to speak up and confront the bias — it’s easier to look the other way.

“Having said that I can’t understand why they would not report on Gaza journalists receiving awards for heroic reporting in circumstances when they know they are on an Israeli hit list. Journalistic solidarity based on fearless reporting which speaks truth to power is sorely missing.”

In general, says Minto, New Zealand journalists wait until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump make a statement before they report anything on Gaza or Palestine.

“And it’s not just reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Again and again I hear stories from our journalists — particularly in our state broadcaster TVNZ and RNZ — being directed towards reporting stories alleging antisemitism here rather than Islamophobia which is a far greater threat to our social fabric.

“It’s as though we never had a terrorist attack in 2019 which killed 51 Muslim worshippers.”

Media releases ignored
Mainstream news media routinely ignore media releases by Palestinian and solidarity groups.

“They are read by news editors and chief reporters but are otherwise disregarded,” admits Minto. “In fact, pretty much the only time our mainstream media report on PSNA is when we are attacked by the pro-Israel lobby as they did when we opposed Israeli soldiers coming here for rest and recreation from the genocide in Gaza or when we were attacked for ‘selective morality’ by an Iranian supporter of the old despotic Shah of Iran.

“On the other hand, our media releases are avidly read by our supporters and get good pickup on social media.”

While there was a fierce pushback by pro-Israel groups over PSNA’s controversial “Genocide Hotline” in New Zealand media, there was a more sympathetic response by many international media.

In fact, many campaigns in other countries, partly due to the inspiration of the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), are going further and actively seeking prosecutions of dual-citizen Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers on rest and recreation to their countries.

The Brussels-based foundation is dedicated to “breaking the cycle Israeli impunity and achieving justice for all the victims of the Gaza genocide” — more than 72,000 people so far, mostly women and children. It was established to honour the memory of five-year-old Hind Rajab who was murdered along with her family on January 29, 2024, in a brutal act of genocidal violence by the IDF.

Hind survived the initial attack, but was left trapped in a car alongside the bodies of her family. Her cries for help were broadcast to the world before being killed by an Israeli tank crew. An investigation found that the car was hit by 335 bullets. The inhumanity of this act has been captured in the 2025 docudrama film The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Hasbara propaganda
The PSNA and other groups have regularly complained to TVNZ and the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) about the “appalling reporting” and “systemic bias”, but with little success. At a national hui in Rotorua earlier this month, the PSNA discussed plans to step up its campaign to push back against Israeli disinformation in response to the Knesset’s approval last month of a fivefold budget boost to $730 million for Hasbara — Israeli “public policy”, or propaganda.

In spite of the many obstacles, Maher Nazzal says public awareness about the Palestine struggle has grown significantly in Aotearoa as well as globally: “Community movements, independent journalists, academics, and grassroots organisations have helped challenge dominant narratives and push for more balanced coverage and accountability.”

To improve media coverage, Nazzal would like to see a greater inclusion of Palestinian perspectives, stronger journalistic independence, and willingness to apply universal human rights standards consistently, regardless of who the victims are.

Dr David Robie is convenor of the Asia Pacific Media Network’s Pacific Media Watch project, a former media professor and who previously worked as a journalist and editor with several global news agencies, including Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Gemini News Service.

Most of the Western media refuse to join the dots and explain Israel’s decades-long obsession with defanging Tehran.

The war in Iran is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has planned for four decades. He has always wanted Israel to extend from Egypt to the Euphrates and in the process have the United States overthrow seven neighbouring countries, the last and latest being Iran.

That was also America’s plot, hatched by the neo-conservative authors at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000. The list of targeted countries, confirmed by US General Wesley Clark in 2007, was based on a proposal published in Israel in 1982.

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Ambitious as they were, these long-held intentions have now culminated in the US-Israel war on Iran, which seems sudden but was carefully planned, a former British Ambassador claims.

US President Donald Trump was not “bounced into it” by Israel: it had been in gestation for months, says Craig Murray, Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004.

Well in advance, Trump had weapons ordered for fast delivery from Lockheed Martin, naval ships and troops were moved to the Gulf, and CIA and Mossad agitators reportedly stirred up Iranians in several cities, already exasperated by their theocratic rulers and by US sanctions.

If Murray is right, Trump and Netanyahu must have been planning this in their frequent meetings before and since the “12-day war” against Iran last year. Or for longer: Trump has reminded the world that as far back as 1987 he wanted the US to take over some of Iran’s oil, and to go to war for it.

Everything is a ‘deal’
But Trump’s shambolic war shows that he regards everything as a “deal’” and while aggrandising himself, he fails to understand that Iranians don’t accept transactionalism about their country, whoever its leader is.

He appears not to remember that under the Shah, Iran was on good terms with Israel and the US, until the uprising against the Pahlavis in 1979. He doesn’t mention the CIA’s overthrow in 1953 of Prime Minister Mossadegh, who merely wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil.

Instead of understanding Iran and its people, Trump claims to trust his “gut instinct” about the war, and he regularly gets it wrong.

The state of the president’s mental, cognitive and physical health has been raised again lately by his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist. She observes symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in Trump, and recalls that his father and her grandfather, Fred Trump sr., died with dementia.

Other specialists detect signs of “malignant narcissism”, and note that the President’s repeated threats, exaggerations, and reversals are more likely to be the results of incapacity than of intent.

Still, Trump’s erratic statements keep attention focussed on him, keeping the world guessing and confused, and his narcissistic self on centre stage. For Trump, as for Netanyahu, the personal is paramount. Both of them face coming elections (Trump has to face the mid-terms in November while Netanyahu has a general election before the end of the year); both want to stay alive and out of jail; and the continuing war further enriches them, their families and friends.

Plans for war
Netanyahu’s project derives from the 1982 Yinon Plan, named after its author, an Israeli diplomat, journalist, and former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (“Directions”) as “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, it reappeared in a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, prepared for Netanyahu by American neoconservative strategists. They also produced their “Project for the New American Century”, advocating a “catastrophic and catalysing event” that would convince Americans of the need for war.

The “Clean Break” document argued that Israel should abandon land-for-peace diplomacy and instead pursue a strategy that would weaken or remove hostile regimes in the region, particularly Iraq and Syria. The goal was not mere military victory but a geopolitical restructuring of the Middle East in Israel’s favour.

In 1997, some of the same people involved with that report established the Project for the New American Century think tank, which produced several major reports, especially “Rebuilding America’s Defences” in the year 2000. It argued for preserving US military preeminence in the Middle East and two other theatres with a “revolution in military affairs” that might be accelerated by a “catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.

Just a year later on 9/11, such an event occurred, leading Congress quickly to pass the Authorisation for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, and the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act.

Track the planning process forward to 2001, and a former CIA operator confirms what many conspiracy analysts have suspected for years: that Israel, together with Saudi Arabia, was potentially informed about conspirators in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 before they occurred. John Kiriakou, a former CIA bureau chief for Pakistan, points to the involvement of the Saudi royal family in Al-Qaeda’s plan.

As well, Kiriakou says that Mossad was thick on the ground on the US east coast in 2001 and Israel knew what was to happen, but did nothing to stop it.

Furious response over Saudis
Kiriakou points to the furious response to Riyadh by US agencies on learning of the Saudis’ dominant involvement in 9/11. It produced three sudden deaths in a week in July 2022: Princes Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz (in hospital after an operation), Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki (in a car accident), and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir (of thirst in the desert).

The latter two were both in their mid-twenties, while Ahmed was 43. Seven months later Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s Air Marshal, died in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly Northwest Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants.

9/11 researchers have found out a lot more about what two US “allies”, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, knew in advance of 9/11 and did in support of al-Qaeda. US lawyer Gerald Posner’s account is based on al-Qaeda operative Ali Zubaydah’s claims about his capture and interrogation, and his admissions about his work with Saudi and Pakistani officials.

From Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held without charge for more than two decades, he told Posner that both Prince Ahmed and Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s Air Marshal, “knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day”. Like Israelis, they did nothing to stop it.

The Report of the 9/11 Commission, which some said was “set up to fail”, read more as a call to arms against al-Qaeda than a forensic criminal report. The GW Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations prevented the US Congress accessing 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after 9/11.

Eventually released by Biden in June 2016, the pages identified Saudi Arabian diplomats, officials, and members of the ruling family as contributors to preparations for the attacks, but not Israelis.

Yet when US President Bush declared a “war on terror” in response to 9/11, he realised Netanyahu’s aim for the US to attack Israel’s neighbours. And war, says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, “is always the first option, not the last one in Israel“.

Heavy insider trading was recorded in New York in advance of September 11, including put options on United Airlines, American Airlines, and other related stocks. A majority of those polled by The New York Times in the five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Washington thought the government was lying or was hiding something.  Even some staff, investigators, and members of the 9/11 Commission knew that senior military officials and CIA director George Tenet had lied to them, while others’ evidence was suppressed. But their knowledge was excluded from the final report.

Terrorists, neo-colonialists, tyrants and war criminals
This history reveals the need to be sceptical of Washington’s claims about terrorism from 9/11 to today’s war against Iran. “Terror” is repeatedly used as propaganda to manufacture consent for war and to demonise enemies of the West, while what the US and Israel do is “not terrorism”.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a war crime, said NATO and its friends: yet the US coalition’s long wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria were not. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its former territory, was an outrageous land grab: Israel’s annexations of Syria’s Golan and the Palestinians’ West Bank territory were not. Hamas’ breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023 was terrorism; Israel’s recurrent attacks on Palestinians since 1948 and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza since 2023 were not.

Hamas and Hezbollah’s retaliation and the Houthis’ attacks are terrorism: Israel’s bombing and occupation of Gaza and southern Lebanon are not. Iran’s leaders are murderous tyrants: Israel’s indicted war criminals Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant (both wanted by the International Criminal Court on arrest warrants for crimes against humanity).are not. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC are designated terrorist organisations: the IDF, CIA, and Mossad are not. The US assaults on Venezuela and Iran, to be followed by Cuba, are claimed to be against terrorism or drugs: in fact they are about who controls oil and makes and unmakes governments.

It does not occur to most Americans and Israelis that their own activities are state terror. Instead, they claim a right to defend US hegemony and all Jews’ right to Eretz Israel and greatness as “God’s chosen people”. Palestinians who resist have no such rights and are called subhuman terrorists, and under a new law, Arab Israelis will be executed for terrorism, while Jewish Israelis are not.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis made similar claims about the superiority of their civilisation to justify the Holocaust. No wonder some now detect a resurgence of fascism in the US, Israel, and elsewhere. Others observe the sudden rise of anti-Semitism since October 2003.

A growing number expect the US war to fail, leaving Israel to do its worst in Iran and Lebanon.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have been added to Al-Qaeda on the list of designated terrorists. The wars that followed culminate in Iran, labelled by Trump a “terrorist regime”.

Candidate Trump took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to “move fast and break things”. He has done it as president. What ends up broken is now the whole world’s concern.

Dr Alison Broinowski AM is an Australian former diplomat, academic and author. Her books and articles concern Australia’s interactions with the world. She is president of Australians for War Powers Reform. Republished with permission from Declassified Australia.

While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security.

Security now clearly is shaped in a global context. The world’s geopolitical issues affect us all, not just those near sites of military engagement, as wars on Ukraine and Iran show.

So it’s misleading to consider security as simply a national or even regional issue, though people within range of military missiles and drones suffer the most horrendously.

• READ MORE: New Zealand in ‘big trouble’ amid growing global uncertainty, US-China relations, expert says
• Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World — Luxon speech

We would agree, as Luxon claims in closing remarks, that we have values worth defending.

What kind of a world and what network of values do we most want to defend? And how can we do this without compromising those same values?

Does anyone really believe that cultural and political values such as democracy are best defended by doubling military spending as he proposes? Or that 20th century national security perspectives and “bomb them to hell” strategies are fit for purpose today, while nuclear arsenals grow month by month, no longer restrained by arms control agreements?

We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order”. Australia, now our only officially acknowledged defence partner, is closely linked militarily with the US.

Exercises against ‘enemy’
Last year. NZ’s navy joined US and Israel in regular RIMPAC military exercises, to prepare for war against those labelled “enemy”. Judith Collins justified this on the basis that the US sent the invitations; NZ didn’t create the guest list. (Jack Tame interview, The Nation).

Clearly it’s time to weigh up our bedfellows more judiciously, and what values their actions, rather than their words, show they are defending.

It’s hard to see how one defends values like democracy by preparing for war alongside nations whose “Ministries of War” commit and enable genocide in Gaza, threaten to add Canada and Greenland to the US real estate portfolio, and bomb weaker nations back to the Stone Age, while kidnapping presidents of other nations if US corporate interests could benefit.

Luxon is right in stating that this is a historical inflection point, and the way in which we react, along with other nations, will determine “what kind of world comes next”.

How are our values best defended? With weapons and threats? Or by joining like-minded nations to call out all who undermine the values, rules and institutions that endeavoured since the end of World War Two and the United Nations Charter to enhance genuine human security worldwide?

Only ethically grounded values, policy and strategies, supported by inspired multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution skills, can promote such values and the multilateral order which supported them.

War is a barbaric, blunt tool from a past age which cannot deal with worsening 21st century existential threats which need global collaboration to solve, if most of humanity is to survive the future.

We owe it to our descendants to defend ethical values appropriately to build the foundations of a world that is fit for them.

Frances Palmer is a peace and conflict studies advocate and commentator. She was a SCF nurse in Vietnam and Khmer refugee camps 1975, 1980. Palmer wrote history resources for schools on “Cambodia, Faces of Violence, Hegemony & Holocaust” and “Aotearoa NZ 1980s-1990s, Participation & Resistance to International War”. This article was first published at Scoop.

Throughout 2025, I served on Australia’s first parliamentary inquiry into society-wide antisemitism. When the Bondi terrorist atrocity occurred, we had yet to finalise a report, and I supported the decision to simply send our evidence to the Royal Commission.

A notable feature of our inquiry was the care taken to test evidence and contentions through robust questioning.

This included testing key witnesses vigorously as to the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, and on other key contentions and demands of Jewish representative groups of a Zionist perspective.

• READ MORE: Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

This didn’t please all the witnesses, for example, it led Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, to later publicly label me as “NSW’s Gaslighter-in-Chief”. This was for daring to even suggest that a wrongful conflation of Israel and the Australian Jewish community could be driving antisemitism.

In my limited observations so far of the Royal Commission, this degree of scrutiny seems not to be present, particularly when

witnesses have sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

The evidence in our inquiry made clear the absolute centrality in Zionist advocacy in Australia of this conflation, which is no new phenomenon, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban famously said of his work, “the chief task of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all”.

This conflation, however, seems to be worsening antisemitism.

Critising Israel not antisemitic
The Jewish Council of Australia spoke in their evidence of “a politicised and divisive discourse which seeks to label any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, thereby increasing antisemitism by linking Jewish identities to the state of Israel and its human rights abuses”.

A central insight I took from the inquiry is that political leaders need to exercise restraint and responsibility in not treating the Jewish community as a monolith (itself an antisemitic trope), but also in how we respond to political demands from pro-Israel Jewish representative groups.

We should undoubtedly treat these groups as important voices and witnesses on antisemitism and recognise their right to lobby, but if we subcontract the development of policy to them,

counterproductive policies focused on criticism of Israel will inevitably be the result.

This has certainly been the case with the appointment of Jillian Segal, someone, as I put to her in our inquiry, with no obvious expertise on the core question of how to reduce racism across a community.

Long before Bondi, Segal played a central role in demanding the banning of pro-Palestine protests from the CBDs of major cities, and she undoubtedly contributed to the divisive and unconstitutional post-Bondi ban on protests.

I challenged Segal in the inquiry on whether this demand was actually pernicious, because such bans would be unconstitutional and calling for them created fear and suggested the Jewish community was deliberately not being protected. She unsurprisingly disagreed.

Shared understanding missing
Another topic at the inquiry was the importance of dialogue at a community level, building shared understanding between communities sitting on each side of the conflict.

I put to a number of witnesses that perhaps this should be a two-way street.

On the one hand, non-Jewish communities are gaining an understanding of Jewish history, why Israel is so important to so many Jewish people and why the tropes of antisemitism are false.

On the other, Jewish people gaining an understanding of Palestinian history, which perhaps might reduce perceptions of antisemitism arising from Palestinian activism.

Segal was asked in this regard whether, “there might be a role for education within the Jewish community about the history of the Palestinian people” and tartly responded, “education is always valuable, but the focus of the plan is protecting Australians from hate, not asking vulnerable communities to adjust their sensitivity to it”.

Similar evidence emerged from Joshua Kirsch, a Jewish community advocate, of whom I asked:

“Do you think there are ways to deepen community understanding on both ‘sides’, if I can use that term, such that there can be a greater alignment of understandings, or greater understanding of the perspective of the other? We’ve heard evidence about perceptions of antisemitism having a pernicious influence themselves, and people interpreting things in a genuine way as antisemitism that is not intended as antisemitism is intended, for example, things that Palestinians might say about their situation.”

He answered, “I think my priority as a Jewish person, and I think as a person who is involved with Jewish organisations, is not to educate Jewish people about why their feelings are not valid.”

Indeed, what became clear in the evidence was that many of the political demands of pro-Israel groups actively

prevent the development of some semblance of a shared understanding of history.

This came up directly in the inquiry when I questioned Waverley Mayor Will Nemesh, whose council has adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which suggests that it is antisemitic to label Israel a “racist endeavour”.

“If you had a Palestinian resident who came to you and said, ‘I was expelled in 1967 from what is now Israel. I’ve been denied a right of return. I think Israel is a racist endeavour,’ is that resident an antisemite?”

Namesh replied, “There are strong views in terms of Israel and Palestine. What is crucial is understanding there are two peoples and both claim connection to the land. I think both are very valid”. 

It seemed to me that the IHRA definition could, in that public exchange, hardly be defended, because to do so would have been to directly and blatantly deny Palestinian history and identity to an absurd degree.

Yet inevitably, it will continue to be advocated for by many Jewish representative groups.

Zionist denials
In that vein, prominent Australian Zionist Alex Ryvchin attended the inquiry and directly denied that any ethnic cleansing had occurred during the formation of Israel.

A level of denialism, contradicted by the historical record, that is difficult to square with a dedicated commitment to inter-community dialogue. The evidence in our inquiry convinced me that ensuring our Jewish community is not conflated with Israel is central to dealing with growing antisemitism.

Callow future Australian political leaders might return from Israel impressed after free study tours, but the difficult, albeit obvious, truth is that Israel is an Apartheid state, founded on ethnic cleansing, a premeditated determination to create a Jewish super majority and then a denial of the right of return.

The world’s expert human rights organisations do not have this wrong.

These facts, the criminality of the destruction of Gaza and Israel’s increasingly expansionist tendencies, mean Israel will continue to attract a growing storm of criticism.

But Australia is a free society, and our Jewish community is allowed to be as supportive of Israel and Zionism as they wish. No other community in Australia is expected to distance itself from a country with which they identify, no matter how illiberal and criminal its government is, and it should never be demanded of any part of our Jewish community.

Ultimately, the only people responsible for the actions of the state of Israel are the officials of that state.

While most people will agree on this statement, the difficulty is found in how broader narratives and policies, including the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, impact across the community.

It is in this fiendishly difficult context that we look to Royal Commissioner Bell to chart a way out of the downward and divisive spiral we seem to be in.

She truly will need the wisdom of Solomon to unpick this knot of growing antisemitism in Australia.

As New Caledonia marks the second anniversary of a spate of unrest and riots that broke out on 13 May 2024, the situation on the ground remains tense, on the political, economic and security levels.

Politically, over the past two years, there have been sequences of discussion between local stakeholders and the French State.

Under the now former Minister for Overseas Territories, Manuel Valls, a series of talks in the suburbs of Paris (Bougival) in July 2025, led to a document that seems to provide a roadmap for more powers for the French Pacific territory, including the prospect of a “State” of New Caledonia, with its associated “nationality”.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

This Bougival process was, however, denounced by the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) which said, after its delegates had initially signed the agreement, that their signatures were withdrawn.

Other parties, including the “moderate” pro-independence PALIKA and UPM, committed to the agreement.

But the legislative byproducts of the Bougival document, including a constitutional amendment and an organic law, could not be enacted, especially as a result of a rebuke from the French National Assembly on April 2 this year.

Through a game of alliances between local and mainland French parties, the rejection of the Bougival-inspired bills came from both left (Socialists) and far-left (La France Insoumise) parties and even from the far-right Rassemblement National (RN).

As French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced earlier this month, after holding a fresh series of talks with local politicians, he had decided that crucial local elections should be held on June 28, most of the local parties have now entered into campaign mode.

The poll, which had been postponed three times since May 2024 (the date originally set) is now once again at the centre of debates, especially on the sensitive question of who will be qualified to cast their votes.

Since the Nouméa Accord was signed in 1998, and as part of its implementation, the electoral roll is currently “frozen”. It means it excludes people who were born or have resided in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted 10 years after November 1998.

There have been talks on an “adjustment” of the sensitive electoral roll to at least include people who were born in New Caledonia and have reached voting age since 1998.

Relaxing this criterion — which was originally designed as a temporary measure to guard against a potential risk of “diluting” the indigenous Kanak population vote — would concern about 10,000 new voters, usually referred to as “the natives”.

But this issue is crystallising again tensions and passions in New Caledonia, just like it did in reaction to an earlier attempted constitutional amendment which, in May 2024, was also perceived as the main trigger for the demonstrations, followed by unrest, staged by pro-independence parties.

But two years on, French Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou and French PM Lecornu, have launched another attempt to “adjust” the provincial roll, focusing on the inclusion of the “natives”.

The provincial elections in New Caledonia elects new members for the three provincial assemblies. Based on the results, they will also determine proportionally, the makeup of New Caledonia’s Congress, the makeup of New Caledonia’s collegial government and its president.

The organic law to integrate the natives is scheduled to be tabled before the Senate on  May 18, and later before the Lower House, the National Assembly.

On the same day in Nouméa, the local Congress will be asked to vote and therefore express its position on the same matter, even though the vote would be non-binding for the French lawmakers.

Under a particularly tight schedule, the proposed organic law is also supposed to be endorsed by France’s Constitutional Council before the end of May 2026.

If it fails, New Caledonia’s provincial elections will still take place, but without any change to the “frozen” electoral roll.

In a special, 30-minute long address dedicated to New Caledonia, on social networks on May 8, Lecornu said the “status quo is not a destiny”.

After the provincial polls, Lecornu intends to bring politicians together again sometime in July to resume wider talks on New Caledonia’s political future.

In preparation for the poll, most of New Caledonia’s political parties and groups, whether pro-independence or pro-France (those who wish New Caledonia to remain a part of France), have already positioned themselves, especially on the electoral roll issue.

In the pro-France camp, there are ructions within leading parties, such as Rassemblement-LR and other components, such as Les Loyalistes or Nicolas Metzdorf’s Génération NC.

Rassemblement president and head of the local government Alcide Ponga’s suggestion that his party should run the provincial elections behind Metzdorf — who is also one of New Caledonia’s two representatives at the French National Assembly — has drawn criticism and several resignations from Rassemblement.

Since August 2024, the FLNKS has lost two of its pillars: the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and the UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia) have formed their own “UNI” (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance) group, mostly based on their disapproval of the hardline approach promoted by the main component of FLNKS, Union Calédonienne and its allied “pressure groups”.

One of those groups, the CCAT (Field Action Coordination Committee), was perceived as the main force behind the protests that later degenerated into riots, in May 2024.

In August 2024, CCAT leader Christian Téin was elected as FLNKS president, even though he was at the time serving a pre-trial jail term in Mulhouse (north-east of mainland France).

Pending the ruling on his case for alleged crime-related charges, which has not happened yet, Téin was allowed to return to New Caledonia.

The purpose of the march was to reaffirm that “the fight is not over” and to pay homage to the Kanak “martyrs” of May 2024.

“We are here because what happened in 2024 is about to happen again,” FLNKS politburo member Henri Juni told the crowd, denouncing what he terms another “passage en force” from the French State.

Juni said the FLNKS now aimed at restoring “maximal unity” within the pro-independence camp to obtain maximal results at the coming provincial elections.

FLNKS’s official stance on the matter is that the electoral roll can be modified, but that this can only take place as part of a comprehensive agreement on the future of New Caledonia.

PALIKA, on its part, held an extraordinary congress over the weekend that mostly concluded that its commitment to the Bougival process, further reinforced by more talks in January 2026, had now de facto come to an end, since it regarded this process as also de facto ended due to the April 2026 French parliament’s rejection.

In view of the June 2026 provincial polls, PALIKA is now calling for “mobilisation” from voters “in order to create the conditions of a ‘rapport de force’ to support our project of full sovereignty in partnership”.

On the sensitive issues of relaxing the restrictions of the electoral roll, PALIKA says in a release published on Tuesday that they are in favour of a readjustment for the “natives”.

One heart, one voice
On the pro-France side, parties are in support of the relaxation of the electoral roll, not only for the “natives”, but also for qualified “spouses”.

A local association named “Un, Coeur, une voix” (One heart, one voice, or OHOV) is campaigning against the minimal inclusion of “natives”, but calls for a wider opening for the roll.

“This is a minimal adjustment that institutionalises a durable exclusion”, OHOV wrote to French President Emmanuel Macron early in May 2026.

OHOV is also preparing to bring the matter to a court, in opposition to the partial “readjustment” of the proposed organic law to eventually contest the future outcome of the provincial polls.

“You have thousands of (New) Caledonians who were born there, or their spouses, … And they cannot vote… This is a matter of justice, of balance also and this is not a great demographic upset, it’s a point of equilibrium”, Minister Moutchou pleaded earlier this week during an interview with French national media France Info.

Security issues
On the security front, French High commissioner Jacques Billant has already enforced a ban on the sale of alcohol between 11 and 17 May 2026. The only exception being the sale of alcohol at New Caledonia’s international airport, Nouméa-La Tontouta.

Billant said this was “to prevent any public order unrest”, or “events and demonstrations” taking place around the symbolic date of 13 May 2024.

Earlier in April, 3-star Lieutenant-General Pierre Poty, who commands all gendarmerie forces in France’s Overseas Territories, told New Caledonian media French forces were “ready to confront fresh unrest, thanks to its prepositioned forces and their armoured components”.

But he said he did not see “any precursor sign of a resumption of violence”.

Meanwhile, in Nouméa, a neighbourhood watch group of so-called “Citizen Resistance Collective” (CRC), said earlier this week they have remained vigilant and would not allow “another May 13 to happen, because the response would be immediate and determined”.

The CRC was formed during the 2024 unrest, mainly to protect their property against burning and looting from protesters.

Early in May 2026, the French High Commission in Nouméa revealed latest statistics showing that in 2025, the number of burglaries on residential properties has risen by 46.7 percent, mostly in the capital Nouméa and its urban surroundings.

Economy
New Caledonia’s economic situation remains a matter for concern.

Most private sector stakeholders have sounded the alarm bell over the past months, despite French assistance being deployed over the past two years, mostly to refinance the construction of destroyed public buildings and infrastructure.

Businesses, employers and employees are up in arms against the current situation which deprives business leaders and investors of the required “visibility” to regain confidence.

Most of them are demanding that a political agreement be reached, which would provide them a minimum of predictability in the long term.

“We don’t believe things are getting better”, New Caledonia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) vice president Stéphane Yoteau told an economic forum earlier this month.

Yoteau said businesses in New Caledonia have now reached “a degree of absolute urgency”.

“The situation is catastrophic, we’re now caught in a vicious circle that is feeding itself: less business (-20 percent), less employment (-12,000), less spending revenues (household budgets have lost 10 percent on average), so there is less consumption, therefore less public tax income, etc. And so on”, the CCI leader explained.

The forum gathered representatives from employers federations MEDEF-NC, CPME-NC (small and medium industries confederation) and FEINC (federation of industries of New Caledonia).

‘A degree of absolute urgency’
They are asking for five emergency measures, including a postponement or a tax holiday for some social contributions.

They said these measure could be drawn from French government assistance and re-directed to help small and medium businesses keep their heads above water.

They say New Caledonia’s economy is “on the verge of collapse” and “economic breakdown”.

“The question today is not even to access financing faculties. There is no more business in New Caledonia. Everything stops,” FEINC President Xavier Benoist told local media.

He said 40 percent of businesses only have a few weeks of visibility and 45 percent have only three months left in terms of cash flow.

Despite the recent announcement from the French PM of a “re-foundation” plan for more than 2 billion euros over the next five years, business leaders are asking for an immediate emergency package to “save New Caledonia’s economy”.

“What we are asking is not a favour, it’s not assistance. It’s something to keep our economic fabric alive. Otherwise, it will continue to go down”, said Sonia Critg, vice-president of the small industries branch of the CPME.

“Not doing anything today amounts to deliberately choosing a much deeper and much more expensive social crisis tomorrow”, she stressed.

On May 11, more than 100 business leaders, employees, unemployed, retired workers, staged a protest march in front of New Caledonia’s government building in downtown Nouméa.

Once again, at the heart of their plea, was a cry for assistance to ease their situation which, they said, was “no longer bearable”.

Minister for Economy Christopher Gygès received a delegation and promised some exemption measures were in the pipeline, especially targeting small and very small businesses.

Recently appointed head of the French inter-ministerial mission for reconstruction, Amaury Decludt recently completed his first mission in the French Pacific territory.

He assured that out of the more than 2 billion euros earmarked by France, about 10 percent was ready to be mobilised, mainly for large infrastructure projects such as one road across New Caledonia’s main island or a project to build bus exchange stations in rural areas.

He said talks were ongoing regarding New Caledonia’s crucial nickel mining sector and has been facing major difficulties over the past few years..

Out of the three companies currently in existence, two (one in the North of the main island, the other in the South) were currently up for sale.

Decludt also said the French government was also in contact with the European Union to persuade Brussels of the appeal of New Caledonia’s nickel.

New Caledonia’s nickel industry has been facing major structural challenges over the past few years, mainly due to the rise of world-class competitors in Indonesia, as well as high costs of production mainly related to high cost of the energy.

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

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.

On the one side, an official Western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.

• READ MORE: Shoot Palestinians, not settlers: Israeli general exposes double standard
• Jonathan Cook’s website
• Other reports on the war on Gaza, Lebanon Iran

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state — armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.

No middle ground possible
Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria.

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?

Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a Western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?

The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own Western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.

Ambassador let slip
In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies — apart from one.

Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”

That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.

So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes — citing the need for cuts — rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.

If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.

For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.

Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.

Israel kills, jourmalists, first responders
Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.

Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.

Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.

Which Western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?

An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel — rather than Russia — carrying them out.

Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets — the BBC, The Guardian and Sky — with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.

Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.”

Hind Rajab headline
That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help.”

In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl — the sole survivor of an earlier attack — who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.

In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive — rather than active — voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery.

The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” Health Ministry — even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead.

The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.

Similarly, the BBC and The Guardian made the decision to humanise Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.

The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 — more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited.

Sickening practice
Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose.

There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the Western media.

Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews Western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved — that is, an accurate — light.

For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.

It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.

Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.

Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy — all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.

Same story since 1948
This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by Western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”.

The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for Western publics, one where our own crimes — and those of our allies — remain invisible to us.

Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.

Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.

That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists.

The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon — in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.

Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.

Colonising occupied lands
That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonise the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.

Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.

Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, The Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described — absurdly — by the paper as “bittersweet”.

Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only levelling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has levelled almost every building in Gaza, too.

But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.

Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another — even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and Western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.

Villify the messenger
If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalised — as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media — then a different strategy is required: villify the messenger.

This is the political task of our times.

The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.

Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” — that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.

Last week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.

Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful.

With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state has set about openly rigging the trials. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories — the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict.

Long-established right
Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit — a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone.

There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them.

It was telling last week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”.

Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone.

Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights — needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published on the author’s website and republished with permission.

“Whoever uses a citizen ill, indirectly offends the state, which is bound to protect this citizen; and the sovereign should avenge his wrongs, punish the aggressor, and, if possible, oblige him to make full reparation; since otherwise the citizen would not obtain the great end of the civil association, which is, safety.”

Swiss jurist Emmerich Vattel expounded this principle in his landmark The Law of Nations, 1758. It is universally accepted today that every State has an obligation to protect its nationals when they are overseas.

As Vattel explained back in the day: this is a duty arising from the bond of nationality. A leader who betrays this principle of citizenship is unworthy of high office. Such a man is New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Late in the night of April 29, a large Israeli force made up of several warships, a prison ship, aircraft, and drones attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of over 60 humanitarian vessels drawn from dozens of nations across the globe.

• READ MORE: Why the Global Sumud Flotilla hasn’t given up in spite of the Israeli attacks
• Gaza Freedom Flotilla Tracker
• Eyes Of Fire Rainbow Warrior educational resource

The Sumud flotilla, in international waters near the Greek island of Crete, was Gaza-bound. The plan was to open a humanitarian aid corridor to the enclave that is suffering genocide at the hands of Israel and its Western allies.

Over 20 vessels were boarded, many dozens of activists beaten, some later requiring hospitalisation. Once the crews were transferred to the prison ship, the vessels were sabotaged and abandoned in international waters.

For the next three days the Israelis beat dozens of the Sumud crew, tortured some, terrorised others with threats of murder, guns in their faces, and performed other unlawful acts including denying essential medication, forcing hostages into stress positions, forcing others to hug the Israeli flag, flooding decks to make sleep impossible, and many other sadistic acts. Several Kiwis were among those who were savagely kicked and punched in the head, back and ribs.

Like many Western governments, New Zealand leaders did absolutely nothing to condemn the attack, nor initiate action against Israel. They did not even offer material support to their citizen-victims once they had been dumped onto Crete without money, adequate clothing or phones.

Rainbow Warrior attack
Let’s be clear: according to international law, sovereignty does not end at the borders of a country. New Zealand suffered the most serious state terrorist attack on its own citizens since the French government bombed and sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985. This time the state was Israel. Both events bear uncanny resemblances and disturbing differences that are immensely consequential.

The similarity: a state terrorist attack on vessels on peaceful humanitarian missions.

The difference: the response to the two events by both the New Zealand governments and media of the day.

In 1985, when news that terrorists had infiltrated New Zealand and attached limpet mines to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior, blasting a hole below the waterline, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, the government, the media and the population of New Zealand went into a frenzy.

I will never forget those momentous times. Within days the culprits had been identified: they were agents of the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French equivalent of the CIA. Two of the large squad of French agents, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were caught. It eventually emerged that this terror plot — which the French impudently codenamed “Opération Satanique” — reached all the way to President François Mitterrand.

The story riveted and animated New Zealand for months. The government relentlessly pursued the villains, eventually forcing the resignation of high officials including defence minister Charles Hernu and the head of the DGSE, Pierre Lacoste. As part of the settlement the French had to pay for a replacement vessel for Greenpeace and the two spies were sentenced to 10 years prison, part of which were spent in New Zealand jails before they were transferred to internment on Hao Atoll. Within two years the French welched on the terms and let their agents return to France for awards and promotions.

Eugene Doyle comments on the flotilla outrage on Neutrality Studies.

The consequences for New Zealand were enormous. New Zealanders were shocked when they learnt Australia helped some of the attackers to escape, and the country’s other closest allies, the UK and USA, uttered not a single word of condemnation to the French. This betrayal and the terror attack itself fundamentally altered New Zealand’s relationship with its Western allies and set it on a path towards an independent foreign policy, the high-points of which was the Nuclear Free Zone Act 1987 and New Zealand’s expulsion from the ANZUS security pact with the US and Australia, both within two years of the attack. It was a time when many felt proud to be New Zealanders.

Shame of reporters
Fast forward 41 years and we have the most serious state terror attack on New Zealand since the Rainbow Warrior bombing. The media, to the shame of reporters I have spoken to off the record, treated it as a minor story and quickly moved on. The government told the victims of this terrorist attack they had to fend for themselves and offered not a breath of condemnation.

No mainstream reporter grilled the government over this inaction.

Prime Minister Luxon’s conduct is reprehensible on so many fronts. Prioritising “strategic alignment” with Israel and the US over the physical safety of New Zealanders is a betrayal of his most fundamental duty.

Even a neo-con like US President Ronald Reagan got the memo: “A government’s first duty is to protect the people,” he said in 1981. Luxon’s failure to defend his citizens — however contemptible it may be — probably does not reach the threshold of “treason” under the Crimes Act 1961 definition (lawyers may disagree) but it does confirm that the man has no place as the leader of a sovereign and democratic nation.

The Prime Minister constantly refers to himself as a “chief executive” or CEO, so I appreciate politics isn’t his strong card. Political philosophy is clearly a weakness too. So permit me, Christopher, a few observations.

Among my first lessons as a tender-faced youth attending political science classes at Victoria University was Thomes Hobbes’s principle that the only reason individuals surrender their liberty to a sovereign is for protection. If certain categories of citizens come to realise the state is willing to see them beaten and abused to please a foreign state, it breaks all sorts of bonds that should not be broken.

In other words, the litmus test for a sovereign democracy is not how the state treats docile citizens and its buddies but how it protects even vociferous dissenters when they are in the hands of a foreign power. The Sumud flotilla crew are anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-genocide; in other words, the opposite side to the Prime Minister and the New Zealand government. They deserve protection and medals not boots in the head and abandonment.

Breaches torture convention
The mistreatment of the Sumud prisoners also breaches the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and meets the threshold for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Kiwis are free now and I know from speaking to some of them that they are shell-shocked and traumatised but also mindful that their ordeal was short and less than the medieval mistreatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli concentration camps today.

As a minimum the New Zealand government should confront the Israelis and demand two things: Non-repetition and Reparations.

Non-repetition is a commitment that such wrongful acts won’t happen again. The government should issue a “Note Verbale” — a formal warning to Israel of real consequences if citizens are in any way abused. They — and all governments — should have done so before the Sumud flotilla sailed.

Secondly, the government should demand Full Reparations — payment for medical bills, evacuation costs, trauma, and damage to property, including the millions of dollars in damage to all the vessels sabotaged, and return of stolen property (including Sean Janssen’s pounamu pendant, a Māori taonga (treasure) that was ripped from his neck by an Israeli stormtrooper).

I was proud to be a New Zealander when our government stood with Greenpeace following the French state terrorist attack in 1985.

Today, I am proud of the men and women of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation, including Hāhona Ormsby, Julien Blondel, Jay O’Connor, Samuel Leason, Mousa Taher, Sean Janssen and Rana Hamida. They keep alive the flame of hope that one day New Zealand will again stand for humanity, international law, peace and an independent foreign policy.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

One of the biggest electricity increases in the history of the Marshalls Energy Company was implemented last week — the first of a two-step tariff increase.

Power charges rose by 6c per kWh across the board for government, business and residential.

On May 18, the price will rise another 5c per kWh, to put in place an 11-cent increase this month, according to a “tariff rate adjustment” announcement posted by the government utility company to its website earlier in the week.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific war on Iran fallout reports

The power rate increases are expected to result in local businesses passing on the costs of the 21 percent electricity rate hike to consumers.

This is the latest economic shock, following skyrocketing gas and diesel prices that have seen gas prices at the pump soar to US$8.40 per gallon, and diesel hit the US$10.35 mark. These led the local taxi industry to implement a 50 percent hike in taxi fares.

While these fuel shocks continue to cascade in this small island nation, the government has responded in an unprecedented way, with more initiatives that put money into the hands of Marshallese citizens.

The Marshall Islands government delayed the power company’s need to raise rates by providing a US$4 million subsidy for its power plant fuel purchase in early April.

Postponed tariff
The aim, said Finance Minister David Paul, was to postpone the power company’s tariff increase to allow time for a new tax break to take effect, putting additional money into the every-two-week paychecks of local workers.

In late April, a few days before the power rates increased, the government’s unprecedented tax cut went into force, giving all workers paid on a biweekly basis US$25.60 more net income per paycheck.

This plan was initiated over a year ago as part of a major revamp of the tax system and was supposed to go into effect next year.

But when the US and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February, the measure that exempts the first US$8,320 from eight percent income tax was fast-tracked to go into effect at the end of April.

Finance Minister David Paul said in an interview this week that workers in Marshall Islands will take home an additional US$665.60 on an annual basis from this initiative. It is the latest demonstration of President Hilda Heine’s government putting money into the hands of individual citizens.

During her first term in office, from 2016-2020, Heine negotiated with the World Bank to support an Early Childhood Development programme to focus on cash transfers to mothers of children from birth to five years of age to counteract severe malnutrition in this age group.

Since its inception in 2019, the World Bank-funded programme is now in its second phase and has injected US$40 million into the project. Mothers receive debit cards associated with their bank accounts at Bank of Marshall Islands and the programme provides regular conditional cash transfers to the mothers to help with needs of their young children.

‘Individual Support Distribution’
As a result of a proposal pushed by Paul when he was an opposition member of Parliament in the 2022-23 period, United States and Marshall Islands negotiators included an “Individual Support Distribution” provision in the Compact of Free Association treaty between the two countries.

This set the stage for the Marshall Islands to become the first nation ever to provide universal basic income quarterly payments to every citizen when the program started last November with a payment of $203 to 33,000 citizens.

Since then, an additional 7000 signed up so the universal basic income programme is paying 40,000 people per quarter at a rate of about $160.

The third quarterly payment for universal basic income recipients is expected to be released at the end of May.

A new social support system that pays a $100 per month stipend to people with disabilities of any age and retirees who are not otherwise eligible for retiree payments was rolled out in April. This is putting cash into the hands of over 1000 Marshallese citizens each month.

The tax reduction for workers, the universal basic income programme, the social support system monthly stipends, and the Early Childhood Development programme are all putting money into the hands of citizens in the Marshall Islands.

Whether these cash programmes are enough to mitigate the inflation caused by the attack on Iran remains to be seen. On top of this, a $9 million grant from the World Bank, negotiated over a week ago, is now pending final board approval, said Paul.

Budgetary support
“This will be a grant for government “budgetary support,” meaning it is to “help us navigate through this crisis,” he said.

The Marshalls Energy Company’s rate hike means that the cash power charges will increase twice in two weeks. The following shows the previous rate compared to what the rate will be per kWh from May 18 once the entire 11 cent increase is factored in.

• Government from 52¢ to 63¢
• Commercial from 51.6¢ to 62.6¢
• Residential from 43.2¢ to 54.2¢

“The $4 million subsidy in April bought some time to allow the tax cut to go into effect,” said Paul. “Any increase is hard for families, but MEC (Marshalls Energy Company) is giving it incrementally.”

Paul added: “There are no easy answers (and) we don’t know how long this (high prices) will go on. Everything is aimed for MEC to land on firm footing and avoid insolvency.”

The Finance Minister said the next universal basic income payment will be out at the end of May, providing $6.5 million to 40,000 Marshallese.

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

Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him.

It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip.

He goes as the leader of a “defeated” nation, against a foe on which the United States has imposed the stiffest sanctions for 47 years. He will be viewed by the Chinese as the President that ended the American empire.

• READ MORE: Iran warns of attacks on US bases; Kuwait intercepts ‘hostile drones’
• Other Palestine, attacks on Iran reports

He thinks he is going as a conquering hero and can wow the Chinese with his empty boasts that America won a huge victory and destroyed Iran. He will be met by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with polite smiles and smirks of the greatest disrespect.

If he has any EQ, he will know that his treatment in Beijing is going to be brutal. The Chinese may even gift him the symbolic white flag of surrender. You will see that in this summit, the US will be very much the junior partner.

Iran will never give this defeated President the satisfaction of a peace agreement which he so desperately needs, and is begging for, before his trip to Beijing. They will make sure he goes to Beijing as a defeated man.

Iran is not after a peace deal, but the total and comprehensive defeat of America as the global hegemon. Iran will see to it that the US gets out of the Middle East totally so that Israel is isolated and the Greater Israel project totally destroyed.

Security architecture shifting
Even as I write, the security architecture of the Middle East is shifting rapidly. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are shifting their allegiances increasingly toward Iran, Russia and China.

Fifty-five years of being America’s poodles are coming to an end. These countries have realised that the US is an unreliable partner and cannot guarantee their security.

The stupid countries are the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, which still hitch their wagons to the Americans and Israel. They have dug their own graves.

History has never witnessed another event as dramatic as the Iran war, where a global power has lost power and prestige in such a short period of 4 months.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

The importance of media freedom is recognised each year globally on May 3. This year the Pacific Island country of Tonga commemorated World Press Freedom Day just a week after one of the most frightening threats to that freedom which took place at a media outlet.

A hooded man brandishing a pistol threatened a female journalist at the newsroom of Kele’a Voice, an FM radio station in Nuku’alofa. The radio station had broadcast a news story about a Tongan deportee serving a life sentence in Tonga for the importation of two kilograms of methamphetamine.

The convicted man was a member of an Australian motorcycle gang known as the Comancheros. He was planning to set up a chapter in Tonga, according to an ABC Foreign Correspondent documentary that included an interview with the man in prison.

• READ MORE: Tongan police investigate journalist threatened at gunpoint after gang-related report
• Other Pacific media freedom reports

The threatened journalist was warned never to broadcast any more stories on the Comancheros and drug trafficking.

The police are still investigating and looking for the man. The incident is to my knowledge the first armed threat ever carried out against any media in Tonga.

The manager of Kele’a Voice, Teisa Cokanasiga, said the incident was a huge threat to their freedom to report the news, and that it was the media’s role to report on stories of public interest.

Veteran journalist Katalina Tohi, president of the Media Association of Tonga (MAT), spoke out strongly: “A climate of fear and intimidation targeting media personnel undermines democratic principles and silences the very voices that hold power to account.”

‘Attack on right to know’
She said that an “attack on the press is an attack on our nation’s right to know”.

“The Media Association of Tonga is appalled by this brazen act of intimidation. Journalists must be able to carry out their work without the threat of violence or death.”

Tohi is also a board member of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA); her condemnation of the Tonga incident is representative not only of MAT’s views, but also those of PINA as the premier news association of the Pacific.

Threats against press freedom are unfortunately ongoing in the Pacific. The incident in Tonga demonstrates that the enemies of press freedom can come from anywhere — not always the government or those in power, but anyone averse to truth and transparency.

Whether it is in Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, French Polynesia or anywhere else in the Pacific, media freedom must be protected, advocated for and exercised to the fullest. Only then can we in the Pacific be assured of the proper exercise of democratic governance, the rule of law, transparency and commitment to truth as foundational pillars of society.

In Tonga, freedom of speech is a fundamental value inscribed in its 150-year-old Constitution. Clause 7 of the Tonga Constitution states:

“It shall be lawful for all people to speak write and print their opinions and no law shall ever be enacted to restrict this liberty.

“There shall be freedom of speech and of the press for ever but nothing in this clause shall be held to outweigh the law of slander or the laws for the protection of the King and the Royal Family.”

Social media issue
In an age when the communication industry has exploded, bringing with it misinformation and disinformation, the dominance of social media platforms has raised an important issue for our profession.

We need to redefine our freedom on the basis of truth, and not just because we have a voice. With the availability of technology such as AI, media freedom may be threatened not so much by forces from outside as from within the industry itself.

Never before has there been a greater emphasis on fact-checking, reflecting a decline in trust and reliability of content. Traditional editing has always included fact-checking, but it has become far more important amid today’s flood of misinformation, AI-generated inaccuracies and manipulated images.

Truth must be the foundation upon which media freedom is built. We are free to speak the truth — we are not free to misinform, deceive or propagate falsehood. There is a huge difference between the freedom to speak truth and the freedom to speak lies.

Freedom of speech is the tool for holding power to account on the basis of truth. And truth matters not only to those who speak but to those who listen; audiences influenced by misinformation train their ears to follow narratives that may be false.

In a world of too many confusing voices, what matters is not simply having a voice but having one that speaks truth — and we cannot be silent about the truth. We must speak, write, print and show, for truth matters.

‘Built on truth’
American civil rights essayist Maya Angelou rightly said: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”. Nothing important is built on silence. If it matters, it must be built on truth. And truth is dependent on a free and fearless media to be its voice.

Finally, I wish to point out a Biblical truth, spoken by Jesus himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8.32)

Here we see a connection between knowledge, truth and freedom — the freedom that is such a vital part of our Pacific cultures and existence.

Kalafi Moala established Tonga’s first independent newspaper and currently manages the online platform Talanoa ‘o Tonga. He was elected president of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) in September 2024. This article was first published by DevPolicy Blog and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

• Pacific Media Watch reports: Tonga dropped five places to 51st out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index.

I was reluctant to enter into journalism because I valued the research and skills attached to the profession, particularly given it’s responsibility to hold the powerful to account.

I was lucky enough to have the legendary Colin McRae as my producer.

He said there are basically three rules. You must be fair, balanced and accurate.

• READ MORE:  Does abolishing the BSA mean the end of NZ’s enforceable media standards in general? — Peter Thompson
• Back to the old Wild West with no media standards? — The Daily Blog
• Open letter sent to Prime Minister and leaders of political parties one week before the decision to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — Gavin Ellis
• World’s most powerful are suing media outlets before stories are even published, says editor — Michael Savage
• Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped
• Other NZ media regulation and self-regulation reports

We did have some wonderful exchanges where I queried how you can be all those things in a blatantly unfair, unbalanced and inaccurate world (you know, one where the dominant lens is rarely Indigenous?).

Sometimes we made slight adjustments to ensure that voices with lived experience or expertise come through. But always — fair, balanced and accurate was the goal. On the odd occasion when I got it wrong, I would be mortified.

I watch aghast at all the people across social media speaking into their microphones and talking absolute rubbish, no restraints or repercussions whatsoever — to get views. Often journalists have to clean up that mess by countering it with facts on their own platforms where we are held to account.

The wholesale ditching of the Broadcast Standards Authority (BSA) probably doesn’t mean anything to anybody struggling to pay their rent. But it is a sign.

Instead of adjusting it to a changing environment, the New Zealand government decided to get rid of the whole thing and let the sector and media companies “self-regulate”. Why not do the same when it comes to health and safety, or dealing with waste?

It is a big deal. So is what’s happening elsewhere to journalism. Actively targeted by hostile military groups and by those who have plenty of money, constantly derided and undermined by those in power.

This is not about me or we journos. It’s about ALL of us.

Anyway, off for a hikoi and a coffee.

Moana Maniapoto MNZM (Ngāti Tūwharetoa/Tūhourangi/Ngāti Pikiao) is an Aotearoa New Zealand singer, songwriter, storyteller, documentary maker, and presenter of Te Ao With Moana. This article was first published on her personal FB page and is republished with permission.

The signals are now coming from both sides of the negotiating table. American sources confirm it. Pakistani mediators confirm it.

The end of the US-Iran war is near, and the terms of that ending will echo across the international order for decades.

Let us be precise about what has happened here.

• READ MORE: Trump says Iran agreement ‘very possible’; Israeli forces bomb Beirut
• Iran’s Foreign Ministry says US proposal to end the war still ‘under review’
• In rare push, US lawmakers demand transparency on Israel nuclear capability
• Other US-Israel war/ceasefire reports

Iran, a nation under sanctions for more than four decades, subjected to assassinations, sabotage, proxy warfare — and finally direct military assault by the most expensively armed forces in human history, backed by a nuclear-armed Israel — has not been defeated.

It has not collapsed. It has not surrendered its sovereignty, its nuclear programme, or its dignity. It stood, absorbed the blows, struck back with precision, and forced Washington to the negotiating table.

That is not a stalemate. That is a victory.

Trump’s 10-day ceasefire declaration in April initially appeared like a pause. However, as days went by, it became clearer it was an exit strategy in search of a face-saving wrapper.

Silence terminal, not tactical
The Americans have not fired a significant shot since. The silence was not tactical. It was terminal.

Consider what Iran has demonstrated to the watching world. It faced two nuclear powers simultaneously, America and Israel, with all the military technology, intelligence infrastructure, and political backing that entails.

Strangely, Iran depleted American missile stockpiles to the point of a three-to-five-year restocking timeline. It struck American bases across seven countries.

It collected tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. It watched its adversary’s approval ratings collapse domestically while its own national resolve hardened.

Trump, the self-proclaimed dealmaker, cannot exit fast enough.

The man who launched this war with the language of dominance is now scrambling for the language of diplomacy, mediated by Pakistan, concluded on terms nobody in Washington would have accepted 12 weeks ago.

History will record this clearly. A civilisation several thousand years old, armed with ingenuity, patience, and righteous resistance, outlasted the last empire’s appetite for a fight it should never have started.

The war is ending. Iran is standing. The world has been watching, and the world has learned something.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

The announcement by New Zealand’s Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith that the government was abolishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) came as no real surprise.

But it leaves a big question hanging: will the news media still be held accountable to basic standards which protect the public interest and the core functions of the Fourth Estate?

Dr Goldsmith has said the Media Council, the industry body dealing with news and online content, “will become the primary regulator for journalism”.

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That only raises more questions. The council primarily oversees standards in print and digital journalism. But unlike the BSA, it has no legal powers of enforcement, and its rulings cannot be appealed through the courts.

Goldsmith rightly points out the digital media environment has “changed dramatically, but our regulatory settings have not kept up”. But that is not the BSA’s fault.

Governments over the past two decades have proposed regulatory updates, but delivered nothing concrete.

Indeed, the Broadcasting Act dates back to 1989. Its definition of “broadcasting” excludes on-demand services but includes “any transmission of programmes […] by radio waves or other means of telecommunication”.

This became the focus of a heated dispute when the BSA signalled it was prepared to hear a complaint about online comments made on independent digital media site The Platform.

Reactions from the political right included accusations of bureaucratic overreach by the BSA, which allegedly was acting “like some Soviet-era Stasi” and making a “secret power grab”.

This significantly misrepresented the complexity of the issues at stake. For some years the BSA has openly advanced the case for regulatory reform — including whether that meant retaining the BSA itself in its current form.

No public consultation
The more fundamental question is whether any standards regime should apply to online media. That was a key issue raised in the media reform proposals put out for public consultation by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in 2025.

These included a proposal to:

modernise the broadcasting standards regime to cover all professional media operating in New Zealand, not just broadcasters. The role of the regulator […] would be revised, with more of a focus on ensuring positive system-level outcomes and less of a role in resolving audience complaints about media content.

This would have entailed a two-tier model: an industry regulator responsible for handling day-to-day complaints about breaches of content standards; and a statutory regulator to oversee systemic issues, with powers to ensure the overall standards regime remained robust.

Even if the BSA were restructured, there was no proposal to simply dispense with it and replace it with an industry self-regulator.

There were a range of responses to the proposal, but policy development certainly appeared to be progressing on the basis that some form of statutory regulator would be retained.

The decision to scrap the BSA may be a politically populist tactic to leverage the case of The Platform in an election year. But it is also democratically indefensible because it has not been subject to any meaningful form of public consultation.

Can the industry self-regulate?
There is no disputing that the regulatory frameworks need to be updated, given the current patchwork quilt of regulations that is full of digital holes. But applying basic standards such as accuracy, balance and fairness on a platform-neutral basis should not be contentious.

These principles are not, as some have claimed, an affront to free speech. They are the basis for upholding freedom of expression in a democracy.

Goldsmith explained the decision to abolish the BSA on the grounds that:

Greater industry self-regulation is the most practical way to level the playing field across platforms, and can provide an appropriate level of oversight to maintain ethical journalistic standards and audience trust.

But eschewing enforceable standards that apply to all media places too much faith in deregulated markets and the industry’s willingness to police itself in the public interest.

It is a regulatory model based on best-case scenarios, where all media players can be trusted to behave professionally, ethically and take their public obligations seriously.

The media system in general is facing unprecedented pressures from audience fragmentation, failing business models, lost advertising revenues and declining public trust.

The opportunity costs of adhering to standards are starting to collide with commercial shareholder imperatives.

That is probably an argument in favour of government funding to support public interest media. But it also demands a regulatory model fit for the digital age, with sufficient power to encourage compliance with basic standards.

Without that, any media operator deciding its commercial interests outweigh the cost of complying could choose to ignore the standards with impunity.

In a media environment where disinformation, fake news and polarising propaganda are already permitted to proliferate, this represents a real risk to democratic processes.

Dr Peter Thompson is an associate professor in media and communication at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article was originally published on The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.