COMMENTARY: By John Hobbs

A friend who lives in Gaza, just posted the following:

From the sea of Gaza, I do not look out . . . I stand on the edge of the world, shouting in a direction that does not hear, and I know that between me and them there is not just a sea, but a silence that is skilled at betrayal.

The New Zealand government has remained silent on the issue of genocide by Israel against the peoples of Gaza, despite numerous other countries publicly condemning Israel’s actions as genocide.

From time to time, the government might call for a “two-state solution”, join allies to issue protestations that the harm inflicted on the Palestinian people must stop, demand a ceasefire, or take part in various resolutions at the United Nations calling for an end to atrocities.

But all the while, the Israeli government rapidly expands its illegal settlements and continues to allow settlers to kill Palestinians under the watch of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Israel is doing everything it can to drive the remaining Palestinian people out of their villages and cities in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The gap between the government’s insincere words and its willingness to take real action mirrors the coalition’s approach to Māori. Here at home, it claims to uphold, honour, and respect the Treaty relationship, all while rolling out policies to dismantle the rights owed to Māori as Treaty partners.

Just as it’s important to hold the government to account for domestic policy, it’s equally important to hold it to account for foreign policy. It’s erroneous to think that the two aren’t intimately connected.

Disgraceful foreign policy
The government’s disgraceful foreign policy approach to Gaza and Palestine was shown up recently during a visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark and the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson.

The women were there on behalf of “The Elders,” an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, working for peace, justice, human rights, and a sustainable planet. They stated: “We believe that the policies of the current Israeli government are leading to Palestine disappearing in plain sight.”

STATEMENT | “Palestine must not disappear.”

Following their visit to the Middle East, Mary Robinson, Graça Machel, @HelenClarkNZ and Hina Jilani call on leaders to act now to stop the disappearance of Palestine at the hands of the Israeli government.

Read the full statement… pic.twitter.com/3crFe2bFnk

— The Elders (@TheElders) July 17, 2026

The evidence for this comes from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In its Humanitarian Situation Report of June 19, 2026, it noted:

“6200 Palestinians, including more than 3000 children, have been forcibly displaced because of settler attacks and related access restrictions across 119 communities. Of these, more than 3,600 people were displaced from 46 communities that have effectively been erased, meaning they were completely emptied of their residents. In 2026 alone, as of mid-June, Israeli citizens, armed and backed by the army, have expelled 2200 Palestinians.”

This is what the person living in Gaza describes as the “silence that is skilled at betrayal”.

Just as it does with Māori, New Zealand uses laudable language to give the appearance of care and decency, but it is a veneer that masks deep insincerity and an unwillingness to take concrete steps to actively protect rights.

There is no doubt the coalition government has “betrayed” the Palestinian people of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. But in fact they’ve done worse. They have potentially made New Zealand complicit in the act of genocide.

Not fulfilled obligations
It is likely that New Zealand has not fulfilled its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, which requires that “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

Chris Sidoti is an international human rights lawyer, an expert on national human rights institutions, and a member of The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a recent address in Wellington, he argued that, in addition to not committing genocide, states had an obligation to prevent it.

“States shall act to prevent the commission of genocide and shall punish the commission of genocide. New Zealand has an international legal obligation to act to prevent the commission of genocide.

“That does not require that genocide actually occur. My prime minister, from Australia, is very keen on saying we can’t say whether this is genocide or not. We’re waiting for the International Court of Justice to decide that issue, which may be in the next five or 10 years.

“That’s not the obligation. The obligation is to act to prevent genocide. It is a prior obligation, and it’s an obligation that is designed to ensure that genocide never exists. So it is an obligation in advance.

“In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued what are called provisional measures, which is like an injunction under your law and ours. And in issuing provisional measures, the Court said that there is a risk that the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention are being or will be infringed. Now, you cannot get a more authoritative case. As of January 2024, all parties to the Genocide Convention have been under an obligation to act to prevent. And the question therefore is, what have you done?”

I recently sought access, through the Official Information Act, to the advice received by the government on New Zealand’s complicity under the Genocide Convention. The government’s decision to withhold the information was reviewed by the Office of the Ombudsman, which in turn supported the government’s right to withhold the advice under legal privilege, as in their view it was not outweighed by the public interest in releasing that information.

How could it not be in the public interest to understand New Zealand’s obligation to act, or otherwise, to prevent genocide?

Labour’s principled stance
Recently, Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson, Vanushi Walters, visited Canberra and met with Noura Saleh, Chargé d’Affaires for the State of Palestine. She is the Palestinian ambassador responsible for the diplomatic relationship between Palestine and Australia and New Zealand.

The last time New Zealand had one-to-one diplomatic engagement with the Canberra-based Palestinian Authority ambassador to New Zealand and Australia was in 2022, when Izzat Salah Abdulhadi visited Wellington at the invitation of former foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta.

That the current government has had no engagement with the ambassador speaks volumes. It’s another example of silence, and silencing.

Sure, New Zealand engages diplomatically at the UN and through its ambassadors in Türkiye and Egypt, but this is all done behind closed doors. The absence of any effort to build a relationship with the Palestinian Authority closer to home is another dimension of betrayal.

What is particularly important as a result of Vanushi Walters’ engagement with Noura Saleh is that she articulated the Labour Party position on Palestine heading into the 2026 election.

Walters stated that Labour was clear about what it would have done if in government now: “We would have recognised Palestine. We would have sanctioned Israel. We would have looked to join South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ. We would have ensured that New Zealand complies with the ICJ opinion on the Occupied Territories.”

This is similar to the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori positions. Both parties have consistently called out Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and criticised the government for failing to prohibit New Zealand entities from engaging with illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Illegal engagement
Such engagement is illegal under international law, as reflected in a UN Security Council resolution (UNSC 2334), which New Zealand co-sponsored in 2016. The resolution states that nations must cease engagement with settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Successive New Zealand governments have ignored this requirement and continue to do so.

Last year, the Green Party championed a private member’s bill, which sought to apply sanctions against Israel for its illegal occupation and rapid expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territories. The bill, modelled on the Russia Sanctions Act 2022, which imposed sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, was supported by Labour and Te Pāti Māori, but the coalition government opposed it.

It is time to support those political parties that more accurately reflect the values of compassion, kindness, and human decency, as expressed through tikanga Māori.

John Hobbs has been a career public servant, working for various government departments and ministers. He has a Master of Commerce (Hons) in Economics from the University of Auckland and a Master of Arts (Thesis) with Distinction in Peace and Conflict Studies, from the University of Otago. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa, The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies — Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, Otago University.

This article was first published by E-Tangata and is republished with the author’s permission.

On June 6, I published a Political Bytes post criticising the mis-named “Free Speech Union” (FSU) for opposing the exercise of free speech, in the context of fulfilling his duty of care for student wellbeing, by Otago University vice-chancellor Grant Robertson when raising a personal concern: Opposing free speech in practice.

In my words:

“The self-styled Free Speech Union has complained to Otago University over its vice-chancellor Grant Robertson both expressing his personal views on a NZ First parliamentary bill seeking to define what is a woman and what is a man and for his assessment on the 2026 Budget as it impacted universities.”

• READ MORE: Martyn Bradbury says he faces prison over blog posts; Free Speech Union ‘not across’ it
• The Daily Blog: We have secretly been taken to court and I’m facing 6 months in prison: We can’t tell you who, how, why or what
• The Daily Blog: Why I am willing to go to prison tomorrow for Free Speech — Martyn Bradbury

I concluded the post as follows:

“Attacking Grant Robertson for exercising his duty of care for student wellbeing crassly exposes the cloak of hypocrisy that the Free Speech Union hides beneath.

“It would be the honest thing for the Free Speech Union to rename itself as the ‘Selective Free Speech Union’ or the ‘Free Speech for the Political Right Union’. Just saying!”

Sinister FSU attack on investigative journalist
As sceptical as I was about the credibility of the FSU’s claimed commitment to genuine free speech, I never expected nearly two months later its sinister attack on an investigative journalist for being investigative in her questions to Health Minister Simeon Brown.

The attack was reported (paywalled) by The Post deputy editor Luke Malpass (July 28):  FSU attacks reporter for asking health minister questions.

The context was what I have previously described in my health systems blog Otaihanga Second Opinion (July 2) as a purging of the Medical Council leadership: Health minister purges Medical Council leadership.

At the heart of the issue
At the heart of the issue was the minister’s express ideological opposition to the council’s recognition of the importance of doctors understanding “cultural competence” or “safety” when caring for and treating patients.

But it went further. Brown is proposing a law change requiring the Medical Council and the other health regulatory authorities, such as the Nursing Council, to carry out government policies.

In other words, end the arms-length independent relationship between health practitioner regulatory authorities and government by enabling political interference in their work thereby undermining their prime statutory purpose of ensuring public safety.

Daring to ask questions
Luke Malpass reports that the day before publication of his article (Monday, July 27) The Post’s national affairs editor Andrea Vance emailed a series of questions to the Health Minister about his appointment of Dr Manoja Kalupahana to the Medical Council.

This had been announced on the Beehive website earlier that day (gazetted the previous Friday).

In his words:

“Before an answer was received and within three hours of the query going to the minister, the Free Speech Union issued a press release attacking Vance for even asking the questions.”

Vance’s questions were about the process of the appointment, rather than the suitability or political views, of Dr Manoja Kalupahana.

Again in his words:

“They focused on the appointment process: whether Brown was aware of her previous public profile before appointing her to the Medical Council; whether officials, Health New Zealand or the council were consulted; whether any concerns were raised about public confidence; and whether the minister had discussed the appointment with the Free Speech Union.”

These were all good questions by a quality investigative journalist. Consequently it was surprising that later the same day the FSU, to whom the minister’s office had promptly forwarded her questions, released a media statement stridently attacking her for her action.

Malpass described FSU’s attack as accusing Vance of an attempt to put Dr Kalupahana’s “lawful political views” on trial and warning against ideological tests for public appointments.

However, none of Vance’s questions involved Dr Kalupahana’s political views. They were about the appointment process, including a suspicion about FSU involvement.

For context, in 2023, Dr Kalupahana’s social media activity became the subject of a workplace complaint and media scrutiny.

A Stuff reporter had contacted her seeking comment about her online posts and their relevance to her role as a doctor. However, no story was published.

Nevertheless Malpass reports that the controversy “…became a cause célèbre for the FSU, which argued it showed health professionals could face consequences for expressing lawful opinions outside their clinical roles”.

Also published on July 28 was Andrea Vance’s own paywalled piece on the issue providing further context and background: Doctor at centre of ‘free speech’ row appointed to Medical Council.

Dr Kalupahana was, in fact, one of four new announced ministerial appointments to the council. As it turns out, she is a member of the FSU. Another doctor appointed to the council, Dr Roderick Mulgan, is on the FSU governing board and former president.

The fallout from the controversy over the Health Minister’s appointment process and FSU’s defence of it continued in Stuff (as the owner of The Post) later the same day with an article by senior political reporter Anneke Smith: Health minister accused of using ‘personal troll farm’ to attack reporter.

And there is more
The FSU got it badly wrong. Andrea Vance is not one for being intimidated into silence.

On July 29, she followed up with another paywalled article that revealed political intrigue (arguably scheming) into the escalating controversy: FSU lobbies health minister over regulating doctors.

In her words:

“A former chairperson of the Free Speech Union (FSU) — who lobbied Health Minister Simeon Brown over proposed changes to how doctors are regulated — has been appointed to the Medical Council.

“Roderick Mulgan, who remains a board member of the FSU, was one of four new members appointed to the council by Brown last week. That includes senior Auckland anaesthetist Manoja Kalupahana, whose anonymous social media activity became the focus of a high-profile FSU campaign. The others are Derek Sherwood and Andie Cook.

“The appointments come as Brown moves to give ministers greater powers over how doctors are regulated and the rules they must follow. He has also overhauled the Medical Council, declining to reappoint its chairperson and deputy in June.

“In May 2025, Mulgan and Kalupahana met with Brown in Auckland as part of an FSU delegation to discuss concerns about freedom of speech and conscience rights in healthcare, including cases involving doctors facing disciplinary action.

“A Health Ministry briefing prepared for the meeting identified Mulgan as FSU chairperson at the time. It recorded that the organisation wanted to discuss its correspondence with the Minister, the Government’s consultation on health workforce and patient prioritisation, and cases before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal.

“The group argues health regulators have moved beyond their role by requiring practitioners to engage with particular views on issues such as Māori health inequities, colonisation and gender.

“The meeting was requested by the FSU and included then chief executive Jonathan Ayling, and liaison adviser Stephanie Martin.”

Spilling the ideological beans

Spilling the beans is an often used idiom for when secret information is released, usually inadvertently.

In a paywalled article published in NZ Doctor (July 28) health journalist Alan Perrott reports a possibly hyped FSU spilling its own ideological beans.

Perrott attributes this “bean-spilling” (my word, not his) to the above-mentioned Dr Mulgan (former FSU president and current board member) as follows:

“Stating that Māori are ‘disadvantaged because of systemic biases in the system’ represents a ‘well-known hard-left view’, says specialist GP and newly appointed Medical Council member Roderick Mulgan.

“Such a view holds ‘that there are nebulous biases in the world and in the health system that somehow or other undermine the welfare of Māori just because they are Māori,’ Dr Mulgan says.

“Dr Mulgan made the comments to The Platform host Sean Plunket on 25 March while discussing three draft consultation documents on cultural safety and competence and hauora Māori released by the Medical Council. 

“Dr Mulgan, also a lawyer and international director of the Free Speech Union, is one of four new appointments confirmed yesterday by Health Minister Simeon Brown, six weeks after Mr Brown changed the authority’s leadership. 

“On the consultation documents, Dr Mulgan says: ‘Whether or not these perspectives [as laid out in the documents] are valid or reasonable, it is highly contested. 

“’So, there are plenty of people who will say yes they are, and there will be plenty of people saying no they’re not, and it is not for regulatory bodies to pick sides in a contested ideological debate and mandate that its members, by reason of being members, must support these perspectives.’ ”

Dr Mulgan is at the very least as ideological as those he criticises are. The fact that he used the hard rightwing The Platform to make his claims is indicative.

Linking colonialisation in different ways to Māori health inequities is not confined to a  “hard-left” (whatever that means), well-known or otherwise.

While this link is certainly not a unanimous view, it is a view shared by many well-beyond the “hard left”, including those of “soft-left”, liberal and compassionate conservative opinions.

Perrott includes a response to Dr Mulgan from another specialist GP, Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen:

“…the statements made by his colleague are ‘troubling and disturbing’ and in denial of systemic biases within healthcare. 

“We need better representation on the Medical Council than the ideological perspective he brings.” 

Where does the FSU stand on a threat to real free speech?
There are many issues raised in the above discussion, particularly the threat to patient safety by the political undermining of the statutory health practitioner regulatory authorities.

However, that is more appropriate for my health system blog Otaihanga Second Opinion.

In this post I focus on the hypocrisy and political tactics of the FSU. Regardless of its name, an organisation that attacks an investigative journalist for investigating a subject that is contrary to the organisation’s political ideology is itself an opponent of free speech.

Instead, it is nothing more than a mask for hard-rightwing trolls. But now an opportunity presents itself for FSU to partly (ever so slightly) redeem itself.

“Bomber” Bradbury is the prolific editor of the leftwing The Daily Blog. On August 2 he reported a particularly vicious legal threat: Secretly threatened with potential six months imprisonment. [Disclosure: The Daily Blog republishes with permission my blog posts]

His blog has been served legal directives under pain of six months imprisonment or a $5000 fine to censor four blog posts. He describes the intimidatory threat this way:

“We can’t tell you who is doing this.

“We can’t tell you why it’s being done.

“We can’t tell you how it’s being done.

“And we can’t tell you what has been censored.”

Bradbury is constrained by legal secrecy but hopes that all these matters can be exposed in an Auckland District Court hearing scheduled for August 4. A ruling allows media to cover this in the courtroom.

Bomber Bradbury is not noted for quietness. In fact, few can surpass him for noise. But now something has; the deafening silence of the Free Speech Union over this nasty threat to free speech makes the editor of The Daily Blog mute by comparison.

Why is this so? Is it simply because the FSU is a hard rightwing troll organisation? Or is it something even more sinister? Just asking.

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

As +972 Magazine’s audience engagement manager, social media is a huge part of my job. I use it daily — not only to promote the magazine’s articles, but also to gauge audience reactions, opinions, and ideas regarding our work.

We simply cannot escape using social media: Most of our readers are there, and it is where millions of people around the world get their news and analysis.

But doing this work also puts me in the position of seeing how social media reacts to our content. I don’t mean the people there; I mean the hidden hand that is the platforms’ algorithms and policies.

• READ MORE: +972 Magazine independent journalism from Israel-Palestine

In other words, I see how some posts remain hidden from much of our audience, while others spread far and wide.

Among Palestinians, and those who write and report on Palestine, it has been common knowledge for years that social media platforms are not neutral, and have in fact actively fought against Palestine-related content — even to the point of limiting posts that merely contain the word Palestine in Arabic.

Palestinians and Arabs alike have responded to this by trying to trick the system: misspelling the word Palestine, or hiding the word shaheed (martyr) by inserting periods and commas.

For the most part, this suppression has remained anecdotal. No one knew exactly how these systems work or what the algorithms prioritise. People could describe the censorship they were experiencing, but evidence of a formal policy was difficult to come by.

Thanks to an extensive new Palestinian-led investigation into Meta, however, that is no longer the case.

Five years of deliberate erasure
7amleh (pronounced “Hamleh”), the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, gathered more than 3500 documented cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over the past five years, on platforms including Facebook and Instagram. They gave this phenomenon a name, “platformicide,” describing the deliberate erasure of Palestinian existence and narratives in the digital sphere.

On the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, I spoke to 7amleh’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, about what exactly they discovered — and how we can fight back.

Meta is censoring Palestinian content, and now we have proof

The consequences, especially in Gaza, have been life or death. Social media is one of a few avenues for Gazans to document attacks, issue warnings, and communicate information that can determine whether others survive.

Yet Meta has repeatedly restricted their accounts, blocked them from live-streaming, and removed footage under policies related to violence or dangerous organisations, even when the material was clearly journalistic.

Although facing an uphill battle, 7amleh’s work shows that these policies can and should be challenged. To do so, Nashif argues, civil society must develop methods of holding technology companies accountable — methods grounded not in anecdote, but in evidence.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nadim Nashif, and subscribe to The +972 Podcast wherever you listen.

Republished from +972 magazine.

America’s entire emergency oil reserve now covers 16 days. Sixteen.

The world spent 40 years building a shock absorber for exactly this war — and burned it down in five months.

What comes next isn’t just a higher petrol price. It’s a bill mailed to every fragile economy on earth, at the worst possible moment to receive one.

• READ MORE: US bombs Iran as IRGC and Houthis claim attacks on ships in Hormuz, Red Sea
• Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb
• Other Lim Tean articles

The economic consequences of war
In 1919, Keynes wrote his famous polemic — The Economic Consequences of the Peace — a warning that the true cost of the Treaty of Versailles would not be paid at the signing table, but for years afterward, by economies nobody had bothered to examine while the ink dried.

The world was so consumed by the drama of the settlement that it missed the mechanism that would define the following decade.

We are making the same mistake now, in reverse. Everyone is watching the war. Almost no one is watching the buffer.

The numbers that matter
Since February, the world has been drawing down oil reserves it spent four decades accumulating. International Energy Agency (IEA) member states held 4.1 billion barrels in strategic reserves in 2004. By 2026, that figure has fallen to 1.8 billion.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve — 414 million barrels at the war’s outset — had fallen to roughly 316–320 million by mid-July, its lowest level since 1983. American crude inventories overall, reserve included, are at their lowest since 1984.

Put that in terms people can actually feel: at America’s total daily consumption of just over 20 million barrels a day, today’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve alone covers barely 16 days. Sixteen days. That is the entire emergency margin behind the world’s largest economy — before commercial stockpiles and ordinary imports, which normally do the heavy lifting, have to carry the load on their own.

This is not incidental. It is the entire reason the war has felt, to most people, survivable.
Governments made a deliberate choice: burn the buffer, keep prices tolerable, buy time for diplomacy.

in March, the IEA itself coordinated the largest emergency release in its history — 400 million barrels. It worked. Prices that could have spiralled were instead managed.

The US bombs Iran for the 12th consecutive night.

Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, says Tehran’s defence doctrine is an “eye for an eye”.

Follow our LIVE coverage: https://t.co/kGUykdVSBy pic.twitter.com/rvYFPnzhph

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 23, 2026

But a reserve is not a subsidy. It is a loan against the future, and the bill is now due. The IEA estimates that refilling what has been drawn down will require an extra one million barrels a day of supply, sustained, for three years — a claim on the market running through 2029.

That is not a wartime cost. That is a peacetime cost, arriving after the guns fall silent, exactly as Keynes argued the costs of Versailles would.

The collision nobody is pricing
Here is the trap. The refill has to happen at scale, which means sustained buying pressure on oil for the rest of the decade. At the same time, markets are expecting a return to surplus once the war ends. Cheap oil and an aggressive refill bid cannot coexist for long — every government rushing to rebuild its stockpile at once will bid up the very barrels it is trying to buy cheaply.

The floor under oil prices for the next three years is being set in storage tanks, not on a trading screen.

What I see from the insurance market
I spent three and a half decades in marine war risk and P&I before any of this made headlines, and the insurance data tells the sharpest version of this story. Before the war, hull war-risk cover for a Hormuz transit cost roughly 0.1–0.15 percent of a vessel’s value — background noise.

During the worst weeks, that spiked as high as 4 percent for seven days of cover on some routings — a 4000-fold multiple on a single VLCC transit, turning a $150,000 cost into $5–7 million.

Rates eased when the US-Iran MoU was signed in June. Then three vessels were attacked in Omani waters this month, two UAE supertankers were struck in the strait itself, and rates snapped back to roughly 5 percent as the new market norm.

That volatility is not a shipping story. It is a leading indicator. War risk premiums move days before oil prices catch up, because underwriters are pricing the war in real time, with their own capital, before anyone else has to.

Right now they are telling you the ceasefire architecture is fragile and the reserve cushion behind it is nearly gone.

What this means for the price of everything
This is where the story stops being about oil and starts being about you. A three-year refill bid of a million extra barrels a day, colliding with markets that expected relief once the shooting stopped, does not stay in the energy pages. It moves into diesel, into freight, into fertiliser, into the price of the food on the shelf and the electricity bill in the post.

Every supply chain on earth still runs, in the end, on the price of a barrel of crude.

And it is landing on an economy that had no slack to begin with. Global growth going into this war was already sluggish — most major economies limping along on thin margins, high debt loads, and a decade of accumulated fragility. Layer a multi-year oil-price floor and a cost-of-living shock on top of that, and the honest question is no longer whether we are heading for a mild recession.

It is whether the world has the reserves — financial as much as physical — to stop a downturn like this becoming something considerably deeper. I do not say that to be alarmist. I say it because the people who priced the 4000-fold jump in war-risk insurance premiums were not being alarmist either. They were simply the first to see what was coming.

The peace will not be peace
When the war ends — and it will end — the headlines will move on. They always do. But the refill bid doesn’t end with the war. The insurance market’s memory doesn’t reset with a ceasefire. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s physical withdrawal infrastructure, built in the 1970s for a 25-year lifespan and now pushed well past it, doesn’t repair itself.

Keynes’s argument was never really about Versailles. It was about the danger of a world that mistakes the signing of an agreement for the resolution of its underlying economics.

We are about to make exactly that mistake again — celebrating a ceasefire while the real invoice, three years long and running through 2029, quietly gets mailed to every economy that depends on oil.

The war will end. The economic consequences of the war will not.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Israel’s Environment Ministry has removed the protected status of Nile crocodiles to allow them to be used in a moat guarding the country’s largest detainment camp, a move requested by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The story has been widely covered by Israel’s English-language press, alternative media worldwide, and news sites in non-English-speaking countries.

But, in the Anglosphere, there is a virtual news blackout.

• READ MORE: Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat — Democracy Now!
• Israel plans ‘alligator Alcatraz’ for Palestinian prisoners
• Other Israeli prison reports

Searching within New Zealand and Australian internet domains yields nothing. In the UK, only The Telegraph has reported the story; the BBC and The Guardian do not deem it newsworthy.

In the US, the only report I have seen was by the progressive independent outlet Democracy Now!

It feels nigh on impossible that a similar event in Putin’s Russia, Iran, or any number of dictatorships would go unreported by the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Age, The New Zealand Herald, or the English-language newswires.

Democracy Now’s headline — ”Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat“ — is about as clickbaity as hard news gets.

Barbarism as state policy
Veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: “National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is taking Israel to the next stage in its development: barbarism as a legal and explicit state policy.”

“Sadism is no longer just for deviants; it is the new political correctness,” he continued.

“After years in which barbarity and sadism toward Palestinians were hidden as something shameful and repressed — and mainly as the exception to the rule — Ben-Gvir is moving them to centre stage to great applause from some of the crowd and silence from the rest.”

A relative in Israel messaged me asking whether I had seen the crocodile story — the “true reality in Israel”. She included this translated snippet from the breaking news story.

“Exclusive: The Crocodile Snatch: The Nature and Parks Authority opposed the establishment of Ben-Gvir’s crocodile prison, but Environmental Minister Silman amended the law, paving the way for the transfer of the animals. Among other things, Silman determined that the Nile crocodile is a ‘cultivated wild animal’ that can be raised within a security entity.”

That Ben-Gvir is monstrous is not news. The Australian and New Zealand governments, along with those of the UK and Canada, have banned him from entering their countries for inciting pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank and promoting the expansion of illegal settlements.

But the monstrousness of Israel’s gulags is newsworthy — if underreported.

18,500 Palestinians detained
In March, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report stating: “Since October 2023, more than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied Palestinian territory, including at least 1500 children. Thousands remain in detention without charge or trial. Many have been forcibly disappeared. Nearly 100 detainees have died in custody.

“Detainees have been abused in unfathomable ways, including rape with bottles, metal rods and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, and being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.”

Albanese said: “A system that has long been used to dominate, degrade and break Palestinians has evolved and hardened into state doctrine.

“It is defended by politicians, rationalised by legal institutions, sanitised by media narrative and tolerated by governments that continue to arm and shield Israel.”

The name of Ketziot Prison, where the crocodiles are to be deployed, will be familiar to some from news reports of the abuse of Freedom Flotilla volunteers held there earlier this year.

News of their mistreatment and images of Ben-Gvir abusing them cut through the Western media fog and prompted rare condemnations from Western governments.

Israel’s ambassadors in Wellington and Canberra were called in for ritual reprimands.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong described the images as “shocking and unacceptable”.

Unacceptable face
Similar statements and actions were made by the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Canada. Ben-Gvir is the unacceptable face of an apartheid regime that all those countries accept and, to differing degrees, abet.

The detained Flotilla activists repeatedly pointed out that their treatment — as appalling as it was — was minor compared with what Palestinian prisoners endure daily.

There was nothing like the same reaction from Western governments when a video of Ben-Gvir taunting imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti emerged in August last year.

Following the visit, Ben-Gvir reportedly said: “We entered Marwan Barghouti’s cell and he was crying in terror. I told the jailers to keep treating them like that,” adding, “When we enter Israel’s prisons, the Palestinian prisoners piss their pants when they see us, they piss themselves out of fear.”

The video was reported by mainstream media outlets but not as prominently as the one showing the abuse of the international activists.

Ben-Gvir is not just a comic-book villain; he is a high-ranking member of the Israeli cabinet. He has a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the convicted terrorist who killed 29 Palestinians, hanging in his Knesset office, and he himself acts as a state terrorist, marshalling the full force of Israel’s prison system and police in his campaign against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Supporters of Israel argue that the country attracts a disproportionate amount of bad publicity.

‘Great negativity’
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that the ABC’s coverage of Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel.”

Segal claimed there had been a “disproportionate” number of critical stories.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

The Jerusalem Post reported last week that Israeli defence-tech start-ups working with the Defence Ministry raised nearly US$3 billion in the first six months of 2026 — three times the amount raised in all of 2025.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and its bombing and assassination campaigns in the war on Iran have been a boon for the self-described startup nation.

Gaza is history’s first AI-assisted genocide, and our media are paying it too little attention, not too much.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has a Substack: Towards Democracy.

Ten nights of bombing. Zero endgame. And now a second chokepoint just slammed shut.

This is what happens when you resume a war without a strategy.

Tuesday brought the clearest proof yet that what we are watching in the Gulf is not a series of isolated flare-ups, but a coordinated strategic encirclement — one I have been calling the “security belt” thesis since Iran’s Quds Force commander first used that exact phrase in June.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan; says 2 tankers in Hormuz ablaze
• Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb
• Other War on Iran reports

What happened today?
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps struck US radar and air-defence installations across the Gulf, claiming the destruction of a missile-defence radar and an F-15 sheltered in Jordan, and hitting Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain.

Senior Hamas official Khaled Meshaal has congratulated Khalil al-Hayya on being named as the head of Hamas’s political bureau.

LIVE updates https://t.co/LRy6Ugekjx

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 21, 2026

This is now the 10th consecutive night of US strikes on Iran, launched at the direction of President Donald Trump, with CENTCOM confirming further attacks on Iranian air defence, radar, missile and drone sites.

But the more consequential news is at sea. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy intercepted and stopped two tankers in the Strait of Hormuz it labelled “non-compliant” — language that should alarm every shipowner and P&I underwriter reading this.

Iran is no longer simply harassing traffic through Hormuz. It is asserting a compliance and inspection regime over the strait — a direct challenge to the transit passage rights guaranteed under UNCLOS.

Hormuz is now estimated at roughly 89 percent interdiction under Iranian naval enforcement.

And now, the second door has closed

Yemen’s Houthis announced on Monday a full maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the 29km chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, carrying roughly 12 percent of global trade and a quarter of the world’s container traffic.

The Houthis frame it as retaliation for the Saudi blockade of Yemen and a strike on Sanaa airport. But the timing is what matters strategically: Saudi Arabia had spent the last four months rerouting the bulk of its crude exports westward through the East-West pipeline to Red Sea terminals — precisely because Hormuz was already closed.

That escape valve is now being shut too.

For the first time in this conflict, Saudi Arabia sits trapped between two blocked corridors. Brent crude has surged roughly 30 percent off its July lows, trading near US$88 a barrel.

The Legitimacy Principle at work
This is the Dual Hegemony thesis made visible: Iran holding the eastern gate at Hormuz, its aligned Houthi forces holding the western gate at Bab al-Mandeb — two actors, one strategic architecture, squeezing the Arabian Peninsula from both flanks regardless of how tightly Tehran and Sanaa formally coordinate operations.

Whether or not the two theatres are directly commanded in tandem, the effect is the same: nearly a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply now sits hostage to a war that shows no sign of a negotiated off-ramp.

For the war-risk and P&I markets, the signal is unmistakable. This is no longer a single-chokepoint risk to be hedged and rerouted around. It is a dual-corridor structural crisis, and premiums, routing, and insurer exposure will need to be repriced accordingly.

The question now is not whether the world absorbs a Hormuz shock. It is whether it can absorb both at once.

Washington’s self-inflicted trap
But there is a second story here, and it is arguably the more damning one: what this does to Trump’s position.

Trump did not have to resume this war. A Memorandum of Understanding was on the table only weeks ago — his own administration’s negotiated off-ramp. It collapsed because Iran acted to defend the one asset that actually matters to it, control of Hormuz, and Trump’s team, led by Vance’s negotiators, signed language loose enough for Tehran to exploit.

Trump himself complained this week that Iran “always breaks” agreements — an extraordinary line from a president whose own record of walking out on international agreements is well known. He chose escalation. Nobody forced his hand.

BREAKING:

President Trump says Iran always breaks agreements, so the U.S. will strike them hard. pic.twitter.com/waWiTxZW08

— Litest (@Litest) July 13, 2026

Ten consecutive nights of strikes later, American service members have already been killed in Iraq and Jordan, and reporting from inside Washington describes an administration that still cannot articulate what victory looks like.

Trump told Americans in a primetime address that the US is “winning big” without once explaining what winning means or how the war ends. There is no regime-change theory of the case. There is no ceasefire architecture on the table. There is only the tempo of the bombing.

Now Washington’s strategic dilemma has just deepened, whether or not that was the intent. Every American strike that fails to reopen Hormuz makes the war look more like a stalemate Trump cannot afford politically. Every escalation invites further retaliation against the very Gulf infrastructure and shipping lanes the US campaign is supposedly designed to protect.

And a US president who staked his credibility on ending wars quickly now finds himself presiding over a widening one, with rising body counts, a global oil market absorbing repeated shocks, and no visible theory of how any of this concludes.

This is the cost of resuming a war without first answering the most basic question any commander is supposed to answer: what does the end state look like?

Months ago, Trump promised this war would last “four to five weeks at most.” It has now dragged on far longer, and the strategic picture is worse, not better, than when he started.

That is not an accident of geography. That is the price of impulse dressed up as resolve.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Strip away the communiqués about the embattled Strait of Hormuz and look at the data, because in maritime commerce the data never lies.

Before the war began in late February, roughly 130 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz every day. It is the aorta of the global energy system — a fifth of the world’s oil, a third of its seaborne LNG.

Then came the American campaign, announced in March with a simple promise: bombing would reopen the strait.

• READ MORE: Ship ablaze in Hormuz Strait after attack – crew rescued
• Two US soldiers dead in Jordan – Trump’s ego has restarted a war he cannot win
• Other War on Iran reports

The verdict of the tankers
Consider what four months of that promise has produced. Over the three days of July 10–12, a total of 73 vessels crossed– fewer than 25 a day.

On July 12, the day CENTCOM completed its fourth strike wave in a single week, transits collapsed to 11. By last Thursday and Friday, shipping data showed just three commodity vessels crossing in 24 hours, with not a single VLCC or LNG carrier transiting for two consecutive days.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that no vessel above 10,000 deadweight tonnes has used the Oman-side “Southern Highway” — the very corridor the Americans coordinate and champion — with its transponder on since July 7.

Read that sequence again. More bombs, fewer ships. Every single escalation wave since March has deepened the shutdown. The strikes are not failing to achieve their objective. They are producing its opposite — measurably, in Kpler and Lloyd’s List data, week after week.

The tanker market has voted with its keels.

Chabahar and the CENTCOM confession
Last week the campaign reached Chabahar, where American forces destroyed the maritime control tower at the Shahid Kalantari port. The stated rationale: the tower was an IRGC surveillance node, and its destruction “protects freedom of navigation”.

Examine that claim on the map before you examine it in law. Chabahar sits on the Gulf of Oman — outside the Strait of Hormuz entirely. It is Iran’s only deep-water port with direct access to the Indian Ocean, the one Iranian harbour whose traffic never touches Hormuz at all.

It is also the port India has spent a decade and hundreds of millions developing as its corridor to Afghanistan and the North-South Transport Corridor. Striking it does nothing to reopen Hormuz. It does, however, tell New Delhi exactly how much its equities weigh in Washington’s calculus.

And a port’s traffic control tower is the classic dual-use facility. Whatever surveillance function it may have served, it is also the instrument that sequences civilian shipping safely in and out of a harbour.

Destroying it does not enhance safe navigation in those waters; it degrades it. Iranian maritime domain awareness, meanwhile, rests on coastal radar, drones, dhows and AIS itself. One tower blinds no one.

But the deepest problem is in CENTCOM’s own language. The strike, we are told, protects freedom of navigation “for all vessels, except for ships attempting to violate the ongoing US naval blockade against Iran.”

CENTCOM: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWER DIRECTLY DEGRADES IRGC’S ABILITY TO COORDINATE ATTACKS ON INNOCENT CIVILIAN CREW MEMBERS. FURTHERMORE, THE STRIKE PROTECTS FREEDOM OF NAVIGATION IN REGIONAL WATERS FOR ALL VESSELS, EXCEPT FOR SHIPS ATTEMPTING TO VIOLATE THE ONGOING U.S. NAVAL…

— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) July 17, 2026

I have practised in the law of the sea for more than 35 years, and I can tell you that sentence is a confession. Freedom of navigation under UNCLOS is not selective. It cannot be granted to some flags and withdrawn from others at the discretion of one navy.

A blockade is not the protection of free navigation — it is its suspension. What the United States is defending in Hormuz is not the principle of open seas. It is a claim to decide who sails. That is not freedom of navigation. That is contested control, dressed in the vocabulary of the thing it replaced.

This is the Legitimacy Principle in its purest form: a rule becomes real only at the point of enforcement. Washington says the strait is open. The point of enforcement is the strait itself — and at the point of enforcement, three ships crossed in a day.

What the underwriters know
Here is what no CENTCOM statement will ever change, and it is the lesson of a career spent in war risk and P&I.

Straits are not opened by admirals. They are opened by underwriters.

A shipowner does not ask whether the US Navy has declared a corridor safe. He asks what his war risk premium is, whether his P&I cover survives the transit, whether his crew will sail, and whether his charterer will pay.

War risk premiums respond to kinetic activity in the area — full stop. It does not matter whose ordnance is falling or whose infrastructure is burning. Every strike, on either side’s assets, keeps the Strait of Hormuz uninsurable at commercial rates. And an uninsurable strait is a closed strait, whatever the press releases say.

This is why the bombing cannot work even on its own terms. The campaign’s theory is that destroying Iranian capabilities restores confidence. But the underwriter does not price Iranian capabilities. The pricing is based on violence — and the campaign itself is the violence.

The second chokepoint
And now the war has done what escalation always does: it has multiplied the battlefield.

On July 16, Reuters reported — from three sources — that Iran has instructed the Houthis to stand ready to close Bab el-Mandeb if the United States strikes Iranian power infrastructure, as Trump threatened on July 14.

JUST IN:

Iran has reportedly told the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait if the United States attacks power plants.

– Reuters pic.twitter.com/j171TCvR6q

— China pulse (@Eng_china5) July 16, 2026

A source close to the Houthis says the missiles and drones are already deployed in the highlands overlooking Hodeidah and the Gulf of Aden, awaiting the order. And the trigger is not in Sana’a: IRGC representatives already inside Yemen will decide when the gate closes.

Understand what this means. Bab el-Mandeb — the “Gate of Tears” — carries 10 to 15 percent of global maritime trade and a significant share of Europe’s energy imports. Since Hormuz shut, the Red Sea route has been precisely the alternative on which Gulf exporters and the entire architecture of workarounds has depended.

Close it, and the Middle East’s two great oil gates are shut simultaneously. Every laden vessel between Asia and Europe rounds the Cape of Good Hope, adding two to three weeks and rewriting freight economics overnight. South African ports are already running heavy.

The Americans set out to open one chokepoint by force. They are on the verge of closing two.

The loaded gun
Let me be rigorous rather than merely alarmed, because the counter-argument deserves its hearing.

There is a serious school of thought — well argued this month by Yemeni analysts — that Tehran will never actually pull this trigger. A proxy’s value lies in the threat, not the execution.

The Houthis’ leverage over Hodeidah, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals, the risk of dragging Egypt and the Gulf states into open confrontation: three concentric circles of deterrence all counsel restraint. The loaded gun on the table, in this view, is worth more than the fired one.

In a stable environment, I would agree. But this is not a stable environment. It is an escalation spiral in which each side has repeatedly done the thing the analysts said was too costly to do. Iran was not supposed to close Hormuz. The United States was not supposed to blockade a nation of ninety million people. Chabahar was not supposed to be struck. The power grid was not supposed to be threatened.

Deterrence logic assumes rational actors husbanding their leverage — but four months of this war have shown both capitals converting leverage into rubble at every juncture. The gun stays holstered only until someone’s escalation makes the holster untenable. Trump’s power-grid ultimatum may be exactly that.

The reckoning
Machiavelli warned that wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Washington began this campaign believing that firepower could substitute for the one thing that actually opens sea lanes: the confidence of the men and women who insure, crew and charter the world’s ships.

Four months on, the strait is emptier than ever, a second chokepoint is mined with intent, and the phrase “freedom of navigation” has been bent into its own negation — freedom for all vessels, except.

The rule is only real at the point of enforcement. At the point of enforcement, the sea is empty.

You cannot bomb a strait open. You can only bomb it shut.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Two American service members are dead. Another is missing. Four more were medically evacuated after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck a US base in Jordan on Friday night.

The American death toll in this war now stands at 16, with more than 430 wounded.

And none of it needed to happen.

• READ MORE: US hits Iran nuclear site; Kuwait desalination plant on fire after attack
• US launches new Iran strikes after two soldiers killed: What’s the latest?
• Other War on Iran reports

The off-ramp Trump threw away
Five weeks ago, Donald Trump had in his hands something no American president has held since 1979: a signed memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Islamabad Memorandum, mediated by Pakistan, gave him everything he claimed to want — a cessation of hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a 60-day window to negotiate a comprehensive settlement.

“Ships of the World, start your engines,” he crowed on social media. “Let the oil flow!”

President Trump:

The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships… pic.twitter.com/hhZnbVm5tg

— World Source News (@Worldsource24) June 14, 2026

He could have walked away a peacemaker. He could have claimed — with some justification — that he had achieved his military objectives and brought Iran to the table. History hands few leaders such a clean exit from a war of their own making.

Instead, the criticisms got to him. The commentators who called the MOU a “capitulation”. The hawks who said he had let Tehran off the hook. The whispers that he had blinked.

A more disciplined statesman would have ignored the noise and banked the win. Trump could not. His ego demanded vindication, and so — seizing on alleged violations that both sides traded in equal measure — he declared the ceasefire “over” and unleashed eight consecutive days of bombardment on Iran.

Yesterday, Tehran formally suspended its commitments under the interim deal. The statement read out on Iranian state television called Trump’s signature “worthless and invalid.” Asked about it, Trump said he “couldn’t care less”.

He should care. Because the memorandum was the only off-ramp he had. And he has just burned it.

Napolean, Hitler, and the fatal arithmetic of ego
I have written before about what happens when leaders substitute ego for strategy. Napoleon crossed the Niemen in 1812, not because Russia threatened France, but because his pride could not tolerate a Tsar who defied the Continental System.

Six months later, the Grande Armée — the finest fighting force in Europe — had been reduced to a frozen remnant staggering back across the Berezina.

Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 against the unanimous advice of his generals, gambling his last armoured reserves on a fantasy of splitting the Allies. Within a month, the Wehrmacht had lost the men and machines it needed to defend Germany itself.

The pattern is always the same. The leader mistakes an adversary’s restraint for weakness. He confuses the opening phase of a war with its outcome. And he doubles down at precisely the moment when a wiser man would consolidate and withdraw.

Trump is now running the same script. After eight days of renewed bombardment, Iran has not capitulated. It has hit back — hard. Four separate Iranian missile attacks struck US bases in Jordan in the past week alone, wounding dozens and destroying helicopters, before Friday’s strike killed two soldiers.

Iranian drones and missiles have forced air defences into action across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan simultaneously. This is not a defeated adversary. This is a state executing precisely the forward-defence doctrine it has spent 40 years building.

The arithmetic of attrition
Remember what happened in the first phase of this war. America’s stockpiles of interceptors and precision munitions were drawn down at a rate that alarmed the Pentagon’s own planners. Defending fixed bases against waves of cheap drones and ballistic missiles is the most expensive proposition in modern warfare: you exchange million-dollar interceptors for hundred-thousand-dollar projectiles, night after night.

Iran manufactures its weapons at home. America must ship its own across two oceans — through waters Iran is actively contesting.

The longer this drags on, the worse that arithmetic becomes. And it will drag on, because Iran’s strategy does not require it to defeat the United States. It requires only that it endure — bleeding American forces, closing the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, and letting war-risk premiums and blockade economics do the rest.

As someone who spent three decades in marine insurance and war risk, I can tell you: the market is already pricing what the White House will not admit. A fifth of the world’s seaborne crude ran through Hormuz. It is not flowing now.

The second checkpoint: Bab al-Mander
And now Tehran has placed its next card on the table. Reuters reports that Iran has instructed the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — if Trump follows through on his threat to strike Iran’s power grid.

This is not posturing. Houthi missiles and drones are already deployed near the strait, awaiting an order that Revolutionary Guard representatives inside Yemen will control. The IRGC has stated its doctrine in a single sentence: the region’s energy exports will be “either for everyone or for no one”.

Understand what this means. With Hormuz shut, the Red Sea became the world’s escape valve — the Saudis have been rerouting crude across their east-west pipeline to Yanbu, and roughly seven percent of global oil output squeezed through the Bab al-Mandeb last month, alongside some 12 percent of all global trade bound for the Suez Canal. Close that strait, and both of the Middle East’s export arteries are severed simultaneously. A quarter of the world’s energy supply — blocked at both ends.

There is no third route. There is no pipeline capacity that can absorb it. Ali Akbar Velayati put it plainly: the Resistance has the capability to lock both waterways.

The global economy is already careening towards crisis on the closure of one chokepoint. The closure of two is not a crisis. It is a convulsion — fuel rationing, freight rates at wartime levels, insurance markets in seizure, inflation surging through every economy on earth. And the trigger for it now sits not in Washington but in Sanaa, in the hands of a militia that answers to Tehran.

Trump’s own escalation has handed Iran a weapon aimed at the wallet of every household in the Western world.

No way out
Here is the difference between this round and the last. In June, Pakistan could mediate because both sides retained something to trade. Today, Iran has declared Trump’s signature “worthless”. What Iranian leader can now sign a document bearing that signature and survive politically? What mediator can broker a deal when one party has publicly established that the other’s word means nothing?

Iran’s Supreme Leader says US breaches show Trump’s signature is ‘worthless’ https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 18, 2026

Trump has manoeuvred himself into the one position a great power must never occupy: a war he cannot win, cannot afford, and can no longer end.

Napoleon at least had Moscow to march towards. Trump is bombing a country of 90 million people with no defined objective beyond his own vindication, while his soldiers die defending bases that exist only to sustain the war that endangers them.

Sixteen Americans are dead. More will follow.

And every one of them is the price of a president who was handed peace and could not bear to keep it.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Last night I attended a packed meeting in Lyttelton against the takeover attempt by DP World of the Lyttelton Port. This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

The meeting was organised by New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy. It was chaired by John Minto, a long time campaigner for human rights.

Think evil predator company with a track record in taking over international ports — sackings, enviro hazards and links to Epstein…  and you have DP World in a nutshell.

• READ MORE:  Community, unions meet over Lyttelton Port takeover bid, as decision looms
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Top Canadian pension fund halts deals with UAE firm over Epstein ties
• Bribery allegations threaten DP World’s expansion plans in India
• Major multinational port operator paid zero tax in Australia while raking in billions
• Other DP World reports

I have researched the history of DP World and it is accused of being corrupt — and good at keeping the corruption out of sight — but that’s the way with these tax-evading companies.

Who pays for their profits? The people, the taxpayers through rate-hikes and workers, through redundancies. DP World loves replacing people with AI.

Predator companies like this start on the port and move into other areas because ports are a gateway to transport and other industries.

This is a local, regional, national and international issue about power and control.

It is about power being taken out of the hands of people and placed in the hands of predator companies.

Workers made redundant
Last night heard from workers who have been made redundant water side. Men who cared about community.

We heard from Gerard Loader, secretary at the Lyttelton branch of the Maritime Union of New Zealand and who is also the national vice-president of the union.

Loader presented as a union official, and also as a boy who grew up, married, had children and works in Lyttelton. He recalled the days when Lyttelton was a hive of activity, a harbour full of ships, trucks, trains, seafarers and “wharfies”.

He gave relevant background to the development of the takeover.

In 2023, the Lyttelton Port Company (LPC) appointed a new CEO in Graeme Sumner and chair of the board Barry Bragg.

“Not long after that we started hearing rumours of plans to privatise city assets, with DP world being mentioned more than once,” said Loader.

“So with the support of the greater community we lobbied council and demonstrated at the CCHL AGM achieving our goal of keeping our assets in public control, albeit with a lot of contorted right-leaning faces looking on in disappointment.”

Battle won, but war continues
That battle was won, but the war is far from over, he said.

“Since early 2024 we have been challenging or asking all LPC management, board members, councillors etc about the persistent rumours of DP World wanting to lease the port operations as a way to get around the mandate of keeping the port in public ownership, and to a man they have all denied or deflected the issue saying they know nothing or it is out of their hands, or we cannot interupt the process as we have to follow due diligence etcetera.

“Then to hear the announcement in June of Tonui (3 runanga and DP World) putting in an unsolicited bid to CCHL for the leasing out of port operations for a 30-year contract was a slap in the face to not only the employees at LPC but the people and ratepayers of Christchurch who have basically been lied to for the last two years by everyone, as DP World and Tonui have been negotiating behind closed doors on this, and in the words of LPC CEO Graeme Sumner, the worst kept secret in Canterbury.”

Barry Bragg is chair of LPC board, was on the Ngāi Tahu Property board for seven years, and is the deputy chair of Stevensons Limited who specialise in concrete and construction.”

Loader said the fact that Bragg claimed he “knew nothing about it”, when asked directly at the Christchurch City Council meeting on June 3, raises more questions than it answers.

Whether the powers that be had full knowledge, or they truly knew nothing while a deal of this magnitude was being discussed, as a ratepayer was “deeply concerning”, Loader said.

“Whose interests do they have at heart?”

End of people’s control
He added that if this “deal” proceeds it would be the end of the port being controlled by the people in the interests of Christchurch city and all profits going back to the Canterbury region.

Rather, the port would be controlled by a huge foreign monopoly which would only have their profit margin at the heart of the operation.

His words were sobering. There is no illusion that control has already slipped and deals are being made behind the scenes.

That is typical of Dubai-based DP World.

The broligarchy is alive and kicking and it does not care about the Tangata or the Whenua or the Moana.

We heard from researcher Edward Miller, of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability (CICTAR) who has investigated DP World’s control of Australian ports.

This company evades tax and so rates rise. Rise and rise. The burden on tax payers is massive because the company is all about profit and not about sharing or caring for community.

The port is the first point of take over and not the last.

Need to stop this
We need to stop this. We need to stop this asset sale and others.

We need to ensure our community is heard and heeded, and not made redundant.
Councils and the government work for us. It is not the other way around.

We heard from poet Gary McCormick who said we, the people, have power. We have the power to stop this. We are the voice.

We heard from Māori women who talked about the generations to come. We heard form Māori women who talked about the terrible effect this would have on the environment. A greedy parasite controlling the port.

We heard from Sara Campbell who spoke eloquently and passionately about the toll this will take on our environment.

“We’re living in a rapidly warming world. The last 11 years have been the hottest on record.

“Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

And yet:

“I truly believe we can stop DP World,” she said.

And the crowd cheered.

“And I believe we can change how the port is run. To a model where we’re actually at the table. Where mana whenua and the unions are strategic partners in decision making.”

No media present
As for me, I will try to publish articles in the media on this but the news media was not there. The newspapers were not present. Radio was not present.

Once the port mattered to media. Now, where is it?

We need to notice this. We need to draw attention to it, we need to join the protest against it. Or it will be too late. And what then?

As Gerard Loader said: “When my grandson asks what I did to stop it, I want to be able to tell him I did everything I could.”

Community for community. Rise people, rise.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Sign the petition Keep Our Port Public to show there is no public mandate for privatisation
• More information on Our Port Public website

The Trump administration has announced a renewed crusade against “far-left terrorism,” which sounds okay if you don’t know that the word “terrorism” only ever means “behavior which goes against the agendas of the Western empire.”

The United States has for example placed sanctions on UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for calling attention to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, justifying the move by claiming the human rights expert has “expressed support for terrorism”.

In the UK, police have been arresting people on terrorism charges just for holding signs which say “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley
• READ MORE: US wants to globalise fight against far-left terrorism
• US urges global crackdown on ‘far-left terrorism’ – NZ says focus on behaviour rather than labels

The designation has nothing to do with actual acts of terrorism as the average Westerner conceives of that notion. In 2024, the US government removed its $10 million bounty on former Al Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) because he facilitated Washington’s regime change agendas in Syria, where he is now the sitting president.

You can literally be a leader in the most notorious terrorist network on earth and still see that designation disappear into thin air as soon as you start assisting the geostrategic ambitions of the empire.

The US has signalled that it will refocus its so-called counterterrorism efforts on repressing leftwing groups.

In a speech to officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday, secretary of state Marco Rubio said “far-left terror” had been overlooked for too long.

It comes as… pic.twitter.com/hXQ5PZRfX7

— Novara Media (@novaramedia) July 17, 2026

The White House announced on Thursday that it has launched “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism,” under which “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that according to leaked documents from Marco Rubio’s State Department, groups to be targeted under the new marching orders will include “violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors,” as well as “violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks” and “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”

Authoritarian implications
The move is premised on a White House memo known as NSPM-7, a directive that critics have been warning about for months due to its dangerously authoritarian implications and lack of congressional approval. In the words of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, NSPM-7 “directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”

This line strongly echoes the language of a 1967 FBI memo describing the goals of the J Edgar Hoover program COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.”

Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism – under President Trump’s leadership this @FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate… pic.twitter.com/AIn0aX29Hl

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) July 16, 2026

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political movement in the United States.

The feds never fully stopped running such programmes of course – groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter were known to have been targeted by police surveillance and infiltration. But it’s clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.

“Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism – under President Trump’s leadership this FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate and disrupt organizations engaging in political violence and terrorism,” Patel said on Twitter regarding the latest escalation.

So it seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward US warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny.

Measures will remain
And what makes all this especially threatening is that you know whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States.

This will be one of those many, many times the Republicans did something evil and the Democrats just quietly kept it running in the background to protect the interests of the capitalist empire. Because that is their job.

But the fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to.

They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children.

They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing.

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.

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon and Stephanie Tran

A Zionist doctor has claimed that the Australian health regulator CEO Justin Untersteiner “was forced into a massive capitulation with IHRA”.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA) recently introduced the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism which puts healthcare workers at risk for criticising Israel.

The Zionist doctor, psychiatrist Dr Doron Samuell, alleges that he was part of a campaign that “exerted intolerable political pressure” on AHPRA to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

• READ MORE: Antisemitic, really? Jewish leader speaks out on Australia’s Royal Commission hypocrisy
• Saige England: Call out the Zionist hypocrisy – genociders are settler colonialists on steroids
• Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

Resisted IHRA for two years
AHPRA, which regulates the conduct of 900,000 Australian healthcare workers, had resisted pressure to adopt the IHRA definition for two years.

However, on June 17, the health regulator shifted its position unexpectedly and without consultation when CEO Justin Untersteiner issued a joint statement with the federal government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, announcing the adoption of the definition and that Segal’s guidance handbook would be used as a tool in handling complaints.

Thousands of health care workers, and many organisations including the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation, NSW Civil Liberties Council and Medical Association for Prevention of War have called for AHPRA to reverse its decision and continue to rely on its existing framework in dealing with complaints of racism, including antisemitism.

In response, Israel’s Foreign Ministry pressured the Australian government to “confront antisemitism in healthcare” in a post on X on Sunday.

This investigation paints a deeply troubling picture and should serve as a wake-up call.

We call upon The Australian government to confront antisemitism forcefully.

Every reluctance, every excuse, and every failure to act sends extremists the same message: they can keep pushing…

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) July 12, 2026

AHPRA subjected to ‘intolerable pressure’ from Israel lobby
The “intolerable pressure” claims were made by “Aba Shesh”, a social media pseudonym linked to the Facebook account used by Dr Doron Samuell, a member of the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance (AZHA).

Dr Samuell’s comments were made in response to a post on “Jews of Melbourne” (JOM) Facebook page drawing members’ attention to a Civil Liberties Defence Centre (CLDC) webinar presented by its chairperson, lawyer Nick Hanna. The webinar was an educational briefing for healthcare workers on the implications of AHPRA’s adoption of the IHRA definition .

A member of the Jews Of Melbourne group predicted there would be

lots of “antisemitism” at the webinar which members could monitor and report to AHPRA.

In response, “Aba Shesh” described Untersteiner as an “unthinking bureaucrat” who “repeatedly minimised the problem until his hand was forced”.

Samuell lamented that Untersteiner “said the right things and even visited a shule but AHPRA sat on their hands, receiving vexatious complaints for two years until we exerted intolerable political pressure on them to act.”

Samuell stated that Untersteiner “was forced into a massive capitulation with IHRA”.

Last year, Samuell claimed he was responsible for the cancellation of a staff forum on Children and War at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

Michael West Media sent detailed questions to Untersteiner and provided him with an opportunity to respond to the comments. Instead of specific answers, AHPRA provided us with a general statement. AHPRA’s full response is below.

MWM also contacted Samuell for comment, he did not provide a response.

APHRA CEO ‘under pressure’
Several healthcare professionals who opposed the change said they met with senior AHPRA officials, including Untersteiner, earlier this year to argue against adopting the IHRA definition.

One doctor, who requested anonymity because of concerns of professional repercussions, said senior leadership were presented with medical evidence of the genocide and concerns that the IHRA definition would be used to silence doctors.

“As well as presenting the overwhelming amount of medical evidence of genocide and the silencing of healthcare workers as an apparatus of genocide, we also focused on the concern of the IHRA definition being used to silence doctors who openly support human rights,” they said.

Jerusalem Definition preferred
The doctor said they proposed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism as an alternate definition.

“We provided an alternative definition on antisemitism, the Jerusalem Definition, should it be necessary to single out one group for a separate definition on discrimination.”

The doctor said Untersteiner told them he had publicly rejected the IHRA definition and discussed pressure the regulator was facing from Israel lobby groups.

“Untersteiner said he has publicly rejected the IHRA definition but when pressed to provide this in writing later, AHPRA did not,” the doctor said.

“[Untersteiner] also expressed some of the personal stress he was under due to the Zionist groups and in particular from doctors like Doron Samuell. It appeared to be genuine and heartfelt.”

MWM put those claims to Untersteiner, who declined to comment.

The doctor expressed concern that AHPRA’s decision to adopt IHRA would encourage vexatious complaints against practitioners, an anxiety shared by thousands of other healthcare workers.

“AHPRA’s statement on the IHRA definition will embolden the Zionists to ramp up their vexatious complaint campaign,” they said.

Path to capitulation
Samuell told the Facebook group that “with my pressure, the Minister issued a directive for Justin to remedy the situation and gave him 6 months to do it” yet, “when he reported back 7+ months later, he was still refusing to define antisemitism”.

In September 2025, health ministers directed APHRA to provide a six monthly report on “Improving the health practitioner response to racism and discrimination, including antisemitism”. AHPRA established a Racism and Discrimination Committee to provide an action plan.

Minister for Health Mark Butler did not respond to questions on the matter.

In February 2026, Untersteiner was pressured by Senator Andrew Bragg in Senate Estimates to adopt the IHRA definition.

“I’m wondering why you haven’t decided to adopt a clear definition of antisemitism. We’ve just had a religious massacre in Australia where antisemitism was a key driver. So I’m wondering why you haven’t adopted one,” Senator Bragg asked.

In response, Untersteiner said the issue was a “live discussion”. However, “the vast majority of practitioners do the right thing and they comply with our codes of conduct” and “in the very few cases where they don’t, we do believe that we’ve got the tools to be able to deal with that effectively.”

The Segal meetings
When pressed further to explain why he had not adopted the IHRA definition, Untersteiner said he had been meeting with Jillian Segal “on a regular basis”.

“I’ve been meeting with the special envoy on a regular basis. I think we’ve been able to work quite well together,” Untersteiner told the Committee.

On 13 April 2026, AHPRA’s Race and Discrimination Committee submitted its report responding to the Ministerial directive. In his posts, Samuell objected to the composition of the committee because it

included a Jewish person who had been critical of Israel.

The report stated that “the National Code of Conduct sets out clear expectations that registered health practitioners will deliver care that is culturally safe and free from discriminatory behaviours.” There was an action plan for strengthening AHPRA’s anti-racism approach but no mention of the IHRA definition.

On April 24, Special Envoy Segal released the Understanding Antisemitism in Australia handbook.

On May 1, the Health Ministers accepted AHPRA’s report and it was published on AHPRA’s website.

APHRA’s usual practice is to publish communiques on its Board meetings shortly after they occur. Communiques have not been published for the May and June meetings.

Call for Untersteiner sacking
AHPRA declined to supply us with copies of those communiques so it is unclear whether the Board approved the use of the IHRA definition in these meetings.

On May 6, Samuell expressed his frustration with AHPRA in a podcast episode published by “The Israel Connexion”.

During the interview, Samuell said that AZHA had called for Untersteiner’s sacking in its submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

“AHPRA has dropped the ball. Now we’re making a submission to the Royal Commission, calling on the Health Minister to sack Justin Untersteiner for the role that he has played in this,” he said.

‘Antagonistic to Israel’
“We’ve outlined in our submission a large number of failures. For example, there are governance problems in AHPRA. There are board members in AHPRA who are on the public record as being antagonistic to Israel,” Samuell said.

“I know from their own staff, many of whom have been in private communications with me, that they are not taking this matter seriously at all. They’ve breached their social contract with us. [Untersteiner] is not the person that can fix this situation.”

Samuell told Israel Connexion that AZHA had encouraged “practitioners and patients in the health sector to make submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism through [AZHA] website” and was “synthesising the submissions into a discussion paper for the Royal Commission” by applying the IHRA definition.

The result is a “whole of sector submission” developed by applying “social theories about what is going on and what should happen to remedy it.”

MWM is not asserting that any of the public allegations against AHPRA are true. In the absence of responses from AHRPA or Samuell on these matters, we are reporting them in the interests of transparency.

Zionist Healthcare Alliance attacks on AHPRA
Samuell is one of several Zionist health workers who represent the Australian Zionist Healthcare Alliance (AZHA).

The AZHA was launched in October last year. It describes itself as “Australia’s first dedicated Zionist healthcare advocacy organisation”.

AZHA’s most vocal member is public affairs officer Sharon Stoliar who helped found AZHA last year.

Ten days after the IHRA definition announcement, on June 27, Stoliar was featured in a major report by The Australian titled “How did hospitals become the front line in the antisemitic onslaught?”.

The report accused AHPRA of ignoring an “unprecedented explosion of antisemitism” and said Australian health care workers were amplifying anti-Jewish hate speech” and deliberating neglecting or harming Jewish patients.

Royal Commission hearsay
Stoliar told The Australian that she hoped to give evidence at the Royal Commission.

Stoliar is quoted describing an incident in which a woman in a Sydney hospital was “left to lie in a pool of blood with no pain relief” while her baby screamed in its cot alongside hers.

She has also claimed that an antisemitic health care worker caused a Jewish person to have a “forced abortion”.

No evidence is provided to support these hearsay claims which Stoliar has repeated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.

The Australian article has taken on a life of its own being regurgitated in various forms in Australian and Israeli media. The Channel 12 broadcast was reposted on Facebook and Instagram by the Zionist Federation of Australia.

Collectively these posts have triggered a large amount of hate against Australian health workers and precipitated the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs tweet this week.

AHPRA’s response
Rather than responding to our questions, AHPRA supplied MWM with a statement similar to one it has sent to thousands of healthcare workers who signed letters expressing opposition to its adoption of the IHRA definition.

AHPRA appears keen to allay the concerns of its registered health care workers. It emphasises that ”there is no place for racism or discrimination in healthcare”, and that it will deal with complaints on an individual basis. An AHPRA spokesperson provided the following explanation for the sudden change:

“Ahpra had initially not adopted the IHRA definition, as we felt there was insufficient clarity between legitimate commentary and debate regarding the policies and actions of the state of Israel and its elected leaders, and antisemitism. However, the Special Envoy on Antisemitism’s handbook is designed to support use of the definition by distinguishing ‘between antisemitism and legitimate political debate, including on the topic of Israel’.

“It is on that basis that Ahpra will use the IHRA definition as a reference tool where relevant, supported by the ASECA handbook, when considering regulatory responses. As a reference tool, the definition is not legally binding. There are no changes to the National Codes or the guidance that supports them.”

AHPRA’s explanation is surprising. The handbook itself exacerbates concerns with the IHRA definition. For example, Segal’s examples suggest that it is antisemitic to say that Israel is a “racist project” or that Israel is “committing genocide”, views that are widely held by numerous international law experts and humanitarian organisations.

The Gaza genocide continues
Daily, the genocide continues. Israel has murdered thousands of healthcare workers in Gaza and devastated its healthcare system.

Last week, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel demanded that Israel release Gaza paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya who has been imprisoned without charge and tortured by Israel for over 18 months.

Australian health care workers are mobilising and have formed a new national coalition. Yesterday, the Australian Healthcare Alliance 4 Palestine, encompassing hundreds of thousands of registered doctors, nurses and dentists, wrote a letter to AHPRA asking it to “provide full transparency regarding the governance, consultation and decision-making processes” that led to the decision to adopt the IHRA definition.

The Alliance said that health practitioners have “an ethical responsibility to advocate for our patients, our colleagues and the healthcare system” and called on AHPRA to rescind its decision.

Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award.

This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is that it should be balanced; that journalists have a responsibility to present all sides of a given issue with equal weight. This view also holds that appearing to be critical of one side and sympathetic to another amounts to “bias”.

That notion of balance sounds ideal. After all, journalists should be neutral observers who favour nobody, so if anybody feels as though their side is not presented with equal measure, the journalist has somehow failed.

That failure was what Jillian Segal accused the ABC of in her evidence to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last week. In her evidence, the antisemitism envoy lamented that the ABC’s reporting on Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel”.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• The problem of false balance when reporting on science
• Other Gaza media coverage reports

“It’s the perception of the Jewish community feeling constantly that they are being faced with reporting about the Middle East, about Gaza, and about Israel in a way that paints Israel constantly in a negative light,” she said.

For the country’s supporters, that is understandable. As Segal went on to point out, there has been a “disproportionate” number of stories critical of Israel.

And Liberal MP and prominent member of the Jewish community Julian Leeser told ABC Radio National:

I think the public broadcasters actually have to be prepared to address systemic bias against Israel in their reporting, and I think they need to subject themselves to greater transparency mechanisms as outlined by the envoy.

But the term “balance” implies finding equivalence between the two competing positions. Sometimes journalists cover stories where achieving balance amounts to a serious distortion of what is actually taking place.

Jillian Segal wants ‘independent group’ to examine ABC’s Israel coverage  Video: Guardian Australia

The pitfalls of both-sideism
A standard, if lazy, tactic for avoiding accusations of bias is to give equal space to opponents in an issue, presenting them as equally valid.

If you give five minutes to a vaccine researcher, you must give the same time to a sceptic. It is something journalists sometimes dub “both-sideism”.

The media grappled with that challenge in covering climate change. In the early heated stages of the debate, news organisations would often place a climate sceptic next to a climate scientist in the name of “balance”.

By 2018, the BBC’s news director Fran Unsworth had had enough. She circulated a briefing note that acknowledged, “Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often”.

The briefing went on to say, “Manmade climate change exists: if the science proves it we should report it.” And in a section on balance, the note said:

to achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.“

As journalism academic Jonathan Foster of Sheffield University used to tell his students, “If someone tells you it’s raining and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the f—ing window and find out which is true.”

Who has the power?
The conflicts between Israel and its neighbours (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran) are not football matches, and journalists are not referees.

But any journalist thinking about how to fairly cover the crises is likely to spend far more time looking at the human cost of Israeli bombs and tanks, than the impact on Israeli civilians.

That is simply because the greater impact of the conflict is felt outside Israel’s borders.

Any reporting that suggests an equivalence of experience between Israelis suffering Hamas rockets, and the Palestinians in Gaza bearing the weight of the Israeli military assault would be plainly disingenuous. Hardliners on both sides are calling for annihilation of the other, but only one side has tanks, fighter jets and control of food, water and medical supplies over the border.

That raises another journalistic cliche: “holding power to account”. It is rooted in the idea that the media’s job is to expose the impact of power on those who have none.

Israel has indisputably been projecting its might well beyond its borders, and correspondents in the region who failed to cover the consequences on ordinary civilians would be rightly criticised.

None of this is to suggest the experience of Israelis or the government’s arguments should be ignored.

But in a world of competing perspectives, the job of journalists is not to make everyone happy. Their job is to accurately and fairly represent the views of everyone involved and on that score, the ABC has been succeeding.

Imperfect, but largely accurate
The national broadcaster has not been perfect of course. The ombudsman found five breaches of editorial standards (out of more than seven thousand complaints).

Its own editorial director Gavin Fang acknowledged they were far too slow to correct a United Nations report that falsely claimed 14,000 children could die of starvation in Gaza within two days.

In her testimony to the Royal Commission, Jillian Segal conceded the government’s broadcast regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, had not “found a great deal of inaccuracy” in the ABC’s reporting.

But she argued she’s trying to achieve “the more complex, nuanced issues of prioritisation, impartiality and objectivity and balance”.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

Perhaps she is right. But positive stories explicitly designed to cancel out the negative start to look like propaganda. And that is something journalists should never accept.

Peter Greste is professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He also serves as an independent journalist on the Australian Press Council. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under Creative Commons.

Late last year, the British government suppressed a report that contained warnings from its intelligence agencies that climate change could drive mass migration and trigger a nuclear war in Asia.

A copy of the report, obtained by The Times, warned of collapsing ecosystems potentially triggering acts of eco-terrorism, and the possibility of NATO being drawn into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

It said: “Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended.”

• READ MORE: Suppressed climate report warned of mass migration and nuclear war
• New Zealand: Defence assessment on climate change and security released
• Palau’s President warns of rising nuclear anxiety in the Pacific and other Chinese missile test reports

In Australia, a 2022 climate change threat assessment by the Office of National Intelligence was described as “terrifying” by Senator David Pocock.

Similarly to the UK, the Albanese government has refused to release the full report.

A 2018 New Zealand Defence Force assessment declared climate change “one of the most significant security threats of our time, and one that is already having adverse impacts both at home and in New Zealand’s neighbourhood.”

New Zealand’s “neighbourhood” — otherwise known as the South Pacific — is on the frontlines of climate change, with low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati predicted to be uninhabitable by the end of the century.

Pacific in forefront
Pacific Island nations have been at the forefront of efforts to force the world — particularly the rich world — to act.

Last year’s historic advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found that countries have a legally binding obligation to address climate change, was initiated by Vanuatu.

The contrast between New Zealand and Australia’s reactions to the court ruling and the existential threat faced by our neighbours, versus their response last week to China’s ballistic missile test which landed in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, is instructive.

Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu has criticised both New Zealand and Australia for continuing with fossil fuel exploration and warned they could find themselves in court on the wrong side of the ICJ ruling.

New Zealand is ranked 44th on the Climate Change Performance Index, down from 28th in 2021. Australia is 56th of the 63 countries (plus the European Union) included in the index.

When it comes to dealing with the existential threat of climate change, both countries are laggards.

But when it comes to updating their military hardware for interoperability with US forces in the new Cold War with China, they’re keen to be seen at the front of the pack.

‘Biggest peacetime increase’
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles has boasted that the country is seeing the “biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in our nation’s history”.

The defence budget is projected to hit A$96.6 billion by 2033, or 3 percent of GDP.

New Zealand has committed to doubling its defence spending from the current 1 percent to 2 percent in the next eight years.

Its recent purchase of five US-built MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, costing NZ$2.6 billion, was made with the expressed intention of making New Zealand’s armed forces interoperable with the US military.

Officially, New Zealand’s only military ally is Australia, but with its commitment to interoperability, regular military secondments, and participation in joint exercises, nuclear-free New Zealand is a card-carrying member of the Western alliance. (Former Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to a NATO conference in Madrid in 2022.)

Both Australia and New Zealand are justifying the billions of dollars being spent on high-end killing machines by hyping up the so-called China threat.

Leaders on both sides of the Tasman were quick to pounce on last week’s ballistic missile test by China as evidence of a growing military threat.

Unacceptable, unwelcome
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was unacceptable, unwelcome, and concerning.

“This is an intercontinental ballistic missile test, the second that we’ve seen in recent years, having not had one in the region for 40 years, from China,” RNZ reported him saying.

“We are living in a region that is proudly nuclear free … we don’t want to see increasing militarisation in our region.”

What was left unsaid is that, according to The New York Times, the US tests between five and 10 Minuteman missiles every year, and both New Zealand and Australia are ramping up purchases of military hardware — massively increasing the militarisation of the region.

Australia, a signatory of the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, has three nuclear-powered submarines on order at a cost of more than A$300 billion.

If Prime Minister Luxon was truly concerned about the increasing militarisation of the South Pacific, he would not be expressing interest in New Zealand joining Australia and Fiji in the “Ocean of Peace Alliance” announced last week.

Peace needs climate justice
Following the announcement of Fiji’s first-ever military alliance, the Pacific Elders Group — whose membership includes former heads of state — released a strongly worded statement reiterating its position that climate change is the region’s most urgent concern:

“An Ocean of Peace cannot be built on a narrow security agenda. Peace cannot be separated from climate justice or from the forces that produce insecurity in Pacific lives: climate change, fossil fuel dependence, extractive industries, militarisation, nuclear legacies, gendered violence and the denial of self-determination. These are the challenges that any genuine Pacific peace agenda must confront.”

Sadly, New Zealand and Australia’s actions suggest they are more committed to militarisation than climate action.

Last month, the New Zealand Defence Force announced its first Harpoon missile launch from a P-8A Poseidon aircraft during a joint military exercise with the armed forces of the US, Australia, Canada, and Japan in the Philippine Sea.

The two missiles fired — estimated cost between NZ$3 million to NZ$6 million — were supplied to New Zealand by Australia.

Millions of dollars blown on sinking a decommissioned warship that could have gone to, say, providing half a dozen Pacific Island villages with solar panels, rather than ramping up a new Cold War.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

The most important response to Trump’s Hormuz announcement did not come from Beijing, Brussels or the United Nations. It came from Tehran, and it was four words long. “POTUS is absolutely right.”

That was Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, replying to the President’s declaration that the United States would henceforth be “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” and would be “reimbursed” at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo transiting the waterway. Araghchi agreed that whoever secured the Strait deserved compensation — adding only that Iran had always been its “true guardian”, and that 20 percent was too much.

Iran, he said, “will be fair.”

• READ MORE: Lim Tean: The Hormuz ‘guardian’ turns pirate – 20% for tribute
• US carrying out new attacks on Iran after Trump’s threats
• Other Lim Tean articles

Understand what just happened. The two states now fighting for control of the world’s most important oil artery are no longer arguing about whether ships must pay tribute to pass. They are haggling over the rate.

For 75 years, the entire edifice of the “freedom of the seas” rested on the opposite principle. Yesterday, its chief architect demolished it in a single post.

POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service.

Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER.

20% is of course too much. We will be fair

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) July 13, 2026

What the law actually says
I practised shipping law for more than three decades, and I want readers to grasp how radical this announcement is in legal terms.

The regime governing straits like Hormuz is called transit passage, codified in Part III of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Its roots go back further, to the International Court of Justice’s very first case — Corfu Channel (1949) — where the court held that warships and merchant vessels alike enjoyed a right of passage through international straits that coastal states may not obstruct in peacetime.

Two pillars hold up this regime:

First, transit passage cannot be suspended. Not by the coastal state, not by anyone. Article 44 of UNCLOS is explicit.

Second — and this is the provision every reader should remember — passage cannot be taxed. Article 26 permits charges upon foreign ships only for specific services rendered to that ship, such as pilotage or towage. A general levy for the privilege of passing is flatly prohibited.

Even for coastal states.

Now consider the American position. The United States has no coastline on the Strait of Hormuz. It is not even a party to UNCLOS — for four decades Washington has insisted that transit passage binds Iran as customary international law, enforced by the US Navy on behalf of all nations.

Oman and Iran, the actual littoral states, could not lawfully charge a single dollar for mere passage. The United States has now proposed to charge 20 percent of cargo value — from 10,000 km away — as a matter of what the President calls “FAIRNESS.” (A laden VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude at today’s prices approaches US$30 million per transit).

That is not the enforcement of the international waterway doctrine. It is its replacement by tribute.

The trap Tehran sprang
Here is where Araghchi’s four words become lethal.

Customary international law — the only legal basis America has ever had in Hormuz, since it never ratified UNCLOS — is formed by two elements: the consistent practice of states, and the belief that such practice is legally required (opinio juris).

When Iran instituted its permit-and-fee regime for the Strait earlier this year, Washington’s legal position was simple: no state may condition or charge for transit passage. Iran’s regime was unlawful per se.

That position is now dead. Killed not by Iranian missiles, but by an American post. If the “guardian” of the Strait may lawfully charge 20 percent for security services, then a fortiori the coastal state — with genuine sovereignty over the waters in question — may charge for the same service.

Araghchi grasped this instantly. His reply conceded nothing and captured everything: you have adopted our legal theory; we now dispute only the price.

The United States has spent decades building the customary law of the sea through its own state practice. It is now dismantling that law by the same mechanism. Every future tribunal, every future crisis, every future power that wishes to tax a chokepoint — the Bosphorus, Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Panama approaches — will cite July 2026 as the moment the precedent was set by Washington itself.

However, President Trump has since backed away from the 20 percent charge, confirming that he was changing the “maritime security fee into historic multi-billion-dollar investment”.

He combined military strength with economic leverage, “securing major investment commitments instead of collecting fees”.

UPDATE: President Trump confirms the conversion of the proposed 20% maritime security fee into historic multi-billion-dollar investment.

President Trump combined military strength with economic leverage, securing major investment commitments instead of collecting fees.

This… pic.twitter.com/Y8LElvI6dZ

— Donald J Trump Posts TruthSocial (@TruthTrumpPost) July 15, 2026

A blockade without a war — the underwriter’s nightmare
There is a second legal absurdity buried in the announcement that only those of us from the maritime world will fully appreciate.

The President declared the reinstatement of “THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE” — stopping not only Iran’s ships but Iran’s customers. Blockade, in the law of naval warfare, is a belligerent right. It exists only in a state of armed conflict, it must be formally declared and notified, and it must be effective and impartial.

The San Remo Manual sets out these requirements precisely.

Yet Washington simultaneously insists it is not at war with Iran.

Consider the position of a shipowner, a P&I club, or a war risk underwriter today. A “blockade” that is not a blockade, imposed by a state that is not a belligerent, targeting “customers” of Iran — an undefined class that could sweep in any tanker that has ever lifted Iranian crude.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority has declared passage “currently unfeasible” and maintains that its own permit system is the sole lawful route through the Strait.

Two sovereigns. Two permitting regimes. One body of water. Every vessel in the Gulf now sails under competing assertions of authority, each of which the other deems an act of war.

War risk premiums do not price legal theory — they price uncertainty. And there has never been uncertainty like this.

The guardian and the protection racket
Readers of this page know my argument: the “rules-based international order” has not been destroyed by its challengers. It is being liquidated by its author — sold off, asset by asset, for cash.

The freedom of the seas was the crown jewel of that order. It was the one rule America enforced with genuine consistency, because it was the rule from which American power flowed. The Royal Navy built the doctrine in the 19th century; the US Navy inherited it in the 20th.

Its moral force rested on a single proposition: the guardian takes nothing for itself. The seas were policed disinterestedly, and that disinterest was the legitimacy.

“Guardian” is an old word. In the waters I have worked in for 30 years, everyone understands what it means when an armed party offers you “safety and security” in exchange for a percentage of your cargo. It is the oldest business model on the sea. We did not used to call its practitioners guardians.

The Strait of Hormuz will remain open or it will close; the ceasefire will be rebuilt or it will collapse. But the doctrine — the idea that the world’s waterways belong to the community of nations and may not be farmed for revenue — died this week.

Not because Iran closed the Strait. Because America opened a toll booth.

The rules were never the order. Power was the order. The rules were its receipts.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Once again, the Strait of Hormuz is at the centre of the latest escalation in the war between Iran, the United States and their allies, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog The Listening Post.

The ceasefire collapsed just days after millions of Iranians took to the streets last week to pay homage to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Hundreds of foreign reporters and social media influencers were granted rare access to Iran to cover the funeral, signalling just how carefully Tehran has been calibrating its media messaging.

• READ MORE: How Iran used Ali Khamenei’s funeral as a political and diplomatic tool
• Tehran teemed with Khamenei mourners, but divisions – and demands for change – remain
• Other war on Iran reports

Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert says what began as a week of mourning in Iran has “turned into the latest flare-up in the war in the Middle East with US President Donald Trump effectively calling the ceasefire dead”.

His programme explores the spectacle and symbolism of Khamenei’s funeral and how coverage of the supreme leader’s funeral exposed the limits of familiar Western narratives about Iran.

Contributors:
HA Hellyer – senior fellow, Royal United Services Institute
Samira Mohyeddin – host, On The Line Media
Negar Mortazavi – host, The Iran Podcast
Alex Vatanka – senior fellow, Middle East Institute

Khamenei’s funeral                          Video: AJ The Listening Post

On our radar
Türkiye has just hosted the NATO summit, and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the US president Trump, used the event to project an image of unity and strength between Ankara and Washington.

Elettra Scrivo looks at the images, the messaging and how the coverage has shaped this story.

How Big Food sells ultraprocessed food
Ultraprocessed food is a major part of diets worldwide. These industrially formulated foods are often marketed as nutritious despite growing concerns that these products are contributing to a global health crisis.

The Listening Post’s Nicholas Muirhead looks at how Big Food is shaping the way we see and consume ultraprocessed food.

Featuring:
Marion Nestle – professor, New York University
Christopher Snowdon – head of lifestyle economics, Institute of Economic Affairs
Arun Gupta – doctor and nutritionist

COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.

I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.

Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community — some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence — which sometimes bordered on hysterical.

• READ MORE: Saige England: Call out the Zionist hypocrisy – genociders are settler colonialists on steroids
• Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

But, the elephant in the room?

Were the “attacks” described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,

or were they people venting their anger and outrage at Jews seen to be rusted-on, unquestioning supporters of Israel’s egregious actions in Gaza?

Take the example of a university student in Canberra who just yesterday was reported in the Nine media thus: ”Liat told the Commission she had felt “very physically unsafe” during the long encampment at her university campus … when people would laugh and leer at me and say, ‘Look at the baby killer, look at the genocide supporter’”.

No, that is not pleasant, but the fact is — a fact unchallenged aside from the state of Israel itself and the likes of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) — that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the state of Israel and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

Why the rise in antisemitism?
What was more than significant, is that many of those who gave evidence of alleged antisemitism demonstrated absolutely no introspection. Why had there been a rise in anti-semitism since October 7?

Not because Hamas attacked Israel. No, it was, in many cases people showing their anger, yes, in some instances in a totally misguided way, at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Why did some 300,000 people from all walks of life and all ages, march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a foul, wet and windy day?

The palpable anger by a significant part of the Australian community, including many Jews, at what Israel did in Gaza, and continues to do to this day, is reflected in the sober evidence given at the Royal Commission yesterday by Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener for Students for Palestine and a protest organiser.

Following her evidence, Johnson, who is Jewish, told the media

the idea that campus protests “create a dangerous atmosphere, fear for people, is farcical”.

Antisemitism, anti-genocide conflation
“What we’ve heard,” she said “so far is day after day after day of evidence which conflates legitimate anti-genocide, pro-Palestine activism with genuine antisemitism which exists in our society.”

The earlier mentioned witness Liat, and others like her, may feel uncomfortable about what is being shouted out at her as much as she probably sees posters like “Free Palestine” as confronting and antisemitic, but has Liat — who acts as a  spokesperson for the Australasian Union of Jewish Students — either personally or on behalf of her organisation ever publicly accused Israel of being responsible for war crimes in Gaza, even if not genocide? Almost certainly, not!

And that is the rub.

Might this alleged antisemitism just have had something to do with Jews so visibly parading around with Israeli flags draped across their shoulders, waving Israelis flags at solidarity rallies for Israel, Jewish communal leaders excoriating those who called out Israel for engaging in genocide or starving children, and welcoming the Israeli President as their “national leader”?

Really? I thought we were Australians.

The “average” person could be forgiven for concluding that members of the Jewish community were demonstrating that they identified with and supported Israel.

The question to be asked here is why it is that criticising Israel by Jews is said to make the speaker a self-hating Jew, a “kapo” a “Judenrat” or, as in the case of Schwartz, to even be accused on ABC Radio National as being “anti-Jewish?”

They are shameful, offensive and disgraceful epithets. They are intended to be so.

Not to be ignored in the above is that the likes of a Mark Leibler, the ECAJ, AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia and similar groups see Jews who criticise Israel as a no-go area even if they, falsely, assert that Jews are free to openly express their views about Israel.

It’s simply untrue!

There is the expectation from these quarters that all Jews will, as a matter of solidarity, support Israel as the Zionist/Jewish homeland. With this forked-tongue and double-speak it is no wonder that the sort of slurs and insults which Schwartz described at the Royal Commission are rife in the Jewish community.

A climate of fear
Conversely, those in the Jewish community who might otherwise speak out against Israel fear that they will be subjected to all manner of insults and even the break-down of family relationships.

Given the airing of Schwartz’s evidence, one has to also wonder why there has been total silence from the usually vocal Jewish organisations. Should they not be publicly calling out vilification of fellow-Jews, calling for vilification to be stopped and asking for respect for those Jews who are not Zionists, strident or not.

Proof of the “attitude” in the Jewish community to those who are not at one with supporting Israel is clearly demonstrated by the Australian Jewish News which, just last week, pulled a story attacking those in the Jewish community who attacked their fellow Jews with the the sort of offensive epithets directed at Sarah Schwartz.

My Israel question
I can speak personally to how the Jewish community reacts when Israel or the Israel Lobby comes under scrutiny. Back in 2006, Melbourne University Press published my son Antony Loewenstein’s book My Israel Question. The book flew off the shelves.

The response from the so-called powers-that be in the Jewish community — including a Jewish Federal member of  Parliament in Parliament, even exhorting people not to buy the book — bordered on feral.

Even putting aside the death threats to my son and his then partner, as an example of hate mail — which Schwartz has so clearly shown in her evidence — one early so-called correspondent wrote that he hoped that when the Nazis came to Australia that he and his parents would be the first to be marched into the gas chambers.

Unhinged? Yes!

But as Schwartz spelt out in her evidence at the Royal Commission many in the Jewish community see attacking those who do not support Israel 100 percent as legitimate. And if that extends to thuggery, look no further than the Jewish group the Lions of Zion and their “activities” — an organisation supported by the powers that be in the Jewish community.

Thankfully the JCA has provided an ever-growing forum and voice for Jews who will not remain silent given Israel’s genocide in Gaza and breaches of multiple international laws and conventions.

Let’s not forget, while Israel denies what a slew of scholars, human rights organisations and aid and medical agencies have found — including those learned on genocide, some of whom even live in Israel itself — the facts on the ground speak volumes. We have all seen and read about it.

Israel clearly stands guilty as charged!

The United States went to war to stop Iran charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. It has now imposed a toll 15 times larger. Where is the “international waterway” chorus now?

For five months, we were treated to a sermon. Foreign ministries from Brussels to Tokyo to the Gulf capitals lined up to recite the catechism: the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. Freedom of navigation is sacrosanct.

No state may impose charges on innocent transit. Iran’s proposal to levy a passage fee was denounced as extortion, as hostage-taking of the global economy, as a violation of the law of the sea so grave that it justified war.

• READ MORE: US carrying out new attacks on Iran after Trump’s threats
• Other Lim Tean articles

On Monday, the President of the United States announced that America will henceforth be known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” — and that as guardian, it will be reimbursed at the rate of 20 percent of the value of all cargo passing through the waterway. Effective immediately.

Let us do the arithmetic the hymn-singers will not do. Iran was reportedly seeking something in the region of US$2 million per vessel — a figure the United States declared intolerable, a casus belli. A 20 percent ad valorem charge on a laden VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude at today’s prices approaches US$30 million per transit.

BREAKING: The UAE says two national tankers were hit by Iranian cruise missiles in the Strait of Hormuz, killing one crew member and injuring eight others. Authorities say the fires have been contained. pic.twitter.com/xfMDH2EHgn

— Al Jazeera Breaking News (@AJENews) July 13, 2026

The United States bombed Iran over a toll, and has replaced it with a toll 15 times greater — collected not by the coastal state whose territorial sea the shipping lanes actually pass through, but by a power projecting force from half a world away.

There is a word for demanding a percentage of cargo value from merchant vessels under threat of naval interdiction. The word is not “guardianship.” Every shipping lawyer knows the word. Every P&I club knows the word. The Barbary corsairs knew the word, and they at least had the honesty to use it.

The law they invoked now condemns them
I have spent more than three decades in shipping law, and I want readers to understand precisely what has been done to the legal order these governments claimed to defend.

Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) guarantees the right of transit passage through straits used for international navigation. That right is absolute in a way few rights in international law are: it cannot be suspended, and it cannot be conditioned on payment — not to the coastal state, and certainly not to a third power that has appointed itself gatekeeper.

Article 42 permits bordering states to regulate certain matters, but expressly forbids any regulation that has the practical effect of denying, hampering or impairing transit. Article 26, governing territorial seas, states the principle in terms a child could understand: no charge may be levied upon foreign ships by reason only of their passage.

When Iran floated its toll, every chancellery in the Western world could recite these provisions from memory. Legal advisers produced learned memoranda. Editorial boards thundered. Now the United States — which, let us remember, has never even ratified UNCLOS — imposes a charge an order of magnitude larger, on a strait whose shipping lanes run through Iranian and Omani territorial waters, and the chancelleries have discovered the virtue of silence.

The US military says it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran, hours ahead of a planned reinstatement of a naval blockade on Iran announced by President Donald Trump. https://t.co/UrU0tRWO2A

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 13, 2026

The historical parallel is exact, and it is damning. For four centuries, Denmark extracted the Sound Dues from every vessel passing between the North Sea and the Baltic — a percentage of cargo value, paid under the guns of Kronborg Castle. The maritime powers spent generations denouncing this as a relic of feudal extortion incompatible with the freedom of the seas, and finally abolished it by treaty in 1857.

The principal architect of that abolition — the state that refused on principle to pay tribute for passage through an international strait — was the United States of America.

And there is an older irony still. The founding myth of the American navy is the refusal to pay the Barbary states for safe passage in the Mediterranean: millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute. Two and a quarter centuries later, America has not merely agreed to tribute. It has become the party collecting it.

The hymn sheet, revisited
So let us now address the chorus. Where are all the governments now — the ones who spent the spring singing from the hymn sheet of the “international waterway”?

You told us this was about principle. You told us that the freedom of navigation through international straits was a pillar of the rules-based order, that small trading nations above all depended upon it, that Iran’s toll was piracy dressed in the language of sovereignty.

Very well. The test of a principle is whether you will state it against your friends. Iran’s proposed charge was a rounding error compared to what Washington has just decreed. If US$2 million was piracy, what is US$30 million? If Iran holding the world economy hostage justified war, what does the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” holding it hostage justify — a strongly worded communiqué? An awkward pause at the next summit?

The silence answers the question. The principle was never the freedom of the seas. The principle was that the patron does not pay; the patron collects. The rules-based order, as I have argued at length in these pages, was never a body of rules at all. It was a hierarchy wearing the costume of law, and the costume has now been removed in public.

Consider what Gulf producers are being asked to accept. They cheered — some openly, some through gritted teeth — as American ordnance fell on Iran in the name of keeping the strait free.

Their reward is a levy on their own exports larger than anything Tehran ever contemplated, imposed unilaterally, with no treaty, no consent, no sunset clause, and no forum in which to contest it. They have exchanged a neighbour’s toll booth for an emperor’s tax farm, and they are expected to call it protection.

Seems like Trump just made a pitch for the Iranian toll system.

Because the Iranians were going to charge $1mn per ship, which would amount to 1-2% of the value of the cargo of an oil tanker.

But Trump is going to charge 20%! pic.twitter.com/m2lpNbxd0W

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) July 13, 2026

What the underwriters will decide
Here is the dimension the political commentary will miss, and it is the one that will actually determine events. The Strait of Hormuz now has two rival authorities, each asserting control, each attaching conditions to passage. Iran’s Strait Authority has declared passage unfeasible until calm is restored and speaks of permits and designated corridors.

Washington declares the strait open, promises convoys, and demands its 20 percent.

For the war risk underwriter in London or Oslo, this is not a geopolitical abstraction. It is an impossible risk matrix. Compliance with one authority is defiance of the other. A master who joins an American convoy has identified his vessel with a belligerent; a master who hugs the Iranian corridor and pays Tehran invites interdiction by the self-appointed guardian.

Either course may void cover or trigger exclusions. Add a 20 percent cargo levy to war risk premia already at extraordinary levels, and the commercial mathematics of the strait collapse entirely. The blockade of Hormuz will be completed not by mines or missiles but by the quiet refusal of underwriters to write the risk — a mechanism I have described in the past, when the enforcement power of marine insurance was still treated as an exotic footnote.

The reckoning
Every empire that turned its guarantees into revenue streams discovered the same thing: protection that must be purchased is indistinguishable from the threat it purports to guard against, and clients who are billed like subjects begin, quietly, to shop for alternatives. The two corridors of the New World Order — the ones I have written about since earlier this year — just became three: Iran’s, America’s, and the growing routes that avoid both.

To the governments who sang from the hymn sheet: you were not defending the freedom of the seas. You were defending the exclusive right of your patron to price it. Now the invoice has arrived, addressed to you, at 20 percent of everything you own that floats.

How does it feel?

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Following the passing of Qatar’s Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani at 74 on Sunday, his solidarity with the Palestinian people remains one of the defining legacies of his leadership.

He is being remembered not only as a regional statesman, but also as a steadfast ally of the Palestinian people and the only Arab leader to physically break the crippling siege on the Gaza Strip.

In October 2012, Sheikh Hamad visited the embattled Gaza Strip, six years after Israel imposed its crippling international blockade on the territory, following the 2006 Palestinian elections.

• READ MORE: How Sheikh Hamad revolutionised Arab media through Al Jazeera

Accompanied by his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, and a high-level delegation, the emir bypassed the political isolation imposed on the enclave by Western powers and regional actors, leading to a massive official and popular reception.

The head of Hamas’s diaspora office, Khaled Meshaal, told Al Jazeera that the visit to the Strip meant that “Jerusalem, Gaza and Palestine mourn him”.

“He was the first Arab and Muslim leader to visit Gaza, standing by its side with chivalry and magnanimity, as if officially announcing the breaking of the siege in its darkest circumstances,” Meshaal told Al Jazeera.

“He was intelligent, brave and a man of principles.”

‘Special love for Palestine’
Ahmed al-Sheikh, a senior journalist, Arab affairs commentator and former news director at Al Jazeera Arabic Channel, said the Father Emir had ”a special kind of love for Palestine”.

“Has any other leader in the Arab world done that [visit to Gaza], except Hamad bin Khalifa?” al-Sheikh reflected in a recent interview.

”Why did he go to Gaza? It’s because he saw that everyone around Gaza is neglecting it”, he added.

During that landmark visit, Sheikh Hamad announced an increase in Qatar’s reconstruction grant to the enclave from $254 million to $400 million, laying the foundation for vital housing, infrastructure and healthcare projects that benefited thousands of Palestinians.

His commitment to the Palestinian cause predated the blockade on Gaza. In 1999, Sheikh Hamad became the first Gulf leader to visit the Palestinian territories since 1967, meeting with the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat during a critical political impasse.

According to al-Sheikh, the emir viewed the Palestinian struggle through a deeply personal lens. When former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon besieged Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, the emir was profoundly pained. He told his aides that when Sharon attacked the Muqata’a, it felt as though he was attacking Qatar itself.

His connection to Palestine was coupled with a regret that he had never visited Jerusalem before its occupation in 1967, According to al-Sheikh, that prompted him to commission an extensive three-hour documentary on the holy city to capture its history and identity.

Rather than relying solely on international intervention, he believed in the agency of the Palestinian people and that they were the essential spearhead of their movement.

“You will do the primary action and without this action there can be no liberation,” the emir once told al-Sheikh.

Defying regional consensus
This stance put him frequently at odds with the regional consensus. During Israel’s devastating 2008–2009 war on Gaza, deep divisions emerged among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members over how to respond to the crisis.

Sheikh Hamad called for an emergency Arab summit in Doha, proposing a $250 million reconstruction fund and a maritime corridor to bypass the blockade. He famously expressed his disappointment on live television about the lack of an Arab quorum for the emergency meeting.

“God is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs.”

Some of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure projects before the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023 were the result of financial pledges made by Sheikh Hamad.

Qatar funded the rehabilitation of vital highways and the flagship Sheikh Hamad City in Khan Younis — a $58 million  public housing project with 53 modern apartment buildings for thousands of low-income families.

Additionally, the Sheikh Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, which officially opened in April 2019, became the territory’s premier facility for amputees and children with hearing impairments.

Israel erased infrastructure
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has systematically erased much of the infrastructure Qatar helped finance during Sheikh Hamad’s leadership. Satellite imagery from May this year confirmed that Hamad City and other areas in southern Gaza have been wiped from the map.

The Sheikh Hamad Hospital managed to resume its vital services last December, despite suffering direct attacks, severe shortages and the broader collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system. Operating the only CT scanner in northern Gaza, the hospital has even opened a new branch in the south to cope with a 225 percent increase in amputation cases.

Sheikh Hamad Hospital’s continued operations during the ongoing genocide in Gaza remain a tangible remnant of the late emir’s unprecedented efforts in the besieged enclave. His support for Gaza will remain for generations to come.

Mohammad Mansour is a senior journalist of Al Jazeera with a particular focus on Gaza, Palestine and Israel. Before joining Al Jazeera, he held editorial positions at A News in Istanbul, Turkey; TRT World; and TRT Arabic in Gaza. Mansour won the 2016 Media Freedom Award for Best TV Report in Gaza, Palestine.

Forty-eight hours ago, I wrote: “Iran doesn’t need to close the strait. It needs only to demonstrate, periodically, that it can.”

Today, Iran did.

On Saturday night, the IRGC Navy struck a vessel it says was running an unauthorised route with its tracking systems switched off — “struck and brought to a halt,” in Tehran’s words.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar after US bombings
• Lim Tean: The Hormuz bone – why Iran will not let go
• Other Lim Tean articles

Hours later came the declaration: the Strait of Hormuz is closed “until further notice,” and until “the end of US interference in this region.”

Washington’s response was immediate — a THIRD round of strikes in a week, hitting radars, missile stores, drone launch sites. And still the declaration stands.

Understand what you are watching. This is not a wall going up. This is the tollbooth demanding recognition.

This is Iran’s third closure declaration since February. Each one follows the same grammar: a strike on a “non-compliant” vessel, a proclamation, a spike in oil prices and war risk premiums — and then, underneath the thunder, negotiation.

Safe passage ‘mechanisms’
Even as the IRGC announced the closure, Iranian and Omani ministers were meeting in Muscat to discuss “mechanisms for the safe passage of ships.”

Qatar and Pakistan are working the phones. Oman has floated a draft: free navigation through a southern corridor in Omani waters, while the northern corridor — through Iranian waters — requires Tehran’s prior approval.

Now, your instinct will be to say: fine — then every ship simply takes the free Omani route, and Iran’s leverage evaporates.

Look at the map before you believe that.

The strait is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. There is no southern corridor beyond the reach of Iranian shore batteries, drones and fast boats sitting minutes across the water.

And look at where this month’s strikes actually landed: off Limah. Off Khor Fakkan. Nine nautical miles east of Oman. Every one of them in or near the very waters the proposal calls “free”.

The corridor is not safe because a document says so. It is safe only for as long as Iran chooses not to fire — and Iran has just demonstrated, three times in a week, that it can choose otherwise whenever it likes.

Not freedom of navigation
A passage that exists by the coastal power’s forbearance is not freedom of navigation. It is a licence — revocable at will.

And here is what 30 years in marine insurance taught me: the underwriters in London know this. War risk premiums do not price the legal regime. They price Iranian CAPABILITY — and the capability survives every settlement, every corridor, every ceasefire.

The day Iran wants leverage in the nuclear talks, one projectile anywhere near that “free” corridor resets the entire insurance market overnight. No cover, no cargo, no voyage. The closure enforces itself.

So read the Omani proposal again, because it is the entire game in one sentence. One lane requiring Tehran’s prior approval — and one lane requiring Tehran’s continued restraint.

Either way, Iran’s supervisory role over the world’s most important energy chokepoint gets written into the architecture of the settlement itself: formalised, internationalised, permanent.

Three rounds of American strikes have destroyed boats, radars and launchers. They have not touched THAT.

Every escalation has followed the same sequence: demonstration, declaration, negotiation. The bombs fall, the boats burn, and Iran’s position at the table grows stronger — because its leverage was never the boats. It was the geography.

And geography, as I said, does not negotiate.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

COMMENTARY: By Cathy Peters

In a move that’s been largely unreported in Australia and New Zealand, Hamas announced earlier this week that it would dissolve its governing Emergency Committee with the resignation of its acting leader.

This move has been recognised as an attempt to hasten the transfer of administrative authority to the Trump-appointed Board of Peace’s National Committee for the Management of Gaza (NCAG), a body of Palestinian technocrats, assembled and waiting in Cairo to manage public administration, security, recovery and transition throughout the Gaza Strip as part of the agreed ceasefire plan.

However, despite being established in January this year, the NCAG has not yet been given access to enter Gaza by the Board of Peace or Israel.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism Envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS Israel bias, wants to vet media
• Other Gaza “ceasefire” reports

Trump’s controversial Board of Peace predictably dismissed the Hamas move, stating that the NCAG is not yet in a position to take on this role while Hamas retains control of weapons. Hamas maintains that while Israel is still killing Palestinians, it will not disarm.

Nine months since the Gaza ceasefire and Trump’s 20-point peace plan of October 2025, conditions throughout the Strip have remained unlivable and deadly for Palestinians, with more than 1000 killed by Israeli forces and more than 3500 wounded.

Parents stay awake all night in their tents to stop rats feeding on their children.

The amount of humanitarian aid is far short of what is required, and there is a trickle of medical evacuations despite some 16,500 Palestinians needing urgent medical transfer out of Gaza.

A Board of Inaction
The UN Security Council supported the establishment of the Board of Peace in November last year, noting that it would be temporary and transitional, although Trump subsequently declared it would address other world conflicts beyond Gaza.

The composition of the Board of Peace Executive and the Gaza Executive Board includes a number of Trump’s leadership team, plus other Republican operatives, wealthy US businessmen and real estate magnates, as well as Tony Blair.

• Donald Trump – Chairman for life
• Marco Rubio – US Secretary of State
• Jared Kushner – US presidential advisor and son-in-law
• Steve Witkoff – US Special Envoy to the Middle East
• Tony Blair – Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• Marc Rowan – CEO of Apollo Global Management
• Ajay Banga – President of the World Bank Group
  

The Gaza Executive Board includes all of the above plus various international diplomats and intelligence officials and representatives from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE and more Republican government appointees, Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and former Trump campaign adviser, and Robert Gabriel, US Deputy National Security Advisor.

According to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803, this body has UN support to “set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until the Palestinian Authority has “satisfactorily reformed”. It also authorised the Board to deploy a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza; however, this has not occurred.

Israel has moved some of the anti-Hamas Palestinian militias it’s been arming and funding for three years now into the area it has occupied behind the yellow line. These various militias, led by factional gangs, drug lords and criminals, pose additional threats to Hamas disarming and the transition of power to a Palestinian-led reconstruction committee and the ultimate withdrawal of the IDF.

Yellow and Orange Lines

The Israeli-defined ceasefire Yellow Line, according to Israel’s legal NGO Gisha, pushes more than two million people into less than half of the Strip’s territory, exacerbating unbearable overcrowding that is harming public health, including outbreaks of disease and infestation of rats and other pests.

Israel’s seizure of such vast areas also prevents Gaza residents from returning to their homes and lands. Most of Gaza’s agricultural lands lie east of the Yellow Line, meaning they are within areas controlled by Israel. Continued denial of access for farmers to their lands prevents the rehabilitation of vital food sources.

From March 2025, Israel instituted the Orange Line, a line that delineates almost 48 percent of Gaza’s land mass where any international organisations are prohibited from moving without prior coordination with Israeli authorities. Gisha reports that this orange line is now a new border that has expanded the area that Israel now directly controls.

While negotiations have stalled for 9 months on the initial implementation of the ceasefire agreement, the IDF, following on from Netanyahu’s call in May, has now occupied almost 70 percent of Gaza, with the yellow cement perimeter markers defining an ever-shrinking area where 2.1 million war-wounded and dispossessed Palestinians are helplessly surviving.

Remote-controlled machine guns
Everyone in Gaza is constantly monitored by drones, and now occupying the eastern perimeter of this dystopian landscape are 23 massive military cranes equipped with remote-controlled machine guns and high-tech surveillance cameras inside the Israeli IDF-defined Yellow Line.

Gaza journalist Tamar Nahed posted this description of Israel’s latest killing apparatus,

“These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound … it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times.”

In the first week of July, the Board of Peace declared that there was no role for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, which is a continuation of the Israeli ban on this aid organisation, which has supported Palestinians with essential humanitarian and educational aid in Gaza since 1948.

This announcement negates the Charter of the United Nations, international law principles and fundamental human rights standards.

Shelters or camps?
Despite the Board’s apparent refusal to allow the Palestinian committee of bureaucrats (NCAG) into Gaza, the Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom just reported on plans aimed at relocating Palestinian residents into barbed wire fenced designated areas. This will allow the IDF to “deepen its grip on areas outside of the yellow line”.

“Surviving Palestinians will be herded into fenced ‘humanitarian shelters’ policed by foreign forces,” as reported by Israel Hayom on July 2.

Images of a camp that’s been described as a concentration camp have emerged in Tel Al-Sultan, an area near Rafah where a pilot project of “humanitarian shelters” will be established. Civilians will be channelled into Tel Al-Sultan, which was a densely populated area of Rafah from which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ordered to flee in April last year.

This image of stark, freshly flattened land surrounded by barbed wire fences and covered with masses of metal box shelters and no evidence of any permanent cement structures (as directed by Israel) appears to be a horrific precursor to

a very grim future for Palestinians in Gaza.

It recalls Israel Defence Minister Katz’s plan of a year ago of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where the goal was to screen people before they were allowed to enter to ensure they were not Hamas and then refuse any exits except to third countries.

Legal immunity
The Board of Peace convened in Cyprus at the end of June for 3 days to “reset” after “the Iran war has completely shifted the attention in the last several months,” according to an official source. It sought to address the funding shortfalls, logistical delays and security challenges.

One of the more controversial draft resolutions was the Board’s plan to grant legal immunity to its members, contractors, and security forces; therefore

shielding the whole enterprise from potential legal proceedings.

As reported widely, human rights lawyers are highly critical of this proposal, including Palestinian American lawyer and academic, Noura Erakat: “They are basically saying there’s no external oversight, including applicable international law regarding occupation. It’s creating a legal system unto itself.”

At the same time, the IDF has reportedly called for fighting to resume as senior officers in the IDF claim that Hamas’ military wing is rebuilding.

Hamas has maintained that it will only disarm under the auspices of the Palestinian NCAG and when Phase 1 of the ceasefire agreement is achieved, which includes the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed positions, full implementation of humanitarian measures and a complete end to Israel’s military attacks.

The nightmare on the ground in Gaza for Palestinians continues. The machinations of Trump’s Board of Peace appear to be

stymying any chance for genuine reconstruction of Gaza

led by Palestinians for Palestinians. The available evidence at this point is that the 1000-day-plus Israeli genocide in Gaza continues apace behind the veneer of Trump’s “peace” plan and the continuing indifference of world powers

On October 9, 2023, just after the State of Israel began its ongoing genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, Sarah Cotte, a French-Ethiopian student at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London gave a speech at a rally organised by the SOAS Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society.

Her speech was “expressing support for the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against occupation and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state”, as the Defend the SOAS 2 website explains.

The speech was filmed on a phone and shared online, and, in response, the vicious and vindictive pro-Israeli lobbying group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), scouring the internet for dissent, shared the video and tagged the Metropolitan Police.

• READ MORE: How were the Filton 4 sentenced for terrorism when they weren’t convicted of terrorism?
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This led, in January 2024, to Sarah being arrested in a dawn raid on her home, on the basis that she had committed a crime under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for “inviting support for a proscribed organisation”, which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

It took another 13 months for the Metropolitan Police to formally charge Sarah, and, on the same day, another SOAS student was also arrested on suspicion of an offence under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, although they have not been charged.

Together, however, they are known as “the SOAS 2″.

On June 22, two years and nine months since Sarah made her speech, her trial began at the Old Bailey, with the prosecution alleging that her speech on October 9, 2023 “intentionally or recklessly” encouraged support for Hamas.

Disgraceful broadened proscription
Crucially, although the military wing of Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government in 2001 (ignoring the fact that it is a legitimate resistance movement to illegal occupation and oppression), it was not until December 2021 that then-foreign secretary Priti Patel, an ardent Zionist, broadened the proscription to encompass the whole of Hamas, which, disgracefully, enabled an entire civilian government, and everyone who worked for it, to be regarded as terrorists.

In her closing remarks after the week-long trial, the defence barrister, Margo Munro Kerr, “reminded the jury that Ms Cotte’s speech was completely legal and that protecting solidarity with Palestine is ‘an absolute necessity in a democratic society’”, as the Morning Star described it.

A spokesperson for Defend the SOAS 2 told the newspaper, “This trial has never been about justice; it is about intimidation. The Terrorism Act 2000 is being deployed by a Zionist-supporting Labour government precisely as it was intended: to systematically criminalise anti-imperialists and silence solidarity with liberation movements.

“While Israeli war criminals enter Britain fresh from committing genocide in Gaza without a glance from the police, a young woman is dragged through the courts for speaking the truth.

“Sarah did not break under the prosecution’s pressure, and neither will we.”

On July 8, after failing to reach a verdict, the jury was dismissed, and a retrial was scheduled for September 14.

Sarah told Socialist Worker that, as the newspaper described it, her trial was “part of a broader crackdown on the Palestine movement and our civil liberties”.

‘Repressing’ Palestine movement
As she described it, “The state has no choice but to repress the Palestine movement”, because it “has politicised so many young people in the past two years.”

As the Morning Star added, she “explained the state has a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it is targeting direct actionists such as the Filton 25 activists and the Brize Norton 6, but it is also trying to criminalise activists for speaking out against genocide.”

Speaking outside the court, Sarah told supporters, “We know that we are on the side of justice. We are on the side of liberation. We are on the side of people who fight back, people who strive for a better world, people who want to build a different system.

“The British state is on the side of terrorism, it’s on the side of apartheid, it’s on the side of colonialism, it’s on the side of imperialism.”

As with the case of Moog 4 — activists facing a retrial for direct action against an arms factory supplying weapons for the genocide, after the jury failed to reach a verdict — and as happened most prominently with the Filton 6, activists who took direct action against an Elbit Systems facility in Bristol in August 2024, and were acquitted of the main charge against them in February this year, the government, with the support of complicit lawyers and judges, refuses to accept defeat.

When jurors are unable to convict, or choose not to, on the basis of their consciences, the government keeps hammering away until it gets the result that it wants; in the case of the Filton 6, notoriously, that meant securing a conviction by the jury on lesser charges at the retrial, followed by the judge grafting a “terrorism connection” onto their conviction at the sentencing phase.

This is not justice, and it is to be hoped that it will backfire, with jurors becoming ever more wary of convicting defendants at all, as they recognise that they are not being allowed to exercise their fundamental rights to take decisions based on the merits of the cases before them, but are being manipulated in a toxic politically-biased charade, which is about defending a foreign country committing a genocide, and defending the rights of its arms companies to contribute to, and profit from that genocide.

The activists have true justice on their side; their opponents have only complicity in the most monstrous crimes of our lifetimes.

Former US Vice-President Mike Pence wants Donald Trump to “finish the job” in the Strait of Hormuz.

After 130 days of war that failed to reopen it for a single day, a shipping lawyer must explain to the Pence who actually rules the Strait.

It isn’t CENTCOM. It is a committee room in London.

• READ MORE: US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Vessels transit Hormuz despite renewed fighting between US and Iran
• Other War on Iran reports

Mike Pence declared this week: “If the Iran deal is over, President Trump should unleash the Armed Forces of the United States to finish the job: destroy their nuclear and missile programmes, end support for terrorist proxies and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Finish the job. Consider the phrase. It implies the job was ever within America’s power to finish — that somewhere in the arsenals of the United States there exists a munition capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

There isn’t. There never was. The past 130 days have proven it beyond any argument, and the fact that Pence has not absorbed the lesson tells you how little the American political class understands about the war it started — and how catastrophically ill-advised Trump has been by the men around him.

What the bombs couldn’t do
Let us recall the record, because the record is merciless.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched their grand aerial campaign against Iran. Washington called it Operation Epic Fury. Iran answered by closing the Strait.

The United States then imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, struck hundreds of targets, and deployed the full theatrical repertoire of American power. Thirteen American service members came home in coffins. More than 7000 people died across the region.

And the Strait? The Strait remained closed.

Tanker traffic through the world’s most vital energy chokepoint collapsed by more than 90 percent. Some 360 vessels sat stranded on either side of the passage.

Eight of the world’s largest container lines abandoned the Gulf entirely and sent their ships around the Cape of Good Hope, as if Suez and Hormuz had never been cut, as if we had returned to the age of sail.

That is the “job” Pence wishes to finish. Four months of the most intensive American military operations since Iraq did not restore freedom of navigation for a single day. Only a negotiated settlement — the Islamabad Memorandum of June 17, brokered by Pakistan, not won by CENTCOM — briefly cracked the Strait open.

And when that truce collapsed this week, with Iran striking commercial vessels and Trump declaring the ceasefire over, the Strait slammed shut again within hours.

The bombs opened nothing. The diplomats opened it briefly. The bombs are now guaranteeing it stays closed. This is the arithmetic Pence cannot count.

The judge who actually rules the strait
Here is what Pence, and evidently Trump’s advisers, have never understood: the Strait of Hormuz is not governed from Washington, or even from Tehran. It is governed from London, from the unglamorous committee rooms of the marine insurance market.

I spent decades in international shipping law, across Iran, Indonesia, Ukraine and half the maritime world, and I can tell you that no force on earth moves a merchant vessel that its insurers have abandoned.

Every commercial ship afloat carries three layers of insurance. There is Hull and Machinery cover — H&M — insuring the vessel itself, an asset worth $100 million or more for a modern VLCC. There is Protection and Indemnity cover — P&I — insuring against third-party liabilities: pollution, crew death and injury, wreck removal, cargo claims.

And there is Cargo insurance, covering the value of the goods themselves — and a laden supertanker’s crude can today be worth nearly as much as the ship that carries it.

All three carry war risk exclusions. War, mines, drones, missiles — none of it is covered under standard terms. To sail into a zone of conflict, an owner must purchase separate War risk cover, and that cover is switched on and off by the Joint War Committee of the London market, which maintains the list of designated high-risk areas.

When the JWC lists an area, premiums explode, cover becomes voyage-by-voyage, renewable in seven-day windows, cancellable on notice.

When underwriters lose confidence entirely, cover simply evaporates — and a ship without insurance does not sail. Its lenders forbid it. Its charterers refuse it. Its flag state warns against it.

Now observe what actually happened in this war. Within 48 hours of the February strikes — before Iran had laid a single mine, before the IRGC had struck a single tanker — the war risk market had already shut the Strait. Insurers terminated existing policies. The Joint War Committee designated the entire Persian Gulf.

Premiums that stood at 0.25 percent of hull value surged past 1 percent, then to several percent — for a single transit. On a $150 million VLCC, that is millions of dollars per voyage, before the cargo is even insured.

Daily charter rates for supertankers quadrupled toward $800,000.

The insurance market closed the Strait before Iran’s navy did
The commercial shutdown preceded the physical blockade. That single fact demolishes Pence’s entire thesis. You cannot bomb your way to freedom of navigation, because freedom of navigation is not a military condition. It is a commercial one.

It exists when a Lloyd’s underwriter is willing to write a policy at a price a shipowner can bear. No B-2 strike has ever changed an actuarial table in the attacking power’s favour. Every strike makes the table worse.

The market never believed the peace
And here is the detail that should end this debate permanently. Even during the June truce — even after Trump stood at Versailles proclaiming “Ships of the World, start your engines” — the war risk designation never came off.

The Joint War Committee did not delist the Gulf. Premiums remained at multiples of their pre-war level. Underwriters kept writing cover voyage by voyage, week by week, ready to withdraw at the first drone.

The men who price risk for a living looked at Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding and rendered their verdict: they did not believe it. July 8 proved them right. The market understood what the White House did not — that a ceasefire built on deferred questions, contested toll clauses and mutual bad faith was a pause, not a peace.

Now, with the MOU dead, any prospect of the designation lifting is dead with it. The Strait’s status as a war zone is entrenched for the foreseeable future.

Mike Pence proposes to fix this with more air strikes. Understand what that means in practice: every American bomb that falls on Iran adds basis points to a war risk premium, extends the JWC’s listed area, and pushes more tonnage onto the long route around Africa.

Even if the United States Navy physically escorted every tanker — an operational fantasy in waters saturated with Iranian drones, missiles and mines — the underwriters would still price the corridor as a battlefield, because it would be one.

Washington already tacitly admitted this when it directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a $40 billion reinsurance backstop, turning the American taxpayer into the marine insurer of last resort. When your own government must insure the ships because the market will not, you have conceded that the market does not believe your military assurances.

There is no clearer confession of strategic failure.

The victory America threw way
The tragedy — and I use the word deliberately — is that America had its exit in March. In the first weeks of the war, Trump declared that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the Strait was open.

The obvious move, the move a Bismarck or a Nixon would have made, was to declare victory and walk away. Announce that the nuclear facilities lay in ruins, that the objective was achieved, and that the Strait of Hormuz — through which barely a trickle of America’s own oil passes — was henceforth the problem of those who actually depend on it: China, which draws over 40 percent of its seaborne crude through the passage, India, Japan, Korea, Europe.

Let Beijing negotiate with Tehran over tolls. Let Asia underwrite the convoys. America, the world’s largest oil producer, could have watched from across two oceans.

Instead, Washington chained its prestige to a waterway it does not need and cannot control, and handed Iran the greatest strategic gift imaginable: a permanent instrument of leverage over the global economy that costs Tehran almost nothing to wield.

Iran does not need to win a naval battle. It needs only to keep the actuaries nervous — a drone here, a mine there, a seized tanker when the mood takes it. Its Persian Gulf Strait Authority now sells passage to favoured nations at seven-figure fees, exercising precisely the sovereignty over the Strait that its negotiators promised it would never surrender.

The Strait, as Iran’s chief negotiator said plainly, will not return to pre-war conditions. He was telling the truth. Washington simply refused to hear it.

The lesson Pence will never learn
This is what the collapse of the old order looks like in practice — what I have called the Legitimacy Principle. American power can destroy, but it can no longer compel. It can level a nuclear facility, but it cannot make a Greek shipowner send a $150 million vessel and 25 souls through a minefield.

It can blockade Iranian ports, but it cannot force a Lloyd’s syndicate to write a policy it knows will lose money. The instruments that actually govern the world’s arteries — insurance markets, charter rates, the quiet risk calculus of men in London and Singapore and Piraeus — do not answer to CENTCOM.

Mike Pence looks at the Strait of Hormuz and sees a target list. A shipping lawyer looks at it and sees a war risk clause. The clause has beaten the target list for 130 days, and it will beat it for a 130 more.

“Finish the job” is not a strategy. It is the sound of a man who has learned nothing, advising a president who was told nothing, about a war that neither of them can win.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Despite advice from wiser heads, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth swallowed the bait from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and launched a miserably conceived, poorly executed and catastrophic war on Iran earlier this year.

Trump is no FDR and Hegseth is no Carl von Clausewitz; it’s more like Dumb and Dumber Went to War.

These are the same people New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines’ leaders are betting the family farms on.  Weep, my beloved country.

• READ MORE: Is the United States prepared for a war with China?
• US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Other war on Iran reports

The Iran lesson: the practical limits of US power
For people in the Asia-Pacific region, the failure of the US-Israeli war on Iran should seriously bring into question long-standing alignments with the US. If the contest between the US and China ever goes kinetic, it is highly likely the US and its allies will be defeated.

The consequences for all the people of Asia-Pacific, all the way down to New Zealand, will be immense.

If the two behemoths refrain from striking the enemy’s mainland, the heavy blows will fall on allies like the Philippines, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand.  I think that was part of the signalling when China fired a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific last week.

This was immediately after Australia signed a defence pact with Fiji, and New Zealand announced it was joining the US-led Project Arcadia — a Five Eyes programme designed to build an AI-enabled, integrated digital battlespace command system. In other words, much deeper integration with the US war machine.

In December 2025 someone in the US establishment leaked to The New York Times “The Overmatch Brief” — a secret Pentagon summary of years of US war-gaming that showed the Chinese outgunned the US in all the areas that will count in a conventional war.

Whoever that person was, I suspect they were trying to avert war, trying to stop the kind of imbecilic decision Trump made just months later in the attack on Iran.

At the heart of the problem for the US and its allies is the West’s steady decline in manufacturing capacity. Modern wars are, as strategists said in the Second World War, about who can get the most stuff to the battlefield.

China is now the factory of the world and, if faced with a war, it can rapidly ramp up production of all the weapons of war to a level that is beyond the ability of the West to respond.

The leaked Overmatch Brief recognised that America’s preference is for high-value weapon systems like aircraft carriers and the performance-plagued F-35 jets that are likely to be overrun by vast numbers of Chinese weapons systems produced at a fraction of the cost.

Faced with China’s synchronised opening salvos of hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and anti-satellite warfare, US forces could face immediate sensor blindness and possibly a crippling blow to key assets within days.

Dr Andreas Krieg of King’s College London is a leading Gulf expert who I follow closely. He spoke recently on Middle East Eye’s “Unapologetic” about the war on Iran: “I think it has undone the American empire in a way that I don’t think the American empire will bounce back.

“It is probably the most seismic shift in regional power we have seen in the past 30 years or so.”

In all likelihood, the US-Israeli war on Iran has been paused, not ended, but certain home truths are clear.

Thanks to Trump and Hegseth we have seen the practical limits of US power. Short of scaling up and bringing in 500,000 to 1 million troops, and the full weight of the US navy, army and airforce, Iran cannot be defeated.

Success, if possible, would likely take years, by which time global energy would be wrecked for a generation, triggering an economic calamity.

Setting aside the illegality, immorality and depravity of such a campaign, what is clear is we are witnessing the end of US global hegemony and the slow, violent birth of a multipolar world order.

If long-besieged Iran — the world’s 51st-ranked economy — was able to force the Americans to sue for peace, what are the prospects of the US getting an ass-whopping from a China that has the military and the manufacturing power, the home advantage and, above all, the existential need to see off the Western empire?

As with the Gulf states which recently sided with the US, reparations demanded — in this instance by China — for such a war could be staggering for America’s Pacific allies.

A peer-on-peer war is a different beast
There are important differences between the US attack on Iran and a peer-on-peer war with China. The Iranian strategy was to hit US bases, hit Israel and escalate horizontally by attacking US allies in the Gulf.

Iran had to absorb tens of thousands of strikes without replying in kind (say, sinking a warship).  Sinking the US fleets will be the first order of business if war breaks out with China.

Any attack by the US on the Chinese mainland will almost certainly be immediately answered by at least reciprocal strikes on the US mainland. Heaven help any allies (that’s us) who paint a target on their backs and join the Americans.

Empty shelves and the innovation question
New Cold War warriors like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington underscore the importance of technological innovation in winning wars. Fair point. America has impressive capabilities in this space but China is a fast-follower and, increasingly, a leader.

One example: China has built the DF-27, the world’s first intercontinental anti-ship ballistic missile, a carrier-killer that can hunt its prey for 8000km.

In its report  “Is the United States Prepared for a War with China?” (2026), CSIS evaluated US military capacity after the clear overreach of the war on Iran. Along with numerous other military analysts, CSIS highlighted the rapid expenditure of hard-to-replace missiles, interceptors and other munitions that, along with commitments to the Gaza genocide (not their term) and the war in Russia and Ukraine, have left the shelves perilously low on supplies for America’s next war.

The reality is US defence is run first and foremost for the benefit of a private sector that is hugely overpriced and slow-to-deliver. It will take years to get the stockpile of precision cruise missiles (like the SM-6, SM-3 IB, JASSM, and Tomahawk) up to anything like a level to fight a superpower-on-superpower war.

Should this surprise anyone? The military-industrial capacity of China now dwarfs Uncle Sam’s. Guess who can produce the most long-range drones, naval drones, interceptors and whatever weapon of war you could choose?

China today accounts for about half of all global shipping production by tonnage — much of it can quickly be converted to wartime production. The US builds less than 2 percent and is woefully slow. The Americans continue to invest heavily in aircraft carriers (nine more are on the drawing board), each costing in excess of US$10 billion — despite hypersonic missiles ensuring any that are within thousands of kilometres of a war zone will almost certainly be sunk by a swarm of missiles.

China’s deep structural resilience, its mature leadership, and its careful marshalling of its resources, makes it the likely victor in a war no one should start and possibly no one can decisively win. War is madness. Diplomacy and moderation are the cure.

For all the reasons above, the current defence settings in both Australia and New Zealand are wrong-headed and wedded to a world that is rapidly disappearing into the rearview mirror.  The specific perils our leaders are placing us in is the subject of my next article.

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 also contributes to Asia Pacific Report and he hosts solidarity.co.nz

“They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people.

There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” Trump said after bombing Iran yesterday and and again today — and threatening to tear up the MOU.

The pussy-grabbing “Leader of the Free World” has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilisations becoming daily occurrences.

What has largely been left unreported after Trump’s outburst at the NATO Summit in Ankara is the elegant response from the Iranians.

• READ MORE: Tehran hits Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar after deadly US strikes
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Iran’s Fars News Agency reported Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi dismissing Trump’s insulting remarks. He stressed that Tehran does not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action.

FM: Iran Not to Answer Vulgarity with Vulgarity, But with Actionhttps://t.co/iFneZILzw2 pic.twitter.com/vyy3T2wfSY

— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) July 8, 2026

“Addressing the Civilised and Courageous Nation of Iran with derogatory language does not diminish its Greatness,” Araqchi said. He added that Iranians were renowned for their “civility, culture, and strong moral values”.

I can vouch for that. I have visited Iran a couple of times, most recently in 2018, and have friendships with Iranians today. Some are anti-government, some are pro-government; all are intelligent, courteous people.

Travelling through Iran it is impossible not to notice that good manners and generosity are deeply embedded in Iranian culture.

And then there’s the Americans.

Best-in-class days gone
I remember attending the APEC summit in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 with the New Zealand delegation. At the time the American diplomats were considered best-in-class, to be emulated. Those days are long gone.

When Trump said in an earlier threat over the Strait of Hormuz: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country” his diplomats made no efforts to soften the edges.

Trump threatened to end the entire Iranian civilisation overnight and the collective West did not demur. No class.

The West is now led by a senile version of Sammy The Bull Gravano, the New York mobster — violent, uncultured and believing that whacking someone is the solution to every problem.

Trump’s outbursts may not simply be a reflection of his lack of moral education but are likely symptomatic of his serious cognitive decline. Dementia experts cite a sudden increase in swearing or crude language as a neurological symptom.

The pussy-grabbing Leader of the Free World has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilizations becoming daily occurrences.

While Trump rants, Tehran’s sophisticated diplomatic corps — packed with PhDs who understand the nuances of international law far better than the real estate agents Trump sends in to bat for the USA — have quietly outmaneuvered the Americans in purely diplomatic terms.

The reason for Trump’s potty-mouthed tantrum is clear: he’s not getting away with murder.

The Iranians are not letting the Americans and Israelis get away with breaching the Memorandum of Understanding.

Tehran safeguarding sovereignty
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baqaei stated that the United States has violated the framework of the Islamabad Accord signed by the two countries, stressing that Tehran will firmly safeguard its national interests and sovereignty.

It is impossible to read the text of the MOU and not see that Iran is on firm ground.  Article One of the signed MOU reads:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final Deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.”

Pacta sunt servanda — “agreements must be kept” — has been a bedrock of international law since before the Roman Empire.  American Exceptionalism has, until now, given itself an exception to the rule. No more, one hopes.

Israel’s war and war crimes in Southern Lebanon have continued since the US signed the MOU.  Iran is imposing a new rule on the Middle East: the rules apply to everyone, including the US and Israel.

Last night, America bombed Iran. Again.

Dozens of strikes — four to five times heavier than the last round — against radar sites, anti-ship missile batteries, and the Revolutionary Guard’s swarm boats. Explosions lit up Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

And what will it change? Nothing.

• READ MORE: Trump says MoU to end Iran war is over, ‘waste of time’ dealing with Tehran
  
• Other Lim Tean articles

Because the strikes were a response to something far more revealing: in the space of 24 hours, three tankers — a Qatari LNG carrier, a Saudi supertanker, and a third vessel hit by drone — were struck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at where they were hit. All three were transiting the southern corridor hugging the Omani coast — the route Washington has designated, patrolled, and blessed with the protection of the US Navy.

That is the whole story in one map. The Strait of Hormuz today is not one waterway. It is two rival corridors.

A northern route, designated by Tehran, where ships must register with Iran and sail under Iranian rules. And a southern route, sponsored by America, where the Gulf states send their oil under the shadow of the Fifth Fleet.

‘No American route’
Iran’s message this week could not be clearer: there is no American route through “their” strait.

Tehran did not even claim the attacks. It didn’t need to. State television simply noted that a vessel had “ignored warnings”. After the American bombs fell, Iran’s military declared it would deliver a “crushing response” and that the only safe passage through Hormuz “is one set by Iran”.

Understand what is actually being contested here. This is not about tankers. It is about governance. For 80 years, freedom of navigation in the Gulf has meant navigation on Washington’s terms.

Iran is now asserting something revolutionary: that the power which sits astride the strait — geographically, permanently, immovably — will write the rules of passage. Not the US Navy. Not the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain.

And here is what Washington refuses to grasp: Iran has already priced in the bombs. It absorbed strikes 10 days ago. It absorbed heavier strikes last night. It will absorb the next round too.

Every strike costs America political capital, splits it further from European allies who have barred their bases from offensive operations, and pushes oil and bond yields higher. Every strike costs Iran some radar stations and speedboats — assets it regards as expendable ammunition in a war of endurance.

Iran is the dog that has the Hormuz bone between its teeth. You can beat the dog. You can bomb the dog. The dog will yelp, bleed — and bite down harder.

Not bargaining chip
For Tehran, control of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip. It is the last and greatest source of leverage it possesses, the one card through which the rising regional hegemon dictates the terms of 20 percent of the world’s energy.

The rules-based order said the strait belonged to everyone. The emerging order says the strait belongs to those with the legitimacy — and the will — to hold it. Iran is betting it can outlast American patience.

History suggests the dog usually keeps the bone.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

On March 5 of this year, the United States launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 km/h, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 6700 kilometres away, 24 minutes later.

Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On March 3, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.

• READ MORE: NZ accuses China of going against peace and stability of Pacific
• RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Other RIMPAC reports

Searches of The New Zealand Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.

And yet, on Tuesday, both The Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the at least 15 ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the US since 2021.

How many missiles has the US fired into the Pacific — did Australia protest those?

Here are the dates that the US test fired nuclear-capable ICBM missiles 7,000kms into the mid-Pacific:

•2026: March 5, June tbc.
•2025: February 19, May 21, November 4.
•2024: June 4,… pic.twitter.com/v6nxkRGA9U

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) July 7, 2026

“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.

Wong isn’t wrong.

Kiribati criticised US test
In 2024 Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.

A statement from the President’s Office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.

“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”

It is a thought — almost — echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”

You will search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That is despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.

Without confirmation from China, it is impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance — which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to — is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.

When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.

Australian nuclear submarines plan
But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).

Shortly after the announcement, then Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.

The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded more than US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.

A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 percent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 percent who saw the US as one.

The US has more than 5000 nuclear warheads with 1700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.

China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.

When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the US regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they are indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

This is a story about what has been taken and what can be saved.  I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing Dr Emalani Case, a Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) academic and activist about the cultural, political and environmental impact of RIMPAC 2026 on Hawai’i.

We also discussed the wider implication of the surge in US-led militarism in the Pacific, its dangers for all Pacific nations, and what a better vision of our future might look like.

Dr Emalani Case is a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. She has written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental impacts, and decolonial movements across Oceania.

I see that you’re named after Queen Emma.

She was the godmother of my great grandmother. She loved her people and cared for their health. She was instrumental in creating the Queen’s Hospital on Oʻahu and worked to create spaces of safety, health and genuine security.If I could make some link between RIMPAC and her —  RIMPAC is not about the health of the people; it’s not about our safety; and it’s not about our future.

RIMPAC is representative of the militarisation of our islands. There’s always this claim that it is for our benefit, for our protection and for the security of Hawai’i and the region, but beginning with the military-backed overthrow of the kingdom, the military has always been there for America’s imperial interests.

The PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an environmentally and culturally sensitive manner.  Is it? What makes you stand up to RIMPAC?  

You can’t say that you are aligned with the interests of the people or even with the environment when you’re based on destruction and violence.

I’ve experienced militarism and really felt it in visceral ways. When you grow up in Hawai’i, the military becomes normalised. It’s in your face all the time. It actually wasn’t until I moved away from Hawai’i that I realised, “Oh, it’s actually odd to see helicopters every day, and it’s an odd thing to see tanks driving through your community.”

Growing up in Waimea, which is about 40 miles from Pōhakuloa, one of the biggest military training facilities in the Hawai’ian archipelago, we could hear and feel when they were doing live target bombing there.

I grew up with parents who were activists in their own right, always fighting for our language, our way.  My mom was part of opening a Hawai’ian language preschool in my town and my dad was always fighting for our rights to continued access to our land, to be able to hunt and harvest, and fish.

So I grew up with that, and I grew up experiencing militarism and observing the violence. That led me to naturally stand against RIMPAC.

Tell us more about the rhetoric that the military are here to protect you — and us.

There’s a myth that the military is here to protect us. I always ask: who’s here to protect us from the military?

They see us as being sacrificeable and dismissible. When you start to confront this notion that we are supposed to be patriotic American citizens, that it’s our duty to give up our land and it’s our duty to sacrifice our places … that can be quite confronting for people.

Militarism shouldn’t be normalised, it is highly destructive. We need to unravel and challenge military rhetoric, because it is so strong.

I had a lot of family members around me who had already started to push back against that. We have a Hawai’ian Renaissance, this huge reawakening of political consciousness that started in the 1970s around the time of the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, one of our islands [for Vietnam war live firing training]. So I was born in the 80s, and I grew up with that reawakening, that renaissance, that revitalisation of language and culture, and dance.

It’s beautiful and it’s strong. We’ve got a really strong nation of people who are still learning, still unraveling, and still dismantling these normalised ideas, this colonial rhetoric.

What else do people need to understand about the negative impact massive events like RIMPAC have on the environment?

If you take Pōhakuloa — as just one example — you have these long stretches of black lava. It might look empty but under that lava is a massive aquifer. If you bomb on top of that and contaminate it with the chemicals that then seep into the soil, there’s major environmental damage.

If you repeatedly bomb a place, the threat to the aquifer is serious.

The logo for RIMPAC looks like a tourist advertisement for a tropical paradise.

That image of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise is strategic. The tourism industry is working as a mask for all of this other violence that’s happening here.

RIMPAC is part of this alliance of nations that ultimately might do crazy things like start a war on China? How worried should we be?

We have to confront these things like RIMPAC that are pulling us together in really dangerous, violent ways. It means confronting how militarism in one place actually shapes and even bolsters militarism in other places across the Pacific.

When these countries do decide to come together and wage war on China, that’s going to impact all of us.

There’s an image of the future that’s a very dark one but there’s also a positive one, that the Pacific can be an ocean of peace. Tell us, how you would like to see things shape up?

I think for anybody who does this work, there has to be a vision of something positive and beautiful. Otherwise, why do we do all of this? My vision for the Pacific is, of course, not just the absence of conflict.

As Pacific peoples, we have responsibilities to engage in some kind of decolonial dreaming and envisioning — as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says: to think beyond the absence of something, and to think about what our futures actually look like, and feels like, and smells like in a future that is demilitarised.

I dream I wake up to silence because I’m too used to waking up to chaos. I want that silence in that moment to breathe and just hear nothing but birds or laughter or all the things that should be there. What peace is to me is waking up in a peaceful environment and having the energy to truly care for people. That brings us back to Queen Emalani.

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, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

Since President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Israeli war on Gaza last October, followed by a UN Security Council endorsement of his Gaza plan, negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld.

While Hamas handed over all of its captives and ceased its military operations, Israel has repeatedly violated the deal, killing more than 1000 Palestinians, restricting aid and movement, and expanding the areas it occupies in Gaza.

With media attention focused on Iran and Lebanon, Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” continues pushing a 15-point “roadmap,” first presented in April, that appears aimed at transforming a limited ceasefire into a broader political settlement based on the disarming of the Palestinian resistance and the abandoning of the struggle for Palestinian national liberation.

• READ MORE: Internal documents show Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ moving to crush Palestinian self-determination
• Trump’s Board of Peace plans to grant itself sweeping immunity, documents show
• Other Board of Peace reports

Drop Site News has obtained two documents from the recent round of negotiations over Gaza’s future:

• Palestinian negotiators’ amendments to the Board of Peace’s proposed roadmap, submitted on June 13; and
• Response delivered late last month by the Board’s “High Representative,” Nickolay Mladenov.

Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad have reported on the documents here and a summary from their X post is below:

Nickolay Mladenov, Bulgaria’s former defence and foreign minister, who served as a visiting fellow at a pro-Israel think tank founded by AIPAC veterans, has generally avoided identifying Israel when discussing ceasefire violations.

Although the October 2025 agreement obliges both Hamas and Israel to halt “all military operations,” and despite Israel’s daily violations in Gaza, Mladenov’s revised roadmap states that “Hamas and the Palestinian factions shall immediately cease all military activities.”

‘Not to assign blame’
A Board of Peace official defended the approach, telling Drop Site News that the body’s role was “not to assign blame” but to ensure commitments were implemented.

One senior Hamas official, however, told Drop Site that Mladenov’s roadmap sought to impose under the threat of renewed war, ongoing killings, and humanitarian catastrophe, “the surrender that Netanyahu failed to achieve through war”.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem added that while Palestinian amendments were welcomed by mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, Mladenov “continues to approach the file from a perspective close to the Israeli position”.

In their June 13 response, Hamas and other Palestinian factions proposed a gradual process for the registration and storage of heavy weapons to proceed in parallel with Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and be contingent on the implementation of key steps: the entry of the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), deployment of the International Stabilisation Force (ISF), and dismantling of Israel-backed armed militias in the Strip.

The Palestinian proposal is limited to “heavy weapons” and would be under the joint supervision of the NCAG and Palestinian factions.

In his response, however, Mladenov expanded the framework into a process to “store and decommission” weapons, broadening the scope beyond heavy weapons to include weapons depots, tunnels, military production facilities, and all weapons stored within them.

Crucially, his version adds a condition stating that once the process was complete, Palestinian resistance factions would no longer “hold, store, control or have access to any weapons”.

Buffer force separating Israelis
Hamas’s draft envisioned the ISF primarily as a buffer force separating Israeli troops from areas administered by the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), monitoring ceasefire compliance, and protecting the delivery of essential humanitarian supplies.

While Mladenov retained these functions, he also assigned the ISF a role in training Palestinian police and “support[ing] the decommissioning process.”

On withdrawal, Hamas proposed a phased Israeli pullout “until Israeli forces are outside the borders of the Gaza Strip”, with the ISF taking positions in vacated areas, and said weapons steps would proceed in parallel with verified withdrawal stages.

Mladenov’s response instead limited Israeli withdrawal to “Gaza’s perimeter” and made it conditional on “verified progress” in the weapons decommissioning process.

Hamas has formally agreed to relinquish governing authority in Gaza to the NCAG, a technocratic body composed of non-partisan Palestinian experts. However, Israel has continued to block the committee from entering Gaza and has demanded Hamas’s disarmament as a precondition.

In Mladenov’s revised document, the NCAG’s entry and assumption of duties are made conditional on Palestinian acceptance of the broader “roadmap” and completion of the second phase’s timeline and implementation mechanisms, particularly on disarmament.

Palestinian negotiators have emphasised that the NCAG should function as a transitional governing authority, stating that it would have “full independence” and be empowered to “fulfill all legal obligations and commitments arising from the current administration of the Gaza Strip”.

Reframed as ‘administration’
Mladenov’s draft removes that language, limiting the NCAG instead to financial liabilities incurred only on or after it assumes control, and reframing it as an administrative body under the Board of Peace.

In their draft, Palestinian negotiators have argued that any resolution of the weapons issue must be embedded in a broader process guaranteeing the Palestinian people’s right to establish a state and exercise self-determination.

But the Board’s draft, by contrast, states only that disarmament “shall create conditions for a credible pathway.”

On governance, Palestinian negotiators have proposed reunifying Gaza and the West Bank, with the Board overseeing an orderly transfer of governance to the NCAG, which would ultimately hand power to the Palestinian Authority as part of a process “leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

They also set a 2027 end date for the Board’s mandate.

Mladenov’s draft omits these elements entirely, makes no reference to the Palestinian Authority, and instead limits the arrangement to Hamas and other factions handing over authority to the NCAG.

Republished from the Drop Site News X feed.

From June 24-July 31, dozens of countries will be taking part in the latest edition of the massive RIMPAC military exercises that take place every two years — including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam. The carbon emissions alone are staggering. Eugene Doyle outlines the high stakes involved in the first of three articles.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

As a dress rehearsal for the coming war on China, RIMPAC is a big deal. This year’s event is billed as bringing together global naval forces to address “the current threat China is posing in the Indo-Pacific region”.

Every two years the US Pacific Fleet/Indo-Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, hosts the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world’s largest international maritime war games.

RIMPAC gathers the US and its allies together for a show of force and a building of interoperability, cementing relationships and ensuring countries like Australia and New Zealand are increasingly integrated into weapons procurement and US war plans so they can act as  “force multipliers” for the United States.

• READ MORE: India sends sub-hunter to US-hosted RIMPAC, world’s biggest naval war game
• Backgrounder: The Asia-Pacific arms race has taken an ominous turn
• Other RIMPAC reports

“The suggestion of being a force multiplier is both absurd and kind of terrifying,” says Valerie Morse of Peace Action.

“We don’t want to be part of a US war in the Pacific. We need to stop engaging in things like RIMPAC.”

Veteran peace activist Mike Smith (Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu) agrees: “What on earth are we doing there? The American strategy is to bind so-called allies, partners and friends all around the Pacific into a proxy force to fight for the US.

“The only thing the Americans know how to do is to bomb other countries. It’s never worked, but it’s what they do. Being led into war as a proxy for a belligerent power is just a nightmare yet our present government, Foreign Affairs, Defence Department, and security agencies are all leading us in that direction.”

Thousands of troops, dozens of ships
From June 24-July 31 dozens of countries are represented, including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam.  Tens of thousands of personnel, dozens of surface ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, naval drones and submarines, hundreds of aircraft, and all the tools of modern warfare get together to game out Armageddon.

They rehearse amphibious operations, anti-submarine warfare, air defence exercises, cybersecurity and all the systems of combined operations warfare.  The carbon emissions alone are staggering.

Unbelievably, the PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an “environmentally and culturally sensitive manner”.  Tell that to Abby Martin, the US activist and journalist who will visit Australasia in July and has produced an outstanding documentary  “Earth’s Greatest Enemy – documenting the environmental cost of history’s biggest empire”.

“The reason we’re at this tipping point is because of the cumulative emissions of carbon in the atmosphere — for which the US is the top contributor. The US military alone is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, at 270,000 barrels of oil a day … more than 150 countries.

“How is that possible?” asks Abby Martin.

Valerie Morse says, “My starting point with RIMPAC was engagement with other Pacific activists who are concerned about US militarisation across the Pacific — that includes Hawai’i, Guam, and places like Okinawa.

“Like many bits of military training, it is imperial pageantry — showing who runs the Pacific. The United States is very keen to say the Pacific is our lake.”

‘Anglo-Saxon Lake’
Just after the Second World War, General Douglas MacArthur was even more explicit: the Pacific from now on was an “Anglo-Saxon Lake”.  Hawai’ian academic and activist Emalani Case challenges this imperialist framing in my next article.

Hawai’ian activists have long campaigned against the impact of so many vessels, so many explosions, on the local environment.

Liz Remmerswaal from World Beyond War raises another reason to distance ourselves from RIMPAC: “Israel is one of the 30 countries that’s participating. For people of good conscience who care about the genocide going on in Gaza, you have to ask: ‘Why would we want to have anything to do with a group of countries which included Israel?’”

The answer, dear reader, appears to be “values”. We share values, according to RIMPAC public relations, with the Americans and Israelis.

Above all, however, RIMPAC is part of the US containment of China strategy.

Radio NZ and reporter Guyon Espiner helped set the scene this week when they gave retired US Brigadier-General David Stilwell a half an hour soap box to tell New Zealanders to embrace US nuclear ships, think Trump is doing a good job, fear wild-eyed Iranian terrorists, spend much, much more on the military, and be afraid, very afraid, of China.

“If you read New Zealand’s defence strategy and the defence capability review, China is seen as the threat,” says Mike Smith says.

“That’s totally stupid. China’s not a threat to us; it’s offering to cooperate with us. The threat to our prosperity comes from the United States.”

Most loathed countries
Smith’s comment is supported internationally. Of the 132 countries surveyed in the Global Country Perceptions Ranking (Nira Data), the USA sits at 128 out of 132 countries surveyed, with Israel claiming the spot as the most loathed country on the planet.

China was invited to just two RIMPACs — in 2014 and 2016 — before being struck off the invitation list as the security competition in the South China Sea ramped up.  Taiwanese media has been promoting the idea of Taiwan being invited to future RIMPACs, another step up the escalation ladder in terms of crossing China’s red lines on the behaviour and status of what it considers an integral part of China.

There are many good reasons countries like the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia  should cancel their subscription to RIMPAC and, more importantly, decline to enlist if a war with China erupts. The United States will in all likelihood be defeated.

How this could unfold is the subject of the third article in this series. The effective defeat of the US at the hands of Iran should be a salutary lesson … but some people never learn.

Fighting alongside the US puts us on the side of an empire that is committed to genocide and whose military industrial complex demands forever wars. The more allies the US has, the more likely megadeath will happen, and the once-peaceful Blue Pacific could be turned red with the blood of innocents.

Should war come and China prevails and pushes the US to the periphery of the region, there will be inevitable consequences for US allies who attacked China.  That is well worth pondering.

We are at a hinge moment in world history; US supremacy is receding. Tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday, and we should adjust to new realities, not cleave to old certainties.

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, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has issued a stark warning in its annual report.

The central bank for central banks warned that the current AI investment boom is unsustainable.

The five largest “hyperscaler” tech firms plan to spend more than a trillion dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. This spending is outpacing their earnings and free cash flow, forcing some to issue debt.

“Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust… should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.”

• READ MORE: ‘We are in a bubble’: Experts warn of historic AI bust risk
• Other financial bubble reports

When the BIS — the only central bank to warn before the 2008 crash — sounds the alarm, we should listen. The Bank of England, European Central Bank, and Monetary Authority of Singapore have since echoed similar concerns.

Financial bubbles have become the norm since the late 1970s, when the US dollar left the gold standard and financialisation took hold. Household net worth began expanding faster than GDP, creating cycles of bubbles and busts.

Yet the current bubble dwarfs all previous ones in history, as illustrated in this graphic from the US Federal Reserve.

First came the Dot-com bubble, then the housing bubble of 2008. A credit crunch in 2019 was poised to trigger another recession, but was submerged by the covid-19 crisis and the unprecedented monetary response.

The result is what can only be described as the “bubble of everything”.

• Equities: US stock market capitalisation is now 230 percent of GDP — twice the long-term average. In early June, stocks were selling at about 40 times average corporate earnings over the previous decade, a level seen only at the peak of the Dot-com bubble.
• Private credit: The $3 trillion non-bank private credit “shadow market,” which exploded over the last decade, is under severe stress.
• AI mania: A trillion-dollar spending wave on AI, chips, and data centers is a real buildout wrapped in a speculative frenzy. This circular spending by tech giants props up the bubble, a risk mainstream media has begun to highlight.

The associated wealth accumulation is historically unprecedented. A new billionaire oligarchy has emerged, deeply reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. It is fully merged with the military-industrial complex, dependent on permanent war and genocide for survival.

The tech wing of this class seeks to surveil, control, and monetise every facet of human life.

Fraud is standard operating procedure, from the Trump family’s alleged looting of state resources to the SpaceX listing.

For the SpaceX IPO, Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their rules to fast-track the company into major indexes after just days of trading. This forced retirement funds to buy a tiny 4 percent float of available shares, artificially inflating the price and creating a trillionaire in Elon Musk overnight — exposing workers’ pensions to immense risk.

This concentrated power is staggering: the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) now account for over 30 percent of the S&P 500, double their weight a decade ago. Tech makes up over 50 percent of the entire Nasdaq.

As the market saw through the SpaceX scheme, its shares fell 24 percent, and Musk lost his trillionaire status — temporarily. When the broader crash hits, pension funds globally will suffer. The longer the mania continues, the more savings will be sucked into these overvalued indexes.

As Marxist economist Gary Wilson explained, Wall Street has priced in profits that may never materialise. The bosses’ response is familiar: cut jobs, attack unions, demand subsidies, and chase war contracts.

The real AI buildout is buried inside a speculative mania. The technology may survive the bubble; these stock prices will not.

“The losses will come as layoffs, frozen hiring and closed factories… and through the 401(k)s and pension funds workers were pushed into… a forced ticket to a casino they neither own nor control.

“The workers who never shared in the boom will be told to sacrifice when the bubble breaks.”

This financial bubble is just one facet of a broader polycrisis. Capitalism has no road forward to solve these interconnected failures.

1. Grotesque inequality: Billionaire wealth jumped 16 percent in 2025 alone, reaching a historic $18.3 trillion. In New Zealand, four people now hold more wealth than 1.8 million citizens combined, while over 900,000 face food insecurity. oxfam.org.nz
2. Permanent war: The ongoing war against Iran has devastated global energy markets, spiking fuel and fertiliser prices. Over 50 percent of the profits from recent oil shocks went to the top 1 percent of Americans; the bottom half received just 1 percent.
3. Looming famine: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens cascading food shocks. As fertiliser prices spike 20-60 percent, the greatest risk is not immediate shortage but collapsing future harvests, leading to higher prices and starvation months later.
4. Debt vortex:
   • Advanced economies: Government debt (100-130 percent of GDP in the US/Europe, 200 percent in Japan) is becoming unmanageable as interest rates rise from historic lows.
   • Developing world: External debt exceeds $11 trillion, with more than 50 nations in distress. Many now spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education, trapped in a neocolonial debt cycle.
5. Climate collapse: Global warming is killing thousands in heatwaves, closing schools, and destroying crops. Political “adaptation” plans are a surrender, substituting leadership with fantasy to avoid the emergency-scale mobilisation actually required.

A major capitalist crisis is nearly certain. As always, the heaviest price will be paid by the working class through escalating unemployment and austerity.

This will radicalise people. Our duty as socialists is to offer solutions that point toward the ruling class — our real enemy — and resist the ruling class’s strategy to divide us by scapegoating racial, religious, or sexual minorities.

As Rosa Luxemburg stated, the historical choice under capitalism is “socialism or barbarism.” That choice is re-emerging as socialism or modern-day fascism.

It is no accident that these are the poles of politics globally today. Far-right parties flirting with fascism are mass movements again across Europe.

Yet, hearteningly, popular support for socialism is the majority opinion among young people in the US and UK. The Democratic Socialists of America are becoming a mass party inside the belly of the beast.

The road forks ahead. One path leads to division, austerity, and barbarism. The other, built by a united working class, leads to socialism.

Mike Treen is a retired trade unionist and political commentator. This article was first published at his Substack @miketreen860764 and is republished with the author’s permission.

ANALYSIS: By Hossam Shaker

Once again, the United Nations reminds us that genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip.

A report issued on 23 June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory documented what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people, especially children.

This followed an earlier report from the same commission on 16 September 2025, which found that genocide was taking place, as well as the report of the UN special rapporteur issued on 20 October 2025.

• READ MORE: Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump in US over ‘attack on judicial independence’
• Chris Sidoti on UN inquiry into Palestinian rights
• Other Gaza genocide reports

But what can meticulously documented international reports do in the face of those who have insisted on averting their eyes from declared Israeli intentions to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, comprehensive destruction and horrific starvation — not to mention the torrent of live images transmitted around the clock to mobile devices from the field of atrocities over the course of two full years?

Specialised UN reports, testimonies by international rapporteurs and experts, assessments by the most prominent global human rights organisations, and even Israeli testimonies have followed one another, all confirming the reality of the genocide committed by Israel under the eyes of the world since October 2023.

In contrast, most European and Western states have clung to a rigid position that ignores this glaring truth, despite genocidal intentions being openly expressed in advance by senior Israeli leaders, who continued to boast of what their army and authorities were doing on the ground.

Official western comments on those reports were often absent, unlike what would have happened in other cases

Avoided the term ‘genocide’
Is it not worthy of condemnation that senior European and Western officials have persistently avoided using the term “genocide” in relation to these systematic and horrific Israeli practices?

It is as though the word were a firmly established taboo in European and Western political, media and cultural discourse whenever Israel is concerned.

This taboo exerts its power over those officials and commentators who, in this way, give reason to suspect that acknowledging genocide depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the status of the victims.

Double standards
It is entirely understandable that the allies of a regime of occupation and genocide, or those who consider themselves Israel’s partners and friends, would avoid issuing a clear condemnation of conduct they themselves helped support and encourage, directly or indirectly, even if only through silence and denial of its atrocities.

Throughout this prolonged season of horrors, the Israeli side has enjoyed military and political backing, as well as propagandistic cover, through carefully crafted formulas uttered by senior European and Western officials.

These amounted to evasive justifications for whatever war crimes and grave violations an occupying authority and its military forces might commit against a population left utterly exposed to continuous bombardment.

This may be inferred from the phrase that has become a staple of Western speeches: “Israel has every right to defend itself” — words that Israeli leaders understand simply as advance legitimation for a policy of mass killing and comprehensive destruction on the ground.

Naturally, no mention is made in this context of any right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, for example, or of their right under international humanitarian law to resist the military occupation entrenched on their land.

States, governments and political leaderships — joined by elites in the fields of thought, culture and media — insist on ignoring the reality of genocide against the Palestinian people, or conceal it through a tendency toward genocide denial, as though all the serious international efforts of documentation and investigation had no value for them.

Denying a genocide that has unfolded before everyone’s ears and eyes simply means minimising its confirmed atrocities. It also entails direct or indirect encouragement of this pattern of horrific violations, so long as they are met with such shocking laxity.

Clinging to outright denial
Moreover, clinging to outright denial encourages the perpetrators to resume committing appalling war crimes, so long as these crimes are not named as such. Which Western leaders — apart from a handful, such as Spain — have described what the Israeli leadership and its army have committed as “genocide” or “war crimes”?

It must be recalled that the centres of Western decision-making, including the European Union and its leading bodies crowned with slogans of noble values and human rights, became implicated in a sweeping display of bias when they chose very mild or evasive terms to describe Israeli war crimes that the entire world followed in images, sound and live broadcasts.

Leaders and spokespersons resorted to cold expressions such as the ploy of “expressing concern” and voicing “sorrow” over the victims, often without naming the perpetrator, because the perpetrator was the Israeli leadership and its army, whose brutal policies and measures were visible to all.

Observers around the world have noted how the charge of “double standards” clings to European and Western political discourse.

This is precisely what the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned his EU colleagues against — in full view of a world that notices the grave moral gap between European positions on Ukraine and Palestine. He issued that warning days into the war, at a Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 23 October 2023.

One would not be exaggerating to conclude from these contradictory positions that they place some human beings above others in status, degree of concern and human dignity, so that the lives, safety and security of Palestinians are placed lower in rank than those of others.

Thus comes the tolerance of the crushing of children, mothers, the sick and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, without serious positions being taken to restrain the machinery of genocide.

The margins, not the centre
Those faltering positions gave the strong impression that they were conferring moral immunity on the perpetrator, namely the Israeli leadership and its regular army.

Prevailing European and Western criticism was limited to only two reckless ministers from the Israeli government, which amounts to little, since Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are already constantly criticised within Israeli circles.

The narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a ‘humanitarian crisis’, as though the programmed genocide were merely a natural disaster

Meanwhile, the government and the political leadership more broadly continue to escape direct criticism, even after the accumulation of filmed atrocities and the issuance of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

This evasion becomes even clearer when criticism, along with some sanctions of limited effect, has been confined to settler gangs and their leaders, without any verbal reproach or punitive gesture directed toward the Israeli army.

The latter not only sponsors and protects settlers on the ground but also directly commits grave violations, appalling war crimes and campaigns of ethnic cleansing within the context of a horrific genocide.

This contradiction betrays a firmly rooted European and Western position intent on exempting the state, its leadership and its regular military and security apparatuses from any clear criticism, explicit condemnation or accountability, while merely formal positions are issued concerning the margins rather than the centre: some settlers instead of the army, and only two ministers instead of the government.

Evading a simple question
Political Europe, and many elites in public life across Western states, have even evaded confronting a simple question: does what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people constitute genocide?

Denying the genocide committed in Gaza requires wilful disregard.

It begins by brushing aside these war crimes and behaving as though they merit no attention. The adopted narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a “humanitarian crisis” and “alarming” conditions, or a show of concern for “civilian suffering” — as though the programmed genocide, reinforced by declared intentions to commit it, were merely a natural disaster that befell the place.

The states and governments that boast of their commitment to moral positions, human values, international law and human rights were supposed to honour those commitments. They should have warned against the campaign of genocide in its earliest stages, stripped it of political and propagandistic cover, and supported the enforcement of international justice and the cases filed over genocide against the Palestinian people.

Foremost among these is the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on the basis of Israel’s violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Instead, campaigns of moral targeting, incitement, intimidation and even the imposition of unjust sanctions on prosecutors have escalated, affecting international justice bodies and their personnel, as well as UN rapporteurs.

Thus, it becomes clear that complicity with the genocide committed against the Palestinian people goes ever further in undermining international law and threatening the foundations of international action and the protection afforded to its institutions and authorities.

Hossam Shaker is a journalist and an author who has extensively covered the topic of migration in Europe.This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

COMMENTARY: By Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitised term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy in America.

It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans.

• READ MORE: America250 versus Freedom 250: What to know about the US semiquincentennial
• Other Chris Hedges reports

It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless.

Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist.

The victims of neoliberal deindustrialisation, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the US in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Celebrated by the disenfranchised
Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the 12 richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions.

It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalised or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularised by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier.

A scam – but it worked
It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible.

Social justice, Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism, exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual.

It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’”

Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

Lack of a story unbearable
“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind.

“Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad.

“The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardise the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30 to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalised. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials.

A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe.

Palestine Action jailings
A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as “terrorists”, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offences.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes.

“And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function.

Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left”. I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalised or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomised by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit.

A nation where the government is privatised. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

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

Whether Israelis will ever comprehend the irreparable damage inflicted upon their country’s reputation by their UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, is a moot point. The damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.

Danon, however, uses a peculiar approach to defending Israel within international institutions: he relies on bullying, intimidation, and an overt attempt to silence anyone who dares to challenge the official Israeli narrative — particularly women leaders.

Yet, what makes his behavior most outrageous is his deployment of these abrasive tactics to suppress an issue that demands the utmost sensitivity: the systemic use of sexual violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Palestinians mark 1000 days since Israel began full-scale assault on Gaza
• Other war on Gaza reports

The confrontation took place during a UN General Assembly session convened to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Senior UN officials were presenting harrowing findings documenting sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.

True to form, Danon refused to engage with the substance of the reports.

For Israeli diplomacy, the enemy is never merely the armed adversary; it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.

The immediate target of Danon’s wrath was Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Instead of reflecting on the grim findings, Danon demanded

Patten’s resignation.

Accused over ‘obsession’
He accused her and the broader international community of harbouring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.

When Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, attempted to intervene on a point of order per established protocol, Danon unleashed a vitriolic verbal assault. Refusing to yield, he shouted over her, ordering her to “be quiet” and drowning out the chamber with his outbursts.

“Shame on you. You are part of this obsession,” Danon bellowed.

While such unruly behavior should have resulted in Danon’s immediate removal from the chamber, the diplomatic asymmetry of the UN prevailed. It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.”

Danon shot back with typical defiance: “You will not be allowed to bully us.”

Herein lies the supreme irony of Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the UN and international law. Israel stands as one of the most egregious, serial violators of international law in modern history — a decades-long pattern of behavior left unpunished by Western vetoes, which ultimately emboldened it to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Yet, Israeli officials persistently claim the mantle of the ultimate victim, alleging they are the targets of antisemitism, unfair bias, and now, “bullying” by the very institutions they defy.

Mountain of evidence
But the mountain of evidence cannot be shouted away. According to an extensive report issued by Patten’s office, there are verified patterns of systemic abuse, sexual degradation, and psychological torture weaponised against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli detention camps like Sde Teiman.

The weight of this evidence reached such an undeniable threshold that the UN Secretary-General’s office formally added Israel to the global “List of Shame” — the blacklist of states committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.

None of this exposure is enough to convince Danon or the broader Israeli political establishment that Israel does not possess a sovereign right to violate international law. In their view, merely pointing out these crimes constitutes an act of aggression.

This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict. A comprehensive UN investigation recently concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza as a core component of its military campaign.

The numbers are staggering: Between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025, an estimated 20,179 Palestinian children were killed — about 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths.

Children ‘deliberately targeted’
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” stated commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar, noting that Israeli authorities have systematically continued to commit the crime of genocide.

While these findings provide another layer of ironclad legal proof regarding genocidal intent, the true significance of the report lies in its exposure of the rationale behind targeting youth.

Typically, the disproportionate slaughter of children and women is dismissed by Western apologists as “collateral damage”.

The UN inquiry shattered this defence, offering a far more consequential conclusion: the targeting of Gaza’s children is part of a calculated strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

As Muralidhar bluntly summarized: “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.”

It remains a profound disappointment that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — often swift to indict war crimes committed elsewhere — continue to move at a glacial pace regarding Israel. Tragically, the catastrophe continues unabated because there is still no meaningful international mechanism willing to enforce sanctions or employ genuine pressure to halt it.

This is precisely why Danny Danon wants the world to be quiet. His outbursts are not merely directed at UN diplomats; they are directed at global civil society, ordinary citizens, and anyone refusing to look away.

Demands absolute silence
Israel demands absolute silence while Palestinians are starved, raped, and murdered. According to its twisted logic, committing these atrocities is an inherent right, and objecting to them is an act of malice.

If this logic is allowed to prevail, it becomes the blueprint for every future aggressor who wishes to kill, rape, and starve a population for geopolitical gain. Palestinians and Lebanese are already forced to inhabit this dystopian reality.

Our collective responsibility is clear: we must refuse to be quiet. We must speak out, ensuring our voices drown out the shouts of Danon and his peers, so that murder and systemic violence are never normalised as tools of military necessity.

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

Giving evidence before Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer, said attacks from pro-Israel groups sought to delegitimise Jewish people who criticise Israel.

“They rest on the idea that Jewish identity is inherently tied to Israel, and therefore Jewish people who don’t support Israel or who criticise Israel are not really Jewish and are traitors,” she told the commission last Thursday.

Schwartz said she had been referred to as a “self-hating Jew”, “Hitler’s Jew”, “kapo” and “Judenrat”, and had been depicted using Holocaust imagery, including “on a train to concentration camps” and with the yellow Star of David imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.

• READ MORE: ‘Unconstitutional’ – NSW court strikes down Minns’ draconian anti-protest laws
• Other Bondi Commission reports

Holocaust weaponised
She said the atrocities of the Holocaust were a motivation for her Palestine solidarity work and the weaponisation by pro-Israel accounts of Holocaust imagery was “incredibly disturbing”.

“I was taught that never again meant never again for anyone, and that’s why I do the work that I do,” Schwartz said.

“To have the symbols of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Jewish persecution used against me has been incredibly disturbing and distressing, and I think it

sends a chilling message to other Jewish people when they want to speak out.

Schwartz said the stereotype that all Jewish people are politically aligned with Israel “causes immense harm”.

“I speak … almost every day to Jewish people who contact me and who are terrified of speaking out, because they know that if they speak their political convictions, they face the risk of a similar sort of abuse and vilification and targeting that I have experienced.”

Murdoch media coverage fuelled abuse
Schwartz told the commission that reporting by The Australian undermined her safety and ultimately led her to abandon a police application intended to protect her from ongoing harassment.

She recounted an incident in March 2025 after police applied for a personal safety intervention order (PSIO) on her behalf against lawyer Zara Cooper, who targeted Schwartz on Instagram under the pseudonym “@clammy_fraud”.

Schwartz said she first learned of the application through a journalist from The Australian, who contacted her to say the newspaper was preparing a story.

“I informed him I hadn’t been informed of the nature of the PSIO,” she said.

“When I asked him if he could provide me with a copy, he said he couldn’t provide me with a copy … because I didn’t know its contents, I also couldn’t really respond to a lot of it, because it was a police application.”

Schwartz said the following day’s front-page article ($) incorrectly suggested she, rather than police, had initiated the proceedings in an attempt to suppress free speech.

Free speech for me, not for thee
She told the commission that The Australian subsequently published further articles about the case, including reproducing images and slurs that formed part of the material relied upon by police in seeking the intervention order.

“What was most distressing to me is The Australian chose to republish some of the offensive imagery that was the basis on which police applied for the PSIO,” she said.

“[The Australian] republished content that took my image and placed it on a train to concentration camps, content calling me a kapo and other various slurs.”

Schwartz said the coverage convinced her that pursuing legal protection would expose her to further public attention and place her at greater risk.

“It became very clear to me after that coverage that this was becoming a media circus,” she said.

“Having reported these matters to police … was actually something that was

going to make me less safe because of the media coverage.

She subsequently told police she no longer wished to proceed with the intervention order, and the application was withdrawn. She has since been reluctant to report further incidents because she fears doing so would attract similar publicity.

“It’s become very clear to me that, because of the media interest in me as a person, but particularly because of News Corp’s targeting of me, it’s not going to be safe for me to engage in reporting,” she said.

She also expressed concern that republishing the abusive material normalised antisemitic attacks against Jewish critics of Israel.

“I think that media reporting really normalises the use of these terms against other Jewish people … people see that coverage and think that it is legitimate to call a Jewish person Nazi-aligned or to place our face on a train to concentration camps.”

Being pro-Palestine is not antisemitism
Schwartz dispelled suggestions that pro-Palestinian activism is a significant driver of antisemitism, stating that, despite attempts to portray Palestine solidarity spaces as hostile to Jews, that had not reflected her own experience.

“I know that there is a lot of public discourse … that suggests that human rights spaces and Palestine solidarity spaces, in particular, are spaces that might be hostile to Jewish people,” she said.

That hasn’t been my experience at all.

Instead, Schwartz said she had received “many messages of support and clear condemnations of antisemitism” from Muslim colleagues following the Bondi terror attack on 14 December 2025.

Government response
Schwartz criticised the government’s responses to antisemitism, which have disproportionately focused on the Palestine solidarity movement, including the banning of protest slogans.

“I think that government responses, which locate the source of antisemitism within the Palestine solidarity movement, suggest for Jewish people who are also part of that movement that either we’re not really Jewish or that we are somehow against Jewish people in our own communities.”

Asked what measures would most effectively combat antisemitism, Schwartz said governments should prioritise addressing far-right extremism and

avoid conflating antisemitism with the Palestine solidarity movement.

“It’s really important for us to take the threat of far-right extremism really seriously … we know that it’s rising and it’s becoming more mainstream,” she said.

“It is critically important that governments and institutions don’t adopt policies in response to antisemitism that engage in that form of conflation itself that suggests that antisemitism is coming from the Palestine solidarity movement.”

She also called for progressive Jewish organisations to be included in policymaking on antisemitism.

“It’s really important that organisations such as the Jewish Council and other progressive Jewish organisations actually have a seat at the table” she said.

“It shows the broader community that

the Jewish community, like every community, has a diversity of opinions.

For four decades, the West presented Iran’s regional strategy as the work of a rogue state exporting revolution and chaos. They never told you about the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953.

They never told you that America armed the man who gassed Iranian soldiers. They never showed you the map — the ring of American military bases on every border, the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the Israeli aircraft that bombed Iranian assets with impunity and assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil.

Iran built the Axis of Resistance and the Mosaic Defence as its answer to that encirclement.

• READ MORE: ‘Technical’ talks under way in Doha as Tehran demands action
• Other Lim Tean articles

Now, with the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess the full doctrine — what it achieved, where it was tested to its limits, and what it tells us about the future of Iranian sovereignty.

This is the story they spent decades trying to prevent you from understanding.

The fortress and the forward shield: How Iran built the architecture of survival
Look at a map.

Not the map the Western press shows you — the one that marks Iran in the colour reserved for rogue states, surrounded by the clean borders of American allies and reasonable nations.

I want you to look at the real map. The strategic map below.

This is the map that every Iranian general, every Iranian strategic planner, every Iranian Supreme Leader has looked at every morning for the past four decades.

What the map shows is not an aggressive power projecting menace outward. It shows a nation under siege — encircled, threatened, and facing an existential choice that empires have always forced upon those they cannot fully control: submit, or build the architecture of survival.

Iran chose to build.

What follows is the story of how — and why. And now, in the wake of the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess that architecture under the most severe test it has ever faced.

1. The doctrine born from betrayal
To understand Iranian grand strategy, you must first understand what Iran learned — not from ideology, not from theology, but from history. From its own history, written in blood and betrayal.

Lesson One came in 1953. Iran had a democracy. A real one — a Parliament, a free press, a Prime Minister of genuine popular legitimacy who had committed the unforgivable act of returning Iran’s oil to its own people.

The West destroyed it. Not with armies, but with money, propaganda, and hired mobs. The CIA and MI6 removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a pliant Shah who would keep Iranian oil flowing to London and Washington.

The lesson Iran drew was stark and permanent: the West does not want Iran strong, sovereign, or self-determining. It wants Iran “manageable”.

Lesson Two came in the 1980s. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 with the tacit blessing of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran in 1979 as a strategic opportunity.

For eight years, Iran bled. Perhaps one million lives. And when Iranian forces began pushing back, Washington made its choice. It provided Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. It supplied the precursor chemicals for the weapons Saddam used to gas Iranian soldiers on the battlefield — mustard gas, tabun, sarin — in one of the most extensively documented war crimes of the modern era.

American officials knew. They continued regardless.

The lesson Iran drew from those eight years was equally stark: when your existence is threatened, no one will come. Not the United Nations. Not international law. Not the conventions against chemical weapons. No one.

These two lessons — the 1953 betrayal and the 1980s abandonment — are the foundation of everything that follows. They are not ideology. They are experience. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed: the life of the law — and we might add, the life of strategy — is not logic. It is experience.

Iran’s grand strategy is the experience of a nation that has been betrayed, encircled, and attacked — and has drawn the only rational conclusions available to a sovereign state determined to survive.

2. The encirclement — what Iran actually sees
Before we examine what Iran built, we must understand what Iran faces. Because the architecture of Iranian strategy makes no sense without the map — the real map, not the sanitised version.

To Iran’s east, American forces spent two decades in Afghanistan — on Iran’s longest land border. To Iran’s west, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein but replaced him with a country that became host to the largest American embassy on earth, a vast network of military bases, and tens of thousands of American troops — sitting on Iran’s western doorstep.

In the Persian Gulf — Iran’s southern maritime frontier — the United States Fifth Fleet operates from Bahrain, a permanent naval presence of carrier groups, destroyers, and the full apparatus of American maritime power.

At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, America maintained the largest US air installation in the entire Middle East — a facility capable of projecting devastating airpower across the region within hours.

In Kuwait. In the UAE. Across the Arabian Peninsula, American bases formed a constellation of military power that, viewed from Tehran, looked less like a defensive alliance and more like a slowly tightening noose.

This is not Iranian paranoia. This is Iranian geography.

Any strategic planner in any country — American, British, Chinese, Indian — looking at that map would draw the same conclusion. Iran had been encircled with a precision that left nothing to chance.

The message was unambiguous: the United States had positioned itself to strangle Iran economically through Gulf control, to strike Iran from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do so from bases close enough to minimise warning time and maximise devastation.

Iran looked at this map. And Iran made a decision.

If the Americans intend to make the Persian Gulf an American lake, Iran will ensure that lake has a price. If American power is to sit on every border, every border will become a potential front. If encirclement is the American strategy, Iran’s answer will be to make that encirclement so costly to act upon that it becomes, in practice, a cage with open bars — present but unusable.

The Axis of Resistance was not born of religious fervour or ideological ambition. It was born of that map.

3. The Israeli dimension — the undeclared nuclear power that bombs its neighbours
And then there is Israel.

The Western framing of the Iran-Israel confrontation presents it as Iranian aggression against a peaceful democratic state. This is such a complete inversion of the actual sequence of events that it requires dismantling with some care.

Israel is, by the near-universal assessment of the international intelligence community, a nuclear power. It possesses an estimated 90 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never submitted to international inspection.

It maintains what is called a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying what the entire world knows to be true. And it directs its considerable diplomatic energy toward ensuring that no other state in its region acquires the same deterrent capability it has quietly accumulated for itself.

This is the context in which Iran’s nuclear programme must be understood. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Its programme operated under international scrutiny that Israel’s never has.

And yet it was Iran that was presented as the existential threat, Iran that was sanctioned, Iran that was threatened with military strikes — and ultimately, Iran that was bombed.

But the nuclear dimension was only the beginning. Israeli planes repeatedly struck Iranian assets in Syria — military installations, weapons convoys, advisers — hundreds of strikes over a decade, conducted with complete impunity.

Israeli intelligence assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. In April 2024, Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus — sovereign Iranian territory under the Vienna Convention — killing senior commanders.

In July 2024, Israeli intelligence assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran itself.

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and America followed with Operation Midnight Hammer — the first direct US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Then, on February 28, 2026, came the full assault: Operation Epic Fury, a joint US-Israeli campaign of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iran’s missiles, air defences, military infrastructure, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Dozens of senior officials perished. Iran’s nuclear programme was severely degraded.

The doctrine that Iran had constructed across four decades — forward defence through the Axis of Resistance, interior resilience through the Mosaic Defence — was now facing its ultimate test.

Hezbollah had served as Iran’s most elegant strategic instrument — a deterrent positioned on Israel’s northern border, ensuring that any strike on Iran carried automatic, unavoidable cost.

For 30 years, it worked. Every Israeli military planner understood that attacking Natanz meant absorbing tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel simultaneously. That deterrent logic held — until 2024, when Israel called the bluff.

Yet even after Nasrallah’s assassination and the degradation of Hezbollah’s arsenal, the organisation demonstrated remarkable residual fighting capacity. When IDF ground forces attempted to push into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah gave them a drubbing — inflicting casualties, destroying armoured vehicles, and forcing repeated tactical withdrawals that exposed the limits of Israeli conventional military power on the ground.

The shield had been damaged. It had not been broken.

4. The Axis of Resistance — architecture of Forward Defence
With the American encirclement and Israeli threat understood, the Axis of Resistance reveals itself not as an Iranian imperial project but as a coherent strategic architecture built on a single organising principle: make the cost of attacking Iran prohibitive, by ensuring that any attack triggers consequences across the entire region simultaneously.

The components of that architecture were distinct in character but unified in purpose.

Hezbollah was Iran’s most sophisticated instrument — battle-hardened, institutionally deep, politically embedded in Lebanese society, and at its peak possessing an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles.

It is not a militia in the casual sense. It is a military organisation with combat experience forged across four decades, in Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian conflict, and multiple wars against one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world.

Despite the severe degradation it suffered in 2024 and 2025, Hezbollah remains a potent force — as the IDF discovered when its ground forces pushed into southern Lebanon and were met with fierce resistance, tactical ambushes, and anti-armour fire that forced repeated withdrawals.

Iran’s first line of forward defence has been bloodied but not destroyed.

Hamas was a different and more complicated case — Palestinian in origin, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition rather than Shia political theology. But Iran adopted the Palestinian cause with strategic intelligence, recognising that support for Palestinian resistance gave Tehran something invaluable: moral legitimacy across the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia alike.

Supporting Hamas cost Iran relatively little. It purchased Iran enormous influence and the one thing that money and missiles cannot buy — the genuine sympathy of the Arab street.

The Houthis of Yemen were the most recent and surprising component. Not originally an Iranian creation, they were driven into Tehran’s strategic embrace by the Saudi-led war in Yemen — backed by American weapons, logistics, and political cover.

The Houthis’ capacity to threaten Red Sea shipping and strike deep into the Gulf transformed them from a local insurgency into a regional strategic asset of considerable importance. Their intervention following October 7, 2023 demonstrated reach that surprised even optimistic Iranian planners — and their continued operations through the 2026 war demonstrated a resilience that confounded repeated predictions of their swift neutralisation.

The Iraqi militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces and their various components — completed the architecture. Born from the chaos of the American invasion and consolidated during the fight against ISIS, these forces represented Iran’s most direct penetration of a neighbouring state’s security structure, giving Tehran influence over the country on its western border through which any American ground offensive would necessarily pass.

Together, these components formed what Iranian strategists called the “ring of fire” — a constellation of armed, motivated, battle-tested forces positioned around Iran’s primary adversaries. Not an empire. A defensive perimeter, constructed outside Iran’s borders precisely because Iran’s borders had proven, twice in living memory, to be insufficient protection against the ambitions of external powers.

5. The Mosaic Defence — making Iran unconquerable
Forward defence alone — however sophisticated — was always only half of Iran’s strategic architecture. Iranian planners understood that the outer ring could be degraded. Proxies could be weakened. Forward positions could be overrun. The question that preoccupied Iran’s military establishment for four decades was this: if the forward shield fails, what then?

The answer was the Mosaic Defence.

The concept is as elegant as it is ruthless. Iran deliberately, systematically, and over decades decentralised its entire military infrastructure across all 31 of its provinces. Missile arsenals were not concentrated in single facilities but dispersed across hundreds of sites — underground, mountainside, desert — spread across a country the size of Western Europe.

Command and control was distributed rather than centralised, designed to survive the decapitation strikes that destroyed Iraq’s military capacity in 1991 and Libya’s in 2011. Defence industries were deliberately dispersed so that no single strike, however precise, could eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce and deploy weapons.

The underground dimension was particularly significant. Iran invested enormously in what it called its “missile cities” — vast subterranean complexes buried deep enough to survive all but the most specialised munitions. The 2026 campaign tested this directly.

Despite nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours and CENTCOM ultimately claiming over 11,000 targets struck across the entire war, a preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment — leaked and characterised by the Trump administration as “political” — concluded that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes began and that the underground facilities had not been collapsed.

The CIA subsequently disputed this, claiming severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The truth, as is so often the case in the fog of war, likely lies somewhere between these assessments.

What is beyond dispute is this: the logic Iran applied — the logic of a student of history who had watched what happened to states that presented centralised targets — proved partially vindicated. The 31-province dispersal model meant that even 11,000 strikes could not deliver a clean, decisive blow. Iran was damaged. Iran was not defeated.

Centralisation is a vulnerability. Dispersal is survival.

The Mosaic Defence and the Axis of Resistance were never separate strategies. They were two halves of a single, integrated doctrine. Attack Iran’s periphery — and the Axis activates. Penetrate to the interior — and the Mosaic ensures there is no clean, decisive blow to be struck. The 2026 war demonstrated both the power and the limits of that doctrine.

6. The 2026 War — the ultimate test
Intellectual honesty requires confronting what Operation Epic Fury achieved — and what it did not.

What it achieved was substantial. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes — a decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership of historic proportions. Dozens of senior IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and regime officials perished. Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure was severely degraded. Its air defences were systematically dismantled. Its navy was effectively destroyed.

The Iranian economy, already strangled by decades of sanctions, went into free fall. Its currency collapsed. Protests that had begun in December 2025 spread across the country as the regime’s authority visibly cracked.

What it did not achieve is equally instructive.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile — the IAEA had confirmed 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity before the war, sufficient for multiple weapons if further enriched — could not be fully accounted for.

Two military campaigns left that stockpile harder, not easier, to locate. Iran had anticipated decapitation. Within 30 minutes of the opening strikes, Iranian forces launched simultaneous retaliatory attacks across multiple fronts without waiting for centralised authorisation — precisely the pre-delegated response architecture that the Mosaic Defence doctrine had prescribed.

The regime was headless. The military machine kept fighting.

Iran’s response was devastating to the American strategic position in the region. It closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes — triggering a global energy shock and fuel crises across Asia.

It struck American bases across the Gulf simultaneously: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. It bombarded Israel with over 525 ballistic missiles. It struck oil infrastructure across the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen American service members were killed. The regional war that Iran’s forward defence doctrine had always promised to trigger — the promise that had deterred attack for thirty years — was fulfilled.

The ceasefire that followed told its own story. After 40 days of sustained combat, with both sides exhausted and the global economy convulsing, Pakistan brokered a conditional truce on April 8, 2026.

The highest-level direct US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution followed — JD Vance meeting Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed the Islamabad Memorandum, with Trump signing at the Palace of Versailles, establishing a 60-day framework for further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Read that again. The United States of America — which had launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and declared regime change as its explicit objective — ended up negotiating. Not dictating. Negotiating. With the Islamic Republic it had sought to destroy.

The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — son of Ali — approved the memorandum, noting he had “a different view” but accepted it in the national interest. Iran committed to reaffirming it would not develop nuclear weapons. The US committed to lifting sanctions and removing forces from Iran’s proximity after a final deal.

Iran’s nuclear programme — battered but not eliminated — remained. Its missile programme was explicitly declared off the table for negotiations by Tehran. And critically, Iran extracted from the world’s most powerful military the one concession that no amount of technical language could conceal: America negotiated.

That fact is irreversible. And every adversary of American power on earth has filed it carefully for future reference.

7. The Strategic Verdict — doctrine under fire
Here is what four decades of Iranian grand strategy achieved, assessed without sentiment.
The Axis of Resistance was degraded — Hamas devastated in Gaza, Hezbollah bloodied in Lebanon, Iranian assets struck across Syria. The Mosaic Defence was tested as never before — 11,000 targets struck, nuclear facilities damaged, leadership decapitated.

The forward shield failed to deter the ultimate assault it was designed to prevent.
And yet. Iran survived.

The Islamic Republic — written off by analysts for decades, subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, struck by two rounds of devastating military campaigns — survived. Its military kept fighting after its Supreme Leader was killed. Its enriched uranium could not be fully accounted for. Its proxies continued operating. The Strait of Hormuz became a weapon that brought the global economy to its knees.

And ultimately, America came to the table.

This is not the outcome of a state that built the wrong strategic doctrine. This is the outcome of a state that built remarkable strategic resilience — imperfect, costly, and tested to its absolute limits — but resilience nonetheless.

The Mosaic Defence’s dispersal across 31 provinces meant no clean killing blow. The pre-delegated command authority meant no paralysis after decapitation. The Houthis’ continued Red Sea operations meant the economic pressure never relented. The Iraqi militias provided Iran with leverage in negotiations.

And the nuclear stockpile — unaccounted for, potentially dispersed before the strikes — remained the ultimate trump card that no military campaign could eliminate with certainty.
What Iran demonstrated in 2026 was not the invincibility its doctrine promised. What it demonstrated was something perhaps more important: the cost of attacking Iran is catastrophic, even in victory.

America got its strikes. It killed Khamenei. It damaged the nuclear programme. It triggered regime change of a kind — though Mojtaba Khamenei is hardly the pro-Western successor Washington imagined.

And what did it get for all of that? A fragile ceasefire, a 60-day negotiating framework, an unaccounted nuclear stockpile, a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested, a global energy shock, thirteen dead Americans, and a region convulsed by war.

Mosaddegh was destroyed because Iran was weak — because it had no forward shield, no interior fortress, no capacity to make its destruction costly. The Iran of 2026 is not that Iran.

The wound of 1953 was the education. The architecture of survival — tested, battered, partially broken — was the graduation.

The lesson of Iran’s grand strategy is ultimately this: a nation that cannot be cheaply destroyed cannot be permanently dominated. Even after the most severe bombings, Iran extracted a negotiation. Even after decapitation, its military kept fighting. Even after 11,000 strikes, its nuclear stockpile remained unaccounted for.

That is not the record of a doctrine that failed. It is the record of a doctrine that made Iran’s destruction more costly than any power was ultimately willing to pay.

In a future article, I will examine Iran’s nuclear programme — not through the lens of Western proliferation anxiety, but through the strategic logic of a state that watched what happened to countries that disarmed, and has now watched what happened to itself when it did not yet possess the ultimate deterrent.

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.

“Why is it that African teams and Middle Eastern teams have to answer for what their governments are doing but European teams don’t?” South African comedian Trevor Noah asked recently during a World Cup watch party.

He was reacting to the questions Western journalists had lobbed at Iranian players following their games. But the question goes far beyond Iran.

It speaks to a familiar hierarchy in global journalism: Some players are allowed to be athletes. Others are turned into ambassadors, defendants and moral exhibits.

• READ MORE: Iran’s heartbroken Team Melli exit World Cup amid silver lining of Mexican hospitality
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• Other FIFA World Cup reports

The World Cup is often sold as the place where football rises above politics. This has always been a canard. Politics, and hypocrisy, have always been part of the sport.

Teams have boycotted or been banned from the competition because of the policies of their governments. Russia is banned for its invasion of Ukraine. South Africa was eventually banned for apartheid.

Israel, however, gets to play in qualifiers despite occupying Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, bombing Iran, and despite findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN experts that it is committing genocide in Gaza and maintaining a system of apartheid at home and in the occupied territories.

The United States, too, has never been banned despite its many wars of aggression.

Full of politics
Nor is the World Cup unique. International cultural and sporting competitions are full of politics and hypocrisies dressed up as principle. Just look at the controversies around Israel’s participation in Eurovision.

Noah’s question is an indictment of a journalism that likes to imagine itself as challenging power but often mirrors its assumptions. Much ink was spilled over the propriety of Russia and Qatar hosting the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, given the policies of those governments.

Yet there has been far less interrogation of the propriety of the US hosting this tournament while it attacks Iran and Venezuela, deports asylum seekers, and blocks or restricts the travel of tournament officials, players and fans.

The selective accountability that runs through the institutions — who is banned, who is allowed to host — runs through the press box too. So it should not surprise us that some political questions are reserved for some teams and not others.

Ahead of their match against Egypt in Seattle, branded locally as a “Pride Match”, Iran and Egypt were both asked about LGBTQ rights. A FIFA official even read a statement saying Iran wished to answer only questions about the game. Still, the media persisted. Egyptian officials also shielded their players from similar questions.

Again, the point is not that LGBTQ rights, war, repression, discrimination, apartheid or genocide are unimportant. They are profoundly important. Journalists should ask difficult questions. But difficult questions should not become a ritual reserved for some passports only.

American players are not routinely asked to account for US bombings, border policy, racism, police violence or support for Israel. English players are not habitually asked about British arms exports or colonial legacy. French players are not expected to answer for military interventions in Africa. German players are not pressed on Berlin’s crushing of pro-Palestinian protests.

Not a confession
And when European teams have been pulled into politics — the OneLove armbands and the German squad covering their mouths for a team photo at Qatar 2022, England taking a knee at Euro 2020 — it was a protest they chose to make, not a confession demanded of them before they were allowed to speak.

No reporter required them to denounce their governments as the price of discussing a match.

Western footballers are treated as individuals who happen to represent a country. Players from Iran, Egypt, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Senegal or Ghana are more easily turned into representatives of regimes.

For many players from the Global South, the tournament press conference becomes an ideological checkpoint. Before they are allowed to talk about tactics, injuries or the opposition’s midfield, they are asked to explain their governments, their societies, their religions, their laws and their wars.

Sound familiar?

Remember Palestinian interviewees being required to condemn Hamas at the start of any interview before they could speak of the genocide in Gaza? The purpose was not clarification. It was classification.

It established the moral hierarchy before the conversation could begin: Israel good, Hamas bad. Palestinian suffering could be heard only after passing through the checkpoint of Western approval.

World Cup pressers
The same logic is visible in these World Cup pressers. The Iranians must condemn Iran. The Egyptians must condemn Egypt. Africans must prove they understand the West’s moral vocabulary before they can be trusted to speak. But Americans will not be asked to condemn the United States, nor the English the UK.

This is the real answer to Noah’s question. The issue is not whether politics belongs in sport. It always has. The issue is who is made to carry politics, and who is allowed to simply play.

Western media is not merely asking questions. It is enforcing a story long carried by Western governments and institutions: the West is the measure of morality, and the rest of the world must constantly answer for itself.

Patrick Gathara is senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

ANALYSIS: By Shannon Bosch

A recent United Nations report has detailed serious allegations of Israel deliberately targeting Palestinian children during the conflict since October 2023.

The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, which has been rejected by the Israeli government, documents harrowing child deaths. It describes the scale of the deaths as “unprecedented”.

Legally, the report itself does not prosecute anyone, but it can have major consequences by adding to a growing record of international law evidence.

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An independent investigation
The commission is a standing investigative body created by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 after the escalation in Gaza and East Jerusalem that year.

Its mandate is unusually broad and ongoing. It is tasked with investigating all alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, identifying root causes and preserving evidence for accountability.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, the commission has published several reports on the conflict, including on the deaths of Israeli children.

This latest report is significant because it focuses specifically on children, examining the impact of Israeli military operations on Palestinian children between October 2023 and March 2026.

The report notes that the commission sent requests for information to the State of Palestine, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government. The first two responded, but the latter did not.

Four major findings
The commission’s report makes four highly significant findings.

1. The scale of child deaths is unprecedented
The report finds more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

The commission says the “overwhelming scale and rate of children killed and injured in Gaza have been unparalleled across modern conflicts globally”.

UNICEF describes the Gaza Strip as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.

2. Evidence of deliberate targeting
This is the report’s most legally explosive finding. It documents repeated incidents of children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso, suggesting deliberate targeting rather than incidental harm.

Cases such as Hind Rajab and other children shot while evacuating or sheltering are central examples.

Doctors on medical missions in Gaza reported to the commission that it appeared Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers were engaged in a “game” of target practice with “different body parts being targeted on different days”.

The commission concluded that based on forensic evidence and military analysis, there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately targeted.

3. Systematic attacks on child-essential infrastructure
The report documents attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, which enjoy special protection under international law. The commission found these attacks have directly contributed to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse.

The commission’s findings raise serious questions about whether those special legal protections were respected, especially where attacks disrupted paediatric care, neonatal treatment and emergency surgery.

4. Arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence
The report documents patterns of child detention, ill-treatment and abuse in custody.

The commission noted that dehumanising rhetoric by political leaders, soldiers and public figures has normalised violence against Palestinian children and contributed to an environment where such harm becomes acceptable.

How do these findings fit with international law?
This report is important because it reframes the war not only through the lens of civilian casualties, but through special legal obligations owed to children.

International humanitarian law and international human rights law apply concurrently in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is because Israel retains effective control over its borders, airspace and territorial waters, and has re-established military control on the ground.

As an occupying power, Israel has specific obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. These include ensuring food, medical care and the protection of civilians, especially children.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel must protect children’s rights to life, survival and development. It must prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and deprivation of life. It must also ensure the best interests of the child remain a primary consideration in all actions affecting them.

The commission’s conclusions are stark: children have not simply been caught in the crossfire of war. Many appear to have been deliberately targeted, denied essential care, detained, tortured, displaced and subjected to conditions that threaten their survival.

It reframes the suffering of Palestinian children not as collateral damage alone, but as a possible site of serious international crimes.

Serious legal questions
Many of the acts documented in the report amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If children were deliberately targeted, this would constitute a grave breach of the international humanitarian law principle to distinguish combatants from civilians.

The sheer scale of child deaths raises serious concerns about whether Israeli forces have been adhering to the proportionality analysis: if civilian harm is excessive compared with the concrete military advantage anticipated, the attack is unlawful.

Parties must take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian harm. The report argues Israel’s use of heavy explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas indicates repeated failures of precaution.

Israel at the UN: “This council has heard the same accusations against us again & again.. that Israel intentionally targets doctors, aid workers & journalists”

Yes, because you’ve murdered hundreds of doctors, aid workers & journalists. pic.twitter.com/9gMhanyYBa

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 30, 2026

Adding to the evidence record
In international law, accountability is often slow, but reports like this help build the legal architecture for future prosecutions.

The findings may feed directly into ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into alleged crimes in Palestine. The commission explicitly recommends further scrutiny by the court.

States could rely on this evidence in domestic prosecutions under universal jurisdiction. This allows domestic courts to hear cases alleging international crimes, regardless of where the crimes occurred, or the nationality of the victims or perpetrators.

States may also impose targeted sanctions or arms embargoes based on credible findings in UN reports documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law, even without a court ruling.

The findings could shape arguments in existing and future proceedings before the International Court of Justice, particularly around genocide and occupation.

Under international law, children are supposed to be the most protected people in war. The children of Gaza have not just suffered in the war, they have become one of its defining legal fault lines.

Shannon Bosch is associate professor (law) at Edith Cowan University. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

Iran’s bittersweet, logistically complicated, politically charged, and heartbreaking World Cup run found a silver lining in Mexico, where the men’s football team departed their base camp in Tijuana to a warm goodbye from fans in the border city.

Iran were eliminated from the World Cup on Saturday, after Austria’s last-gasp equaliser against Algeria saw them drop out of the tournament’s eight best third-placed teams.

It capped a dramatic 24 hours for Iran, who lost control of their fate for the knockout stage following a 1-1 draw with Egypt on Friday, which ended dramatically with an apparent last-ditch Iranian winner controversially ruled offside following a VAR check.

• READ MORE: Iran bow out of World Cup: Late drama ends Team Melli’s knockout dream
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The United States and Israel’s war on Iran dictated the logistics for Team Melli’s presence at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Iran shifted their base camp from Arizona to Tijuana not long before the tournament began, fearing visa complications.

In rarely-seen stringent logistical conditions, the team was forced to depart for Mexico mere hours after the full-time whistle of their matches in the US, despite repeated requests from the Iranians to relocate their fixtures out of the country engaged in an active war against them.

But from the moment Iran first touched down in Tijuana, Mexico welcomed the team with open arms. Fans thronged the perimeter of the team’s hotel before and after their travels for each group stage match, holding posters and waiting for autographs from players.

‘Hope our paths cross again’
The mutual love and respect that developed over three weeks made its way to social media and a global online audience that backed Team Melli through their off-pitch hardships.

It was also on social media that the team’s media department thanked the people of Mexico for their hospitality.

“Thank you for your professionalism, your support, and for covering not only our team’s sporting journey but also the unfair and unsportsmanlike treatment our delegation faced during its stay,” a message on X, posted by the Embassy of Iran in Mexico, read.

“Your commitment to reporting the facts accurately and with integrity meant a great deal to us.”

The message extended specific thanks to the residents of Tijuana, who welcomed the team with “generosity and genuine hospitality that made us feel right at home”.

“For all of us, leaving Tijuana is truly difficult. The memories we built here, the friendships we forged, and the affection we received will forever remain in the hearts of every member of the Iranian National Team.

“Thank you, and we hope our paths cross again,” the message read.

‘You’re Mexican now’
Videos on social media showed the Iranian team out and about in Tijuana as they autographed World Cup footballs and Panini sticker books and posed for photographs with fans.

Iran’s ambassador to Mexico, Abolfazl Pasandideh, and Football Federation of Iran’s (FFIRI) secretary-general, Hedayat Mombeini, spoke to supporters and media representatives over the weekend and thanked Mexico for its hospitality.

The Iranian embassy in Sarajevo also thanked Mexico for graciously hosting Iran, while simultaneously underscoring the US ill-treatment of the team.

“FIFA should exercise greater care in selecting future host nations, ensuring they are worthy hosts and committed to humanitarian principles,” the post on X read.

Anushe Engineer is a freelance sports journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan, where she previously worked for Dawn.

A friend and colleague, Solidarity columnist Eugene Doyle, posed a brief question on the Facebook media page Kiwi Journalists Association last week.

“Kiwi journalists . . . is there a reason for so little solidarity with Palestinian colleagues,” he mused over a haunting portrait of emaciated Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufleh showing his appalling state after 14 months inside an Israel torture prison.

“No trial. No conviction.”

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This is what Palestinian hostages look like after release: emaciated, exhausted, and visibly scarred by prolonged detention.

Occupied Palestine has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world. Yet merely three media people responded to Doyle’s question.

Broadcaster and singer Moana Maniapoto (Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa)
summed up the cruel image as “journacide”, citing the use of the label by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese: “Absolutely shocking.”

Journacide is a neologism used by scholars, journalists, and human rights experts to describe deliberate mass killing and hunting down of journalists and media workers in conflict zones. It is also the title of a harrowing new documentary on the topic: Journacide: The War on Truth.

Courage and fortitude
Community broadcaster and educator Victoria Quade commented: “I think few people living and working in relatively protected environments like New Zealand can imagine the courage and fortitude it takes to be a journalist under an oppressive regime where reporting on those regimes can be physically dangerous.

“And, if they can imagine it, would be able to match that courage in their own lives.”

A third comment was posted by communications adviser and journalist Susan Belt: “I think people are battle-worn after so much general genocide, kids and press included, on the part of Israel. There’s so much press targeting etc that it almost becomes ridiculous to keep posting on it. Stuff and NZME keep running Gaza, Lebanon stuff but because our govt like some others has not made much of a fuss about Israel’s illegal civilian and press killing in Gaza and its unprovoked attack on Iran and illegal forays into Lebanon, it leaves people feeling hopeless.

“I am very pro-Palestinian rights and have been since the 1970s but even my Facebook friends despair at the sad postings I seem to always be doing. They know it’s very bad behaviour but we’re in a trance at the hopelessness of it. When our ally the US is backing Israel (though cooling of late) our govt is too scared to say what’s right because it doesn’t want to offend Trump’s team.”

These comments reminded me that I have been puzzling over the generally poor and weak response from New Zealand journalists over what is currently the toughest moral and ethical challenge of our times. Yet, instead of facing up to the Gaza genocide and the accompanying journacide, most of our media colleagues have preferred to look away and remain silent.

The prevailing attitude is that it is something remote and of little relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a response of denial, astonishing given that there have been protests across the motu against the Israeli genocide — and lately the unjustified US-Israeli war on Iran and fragile peace — for the past 142 weeks: by far the longest and sustained political protests ever in this country, yet largely ignored by the media.

This has led to many public protests over media coverage. These too have rarely been reported.

Genocide in plain view
My own articles on the topic on Aotearoa and the Pacific, while stirring responses internationally, have barely raised a ripple in this country. Shameful responses to a genocide — at least 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 20,000 of them children — revealed daily before our very eyes. Even since the sham ceasefire declared in October, more than 1000 people have been killed.

And the cost in lives of hundreds of Palestinian journalists trying to bear witness on the annihilation of their own communities is deeply shocking. Yet this barely raises a shrug from New Zealand journalists.

In a report released last week by the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a chilling new statistic was revealed — out of an estimated 1200 journalists in Gaza between 60 and 75 percent of them have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced since 7 October 2023.

The report, titled “Media Without Walls”, also said that approximately 265 journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, by far the highest death toll recorded globally against journalists in a single conflict.

More than 80 percent of media offices and institutions had been completely or partially destroyed, leading to an “almost complete collapse” of journalistic infrastructure, it said.

The report added that journalists in Gaza no longer work from newsrooms but from tents, footpaths and shelter centres, with mobile phones as their primary production tool and intermittent internet dictating when they can publish.

“I lost my home and my office in the same week,” said one displaced journalist, Dr Ahed Farwana. “I no longer have a place to write, but I write from my phone among people, sometimes while searching for water for my family.”

‘Trying to concentrate’
Another Gaza journalist, Ola Kassab, said: “I work from inside a displacement shelter, choosing the quietest corner I can find. The hardest part is not the bombing itself, but trying to concentrate amid the overcrowding and fear.”

Photojournalist Wisam Zughair said: “The camera is no longer the heaviest thing I carry; it is the feeling that I may also be documenting what could happen to me.”

Just two weeks ago, an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Ahmed Wishah, 25, was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. He was the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since 2023.

His targeted murder came just weeks after his brother Mohammed Wishah, who also worked for the Doha-based global television network, was killed in a deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.

In an interview after his brother’s death, Wishah called on the world to stop the killing of journalists.

“Let the martyrdom of Mohammed Wishah be the end to the killing of journalists. This is my message to the world . . . Stop the Israeli occupation from targeting journalists.”

Smearing journalists
The routine response of Israeli military authorities is a hamfisted attempt to smear all Gazan journalists as “Hamas terrorists”. There is never any credible evidence to back this up and it is shameful that New Zealand media simply echo these lies from a discredited regime whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a “false balance”.

The New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have frequently condemned the “smearing of killed Palestine journalists” with “baseless claims”.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it condemned the Israeli occupation army’s “baseless accusations”, which sought to “justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.

“Since October 2023, the Israeli campaign of incitement has relentlessly spread false allegations and baseless accusations against Al Jazeera staff. The Network considers this smear campaign a transparent and futile attempt to justify the deliberate targeting of journalists and cameramen whose only ‘crime’ has been their courageous determination to document and expose the genocide being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip.

“These attempts deceive no one and cannot obscure the truth witnessed by the world.”

Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip and ensure their safety.

Reporters Without Borders has filed at least five complaints with the ICC over alleged war crimes against journalists, and together with other media freedom groups such as the Foreign Press Association, has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought an Israeli Supreme Court ruling overturning the IDF’s ban on global journalists being allowed into Gaza to see the reality for themselves.

Gaza bloodlust spreading
Another disturbing factor about the slaughter of journalists is the fact that the Israeli bloodlust against journalists in Gaza is spreading also to the illegally occupied West Bank and the invaded Lebanon.

Journacide: The War on Truth                                    Video: Democracy Now!

Irish filmmaker Seán Murray has investigated Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth, which was featured by Democracy Now! earlier this month. Murray says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth.

The filmmaker describes it as “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon”.

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman highlighted the attempted killing on June 15 of Iranian journalist Hadi Hoteit, who was working for the news outlet Press TV in southern Lebanon. He was attacked by an Israeli drone while reporting live for his network at Kafr Tebnit.

Although he survived the attack, he was struck by six pieces of shrapnel.

With the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the death toll of journalists has now topped 29.

Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists for his documentary Journacide.

On March 28, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed — all together — in an Israeli drone strike on their car.

The following month, on April 22, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her, reports Democracy Now!

About the silence
In a trailer for the documentary, Murray says the film is not about war, it is about the silence. “As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.”

In the Democracy Now! interview about his film, Murray explores the lengths that Israeli military authorities go to create false narratives about journalists, even to falsifying documents and creating fake images.

“I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. Not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon.

“So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike.

“This is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed.

“But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel doesn’t have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out.”

A wake up call surely for the Middle East realities for New Zealand journalists.

David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, one of the signatories to the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US, has called out what he says are double standards and duplicity by those trying to wreck the peace deal.

His short, memorable statement was largely ignored in the Western media but its content should be digested by all.

He addressed his comments directly to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian who arrived in Pakistan on June 23. The Iranian delegation had just arrived on a plane named Minab 168 — in memory of the 168 children and staff killed in an attack on an Iranian girls’ school by US and Israeli forces at the outset of the US-Israel attack on Iran.

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Sharif made his comments a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gulf foreign ministers issued a joint statement that “lasting regional peace and security requires addressing the full spectrum of Iran’s threats, including its ballistic missiles, drones, and support of proxies in the region.”

Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif addressing the Iranian delegation:

“There are spoilers all over the world who want to scuttle this peace deal.”

“They don’t want the Iranian nation, a great nation, to come out of the ashes of war and touch the zenith of glory.”… https://t.co/17vpQQNamy

— The Saviour (@TheSaviour) June 23, 2026

One of the reasons Sharif’s comments are important is that the US-Israeli side operates a well-thumbed playbook of agreeing on frameworks for negotiations and then immediately breaking them (killing negotiators or attacking Lebanon, for example) or trying to rewrite the framework midstream to their advantage.

Shehbaz Sharif called them out:

ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

It is a peculiar kind of defeat — one dressed in the language of victory. Operation Epic Fury was sold to the world as a decisive strike to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Washington for precisely this moment. He got his war. What he didn’t get was the outcome he promised.

The US-Iran MOU is Israel’s strategic nightmare rendered in diplomatic text. And the consequences extend far beyond the terms of any single agreement.

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• Other Lim Tean articles

Left out of the room
Let us begin with the most humiliating fact. The MOU’s second paragraph mentions Lebanon three times and declares the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts — without once mentioning Israel.

A new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon has been announced, including the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar. Israel is excluded from that too.

Think about what that means. The country that triggered this war, that flew alongside American aircraft, that provided the intelligence Netanyahu boasted had been decisive — was not in the room when peace was made.

Washington negotiated Israel’s strategic future without Israel.

Vice-President JD Vance’s message to Israeli critics of Trump and the MOU was blunt: they need to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”. That is not the language of alliance. That is the language of managed irrelevance.

What Iran kept
The nuclear question — the ostensible casus belli for the entire war — remains unresolved.

The MOU suffices with rhetorical promises, deferring the actual mechanics of blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, with no guarantee of agreement on that most critical issue.

Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal? Untouched. The MOU offers no treatment of Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its patronage of regional proxies — leaving Israel to contend with those threats as before.

Iran’s financial position? All US sanctions on Iran have been lifted, giving Tehran immediate and significant financial relief — resources that will flow into rebuilding military capabilities.

Tehran emerged from this war battered but unbowed, its theocratic system intact, its strategic leverage demonstrated to the entire world.

Foreign Policy and The Atlantic described the outcome as a defeat for the United States and Israel. The BBC’s international editor assessed that while US and Israeli air forces scored tactical victories, they were not enough to avoid strategic defeat.

The death of the Abraham Accords
Let me be categorical: the Abraham Accords are dead.

That architecture — the crown jewel of American-brokered Middle East diplomacy, the grand bargain that promised Arab “normalisation” with Israel in exchange for security guarantees and Palestinian deferral — has been buried by the post-war regional reality now taking shape.

The Saudi-Iran reconciliation summit now gathering momentum tells the whole story.

Riyadh is actively convening Gulf states and Tehran around a new regional order. And at the centre of that order sits the Palestinian question — not deferred, not managed, but central.

Saudi normalisation with Israel, once dangled as the great prize Netanyahu sought, is now explicitly conditional on Palestinian statehood in terms his government categorically rejects and always will.

The Abraham Accords were premised on one fundamental assumption: that Arab states could be peeled away from the Palestinian cause by American inducements and Israeli economic partnerships.

The Iran war has demolished that premise. Arab publics watching Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran have made their governments’ calculations for them. No Arab leader can now normalise with Israel without paying a catastrophic domestic political price.

The Abraham Accords are not merely stalled. They are finished.

Some will argue that normalisation architecture, once built, has institutional momentum that survives political setbacks. This misreads what has changed. It was not merely the political temperature that shifted — it was the foundational premise of the entire enterprise.

The Abraham Accords assumed American power could permanently reshape Arab strategic calculations. The MOU has demonstrated that American power in the Middle East is now conditional, transactional, and self-limiting.

The architecture built on that power has no foundation left to stand on.

The dual hegemony: Iran and Turkey
Most analysts have framed Turkey’s rise as a consequence of Iran’s weakening — the great power stepping into the vacuum left by a damaged adversary. This framing is fundamentally wrong, and it misreads the emerging regional order.

My thesis is this: what this war has produced is not a Turkish replacement of Iranian power, but the consolidation of a dual hegemony over the Middle East — Iran and Turkey together, each dominant in its own sphere, each with its own tools of regional influence, and collectively forming the twin poles around which the new Middle East will organise itself.

Iran has survived this war with something more valuable than military capability — it has demonstrated to every state in the region that it possesses a weapon of genuine mass economic destruction in the Strait of Hormuz, with strategic leverage over both the Gulf region and the world economy that no military strike can eliminate.

Iran will rebuild. Its reconstruction will be funded by sanctions relief. And it will re-emerge as the dominant power of the Persian Gulf and the Shia arc from Baghdad to Beirut.

Battered, yes. Eliminated as a regional hegemon? Absolutely not.

Turkey simultaneously consolidates its own distinct hegemony — Sunni, NATO-anchored, commercially formidable, and diplomatically agile in ways Iran can never be.

Turkey maintains a permanent military base in Qatar. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among its largest defence clients, with Riyadh reportedly in final-stage discussions to join Turkey’s KAAN fifth-generation stealth fighter programme — which would make it the first Gulf state with a stake in an advanced combat aircraft project outside direct American control.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has already called for the formation of a Middle East security pact to build trust and stability across the region after the war.

Crucially, these two hegemonies are not necessarily in fatal conflict with each other. The restraint that Turkey and Iran have historically shown towards one another, particularly at moments of regional and global crisis, constitutes a managed rivalry — one that involves compartmentalisation, coexistence of competing strategic depths, and mutual calculation that outright confrontation serves neither.

They will compete, yes — in Syria, Iraq, and across the Levant. But they will also tacitly coordinate where their interests converge, above all in containing Israeli power and ensuring that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can dictate the regional order.

For Israel, this dual hegemony is a strategic nightmare of the first order. It faced Iran as a declared enemy — isolated, sanctioned, and manageable within a US-led containment architecture. It now faces two hegemonic powers operating across every theatre in which Israeli interests are engaged, one of them a NATO member with a domestically built defence industry and deepening Gulf partnerships that Israeli power cannot easily reach.

Israel traded a weakened, contained adversary for two formidable and rising ones.

Netanyahu’s shattered grand design
History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic vision. Behind the stated objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme lay a grander ambition — the consolidation of Israeli regional dominance, the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood, and the realisation of a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the sea, secured by Arab normalisation and American military backing.

That project is now in ruins.

Reports cited Israeli intelligence provided by Netanyahu as a decisive factor in Trump’s authorisation of Operation Epic Fury. He designed this war. He lobbied for it. He provided the intelligence that launched it. And the outcome — Iran surviving with its strategic leverage intact, Turkey ascending, a dual hegemony replacing the old order, the Abraham Accords collapsing, and Palestinian statehood returning irresistibly to the regional agenda — is the precise opposite of everything his grand design required.

The Greater Israel project required three things simultaneously: permanent American backing, Arab acquiescence, and the suppression of Palestinian nationhood. All three pillars have collapsed in the same season.

A recent poll shows that 92.1 percent of Israelis, including Jews and Arabs, believe Iran gained the most from the MOU, and 86 percent hold a negative view of the agreement.

Netanyahu faces elections in September or October. He went to war promising existential resolution. He faces the ballot box having delivered existential ruin.

The greatest blow: The loss of the American shield
But the deepest and most consequential damage inflicted by this war on Israel is not the MOU’s terms, not the dual hegemony, not the death of the Abraham Accords. It is something more fundamental.

Israel can no longer be assured of American support in future conflicts.

This is a tectonic shift in the foundations of Israeli security doctrine. Since 1973, Israel has operated on one unshakeable assumption: that the United States would underwrite its military adventurism, absorb its diplomatic costs, and stand between Israel and strategic consequences. That assumption is now shattered.

Trump refused to share a preliminary text of the MOU with Netanyahu, whose judgment he questioned using multiple expletives, while simultaneously describing Iranian interlocutors as “very rational people who were nice to deal with.” Washington did not merely negotiate over Israel’s head — it negotiated against Israel’s preferences, excluded it from the peace architecture, and then told it to accept the outcome.

The lesson every future Israeli government must now absorb is devastating in its simplicity: America will pursue its own interests. When those interests align with Israeli military action, Washington will partner.

When they diverge — as they did the moment the Strait of Hormuz closure threatened the global economy — Washington will deal. And Israel will not be in the room.

This is not a temporary rupture that a change of American administration will repair. It is a structural shift. The United States has demonstrated, in front of the entire world, that Israeli military adventurism carries costs that Washington will not indefinitely absorb. Every future Israeli prime minister will govern in the shadow of that demonstration.

A bleak horizon
Israel enters this new era already deeply wounded from within.

More than 150,000 people have left Israel in the past two years, and more than 200,000 since the current government took office in December 2022. This is not the normal ebb and flow of migration. A Knesset report described it as a “tsunami” — and those departing are disproportionately the young, educated, tax-paying professionals who constitute the backbone of Israel’s high-tech economy.

For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived — a negative net migration balance unprecedented in the country’s modern history. Population growth slowed in 2025 for the first time in decades, driven primarily by emigration alongside declining fertility rates and war-related mortality.

More than 25 percent of Israelis are now considering leaving. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.

For a state that defines itself as the ultimate sanctuary for world Jewry, this exodus carries a verdict more damning than any diplomatic agreement. Jews are leaving Israel because of Israel’s wars. The state founded to make Jews safe has become, in the eyes of growing numbers of its own citizens, a state that makes them perpetually and inescapably unsafe.

The economy mirrors the demography. The departure of high-tech workers — the engineers, physicians, and entrepreneurs who drove Israel’s “Start-Up Nation” identity — carries compounding consequences. Capital, talent, and tax revenue leave together. The sectors that remain are progressively more dependent on state subsidies and less capable of generating the growth that underwrites military spending.

A state in permanent war cannot indefinitely sustain a first-world economy, and the numbers are beginning to reflect that truth.

The only path forward: A Palestinian state
There is only one exit from this strategic catastrophe, and it requires Israel to face a truth it has spent 70 years refusing to acknowledge.

Israel’s long-term survival as a viable state — economically, demographically, diplomatically — now depends on a single political act: the acceptance of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

This is no longer a moral argument, though the moral case is overwhelming. It is a cold strategic calculation. The post-war regional order being assembled — the dual hegemony of Iran and Turkey, the Saudi-led Gulf reconciliation, the death of the Abraham Accords — has Palestinian statehood as its non-negotiable foundation.

Every regional power that matters has made this clear. The price of Israel’s reintegration into a workable Middle Eastern order, and by extension the restoration of something resembling normal economic and diplomatic life, is Palestinian statehood.

Without it, Israel faces permanent regional hostility, no prospect of Arab normalisation, a continuing haemorrhage of its most productive citizens, an economy under sustained pressure, and an American patron whose support is now conditional and transactional rather than unconditional and structural.

The Zionist founders understood something Netanyahu’s generation has forgotten: that Israel’s survival ultimately depends not merely on military power but on legitimacy — the legitimacy that comes from being a state that other states and peoples can live alongside.

That legitimacy has been catastrophically squandered. It can only begin to be rebuilt through justice for the Palestinian people.

The reckoning has arrived. And the path forward, however painful, is clear.

Accept Palestinian statehood — with East Jerusalem as its capital — or face a future of accelerating isolation, demographic decline, and strategic irrelevance in a Middle East that has irrevocably moved on.

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

And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

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Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations.

And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Let me show you why.

The original theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative.

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply.

Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries.

The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

Mosaddegh and the ‘crime of democracy’
Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel.

He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian Parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration.

For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history.

They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

The Shah’s gilded cage
The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — 26 years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image.

When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

To mark the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of 50 lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital.

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France.

Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation.

The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

The estimated cost was anywhere between US$100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

Khomeini’s rational revolution
When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity.

He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together.

They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution.

The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

When America armed the man who gassed Iranian children
If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited.

The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win.

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew.

American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day.

It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.
Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging.

It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian “irrationality”. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

47 years of punishment
Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice delayed
When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine.

It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs.

They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

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 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.

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