The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Israeli authorities’ impunity for a massive increase in crimes and has demanded the protection of all journalists.

Over the three years of the war in Gaza since 7 October 2023 — which has spread to Lebanon and the West Bank — nearly 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military, at least 71 slain due to their work, and 59 detained, the watchdog reports.

Compared with the previous three-year period (2020–2023), the number of journalists killed by the Israeli army has increased 24-fold, while the number detained has nearly tripled, RSF said in a new report.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza media freedom reports
• Read the full report at RSF

“Comparing the appalling number of journalists killed and imprisoned over the past three years with the statistics from the previous three-year period makes it possible to measure the massive scale of the abuses committed by Israeli armed forces since 7 October 2023 in Palestine,” said Jonathan Dagher, head of the RSF Middle East Desk.

“The impunity surrounding crimes committed against the press under the orders of the Israeli authorities in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon has continued, unpunished, for far too long.

“Israel’s allied governments must put pressure on the next cabinet formed following the Knesset elections [last month], whatever its composition, to investigate these crimes and put an end to the abuses.”

Over the past three years of war, the number of journalists killed by the Israeli military while working or in relation to their work was 24 times higher than in the previous three-year period, the RSF research found.

Also, the number of news professionals arbitrarily detained because of their work has tripled.

Of the nearly 210 journalists killed in Gaza and Lebanon between October 2023 and October 2026, at least 71 were targeted or killed by Israeli soldiers in connection with their work, compared with just three between October 2020 and October 2023.

59 arbitrarily detained
Meanwhile, 59 journalists have been arbitrarily detained by Israeli authorities for their work over the past three years, compared with 22 during the preceding period. This makes Israel one of the world’s 10 largest prisons for journalists for the fourth consecutive year.

Of the 71 journalists killed by the Israeli military due to their work over the past three years, 63 were killed in Gaza and eight in southern Lebanon.

Some journalists were targeted by drones, such as Amal Khalil, a reporter for the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar who was killed in southern Lebanon on 14 April 2026, and Mohamed Balousha, a correspondent for the Emirati television channel Al-Mashhad, killed in the Gaza Strip on 14 December 2024.

Others were targeted by snipers, such as Yasser Mamdouh El-Fady, a journalist for the Kan’an News agency, who was killed on 11 February 2024 while reporting near Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza.

Fadi Al-Wahidi, a journalist with the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, was also seriously wounded by a sniper on 9 October 2024 in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Between 2020 and 2023, one journalist was killed in Lebanon: Lokman Slim, whose murder is attributed to Hezbollah, although the investigation has still not reached an official conclusion. On 7 October 2023, two Israeli journalists, Roee Idan and Ayelet Arnin, were killed while working by armed members of Hamas.

‘Double-tap’ strikes
Palestinian reporters have fallen victim to the Israeli military’s use of “double-tap” strikes, a tactic involving two attacks on the same location within a short period of time. As a result, those who arrive at the scene following the initial strike — generally journalists and rescue workers — are also killed.

On 25 August 2025, the Israeli military killed five Palestinian journalists who had rushed to Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis to cover the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike.

Mariam Abu Dagga was one of the five journalists killed. She was among the journalists and first responders who had rushed to the scene after a first strike killed Hossam al-Masri, a photographer working for Reuters. The second strike, which killed Abu Dagga, was captured live by television cameras, with the journalist and her colleagues clearly visible in the footage.

Haitham al-Mousawi, a Lebanese photographer for Al-Akhbar, was also wounded in a double-tap strike in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut.

West Bank: 12 journalists detained in the first month of Gaza offensive
Alongside the conflict in Gaza, the Israeli military has been conducting its offensive against the press in the rest of occupied Palestine.

Of the 59 journalists arrested by the Israeli authorities since 7 October 2023, 40 were detained in the occupied West Bank, including 12 within the first 30 days after the start of the offensive in Gaza.

By comparison, a total of 21 journalists were detained during the three years preceding the war launched in retaliation for the 7 October attacks.

To justify these mass arrests, the Israeli judicial system has made extensive use of “administrative detention”. This legal provision allows individuals to be imprisoned indefinitely, without charge or trial.

The Palestinian Authority, which has also participated in the repression of journalists, has likewise stepped up its actions since 7 October 2023. In several cases — not included on the RSF map because the arrests lasted less than 48 hours — its security and intelligence services detained media professionals who were subsequently thrown behind bars by the Israeli armed forces.

No convictions have been handed down in connection with the 71 killings of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who were targeted or killed due to their work by the Israeli military since October 2023, despite the fact that these killings appear to constitute war crimes.

Shireen Abu Akleh shot by sniper
An illustration of how this impunity long predates October 7 is the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist and one of Al Jazeera’s best-known correspondents. She was shot and killed on 11 May 2022 by an Israeli soldier while covering clashes in the Jenin area, in the northern occupied West Bank.

Although authorities have apparently identified the perpetrator, he has never been convicted. Israel’s then-Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, even publicly defended him.

Since 7 October 2023, the Israeli authorities have also maintained impunity for cases of abuse committed against international journalists.

Eleven reporters aboard ships belonging to the Global Sumud Flotilla, an international maritime initiative seeking to break the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, were arrested in international waters in violation of international conventions.

Despite reports submitted to RSF concerning cases of torture and sexual violence suffered by these journalists at the hands of Israeli security forces, no perpetrators have been identified or prosecuted.

RSF is working to combat this impunity. The NGO has filed five complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) concerning war crimes committed by the Israeli military against journalists in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023.

Republished from Reporters Without Borders by Pacific Media Watch.

“New Zealand has spoken,” Labour leader Chris Hipkins said to the party faithful on election night, before adding: “It may take us a little bit longer to figure out exactly what it is that you’ve said.”

There hasn’t been an MMP election quite (or even anything) like the one that played out tonight. With the ordinary vote largely counted, the incumbent coalition parties — National, ACT and New Zealand First — hold 67 seats to the left bloc’s 56, with the centrist Opportunity party getting over the parliamentary line for the first time with 7 seats.

The numbers are likely to shift again with the counting of special votes, which tallied nearly 600,000 in the last election.

• READ MORE: NZ’s next government hangs in the balance: 2026 election results at a glance
• Right bloc takes lead in NZ election, but senior National MPs ousted
• Other NZ election reports

But the big story of the night is the size of the overhang: New Zealand’s parliaments generally have 120 MPs, but it looks as if there will be 129 or 130 MPs in the next one. If so, the right bloc will hold a 1 or 2 seat majority.

It promises to be a long three weeks before final results are announced.

There is no way of predicting where the numbers will land, but on the basis of the election night’s provisional results, there are (at least) three possible scenarios.

Scenario 1: the right has a working majority
In this scenario, National returns to office at the head of a second-term coalition government. However, it is not quite the same government that was formed following the 2023 election. The same parties will gather around the cabinet table, but both the personalities and the balance of power will have changed markedly.

Most obviously, the parliamentary overhang created by National’s strong performance in the electorates — it looks to have held onto 41 of the 44 electorate seats it took at the last parliament — means Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s party has been shorn of its most senior and experienced ministers, including Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and (in all probability) Chris Bishop.

As a consequence, when the prime minister sits down at the first cabinet meeting of the returning government, he will be accompanied by fewer and less experienced National Party colleagues.

He will also, of course, see more of the numpties and yahoos he derided not so many months ago.

If cabinet positions are shared proportionally based on election results — and Winston Peters and David Seymour are well placed to ensure that they are — then National’s share of all cabinet positions is going to fall below the proportion it held (67 percent) in the coalition’s first term.

Scenario 2: the coalition needs Opportunity
See above – only more complicated. Under this scenario, the coalition falls just short of a majority and needs the Opportunity Party’s (TOP) support to govern. Whatever their positions before the election, David Seymour and Winston Peters will entertain doing a deal with Opportunity.

The real question is whether or not Luxon will prove equally flexible. In all likelihood he will: even though he spent the entire campaign saying that he would not answer a call from Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong.

If he sticks with that position, and the alternative is a return to the opposition benches, Luxon will likely be replaced as party leader (and therefore prime minister) in short order by someone who is prepared to have the difficult conversation.

But Opportunity’s situation is not straightforward either in this scenario. There are real risks for Wong’s party if it opts to support a National-led government — and any preliminary decision to do so may, of course, be vetoed by the party’s board.

Her party’s supporters would prefer a centre-left administration and, if the party props up a government which takes the country out of the Paris Agreement, erases the Treaty of Waitangi and does away with the minimum wage, the odds that Opportunity will continue to exist as a parliamentary force in three years time will shorten considerably.

On the other hand, the party could position itself as the one that prevents the coalition from indulging its worst instincts. Opportunity will likely support the government on confidence and supply from the cross-benches — but it will have a veto over other legislation, which it could use to prevent the government from drifting too far to the right.

Scenario 3: the left plus Opportunity have the numbers
In this scenario, Chris Hipkins becomes the first prime minister to return to the top job following a spell as opposition leader since Keith Holyoake, who became leader of the National Party and prime minister two months before the 1957 election, and returned to power in 1960.

But quite what configuration of government emerges among the parties on the centre-left depends on other factors. Te Pāti Māori — which on last night’s results has five seats, creating a parliamentary overhang of their own in the process — has a choice to make. It can negotiate seats at the cabinet table, or support a Labour-led government on confidence and supply from the cross-benches.

For a kaupapa Māori party, the former comes with risks. The party may, therefore, opt for an enhanced confidence and supply agreement. This would leave the party room to push harder on Treaty-related matters than they could do from within a formal coalition.

Opportunity has a similar choice to make. The smart money is on the party also opting for an arrangement on confidence and supply, rather than a formal executive coalition. It seems prudent for the party’s new MPs to give themselves time to learn the rules of the parliamentary game before entertaining thoughts of ministerial office.

Are we there yet?
Whichever of these — or some other — scenario comes to pass will depend on special votes. This year, special votes — which typically break left — include an unusually large number of overseas votes.

Although the impact of specials on the party vote is generally the focus, the size of National’s overhang means that this time round, it will be their impact on seats that National held or took narrowly on the night that will count. If Labour or the Greens flip two or three seats, that could make all the difference.

Even then, there may be some final plot twists. Electorate candidates have three working days following the announcement of final results within which to lodge a request with the District Court for a recount (and the judge has a further three working days within which to commence the recount). In short, this could take some time.

Meanwhile, the political clock is ticking. Constitutionally, the next Parliament must meet no later than six weeks following the return of the writs. That means MPs must gather in Wellington by January 14 at the latest.

There is no formal constitutional requirement for a government to have been formed by that date, but the political imperatives to have done so are significant. The politicians are going to need to work fast.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article here.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters — a veteran of 18 general elections — has called this long and sometimes fractious campaign “the worst of my career, easily”. But whether you agree with him or not, tomorrow night still promises exciting live entertainment.

Will Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his three-party coalition be removed from office after just one term? Will they be replaced by a left-wing coalition led by Labour’s Chris Hipkins — the same man who lost to Luxon in 2023?

Will the Opportunity Party make it over the 5 percent threshold for seats in Parliament, potentially holding the balance of power?

• READ MORE: Election Policy Tracker: your guide to what the parties are promising during the 2026 election campaign
• Other NZ election reports

More technically, will the various campaigns to have voters split their two available votes (one for their electorate candidate, one for their preferred party) have a bearing on the result?

Normally in New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) system, the election numbers that really count are the party-vote percentages. This time, however, individual electorates will matter more than usual.

With polls promising a very tight race, here are some numbers and possible scenarios to track on the night.

Overhangs on the left or right
A parliamentary overhang happens when a party wins more local electorate seats than it would have been awarded in proportion with its percentage of the party vote.

The overhang seats are added (above Parliament’s normal 120) to accommodate those extra winners of single-member districts. Overhangs of one to three seats have occurred before.

But this election campaign has seen organised efforts on both the left and right to deliberately use the overhang rule to increase the number of seats their respective sides can win.

Te Pāti Māori is ignoring the party vote entirely and asking supporters to deliver wins in the Māori electorates but give their party vote to Labour or the Greens (which would increase the overall party vote on the left).

Winning three to five Māori electorates would greatly outweigh Te Pāti Māori’s party vote entitlement, which could go below 1 percent. The number of overhang seats produced on the left will be a major talking point on the night.

A counter-strategy on the right (not officially endorsed by the National Party) assumes National can win more electorates than its party vote (possibly below 30 percent) would warrant.

The campaign is asking right-wing voters to keep the left-wing parties out of office by party-voting ACT or New Zealand First, and giving electorate votes to the National candidates. By some calculations, if that works, it significantly increases the odds of a right-coalition victory.

Tactical voting and skewed results
It’s impossible to predict how many voters will heed the calls for tactical vote splitting. In the 2023 election, 35.51 percent of voters split their votes, compared to 27.33 percent in 2020. National voters were the least likely to do so.

Nonetheless, the overall impact of these opposing strategies to maximise the overhang could increase the size of the next Parliament and alter the balance of power.

On the night, watch the numbers of electorate seats won by National and Te Pāti Māori.

In 2023, National won 44 electorates and 38.1 percent of the party vote. Five MPs from the party list then made up its proportional share of seats. If National’s party vote falls to around 30% this time, we’d normally expect its number of electorate seats to fall, too — maybe below 30.

But if ACT and New Zealand First voters do split their votes, National could win more local electorate seats than the party vote would normally deliver overall.

If National wins 29 percent of the party vote, for example, that would normally entitle it to 35 seats. Predictions are hazardous, but National could conservatively win 39 or more electorates.

One peculiar outcome could be that Labour gets a higher party vote than National, but National wins more seats than Labour. That’s the kind of disproportionate outcome that brought the old first-past-the-post system into disrepute after the 1978 and 1981 elections.

Should small parties that don’t have a chance of getting over 5 percent, get government funding? That is the question I would have answered on The Platform with Michael Laws (before his repugnant statements about women candidates came to light), had Sean Plunket not banned me.

That’s right, I received a text from The Platform which stated, “Change of plan … Sean Plunkett says you are banned from The Platform”.

Not a great loss you might think from that self-proclaimed champion of free speech, but it is a question I have been asked many times over the last few months.

• READ MORE: Free Palestine party seeks electoral voice in New Zealand
• NZ First’s Laws sorry for remarks, hours after defending them
• Palestine free from the River to the Sea Party
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The broadcasting allowance is from the statutory requirement to provide a fair opportunity for all eligible parties to convey their policies to the public. It can only pay expenses for TV, radio and some internet advertising but the rules aren’t clear for this.

To qualify your party must have more than 500 current financial members. There is just over $4 million to spread across 17 registered parties. Those six parties that are in Parliament having received more votes in the last election get most of the cash.

But the real money comes from donations from the super rich and corporates. So far this election $8,254,331 has been given in donations over $20,000.

As might be expected, National, Act, Labour, NZ First, Greens, and now Opportunity have got significant donations of $20,000 or over.

Extra $8 million to spend
You might think that these parties got an extra $8 million bucks to spend. Well yes, but there is more.

The real money comes in the form of smaller donations of $5000 or under. An unnamed individual can give an unlimited amount of these donations to a party and the amount of these only comes in their annual reports.

Of the $10,383,230.39 National got in the 2023 election, $6,003,941.05 came from donations of $5000 or under.

Of the $4,769,395.26 that Labour got in the 2023 election, $2,889,810.26 came from donations of $5000 or under.

So on top of getting the biggest share of the broadcasting allowance, in the 2023 elections National, Labour, Act, Greens and NZ First got an extra $24,607,405.60. The Free Palestine Party got $82,000 in Broadcasting Allowance this election.

Last election the Opportunity Party couldn’t get halfway to the 5 percent threshold; current polling puts it at 6 percent. Some super rich now approve of them, so they allow enough funding so Kiwis know who they are.

Do you wonder why the ordinary Kiwi has been getting poorer and their share of the wealth Aotearoa produces is getting less over the last 40 years? Or why the richest 150 individuals in NZ increased their wealth by 26 percent or $27 billion dollars in the last 12 months.

While the rest of us suffer a cost of living crisis thanks to the Israeli/US war on Iran. Why do well over 60 percent of Kiwis want Israel sanctioned for 78 years of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide, but no NZ government has ever done anything about it?

Odds stacked in favour of super rich
With the odds so stacked in favour of the super rich, most of whom support the apartheid regime of Israel and Western imperialism, you think that the Zionist lobby in NZ might have just let our $82,000 in broadcasting allowance go.

But when you’ve been raised or believe in an ideology and society that tell you you’re superior, you don’t stand for criticism from people you consider less human than you.

The tactics of the Zionist lobby are the same the world over and most mainstream news organisations don’t have the courage or integrity to challenge them, no matter what crimes against humanity they commit.

To TVNZ’s credit, despite some technical issues, they had the courage to run the few ads we could afford.

NZME has no courage or integrity and were completely gutless in face of the threat of the Zionist lobby. But they went beyond just saying no, they tried to tell us what political messages they would allow us to tell Kiwis.

They wasted our time until it was too late to advertise elsewhere. Perhaps the ZB in Newstalk stands for Zionist Broadcasting?

True to the tactics the Zionist lobby has used overseas they’ve come after me through my employment. They have made complaints to the school I teach at and the Teachers Council to intimidate, silence and make an example out of me to others.

But the members of the Free Palestine Party and the Kiwis of the Palestine solidarity movement in Aotearoa and around the world can’t be intimidated.

We will hold whatever government is formed after November 7 to account. We will continue until Palestine is free from the river to the sea!

Paul Hopkinson is president of the Free Palestine Party Aotearoa.

In colloquial language, “Jesus wept” is a cry of exasperation when we encounter something either appalling or appallingly stupid.

The leaders of the 18 states and territories comprising the Pacific Island Forum — including Australia and New Zealand — have done both by inviting Israel to be a second-tier sectoral partner to their regional organisation.

The origin of “Jesus wept” lies in the Bible and Christ’s despair at the human condition — which I discuss in a separate article, Lazarus has come back from the dead.

• READ MORE: Israel approved as second-tier partner in Pacific Islands Forum — Barbara Dreaver
• Shameful move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice — David Robie
• Other Israel in Pacific reports

First and foremost the Forum’s invitation to Israel is a political statement that these countries — at the political level — are in alignment with the values and programmes being advanced by Israel.

As decisions of this body are made by consensus, it means that all 18 member states — including Australia and New Zealand — have given their blessing. At the heart of this move is the theologically-twisted world of Christian Zionism which has a powerful hold on both political elites and many ordinary folk in Pacific communities.

Fables, such as certain Polynesians or Melanesians being among the Lost Tribes of Israel, swirl around the Pacific and are deliberately nourished by cynical actors. The myth of a Pacific connection to Israel was first peddled by Christian missionaries in the early 19th century to rustle up recruits and has held sway with gullible minds ever since.

Shared Judeo-Christian framing
Elise Barandon, a visiting fellow at Australian National University, says Israel’s growing influence in the region can be better understood through the lens of a shared Judeo-Christian framing.

“These engagements — alongside targeted development cooperation, security assistance, and increased political dialogue and visits — signal the activation of existing religious affinities, now translated into more explicit diplomatic positionings, including in multilateral arenas such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA),” Barandon wrote earlier this year in an ANU paper All In for the Holy Land: Pacific Islands and Christian Zionism.

Scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007) exposed the depth of collusion and modus operandi of Israeli and US homegrown Zionists — Christian and Jewish — in massively influencing US policy. Israel has applied the same techniques with great success to the smaller fish in the Pacific.

For Israel the support of these small Pacific nations (Palau has a population of just 18,000 but one vote at the UN) is gold. For the price of a few shekels they can help build a narrative of “legitimacy” at the United Nations, despite the world’s states in large measure repudiating the racist Zionist project to extinguish Palestinian identity in Palestine.

Israel runs a sophisticated global influence campaign; state agencies include MASHAV and the “humanitarian” NGO IsraAID. Similar to US agencies like USAID these are operated as extensions of foreign policy, often focusing on “aid for votes”. What goes on under the radar in terms of purchasable politicians is opaque.

IsraAid is tasked with providing water, sanitation, mental health and emergency medical care — all the things they have systematically destroyed for millions of Palestinians. But some Christian communities of the Pacific turn deaf ears and blind eyes to this and accept the largesse.

Many — but not all — the leaders of the heavily Christian Pacific — where churches are still full on Sundays — have chosen to side with a regime that has killed tens of thousands of children and is actively attacking the Christian community of Palestine. A strange element of Christian Zionism is the fact it also ignores this persecution of Christians in the Holy Land.

Erasure of a people
As Australian John Menadue pointed out in a recent article in Pearls & Irritations:

“The ethnic cleansing of both Christians and Muslims from Palestine continues. It is not only erasure of a people but of their culture and history.

“Australian leaders in church and state are complicit in the ethnic erasure of the Palestinian people, Muslim and Christian alike, from their homeland. They appeal for our help. But they are not being heard. They are being ignored.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, like most “Christian” politicians, is probably not a true believer, otherwise he would know full well that by joining 17 other Pacific leaders last month in welcoming the state of Israel as a partner to the Pacific Islands Forum he has indelibly stained both his country’s and his own name.

To be clear: all 18 states have a great number of people who actively oppose the genocide and support the Palestinian people in this hour of need.

As David Robie, one of the veterans of Pacific journalism pointed out, the Forum has decolonisation as one of its founding principles. For good reason: our region has a long dark history of slavery, indentured labour, violent expropriation of land and European political and missionary imposed cultural erasure.

These wounds have not yet healed and now we have the ghastly sight of Israel representatives being embraced by Pacific leaders from New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other states.

‘Global rogue pariah’
Dr Robie, in a recent article in Asia Pacific Report, Shameful Israel move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice, says: “The Pacific Islands Forum has betrayed one of its founding principles in admitting Israel — already a global rogue pariah state — as a development partner in the middle of the genocide of an Indigenous people, the Palestinians.”

Their actions effectively express support for widely-held religiously-fuelled sentiments like these:

“We should take the land because God commanded us to take it. It’s our land. The Palestinians can go to any other Arab country, except Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — those are ours too. Or we will kill them,” said American settler Atara Serwatien, who recently moved to Israel from the US.

I spoke over the weekend with Rinad Tamimi, a Palestinian-New Zealand activist. She was understandably distracted by the fact that 35 members of her family had been evicted this week, along with thousands of other Palestinians, by Israeli Occupation Forces from their homes in Hebron, in the West Bank.

The United Nations has made clear the Israelis are an illegal occupation force and should not be in the West Bank at all, let alone imposing a collective punishment pogrom as part of its widening and accelerating genocide. New Zealand’s famously-racist Foreign Minister Winston Peters yawns and looks the other way when Palestinian rights are on the agenda but the rest of us should not.

Rinad Tamimi’s 95-year-old grandfather was among the family members manhandled out of his home by the Israeli stormtroopers.

“We’ve been pleading, rallying, marching for over three years now. We’re not asking for a miracle. All we’re asking for is for our government to sanction Israel, join the ICJ [International Court of Justice] case, and most importantly, speak out for what’s going on in Palestine. But we are seeing quite the opposite and I think it’s sickening,” Tamimi says.

I’ll give the last word to Dante Alighieri. I re-read Dante’s Divine Comedy recently and this line came to mind as I wrote about these Pacific Forum leaders:

“Oh, you proud Christians, wretched and small

“Who, by the dim lights of your twisted minds,

“Believe you prosper even as you fall.”

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

INVESTIGATION: By Cathy Peters and Wendy Bacon

Civil liberties and Palestinian supporters are calling for the sacking of Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, after her latest “Priorities” report accused them of using “human rights” to hide their “antisemitism”.

Segal’s Priorities “roadmap” appears designed to increase the pressure on all levels of government as well as the forthcoming final report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in December.

Segal is an active player in an international network coordinated by key pro-Israel Jewish bodies as well as the US State Department. Indeed, if it had not been for pressure from the US government, Segal might not have the job at all.

• READ MORE:  The Israelisation of Australia. Segal’s report is an attack on democracy. Abolish the job.
• ‘Rejecting hate’: Abdul El-Sayed wins Senate seat in US despite racist attacks
• US voters outraged by Gaza are turning against politicians who back Israel’s wars
• Other MWM reports

Global network of antisemitism envoys
Segal is one of 32 Special Envoys in North America, Europe, South America, Israel and Australia.

The position of the US Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism was established in 2004 when New Jersey Republican congressman Chris Smith, who has a history of advocating for Israel and a record of accusing organisations, including UN bodies, of rampant antisemitism, successfully pushed to pass legislation creating the position.

The State Department then lobbied allies to appoint Envoys.

Following the US lead, the European Union appointed an Envoy in 2015, followed by Canada, Greece, the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the UK. Israel’s envoy is part of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In 2021, Smith, by then a strong Trump supporter, successfully pushed for an amendment which strengthened the position of US Special Envoy to the level of ambassador, who reports directly to the Secretary of State, is appointed by the President and crucially, can access foreign governments.

The ambassador’s mission is to promote US foreign policy by developing and implementing policies and projects to support action against antisemitism. The office uses the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition which directly links Jewish people with Zionism and the State of Israel, and conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Current US Antisemitism Ambassador is far-right winger Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun who has boasted about influencing governments and recently described his office as supporting Trump’s policies by having 250,000 visas cancelled to keep campuses “safe”, interfering in foreign educational curricula and initiating prosecutions of what he describes as “hate crimes”.

This is echoed in Segal’s “Priorities” which include compulsory training for Home Affairs staff responsible for certain visa applications and a task force to review existing visas.

Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, who serves as the U.S. task force for combating anti-Semitism, boasts about enjoying the ability to make governments comply with his will, using either gentle or forceful persuasion and leveraging the power of the U.S. government to advance Jewish interests.

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) February 6, 2026

Acceding to US demands
Initially reluctant, the Albanese Labor government finally appointed Segal in July 2024.

Her appointment followed a period of intense lobbying from the US State Department which was not covered by Australian media.

FOI releases show that In May 2024, the then US deputy antisemitism envoy, Aaron Keyek travelled to Australia and met with officials in Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney General’s Department to put pressure on the Albanese government to appoint an envoy.

He also met with the co-chair of Labor Friends of Israel Deborah O’Neill.

The crunch came with an ultimatum regarding a meeting of special envoys in Argentina in July 2024 to sign US drafted global guidelines to counter antisemitism. A former senior US official told JNS,

“We were all diplomatic about it, but we told Australia, essentially, ‘it’s going to be glaring.’ We didn’t want to repeat the situation where one of our closest allies didn’t stand up to one of the top foreign-policy priorities when it comes to human rights that the United States is pushing internationally … So we told them that they could

only attend if the delegation was led by a special envoy.”

Australia jumped and DFAT sent a cable on July 4 to the US State Department saying the appointment of an envoy who would report directly to the Prime Minister was imminent.

Jillian Segal was appointed on July 9, just 10 days before the meeting in Buenos Aires which she attended. According to that cable, she had already approved the guidelines and

her tickets were booked before she was even appointed.

Australia’s Ambassador to Argentina was permitted to sign off on the Guidelines which refer to the IHRA definition as a key tool for fighting antisemitism, as a result of Segal’s hasty appointment.

World Jewish Congress
US State Department works with World Jewish Congress (WJC) – Special Envoy and Coordinators Network

In 2019, the New York-based WJC — the central governing organisation of Jewish organisations, which “defends the Jewish state of Israel” — established the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combating Antisemitism (SECCA) Network which coordinates “responses to antisemitism …”

Segal’s work is partially dictated by this body.

Since her appointment, Segal has worked closely with SECCA. In July last year, the US Special Envoy in the State Department Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda thanked her for hosting an online forum.

Full costs of Segal’s overseas travel since she was appointed. https://t.co/DHLVpOyoes

— Jommy Tee (@jommy_tee) October 20, 2026

In her first 15 months, Segal took five trips overseas costing $85,000 and in May this year she travelled to Geneva to sign another SECCA joint declaration.

SECCA’s Dublin meeting
The 15th meeting of SECCA was held last month in Dublin organised by the WJC in partnership with the European Commission.

The conference aimed to look at ways to implement strong measures to “confront online hatred and turn government promises into concrete action”.

It heard reports from delegates from 28 countries including Australia and included visits to the European headquarters of TikTok and Meta which included representatives from the WJC’s Technology and Human Rights institute (TECHRI) which focuses solely on lobbying governments, international bodies, and tech companies on policy, monitoring and control within the digital realm.

Maram Stern, WJC Executive vice-president and SECCA co-chair, spoke at the forum emphasising the need to urgently enforce “practical solutions” to antisemitism. She linked the October 7 Hamas attack to a worldwide surge in antisemitism rather than to the worldwide revulsion with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Segal spoke via video at the Dublin conference urging stronger institutional accountability, education and enforcement against antisemitism. Referring to the Royal Commission (which heard many unchallenged allegations of antisemitism in what some commentators saw as a concerted effort to demonise pro Palestine groups and supporters), she noted that its proceedings had brought into focus, “concerns about antisemitism in universities, cultural institutions, and healthcare”.

These are key areas where there have been false claims of antisemitism and lawfare used against academics, artists and healthcare workers.

Segal wasn’t the only Australian who spoke. Her close partners from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (EJAC), Peter Wertheim, EJAC co-CEO, called for “more proactive regulation of technology companies and effective legal avenues for people harmed by online content” while ECAJ president and WJC vice president, Daniel Aghion emphasised the importance of “active special envoys, sustained government engagement and coordination between Jewish organisations”.

Hotel boycotts SECCA conference
Before the conference started, it emerged that one of Dublin’s prestigious hotels had refused to accommodate the SECCA delegates and alternative accommodation and a conference venue had to be found.

This went unreported until Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, told a pre-conference event that the 4-star Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin which had taken the SECCA booking for 70 rooms in April this year had abruptly cancelled this booking after a meeting with the conference organisers and the hotel’s general manager.

Cohen was asked by the hotel manager whether the event had any ties to the Israeli Defence Force. He told Fox News Digital, “I was completely taken aback by that question. I said,

‘What would the IDF have to do with a conference on antisemitism?’”

It was revealed that the hotel’s general manager subsequently consulted the hotel owners before the cancellation was made.

This was immediately characterised as a major antisemitic event by the organisers. The World Jewish Congress published an opinion by Maurice Cohen on October 14 titled, “Ironically, an Antisemitism Conference Falls Victim to Jew-Hatred”.

Although the Herbert Park Hotel refused to make public comment, it is clear it chose not to be associated with an event that had any ties to the IDF. The links between SECCA and support of Israel and members of the IDF are strong.

SECCA representatives work with pro Israel organisations who have key personnel directly connected with the Israeli state and past and present members of the IDF.

Conflating this refusal with antisemitism, is yet another example of how peak pro-Israel Jewish organisations continue to deceptively link antisemitism to protest actions such as the Herbert Park Hotel boycott.

Combat Antisemitism Movement
One of the major organisations participating in the SECCA conference in Dublin was the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) which is based in the US and has spread internationally. Its advisory board members and its CEO are directly linked to Israel.

CAM works globally to pressure governments to not only endorse the IHRA definition of antisemitism but to enforce it. It reported that it was recognised as a “trusted US State Department partner” at the SECCA conference where it reiterated the coordinated push to get governments to enforce the IHRA antisemitism definition —  a point which was emphasised by the US Special Envoy Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun.

As previously reported by Michael West Media, CAM also has strong links with the IDF.

Antizionism equals ‘antisemitism’
The J50 forum is a body founded by Israel’s Foreign Ministry that includes 50 Jewish organisations internationally. It held its third meeting in Jerusalem in September and published its hardline and contentious Declaration on Zionism and Antisemitism which stated unequivocally that “Zionism is part of Jewish identity” and defined anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism when used to “marginalise or deny Jewish self-determination”.

Daniel Aghion spoke and his presentation summarised ECAJ’s work since Bondi. He offered some unguarded and frank insights into the way in which this organisation mobilised around the Royal Commission:

“It has been a massive exercise over the last year. The Jewish community has spent millions of dollars, and many millions more in pro bono legal and non-legal work. This was to make sure that our voice is heard properly, both inside and outside the Commission, and to ensure that the Commission has run as well as it can.”

MWM asked ECAJ about whether any of ECAJ’s large government grants had been used on the Royal Commission work but got no response.

No stone unturned
On November 19, the Israel-based Jerusalem Post Group’s first Asia-Pacific Summit, will be held in Sydney. It will feature many Israeli speakers including Israel’s president Isaac Herzog’s wife Michel Herzog online, the Israeli ambassador to Australia, former senior IDF members as well as President of Zionist Federation of Australia, Jeremy Liebler.

The focus is on countering hostility to Israel and building business links, something which many Australians do not support, not because they are antisemitic but because they are anti-genocide.

Then 10 days later, the 2026 CAM conference for mayors and councillors will be held in Sydney. These events reinforce the global messaging of SECCA, WJC and J50.

They are designed to add extra impetus for calls to impose Segal’s agenda leading up to the first anniversary of the Bondi massacre and prior to the release of the Report of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in December.

Segal’s overreach into all aspects of our civil life

is not just angering human rights activists and those who are unfairly being labelled as antisemitic but large sections of Australian society who increasingly do not support Israel and do not want to be policed at the service of this rogue state.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese buckled to pressure in creating the position of antisemitism envoy and made a striking error in appointing the Israel lobby’s choice, Segal, to that position.

As anger grows about her appointment, it’s time to reassess the legitimacy of the position itself in light of the facts surrounding its creation. We have existing anti-discrimination legislation and strong National Anti-Racism Framework guidelines that are yet to be implemented.

Bending to US, Israel and the local Israel lobby’s demands will only intensify public anger.

On this United Nations-designated International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) stands in solidarity with journalists and media workers around the world who face intimidation, harassment, violence, imprisonment and death for doing their jobs.

We maintain that targeting journalists is an attack not only on individual journalists and their families, but also on the public’s inalienable human right to information and freedom of expression, which underpins the foundations of democratic society.

When journalists are silenced through violence and intimidation, the stories they tell, the abuses they expose, and the questions they ask are silenced with them.

• READ MORE: UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals
• Al Jazeera – its vital place in the global media landscape is more important than ever
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Other media freedom reports

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 2565 journalists and media workers have been killed since 1992. Of these, 1053 have been deliberately targeted and murdered for their work; 842 of these murders have not received justice.

The scale of such impunity remains deeply concerning, and its further erosions deeply troubling. The global UNESCO impunity rate for journalist killings has risen to a staggering 86 percent. Almost six out of seven killings remain judicially unresolved.

Journalists working in conflict zones continue to be particularly vulnerable, and the use of drones in targeting and killing journalists has added a particularly alarming dimension to conflict reporting.

In 2024-25 UNESCO reported 50 journalists had been killed in drone attacks across six war zones. Journalists in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan speak of horrendous accounts of how drones have stalked and killed their colleagues.

Gaza deadliest conflict
The war on Gaza, now widely acknowledged as the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history, continues to exert a heavy toll. The Cost of War report published by Brown University’s Watson Institute in April 2025, stated that Gaza had been turned into a “news graveyard”.

In her July 2026 Truth Under the Rubble report, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese describes the assault on Palestinian journalism as “mediacide” — the systematic destruction of the media’s public function.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Israeli military has been responsible for approximately two-thirds of all journalist and media worker deaths worldwide since October 2023, with killings documented in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.

We acknowledge that impunity is not confined to armed conflict. Journalists investigating corruption, organised crime and abuses of political and corporate power also face threats, physical attacks, legal harassment and assassination.

The UN Secretary-Generals’ August 2025 report cites UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists figures stating “44 journalists covering environmental issues were killed over the past 15 years”. The same report notes “UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists have recorded 353 physical attacks against environmental journalists between 2009 and 2023”.

We further acknowledge that female journalists are disproportionately exposed to gender-based threats, online abuse, sexualised harassment and doxxing. The International Center for Journalists’ 2020 The Chilling shows 73 percent of respondents had experienced online violence in the course of their work, with 25 percent reporting threats of physical violence and 18 percent threats of sexual violence.

The 2026 Tipping Point report found that 45 percent of women journalists and media workers surveyed had self-censored on social media, while 22 percent had self-censored in their professional work because of online violence. These findings demonstrate that the impact of such threats extends beyond the psychosocial harm experienced by individual journalists, compromising their capacity to undertake independent public-interest reporting, which ultimately restricts the public’s access to information.

Importance of education
As an association representing journalism educators and researchers, JERAA also recognises the importance of education in sustaining a culture that respects press freedom and the safety of journalists. We maintain that press freedom begins with robust journalism education that equips future journalists to understand the value of fearless reporting, to uphold professional ethics and protect sources, and to recognise the importance of solidarity and collective action when colleagues are targeted.

We call on Australian universities to invest in journalism education and acknowledge the important role journalism educators play in challenging the normalisation of violence against journalists, defending the principles of independent public-interest journalism, and building resilience in future journalists.

JERAA emphasises that protecting journalists requires more than condemning attacks after they occur. We call on governments, media organisations, civil society and the international community to ensure crimes against journalists are investigated, perpetrators are held accountable and journalists can report freely and safely, without fear of violence or retribution.

We support the International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) call for a for a binding International Convention on the Safety and Independence of Journalists and other Media Professionals, and urge the Australian government to support such a convention in the international theatre.

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is vice-president (networks) of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). This article was first published by JERAA to mark International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists on 2 November 2026 and is republished with the author’s permission.

REVIEW: By Aleta Moriarty

Israeli forces have killed between 209 and nearly 300 journalists and media workers in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since October 2023, depending on when data was collected, and Western outlets routinely omitted or downplayed Israel’s responsibility in their headlines, according to the latest United Nations Special Rapporteur report.

The report, Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide, by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, was presented to the General Assembly recently and publicly launched yesterday.

It finds Israel’s failure to stop incitement on its airwaves is a continuing breach of the Genocide Convention and defies the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent and punish it.

• READ MORE: The BBC and Western media have a case to answer over Gaza
• Other Gaza genocide and media reports

It also puts broadcasters and social media companies on notice: since that order, saying no platform can claim ignorance of the risk, and where a company knowingly provides practical assistance that has a substantial effect on international crimes, “questions of complicity arise”.

Massive toll on Palestinian journalists and their families
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Gaza the deadliest war for journalists ever recorded. Israeli forces have wounded more than 400 journalists, and the report finds around

70 of those killed were killed as reprisal for their work.

More than 150 journalists’ homes and media offices and institutions have been destroyed, and Israel has completely destroyed 81 percent of Gaza’s information and communications infrastructure.

This devastation has not just been focused on the journalists, with around 710 journalists’ relatives also killed, 436 of them in the first four months alone.

Deliberate targetting
Photojournalist Fatma Hassouna was killed with five family members when precision-guided munitions struck their apartment in April 2025, a day after her documentary about life during the genocide was selected for Cannes.

In August 2025 a “double-tap” strike on Nasser Hospital killed 22 people. The first strike killed Reuters cameraman Hussam Al-Masri, and the second killed four more journalists who had rushed to the scene.

Israel said it had hit a “Hamas camera” — it belonged to Reuters.

Israel’s military says it does not intentionally target journalists. In October 2023 the Israeli military reportedly set up a “legitimisation cell” that has systematically recast Gaza-based journalists as “Hamas operatives”, the report says, creating a pretext before attacks and a justification after them.

More than 100 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been detained since October 2023, and around 30 are still held. Those released describe physical assaults, sexual violence including rape, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation and medical neglect.

Dehumanisation and incitement to genocide
Under Article III of the Genocide Convention, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is a crime in its own right, the report explains, “complete upon utterance or publication and applicable to officials, broadcasters and private media actors”.

No one has to act on it. Albanese finds that some statements broadcast in Israel meet that threshold.

Most people picture arms manufacturers when they think of business entities complicit in genocide. However, according to a 2024 Israel Law Review paper on Ben & Jerry’s exit from Israeli settlements, only two cases before international criminal tribunals since Nuremberg have held individual corporate defendants accountable, and both arose from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

The best known is the Media Case. In December 2003 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted RTLM executives Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, whose station became known as “Radio Machete”, along with Kangura owner and editor Hassan Ngeze.

A third case, against RTLM founder Félicien Kabuga, collapsed when he was found unfit to stand trial.

Broadcasters culpable
Albanese leans on the Nahimana judgment to argue that when presenters’ calls for genocide go unchallenged and unrepudiated by the broadcaster, the people who control the outlet carry the responsibility.

There are several worrying examples cited in the report. Channel 14 aired singer Eyal Golan’s call to “erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there”, along with statements calling for a “Holocaust”, including “gas chambers”, and urging viewers to “destroy, kill, and obliterate”.

Three Israeli civil society groups listed hundreds of instances of incitement on the channel in a May 2025 High Court petition, yet the broadcasts continue unchecked. Channel 12 journalist Yehuda Schlesinger, who argued sexual violence against Palestinian detainees should become state policy, was temporarily suspended, then joined Channel 14.

Mainstream and pro-government Israeli media have described Palestinians as “Amalek”, “monsters”, “a cancerous growth” and

even “cannibals” who “must be eradicated”.

The report says this rhetoric comes with a denial of civilian status, with Israeli media asserting that “there are no innocents” in Gaza, that Palestinians are “not civilians” and that Gaza is inhabited by “two and a half million terrorists”.

Double standards and censorship
The report highlights how Western outlets widely reported unverified claims, including that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7 and that Palestinian journalists killed by Israel were “terrorists”, the report says, while corrections received far less prominence.

German broadcaster ARD’s editorial guidance presents civilian casualties as primarily a consequence of Hamas’s alleged use of “human shields”. Much of the media reproduced what Albanese calls “humanitarian camouflage”, presenting so-called safe zones and evacuation orders as civilian protection.

Content analysis cited in the report found the BBC downplayed or omitted Israeli responsibility in 83 percent of relevant headlines, and The New York Times in 65 percent. The BBC still runs its story on six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by Israeli forces, under the headline

“Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help“.

Between October 2023 and August 2025, The Times invoked Hamas “human shields” 176 times and the BBC 81 times. The Times mentioned sexual violence against Israelis 76 times and against Palestinians four times across two sample periods.

At Germany’s ZDF, 90.7 percent of uses of “barbaric” referred to Israeli victims, and the word was never applied to attacks on Palestinians. Palestinian children made up about 99.7 percent of child deaths, yet appeared in just over half of CNN’s personalised stories about child victims.

Israel’s most important ‘weapon’
Alongside propaganda, high levels of censorship are also reported. Israel’s military censor banned 1635 articles in 2024 and redacted another 6265, 21 interventions a day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described social media to US-based influencers as Israel’s most important “weapon” in what he calls the “battle for truth”.

The report also explicitly names Antoinette Lattouf,

unlawfully dismissed by the ABC after reposting a Human Rights Watch report on starvation in Gaza.

The report saves some of its sharpest findings for tech companies.

With Palestinian journalists killed and foreign media shut out of Gaza, Meta, X and Alphabet Inc. (Google) became the principal gatekeepers of information on Palestine, and the report finds recurring patterns of discriminatory moderation, censorship and amplification of Israeli government narratives.

Leaked Meta data shows about 38.8 million Facebook and Instagram posts have been removed, banned or suppressed since late 2023, and engagement with major Palestinian news outlets has fallen 77 percent. TikTok and Meta reported compliance rates of 99.2 and 94 percent with Israel’s takedown requests.

Meta had been warned before.

In 2018 the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar found Facebook had been “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate,” a conclusion Meta’s own commissioned assessment accepted.

Israel signed contracts worth roughly US$50 million, including with Google and X, for ads dismissing famine reports, among them a message telling viewers “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie“.

Platforms kept taking that money after famine had been confirmed and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered aid let in. Google reportedly concluded the famine-denial ads didn’t breach its policies, and it carried paid ads calling the ICJ genocide case a “blood libel”, discouraging donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and attacking Albanese’s previous report.

Platforms also left up campaigns smearing Palestinian journalists before they were killed, including claims that Reuters and AP reporters had advance knowledge of October 7, which both agencies refuted.

What the report demands
Albanese wants the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor to investigate direct and public incitement to genocide by government officials and media figures, and the UN General Assembly to set up an independent mechanism to preserve evidence of crimes against journalists, secure the release of detained journalists and open Gaza to international media and human rights monitors.

Governments are urged to prosecute attacks on Palestinian journalists, treat their footage and archives as evidence, and review public funding and partnerships with media organisations and platforms that spread incitement or help conceal atrocity crimes.

Media organisations and platforms are told to stop “laundering propaganda through the journalistic form”, verify belligerents’ claims before publishing, run corrections as prominently as the original story and stop retaliating against journalists.

“Accountability depends on the survival of the record,” the report concludes. “Without it, neither justice nor the prevention of future atrocities remains possible.”

In what is probably one of its most shameful acts ever, the Pacific Islands Forum has betrayed one of its founding principles in admitting Israel — already a global rogue pariah state — as a development partner in the middle of the genocide of an Indigenous people, the Palestinians.

As decisions of this nature are made by consensus, it means that all 18 member states of the region’s main political body – including Australia and New Zealand – have given their blessing.

The move undermines the Forum’s founding commitment in 1971 to regional decolonisation.

• READ MORE: Israel becomes world’s most disliked country, global survey finds
• Gaza Strip: A beginner’s guide to an enclave under blockade
• An Ocean of Peace is not built on occupation
• Other Israel in the Pacific reports

Six Pacific countries and territories — American Samoa, French Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), Guam (Guåhan), New Caledonia (Kanaky), Pitcairn and Tokelau – are still on the UN Decolonisation list.

And there are also questions about West Papua with supporters of independence long claiming the 1969 Act of Free Choice was fraudulent process – and branded as an “Act of No Choice”.

A perception of arrogance and deceit about the Israel partnership process has also angered many in the Pacific.

Israel move condemned
Already, two regional civil society groups have condemned the move after news emerged about the controversial move – not by a Forum announcement, but by a social media post by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.

They are the Suva-based ecumenical Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), which has called for a review of the decision, and the Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisations (PRNGO), which has challenged the “Blue Pacific” mantra, arguing “an ocean of peace is not built on occupation – Pacific civil society questions the Pacific Forum on Israel partnership”.

Another diplomatic achievement: Israel joins the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) as a Forum Partner.

The Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, Baron Divavesi Waqa, has informed me that Israel has been accepted as a Forum Partner, following a decision at the meeting of the Forum’s member state leaders in Palau.

This follows my visit to Fiji in June, where I met with the Secretary General and presented Israel’s request to join the Forum.

Strengthening ties with the Pacific Island nations is one of my objectives. Earlier this year, I opened Israel’s Embassy in Fiji, which also serves nine other Pacific Island nations, all friendly to Israel.
Under the current government, three of these countries, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Nauru, have opened embassies in Jerusalem.

As a Forum Partner, Israel will participate in a framework for cooperation in areas of mutual interest, based on regional priorities and Israel’s expertise in water management, desalination, agriculture, tackling climate change, innovation and sustainable development.

Israel and the Forum will also develop a joint action plan setting out practical areas of cooperation and a mechanism to monitor progress.

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) October 20, 2026

Reminding the Pacific over the failure of partnership with Indonesia regarding accountability over the Melanesian region of West Papua, “inviting another state that perpetrates occupation and denies self-determination repeats that mistake, and weakens the principle on which our decolonisation depends”, PRNGO warned the move could split the Pacific.

This controversy comes at a time when Israel has been ranked as the world’s most unpopular country because it has consistently trampled on international law, and ignored eight decades of resolutions by the United Nations, the very body that created the State of Israel in 1947 through Resolution 181 — by partitioning Palestine when the Zionists only controlled 7 percent of the land in the British mandate of Palestine with 30 percent of the population, yet granting it 55 percent as their share of land at independence.

Jerusalem and Bethlehem would become an international zone. Palestine with about 70 percent of the population of almost 1.9 million, comprising mostly Arabs, and other non-Jewish communities, would have been left with 45 percent of the land under the UN Partition plan and, unsurprisingly, rejected it.

Israel unilaterally declared independence the following year and armed Zionist militia and terrorist gangs began a campaign of ethnically cleansing and expelling some 750,000 Palestinians and razing at least 450 Arab villages known as the Nakba (the “catastrophe”).

This set in motion eight decades of illegal occupation, militarisation, wars and repression of the Indigenous Palestinian people.

In the Six Day War in 1967, Israel captured and occupied Gaza, East Jerusalem and West Bank — the occupied Palestinian Territories have been administered illegally by the Israeli military ever since.

Since October 2023, Israel has launched 100,000 attacks on five Middle East countries and territories.

Voted against decolonisation
At the UN Decolonisation Committee (C-24) meeting earlier this month, Israel and the United States were the only two countries that voted against decolonisation, and the US unsuccessfully attempted to end the committee’s mandate.

In a statement issued on Friday, the PRNGO Alliance declared: “We understand our communities’ real needs for water, food security, agriculture, development and climate adaptation. The urgent need for resources across the region is increasing, and partnerships to secure such are important.”

However, “our concern is that the Forum family will welcome, without condition, a state in continuing breach of international law. We reject antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, and mourn every civilian life lost, Israeli and Palestinian.”

Israel’s war on Gaza since the “breakout” attack on southern Israel from the “world’s largest open air prison”, by Hamas and other resistance fighters on 7 October 2023, has led to more than 75,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — being slaughtered.

Although a sham ceasefire was declared in October 2025, Israel has continued attacking the besieged enclave almost daily since then killing at least 1500 people, mostly children, and has failed to honour the terms of the first phase of the peace agreement. US President Donald Trump’s brokered Board of Peace is widely regarded to be a failure.

Last year, the Belgian-based Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar — the very person who announced the Forum partnership.

Seeking an arrest warrant
The foundation announced at the time that it was seeking an arrest warrant for Sa’ar for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel’s military assault on Gaza since October 2023.

It was alleged by the foundation that as a senior member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Sa’ar had played “a central role in shaping and implementing policies that have led to mass displacement, collective punishment, and systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians”.

Although it is understood Sa’ar is not being formally investigated by the ICC, the court had already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity and is believed to be investigating other officials.

The PRNGO Alliance statement cited the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, Advisory Opinion on 19 July 2024 that found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful and that it must be ended “as rapidly as possible”.

The UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) affirmed that the Israeli settlements had “no legal validity” and were “a flagrant violation under international law”. Also, the UNSC Resolution 478 (1980) called on States to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem.

Yet “three Forum members of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Naoero [formerly Nauru] have opened embassies there; Samoa has announced plans to follow, and Israel’s announcement cites them,” said the PRNGO statement.

Israeli forces launch a “targeted” raid in Hebron after a shooting killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded several others, as Palestinians fear “collective punishment” days ahead of Israel’s October 27 elections.

Follow our LIVE coverage: https://t.co/FL4SrZ5U5K https://t.co/DHUJNFknqd

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 24, 2026

Deprivation of Gaza’s water
Noting the mounting death toll with Israeli violations since October 2025 “ceasefire”, the statement said: “Human Rights Watch found Israel’s deliberate deprivation of Gaza’s water amounts to extermination and acts of genocide.

“FAO reports nearly 87 percent pf Gaza’s cropland damaged. The war’s emissions, an estimated 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, fall on islands like ours. Water, food and climate security cannot be offered with one hand and destroyed with the other.”

The PRNGO statement highlighted the fact that under international law, “a ceasefire requires a complete halt to the attacks, and allows unimpeded entry of humanitarian relief at scale.

“It would end unprecedented Israeli settlement expansion and terror, guaranteeing the right of displaced Palestinians to return home, prohibit forcible transfers and end collective punishment.

“Our Forum leaders have called on all the world to uphold the UN Charter, including the sovereign equality of all states and the rights of all peoples to exist in peace and security.”

The PRNGO statement recalled that in September 2025, “our leaders declared the Blue Pacific as an Ocean of Peace, grounded in the UN Charter and international law.”

“As we said in July, a genuine Ocean of Peace means security ‘founded on justice, sovereignty, self-determination, environmental stewardship and the wellbeing of our peoples’. It rests on a strong rejection of militarisation and great power rivalry at our expense.

“A regional partnership with Israel would further facilitate and advance security cooperation, military technologies and infrastructures, in addition to the growing military exercises and security treaties crowding our ocean.”

Pacific regionalism rested on solidarity based on shared values, not merely on shared resources, PRNGO said.

Whose voice will be silenced?
“This partnership will unravel — not strengthen, that weave. It risks dividing the Forum family, tying our voice at the United Nations to bilateral favours, and making the Pacific complicit in a conflict far from our shores. Who stands to benefit from this partnership? Whose voice will it silence?

“The Pacific remembers the cost of occupation, and our peoples continue to struggle under colonisation, nuclear testing and environmental destruction. In Kanaky New Caledonia, Ma’ohi Nui, Guahan and West Papua, the struggle for self-determination continues.

“West Papua is a long standing item on our leaders’ agenda. Since 2019, they have asked Indonesia, a Forum Dialogue Partner since 2001, to allow a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — a visit Jakarta offered in 2018.

“It has not eventuated, yet a similar partnership has brought delay: not accountability. Inviting another state that perpetrates occupation and denies self-determination repeats that mistake, and weakens the principle on which our decolonisation depends.”

The PRNGO Alliance demanded:

• The Forum Troika — Solomon Islands, Palau and New Zealand — reflect on its concerns over partnerships;
• Forum leaders review Israel’s partnership and suspend all engagements until Israel complies with the ICJ and UN Security Council resolutions;
• The Forum Secretariat publish the basis for the Israel decision and ensure any partnership agreement commits to international law;
• Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Naoero return their embassies to Tel Aviv, consistent with Resolution 478, and Samoa reconsider its plan; and
• All Forum members ensure no partnership, aid, or security, cyber or surveillance cooperation helps maintain the occupation.

The day before the response by PRNGO, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), an umbrella organisation representing Christian churches and national councils across 18 countries and territories in the region, called for all engagement with Israel to be suspended until it complied with international court rulings and UN resolutions.

General secretary Reverend James Bhagwan told RNZ Pacific Waves that the region needed to apply consistent standards to its international relationships.

“We cannot invoke the [International Court of Justice] for our islands and ignore the fact that the ICJ, in 2024, stated that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian territory as soon as possible,” he said.

Reverend Bhagwan, who is also a signatory to the PRNGO statement, was speaking in response to Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Viliame Gavoka who had claimed the “entire Pacific Islands identify with Israel” and their relationship with the country was “biblical, ageless and real”.

Responses from New Zealand
In New Zealand, the coalition government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon which is fighting desperately to be re-elected on November 7 with tight opinion polls predicting a possible hung Parliament, has been struggling to justify support for the Forum move.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters described criticism of Israel’s inclusion in PIF as an “insult” to Pacific Island countries, adding that the decision by the Pacific leaders should be respected. However, the opposition parties led by Labour demanded explanations.

John Minto, national organiser of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), the largest activist group in New Zealand, which has been organising weekly protests against Israel for the past three years, said: “Wow – a tiny country in the Middle East is now joining the Pacific Islands forum [as a second-tier partner].

“This has nothing to do with supporting the Pacific but has everything to do with using Pacific nations to provide cover and legitimacy to a racist, apartheid state currently committing genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and conducting pogroms against Palestinian Communities across the Occupied West Bank.

“Sickening complicity by Pacific leaders!”

The chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, Maher Nazzal, has called on the government to “explain itself”, especially in view of New Zealand becoming the host for the Pacific Islands Forum next year.

“Technical cooperation must not shield any state from scrutiny under international law,” he said.

Support Palestinian self-determination
Writing in the Otago Daily Times, John Hobbs, a doctoral scholar and former career public official at the University of Otago’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, has a clear-cut message for the incoming post-election government next month:

“New Zealanders and our political parties must act and be part of the global momentum to end the brutality in Gaza, to reverse the illegal occupation of the West Bank, support Palestinian self-determination and hold Israel to account.

“To do otherwise represents a moral failure as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand and it will severely damage our reputation among many of our traditional allies, trading partners, and the international community.”

A poignant lesson also for the Pacific.

Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs.

The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it.

On Wednesday, Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it.

• READ MORE: The real reason Kerrin Leoni had to go is not about the gangs
• Other NZ election reports

Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it making a decision they would describe as political. A clip surfaces. A second outlet obtains it.

A third finds the still that works better than the clip, because a photograph of men making hand signs needs no context and cannot be argued with. A fourth adds a detail about money that turns a family gathering into a transaction. A fifth books a Labour MP and asks her to account for a colleague.

Somewhere in the middle of that chain the thing stops being a story about an event and becomes the event itself, and the party reads the coverage, calculates the damage, and acts on the coverage rather than on anything that happened in that room.

Not one outlet in that chain appears to have asked the question that any reporter who had read the last decade of this country’s own inquiries would ask first. Where did the men in the photograph come from? Who put them in the institutions that produced them? What does the Crown owe them?

A question of candidate conduct
The story was reported instead as a question of candidate conduct, which is the safest possible framing and the one that requires the least work, because it needs no history, no interviews outside Parliament, and no contact with anybody in Tāmaki Makaurau who was actually at the gathering.

The video and the photograph were taken at the same gathering and they carry opposite cargo. In the video a patched man argues that the gangs should stop fighting each other and put their attention on the government, and a candidate tells a room that people who are not enrolled hold the power to change who governs. That is footage of political organising, and any newsroom that wanted a story about democratic participation among the most excluded citizens in the country had it handed over free.

The still photograph carries none of that. It shows bodies, patches and hand signs, and it travelled furthest, because an image requires no reading and permits no reply.

The caption vocabulary gives the game away. Regalia. Hand gestures associated with the gang. Those are the words of a police file transposed into news copy, and they work by telling the reader that what they are looking at is evidence.

Parliament has already made the patch an offence to wear in public, so the photograph functions as a charge sheet while the outlet that published it makes no accusation at all and takes no responsibility for one. The men in that frame are not named, not interviewed, not asked why they were there, and not treated as people who might have a view about the government they were discussing. They appear as a visual condition attaching to the woman standing near them.

Think about what never happens. A candidate photographed at a Federated Farmers breakfast is not asked to account for the nitrate in the Manawatū. A candidate at a corporate box is not asked whether he endorses the firm’s tax structure. A minister photographed with a property developer is covered as a diary item. Proximity becomes contamination only when the bodies in the frame are Māori and poor, and the newsroom knows this without ever having to say it, which is precisely how a shared set of assumptions does its work. Nobody had to instruct anybody. The picture editor simply knew which image would run.

Oriini Kaipara is in this story, which makes it almost too neat. A few years ago she was the first person to read primetime news in this country with a moko kauae, and viewers wrote in to tell the newsroom her face was offensive. She is now Te Pāti Māori’s candidate in Tāmaki Makaurau, and the same industry that once relayed complaints about her chin has spent this week staging a contest between two Māori women over which of them stood nearer to a gang pad.

Lively moment in a tight race
Leoni attacked Kaipara over it at the debate on Wednesday. Kaipara put it straight back. The coverage carried the exchange as a lively moment in a tight race, and the structure that made two wāhine Māori prosecute each other on camera went unexamined by every outlet that profited from it.

The record here is long and consistent. A Māori MP’s tie became a national story. A Māori foreign minister’s face was discussed as a diplomatic variable. Every Māori politician in this country gets asked, sooner or later, to account for a relationship no Pākehā politician is ever asked about, and the question is always framed as a reasonable one about standards.

The reason it is always framed that way is that the people framing it have never had to explain their own cousins to a camera. Senior editorial judgment in New Zealand newsrooms sits overwhelmingly in Pākehā hands, and the judgment in question is not malice. It is the plain inability to see that a room full of Māori men might contain anything other than a threat, combined with an institutional certainty that this inability is neutrality.

Whakaata Māori reported the footage first, and that fact deserves to be stated rather than stepped around. A Māori broadcaster is still a broadcaster, working under the same commercial logic, the same political pressure and considerably more funding risk than the outlets that picked the story up.

What happened afterwards is where the whiteness lives. One report became a saturation event because the rest of the industry recognised the material instantly as the kind of thing that performs, and pushed it until a party leader had no room to move. The first report is journalism. The 48 hours that followed is a removal mechanism, and no individual inside it has to intend the outcome for the outcome to arrive on schedule.

The figure that would have reframed the entire story has been sitting in the public record for years. The Waitangi Tribunal estimates that 80 to 90 percent of Mongrel Mob and Black Power members were once wards of the state, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care carried that estimate into its own findings after sitting with gang members who described what was done to them as children in Crown institutions.

Every newsroom in the chain has covered that inquiry. Not one of them reached for it this week. The men in the photograph are the state’s own product, documented at enormous public expense, and the press that reported the inquiry found no reason to connect the two stories when a connection would have cost a political party something.

The press played its colonial role
The press in this country was built into the land taking from the beginning. The settler papers of Auckland and Taranaki spent the early 1860s telling their readers that Waikato Māori were arming, that the Kīngitanga was a standing threat to settler life, and that the government had to move.

The invasion came, the confiscations followed, and the newspapers had supplied the public reasoning that made both appear defensive. Newspapers were as much a part of that apparatus as the survey chain and the militia, and the people who ran them understood themselves throughout as reporting the facts.

The technology changed and the function held. The Dawn Raids were covered as a crime wave. Bastion Point was covered as an occupation to be cleared. In 2007 newsrooms ran police allegations about training camps in Te Urewera for months, in detail, and the case against almost everyone arrested collapsed, after which the coverage simply stopped rather than reckoning with what it had helped do to a community that is still living with it.

In each of these the press produced the Māori body as a question of public order first, which is the step that makes everything the state does next look like a measured response to a situation it did not create.

What happened to Kerrin Leoni belongs in that sequence. No outlet in the chain published anything false. The video was real, the photograph was real, the advertisement for the event existed. The violence is in the selection, the sequencing and the frame, in which still ran and which three seconds of footage did not, in the decision to make candidate conduct the story and state care no part of it, and none of that is actionable before any media standards body in this country.

Watched a woman being publicly destroyed
A complaint can test accuracy. There is no complaint available against an industry’s shared sense of what is obviously a scandal, which is the thing that actually ended her candidacy.

Set out the week’s ledger. Labour lost a candidate and kept its standard. The newsrooms had a running story through a slow stretch of the campaign and will have forgotten it by the time the votes are counted.

The men in the photograph, who were abused by the Crown as children and have since been told that the clothing they wear is itself an offence, watched a woman be publicly destroyed for standing in a room with them and telling them that their vote could change the government.

They were the only people in this whole affair with nothing to gain and they paid for it anyway. Any newsroom could have written that story this week. The material was in their own archives. They ran the hand signs instead.

Professor Mohan J. Dutta of Massey University, Aotearoa, publishes the blog The Margins Review – Culture-Centered Approach featuring critical intellectual opinions from Aotearoa to the world. The views expressed are personal. This article is republished with permission by the author.

Israel voted against all UN resolutions concerning decolonisation of the six Pacific territories at the UN General Assembly’s Fourth Committee (Decolonisation — C-24) meeting last week.

Decolonisation has been a founding principle of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) since its establishment in 1971.

The announcement by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar that it has become a PIF partner on social media earlier this week has stirred controversy.

• READ MORE: Israel’s relationship with Pacific is ‘biblical, ageless, real’, says Fiji deputy PM
• NZ’s foreign policy obligation to confront Israel’s Gaza genocide
• ‘Please explain’, Palestine Forum tells NZ over Israeli-Pacific Islands Forum ‘partnership’
• ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Israel joins Pacific Islands Forum as development partner
• Other Gaza genocide reports

As well as voting against decolonisation on October 15, Israel — along with the US — were the only countries to oppose all resolutions at the Fourth Committee including:

• reporting obligations for administering powers;
• dissemination of decolonisation information;
• economic activities affecting territorial peoples;
• education and training opportunities; and
• implementation of the UN Declaration on decolonisation.

At the same meeting, the US explicitly called for the abolition of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation’s mandate. Israel did not address the committee.

On October 20, Sa’ar posted on social media that the Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Baron Waqa had told him Pacific leaders accepted the country as a Forum Partner at PIFLM in Palau last month.

Another diplomatic achievement: Israel joins the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) as a Forum Partner.

The Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, Baron Divavesi Waqa, has informed me that Israel has been accepted as a Forum Partner, following a decision at the meeting of the Forum’s member state leaders in Palau.

This follows my visit to Fiji in June, where I met with the Secretary General and presented Israel’s request to join the Forum.

Strengthening ties with the Pacific Island nations is one of my objectives. Earlier this year, I opened Israel’s Embassy in Fiji, which also serves nine other Pacific Island nations, all friendly to Israel.
Under the current government, three of these countries, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Nauru, have opened embassies in Jerusalem.

As a Forum Partner, Israel will participate in a framework for cooperation in areas of mutual interest, based on regional priorities and Israel’s expertise in water management, desalination, agriculture, tackling climate change, innovation and sustainable development.

Israel and the Forum will also develop a joint action plan setting out practical areas of cooperation and a mechanism to monitor progress.

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) October 20, 2026

There was no mention of Israeli or any other country’s partner status in this year’s 55th PIFLM Communique and there has been no subsequent statement from the PIF secretariat.

On the PIF Review of the Regional Architecture and partner status, the Communique said, “leaders further agreed that the Secretary General would communicate the decision to Partners in line with the endorsed communication approach”.

PIF’s last status update on Israel was a meeting with ambassadors and its international aid agency Mashav on October 18, with no mention of its partner status.

“The criteria for PIF Dialogue Partners, which must be met by countries at the time of admission and then continuously adhered to, are:

• demonstratable commitment to advancing the vision and priorities of the Leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum;
• long-term forward commitment to the Pacific region as demonstrated through foreign policy commitments, engagement strategies, diplomatic missions and engagement with regional organisations, and transparency in declaring economic, political, and strategic interests in engaging in the region; and
• shared interests and common positions on international issues and a commitment to using global networks and membership of international organisations to support Forum priorities.”

Six of the 17 non-self governing territories on the UN decolonisation list are in the Pacific —  American Samoa, French Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), Guam, New Caledonia (Kanaky), Pitcairn and Tokelau.

Pacific leaders at PIFLM in 1981 passed a resolution “reaffirming their belief in the principles of self-determination and independence applying to non self-governing Pacific Island countries, including the French territories”.

In 1991, the PIF leaders Communique under the heading “Decolonisation” stated they “again reaffirmed the importance of the universal realisation of the right of peoples to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, and the principles and practices of the United Nations pertaining thereto.”

The UN recognises the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) under the framework of belligerent occupation and international humanitarian law not the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation.

Stefan Armbruster is a freelance journalist covering Pacific regional issues.

• Video and transcript of the Fourth Committee meeting via UN Web TV.

New Zealand is failing its responsibilities towards the Palestinian people; a people who are dying from the actions of Israel.

Its responsibilities to hold Israel to account are laid out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. States are obliged to prevent and punish the commission of genocide.

This does not require that genocide actually occurs, the obligation is to act to prevent genocide. It is a prior obligation designed to ensure that genocide never exists.

• READ MORE: ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Gaza mass killing documentary a warning of global dystopian future — David Robie
• Other Gaza genocide reports

New Zealand’s lack of support for South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention and its unwillingness to mirror the sanctions imposed on Russia following it’s invasion of Ukraine, are two examples of inaction.

New Zealand’s passivity reflects other influences, particularly those of the US.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters says as much in his recent speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs: “An independent foreign policy can never be unidirectional. The left and a large section of the media, they define us acting independently only when we are disagreeing with the Americans.’’

New Zealand, and the US, unlike the UK, Canada and Australia, have not formally recognised the independent and sovereign State of Palestine. Peters curiously argues this reflects an expression of New Zealand’s independence, asserting this doesn’t foreclose alignments with countries such as the US.

Unquestioned alignment with US
New Zealand’s unquestioned alignment with the US is occurring in spite of US agreement to provide a $2.8 billion arms package to Israel.

A movie, now showing in New Zealand, American Doctor adds another dimension to the cruelty occurring in Gaza. It focuses on the work of three American doctors — Perlmutter (Jewish); Thaer Ahmad (Muslim of Palestinian descent); and Feroze Sidhwa (son of Zoroastrian parents.)

American Doctor – a new film.          Video: Democracy Now!

It is harrowing but essential viewing and brings an immediacy to the situation.

The suffering Perlmutter and his colleagues have seen in Gaza hospitals since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas attack forms the core of the movie. The movie begins with the shredded bodies of tiny children lying on a medical bench – the result of US-made bombs employed by the IDF in Gaza.

The movie documents images of the Israeli military deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, and hospital staff.

Dr Sidhwa comments:  “People feel like they have to have a PhD in this topic to understand it, or to discuss it sensibly. The question isn’t how well you know Arab-Israeli history.

“The question is: Do you or do you not support the murder of children? Do you or do you not support the torture of physicians? Do you or do you not support the bombing of hospitals?’’

Puzzling NZ not influenced by UK
It is puzzling that New Zealand has not been influenced by one of its closest allies, the UK, when its Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband, says: “The Palestinian people’s suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world. We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank.

“We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.’’

Miliband accepts that the UK has a responsibility to do everything to end the occupation. Hence its decision to ban trade with all illegal settlements.

Such moves by the UK represent a sea change in the struggle to end Israel’s occupation and its programme of annexation of Palestinian land. New Zealand must be part of this change.

So what would a principled New Zealand foreign policy look like on Palestine?

It needs to be put on a firm foundation of the rule of law — stand with South Africa in its case against Israel at the ICJ, support the equal rights of Palestinians to self-determination with statehood recognition being a small step in this direction.

Impose sanctions against the State of Israel (not just against the illegal settler colonial settlements.) Scrutinise Israeli passport carrying arrivals into New Zealand to ensure they have not been part of the IDF acts in Gaza and the the West Bank.

Foreign policy isn’t something New Zealand voters prioritise.

Shameful NZ record on Gaza
New Zealand’s shameful record on Gaza, however, should be top of mind going into the election.

While the government has failed in its response to the horror of Gaza, undermining our standing in the international community, three political parties — Greens, Labour, and Te Pāti Māori — are articulating an approach to Palestine grounded in a morally defensible foreign policy.

All support statehood recognition of Palestine, the imposition of sanctions on Israel and joining South Africa at the ICJ. Labour will require the NZ Superfund and ACC to divest from holdings in companies on the UN list of companies operating in the Occupied Territories.

Whatever shape the next government takes it must shift its approach to one which upholds international law and supports the people of Palestine as their survival in their homeland is in peril.

New Zealanders and our political parties must act and be part of the global momentum to end the brutality in Gaza, to reverse the illegal occupation of the West Bank, support Palestinian self-determination and hold Israel to account.

To do otherwise represents a moral failure as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand and it will severely damage our reputation among many of our traditional allies, trading partners, and the international community.

John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

I have watched the most disturbing film in my lifetime — a warning to the world of a horrendous dystopian future when human life and death is being decided by remote AI-assisted control warfare weapons. The problem is that this dystopian future is already with us now and has been unfolding for three years — with genocide in the Israeli besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Unlike the Venice film festival premiere last month when the audience gave an unprecedented 25-minute standing ovation for The Guardian-produced NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, the New Zealand preview audience at Auckland’s Rialto Cinemas sat in shocked silence for minutes at the end, unsure how to respond to this harrowing documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. NAZA won the Venice Special Jury Prize.

So stunned was the Auckland audience that there was not a single clap.

This is a chilling visual testimony (surely likely evidence for future war crimes trials of Benjamin Netanyahu and others?) of what Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein wrote about in his landmark 2023 global book The Palestine Laboratory. At least 75,000 Palestinians have now been slaughtered (the real total is bound to be far, far higher) in the more than 1000 days since the genocide began — mostly women and children (some 25,000 of the latter).

And a Republican congressman, David Valadao, has just been reported as gloating about the US “benefits” of the war on Gaza in that weapons “are tested there; we are able to learn from that”. “We”? Sickening!

Ironically, the standing ovation in Venice eclipsed by a couple of minutes another Gaza film last year, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, a dramatised feature film about the cold-blooded murder of a five-year-old girl by an Israeli tank crew, who also ambushed and assassinated the two ambulance responders sent to rescue her.

The Hind Rajab film was heart-rending and tragic, whereas NAZA is so deeply disturbing because of the sheer callousness and remoteness of the killing carried out by 24 intelligence agents and soldiers at the push of a button through their AI applications known by Orwellian labels such as “Lavender”and “Where’s Daddy?” Yet to their credit, perhaps, they must have at least had tugs at their conscience to agree to being interviewed for this film (anonymous and with disguised voices) in secret to expose the industrial level killing.

Acceptable kill ratios
One of the interviewees tells of approval to kill 500 civilians as acceptable to target one Hamas resistance fighter. Others spoke of 200 killings at a time for one target as “acceptable” – or even “expected”. The gloves of revenge were cruelly off.

The official Naza documentary trailer.                  Video: Madman Films

The location is eerie, even ghostly, as the narratives explore remote killings during the interviews on (presumably) Tel Aviv rooftops. In the background, are the lights from Israeli apartments as people go about their mundane lives — a far cry from the terror experienced by Gazan families as they are targeted, often during the night, by quadcopters, missiles or bombs — or “Whoops”, mini drones designed especially for attacking inside homes.

“It’s so insanely fun. . . ” “It’s like a video game . . . ” “You understand that your goal is to destroy . . . ” are some of the reflections of the death dealers under the cover of darkness. The “whistleblowers”, if we can call them that, spoke to co-director Abraham under the expectation of complete anonymity for fear of retribution from the system they were once — or possibly still are — embedded in.

The film title NAZA is an acronym standing for the Hebrew term Nezek Agavi, which means “collateral damage”.

This documentary has provoked an immediate and savage response by the extreme rightwing Netanyahu regime. Responses began with Culture Minister Miki Zohar calling the film “despicable” and saying he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators on the grounds of treason against the state”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, was the next to attack the filmmakers. He declared he would introduce two legislative bills targeting those who “defame” the Israeli military. According to him, the first bill would enable revoking the citizenship of “anyone who defames soldiers”. The second would boost “twentyfold” the amount in damages in lawsuits for defamation.

The military itself has also threatened action. Chief-of-staff Eyal Zamir ordered punitive legal steps against the filmmakers with the help of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet.

Punishing the filmmakers
The documentary is not an outlier in the allegations it makes, and it is revealing that the Israeli establishment should seek to punish the filmmakers rather than examine the abhorrent rules of engagement that have blighted this war on Gaza (in response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 – a “breakout” from their 23-year prison enclave).

Just this week, the German news magazine Der Siegel has published accounts from 10 Israeli soldiers describing how troops killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza and branded them as “terrorists”. The soldiers recounted war crimes in their testimonies, including slaughtering unarmed Palestinians and destroying entire neighbourhoods to prevent families returning. One infantry reservist described how he was encouraged to kill unarmed civilians, saying: “The Arabs must be punished.” Collective punishment is a war crime.

The Israeli authorities are so desperate to minimise the political damage from this documentary that a hurriedly produced “counter” film as part of the $1 billion hasbara propaganda programme has been released — but this is littered with lies and disinformation and is unlikely to have the desired impact.

For an accurate exposé of the Gaza breakout itself that triggered the genocide following more than seven decades of occupation and repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their own land during the 1948 Nakba (“the Catastrophe”), it is hard to match the Al Jazeera investigation October 7.

• NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (Madman Entertainment). The film has been released in 55 countries, including New Zealand, but is banned from screening in Israel. It will be streamed for free on The Guardian’s website in late November.

Western civilisation has never had a clean record. Its history is soaked in conquest, enslavement, and slaughter. Yet it always took solace in one redeeming quality: it carried within itself the seeds of its own correction.

Its unwavering support for Israel has betrayed the values and squandered the achievements cultivated over centuries of philosophical inquiry and moral struggle. But more importantly, it has dismantled the very mechanism of self-correction that once enabled it to confront and overcome its own wrongs.

The West’s defenders often argue that, yes, it lived under some of history’s most brutal monarchies, but it gave the world constitutional democracy. It enslaved Africans on an industrial scale, they concede, yet abolished slavery and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• READ MORE: The escalation in Yemen is a turning point
• Other Gaza reports

It colonised continents, but came to recognise the right of peoples to self-determination. It waged two world wars, yet drafted the UN Charter and outlawed aggression. It perpetrated the Holocaust, yet helped establish the Genocide Convention. It committed unspeakable crimes, yet helped build the architecture of accountability, from Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions to the International Criminal Court. It dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities and gassed soldiers in the trenches of Ypres, yet helped forge the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the ban on chemical weapons.

This capacity for self-correction gave the West a normative power that served it for decades. It allowed Western capitals to speak the language of rules and rights, and to be heard even by those who remembered suffering at Western hands.

Its unconditional support for Israel has squandered that capital. Worse, it has turned the West against the very mechanisms that once allowed it to redress its mistakes. This did not begin in Gaza. It has been under way for half a century.

Democracy was the first casualty. When Vietnam War opponent Senator Charles Percy lost his seat in 1984, the head of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby publicly boasted that politicians everywhere had taken note.

Free speech policed for foreign power
Four decades later, a single pro-Israel super PAC spent more than $20 million to unseat two members of Congress in one election cycle. Governments across the West have adopted definitions of antisemitism that blur into criticism of Israel. Students are arrested for protesting, foreign scholars face deportation for their op-eds, and in Britain hundreds have been detained for holding placards. Free speech is being policed on behalf of a foreign regime.

The legacy of abolition has been betrayed. The West that ended slavery and ultimately turned against apartheid South Africa has made peace with racial domination.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the world isolated Pretoria, Israel was among its most important military partners. Today the very instrument that helped bring down South African apartheid, the boycott, is penalised in dozens of American states and condemned by Germany’s Parliament when aimed at Israel. This comes even as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own B’Tselem conclude that Israel practices apartheid.

The promise of decolonisation has been inverted. The West that eventually conceded independence across Asia and Africa has, since 1967, armed and shielded an occupation it formally considered illegal. It shrugged off the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling against the separation wall and watched settlements expand in defiance of Security Council Resolution 2334. When the Court declared the entire occupation unlawful in 2024, Western capitals answered with more weapons.

The UN Charter has been hollowed out. The principle that territory cannot be acquired by war, enshrined in Resolution 242 and drafted by Britain, was abandoned when Washington recognised Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. The United States has vetoed roughly 50 Security Council resolutions to shield Israel since 1972, about half of all the vetoes it has ever cast.

It has paralysed the Council as occupation hardened, ethnic cleansing continued and tens of thousands were killed. It has walked out of UNESCO and the Human Rights Council over their treatment of Israel and defunded UNRWA, the lifeline of Palestinian refugees.

The Genocide Convention has been emptied. In 1982, the General Assembly declared the Sabra and Shatila massacre an act of genocide. The massacre was carried out in camps ringed by Israeli troops, and the major Western powers abstained. Four decades later, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, and a UN commission of inquiry has since concluded that Israel committed genocide. Western weapons kept flowing. Germany, of all nations, found itself defending its arms exports before the Court.

International justice gutted
International criminal justice has been gutted at every level. When Belgian courts pursued Ariel Sharon over Sabra and Shatila, Belgium rewrote its universal jurisdiction law under Israeli and American pressure. When a London court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, Britain changed its law so it could not happen again.

In 2020, Washington sanctioned the ICC prosecutor for investigating Americans and Israelis. In 2025, after her successor sought Netanyahu’s arrest, it sanctioned him, the Court’s judges and even a UN special rapporteur. European governments that once championed the Court found reasons not to enforce its warrant.

And the non-proliferation regime is collapsing. Since 1969, Washington has tacitly accepted Israel’s undeclared arsenal behind a doctrine of “deliberate ambiguity”. Israel remains outside the NPT and the Biological Weapons Convention and has never ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Western states have repeatedly obstructed a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, the very bargain that secured the NPT’s indefinite extension in 1995. Meanwhile, they demand total transparency from Iran, an NPT member under IAEA inspection.

In 1981, even Washington voted to condemn Israel’s strike on Iraq’s safeguarded Osirak reactor. In 2025, when safeguarded Iranian facilities were bombed, Germany’s Chancellor praised Israel for doing the “dirty work” for all of us. The lesson to every capital is that joining the treaty buys no protection, and staying out of it costs nothing.

Netanyahu likes to portray Israel as the defender of Western civilisation against Iran. The truth is the opposite. Iran never made the West abandon its own principles. Israel did. No adversary has damaged Western civilisation as profoundly as the ally that persuaded it to dismantle its own conscience.

Rez Nasri is an international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, and he writes about Iran in Persian, English and French.

ANALYSIS: By Shailendra Singh

In his address at last month’s Pacific Media Summit, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka highlighted his government’s repeal of Fiji’s Media Industry Development Act 2010, saying that it was in the interest of democracy.

While the Rabuka government has been rightly recognised for scrapping that Act in 2023, another piece of legislation with potential significant implications for journalism remains in force — the Online Safety Act 2018.

Like the Media Act, the Online Safety Act was enacted under the FijiFirst government and gives the state a role in regulating expression.

• READ MORE: Special fijivillage Straight Talk public forum on online safety
• Other Fiji online safety reports

The Online Safety Act was tabled in Parliament in 2018 in response to escalating social media abuse, but was controversial from the outset, especially the breadth of its provisions.

The backlash was such that the entire opposition voted against it, arguing that it undermined democracy. Rights groups were similarly alarmed, describing the Act as a “Trojan horse” for censorship.

However, because much of the attention focused on the draconian Media Act, and relatively few people were being charged under the Online Safety Act, the latter escaped sustained scrutiny.

That changed in 2025, as the unabated abuse of digital platforms and a spate of charges laid under Section 24 of the Act, which criminalises the posting of electronic communication that causes harm, brought it back into the spotlight.

Expecting stronger legislation
Currently, the Act is under review and Information Minister Lynda Tabuya, under whose ministry the Act falls, has told Parliament to expect stronger legislation by the end of this year.

To some extent, Tabuya’s call for tougher laws is understandable. The misuse of social media platforms is a global problem, but the threat is considered greater in fragile democracies with multiethnic societies, such as Fiji.

The Online Safety Commission received 1609 complaints in 2025 alone, with more than 50 percent involving cyberbullying, harassment and defamation.

More broadly, policymakers have warned that online misconduct poses a serious national security threat.

In March 2026, Tabuya flagged the increased prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, stating, “A single lie can divide a nation”.  Likewise, Fiji’s National Security Strategy 2025-2029 warned the malicious use of emerging technologies for misinformation and disinformation posed a threat and could “undermine the credibility of national leaders and erode public trust in governance structures”.

Even before the proliferation of social networking platforms, there were concerns in Fiji about the mainstream media’s alleged role in fomenting societal conflict, with some analysis even suggesting that the media acted as a catalyst in the 2000 and 2006 coups.

The increase in digital penetration has added a new dimension to these security challenges.

Young people particularly, the most avid consumers of online networks, risk exposure to disparaging and damaging online discourses, including racism and hate speech.

While these trends are serious and require a firm response, they do not negate legitimate concerns about the flaws in the Online Safety Act.

Implications for media and press freedom
While the aim of the Act is not specifically to regulate media — Section 4 stipulates the law applies to the “whole of Fiji” — media are, nonetheless, caught in its crossfire.

The Act contains no protections for the practice of journalism. Professional journalists using social media platforms in the public interest are lumped with ordinary citizens who may be using them with malicious intent.

This renders journalists and media organisations particularly vulnerable to the Act due to the broad provisions of “electronic communication” that causes “harm” (defined in the Act as “serious emotional distress”), as most of their work is published online and can require critiquing the actions of private individuals and public officials.

The Act also does not differentiate between public and private individuals. In general, public figures such as politicians enjoy a lower level of privacy compared to private citizens. The scrutiny can extend to their private lives should they overlap with, or endanger the fulfillment of, their public duties.

Under the Online Safety Act, media could be held culpable if their reporting causes individuals “serious emotional distress”, which could be a consequence of, for example, news coverage of actual or alleged wrongdoing.

Then there is Section 2’s treatment of electronic communication as “any information, whether truthful or untruthful…”. This suggests journalists publishing legitimate and verified information in the course of their professional duties could face the same criminal liability as bad actors posting untruthful content with malicious intent.

Section 6 raises concerns about the independence of the Online Safety Commission, including the ministerial-appointed Commissioner, which introduces the risk of a political appointment.

Indeed, the appointment of Anne Dunn as the first Commissioner by the then Communications Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was controversial for this very reason. Dunn contested Fiji’s 2018 election under Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst Party.

The potential conflict of interest could render the Commission vulnerable to political pressure, and have consequences for the Commissioner’s role as an independent and unbiased authority.

The Act does outline seven factors the courts may use to determine whether an offence has occurred, including: the extremity of the content; the age and characteristics of the victim; whether the posting was anonymous; the repetitiveness and extent of circulation; and its truth or falsity, along with the context in which it appeared.

However, it does not provide specific defences based on public interest, truth, reasonable error, or the absence of malice.

An opportunity for reform
The fact that no journalist or media organisation has been charged under the Act in the eight years since its inception is of little consolation. No journalist or media organisation was charged under the now-repealed Media Act, but we are all aware of that legislation’s deleterious effect on the media sector as a deterrent to robust journalism and a catalyst for self-censorship.

Some criticisms of the Online Safety Act — including its open-ended provisions, the Minister’s role in appointing the Commissioner, and the potentially chilling effect on freedom of expression — are uncannily similar to those expressed about the Media Act.

Against this backdrop, Rabuka’s remarks at the Pacific Media Summit are pertinent. The Prime Minister emphasised that the media are “not a threat to democracy” but a “part of” it.

The reviewers of the Online Safety Act would do well to heed his words, as well as those of Rabuka’s deputy, Manoa Kamikamica, at the same event. Kamikamica stated that while this government was committed to media freedom, there was no guarantee future governments would share the same mindset.

In other words, the weaponisation of the Online Safety Act might not be a present danger, but it cannot be ruled out as a future one.

Associate Professor Shailendra Singh is head of journalism at The University of the South Pacific. This article is derived from his submission to the review of the Online Safety Act 2018 and was first published by Pacific Security. It is republished with the author’s permission. Dr Singh’s views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

Benjamin Netanyahu’s whirlwind visit to the United States late last month to address the United Nations General Assembly was further evidence that the Israeli prime minister is now a universal pariah.

He is being abandoned even by his closest allies.

It was perhaps not surprising that 77 nations, including a handful of European states, walked out of the chamber in protest that a wanted war crimes suspect — a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — was being given a platform to speak on the world’s largest stage.

• READ MORE: Map of Middle East redrawn after October 7
• Other Gaza, West Bank reports

Far more notable was what happened — or rather, didn’t — away from the podium. Netanyahu spent just eight hours in the US before heading back to Israel. It is hard to believe that that was his choice.

He was denied his usual moment in the sun with US President Donald Trump at the White House, and could not even secure a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

There was no invitation to address the US Congress, and with it familiar scenes of legislators rapturously celebrating his anti-Palestinian incitement.

Israel’s former Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Reuters: “I don’t recall a time when the prime minister came to the United States and didn’t meet with the president.”

Stark contrast to Xi
The shunning of Netanyahu stood in stark contrast to the reception of Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader was personally greeted at the airport by Trump with a red carpet and military flyover.

Netanyahu’s UN visit was exploited by both sides — by Israeli officials and Western leaders — to advance their separate, and conflicting, agendas.

Netanyahu is less than a month away from a hotly contested general election in which, for the first time, his failures to prevent Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 are under intense scrutiny.

According to a growing number of recent reports, he was warned by Egyptian and Gulf leaders of a major event — an “earthquake” — coming from Gaza in the days and weeks preceding Hamas’ breakout, but failed to act.

Netanyahu had scheduled his UN speech for Israeli prime time, to attract the largest domestic audience possible. He took the opportunity to call out other world leaders as “moral cowards” and “hypocrites”.

As Israeli analyst Jonathan Ofir notes, Netanyahu also used the UN platform to smuggle in a biblical phrase in Hebrew that was designed, for listeners back home, to serve as a dog-whistle: a call for Israel to carry out genocide to the bitter end.

Netanyahu’s goal was to demonstrate to voters that he is still a force to be reckoned with on the international stage, and that he alone can make Israel safe from a world supposedly mired in “antisemitic”, anti-Israel sentiment.

Nudging Netanyahu out of office
Western leaders, by contrast, wish to demonstrate the precise opposite, hoping to nudge Netanyahu out of office by suggesting to Israelis that their leader is a spent force, that he has gone too far.

Time to be rid of him.

This may prove no simple matter. Netanyahu is the great political survivor, serving a record near-two decades as his country’s prime minister — longer even than Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. He has used that time to whip up much of Israeli society into an ever greater, ultra-nationalist, genocidal fervour.

The current antipathy in Western capitals to Netanyahu is most certainly not based on any kind of ethical assessment of Israel’s recent actions: a three-year genocidal rampage through Gaza; the violent expansion of Jewish settlements and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank; the bombing and ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon; and the Israeli leader’s starring role alongside the US in launching a catastrophic war on Iran whose fallout has destabilised the global economy.

Washington — backed by its European client states — has been an ardent partner to these crimes, supplying the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic leverage to help Israel carry them out.

But Netanyahu now looks to be a political liability, even for Trump.

The US President, nosediving in the polls, needs a scapegoat — and the Israeli prime minister appears the only one suited for the role.

The antagonism is, in part, personal.

Netanyahu seduced Trump on Iran
A number of recent reports indicate that Netanyahu pulled out all the stops to seduce Trump, against the advice of his generals, into launching an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran.

The promise of a decisive victory persuaded Trump he could secure his place in the history books as the president who “remade the Middle East”. Once Iran was out of the picture, the US would enjoy unchallenged control over the region’s oil.

And all of this would supposedly take place weeks after Trump had cemented his command over Venezuela’s oil, following an illegal operation at the start of the year to kidnap President Nicholas Maduro.

With Iran’s defeat, and Venezuela subjugated, economic rival China would find itself utterly dependent on the US for access to the main lubricant of the global economy. Trump could avoid a direct military confrontation with Beijing, bringing it to heel simply by threatening to turn off the oil spigot.

But, of course none of this came to pass.

Washington is now in an unwinnable war with Iran that has clarified to Tehran the extent of its power over the Strait of Hormuz — and of the parallel power of Ansar Allah, its allies in Yemen, over the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Together, they can inflict unmitigated damage to the world economy.

Soaring petrol prices on US forecourts are likely to be a critical factor in the collapse of the Republican vote in November’s mid-term elections and the likely loss of both Houses to the Democrats, turning Trump into a lame-duck president.

Supremely vulnerable
Meanwhile, the war has educated Washington’s client states in the Gulf that they are supremely vulnerable to any retaliation from Tehran and from Yemen — a fact they are reminded of every time Trump orders another reckless round of strikes on Iran.

For all its military might, Washington has shown it is unable to defend its Gulf allies.

But Netanyahu is not facing a reckoning just because of his role in engineering a disastrous war on Iran.

Despite the best efforts of Western political and media classes over the past three years, the reality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza — and the murder and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children — has become ever harder to hide or rationalise.

Even among those parts of the public little interested in world affairs, the truth is gradually sinking in, aided by battles in mainstream cultural spaces that have swung conclusively against Israel.

NAZA standing ovation
NAZA, a new documentary on Gaza made by Israeli film-makers, won a record, 25-minute standing ovation at last month’s Venice Film Festival. In it, anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers document in detail how they engineered genocide in the tiny enclave. It is scheduled to be available to stream for free in November.

Ireland’s team, forced to play Israel in the Uefa Nations League at the weekend, did not hide their feelings. They wore black armbands in a show of solidarity with Israel’s victims in Gaza and refused to shake hands with their opponents. Irish captain Dara O’Shea pledged to donate his match earnings to humanitarian causes in Gaza.

Superstar musician Ed Sheeran has found himself unexpectedly painted as the bad guy for failing to stand by his support act, the rapper Macklemore, over the latter’s comments opposing genocide in Gaza.

Predictably, when faced with pro-Israel stadium owners threatening to pull the plug on the tour, Sheeran caved and dropped Macklemore. But Sheeran is reeling from a widespread backlash that clearly took him by surprise.

And leading British politicians, such as former prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretaries David Cameron and David Lammy, are for the first time facing serious critical scrutiny in the mainstream over their conduct towards Gaza.

Last month, a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, revealed that British officials had imposed a deeply flawed methodology, apparently so they could ignore mounting evidence of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

As a result, they were able to duck out of their legal obligations to take action against Israel, including by ending arms sales.

Rising tide of revulsion
Western capitals are finally realising this rising tide of revulsion at the Gaza genocide cannot be staunched.

In the US, where bonds to Israel are invariably described by politicians as “unbreakable”, 62 percent of respondents told Pew in July they had a negative opinion of Netanyahu’s government.

Meanwhile, a poll last month found 60 percent of American Jews want the Israeli prime minister voted out at the forthcoming election.

As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper observed: “Trump is well aware of the consistent, dizzying decline in support for Israel among Americans.”

Which is why he and other Western politicians are desperate to reframe the conversation. Singling out Netanyahu over Israeli atrocities in Gaza does not get them off the hook because they so obviously partnered with him every step of the way.

Instead Western leaders want to switch focus to the West Bank, where their role is more easily obscured and Netahyahu’s law-breaking is unmistakable.

Since October 2023, he, along with his self-confessed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have given both violent Jewish settler militias and the Israeli military greater freedom to terrorise Palestinian families off their land in preparation for the West Bank’s annexation.

Illegal West Bank settlements role
In the West’s new, self-serving narrative, Netanyahu isn’t a pariah because he is sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving the people of Gaza.

Nor because the International Court of Justice is currently investigating his government over “plausible” allegations that it is committing a genocide in the enclave.

Nor because his government has overseen the killing of at least 21,000 children there — and most likely, far more.

Nor because he continues to violate a sham “ceasefire”, one in which Israel has killed more than 1400 Palestinians penned up in the ruins of their enclave since the fighting supposedly ended. A further 4900 of Gaza’s residents have been maimed over the same period.

No, Netanyahu is not a pariah in the eyes of Western leaders because of any of these savage crimes — crimes they have been fully complicit in.

His offence — the one they are now determined to focus attention on — is Netanyahu’s role since October 2023 in intensifying the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank to expel Palestinians from their lands.

But this narrative works only if Western politicians and media studiously ignore the context: that for more than half a century, all Israeli governments sponsored settlement expansion, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.

Exploited the opportunity
Netanyahu is not an outlier in doing this. He simply exploited the opportunity to accelerate West Bank expulsions on the back of world sympathy after Hamas’s single-day attack in October 2023.

The most likely explanation for why Britain and 11 other Western states, including France and Canada, declared their intention last month to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is that they had received signs from the Trump administration for the first time that there would be no serious repercussions for doing so.

Britain’s new government under Andy Burnham also dared to describe what Israel has done to West Bank Palestinians as “ethnic cleansing”. Notably, and paradoxically, the UK has avoided using the term to describe Israel’s even more brazen ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a campaign of expulsions that have all too clearly been aided by Western bombs and logistics.

Officials under Mike Huckabee, the fervently partisan US ambassador to Israel, reportedly drafted a stinging rebuke in preparation for the British announcement of sanctions. It accused London of replicating the “playbook of the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] movement”.

That expected line of attack, favoured by Israel lobby groups, was presumably the reason why Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, went to such exaggerated lengths to publicly distance his new policy from BDS.

But in fact, no attack materialised from the Trump administration. Instead, Marco Rubio, Miliband’s US counterpart, stated innocuously: “I don’t have any comment on it [the sanctions policy] right now.”

The next day Trump appeared to buy time with a uncharacteristically non-committal response: “I want to find out why all of a sudden has that [the announcement of UK sanctions] happened.”

Trump and Rubio have said nothing more of substance on the matter.

Failure to listen to warnings
Then there is the recent flood of media reports suggesting that Netanyahu personally failed to listen to multiple warnings from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates that an unprecedented attack was coming from Gaza in the days before Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu has called on Abu Dhabi to deny the leaks. But it has so far failed to help out by doing so.

The two countries, among Washington’s closest client states in the region, have always appeared anxious to avoid openly defying a notoriously vengeful Trump.

In his address to the UN, Burnham noted the dilemma facing Western governments: “We live in an age of low trust in politics. If we were to continue to talk about the two-state solution, but fail to back those words with deeds, that trust will fall even lower — and our enemies will seek to exploit the alienation that follows from that.”

Burnham seems oblivious to the reality: that part of the reason trust is so low is because a succession of British governments have not only colluded in the genocide in Gaza but arrested critics of the genocide as supporters of terrorism.

Miliband demonstrated precisely the kind of hypocrisy Burnham had warned is alienating the public when he told the Labour Party conference last week — to great applause — that “millions of people in this country”, opponents of the genocide, “were right”.

The previous day dozens of protesters had been arrested outside the conference venue for silently holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Burnham and Miliband wish to have their cake and eat it. Neither has indicated that there is any intention to scrap the previous government’s decision to use terrorism laws against anyone who holds such a sign — or is “right”, as Miliband now admits.

Cynical theatre of distraction
What Western leaders are engaged in here is the cynical theatre of distraction.

The declarations of “You were right” and “We feel your pain”, the promises of sanctions and urgent calls for two states, amount to nothing more than virtue-signalling. They are designed to divert public indignation over Israel’s atrocities away from the complicity of Western capitals and direct it exclusively at Netanyahu.

The new spin suggests the gun-wielding, religious zealots in the West Bank settlements who have been growing ever more violent and politically powerful for over half a century — under successive Israeli governments — are solely Netanyahu’s creation.

The new spin argues that the growing confidence of these pogromists, who have long worked hand in glove with the Israeli military, is entirely unrelated to the West’s unconditional support for Israel over many decades.

In absolving themselves, however, Western leaders are necessarily crafting a new lie to deceive their publics: one that suggests the “settler terrorists” are some kind of personal Netanyahu militia that stands or falls with his premiership.

The implication of this new narrative is that, were Netanyahu to be prised from power, a more empathetic leadership would emerge, one that could be cultivated by Western powers to make peace with the Palestinians.

This is all patent nonsense.

Supremacist political spectrum
Like the Israeli public, leaders from across Israel’s narrow Zionist, ethnic supremacist political spectrum shared the genocidal logic that propelled forward the past three-year erasure of Gaza.

None dissented. All engaged in genocidal incitement.

There is no hope of their making peace with the Palestinians under illegal occupation when Israeli leaders cannot even allow their own Palestinian “citizens” — a much-oppressed minority comprising a fifth of Israel’s population – a meaningful voice in next month’s general election.

The central elections committee, a political body whose members are drawn from Israel’s main parties, voted to ban from standing all four factions representing the Palestinian minority.

Whoever wins next month’s election, whether Netanyahu again or one of his rivals, will keep the country heading on the same ethnic supremacist track Israel has been on for decades. Trump, Burnham, Macron and other western leaders understand this.

They want Netanyahu out of the way not so there is real change but simply so they can revert to what constituted business as usual before the Gaza genocide: a slower, more incremental pace to the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Rebranding the Gaza genocide
They want to be able to rebrand the Gaza genocide as one man’s historic folly, a tragic catastrophe that cannot be reversed but can be mitigated if he is gone.

They want us looking resolutely forwards, to real-estate deals and a distant two-state solution, not backwards: to their active role in levelling the homes of more than two million people – with mostly US munitions that unleashed eight times the explosive force of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Trump administration has already okayed the shipment of vast numbers of these mega bombs to replenish Israeli stocks, even before the result of the Israeli election is known.

Notably, the same Trump administration that allowed Netanyahu, a war crimes suspect, to travel to the UN in New York blocked the putative leader of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, from doing so.

In announcing his new sanctions policy targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, Miliband was keen to stress that it would in no way affect intelligence sharing with Israel — the kind of intelligence coordination that saw British planes carrying out surveillance operations over Gaza throughout the genocide.

And while Miliband promised a “double lock against arms exports” to Israel as part of the UK’s sanctions package, in practice not a single existing arms export licence has been revoked or suspended since.

The current fight is not against a genocidal Israeli state or for some illusionary Palestinian state — let alone for justice for the endlessly abused Palestinian people.

Engineering a reset
It is about engineering a reset in which the West gets Israel’s old guard back in charge.

Western leaders have been embarrassed by the froth-mouthed rantings of Netanyahu’s government. This week Smotrich called for Israel to unleash its genocidal Gaza policies on the West Bank — presumably using the very bombs Trump is about to ship them.

He told the Israeli media: “We should do there what we did in Gaza.”

Western leaders fear what that would do to their sinking credibility. And they have allies in Israel, among its opposition, whose vision — at least for the moment — is not Smotrich’s of a Gaza-style eradication of the West Bank.

Rather they envision continuing the current trajectory of gradually turning the West Bank’s small, surviving Palestinian ghettos, trapped in a sea of illegal Jewish settlements, into mini-concentration camps — replicas of Gaza before it was destroyed.

Those are the competing visions among Israelis for the West Bank: the absolute confinement of Palestinians in a series of cages versus their extermination.

That is what is really at stake — nothing more — in the West’s struggle to unseat Netanyahu and uphold its fabled two-state solution.

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

Tracing the illegal land, sea and air siege of the Gaza enclave by Israel:

2006: Hamas elected in the last Palestinian legislative election
Israel withheld Palestinian tax revenues and imposed further restrictions on Gaza. Major international donors suspended direct funding to the Palestinian Authority.

That summer Israel launched a major attack on Gaza. On June 28, Israel destroyed all six transformers at Gaza’s only power station.

• READ MORE: Fear and a far-right lurch: How October 7 reshaped Israel
• How Israel’s genocide in Gaza pulled Britons into the Palestine movement
• Three years of Israel’s mass dispossession of West Bank Palestinians
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

2007: Gaza ghetto was sealed
Israel imposed an unlawful land, sea and air blockade on Gaza. For the next 16 years, more than 2 million people were trapped in a strip of land about 40 km long with illegal occupation forces controlling their borders, airspace and territorial waters. Most people could not leave without Israel’s permission. Israel restricted imports, virtually eliminated exports for years, restricted fishing waters and prevented people from accessing farmland along the perimeter.

The United Nations described Gaza’s population as “locked in”. UN bodies repeatedly described Israel’s blockade as collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment.

Children born when Israel imposed the blockade were 16 years old by October 2023.

And inside the ghetto came Israel’s attacks:

2008–09: Operation Cast Lead
Israel killed 1383 Palestinians in three weeks — more than the resistance attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

2012: Operation Pillar of Defense
Israel killed 174 Palestinians in eight days.

2014: Israel attacked Gaza for 51 days
Israel killed 2251 Palestinians, including 551 children — more than October 7, 2023.

Then Palestinians tried peaceful resistance.

2018–19: The Great March of Return
For almost two years, Palestinians marched against Israel’s blockade and for their right of return. Israel put snipers on the ghetto walls and shot them.

Illegal occupation forces killed more than 200 people and shot and crippled thousands more during the demonstrations. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli snipers intentionally shot children, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities who were recognisable as such.

In 2020, Israeli newspaper Haaretz interviewed the snipers. One Israeli sniper described shooting 42 knees in a single day.

It was the end of peaceful resistance in illegally occupied Gaza.

2021: Israel bombed Gaza again
Israel killed 261 Palestinians, including 67 children.

2022: Israel killed another 49 Palestinians, including 17 children.

May 2023: Israel killed another 33 Palestinians.

By October 2023, an entire generation had been born and raised inside Gaza Ghetto under an unlawful Israeli blockade, through repeated Israeli attacks, electricity shortages, polluted water, economic strangulation and an Israeli permit system controlling whether people could leave.

Then came 7 October 2023 — Al-Aqsa Flood.
Al Qassam Brigades and other armed groups broke through the ghetto walls and attacked Israeli military bases and communities.

7 October 2023 was not Year Zero
It came after sixteen years of unlawful blockade.

It came after Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed thousands of people.

It came after the people marched against their imprisonment and Israeli snipers shot them from high on the wall.

It came after decades of illegal occupation.

And what followed is genocide by Israel.

Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians according to the recorded death toll alone. The real number is substantially higher.

As early as July 2024, when the recorded direct death toll stood at 37,396, public-health researchers writing in The Lancet estimated that, once indirect deaths were included, a death toll of 186,000 or more attributable to Israel’s attack on Gaza was plausible.

Israel has displaced almost the entire population of Gaza, many repeatedly. Israel has destroyed homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, sanitation systems and much of the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention, with genocidal intent. Its conclusion was unequivocal: Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. The Court has also confirmed that the law of occupation applies in Gaza and treats Israel as the occupying power there.

For 20 years Israel told the world that history begins and ends when Israel suffers.

It does not.

Al-Aqsa Flood belongs to history. It was never Year Zero.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

EDITORIAL: By Michael West, founder of Michael West Media

On Friday, Mario Christodoulou, executive producer of ABC Media Watch, quoted two posts we had made on X regarding last Wednesday’s FlyDubai “terror hijacking” incident and asked two questions:

Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?

Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

(Full email and X posts below.)

• WATCH MORE: Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post – Netanyahu’s fight for political survival: PR stunts and press control

Our response

Hi Mario,

Excellent questions. You are barking up the wrong tree, however. My take on both flydubai and RAF Fairford is clearly — and the word was used in one of the tweets — “probably” false flags, or at the least “beat-ups” concocted for political advantage.

This view is borne out by evidence of multiple false flag attacks in Australia, as belatedly admitted by police, and around the world.

The bigger story, the real public interest in media coverage of these incidents, is how they are leveraged by our politicians and a compliant mainstream media. The minute they occur, whether actual false flags or just suspicious incidents, they are branded as “terror plots”, “Islamist attacks … jihadis” etc.

This media branding of these events, *before* the circumstances are known and the evidence is established, has given licence to political actions such as the ramping up of hate speech laws in Australia and justification for passing the private data of Australian citizens to foreign parties as per the arrangements with Cellebrite and Palantir.

As a pilot for 20 years I have questions:

– where are the cabin crew here?
– where are the oxygen masks that automatically drop during a rapid emergency descent?
– how did the Capt manage to open the door while being stabbed?
– Omani pilots were not allowed to fly to Israel, why was he allowed?
– how did the offending pilot get a weapon onboard?
– why has this happened so close to elections?
– how are passengers walking around while apparently in a nosedive?
– who else was injured? Nose dives cause significant g force incidents
– why is there two perfectly positioned people recording the incident and not helping?
– why did a plumber take control and not the 2 pilots onboard who would certainly know when an aircraft was in a nosedive?
– why was the plumber speaking in English to Bibi after the flight
– why was he still in his blood soaked clothes 8 hours after the incident

False Flags have been a very effective mechanism to influence public opinion

Hitler burnt down the Reichstag just before his parliament elections and he won the election…changing the course of history.

A full and independent investigation should be carried out here.

Hopefully independent journalist will be allowed to view this too.

— The Long Investor (@TheLongInvest) October 1, 2026

flydubai X post retweeted by MW

Let’s say flydubai is not a false flag in a technical sense; that is, a ploy cooked up by the Netanyahu regime in Israel just a few weeks before the election. Let’s just say it was actually a fight between the pilots and a happy ending. The fact that the initial coverage branded the event as a terrorist hijacking demonstrates that the incident was used for political gain.

The Fairford incident was also branded as a terrorist plot in its initial coverage, egged on by Trump and Rubio and the usual people on social media. Why did they not wait until it became evident that it was 5 lads pilfering diesel before reporting it as terror?

Here in “evidence-land” we try to ignore the noise and report the truth. And the truth is that the mainstream media has blood on its hands, a lot of blood. Its failure to address the exaggerated claims of the October 7 Hamas attacks — 40 babies beheaded, mass gang rapes, babies in ovens, babies on clotheslines — has given licence to genocide, to the worst human atrocities of this century.

Lies have dragged us into war against Iran which is hurting every citizen via higher petrol and food prices.

The effect on humanity has been drastic, and much of that can be foisted home to a failure by a craven media to report responsibly. The media is culpable and the rise of new media such as MWM is due to plunging public confidence in the institutions of power such as the ABC and traditional corporate media.

We haven’t grown from scratch to millions in audience a month by making stuff up.

To be fair, the ABC has done better than corporate media but it is still culpable. Where is the Four Corners on the hasbara movement, the litany of false flag attacks in Australia such as the Dural caravan hoax and the other 12 or so “terror” acts which turned out to be no-hopers with no political ideology apparently paid for by foreign interests?

This is the real story, the culpability of media in genocide, not some guy on X raising credible doubts about the official narrative because the evidence for terror claims does not stack up and the historical evidence of false flags is so compelling it should not be ignored.

As we approach the three-year anniversary of October 7, it would be apposite for traditional media to contemplate its own epic failures, its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. You could start by analysing the lies which have already been debunked.

Here are some questions: how many Israelis were slaughtered by IDF Apache gunships on October 7? Why did Netanyahu ignore warnings of the Hamas attacks from Egyptian and Qatari leaders? What is the evidence for mass rapes and babies beheaded? How and why were the Nova Festival arrangements changed prior to the attacks? Why has there been no official inquiry by Israeli authorities?

And what role did the mainstream media play to give licence to genocide?

Cui bono?

Media Watch email
Thanks for your time on the phone just now. Here’s what I sent via your website portal. 

We’re writing an item examining the FlyDubai incident, which has been widely reported this week, where passengers managed to seize control of a 737 en route to Tel Aviv from Dubai. As part of that story, we are examining the conspiracy theories that have cropped up online, and we noticed you have been posting about this being a “false flag” operation.

There was this repost in particular: 

But also this:

We may mention this in the segment. To my knowledge, there is no evidence this was an Israeli “false flag”, and theories like this are unsubstantiated.

Questions below:

• Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?
• Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

Deadline is 5pm today.  Let me know if you are having trouble reaching this.

 ‘Cheap 20 second opinions’
When the show aired last night, host Linton Besser didn’t hold back on the accusations of peddling conspiracy theories and “cheap 20 second opinions”.

We concede that in the absence of ABC’s $1.23 billion budget — even a dedicated team of researchers and others working for an entire week to produce 15 minutes of television for just 42 weeks of the year — that we may be cheap, at least in budget terms, by necessity.

Yet with our humble budget and the goodwill of the community we have managed to break a lot more stories than the ABC in relation to the crime of the century. Where is the ABC’s coverage of Australian charities funnelling money to the IDF and illegal West Bank settlements?

Nowhere, despite it being raised in Parliament.

Where is the coverage of Australians serving with the IDF, a story we broke with FOIs? Where is the coverage of the money trail of public grants to the Israel lobby?

We even beat this billion-dollar corporation on the story of Australian UN commissioner, Chris Sidoti, releasing an independent report for the UN on the systematic slaughter of Palestinian children by the IDF. We were literally first media in the world.

The ABC trundled along timidly a day late with its billion-dollar budget and, typically, buried the story anyway. This — an investigation about a rogue state engaged in genocide which Australia furnishes with weapons parts, to be found by the highest body in the world, to be deliberately murdering children.

Shamelessly buried.

And here they are with the gall, to sermonise about an independent journalist saying on social media that flydubai was “probably” a false flag or at least had been leveraged for political advantage. This, after three years of spinelessly tip-toeing around every single story which mentions the word Israel.

As Media Watch host, my former SMH colleague, and a first-rate journalist, Linton Besser did note in his piece, Benjamin Netanyahu was very quick out of the blocks when the story broke to get on the phone to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to kick off his media campaign.

With zero evidence Israel’s PM pointed the bone at Iran. Was Iran directly behind the plot, asked career misinformation-spreader Sean Hannity? “Too early to say,” said Netanyahu. Job done, as with the RAF Fairford “terror plot”, Iran named. The rest of the corporate media followed.

This is the way it works and ABC is a part of it. “Israel says”. Frothing forth with every false claim uttered by a war lobby whose lies are established and far too prolific to list here. They are daily.

Is flydubai a false flag?
Is the flydubai incident a false flag? It’s too early to tell but the narrative has changed a lot, the evidence suggests the official story is not credible, even CNN had a pilot demonstrate why it did not stack up. Many questions remain.

“This is Hollywood on steroids … ordinary civilians became superheroes,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “If you’re next hijacked, make sure an Israeli is sitting next to you.”

Is not the story — the story for Media Watch — why are so many sceptical about Israel’s claims? The answer is clear: they lie and twist facts relentlessly. The suspicion is warranted. The propaganda is documented. Why does ABC not cover that, bigger, story?

Our personal favourite was the still glass of water after the 14,300 ft nosedive (no, not the heroic plumber who watched aviation rescue shows or the pilot, Hamam al Hamami, whose name has been translated by scallywags as Bathroom King of Bathrooms).

Why does the ABC continue to trot out the Israel lobby’s propaganda when it has been proven time and time again to be false? The mainstream media has literally, deliberately missed the story of the century.

They avoid the G-word like the plague.

And this cowardice, this complicity by our institutions of power, has degraded all humanity. Our leaders and our institutions, in not standing up to genocide, in perpetuating lies, even rewarding them, have let us all down.

At least we said “probably” a false flag. They can’t even bring themselves — with all their sanctimonious tut-tutting about journalistic integrity to say “probably a genocide”, let alone admit they’ve been captured to the point of even sacking at least one journalist for raising the question.

Just look at the pictures. Gaza razed by US bombs, a population starved and tortured, homeless, 70,000 to 700,000 dead, concentration camps, the largest population of child amputees in history.

You allowed this to happen.

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker. This article was first published by Michael West Media on 6 October 2026 and is republished with permission.

Seeking to discredit reports of its unprecedented killing of journalists in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces last week published a list of 170 slain Palestinians it claimed were not legitimate media workers but members of “terrorist groups”.

Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, reviewed every single entry on the list.

He called it “the most sloppy shameless fraud possible.”

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s attack on journalists in UN speech
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them — David Robie
• West Bank: RSF condemns Israeli army over escalating violence against Palestinian journalists
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

Israeli officials and Western supporters have trumpeted the IDF’s list as a counter to findings by groups like the International Federation of Journalists, which has described Israel’s nearly-three-year-old-war in Gaza as “the deadliest period in the history of journalism” and cataloged at least 240 journalists and media workers killed.

Other global media watchdogs have cited an even higher number while the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel has reported at least 270 killed — 12 of them being its own journalists.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has found dozens of cases in which it concluded journalists were targeted deliberately because of their reporting and filed multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging war crimes against the press.

The database, which the IDF refers to as the “Press Files,” says “that claim does not tell the full story” and alleges that “individuals presented as innocent journalists were, in fact, militants in the military wings of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other terrorist organisations.”

Investigating war crimes in Gaza                     Video: Al Jazeera

Claims ‘in-depth’ list
The IDF claims the list was the product of an “in-depth investigation” consisting of open-source information, documents recovered by Israeli forces in Gaza, interrogations of alleged Palestinian militants, and intelligence gathered during military operations.

But as Shehada explained in a thread posted to social media on Sunday, “in the overwhelming majority of those listed, the IDF presents ZERO credible evidence. In most of them, their pages are literally blank”.

In 59 cases, Shehada found that the IDF did not provide any evidence for its claim that a journalist was a member of Hamas or PIJ other than that the claim was “based on multiple intelligence sources”.

Shehada said this amounted to essentially saying “trust me, bro,” which is especially insufficient given the numerous instances in which the IDF has been found to have misled the public about its responsibility for certain attacks, like the killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab in 2024.

In another 42 cases, Shehada found that the IDF provided only decontextualized “snippets” of files, which were “undated and unspecified”. Without more information, Shehada said, this is “not… evidence of anything”.

“Those snippets could be taken from random files; they could be outdated or fabricated,” Shehada said, pointing to previous cases in which purported Hamas intelligence circulated by Israeli sources was later revealed to be misleadingly presented as fabricated.

Shehada pointed to specific cases in which Israel’s allegations against specific journalists have been undermined by the underlying evidence.

Israel claimed that Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul, whom the IDF killed in July 2024, was an operative with Hamas’ elite Nukhba wing and released a supposed Hamas personnel document as proof.

Debunked by RSF
But as Reporters Without Borders has previously explained, the document says al-Ghoul, born in 1997, received a military rank in 2007, when he was 10, while elsewhere saying he joined in 2014.

It also identifies him as an engineer, contradicting the IDF’s description of him as a Nukhba fighter. Israeli troops also detained al-Ghoul at al-Shifa hospital months before he was killed but released him after 12 hours.

The case of Anas al-Sharif, another Al Jazeera journalist killed in 2025, is similar. As Shehada documented for +972 magazine last year, al-Sharif was seriously injured in 2017, listed in a military context in 2019, but described as “suspended” and “unassigned” by 2023 — while another document nevertheless portrays him as an elite Nukhba fighter. He was also reportedly detained and released by Israeli forces during the 2024 al-Shifa raid.

In other cases, the IDF’s evidence outright debunks the military’s own claims. For instance, Israel labeled photojournalist Hassan Aslih — killed by an airstrike at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in May 2025 — as a “military operative.”

But the 2019 Hamas document provided as evidence for this lists him as a “photographer” involved with “media services”.

While the document, if authentic, does establish a relationship between Aslih and Hamas’ Qassam Brigades at least six years before his death, this does not make him a legitimate target under international humanitarian law, which distinguishes between those who have a “continuous combat function” and those who provide political or other indirect forms of support, like media coverage.

Shehada found at least seven cases in which the only evidence provided by the IDF was photos of slain journalists holding guns. In another 12 cases, the IDF provided undated photos of journalists allegedly taking part in Hamas or PIJ military activities.

Israeli journalists’ military service
Shehada noted that many prominent Israeli journalists also have past military service, such as Axios correspondent Barak Ravid, who was an IDF reservist until 2023. “Does that make him a ‘legitimate target’? or a non-civilian forever?” Shehada asked.

The distinction between past military affiliation and active combatant status has been a repeated source of dispute for press freedom groups that have attempted to tally the number of journalists killed.

Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) completed a sweeping review of 229 deaths after Hamas and PIJ published obituaries identifying some people listed as journalists as members of armed groups.

CPJ ultimately removed 22 people from its list, including some it found had participated in combat — but retained others despite militant obituaries, gun photos, or past organisational ties when the evidence did not establish active combatant status.

The “Press Files” database contains 49 cases in which the main piece of evidence is one of these obituaries. Among them are people who CPJ examined and concluded were not active combatants, such as photojournalist Amr Abu Odeh — a 26-year-old freelance photographer for the Anadolu Agency and Reuters — whom the IDF database labels a Hamas “squad commander”.

CPJ examined photos of Odeh wearing a military uniform, which came from a 2021 military training course with Gaza’s Ministry of the Interior. The group noted that “No armed factions in Gaza have claimed Abu Odeh as being affiliated with them, and the IDF has not alleged he was involved in combat”.

‘NOT engaged’ militarily
“In multiple cases, despite obituaries by Hamas/PIJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists investigated thoroughly and concluded those journalists were NOT engaged in any militant activity during the genocide,” Shehada wrote.

“They may have in the past. That doesn’t make them combatants forever.”

He added that the flimsiness of the IDF’s evidence was more striking given the sophistication of the intelligence unit it uses to “dig up dirt” on journalists to provide post hoc justification for their killings, which has been referred to internally as the “Legitimisation Cell,” which was revealed in a +972 investigation.

“If that’s all they can provide as ”evidence“ (e.g. blank pages, random snippets, outdated docs) despite having formidable resources,” Shehada wrote, “then it’s a vindication of Gaza’s journalists!”

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished under Creative Commons.

Nurlan Yermekbayev is one of those very important people most of us in the West have never heard of. I had been travelling with him for two days in the Xinjiang Region of China before I even realised who this quiet, dignified man was.

As the Secretary-General of the SCO — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — Yermekbayev helms a multi-state organisation that is helping drive, in their own words, tectonic shifts in global politics, economy, and other spheres of international relations.

How I got an interview with him was almost comedic.

• READ MORE: Other Eugene Doyle articles

I was part of a group of international journalists, politicians, academics and analysts who were hosted on a tour of Xinjiang last month and invited to attend an international conference with the region’s leaders.

It turned out that the main reason the Secretary-General was in the region was for a series of meetings with Party Secretary Chen Xiaojiang and other officials of the region.

Xinjiang is home to 25 million people, about 45 percent of whom are ethnic Uyghur. It is also China’s key gateway to the rest of Eurasia and what many believe will be tomorrow’s new world order.

Our group visited a variety of sites associated with the Belt and Road Initiative, including the Khorgos Gate on the border with Kazakhstan. Khorgos is a centrepiece, a key node in the chains that are binding the countries of Eurasia into a modern Silk Road stretching from Europe to the Sea of Japan. Seeing Khorgos was Yermekbayev’s idea of a bit of R&R.

Massive scale
The scale of what has been — and is being — created across Xinjiang is something you have to see to believe. Long ranks and files of rail freight crossing the border, massive factories and logistics centres popping up like spring mushrooms, millions of new housing units for the population and its booming economy, the caravans of trucks, the endless fingers of pipelines and telecommunications cables extending into the distance and which eventually criss-cross the SCO member states — China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus.

While the rest of the world follows US President Donald Trump’s latest antics, these countries are quietly spending trillions of dollars to create an integrated Eurasia.

Over breakfast one day in the State Guesthouse in Yining, a Brazilian journalist, Nelson de Sá, leant towards me and whispered: “Do you know who that guy there is?” I had seen and greeted the man he was referring to but had no idea.

True, I had been puzzled why, wherever we went, there was a small accompanying motorcade of black sedans, and a mini-bus out of which emerged minders, a few distinguished delegates and various athletic men in suits. “He’s the Secretary-General of the SCO,” de Sá whispered.

“[Expletive!] If I get a chance I’m definitely going to ask for an interview,” I told the Brazilian journalist. The next day at lunch Yermekbayev was seated with Bhokin Bhalakula, Thailand’s former Deputy Prime Minister who was also part of our party. I joined them and we talked about Émile Zola, the Dreyfus Affair, and geopolitics.

At the end of the lunch I asked if the Secretary-General would accept a short interview. Yes. That afternoon.

Immediately before joining our tour, Yermekbayev had been with Presidents Xi Jinping, Putin, Pezeshkian and Erdoğan along with a host of other leaders, including India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attending the 26th SCO Council of Heads of State summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

40% of global population
The SCO members account for 40 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 60 percent of the vast Eurasian landmass, with coastlines on the Indian Ocean, the Arctic and the Pacific. It has seven times the population of the EU, eight times the land area and more than double ($71 trillion) the EU’s GDP (PPP).

It is not a military bloc but it is worth noting that its members include four nuclear-weapon states — China, Russia, India and Pakistan. As I wrote a few years ago: when Eurasia awakes our world will shake. The organisation sees itself as the driver of a fairer multipolar world order that is slowly overtaking the Western-dominated system. This is the Quiet General’s day job.

Over a small table in the hotel in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Yermekbayev spoke in a soft Central Asian accent; a rumbling voice, a bit like an idling tank. He is a former Defence Minister in Kazakhstan, a lieutenant-general, and a long-standing diplomat who has the wonderful title of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. A graduate of Moscow’s Military Red Banner Institute, a sinologist, an author, and a PhD fluent in Mandarin and English, the Secretary-General discreetly commands attention.

Years ago, as Secretary of the Security Council in Kazakhstan he was tasked with dealing with Islamist militants within his country and cross-border counter-terrorism. As with Xinjiang, and, of course, Pakistan, Iran and others in the region, Kazakhstan had serious challenges from militants. The US war on Afghanistan was still raging, with knock-on impacts across the region.

Yermekbayev recalls that the SCO was initially formed as a security organisation in 2001 to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism within the member countries before evolving into the social, economic, security and infrastructure facilitator it is today.

“We realised that sustainable security cannot be provided without solving social and economic issues. And it can’t exist without building trust between our member countries — that’s why building trust is one of the major pillars of our organisation,” Yermekbayev told me.

As the US continues to weaponise the dollar-denominated global trading system, SCO countries are moving closer to the creation of alternative systems. Bilateral trading in national currencies to bypass Western sanctions is growing steadily.

Bilateral commerce
Russia and China, for example, settle over 90 percent of their bilateral commerce in rubles and yuan. Various SCO countries tap into China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) for bilateral trades. The establishment of an SCO development bank capable of fully protecting Eurasia from Western coercive measures is still, however, on the drawing board.

Yermekbayev stresses the centrality of accepting different systems of governance as one of the keys to the SCO’s success.

“We have parliamentary countries like India and Pakistan. We have Iran and Pakistan which are Islamic republics. But at the same time, we have presidential republics in Central Asia. We have Russia. We have Belarus. So location, ethnic traditions, organisation of the state system may differ, but still all these countries manage to find compromise, manage to sit at the table and discuss issues.”

Yermekbayev also emphasised the “Shanghai Spirit” that drives the organisation — a commitment to multilateralism centred around an agreed code.

“There are six principles. One of them is what you just mentioned: respect for cultural and civilisational diversity. The other principles include mutual equality, mutual trust, mutual profit, and striving for common development. One more important principle is to solve all issues only through negotiations and consultations.

“That’s why, regardless of the size of the country — for example, China is very big — all are equal. It is strictly followed at all levels: junior experts, at the level of ministers, and at the level of heads of state.”

“Regarding the multipolar world — there is a misperception that the SCO is a kind of ‘anti-somebody’ bloc. SCO is not a military-political bloc. For example, in NATO, they have so-called collective security principle (Article 5). We don’t have this.

Multipolar, more fair, world order
“But our leaders consistently declare — and it is written in our declaration — that we stand for a multipolar, more fair, more democratic new world order — one which will better represent the interests of the global south, of developing countries, and also which will be guided by United Nations, by the UN articles, and by international law. So it is a priority for us: international law and United Nations regulations.”

Yermekbayev believes these values and principles are acting as a magnet for new SCO members that is as powerful as the economic factors driving Eurasian expansion.

The Secretary-General is determined to accelerate the SCO’s emergence as a key international institution particularly at this time of rising tensions, unilateral wars and the constant violations of the UN Charter. He told the audience at the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier this year:

“In these conditions, the role of regional organisations continues to steadily increase, with a greater responsibility falling on their shoulders for the affairs in their regions.”

Watch this space. It’s called Eurasia.

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Publix, the House of Journalism in Berlin, Germany.

The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East as President Trump considers a new escalation of the US war on Iran. The latest move adds 7000 sailors, up to 3000 Marines, to the US military presence in the region.

Today, we look at the US bombing of a children’s school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on the first day of the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran. The bombing killed at least 156 people — 120 of them children, 26 teachers, all women. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded the US strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged US responsibility.

Drop Site News is out this week with a devastating investigation into the bombing of the school. The article and accompanying video is headlined “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” We’re joined right now by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, lead author on the report.

In a moment, Jeremy, we’ll play some of your interviews with survivors, first responders and parents. But first, Jeremy, set up what happened that day on February 28.

‘The school that became a grave.’                    Video: Democracy Now!

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

You know, we need to back up a few weeks and remember that Iran and the United States were engaged in an intense round of negotiations that were being mediated by the Sultanate of Oman, which had been the main mediator for two decades between the United States and Iran on nuclear issues and had played a major role in brokering the 2015 JCPOA agreement signed under Barack Obama.

And the Iranians were very sceptical about this process, because just some months before these negotiations, in June of 2025, when the Iranians were negotiating with the United States, the US and Israel launched surprise bombing attacks against Iran in what became known as the 12-Day War.

But the foreign minister of Oman, on February 27, had gone to the United States. He met with Vice-President JD Vance in the White House. He came out, and he told media that he was optimistic that a deal was going to be reached and that it would be historic in nature — yes, there were details to work out; nothing was guaranteed — but that there were technical talks scheduled for the following week in Vienna, Austria.

And so, when Iranians woke up on the morning of February 28, let’s remember this was a Saturday, but in Iran, Saturday is the beginning of the school and workweek, and so Iranians were, you know, paying attention to everything, but they went to bed understanding that this process was still going on, that war was very much a possibility, but not believing it was going to start imminently, because you had this next round of negotiations and you had the Omani foreign minister expressing optimism.

Well, then, as people are stuck in traffic jams, they’re getting their kids out the door for school, children start arriving at school, we get the initial reports that there are airstrikes that have happened in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And the first strikes that happened that day were on the residence and offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so a lot of the media speculation at that point was about whether or not Iran’s supreme leader had been assassinated.

And word starts to spread very quickly across Iran and on state media that there are attacks happening throughout the country. And so, administrators and officials in provinces around Iran begin calling schools and directing principals and teachers to start having parents come to take their children home. There was going to be a shelter-in-place order.

The Iranians had been through this before.

So, as this is happening, we then start to hear shocking reports that in the southern Iranian city of Minab, a missile has slammed into a girls’ school, and we start to see images that show children and the bodies of children. And very quickly, the media narrative sort of becomes — and this is being pushed kind of by the United States — that the school had been right next to an IRGC missile facility and that it was sort of collateral damage.

We did an investigation into this. There’s been some very good reporting on this. This is not a story that we broke. But what we did is we really went deeply into what happened in the experience of Iranians who lived it that day, and by talking to teachers who survived. You know, 26 teachers were killed in this attack — one of them was pregnant — 120 children.

This was not a single bombing or collateral damage. There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children. That was with Tomahawk cruise missiles, one of the most sophisticated weapons in the US arsenal. And a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the US launches more strikes.

A total, Iran says, of 13 missiles were launched. The justice minister of Iran told me, “This isn’t a double-tap — a double-tap strike; this is a triple-tap strike.”

You know, one of the most horrifying details, Amy, that we uncovered is that after the first bomb had hit near the school that morning, the teachers didn’t believe that their school would be bombed, because it was a school, and they had gathered the children, many of the children, in the schoolyard because their parents had come to pick them up.

And when the bombs hit not far away from the school, they said, “My god, we need to get everyone back into the school.” So they ushered the children back into the school. One of the teachers took some of the girls into a prayer hall inside of the school, and then, moments later, direct hit with a Tomahawk cruise missile on the school.

So, the protected site of the school, the parents and the teachers thought that they would find shelter there, and the United States directly bombed that school while they were inside.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to go to the voices of the people themselves. This is an excerpt of your Drop Site News new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” featuring interviews with Yaghoub Yazdanpanah. His daughter Fatemeh died in the strike. But first, this is preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7:00, because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school. I got my child ready and headed to school.

My son went to the boys’ school, and I stayed at preschool in my own class. Our school had two floors. The upper floor was for the girls, and the downstairs was for the boys.

One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. There were students there from all walks of life, children from working-class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] I have to go back a little and tell you about how I chose this school. Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story, and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word.

I wanted to find a very good school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. After asking a lot of questions, I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] After the lesson started, we handed out books, and the children did their activities. I took the children to the schoolyard, the park that was in our schoolyard, so the children could play. The time was around 9:30, I think, when I was informed by a friend that the war had started and they had hit Tehran.

JEREMY SCAHILL: In the first moments of the US and Israeli bombing campaign, they strike the personal residence and offices of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. And they killed, assassinated not only Khamenei, but members of his family.

They start then striking other leadership targets of the IRGC, the elite military force of Iran; political offices in Iran; government ministries in Iran. And word starts to spread all across the country that this isn’t just like a one-off airstrike, that this does seem to, in fact, be a full-scale war.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Administrators said there are war conditions, and it’s better if the children go home early. We didn’t have a single thought or didn’t imagine that they may want to hit our school.

In complete calm and relaxation, we were calling families and telling them to come and take their children. As they were coming to get the kids, a number of the children had left, and some were still at the school. I first heard the sound of an explosion.

ON-SCREEN TEXT: After a missile strike nearby, some teachers ushered children back inside the school for protection.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] The preschool children were 5 years old, and all they did was yell, “Miss! Miss!” and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, “Get under the table!” I didn’t think they were going to hit the school. I just thought that someplace had been hit. I said, “Don’t be afraid. Sit down.”

I heard this horrible sound, and it was so close, two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them.

“Woosh, boom! Woosh, boom!” And then explosion. Plaster was falling. The ground was shaking. And at that moment, I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, “It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble. It’s going to fall now.”

Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, “Yassin, run and open the door. Let’s get out!” My preschool kids didn’t have shoes on since our classroom was carpeted. I took the children in my arms, one by one, and brought them outside. We exited from the preschool yard gate until we reached the first street.

I looked behind me, and I saw smoke and fire coming from the school office. All I said to the preschool children was, “Kids, just look in front of you. Don’t look back!”

I told everyone to run to the school because they had hit the school. “The children are under the ruins. Go save them!”

AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” That was preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing. In this clip, we hear more from Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, who describes how he raced to the school to look for his little daughter Fatemeh.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] It was like something was telling my heart that the school they were talking about was Shajareh Tayyebeh. I lost it. I left my classroom, ran home, took my car and sped to Minab.

When I arrived, I said, “Oh no!” The unimaginable had happened. As soon as I arrived there, I saw there was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed.

Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.

AMY GOODMAN: In this excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” we hear two Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency workers describing the utter devastation following the US strike on the Minab school.

EHSAN MOHSEN: [translated] Mothers came to me and said, “My daughter is in the classroom,” “My son is in the classroom. In God’s name, please bring me my son.”

We didn’t know how to answer these families. Each body part that was brought out from the building and taken to the ambulances, the families ran, looking to see who it was.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] People kept coming and coming to help, to remove children from under the ruins. All of us were there waiting. I, a 32-year-old father, was waiting for them to bring my daughter from under the ruins. Imagine the depth of this catastrophe and how hard it was for us.

MAJID DADANIA: [translated] There was a father with us who was searching for his two children until it was 4:00 or 5:00 at night, when his fingers no longer worked. His fingers were covered in blood. He had lost his fingernails. In that same condition, he fell asleep.

There was also a father — we had nothing to give him. All that remained was a school bag and shoes. Where we had collected the school bag and shoes, the father sat and was talking to the school bag and shoes.

He was just talking to the school bag and shoes. Nothing from his child has been recovered.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, those are two Red Crescent workers, an excerpt of Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”

In March, President Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth denied the US was responsible for bombing the school. They spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One.

REPORTER: Did the United States bomb a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.

REPORTER: Is that true, Mr. Hegseth, that it was Iran who did that?

DEFENCE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: We’re certainly investigating.

REPORTER: Still investigating?

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: But the only — the only side that targets civilians is Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We think it was done — we think it was done by Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump. In July, President Trump told a different story, appearing on Fox News, talking about the airstrike.

TREY YINGST: There are images from this site that show fragments that appear to be from US Tomahawk missiles. Is it possible that old intelligence or a mistake during a very active time in the war led to this event?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It is, but it’s also possible that those images that you have are AI-generated. … Now, I know we’re waiting for a conclusive report. I don’t think there can be a conclusive report.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, really? So, that’s President Trump talking about the report. Jeremy Scahill, you are the co-founder of Drop Site News. This is an incredible investigation, “Massacre at Minab.” Can you respond to what Hegseth and Trump said? And talk about the state of the investigation into this deadly attack on the schools, February 28, that killed over 150 people, as you said, 120 of them children.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, I think there’s only two possibilities here for what actually happened that day. On the one hand, it’s possible that because Pete Hegseth came in with a tone set by Trump himself that civilian deaths don’t matter, that soldiers and military personnel should not worry about killing or injuring civilians, that they eliminated the entire department that is supposed to do civilian harm mitigation, that they used AI, including Maven systems developed by Palantir, to rush to develop as many targets as possible, that they had old satellite photos that indicated that this was a military base and not a school, and that because of that disregard for civilians and civilian life, they pushed forward and said, “We want to break records”.

They’re always talking about records — “and maximised lethality.” And so, it was a process where they didn’t care, and they just started striking everything.

On the flip side of it — and, you know, a former senior State Department official told me this — knowing what she knows about the entire system and the fact that this was struck in the first hours of the first day of this war that they had been planning, that something very sinister may well be at the core of this.

So, you know, it’s important to say, up until the year 2013, this was — this area in Minab was actually a facility that was operated by the IRGC. We obtained documents, and the satellite photos also show this clearly, showing that in 2014 the school filed for registration.

The IRGC donated the land. The province redistricted the whole area, and the IRGC actually moved most of its facilities more than 3 km away. That base, which was a publicly known base, was not hit during these attacks that morning. Instead, it was an area that was a school, a car wash, a clinic — what we would call in America a strip mall — and the only remaining IRGC building in that vicinity was an administrative office of the naval forces of the IRGC, and they had totally vacated that property after the June 2025 war.

So, what happened that day was there was literally no presence of the IRGC whatsoever there. And in fact, satellite photos from just weeks — that the public can see — from just weeks before the strike, you could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside.

I spoke to Wes Bryant, who used to be one of the people in charge of civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon up until 2025. His division was the one that Hegseth shut down. And he said that under the rules in the doctrine, they should have checked the most readily available satellite imagery before launching any strike of that nature. The other thing is, Tomahawk cruise missiles have cameras on them. They can loiter. They can shift direction.

So, there are many, many questions that need to be asked about this.

This is one of the single gravest war crimes that I’m aware of since Vietnam. It’s akin to the Amariyah shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 1991 Gulf War, when the US dropped a bomb, a bunker buster bomb, ripped open a hole in a bunker where hundreds of civilians were, and then dropped another 2000-pound bomb directly, incinerating more than 400 people. It rises to the level of gravity of that crime.

And it’s really just shocking that there isn’t more outcry from the American public and the US Congress. This is one of the most severe war crimes. And it’s not like, you know, the tone under Obama, where he says, “Oh, oops, we tortured some folks,” or they said, you know, “We regret this.”

Trump’s people are defiant about this. And the Democrats, you know, they’re not in control of the Congress right now, but this should be front and center of foreign policy questions toward Donald Trump. If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, they should go after them for this. These are war crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Has any — has any investigation been done by the US government, made public?

JEREMY SCAHILL: No, the United States Central Command is supposedly doing an investigation, but Bradley Cooper, the head of CENTCOM, lied in front of Congress and said this was an active IRGC missile base. There’s no evidence to suggest that there ever were missiles launched from this site. And this was congressional testimony.

It seems like the best-case scenario is that they kind of say this was human error, artificial intelligence and outdated maps, because the threat was so serious, and we moved forward, and, oops, this was a mistake. That would be the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario, in some ways, is that Trump’s people and the Pentagon just simply say, “Oh, no, this is Iranian propaganda. We still think that maybe the IRGC bombed it themselves.”

That’s why it’s so important to have actual investigations. The UN sent a commission there, and they’ve determined that it’s a war crime, just on the basis of the idea that if they used AI, if they used systems where they shut down the civilian harm mitigation and they didn’t check to see what was there before they launched the missile, that satisfies the legal barriers to indicate that a war crime, not just a crime against humanity, was committed.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we just have 20 seconds, but the devastating pictures of — I mean, the victims are not only those who’ve died, but the children that survived, that are saying to their parents, “I wish I had been one of the martyred to be with my friends.” These last 20 seconds, the effect today?

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, one of the drawings from the psychologist, a child just drew a severed hand. And she said, you know, that the kids feel like they did something wrong, that they don’t understand why their friends died and they weren’t able to save them.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have to leave it there. It is an incredibly devastating report. Jeremy is co-founder of Drop Site News. We’ll link to your new investigation and film, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”

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

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The ferocity with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story.

It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined.

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge — who could not possibly have read it — declared it “junk” and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show.

• READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway.

Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: “a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.”

Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an “elite intelligentsia” suffering from something he calls “Free Speech Union derangement”.  This “elite (liberal) intelligentsia” is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

FSU’s dishonest portrayal
This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as “grassroots” is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity.

The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade — groups that claim to defend “free speech” while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre — painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian — is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery.

But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not “derangement”. It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing “ordinary New Zealanders” rather than well-connected political networks.

When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are — professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

A shadow infrastructure
From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs.

Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself — the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere.

But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

• Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, by Nicky Hager, 2026 (Potton & Burton).

President Masoud Pezeshkian came to New York with a written text. After hearing US President Donald Trump at the same rostrum the day before, he set it aside, telling delegates he had prepared a speech before the US president called Iran a terrorist state.

He was, by most accounts, the first leader to speak at the UN in person in the middle of a war with the United States.

Speaking from the heart is why the historic address will be heard well beyond the hall. It should not hide how precise it was — legally, morally and strategically.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

He opened with photographs of dead children, victims of American and Israeli bombs, and a direct reply: “We have been the victims of terrorism.

“We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists.”

Palestinians know this inversion well. A people defends itself, and the aggressor calls the defence terrorism. Anyone who has watched the last seven months with clarity will recognise it.

He answered the bullying Trump had put on display, musing aloud about “annihilating” Iran, by standing on the ground of law. Everything said against Iran from that podium, he argued, contradicted the UN Charter.

Use of force, threats forbidden
He is right. Article 2(4) forbids not only the use of force but the threat of it, and a head of state weighing the annihilation of a fellow member state before the General Assembly is as plain a threat as the Charter’s drafters could have imagined.

Iran asks for no special treatment, only the sovereign equality the Charter promises every member. On the nuclear file, his formula was “no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”

That is the NPT’s own bargain: the treaty bars non-nuclear states from acquiring the bomb, and its Article IV guarantees the “inalienable right” of every party to peaceful nuclear energy “without discrimination.”

He was equally plain that Iran built its defences to guarantee that any strike on its cities is answered. In Nicaragua v. United States, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that international law places no limit on a sovereign state’s armaments beyond what it accepts by treaty.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian displays images of Iran’s martyred Leader and the several children murdered in the US-Israeli attacks on Iran during his UNGA address.

Follow Press TV on Telegram: https://t.co/GHI09iAGh2 pic.twitter.com/eGDt1DDAHA

— Press TV (@PressTV) September 23, 2026

He also took apart the Israeli-made story that Iran’s political establishment is on the verge of collapse, and that Iranians would welcome foreign invaders. For seven months people have been in the streets daily in support of the defence effort.

The same fact answers Trump’s claim that the Iranian state has killed tens of thousands of its own people. A population does not rally under bombardment behind a government it regards as its killer.

Naming the war crimes
Then he named the war crimes. He showed images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab and of a sports hall in Lamerd where children had been playing. A weapon that scatters tens of thousands of tungsten fragments cannot be used on a school or a gymnasium without striking indiscriminately.

A UN fact-finding mission reported this month that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in the February 28 strikes. The US delegate left the hall during this passage. Pezeshkian drew the parallel with Gaza, where the ICJ has ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and former defence minister.

He turned next to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Israel stays outside the NPT and accepts no comprehensive safeguards, although the Security Council called on it in Resolution 487 of 1981 to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, and the General Assembly repeats the call every year.

Israel has struck the capitals of its neighbours in breach of the Charter and carries out a documented pattern of war crimes, yet keeps its weapons with impunity. Iran, which has acted only in self-defence for two centuries, is sanctioned and attacked instead, although its facilities remain under an IAEA safeguards agreement.

On Hormuz, he described a strait closed to Iran even as it serves to ship missiles and weaponry into the surrounding region. The law of the sea does not allow this.

The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which Washington invokes but has never ratified, requires ships passing through a strait to refrain from any threat or use of force against the states bordering it. Under the older rule of innocent passage, a ship serving an attack on the coastal state is no longer in innocent passage at all.

Will not be shut out
Iran will not be shut out of its own waters while others use them to make war on it.

He closed on the indivisibility of security: it exists for everyone in the region or for no one. The idea has a long pedigree. European states wrote it into the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and restated it in 1999, pledging not to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.

“We want strong neighbors,” Pezeshkian said. Iran has always been open to diplomacy, “without accepting the language of force.”

Rez Nasri is an international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, and he writes about Iran in Persian, English and French.

There is something grotesque about taking one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history — a technology capable of translating languages, modelling proteins, accelerating scientific discovery, assisting doctors, educating children and placing an astonishing repository of human knowledge at an ordinary person’s fingertips — and harnessing it to the ancient government business of deciding who may be killed.

States hardly needed technological assistance with that.

For as long as states have made war, they have assassinated, disappeared, tortured and executed.

• READ MORE: Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
• The controversial documentary NAZA: 10 reasons to defend this whistleblower war on Gaza film
• Other AI killing in Gaza

They have acted on rotten intelligence, mistaken civilians for enemies, bombed the wrong houses and buried the innocent alongside the intended target.

Humanity has accumulated centuries of law in an attempt to restrain that capacity for violence.

Now we have given it an algorithm.

A +972 Magazine investigation into Israel’s “Lavender” system used in the Gaza genocide describes an AI-assisted process that marked tens of thousands of Palestinians as suspected militants for potential assassination. Six Israeli intelligence sources described enormous target lists, scant human scrutiny and predetermined tolerances for civilian deaths.

Significance of Lavender
The significance of Lavender reaches far beyond one system, one military, or one war.

Artificial intelligence does not hate anyone. It has no territory to conquer, no frightened electorate to appease, no flag to salute and no enemy it wants dead.

It cannot decide that one nationality, ethnicity or political movement is hateful. It cannot lust for revenge.

Humans supply the malice

And AI offers governments a hideous new possibility: not merely to make lethal decisions, but to industrialise them.

A human life can become data, the data a probability, the probability a classification and the classification a target. Somewhere along that progression, the unique, precious universe of a living person — somebody’s child, parent, lover, neighbour — disappears into a machine-generated assessment which can be processed thousands of times faster than any human being could properly investigate the people concerned.

That isn’t intelligence replacing human cruelty — it is human cruelty acquiring computational power.

Recreated in machinery
Alan Turing wondered whether machines could think. John McCarthy gave artificial intelligence its name. Claude Shannon helped establish the mathematics on which our information age was built. Marvin Minsky devoted much of his life to understanding whether intelligence itself could be recreated in machinery.

They helped begin an intellectual adventure of almost preposterous ambition: to understand intelligence sufficiently well that we might reproduce some part of it.

Today Demis Hassabis speaks of developing AI to benefit humanity. Dario Amodei leads Anthropic, founded around the problem of making immensely powerful AI safe.

Sam Altman heads OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity.

Surely this cannot be what benefiting humanity was supposed to mean.

AI may help us understand disease, proteins, climate, mathematics, language and perhaps eventually the nature of intelligence itself. Yet the same extraordinary capacity to detect patterns across quantities of information beyond the reach of a human mind can be turned towards finding patterns in a population and deciding which people resemble the people a state wants dead.

And therein lies another danger.

Human judgement, evidence
When a human intelligence officer says, “I believe this person is a combatant,” we understand that a human being has made a judgment and can demand the evidence behind it.

When a machine assigns a probability, the mathematics can lend the conclusion an entirely undeserved aura of objectivity. But an algorithm cannot cleanse dubious intelligence, discriminatory assumptions or corrupted data merely by processing them at enormous speed.

Nor can it assume responsibility.

The analyst can point to the algorithm. The commander can point to the analyst. The politician can invoke the demands of war. The engineer can say the machine was only an advisory tool.

The machine, magnificently innocent of everything, points nowhere.

That is why human responsibility must remain absolute. I would go so far as to say that any use of AI in warfare should be prohibited.

Artificial intelligence must never become moral laundering for state violence. A computer-generated confidence score does not acquire the moral weight of evidence merely because mathematics produced it.

10,000 suspicions
Processing 10,000 suspicions in the time a human being could properly investigate 10 does not make those suspicions more reliable. It merely makes killing scalable.

Turing did not ask whether machines could think so that governments could think less.

Human beings have finally built machines capable of doing things our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

If one of the achievements of artificial intelligence is that it enables us to kill people faster, we will not have taught machines something new.

We will simply have taught them something terribly old.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

COMMENTARY: Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy answers some emerging criticisms.

• READ MORE: Gaza documentary ‘NAZA’ Sets US theatrical release through self-distribution model

I watched NAZA. (Unlike 99 percent of people expressing their very strong opinions).

So here are my takes, which will make a lot of you very angry.

1. “Is the film antisemitic blood libel against the IDF?”

No, it is literally a series of confessions by IDF war criminals themselves, so that claim is laughable.

2. “How can Yuval and Rachel betray their country?”

Our loyalty must be to justice and humanity, not to systems of power that privilege us. It is your duty to resist your country if your country is committing genocide.

3. “Is the film good?”

Yes. And the vast majority of you will learn something new about the mechanics of the Gaza genocide, even if you’ve been following it closely. And for the people who haven’t been following — who will watch it now because of the festival award — it may be absolutely eye opening.

Democracy Now! features Yuval’s speech.                   Video: Democracy Now!

4. “Is the film good for the justice movement?”

It’s very good for the Palestine justice movement that a film on the Gaza genocide is getting so much attention. It forces the mainstream to confront Israel’s crimes once again, which is especially important now when the attention is dying down because of the so-called “ceasefire”.

The activist scene is still very focused, but the mainstream attention is decreasing, and NAZA winning festivals around the world will do a great job returning the conversation to what matters.

5. “Why didn’t they release the evidence as articles instead of a film?”

They did, over the course of the past three years Yuval published some of the most valuable investigative journalism on the Gaza genocide in +972 Magazine. The fact that you all didn’t know about it is all the more evidence for why this film was needed to be made.

6. “Is the film beyond reproach?”

Every piece of art, journalism or activism must be subject to criticism. And from the activist standpoint there is only one metric that’s important — its material impact. Not the identity of the artists, not the form, and not even the content. Only the material impact.

7. “The film protects war criminals, instead of delivering them to international courts.”

Providing a anonymity to whistleblowers is an essential part of investigative journalism. I also have sources in the IDF and the settler movement that I keep anonymous. Getting 24 people charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — and likely never prosecuted — is much less useful than getting their testimonies heard by the entire world.

8. “The film didn’t show anything new, all of this has been reported by Palestinian journalists.”

This is largely true, as stated by Yuval himself. Nonetheless, confessions of the perpetrators are adding to the body of evidence of the Gaza genocide, and confessions always hold more weight than accusations. For many, this may be THE tipping point, unfortunately.

9. “Why not just upload it to the internet instead of going to festivals?”

Social media videos, written articles, feature films and many other formats cannot replace one another. They work for different audiences and achieve different goals.

Festivals bring the film to an audience that wouldn’t watch it on the internet, and provides credibility to a very damning account of the genocide.

10. “Yuval Abraham is too Zionist/too anti-Zionist.”

Yuval’s politics is beside the point. You can disagree with someone and still find their work valuable.

A comprehensive pressure campaign at all levels is very important for the Palestine cause.

Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy is an independent journalist and human rights advocate working in the West Bank. Follow his on-the-ground reports about settler and IOF violence.

Julian Assange is officially back on X/Twitter, restoring to the world an important voice we were robbed of by the US empire’s years-long campaign to silence the WikiLeaks founder via lifelong imprisonment for forbidden acts of journalism.

Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine. It seemed almost certain that this man was going to die in Belmarsh Prison or spend his remaining years in some hellhole in America.

Now whenever my nephew catches me or my husband expressing pessimism about something working out, he tells us “Hey. Assange is free now.” It’s become our family code for “Anything’s possible. Don’t give up hope.”

• LISTEN: Video reading by Tim Foley
• Other Caitlln Johnstone reports

Assange returns                                                 Video: Caitlin Johnstone

We should really try to appreciate this. Never let hope die. A better world is possible. Anything can be.

In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening.

I’m back. https://t.co/2e58azeJkt

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 17, 2026

If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father.

A modern military force hammering a giant concentration camp full of colonised people using high-tech weapons of mass murder with the help of your tax dollars is not a “war” that you get to be “neutral” towards. It’s a genocide, and you’re either for it or against it.

There is no comfortable third option where you get to avoid picking a side and also avoid looking like an asshole.

One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticise Israel without also criticising Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticise a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticise a tiny group of besieged militants?

You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the Western world, unless I in the same breath also criticise a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?

No I’m just going to criticise Israel, thank you very much. I am going to criticise the state whose genocidal atrocities are supported by the power structure under which I live and pay taxes, whose support network is systematically demolishing the rights of me and my countrymen. If you don’t like it, go screw yourself.

If you want to enrage an Israel apologist, tell them you won’t listen to the mountains upon mountains of verbiage they throw at you explaining why it’s actually fine to drop bombs on buildings full of children. pic.twitter.com/61JI50IozZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 15, 2026

I have a few more thoughts for today:
Firstly, I love it when I see Israel apologists whining about people responding to their screeds with “I ain’t reading all that. Free Palestine.” All hasbarists have is endless mountains of verbiage explaining why it’s fine and normal to drop military explosives on buildings full of children, so it enrages them when someone takes away their only weapon.

They don’t have truth and morality on their side, so all they have is words, words, words, words, words. Take that away from them and they’ve got nothing, and they know it.

Imagine for 1 second that you have it wrong and Jews are telling the truth. That the genocide libel is bs. That Hamas are terrorists. That you are being manipulated to desire the removal of Jews from society.

Do you understand if we’re right, that makes you the millions of…

— Jonah Platt (@JonahPlatt) September 16, 2026

And finally, new rule: if you deny that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, then the onus is on you to provide a convincing explanation for why every human rights group on earth (including the Israeli ones) agrees it’s a genocide.

If you hold that there’s an antisemitic conspiracy between all human rights groups, then the burden of proof is on you to show that conspiracy taking place.

If you hold that there has been an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate all human rights groups, then you need to provide proof of that conspiracy.

If you hold that there is no conspiracy and it’s just a coincidence that all human rights groups happen to think Israel is committing human rights abuses, then you need to provide a convincing argument why every institution of human rights experts coincidentally came to the same conclusion and are still incorrect.

You can’t just say “I disagree with their findings” or “That one group made an argument I find weak” or “It’s not a genocide because blah blah blah”. You need to address the unanimous consensus, because that’s part of the debate now.

Even flat earthers and climate deniers who claim all the experts are wrong at least try to provide arguments for why there’s a secret conspiracy to amplify faulty conclusions in the scientific community, but deniers of the Gaza genocide somehow seem to think they don’t need to address their dissent with the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field.

You don’t get to do that, guys. That’s not a thing. If you’re claiming the experts are lying about one specific country, then you need to provide a detailed and believable explanation for why that might be.

I’ve yet to encounter a single genocide denier who can do this, online or otherwise. Not one.

PS: Claiming you can’t accuse Israel of genocide until the ICJ rules it a genocide is exactly the same as claiming you can’t say Charlie Kirk was murdered until his killer has been officially convicted of murder.

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.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York joined by Democracy Now! cohost Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us by the end of the decade.” That was the warning last week from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that set off an escalating debate over how to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems.

• READ MORE: AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
• Other AI reports

Coxon spoke to the BBC:

COXON: So it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who were involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction.

And many of the people who are sort of deep in the weeds on actually coding the thing believe that there is like a greater than 10pc chance or even greater – some smaller, but they all have different numbers – for a probability that humans might die.

And they all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei also called for the pace of development of artificial intelligence models to slow down. In an essay, he wrote that within six to 12 months a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

He wrote, “The scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.” But President Trump has rejected growing calls for placing regulatory guardrails on the AI industry and has called concerns over AI a “hoax”.

On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chip maker Nvidia, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles. Huang put the president on speakerphone.

PRES. TRUMP: The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It’s bigger than the Internet.

And the AI, you know, much more so. And they are just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen.

And that could be political people; it could also be China. And we’re not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax. And [crosstalk]—

JENSEN HUANG [laughs] You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir.

AUDIENCE: [applause]

PRES. TRUMP: No, we’re not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: As the debate over AI intensifies, the award-winning journalists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book out today that is connected to all of this. It is titled End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

It examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability, wars and the climate crisis. They will join us in a minute but first, here is a short excerpt from a video that was released with the book.

ASTRA TAYLOR: End-times fascism is not a monolith. It’s a dangerous and fractious alliance of three main groups.

NARRATOR: Religious end-timers.

ROBERT JEFFRESS: From the very beginning it has been clear that god has a special plan and purpose for the nation of Israel.

NARRATOR: Tech end-timers.

SAM ALTMAN: You know, I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime there will be great companies created.

NARRATOR: Ethnonationalist end-timers.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: America is fighting with Israel for a common goal – to protect our future, to protect civilisation against these barbarians.

PERSON: That was a good take right there.

PERSON: Seig fucking Heil, let’s fucking go!

PERSON: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

PERSON: Uh—

PERSON: You’re hesitant.

PERSON: Yeah, well, I—

PERSON: End-times fascists haven’t just given up on liberal democracy. They’ve given up on the possibility of a shared future for all of us.

PERSON: The most powerful people in the world –

PERSON: – are preparing for the end of the world –

PERSON:  – an end they themselves are both accelerating –

PERSON: – and profiting from.

ELON MUSK: [laughs]

PERSON: We have imagined Armageddon so many times it can almost feel inevitable. Except it’s not. So, which side are you on?

PERSON: The side of bunkering down, abandoning Earth and profiting from apocalypse? Or staying loyal to this planet and its people—

PERSON: Who are you aligned with? Who are you protecting?

PERSON: – and making life here better?

‘End Times Fascism’      Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: A short video released in conjunction with the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World written by our guests in studio for the hour.

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, best-selling author of a number of books including Doppelganger and No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein is also an associate professor and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist and documentary filmmaker, the co-founder of the Debt Collective and author of several books including The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

Thanks so much for spending the hour with us. Naomi, start off with a title, start off with End Times Fascism, why you chose this.

NAOMI KLEIN: First of all, thank you for having us here, Amy. It’s great to be launching the book on Democracy Now! It just came out this morning, as you said. And I think we have a long tradition of launching books together. We decided to call it End Times Fascism because we are trying to understand what is the same and what is different about our moment of far-right extremism.

We know that far-right parties with lineages to the fascists of the 20th century are rising to power around the world. We just saw a fateful election in a German state, the first time the far right has won an election since the Second World War. We’re seeing very disturbing polls in France, for instance.

And we’re seeing more and more open fascist expressions in the United States from very powerful people in government and in tech.

But we don’t believe that this is simply a rerun. We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanisation, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis. This is not news to Democracy Now! listeners and viewers that we live in a time of a climate breakdown and collapse.

We have tools like nuclear weapons, that were not known to Hitler and Mussolini, that have the ability to inflict apocalyptic levels of violence that were beyond their reach.

Fascism always emerges during times of systemic crises, and it actually emerges as a way to protect capitalism from systemic change. So if we think about 20th century fascism in Europe after the First World War, there was a rising socialist response to the wreckage of the First World War and then to the Great Depression.

And fascism rises up — we call it “capitalism threat response” or “capitalism with bared teeth” — to make sure all of that popular public anger is pivoted toward the scapegoat. In our time, as we see these global crises — that could lead to systemic change or there can be this what we are calling “end times fascist” response that says, “let it burn,” and now it’s a fight for who’s going to survive the future.

Now it’s about building — as you saw in that film that we were fortunate to work with a great team of filmmakers on — it’s about building the bunkers and the rocket ships and the escape hatches. For religious end-timers, it’s literally about the bunker in the sky; it’s about the idea of the rapture.

But that is almost like a template for these more secular stories that are also a kind of a rapture, but we call it in the book a “wealth rapture”. If you’ve got resources, you can rapture yourself away from the impacts of those threats that we are all in. So that’s why we call it End Times Fascism. It hasn’t won yet.

The reason we wrote the book is because people are fighting back. And we think if we are able to look at this very frightening reality with clear eyes, the more it is exposed to the light, the less popular it is because in fact those people cherish our one and only home and want to stay and want to make it better.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, how is this different, for example, if in the 1950s and 1960s when at the height of the Cold War there were Americans, especially upper-class Americans, building bomb shelters, convinced that there was going to be a nuclear war, and the rest of the population eventually began to organise in an anti-nuclear movement that peaked in the 1980s and that led really to capitalism being forced to restrain itself to some degree in terms of arms control treaties?

Why is this different than back then?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Juan, I guess it’s different because the people we’re calling end-times fascists are systematically dismantling that precise international infrastructure. One of the things that all those three factions all agree on — whether it’s the religious fundamentalists, the tech extremists that we heard from in that video, or the ethnonationalists — they don’t agree on everything but they all agree they want to get rid of the United Nations.

They all believe that that is the sort of antichrist of their story. Sometimes they literally call it the antichrist. And that chapter that you are describing, which we write about in the book, Juan — and I would actually love to bring Astra into the conversation because she went pretty deep into this research on the history of bunkering in the United States and how people shifted the tide, because we actually think that’s a really inspiring story that we need to know better.

Can I bring in Astra, my incredible co-author?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sure.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Thank you so much. Again, thanks for having us. Yeah, it is — very quickly, in the 1950s, the government policy was to encourage people to build their own bomb shelters in their backyard, and that was the response to the nuclear threat. Only around 1 percent, 2 percent of households did that, in part because people revolted at the idea of protecting themselves and letting their neighbors perish.

And there was a massive debate in magazines like TIME magazine, LIFE magazine that was around the idea of “gunning thy neighbor”. People said, “We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to be hiding in a hole in the ground with guns pointing outwards and turning the people we care about away.”

That is part of the genesis of the movement for nuclear disarmament. It was ordinary people who put the right solution on the table, which is let’s get rid of nuclear bombs; let’s not turn on each other and bunker down. There’s a lesson in that for today.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s so interesting because what they understood at the time is like either you bunker — either you just protect you and yours — or you get at the root cause of the crisis and you say, “Actually, we can’t live with these weapons.” Right? It’s just—”It’s too dangerous.”

As you both know, the nuclear disarmament movement had tremendous successes. In many ways, we argue in the book that it was a victim of its own success because many people in the disarmament movement believed that they had won so many victories that now the people in charge were just going to finish the job, because so many thousands of nuclear warheads were successfully disarmed that it seemed like there was a new era.

The majority of the stockpiles were disarmed but not enough, and now there is a rearming and AI is being embedded in the nuclear arsenal. Which is why at the end of the book we call for a triple disarmament movement.

In fact, Juan, we have something that you might be interested in — a new coinage in the book — which is “the Stephen Miller test”. Basically the argument that we’re making is that eventually, the most powerful tools, the most powerful weapons, will meet the worst people in the world, and if you don’t want those tools to find themselves in the hands of Stephen Miller, then the tools should not exist.

That applies to nuclear weapons. It applies to AI. It applies to the wealth concentration itself, which we believe should be now understood as a WMD. That this level of wealth that has accumulated at the top of our economy has itself become a weapon of mass destruction.

And so we need to be disarming the wealth bombs, the tech bombs, and of course, the bomb-bombs. Because we are now seeing that these very dangerous, completely immoral people who seem to have such a casual attitude — and we see this from Donald Trump’s most recent post, just a kind of shrug in the face of apocalypse — they will find — they exert a magnetic pull towards one another.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to follow-up and ask either one of you if you want to answer this, because I did read the book in the last couple of days and really found it to be tremendously well written. At the same time, though, there were some concerns I had. For instance, there is very little mention of the rise of a multipolar world, of how the rise of East Asia, especially, the shift of the world’s industrial working class to China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, along with Brazil and Mexico — in the view of many, that is the single biggest impediment to US economic dominance, of the capitalist markets’ expansion.

And that’s also the biggest threat that many of these end-timers, as you label them, are concerned about. They are concerned about China, yet China and its impact on US hegemony and capitalism is not mentioned at all in the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that the threat of China is really, really central to the unimpeded AI rollout. It’s really the only argument they have. We do write about that in the book, but you’re right, it’s not the central focus of the book. We are more focused on the United States and the way in particular this is being pushed through Latin America, because we think there — and Europe.

But the threat of the multipolar world I do think is central, because the only argument that Donald Trump really has in the face of the threats that are now being articulated from inside the house, from inside the companies, is “But China, but China; if we don’t build it, they will.”

It’s completely untrue that deregulated AI has to be built the way it’s being built or else China will build it. China is much more open to regulating these technologies, to rules within the multilateral system. It’s the US that has been blowing up these agreements.

And when the Doomsday Clock was reset this year, it was a really — I mean, it’s always pretty harrowing, but this year it was particularly so; they moved it forward four seconds — and described not just the threats, whether it was biological weapons, nuclear weapons, AI, but the way the US government under Donald Trump was going after all of the international agreements that governments like China had been a party to, and just saying, “We don’t need them.”

So I think it’s the tools and the dismantling of any attempt to constrain those tools.

ASTRA TAYLOR: It’s also about the narrative that the people in power are telling themselves. We’re tracking how there’s a certain embrace of apocalyptic narrative, of Armageddon, of the end times, that doesn’t — every government in the world doesn’t have that narrative, right? It’s something that’s very powerful in certain branches of the United States political class, in Israel, in parts of Latin America.

We’re not saying that it applies to every country around the entire world, and so that’s one reason that that isn’t — there are some very powerful international players that aren’t central to the thesis.

AMY GOODMAN: Astra and Naomi, you write about Peter Thiel, saying, “Today a staggering number of his former colleagues and acolytes occupy powerful positions in every part of the Trump Administration. The most consequential of them is JD Vance.” If you can explain, who is Peter Thiel? What does it mean to have his inner circle populating the inner circle of the United States?

And talk about all of these figures that are so much in the news now, that were standing behind President Trump during his inauguration, people who were opposed to him before, who took him off their platforms. We are talking about people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg and others.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yes. Peter Thiel is a powerful billionaire and venture capitalist who has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He is part of the PayPal mafia so he founded PayPal with David Sacks, who was Trump’s former AI and crypto czar. And also Elon Musk, of course, who is now the president of SpaceX; everybody will know him.

Peter Thiel is quite interesting because he has been on the far right very proudly for a long time since he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he and David Sacks actually wrote a book against political correctness. And he has been on the vanguard of being very much against democracy, very — quasi-libertarian but now just explicitly authoritarian — and has written things like “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.”

He was one of the first figures in Silicon Valley to come out for Trump in 2015.

And as we write in the book and, as you said, many of his protégés are now in positions of power and the most influential one is JD Vance. JD Vance has written about how his life changed when he saw Peter Thiel give a lecture. This lecture inspired Vance to go to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist — not a very illustrious one — and that’s where he met critical figures who would fund his political rise, including Thiel who gave what was a record-breaking donation of $15 million and kind of launched and made possible Vance’s bid to become a senator of Ohio.

And it was Peter Thiel who also brokered the meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Vance was able to apologise for calling Donald Trump “Hitler”. So Vance is of course one of those figures who used to be opposed —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that? That Vance said —

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, Vance was once — he was once for green energy. He was against Donald Trump who he said misleads people and offers empty promises like building a wall which won’t actually improve people’s lives. But he’s also quite an opportunist, and Peter Thiel brokered peace among those two, and now we know Vance as the VP.

J.D. Vance is also critical in our book because he is who helped bring together the AI industry and Donald Trump. We remember from Donald Trump’s first term that he was against Big Tech. He was railing against Big Tech all the time. Thanks to JD Vance who hosted a dinner at David Sacks’ house, Trump got on the AI train. It was a fundraiser but it was also a pitch session.

Vance’s Silicon Valley brethren told Donald Trump that AI would be good for the economy but it would be very good for the fossil fuel sector. And now we see that the Trump administration is all in on AI and not much else.

So when we look at the famous image of the second Trump inauguration and we see all those tech execs given their front seats and they’re lined up, our position is that it was the promise of generative AI eating the economy that actually turned them fascist and caused this incredible alliance with the Trump regime that we’re seeing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, that alliance has served them incredibly well. It has produced the first trillionaire. It has produced companies that are claiming valuations roughly equivalent to the entire US economy. And what they wanted from Donald Trump was exactly what they got: a frontier.

You hear this phrase used all the time now — ”frontier AI” — but if you think about what a frontier is, a frontier is a Wild West. It has no rules. And what they were upset about under the last administration was that there were some, you know, not radical, very simple rules like you have to label deepfakes, guardrails against precisely the scenarios that they are now talking about in terms of integration with weapons systems, and the prospect of a rogue AI.

So all of this was on the table years ago. There were discussions at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that they’re always using China as the bogeyman of why they have to roll out AI without rules. China has many more rules regulating AI than the United States has,
including rules around not allowing children to have these like personal relationships with AI where there’s confusion about whether or not you are talking to a friend or a robot or a therapist or whatever it is.

First of all, that’s a lie, and that’s just the fact that people are not educated about what China is doing that is allowing people to fall for this line of, like, “Oh, no, if we don’t do it, China will.” They just simply don’t know how China is regulating this.

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about is — and we have to be aware of how active this push was for the frontier, because now of course these CEOs are all coming forward and saying “Please regulate us, we’ll regulate ourselves, we know we need to be regulated,” as if they weren’t the ones who not only demanded this Wild West frontier but bankrolled it and created the strategic alliance with Donald Trump so that he would deliver it to them.

And now they’re realising, “OK, maybe we’ve gone too far and have to look more credible.” And Donald Trump is going, “No way.”

Why is he saying, “No way”? Because he has tanked the entire US economy and the only thing he has going for him is the AI stock bubble, and he’s terrified of this bubble bursting all over him before the midterm elections or before the next presidential.

He also is very invested in it personally. He’s richer than he has ever been because of the rampant corruption of this administration, the money he has made from crypto but also many different ways that he and his family are invested in AI.

So that’s why he’s doing these frantic things like calling Jensen Huang on stage to say, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do anything.”

But if you’ll allow me, I was really struck because there’s this myth that — these sort of parables of the technology slipping out of the hands of the men who built it, right? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein. Creating a monster right?

That’s the myth that they’re all telling. “Oh no, we’ve created this powerful monster. It’s out of our hands and now it’s going to destroy us.” I would argue that that myth really is coming true but the monster is not AI; it’s Donald Trump.

They created Donald Trump, he is their monster, he’s out of control and he just won’t stop. And they’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe it is going too fast.”

[MUSIC BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. We are spending the hour with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. I want to go back to the video that was released in conjunction with the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: On a mountaintop in the dead of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision. They had seen a gleaming city bathed in golden light.

The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name.

PERSON: New Gaza.

JARED KUSHNER: So, we’ll see if these things work. They never usually work.

NAOMI KLEIN: The mountaintop in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were US real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location. Look at this beautiful piece of property.

PERSON: Let’s just plan for catastrophic success.

NAOMI KLEIN: Out of the horrors of a live-streamed genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully formed.

PERSON: We’ve already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition.

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the video that was released with the book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. It is by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I want to talk about Gaza right now. We are coming off — in Venice right now you have two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, who just came out with a film called NAZA and now members of the Israeli government are threatening to take away their citizenship, and it was based on the commentary of high-level Israeli officials, unnamed, talking about the killing in Gaza deliberately. Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and the use of AI to do so. I actually haven’t seen the film. I’m definitely looking to see it. But it underlines what we already know thanks to Palestinian journalists at huge personal cost in the documenting of a livestream genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Over 250 of them killed in this last two years.

NAOMI KLEIN: And as we say in the film, this is the story that the Trump administration is telling, is that out of apocalypse there will be this paradise. There will be what they are calling “New Gaza”. We begin the book with it because it is such an extreme distillation of the story.

And I believe it’s the most dangerous story ever told. It’s a biblical story. It’s deeply encoded in our culture whether we’re religious or not. And the story is first comes the flood, first comes the apocalypse, first comes the mass death — and out of the mass death, the great cleansing, the fury of god, comes the golden city, the paradise, for the chosen few.

That story, which — it’s the story of the flood and the ark; it’s told in its most violent form in the book of Revelation — for people who believe in it literally, it has confused the difference between bad and good. It has kind of flipped the switch, where when we see the things in our world that should be warning us, telling us we need to act, we are in a time of crisis, it is an emergency — whether it’s climate disasters, whether it’s covid, that things are breaking down — that what is seen instead are signs.

“Oh, no, what it means is that we’re entering the end times.” And while that may be bad for many people, it’s actually very good for the chosen few.

That’s why we started with this myth of New Gza . . . there is no paradise that is coming out of the apocalypse in Gaza but that is the story that the Trump administration is telling. It’s a privatized paradise that they’re proposing to build. They are using this kind of biblical narrative but of course it’s all for profit because it’s the Trump administration. They want to build luxury condominiums over a mass grave. And you saw there that it’s a literal story.

We do think that the Board of Peace is significant in the sort of evolution of the privatisation of the state, the fact that the Trump Administration is not just attacking the United Nations and defunding the United Nations but trying to replace the United Nations with something called the Board of Peace, which Trump would be head of for life, that they would control — they would give themselves immunity.

This is part of what we mean by bunkering, by escaping. It’s like they see the state as a mine site. They see the United States as a place that they can extract from. Not just extract wealth and resources — and we’re watching them do that — but also extract other things that matter to them, like legal immunity. Right? I mean, the Board of Peace gives them that.

So that’s why we start with that. And it brings together these different parts of the coalition. Because there are religious extremists, both Christian Zionists and messianic Jews, who really do believe that Gaza, Iran — mean that the Messiah is coming. Like the more violent, the better.

And you’ve covered on the show officers in the US military lodging complaints that their officers are telling them that they should welcome apocalyptic levels of violence in Iran because it means that Jesus is returning.

But it’s not just the religious extremists. It’s also the secular versions of the story. We don’t think Trump believes in the biblical version of this story, but we do believe he believes in a kind of a wealth rapture. And when you see those AI-generated images of new Gaza and Trump sharing them, you can see how these stories have distorted his brain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the little time we have left, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resistance movements, the people’s movements against this growing fascism, and also perhaps deal with some of the critiques of let’s say of Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, who basically insists that the fascist movement in the United States, the mass base of it is really the middle class, those people driven out by the Walmarts and the Targets from small businesses, and franchisees and others who have been driven down by the growth of these top-end monopoly capitalists and who have now turned to a fascist movement for their salvation.

ASTRA TAYLOR: To answer the second part first, fascism is always a movement of the injured powerful. It is a movement that creates vertical solidarity between political and corporate elites and people who are not the worst off but feel that they’ve lost status and directs their sense of insecurity downwards further towards vulnerable scapegoats — towards immigrants, towards trans kids, towards feminists — instead of upwards at the oligarchs and the politicians.

So that’s how we understand Elon Musk buying X or what was Twitter, right, is that it was a way for him to control a media ecosystem and help direct that rage downwards at the left and at the vulnerable instead of letting it be harnessed towards people like him.

So I think that that’s right, if fascism creates what we call a vertical solidarity to protect capitalism, to protect the status quo. That’s certainly true of fascism in the past and it’s certainly true today.

What we have to do to build the resistance is create that horizontal solidarity, to not scapegoat the vulnerable, to build our own coalition and find our own unusual bedfellows. I think you see that in the resistance to fascism that’s growing in the United States and around the world.

One thing — Naomi said this — the people we’re tracking — end-times fascism is not a coherent ideology necessarily. It’s not a monolith. It’s a fractious alliance of these three groups: the religious end timers, the tech accelerationists, the ethnonationalists.

But what they have in common is this sense that things are going to be increasingly unstable. We say that they’re both building their arks and they’re causing the floods. They’re accelerating collapse. They’ve decided to just bring it on and abandon this shared world in their various fantasies about bunker nation or ascending to heaven or the digital class.

So the resistance fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place. We describe them at one point in the book as traitors to creation. And we don’t use that word “traitors” lightly. We are saying they’re not traitors to the flag or the nation but actually to life on Earth, to our shared humanity, our shared planet.

And I think we see that commitment to what we call “hereness” in the book in the movement against data centers that is sweeping the nation, in the resistance to ICE where people are saying, “No, I’m going to defend my community, defend my neighbors” and people standing up and fighting for labour rights, which fascists are always attacking.

Fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers.

And so we see the resistance growing all over the world, but I think that the data center revolt is the main one for us because it really draws new lines and shows people — is bringing people together who a year ago or a couple of years ago might have been fighting over culture war issues.

Now they’re saying, “Well, actually, we have a lot in common because there’s a class of people who actually want to replace us with robots. Maybe we should be on the side of humanity against the machines.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Including those small business people, Juan, who you were referring to. This is why it really is an opportunity to form those new alliances. Because Donald Trump has betrayed many of the people who did vote for him the first time. The trouble, of course, is that many powerful Democrats are also taking money from the large tech companies and so are not willing to harvest what has been called by a comedian in I believe it was Madison — ”the most bipartisan issue since beer” is the opposition to these tech companies.

But in order to gain political advantage from that huge bipartisan issue, you have to be willing to go against your donors or not take their money in the first place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, the business model of these AI fascists, if they were to be able to prevail, throw millions of people out of work, how will they make their money? Because obviously Henry Ford, back in the days of the early monopoly capitalism, believed you had to give workers a living wage so they could consume the products that you produced.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m not sure it’s all that thought through. I think that they think they’re mainly going to be selling products to other businesses in the short term. But this is why, Juan, it is a bubble, and it is a process of extraction, and the bubble is rigged to explode all over working people and their pensions right now.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think they also think that they’ll make a lot of money hooking up with the government and the military. There is a quote from Alex Karp — who is a colleague of Peter Thiel, CEO of Palantir — and he said — we quote him in the book saying, “If these tech companies think they’re going to take everybody’s jobs and then not work with the military, they are” — I’m going to change what he said and say — ”they are foolish.”

What he’s saying is essentially if you’re planning to build a technology that causes a job apocalypse, you are also going to have to align with the state and help build the mechanisms to police and control and contain the masses of dispossessed human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with the end of your book: “We didn’t choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful but we have reached a choice point. We can either follow end-times fascists into oblivion or we can commit to building the unruly, boundary-crossing movement they so deeply fear, one that wrests away their weapons, holds them accountable for their crimes, and defends the paradise of here.”

Those are the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book out this week, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

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

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon

The last hearing block of Australia’s Bondi Royal Commission focused on social cohesion, defined as the “national consensus in support of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law”.

Counsel assisting Zelie Heger SC explained that the block would present “measures currently contributing to strengthening social cohesion” and “advancing the interests of all Australians” by promoting “respectful discussion of difficult issues”.

Among those chosen by Counsel Assisting were Roz Mendelle and Simonne Whine, co-directors of the Australian Cohesion Forum (ACF).

The Australian Cohesion Forum
ACF is a national not-for-profit connecting communities across Australia. It claims to be apolitical,

“… we don’t advocate for parties, candidates, or geopolitical positions, and we don’t promote stances on international conflicts. However, we recognise that politics is often central to lived experience. Our focus is on how global events affect Australians here, and our programs create structured, safe spaces to discuss difficult topics with openness, respect, and healthy boundaries.”

• READ MORE: Dark Money: Labor and Liberal join forces in attacks on Teals and Greens
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

In explaining how ACF came into being, Mendelle and Whine told the commission that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, they had separately organised to support the Jewish community.

Marketing manager and Israeli citizen Roz Mendelle explained how she moved to Brisbane with her Australian wife Hava, who had “made Aliyah” to Israel.

After October 7, Mendelle felt a

“‘wall of hate’ from protests against Israel.”

She started organising pro-Israel events which were supported by Iranians and Hindus who supported Israel. She realised “this is the trick … these are the people that I need to expand relationships with”.

Meanwhile, Whine had founded a grassroots network in Melbourne called J-United to support the Jewish community.

Whine told the commission that she kept hearing about Mendelle’s work, telling the commission, “We want to fill a gap. And so we came up with the Australian Cohesion Forum.”

The ACF organises “impact nets”, “coLabs” and virtual storytelling through which they collect data from attendees to analyse how they can partner together in a “fully collaborative, agile” way.

“As long as ‘none of us endorses violence against another community, and we don’t wish the elimination of another community, we can work together, we can create beautiful things together,'” Mendelle told the commission.

None of the lawyers present or the commissioner had any questions, and so Mendelle and Whine were excused.

Astroturfing campaigns
There is an easily identifiable gap in Mendelle and Whine’s evidence about how they came to work together, which in turn raises questions about how they were selected as witnesses who are said to be “advancing the interests of all Australians” by promoting “respectful discussion of difficult issues”.

Mendelle and Whine collaborated in well-funded political astroturfing campaigns in 2024 and 2025 aimed at defeating Greens and Teals. (Astroturfing is the practice of making a top-down political campaign look like a spontaneous grassroots movement.)

Deep Cut News, The Guardian and Australian Jewish News also reported on these campaigns.

In March  2025, Whine and Mendelle appeared in a webinar staged by the far-right Australian Jewish Association, then led by David Adler, who was a founder of Advance Australia. Advance campaigned strongly against the 2023 Voice Referendum in terms that many saw as racist.

On this occasion, Mendelle and Whine gave a different version of how they came to work together.

Earlier still, in 2024 Mendelle and her wife Hava began the third party campaigning organisation the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC). Their strategy was to defeat the Greens by recommending voters put them last on the ballot papers.

Asked how she developed her messaging, Mendelle explained that she chose

“what was screaming in her head”,

which was that the Greens support terror groups and are anti-semitic.”

It was that simple. Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, so it didn’t matter that the Greens completely rejected the allegations.

QJC claimed credit for defeating Queensland Greens MP Amy McMahon in October 2024. They then set their sights on the Federal election and established a new third-party organisation called Minority Impact Coalition (MIC) to campaign in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. MIC describes itself as “minority and refugee lead grassroots advocacy“.

MIC and ACF operate from the same address in Apsley, Queensland. Roz Mendelle was an MIC director until January 2026.

J-United director Sharon Kuper later told the pro-Israel L’Chaim radio programme that QJC were happy for J-United to replicate their messaging campaign that the Greens were “misinformed, dishonest, fostering hatred and harming social cohesion” and “disregard for human life”.

Enter Advance Australia
When J-United needed funds to emulate the QJC campaign in the 2025 Victorian Prahran byelection, they reached out to Advance Australia. Kuper told the L’Chaim radio programme that the Advance organisers said, “We’re happy to support you. What do you need? How about if we just support your whole campaign?”

Kuper described this as a “huge boost that they paid for our entire campaign… it took away the security concerns we had, with them endorsing and authorising our campaign”.

Advance went on to work with MIC and J-United on the Federal election under the brand name Put the Greens Last.

In the AJA webinar, Whine confirmed Kuper’s account of Advance providing assistance to J-United, describing it as a “fantastic, efficient, strategic and resource” which was “totally transparent. Very helpful…I think we’ve now built a really good relationship”.

The QJC’s Queensland campaign cost $30,000. Mendelle realised that they needed more funds for the Minority Impact Coalition’s Federal campaign from “people with slightly bigger means”. MIC sought help from Advance, who she found to be “absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with”.

ZIonist astroturfing organisations were not the only Zionists to embrace Advance. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal’s husband John Roth donated $50,000 to Advance through a family foundation.

Any hint of this intense political campaigning was missing in Mendelle and Whine’s Royal Commission version of how they came to join forces in ACF.

Women’s International Zionist Organisation
In June, ACF featured in a plenary at the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) Australia conference on the Gold Coast. WIZO works in partnership with the Israeli government to strengthen the resilience of Israeli society and raises funds for Israel.

The panel discussion “Cohesion in Action: Strength and Friendship featured Jewish, Iranian, Druze and Torres Strait Islander Australians”, led by Roz Mendelle, with the five speakers each expressed support for Israel.

Minority Impact Coalition
In introducing the Social Cohesion hearings at the RC, Senior Counsel Assisting Richard Lancaster SC explained that staff had already reviewed all submissions and that these informed the choice of witnesses. We can assume then that counsel were aware of MIC’s 122-page submission.

The key contact for the MIC submission is Roz’s wife, Hava Mendelle, and the submission team includes Roz Mendelle, fellow ACF director Iranian Azin Naghibi, messianic Christian Zionist preacher and lawyer Dr Warren Keir and extreme pro-Israel supporter Joshu Turier.

MIC’s recommendations to the Royal Commission are hard-line, in some cases going beyond Special Envoy Jillian Segal’s recommendations.

Far from showing respect for other Australians, MIC wants Australians who do not support Israel to be penalised and shut down.

According to MIC, accusing Israel of genocide is a “blood libel” sustained through “fabricated casualty figures and weaponised by elected officials, protest organisers and venue operators” to justify the exclusion of Jewish Australians.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

According to MIC, those who amplify anti-Zionist narratives should face enforceable consequences including loss of funding. Institutional silence in the face of documented antisemitic conduct should be considered a failure of duty of care.

Elected officials who promote statements that do not meet the IHRA definition or who operate official Parliamentary events featuring such content are in breach of their duties and should be accountable.

The ABC and the Federal Court should both be investigated for antisemitism for accepting the existence of a “lobby” that pushes pro-Israeli perspectives.

Duties of Counsel Assisting
Counsel assisting Royal Commissions play a key role in developing investigation strategies and ensuring evidence is presented impartially and in a way that does not obscure the truth.

Mendelle and Whine were introduced by Counsel Assisting Tamara Phillips whose manner throughout the Royal Commission has been empathetic.

In December 2023, Phillips was one of more than 450 lawyers who signed a letter which defended Israel and its military tactics against criticism by 1400 lawyers who had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire.

Mark Liebler of law firm Arnold Block Liebler, which represents Federal and State Zionist organisations at the Royal Commission, was a top signatory to the pro-Israeli letter.

All the material in this article is on the public record. Michael West Media alerted the Royal Commission to published material about their astroturfing activities shortly before Mendelle and Whine gave evidence.

Has the evidence changed?
MWM has been asking for the exhibit of Roz Mendelle for three weeks, and has been told that there are delays “to ensure accuracy is maintained, and legal sensitivities are addressed.” We have responded and asked

how an exhibit once tendered could be changed?

Commission lawyers are now summarising evidence and developing final arguments. The commissioner alone will then make findings. Meanwhile, the commission staff continues to hold meetings with selected individuals where no details are published.

In the name of “procedural fairness”, those who were called as witnesses will be given a chance to respond to final submissions of Counsel Assisting.

Not so the groups and unnamed but identifiable individuals in the pro-Palestinian movement whom witnesses have accused of antisemitism, including those who wanted to give evidence but were not invited.

For them, there is no right of reply.

INVESTIGATION: By Stephanie Tran and Michael West

The Zionist Federation of Australia’s chief executive Alon Cassuto has dropped his case against Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis, a high profile critic of Israel. The ZFA is the Australian arm of the World Zionist Organisation.

The World Zionist Organisation has a settlement division which is responsible for expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — in contravention of international law.

It also has extensive ties to United Israel Appeal (UIA) and Jewish National Fund (JNF), organisations which

raise funds for the IDF and illegal settlements.

• READ MORE:  Journalist Mary Kostakidis stared down the Zionist lobby – and courage won
• Other Mary Kostakidis reports

The Zionist Federation of Australia, whose chief executive Alon Cassuto brought a racial discrimination case against former SBS journalist and news anchor Mary Kostakidis, is financially dependent on the World Zionist Organisation and Keren Hayesod for the majority of its revenue, according to the federation’s latest financial report.

Cassuto is paid by the ZFA which is in turn funded by the WZO.

The ZFA’s 2025 financial report, states that the organisation is “dependent on the funding from the World Zionist Organisation and Keren Hayesod for the majority of its revenue used to operate the business”.

The ‘charity’ war chest
The report says the directors “have no reason to believe that the World Zionist Organisation and Keren Hayesod will not continue to support Zionist Federation of Australia Limited”.

The financial statements show that the ZFA received $3.44 million in total revenue in 2025, compared with $3.61 million the previous year. Of that 2025 total, $1.61 million was recorded as revenue and a further $1.746 million as subsidies.

It is cashed up, with a war chest approaching $5 million.

The report does not disclose the source of the subsidies nor does it identify the precise amount ZFA received from either Keren Hayesod or the World Zionist Organisation during 2025.

The ZFA has declined to respond to questions as to whether it also received “security funding” from ECAJ public grants.

The ZFA did not respond to questions about the precise amounts it received from the World Zionist Organisation and Keren Hayesod, or whether any of that funding was connected to the organisation’s legal action against Kostakidis.

STATEMENT RE MARY KOSTAKIDIS AND THE ZIONIST FEDERATION

After 2 years of utterly pointless legal proceedings against Mary Kostakidis, Alon Cassuto of the Zionist Federation pulled up stumps and ended the case on Friday.

There were no deeds, undertakings or apologies. There…

— XD LAW (@XDlawyers) September 12, 2026

Peak Zionist body
The ZFA describes itself as the peak body for Zionist organisations in Australia and represents more than 200 affiliated organisations.

The federation also maintains an office in Israel. In 2025, the ZFA spent $190,189 on its Israel office.

The ZFA’s directors in 2025 included president Jeremy Leibler, treasurer Benjamin Simon, secretary Lauren Blecher, vice-presidents Paul Gould, Jeffery Lin, Ehud Hauben and Elyse Schachna, and immediate past president Danny Lamm.

The federation’s principal activity, according to its directors, was to “uphold and foster the aim of Zionism”.

The ZFA is the Australian branch of the World Zionist Organisation, which describes national Zionist federations as umbrella organisations for Zionist bodies in each country.

The WZO has a direct role in Israeli settlement activity.

According to reports by Israeli advocacy organisation Peace Now, the Israeli government “finances and operates the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organisation”.

Established in 1971, the Settlement Division of the WZO has enabled Israel to “establish and develop settlements far from the public eye, using controversial means, with full funding from the state and without any oversight or control”.

Exhausted but victorious. Mary Kostakidis’ 2 year battle defending her right to free speech and political expression ended today with the case withdrawn at the federal court. From all of us at XD Mary, well done, get some rest…….hear from you soon! pic.twitter.com/HcLDahAZ59

— XD LAW (@XDlawyers) September 11, 2026

Ties to UIA and JNF
The ZFA’s constitution also commits the organisation to supporting the fundraising activities of the “National Funds”, defined as Keren Hayesod — United Israel Appeal and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael — Jewish National Fund.

The constitution states that one of the federation’s objects is “to support the fundraising activities of the National Funds”.

It also requires state Zionist councils to work with Keren Hayesod’s state directorates to ensure the “maximum success” of United Israel campaigns.

The constitution further states that, state Zionist councils must “stipulate that all its member Zionist Organisations commit their members to fulfilling their obligations towards the National Funds and stipulate that all members of its executive shall have an obligation to take part in the work of the National Funds”

Investigations by MWM have found that United Israel Appeal and the Jewish National Fund are among a number of Australian charities that are raising tax-deductible funds for programmes supporting the IDF and illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The federation has also publicly rejected international legal findings that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

It described a UN Commission of Inquiry report alleging Israel committed genocide in Gaza as “a baseless and biased assault on truth and justice”, and rejected the ICJ’s advisory opinion as “politically driven” and “deeply flawed”.

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.

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

This article is republished from Michael West Media with permission.

The New Zealand government has so far declined to join the United Kingdom and announce sanctions on goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The UK is one of 12 countries, including France and Canada, which have announced similar trade restrictions or an intention to do so. The goal is to rescue an eventual two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

The sanctions are in response to what UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians […] perpetrated by settler terrorists”, with the Israeli military “complicit” in those actions.

• READ MORE: Pioneer of Palestine protest in NZ warns against the IDF ‘obscenity’ becoming normalised
• Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine
• Other Israeli illegal settlements in Palestine reports

While condemning the increase in illegal settlements, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand “has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues”.

To do so would be complex and require a full policy process. We are not in a position to do that ahead of the election.

The official response to the UK initiative can be questioned on several grounds.

First, New Zealand has used trade measures in the past to address foreign policy issues, most notably against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Imports of gold, oil and gas are prohibited and there is a 35 percent tariff on all imported Russian goods.

Second, while New Zealand needs to adopt special legislation to impose sanctions outside the United Nations regime, the Russian Sanctions Act — passed in 2022 just three weeks after the invasion of Ukraine — shows it can be done swiftly.

The precise nature of the sanctions may be complex to implement, as the UK has acknowledged. But the intent comes first.

Third, the proximity of a general election should not prevent New Zealand complying with its obligations under international law — especially when the opposition Labour Party has indicated it strongly supports adopting sanctions.

Israeli settler colonialism, explained in 15 seconds https://t.co/WFNekm8uhK pic.twitter.com/j0xgONzYyy

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) September 15, 2026

Saving a two-state solution
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, dates from 1967 and was characterised as a “flagrant violation of international law” by the UN Security Council in 2016.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel’s actions amount to an illegal annexation of territory and are contrary to the prohibition on the use of force and the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Despite this, Israel has built around 160 settlements housing 700,000 people since 1967. In the past 18 months, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated more than 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers (with 20 Israelis killed by Palestinians in the same period), and more than 6000 Palestinians displaced.

In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a plan to construct 3000 settlement homes east of occupied East Jerusalem, known as the E1 settlement plan. This would split the West Bank and isolate East Jerusalem, which Palestine regards as its capital.

This is intentional. Smotrich has asserted the E1 settlement plan “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”. In August this year, Israel opened tenders for the construction of 1200 settlement homes, prompting the UK sanctions response.

These UK sanctions go further than the limited restrictions on arms exports to Israel introduced in 2024 (extended in 2026), targeted sanctions on individual settlers and Israeli ministers, and even the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state in 2025.

While trade more generally between Israel and the UK is unaffected, Israel has reacted furiously, closing the British consulate in Jerusalem (which operates as the de facto British Embassy in Palestine) and banning 12 British MPs from entering the country.

Israel in Panic: The Truth About UK Sanctions Revealed! @Lowkey0nline pic.twitter.com/61NhAACTh0

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) September 14, 2026

Support for a rules-based order
All states have an obligation under customary international law to cooperate to bring an end to serious breaches of certain fundamental rules, including the prohibition on the use of force, illegal occupation of territory, and the right of self-determination.

The International Court of Justice explicitly highlighted this obligation in its 2024 Advisory Opinion which stipulated that states must not recognise Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They must also “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” concerning the territories.

For New Zealand, joining trade (and other) sanctions adopted (or slated to be adopted) by 12 other countries would be an appropriate way to comply with this obligation.

Not doing so further risks undermining the international rules-based order on which New Zealand relies to protect its interests in trade, security and the environment — at a time when that order is under extraordinary strain.

New Zealand is already an outlier, given its refusal to join the 157 countries — including Australia and a majority of European countries — that have recognised Palestine as a state.

To join the UK and other nations sanctioning goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in no way denies the existence of Israel itself as a state.

But by adopting comparable sanctions, New Zealand would strengthen the global response to Israel’s illegal activities, demonstrate regional leadership, and reassert support for the international rules-based order more generally.

Karen Scott is a professor of international law at the University of Canterbury and has produced more than 70 edited books/journal articles and book chapters in the fields of international environmental law, law of the sea and Polar law. She was president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

ANALYSIS: By Ralph Nader

In his rambling and incoherent remarks for nearly two hours over two nights before a knee-jerk crowd in Dallas last week, Trump provided ample evidence that he is a dangerously unstable, delusional, egomaniacal, and megalomaniacal personality.

He pushed for this unusual midterm GOP convention to shore up his dwindling faithful followers and get out the votes in what is likely to be a losing midterm election for Republicans in the House and maybe the Senate on November 3, 2026.

That is, if Trump fails to steal the election, as a 22 single-spaced-page account published by the Washington Spectator documented in alarming detail (see Dancing in the Dark, Part 4 by Mark Medish and Joel McCleary).

• READ MORE:  US Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms
• ‘War on terror’: How 9/11 changed the language of conflict
• Other Palestine, Gaza reports

CNN reported that Trump brazenly urged his followers “to ‘cheat like hell’ to help Republicans keep control of Congress… and asked supporters to treat November’s elections as if he were on the ballot”.

Trump certainly lied like hell as he repeated again and again his standard lies about the Trump economy and the United States’ standing in the world.

He lied about the number of illegal aliens entering the US and the crimes they have committed during the Democratic administration.

He lied about “bringing food prices and almost every other item rapidly coming down,” … “no tax on Social Security,” “the US is producing more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined,” “sixty-five billion barrels [of oil] in Venezuela are ours,” “raking in trillions of dollars in tariffs” “making [America] richer than we ever thought,” “we now pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” labeled the Democrats “communists” when he extorted companies to give the federal government part ownership as he courts and praises two communist dictators — Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

Unfunded fake promises
Then there are the legally questionable and unfunded fake promises to give every adult $5000 if the GOP wins Congress in November.

He boasts of having the greatest military in the world as he approves the firing of seasoned, experienced generals and admirals who might question the sanity of his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who calls himself “a warrior of God in the service of Jesus Christ,” while running out of ammunition in the service of Israel’s mass murdering genocide of Gaza’s civilian children, mothers, and fathers.

Trump lied about named Democratic politicians and wildly praised Ken Paxton as the greatest state attorney-general in history. Paxton is a crook, having been impeached by his own party in the state House, but was acquitted by the Senate.

Conviction on any article required a two-thirds vote — 21 of the 30 eligible senators. Paxton escaped conviction by seven votes.

Trump viciously exaggerated Joe Biden’s physical mobility and mental condition and falsely claimed the Biden administration wrecked America in all ways. This is the same polite Joe Biden who transferred power in the White House on January 20, 2025, greeting Trump with “Welcome Home”.

Because Biden backed the same genocidal Netanyahu, Trump avoids accurately accusing Biden of aiding and abetting genocide. Tyrant Trump has continued providing powerful weapons and unconditional political backing.

Trump’s practice is to mix lavish praise for loyalists by name while assailing opponents with scurrilous libels, including two Senate Democratic candidates, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Abdul El-Sayed (typically mocking his last name) of Michigan.

Zig zag displays on Newsmax
On frantic zig zag displays at his podium, faithfully played on Newsmax — the very biased and often slanderous channel built for Trumpism — were vivid demonstrations of his megalomania and egomania.

Trump told the crowd on September 9, 2026, that “everybody loves me, and I love everybody.” The following evening, he asked supporters to raise their right hands and recite a pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” — a reference to himself.

Perhaps these are his greatest lies, as he wrecks the lives of the poor, federal civil servants, firefighters, scientists, the sick and injured who needed insurance and benefits, and key protective and nurturing programmes for children in both Red and Blue states and overseas in Africa and Asia.

For some reason needing psychiatric explanation, he hates and undermines wind power and solar energy, while embracing oil and gas, “clean, beautiful coal” to worsen global omnicidal warming.

With his polls plunging and his postings on his misnamed “Truth Social” further bolstering the assessment of his worsening mental stability by 30 credentialed mental health professionals — both Democrats and Republicans (see April 30, 2026 of Congressional Record), Trump is running out of words like “lunatics,” “fanatics,” and “maniacs” to tarnish his critics with descriptions that apply to his own zany, lying, corrupt, violent, treacherous, law-violating, vengeful, obsessive, reality-faking daily impeachable behaviors.

His endless self-naming mania went viral with his planting American flags on a map covering Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Iceland, Cuba and Jamaica.

The man, with his finger on the nuclear trigger, who calls violent climate intensities “a hoax” and scoffs at scientists’ warning of coming pandemics, is openly and proudly out of control.

It is time to fire Duplicitous Doubling-down Donald.

Ponder why the Democratic Party is befuddled without a coherent way of responding to “crazy Donald” or a coherent, authentic pledge to the American people about what they intend to do for and with them should they regain control of Congress and the Presidency.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012). His new book is, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All (2020, co-authored with Mark Green). Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

Two months out from New Zealand’s general election, and we have yet to see new policy from any of the seven main political parties on media and communication.

Only the Greens have a media policy on their website — and it is effectively a repeat of the 2023 policy that was heavy on high-minded rhetoric but very light on functional detail. No party has yet presented voters with practical initiatives that take account of the significant shifts in the media industry since the last election.

Admittedly, this is not the sort of policy that will sway voters, but manifestos are more than vote-grabbers. They represent commitments by each party to use their best endeavours during the coming Parliamentary term to give effect to what they say they will do in the interests of the public good.

• READ MORE: Other Gavin Ellis articles on media

Unless there is a sudden avalanche of media policy promises, the signal the parties are sending is that, in this area of public policy, they plan to do very little.

I do not believe our politicians are unaware of the precarious state of journalism in this country. They have been lobbied by every media organisation and left in no doubt that the cuts that have kept newsrooms in operation are not sustainable in even the medium term.

The have been warned we will see the loss of significant news publications and news broadcasts within the term of the next government unless there is a reset. The playing field needs to be levelled to overcome the pernicious effects of uncontrolled foreign digital players in our media market.

Those effects are not only financial. They include significant civic, social and cultural consequences. We have already suffered damage caused by years of political inaction and ineffectiveness, but believe me, worse will come unless significant change is forthcoming.

Comfortable with less scrutiny
One of my worries is that, irrespective of high-minded utterances about the importance of journalism to democracy, most politicians are comfortable with less scrutiny of their activities by journalists than with an enhanced ability to speak truth to power.

Too many politicians, and the functionaries who spread their messages, mistakenly believe that their responsibility to keeping the public informed is met by speaking directly to constituents through social media and email lists, and that news media are no longer needed.

They are mistaken because scrutiny is the missing element in that interpretation of their social contract. Scrutiny includes ferreting out those matters of public interest that politicians would prefer you do not see or hear.

There is also a prevailing view that commercial news media are creatures of the marketplace and should, like any other business, stand or fall on the basis of their ability to sell goods or services.

Under the model prevailing when they were created, that is a valid viewpoint. However, that model is broken and has been dysfunctional long enough for some parts of it to become almost irretrievable.

Some will say that is the nature of the marketplace — ever changing and requiring nimble business practices to keep pace. It is only to be expected that some businesses will fail because they do not (or cannot) adapt.

Again, that is a valid viewpoint. But it is one that does not recognise two things. The first is the civic and social roles that news media play in a society that requires diverse and independent sources of information to properly function. The second is the inequity of a marketplace in which foreign players can plunder content with impunity and avoid the taxes and regulations that burden domestic media.

Untouchable foreign players
Beyond the marketplace are the social harms that are undeniably caused by those apparently untouchable foreign players and the as-yet-unquantifiable effects of their use of artificial intelligence.

The present government’s introduction (not passage) of legislation to introduce an Australian model under-16 ban on social media appears to be a calculated pre-election move, rather than an earnest attempt to deal with the problem (see below).

That Bill may look as if we are catching up with other countries on media policy, but the reality is that we have been left far behind. Inaction and widespread political indifference could see an incoming government face a firestorm of compounding consequences.

There are eight areas that all political parties need to address. I would like to think they could reach consensus on most of them.

The first is to create an enforceable environment that will allow all news organisations to negotiate financial compensation from foreign digital platforms for the use of content. That use would include search and social media plus large language models and other artificial intelligence assets.

The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that has lain dormant in Parliament throughout the term of the present government should be resurrected, updated to bring its provisions in line with those of Australia, and extended to account for developments in artificial intelligence.

The second is to enforce the provisions of the OECD profit shifting framework to impose a tax on revenue that is currently moved offshore in the form of service payments. The resulting impost, which would be in addition to the money negotiated by news organisations, should be used to finance non-profit local and iwi news initiatives.

Sustaining local newsrooms
The third is the adoption of policies to help sustain local newsrooms. Two initiatives should be considered. Firstly, the State of California’s Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act which will provide refundable tax credits to local newsrooms for each journalist they employ.

Such measures could be used to help sustain local and iwi news outlets. The Californian legislation, which passed the Senate and Assembly by overwhelming majorities and is awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, extends eligibility to print, broadcast, digital, nonprofit, and independent family-owned news outlets. It is regarded as a blueprint for other states to follow.

Secondly, there is a British initiative that allows local authority rates relief on local news premises. The virtue of policies such as these is that they are effectively revenue neutral. Without the help, the newsrooms would not exist.

The fourth policy relates to public media. The amalgamation of Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand should be resurrected in light of TVNZ’s increasingly problematic advertising revenue base and the need to affect cost savings in both organisations.

The funding system for both organisations, together with Whakaata Māori and Iwi Radio, should be reviewed and consideration given to triennial funding.

The fifth policy should be a comprehensive review of the future of terrestrial broadcasting and the consequences of moves to digital-only delivery. Its deliberations should include possible disenfranchising of the elderly and poor; the impact on Māori broadcasting; the impact on TVNZ news services that could arise in a move to video streaming on demand; and the consequential uses of radio spectrum.

The sixth policy should be an urgent review of the harmful effects of social media that would include, but not be limited to, the effects on those under the age of 16. The proposed ban is based on that currently enacted in Australia, which has been been ineffective. Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, last month issued the results of a study that found that more than eight in 10 Australian under-16s are continuing to use social media despite the ban.

Platform operators as publishers
The review should consider deeming social media platform operators to be publishers (on the basis that their algorithms and AI tools manipulate content and determine audiences) and liable for infringements of law and regulation.

The seventh policy initiative should be a comprehensive review of media regulation and the development of an independent framework for complaint and adjudication. The review should embrace not only local media but also foreign-controlled digital platforms with New Zealand user bases over a certain size. Pending the adoption of findings from the review, existing regulatory bodies (state and industry-led) should remain in place.

Finally, any policies relating to artificial intelligence should make specific reference to news media, the integrity of news content, and intellectual property rights. It should include measures to limit the spread of disinformation, the verification and validation of legitimate news content produced by journalists, and the identification of AI-generated content.

Our political parties — and the public — need to understand the consequences of failing to deal effectively with what will become increasingly existential issues for journalism. Perhaps their starting point should be a general enquiry into the viability of New Zealand journalism and our media infrastructure, even if it tells them what some of us already know.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

The section 18C case Zionist Federation of Australia’s CEO Alon Cassuto brought against high profile Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis in the Federal Court has been discontinued with no order over costs.

There is no finding that Kostakidis breached Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. No apology has been ordered. No corrective notice will be published.

There was no judgment. What Mary Kostakidis got instead was a short consent order noting that the man who sued her had decided not to go on.

• READ MORE: Australian Zionists drop case against ‘truth’ journalist Mary Kostakidis
• Other Mary Kostakidis reports

The ZFA calls the matter “resolved”. Cassuto filed the case. Kostakidis spent two years preparing to fight it. Then Cassuto dropped it. The person who walked out of the courtroom was the one who chose to walk into it.

The complaint concerned two posts in which Kostakidis shared and commented on a speech by the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Cassuto said the material was “racially offensive”.

Mary denied endorsing anything and argued that a journalist has to be able to report what the people fighting a war are saying.

She is a former prime time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS over two decades. Her journalism spans geopolitical issues, democracy and press freedom.

Kostakidis told Michael West Media, “This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression.”

Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial.

Lawfare
Cassuto says he got what he wanted because Mary Kostakidis had already issued a qualified apology. He leaves out the timing. She made that apology before he went to the Federal Court.

He called it insincere and sued anyway. Two years on, he points to the same apology as his reason for stopping. That is a man looking for the exit.

Call it what it was. This was “lawfare”. The court process was the weapon, and the target was wider than one journalist.

Every editor and journalist with something to say about Israel was meant to be watching.

From the outside, each move looks separate. A complaint here. A referral there. A story in a friendly newspaper, then a writ. Put them side by side, and you see a structure built to make criticism of Israel expensive enough that most people decide it is not worth the trouble.

The letters are polite. The threat underneath is not. Legal bills keep arriving, and behind them the possibility of losing everything.

A case like this does not need to succeed to do its job. Once defending your own words puts your house at risk, the process is the punishment.

Defence won
Kostakidis’s defence put it plainly: the case was designed to discredit her and to frighten others into shutting up. “I have spent two years doing nothing but preparing my defence in a case aimed at silencing me,” she wrote.

For an ordinary Australian, she said, that could have meant losing their home.

Each new demand ate into her time and her savings. She could have gone quiet. Instead, she kept publishing and

kept her eyes on Gaza while most of the Australian media looked away.

Ordinary people chipped in to fund her defence. Her lawyers and her husband stayed beside her. But the name on the writ was hers, and so was the house. She did not fold.

The ZFA’s parting statement threw in fresh accusations and described her commentary as repugnant. None of it was ever tested. It reads less like the words of a winner than a door slammed on the way out.

The brutality and effectiveness of the Zionist cancelation of people’s livelihoods and opportunities for criticising the conduct of the State they worship. Their own conduct is responsible for their reputation. The response to the reputation: ‘Antisemitic tope!!!’ “Blood… https://t.co/u68vBi4Y9G

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 11, 2026

The moral high ground is Mary Kostakidis’s
There is a deeper problem for the lobby, and no writ will fix it. It is impossible to stand on a hill of infant bones and claim the moral high ground. The army of pedants and lawyers trying to trauma-clean the crime scene is doomed to fail. Resentment rises with every scrub.

Will the Zionist lobby ever learn?

Legal attack dogs bark loudly, and often that is all it takes. Then someone stands still and says, fine, put your evidence in front of a judge. The barking stops.

“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth, fearlessly, and to hold power to account,” Mary Kostakidis wrote, calling the outcome “a win for press freedom, which has prevailed”.

She also thanked Jewish and Israeli people who have opposed the destruction of Gaza, saying:

Our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism.

The determination to erase Palestinian voices.
‘We Never Paid Him a Dime’: Palestine Chronicle Editor, Lawyer Respond to Lawsuit over Slain Gaza Journalist – Palestine Chronicle https://t.co/DQs3sUGaYN

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 12, 2026

Standing with Jewish Australians
Mary Kostakidis did not beat Jewish Australians. She beat an organised lobby whose power rests on making criticism of Israel personally costly. A great many Jewish Australians stand with Palestinians and refuse to have their identity yoked to the conduct of a foreign government.

Small wins matter because of what they do to the next person. A journalist sees that someone survived and files the story. An activist feels less alone. Fear moves through a community quickly. So does nerve.

None of this makes Mary Kostakidis infallible. Heroism has never required that. It requires knowing the cost and standing there anyway.

Lawfare is a muzzle made of good manners. Mary Kostakidis has torn a hole in it.

Martin Luther King Jr once famously quoted 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”

It does not bend on its own. It bends because people like Mary Kostakidis lean their whole weight on it.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and a Palestine peace activist. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/11/pacific-islands-forum-leaders-in-koror-heavy-on-reaffirming-but-light-on-tasking/ Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:03:10 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133400

ANALYSIS: By Tess Newton Cain and Stefan Armbruster

With a Chinese ballistic missile test in July as prelude, the familiar China-Taiwan tensions and preparations for the Pacific pre-COP in October and COP31 the following month, the annual Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) returned to Palau last week for the first time in 12 years, and north of the equator for the first time since Pohnpei in 2016.

Preparations for the 55th PIFLM were still underway as delegates arrived in Koror. An expected 2000 people soon choked the town as motorcades shuttled VIPs between hotels and venues.

Attendance speculation dominated the early part of the week. The leaders of Fiji, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Samoa and Vanuatu were absent, and barely anyone mentioned that New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon, chair from 2027, only planned to attend the retreat.

• READ MORE: Pacific Islands Forum: Is Australia out of touch with the Pacific and climate?
• Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

Kiribati, close to Beijing, sent the Director of Foreign Service and former ambassador to China, David Teaabo, but he was not in the room for the retreat, where the missile response was thrashed out, and Kiribati was initially omitted from acknowledgements at the closing session, which Teaabo called “protocol-wise … not good”.

Matthew Wale, Prime Minister of Solomon Islands and outgoing PIF chair, added to the drama: met on arrival on the evening of Saturday, August 29, by journalists asking about a no-confidence motion lodged in Honiara that day, he flew home in the early hours of Sunday. (The motion was withdrawn on September 7.)

Invited back were the Forum’s 21 dialogue partners, excluded from last year’s meeting in Honiara over China-Taiwan tensions, along with the sole “development partner”, Taiwan. At the opening ceremony, China’s envoy Qian Bo and Taiwan’s foreign minister Lin Chia-lung were seated in the same room.

The week culminated in the communiqué, 76 paragraphs under headings tracking the thematic areas of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Leaders endorsed “revised Communiqué drafting procedures”, but the document is increasingly flabby and lacks forward momentum: “reaffirmed” appears 38 times and “endorsed” 20; “agreed” 14 times, twice only in principle; “tasked” once.

‘Partnership streams’
Leaders agreed on the placement of partners in the two “partnership streams” created by last year’s Leaders Policy on Partnerships, the communiqué’s only words on the subject. As the Secretariat explains it, Tier 1 “strategic partners” keep leader-level access, while Tier 2 “sectoral partners” engage only at ministerial level on specific issues, with placements reviewed after a year.

Secretary General Baron Waqa will now write to the countries concerned. The communiqué does not name them, but the ABC and SBS report that the 13 strategic partners are China, the United States, Japan, France, India, Indonesia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Singapore, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

That leaves in the second stream Türkiye, the host of COP31, and Thailand, whose prime minister is coming to the pre-COP, and six others. Their reactions will be watched closely.

The Belau Declaration for Urgent and Inclusive Climate Action to Keep 1.5°C Within Reach was issued the day after a sobering UNEP report confirmed that the target will be overshot, as the declaration itself concedes.

It restates the Pacific position more strongly for the pre-COP and COP31 but sets out no pathway for returning the issue to centre stage globally; that job is deferred to the leaders’ meeting in Tuvalu that sits alongside the pre-COP proper, which Fiji co-hosts.

After Australia failed to secure a Pacific COP31, the consolation prize of a pre-meeting had been sold as a chance for world leaders to see Pacific climate impacts firsthand.

Fiji’s foreign minister, Sakiasi Ditoka, revealed that the leaders of Antigua and Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Thailand, Maldives and Timor-Leste would come, along with a handful of ministers. Leaders do not usually attend pre-COPs, but the media presented the low turnout as a major embarrassment.

Australian sticking point
For some, Australia’s own contribution remains the sticking point. Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister, Ralph Regenvanu, was typically forthright, telling the media that Australia was “not doing enough” and must end fossil fuel expansion.

He spoke on the day Australia’s new environmental regulator approved an extension of the BHP Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji coal mine to 2055, its first coal approval since it began operating on July 1, and by the Climate Council’s count the 37th fossil fuel project approved since Labor took office in 2022.

The Chinese missile, fired from a submarine, crossed the exclusive economic zones of several Forum members, including the Federated States of Micronesia, Naoero (formerly Nauru) and Kiribati, before coming down near the Kiribati-Tuvalu boundary.

Leaders “registered concern” and called for at least 24 hours’ notice of future tests from all states, presumably including the United States, though neither China nor the US is named.

But with Kiribati absent from the retreat and Naoero’s President, David Adeang, dissociating his country from the paragraph in a footnote, the consensus was undermined. Naoero, which switched recognition to Beijing in 2024, was the sole formal dissenter among the 18 members.

There was some movement on West Papua. Prodded by the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), the PIF agreed to facilitate a dialogue with Indonesia and a mission of “interested Leaders”, destination unstated, in consultation with the MSG Secretariat, reporting back in 2027.

The Forum’s envoys, appointed in 2023, Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and PNG’s James Marape, are to press Indonesia on the long-sought visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the invitation for which was originally extended by Indonesia in 2018 but still not granted.

Indonesia may face ‘review’
The MSG wants the visit by 31 December 2026, when Indonesia’s presidency of the UN Human Rights Council ends, or it will review Indonesia’s associate member status at its 2027 summit.

Leaders also approved terms of reference for a Renewable Energy Commissioner, first agreed in 2023, to sit within the Pacific Community (SPC) with dual reporting to SPC and the Forum Secretariat, funded by an initial A$1.89 million from Australia. Once appointed, the commissioner is to advocate for investment in renewables and coordinate the push towards 100 percent renewables, cutting dependence on imported diesel.

AI and digital sovereignty formally joined the regional agenda with the endorsement of the Pacific Digital and Artificial Intelligence Technology Principles, “the Pacific’s first collective regional position on artificial intelligence”, which will inform a governance framework in 2027.

The Pacific Pact on Gender and Climate Action is also new, committing governments to strengthen women’s representation in climate delegations, ministerial portfolios and governance bodies. Asked at the final press conference how that would happen with only one female leader among the Forum’s 18 members (Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine), after some confused looks, PIF chair Surangel Whipps said Palau was traditionally a matrilineal society where the women “decide who’s chief“, and predicted that “a new woman president is not far away”. (When Whipps invoked the influence of leaders’ wives, Luxon said, “That’s not the same, mate”.)

The closing press conference also exposed issues yet to reach the leaders’ agenda, none of them in the communiqué: a growing HIV crisis, which civil society groups complained was left off the health agenda; the future of Bougainville as it moves towards independence from Papua New Guinea; and the ambitions of Guam and American Samoa, associate members since 2024, for full membership despite their status as US territories.

The next PIFLM will be held in New Zealand in 2027, and the one after that in Naoero, the missile-testing dissenter, followed by Marshall Islands in 2029, Vanuatu in 2030 and French Polynesia in 2031.

Whether the intervening 12 months produce action on the commitments made in Koror, or another communiqué heavy on reaffirming and light on tasking, remains to be seen.

Dr Tess Newton Cain is an Associate of the Development Policy Centre and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. Stefan Armbruster is an award-winning journalist with 30+ years experience covering Australia and the Pacific. Formerly head of news (Pacific) at RFA/BenarNews and SBS correspondent; previously with BBC, ABC, Dow Jones and CNBC. This article is republished from ANU’s Development Policy Blog under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/maori-delegations-israel-trip-under-scrutiny-over-funding-and-itinerary/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:19:14 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133351 Te Ao Māori News

A delegation of Māori leaders visiting Israel under the banner of “business and innovation” faces public criticism over its timing and purpose, while questions remain about how the trip was organised and the full extent of its funding, itinerary and engagement with Palestinian organisations.

The visit comes as New Zealand criticises the Israeli government’s actions in the occupied West Bank but stops short of joining international moves to ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements.

Northland Regional Council chair Pita Tipene is among those who have visited Israel in recent days. The trip is taking place against the backdrop of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, escalating Israeli settlement activity and settler violence in the West Bank.

• READ MORE:  Labour would prioritise recognition of Palestine, sanctions on Israel
• Peters’ ‘hot air’ over Israeli settlement trade ban rules out of step with world
• Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative claims deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to evade settler-colonial characterization — Arama Rata
• Other Gaza reports

In September 2025, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has rejected that finding.

Former delegate says Israeli ministry funded the visit
Te Ao Māori News understands prospective delegation members were told the visit would focus on “business and innovation”.

Riki Manarangi, who travelled to Israel as part of a Māori delegation in November 2025, said he heard “through the grapevine” that another delegation was planned for 2026 and volunteered to recommend potential participants.

“I wasn’t formally approached or asked to organise anything,” he said.

“I reached out to a few people I thought would be a good fit and asked if they’d be keen to be considered. Some went, and some declined.”

Manarangi said he approached several people he believed would suit the delegation’s business and innovation focus but was not responsible for deciding who would participate.

He said Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs organised and funded the visit.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs over there are the ones who organise and fund it,” he said. “They cover basics … transport, accommodation, and kai.”

Asked who helped coordinate the current visit, Manarangi described Yifat Goddard as “like the programme lead” and said she was unpaid.

Goddard, an Israeli-New Zealander, also proposed the November 2025 Māori delegation that Manarangi joined, according to an account published by the “Indigenous Embassy” Jerusalem. Te Ao Māori News has asked Goddard for comment and has not yet received a response.

The Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem said it had no involvement in the current delegation and had not been approached to help organise, recruit for, fund or facilitate it. It said it learned of the visit second-hand and through social media.

MFAT notified after delegation was underway
New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it had no involvement in the visit.

“The Israeli government advised MFAT it was hosting the group once the visit was underway,” a spokesperson said.

MFAT did not say which arm of the Israeli government contacted it, what “hosting” involved or whether it was given information about the delegation’s funding.

Te Ao Māori News has requested further information under the Official Information Act, including correspondence about the visit and details of when and how MFAT was notified.

The Israeli Embassy’s initial response did not confirm who initiated or funded the delegation, what costs the Israeli government covered or how participants were selected.

It also did not identify which Israeli government officials or organisations the group was meeting or say whether the itinerary included engagement with Palestinians or Palestinian organisations.

Instead, the Embassy said it was pleased delegates had been able to visit Israel and “see the country for themselves, rather than relying solely on the picture presented through the media”.

It said delegations travelled throughout Israel, met Jewish, Arab, Druze and Bedouin Israelis, and were free to hear a range of views.

“Israel is a democratic country. Visitors are free to ask the questions they wish, to say whatever they want, and to make up their own minds,” it said.

Te Ao Māori News has since asked the Embassy to confirm Manarangi’s account, including Goddard’s role, whether international flights were covered and which Israeli government body administered the funding. It has not yet responded to that follow-up.

The New Zealand Israel Innovation Hub declined to confirm whether it was involved in the current visit.

It described the delegation as a “tremendous success”, saying that the assessment was based on social media posts and second-hand feedback. The hub said the visit had inspired plans for three Māori Innovation and Technology Delegations in 2027.

The first would focus on Northland Māori communities and educational outcomes. The hub also invited a representative from Whakaata Māori to consider joining one of its future delegations.

Pita Tipene says he will respond after returning to Aotearoa
Tipene declined an interview while overseas, saying he had received requests from several media organisations.

“I’ve responded by saying that I’ll speak my truth when I set foot home,” he told Te Ao Māori News.

Tipene has, however, responded publicly to criticism of his presence in Israel.

“It’s horrible and gut-wrenching, and it must stop!” he wrote.

“I am not pro-Israel — I am pro-peace and humanity, as the killing and destruction is happening across national boundaries here in Gaza and in other nations.

“I’m not here to judge, but I’m not immune to the gravity of what’s happening here either.”

Northland Regional Council said it had no involvement in the visit.

Chief executive Jonathan Gibbard said Tipene was travelling in a personal, non-council capacity and the council had not funded, organised or endorsed the trip.

Gibbard said the travel was not related to council business.

Other current delegates approached by Te Ao Māori News have not responded to requests for comment.

An invitation some Māori leaders declined
Some invited Māori leaders declined to participate. Te Ao Māori News understands concerns were raised during planning about the trip’s funding, its political context and whether delegates would have opportunities to hear directly from Palestinian communities.

Manarangi said prospective delegates who raised concerns were offered meetings with representatives of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and encouraged to participate. He said nobody was excluded because of concerns about Israel or Palestine, and those who did not travel had chosen to withdraw.

“There are plenty of people over there who are openly critical of the Israeli government, no different to here in Aotearoa; that’s just what living in a democracy looks like,” Manarangi said.

Te Ao Māori News continues to seek responses from others involved in facilitating the visit.

NZ condemns settlement expansion but does not join import-ban push

Questions about the delegation come as the United Kingdom, France and Canada move to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The three countries were among 12 that issued a joint statement warning that unprecedented settlement expansion and settler violence were rapidly undermining the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Israel responded with retaliatory measures against the UK, including ordering the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem, which serves Palestinians.

New Zealand did not sign the statement and said it was not in a position to introduce an import ban before the election.

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters issued a “standalone” statement on Wednesday saying New Zealand was “deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in the West Bank”.

“There has been a marked escalation in Israel’s actions, jeopardising the prospect of a durable peace,” Peters said.

“Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are a violation of international law. Expanding settlements undermines prospects for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict.”

“New Zealand strongly opposes actions that advance annexation or threaten the forcible displacement of Palestinians,” he said.

“Such measures are incompatible with international law and risk perpetuating the cycle of violence and insecurity.”

A spokesperson for Peters said New Zealand had not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign-policy issues. Introducing an import ban would require a full policy process that could not be completed before the election.

New Zealand had previously imposed travel bans on 38 people over extremist settlement activity, including two Israeli ministers, with the latest three bans announced in June.

New Zealand had earlier joined an international statement specifically opposing the Israeli Government’s E1 settlement plan, warning it would divide the West Bank and further undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.

Israel faces international legal scrutiny over Gaza conduct
Israel’s conduct in Gaza is also under scrutiny before two international courts.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

The ICC found reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.

The warrants are not findings of guilt, and neither man has been tried or convicted by the ICC. Israel has rejected the court’s jurisdiction and denies the allegations against Netanyahu and Gallant.

Separately, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel remains before the International Court of Justice. The court has not issued a final judgment determining whether Israel committed genocide.

The full funding arrangements, selection process and itinerary for the current delegation remain unconfirmed. It is also unclear how the proposed 2027 delegations would be funded, structured or opened to participants.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/pacific-islands-forum-is-australia-out-of-touch-with-the-pacific-and-climate/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:21:06 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133339 ANALYSIS: By Teuila Fuatai of RNZ Pacific

On the second day of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Palau, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked about the potential participation of Torres Strait Islanders in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — one of the forum’s three sub-regional groups.

Albanese, alongside his ministers Chris Bowen and Pat Conroy, was holding a press conference at the leaders’ meeting venue in Koror. Bowen holds the climate portfolio while Conroy is Australia’s Minister for Pacific Island affairs.

Conroy responded on behalf of his prime minister.

• READ MORE: West Papua: The Pacific’s new test of Indonesia’s sovereignty narrative
  
• The Pacific’s cocaine highway: will Australia’s $600m deal really help?
• Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

“I was honoured to be the first Australian minister to attend a Melanesian Spearhead Group as an observer in Fiji [in June 2025],” Conroy began.

“Obviously, there’s a process that is going through where the Melanesian Spearhead Group consider whether Australia would be an observer at the MSG. We’re obviously keen to make that happen because we see value in having the people of Australia as an observer through the Australian government at the Melanesian Spearhead Group.”

No mention of the people of Torres Strait Island was made, even after the reporter attempted a follow-up question.

The MSG, which as a starting point acknowledges Torres Strait Islanders as part of its Melanesian family, holds a different view.

The group’s newly appointed Director-General Dr Anna Naupa, speaking to reporters the previous day, said the MSG’s preference was for Australia to include its Melanesian communities, like Torres Strait Islanders, when engaging with it.

“Because of our attention to our Indigenous Melanesian peoples, very much that is the preference, is that we bring and we connect our communities with each other,” Dr Naupa said.

It is a difference in outlook that reflects some of the wider challenges to Australia’s engagement in the Pacific region.

Sometimes the subtleties and nuances of regional politics can be lost or completely dismissed by the Australians.

Climate contradictions
Other times it feels like Australia does not fully appreciate — outwardly at least — how closely watched it is by smaller Pacific nations.

For example, one of the major developments at the leaders’ meeting was the release of a report from the UN Environment Programme, which stated that overshooting the Paris Climate Accord goal of 1.5C was now unavoidable.

It came a day after Albanese’s government supported the opening of a new fracking project in the Northern Territory.

It was also confirmed during the week that Albanese’s government had approved the expansion of an open-cut coal mine in Queensland.

Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu, fresh from a climate media briefing on the UN report release, pointed the finger squarely at the Forum’s largest member in Koror.

“Australia is a great partner for the Pacific in helping adaptation and renewable energy pathways, and that’s all good,” he said.

“But as I said … in the press conference, fossil fuels remain the primary driver [of rising temperatures]. And if you expand fossil fuels, you’re not recognising the declaration you signed up to yourself, which is Boe, which says it’s the greatest single threat to the peoples of the Pacific.

“So that is a contradiction that Australia needs to find a way out of,” Regenvanu said.

Climate featured heavily
Similar to previous years, climate change featured heavily in the leaders’ meeting communique this year.

Leaders signed off on the Belau declaration for urgent and inclusive climate action to keep 1.5C within reach through it. As part of that, the Boe Declaration was recalled.

Leaders also reaffirmed that “climate change remains the single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods, wellbeing and future of the peoples of the Pacific”.

For his part, Albanese did not miss a beat when questioned about whether his government’s commitment to the climate crisis was geniune.

“We all need to do more,” he told reporters.

He also made the point that Pacific leaders understood Australia’s current reliance on fossil fuels and “have respect for the position that we’ve taken” — directly contradicting Regenvanu’s words.

“They also understand with the transition [away from fossil fuels] — because they’re dealing with it as well — that the transition can’t happen overnight, that it requires strategies and policies to be put in place,” Albanese said.

It’s not new for countries in the Pacific to have different outlooks — but when it comes to these regional big issues, there’s a gap between the Australian view and those of the Pacific islands that may suggest a lack of understanding of the latter by the former.

Security arrangements
In regard to traditional security, Australia’s been building an array of treaties and bilateral agreements with different partners across the region over several years and particularly in recent months.

These include the Ocean of Peace Alliance or Veitacini Treaty with Fiji, which other parties may eventually join, the Nakamal agreement with Vanuatu, the Pukpuk treaty with Papua New Guinea, the Nauru-Australia Treaty and the Falepili Union with Tuvalu.

Despite that, it will likely have come away from this year’s forum feeling slightly short-changed because there were signs of a handbrake being applied on this security stuff, amid concerns from Pacific islanders about where it’s all heading, and how quickly it’s going that way.

As part of the Forum’s peace and security agenda, the Joint Heads of Pacific Security (JHOPS) which is headquartered at Australia’s Department of Defence, has been tabled under the review of the regional architecture.

The JHOPS brings together the heads of police, military, customs and immigration agencies from across the region. Japan and the US are observers.

Civil society group Pacific Action Network on Globalisation (PANG) has raised serious concerns about the insertion of JHOPS and a regional deployment framework into the forum-led security architecture.

Its main concern is the lack of scrutiny over the process, and the potential legal structures that may result which lock Pacific nations into security arrangements they hadn’t foreseen or agreed to.

Further consultation needed
In Koror, PANG along with the Pacific Regional NGO Organisations Alliance was represented by Joey Tau.

He told RNZ Pacific he was pleased leaders had only agreed in principle to recognise JHOPS as part of the Forum-led security architecture, noting in the communique that further consultation would be needed.

Similarly, the Waqa Moana maritime security initiative targeting illicit drug trafficking, backed heavily by Australia, was only agreed to in principle by leaders, with the overall decision seeking more consultation.

To add to that, the proposal from the Solomon Islands for a regional security treaty, which Australia’s said it was open to, has been kicked down the road. Leaders chose to note the proposal and acknowledged further consultation among members.

Overall, as Tau, pointed out, there are still major questions over the direction of the reform of the forum’s regional architecture, and the processes and people guiding it.

“We’re in a state where, not only external parties, but member states who are part of the whole architecture are driving security agreements, compacts, initiatives, without proper consultation,” he said.

For Australia, which has steadily increased its activity and engagement in the region, particularly around security, it may be questioning where exactly the speedbumps emerged at last week’s Forum leaders’ summit.

The resourcing it brings will always afford it a seat at the table, and there is no doubt its investment in the Pacific in areas such as sport, particularly rugby league has gone down well.

But understanding how to discuss contentious issues and negotiate in Pacific circles are not skills that come automatically with “big ticket” agreements and promises — they are honed through relationships, experience and being in the room.

Time in the region will also let you know that more often than not, decisions turn on a dime, as the absence of several leaders from the forum showed last week. It’s all part and parcel of politics in the Pacific region.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/a-landmark-un-report-says-the-world-will-overshoot-the-1-5c-climate-target-what-happens-now/ Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:42:53 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133236 ANALYSIS: By Jacqueline Peel and Wesley Morgan

For more than a decade, the world has been trying to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

That’s no longer possible, according to a new United Nations report. We will likely pass 1.5°C in 2030. That’s not good news for anyone, least of all Australia and New Zealand’s Pacific Island neighbours who face rapidly rising seas.

In response to the report, Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr said:

It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement […] calls for greater ambition are no longer enough — we need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate safe future

READ MORE:

The small silver lining is that it’s still possible for this to be a temporary overshoot of the target. If nations redouble their efforts to phase out fossil fuels and reduce other sources of emissions, they could limit peak warming to 1.8°C and then use carbon removal methods to bring temperatures back to 1.5°C or below this century.

In 2026, the world is already about 1.4°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, and the damage and death toll from climate-boosted disasters is ramping up.

The United Kingdom is warning of possible food shortages amid a historic drought. Wildfires hit new areas in France and Spain, while glaciers are melting rapidly and the oceans are at their hottest level on record. The enormous El Niño event emerging in the Pacific is likely to bring major disruption.

Every fraction of a degree makes things worse.

There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C. Urgent cuts to emissions and efforts to protect the most vulnerable are our best remaining options. Failure to do so risks irreversible harm.

Why does 1.5°C matter so much?
The 2015 Paris Agreement established a shared goal for the world: keep the rise in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels “well below” 2°C and “pursue efforts” to hold warming to 1.5°C.

This goal was set based on expert scientific assessments that warming of more than 2°C would be dangerous and that limiting warming to 1.5°C was necessary to minimise climate risks.

Pacific nations fought hard to include 1.5°C in the agreement, arguing it was essential for their communities to “stay alive” in the face of rising sea levels and other climate-fuelled threats.

Last year, the world’s top court — the International Court of Justice — ruled that 1.5°C is the primary temperature limit nations have committed to work towards.

This ruling means that if governments fail to act as ambitiously as they can, they could be sued in international courts.

In May this year, a majority of nations voted in the UN General Assembly to endorse the court’s ruling and urge action to keep to 1.5°C.

It’s not time to give up
Warming of 1.5°C will be bad. But 1.6°C will be worse, and 1.7°C worse again. Every increase will bring more extreme weather, more loss of nature, more loss of land to the sea and more harm to humans.

If we stay over 1.5°C, we risk triggering climate tipping points — sudden shifts which cannot be undone on human timescales. These include the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting, the collapse of crucial heat-distributing currents in the Atlantic Ocean or the Amazon rainforest becoming a source of emissions.

Overshooting 1.5°C doesn’t mean it’s time to throw out the Paris Agreement. It is not working fast enough, but it is working.

Solar power and electric vehicles have boomed and electrification has accelerated. Nations have cut emissions enough to avoid the worst climate futures of a 3°C rise or even higher.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, the Paris Agreement has averted the equivalent of 1°C of warming. Rather than hitting 3.6°C by 2100, the world is on track for 2.6°C.

While this is progress, it is not enough. Global emissions are plateauing, but have still not begun to fall in earnest.

As damage from climate change mounts, leaders must do the work and begin rapidly cutting emissions to keep the goal of net-zero by 2050 alive.

To get temperatures back under 1.5°C, we will also need to pull gigatonnes of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere using tree planting and nature restoration. We may also need technological approaches such as rock weathering or ocean alkalinity enhancement, though these are not proven at scale and can come with other risks.

We are all in this together
It may seem as if climate action faces impossible headwinds, as populism surges and the current United States administration doubles down on fossil fuels.

It is worth looking beyond these headlines. It took almost 70 years for the world to install a terawatt of solar power, but then just two years for the second and another two for the third terawatt. In ten years, that figure will likely have tripled. Developing nations are moving rapidly to take up non-polluting electric transport.

Climate change can no longer be ignored. As damage mounts, nations will have to cooperate to cut emissions as rapidly as possible and figure out how to safely and equitably pull carbon back out of the atmosphere.

Action depends on strong political will, inclusive governance, and finance to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt.

In November, Australia will lead negotiations at the next international climate summit, COP31, in Turkey. Leaders and diplomats will work to keep 1.5°C in reach — even after overshoot. Australia can point to its own rapid clean energy transition and urge others to set clear pathways to go electric — and wean themselves off the production and use of fossil fuels.

Climate change has been described as a super wicked problem — big, complex and impossible to solve simply. The solution is to see the urgency of the issue and act cooperatively to tackle it.

If we make it a problem for the next generation, there may be no way back to a safe climate.

Dr Jacqueline Peel is professor of law, The University of Melbourne; Dr Wesley Morgan is research associate, Institute for Climate Risk and Response, University of New South Wales. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/07/west-papua-the-pacifics-new-test-of-indonesias-sovereignty-narrative/ Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:40:10 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133151 ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

The 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Meeting in Koror, Palau, last week has pushed West Papua back to the centre of Pacific diplomacy.

At an Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) caucus held on the margins of the Forum, leaders reaffirmed their longstanding call for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to visit the West Papuan provinces.

They urged Jakarta to facilitate the visit before 31 December 2026, the end of Indonesia’s term as president of the UN Human Rights Council.

• READ MORE: UN human rights commissioner visit to West Papua on track, says Indonesia
• Other West Papua reports

Crucially, the MSG said that if the requested steps were not undertaken, Indonesia’s associate member status would be reviewed at the 2027 MSG Summit.

The question is whether Jakarta is willing to allow independent international observers to see, hear, and assess conditions in West Papua?

Sovereignty cannot be the end of the conversation
For decades, Indonesia has relied heavily on sovereignty and territorial integrity when responding to international criticism of West Papua.

Jakarta maintains that Papua is an integral part of Indonesia and that its political status was settled through the international arrangements culminating in the 1969 Act of Free Choice.

From this perspective, calls for international intervention can be portrayed as challenges to Indonesia’s territorial integrity and interference in its domestic affairs.

But sovereignty and accountability are not mutually exclusive. Recognition of territorial sovereignty does not eliminate a state’s responsibility for human rights. Nor does it prevent international organisations from seeking access to investigate allegations of abuses.

The unresolved legacy of 1969
Indonesia’s sovereignty argument also rests heavily on history. Under the 1962 New York Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands, administration of West New Guinea was temporarily transferred to the United Nations before being transferred to Indonesia.

The agreement envisaged an act of self-determination before the end of 1969.

Rather than a territory-wide referendum involving universal and direct participation by the adult population, the process involved representative councils. UN records state that 1026 members of the enlarged representative councils were asked to express the population’s choice, and all chose continued association with Indonesia.

The UN General Assembly subsequently adopted Resolution 2504, taking note of the Secretary-General’s report and the agreement concerning West New Guinea.

The dispute, therefore, is not whether the 1969 process occurred. It clearly did. The deeper question is whether it represented a genuinely free expression of the political will of West Papuans.

This historical disagreement remains politically powerful because the competing narratives have never been reconciled.

For Jakarta, 1969 closed the question of sovereignty. For many West Papuans, it remains evidence that their political aspirations were never freely tested.

But contemporary Pacific diplomacy should not become trapped entirely in this historical dispute. Even if one accepts Indonesia’s present sovereignty over Papua, contemporary human rights questions remain legitimate.

Indonesia’s anti-colonial rhetoric
There is also an uncomfortable contradiction in Indonesia’s international rhetoric.

Indonesia has historically presented itself as an anti-colonial state and a supporter of the principle that peoples should be free from colonial domination.

At the UN Pacific Regional Seminar on Decolonisation in Bali in 2023, then-Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi stated that “independence is the inalienable right of all nations” and argued that colonialism must be abolished.

Indonesia’s response is that West Papua is not a colonial territory and that its political status was settled through an internationally recognised process.

That is a legitimate position for Indonesia to defend. But the political question remains: if self-determination is a universal principle, how should it be applied when Indigenous Papuans continue to challenge the political circumstances under which integration occurred?

Jakarta’s ‘right path’ needs a destination
Indonesia has responded by insisting that the proposed UN visit is progressing and is “on the right path.” Yet the phrase raises more questions than it answers.

What does “the right path” actually mean?

When will the visit occur?

Will UN officials have freedom of movement?

Will they be able to speak privately with Indigenous communities?

Will they meet civil-society organisations, church leaders, victims, local officials and political representatives?

Will they be able to visit areas affected by military operations and displacement?

And will their findings be published without political interference?

These are not unreasonable demands. They are the minimum conditions necessary for an assessment to have credibility.

If Jakarta is confident that conditions in Papua have improved, an independent UN assessment could actually strengthen Indonesia’s position.

Transparency is not necessarily a threat to sovereignty. In fact, it can reinforce legitimacy.

Why the MSG decision matters
The MSG is uniquely placed in this debate because West Papua is not merely a distant foreign policy issue for Melanesian governments.

West Papuans are Indigenous Melanesians, and the MSG was established to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation among Melanesian peoples.

Indonesia’s associate membership has therefore always contained a political tension.

Jakarta seeks recognition and legitimacy within an organisation representing Melanesian interests, while some MSG members continue to raise concerns about the rights and welfare of Indigenous Melanesians inside Indonesia.

The organisation has not abandoned dialogue. Fiji has made clear that engagement with Jakarta remains necessary. But dialogue without measurable outcomes risks becoming a diplomatic holding pattern.

The proposed OHCHR visit provides a practical benchmark. The MSG has effectively placed a deadline on the issue. That changes the diplomatic calculation. Jakarta is no longer responding only to general statements of concern; it is responding to a specific request accompanied by a potential institutional consequence.

The Pacific is testing itself
Pacific governments increasingly speak of a regional order grounded in Indigenous rights, human security, climate justice and self-determination. They insist that Pacific priorities should not simply be dictated by larger external powers.

West Papua therefore presents a difficult consistency test. At the same time, Pacific diplomacy must avoid reducing every disagreement with Indonesia to a confrontation over sovereignty. Indonesia is too important to the region for that approach to be strategically sustainable.

The better approach is precisely what the MSG appears to be attempting: engagement combined with accountability.

A new phase in the West Papua debate
The significance of Koror is therefore not that the Pacific has suddenly endorsed West Papuan independence. Nor has the MSG decided to remove Indonesia. What has changed is the political language.

The debate is shifting from the binary question of “Indonesia or independence” towards the more immediate question of “sovereignty and accountability”.

That shift creates political space for Pacific governments to demand transparency without having to settle the final status question first. It also places greater responsibility on Jakarta.

Indonesia has spent decades defending its sovereignty over West Papua. It now has an opportunity to demonstrate that sovereignty is compatible with transparency.

The coming months will determine whether the Koror decision becomes another diplomatic statement or a genuine turning point.

For West Papuans, this is not merely a diplomatic dispute. It concerns whether their experiences can be independently heard and investigated.

For the MSG, it is a test of whether Melanesian solidarity has practical meaning.

For the Pacific Islands Forum, it is a test of whether its principles apply consistently.

For Indonesia, it is a test of whether sovereignty can coexist with scrutiny.

And for the United Nations, it is a test of whether international human rights mechanisms can gain meaningful access to one of the Pacific’s most enduring political disputes.

Indonesia’s sovereignty may be internationally recognised, but sovereignty should never become a shield against legitimate human rights scrutiny.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star Mountains region of Papua New Guinea. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/07/student-newspaper-wins-lawsuit-against-trumps-crackdown-on-pro-palestine-speech/ Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:30:39 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133164 Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge has ruled the Trump administration has violated the constitutional rights of international students in seeking to deport them for their pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel.

In her ruling, US District Judge Noël Wise wrote, “In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticise the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength. That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation.”

The lawsuit was filed by The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper at Stanford University, which claimed some of its writers on student visas declined to cover pro-Palestinian protests or report on topics related to Israel, fearing deportation.

Student journalists also requested their published articles on such topics be removed from the paper’s website.

The case raises broader questions about the climate of fear and political repression facing international students during the Trump administration. One of the most striking examples is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University.

Last year, masked plainclothes immigration agents snatched Öztürk off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. A year earlier, she had co-written an opinion piece for the Tufts student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, critical of the university’s response to campus protests over Gaza and the school’s failure to uphold student Senate resolutions on Palestine.

Tufts University later stated the op-ed did not violate university policy, that no complaints had been filed about it, and that Rümeysa Öztürk had been in good academic and immigration standing.

Nonetheless, her student visa was canceled, and she spent more than six weeks in an ICE jail in Louisiana. An immigration court eventually ruled in Rümeysa’s favor, saying the government failed to meet its burden of proof to deport her.

However, the message from the Trump administration to international students across the nation remained clear: Their ordinarily protected free political expression could now potentially cost them their immigration status and their freedom.

Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests who successfully challenged the Trump administration in court. Here in New York City, George Porteous is with us, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. And in Moorestown, New Jersey, Will Creeley, legal director of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented The Stanford Daily in court.

George and Will, we welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with you, George Porteous. You are a rising senior —

GEORGE PORTEOUS: Senior, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — at Stanford. You’re the editor-in-chief of the paper. Talk about why you brought this suit. What were the student reporters saying to you, the international students?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: Thank you for having me.

And what we were hearing from the noncitizens in our newsroom and from noncitizens across campus — current students, former students, alumni — was that they were genuinely frightened because of what they saw in the headlines, what they saw happen to Rümeysa Öztürk.

They were understandably frightened that if they reported the news, even if they weren’t writing an op-ed, even if they were just covering a protest or a vigil, if they put their name on a byline, they were frightened that they were going to lose their visa.

And so, what we said is, we can’t function as a newspaper if we don’t have these voices included in our newspaper. So, we filed suit, and last week the judge gave us a favorable ruling.

Stanford Daily student press wins free speech lawsuit.    Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, George, what was the initial response of the Stanford administration to your lawsuit? Did they — did they support your efforts?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: You know, the administration has remained relatively silent about this suit. We still haven’t heard any response from them since this decision. And we’re an independent organisation, so this was a suit filed by The Stanford Daily on our own, independently. And that’s really why we were in this case, not really because of the university.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what has this all taught you in terms of the ability of folks to stand up and defend the First Amendment?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: Well, I think what it’s shown me is that it really has to begin locally, because we were dealing with a problem inside of our newsroom with our peers, and this was about solidarity, and also just the practical need to continue doing our jobs and to continue reporting the news.

So, it’s shown me that it really does begin with everyday people. It begins with students, too. Students, I think, have enormous power to stand up to what this administration has done in terms of civil liberties and constitutional rights. And we have real power, is what this ruling has shown us.

AMY GOODMAN: And are other students who have previously said they’re not going to cover a protest — are they willing to now? Has this made a difference, changed the climate in your newsroom?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: You know, it’s still, I think, too early to see. But I’m hopeful that this ruling, because it’s a very strong legal precedent, will carve out more room for noncitizens to feel that they can participate in democracy on campus.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Creeley, you are legal director at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Talk about why you approached The Stanford Daily, why this is such a significant decision.

WILL CREELEY: Well, it’s an honour to be here, Amy and Juan.

And I’m so proud listening to George now expound upon the importance of folks like George and his predecessor, Greta, standing up for First Amendment rights. It’s extremely important. When you see Rümeysa Öztürk in prison orange from a detention center in Louisiana for co-authoring an op-ed, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

With this administration, again and again, the chill is the point. These actions that they’re taking, these wanton violations of the First Amendment, are designed to get folks like George and his colleagues at The Stanford Daily to feel scared, to think twice, to ask that their names not appear on news reporting or opinion pieces.

That’s flatly un-American.

So, it was extremely important to us to fight back. And we’re so grateful for the bravery of The Stanford Daily folks and our Jane Doe colleague — Jane Doe plaintiff, who was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine and was no longer going to protest or flying a Palestinian flag or wearing shirts that expressed her political opinions.

She self-censored because of what the administration was doing. That’s a First Amendment violation every day of the week. It’s flatly un-American. And that’s why we’re very proud of last week’s victory.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Will, some members of the Trump administration responded. Stephen Miller posted on X, “A district court judge says America must admit and keep foreigners who hate America and hate Americans. Court-ordered civilisational suicide. It will not stand.”

Your response? And also the issue that you —

WILL CREELEY: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: If you could talk a little bit about the due process question you raised?

WILL CREELEY: Stephen Miller has got it exactly backwards. In the year 1800, Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, made clear that in this country we protect the First Amendment rights of even those who call for the dissolution of this country, responding to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

We have a long history in this country of protecting that speech. That’s what makes this country special. We have to live those values. It’s Stephen Miller who’s un-American here, not folks who are expressing their political opinions.

The United States is supposed to be where folks from around the world, folks like Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Mahmoud Khalil, can come and learn about what it means to be able to speak out without fear of a midnight knock on the door or being whisked away by masked federal agents.

We’re going to continue fighting for those fundamental American rights, no matter who’s in office.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be talking about people being whisked away by federal agents in a moment when we go to Danbury, Connecticut. I want to thank you both for being with us, and just ask you, as you go into your senior year, George: What are you majoring in?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: I’m a history major.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what have you learned?

GEORGE PORTEOUS: Well, history repeats itself. And I think what we’ve seen is this administration has a clear agenda. They’re trying to instill fear on campuses. And they’ve done lasting damage. I mean, this lawsuit is a victory, but a lot of damage has already been done.

So, I think what I’ve learned is that we have a responsibility, especially as students. We have an opportunity to continue standing up for our peers, because when the most vulnerable among us is afraid to speak, we should all be deeply concerned.

AMY GOODMAN: George Porteous, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. Will Creeley, legal director at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

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

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/04/two-small-pacific-islands-creating-one-big-stink-with-france-over-ownership/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:39:25 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133063 SPECIAL REPORT: By Ben Bohane

Amid an escalating sovereignty and maritime boundary dispute with France, Vanuatu has now filed an “application” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against France.

Vanuatu is seeking international recognition of sovereignty over two small islands in its far south.

The islands are known on charts by their European names Matthew and Hunter islands, but in Vanuatu they are called Umaenupne and Umaeneg with claims of long standing cultural and religious ties to the islands.

• READ MORE: Umaenupne and Umaeneg – isles of the Resting God — Ben Bohane
• Other Ben Bohane articles

From the early 1900s Vanuatu was jointly administered by France and the UK under a condominium regime.

In 1962, Australian planter and aviation pioneer Bob Paul, along with his aviator friend Henri Martinet applied to the Joint Court of New Hebrides to claim the islands, but their claim was rejected when France claimed the islands as part of New Caledonia.

Vanuatu has initiated proceedings at the ICJ following the collapse of negotiations between the two countries in Paris in July, and decades of unsuccessful attempts over the years since Vanuatu’s independence in 1980.

President Emmanuel Macron had offered to resolve the dispute when he visited Vanuatu in 2023 and meetings have since taken place in Port Vila last November and in Paris this past July. But the negotiations failed to deliver an agreed outcome.

Legal precedent risk
French analysts are concerned about the legal precedent of conceding the islands to Vanuatu, worried it will re-energise similar territorial disputes France has with other nations over remote islands, such as Clipperton atoll, which Mexico wants back.

The French rightwing have also applied pressure to the issue, with Marie Le Pen warning after the meeting in Port Vila last November that the two islands were “not [Macron’s] to give away.”

The ICJ is the world’s highest judicial body, and could provide a final, legal determination on the dispute. Vanuatu is banking on France supporting their application for a ruling.

At the most recent Davos meeting in January, President Macron affirmed France’s commitment to international law and even warned against a world in which “the law of the strongest” prevails.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat told The Sydney Morning Herald:

“Umaenupne (Matthew) and Umaeneg (Hunter) Islands have always belonged, and will always belong, to the people of Vanuatu. Vanuatu is a strong supporter of the international rules-based order and of the peaceful resolution of disputes through international law.

“Seeking recognition of Vanuatu’s sovereignty over these islands is not an act of confrontation; it is an exercise of our rights through the legal processes of that international order. It is about addressing an unresolved colonial legacy with dignity, determination and confidence in international law.”

Sovereignty dispute
Stephen Webb, an Australian lawyer acting for the Vanuatu government — who also acted for Timor-Leste in its maritime boundary dispute with Australia — said:

“This is fundamentally a legal dispute over sovereignty, and the ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, specifically established to resolve disputes between States in accordance with international law. For Vanuatu, bringing this matter before the ICJ is about finding a definitive, peaceful and legally binding resolution.”

In recent years, Vanuatu won global support for leading the initiative for an advisory opinion from the ICJ clarifying obligations and consequences of causing harm to the climate.

This initiative was endorsed unanimously by the UN General Assembly, including by France who co-sponsored the resolution.

With the ICJ confirming receipt of Vanuatu’s application, attention turns to France’s response. The court can only determine the dispute with France’s acceptance, so France now needs to decide whether it will submit the questions of sovereignty over the islands to judicial determination.

China outright rejected the ICJ’s decision in favour of the Philippines in its 2016 case against China’s claims over the South China Sea.

Given France’s vocal championing of international law, it may be more difficult for France to take the same position.

Pacific decolonisation
If France rejects Vanuatu’s case, it also risks putting itself offside with a Pacific region committed to decolonisation and further unrest in New Caledonia.

Indigenous Kanak chiefs in New Caledonia, including the leader of the pro-independence FLNKS movement Christian Tein, have all backed Vanuatu’s claims, stating Kanaks never had links to the two islands and they belong to Vanuatu.

Kanak chiefs have told Vanuatu’s leaders that when New Caledonia becomes independent, it will return the two islands to Vanuatu.

The coming months will reveal whether this dispute has any chance of being resolved before the world’s highest court.

Ben Bohane is Vanuatu-based Australian journalist and policy analyst who has reported the Pacific for nearly 30 years. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/04/nepali-times-not-if-but-when-next/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:31:10 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133040 EDITORIAL: Nepali Times

No one could have predicted this disaster would happen when it did, but we all knew it would happen one day.

As this paper went to press last Thursday afternoon, the unimaginable scale of the Central Nepal flood catastrophe was becoming apparent. With every notice about a bank branch that lost all its staff, a police station without a single survivor, buses full of Janai Purnima pilgrims swept away, and phone calls to this office from Indian families asking to locate their loved ones — we have had to come to terms with the tragically high cost in human lives.

Not since the 2015 earthquake has Nepal seen a disaster of this magnitude. In terms of economic damage to infrastructure and property, it is the worst in this country’s history. Remote sensing has enabled us to pinpoint the location of the avalanche on the north face of Langtang in Nepal that blocked the Lhende Khola which flows into the Trisuli in Nepal and which burst last Wednesday morning just before 9 am.

• READ MORE: Rescue efforts continue as Nepal-China flood death toll surpasses 1270
• Temporary burial for flood victims in Nepal
• Nepal-Tibet floods: What happened, what caused them and who is missing?
• Other Nepal-China flood reports

The debris flow at Timure on the border was nearly 80m high, and as the flood raced downstream it swept everything in its path. It spared nothing.

No one could have predicted this disaster would happen when it did. But anyone could have said it was bound to happen one day. In this newspaper, we ourselves have frequently reminded policy makers about the need to prepare for floods unleashed by extreme weather, glacial lake outburst floods, and transboundary climate calamities.

We said that after the Barun Khola flood of 2017, after the Melamchi disaster of 2021, and after the Teesta flood in Sikkim that swept away a $1 billion dam, we wrote in this space about lessons for Nepal’s own hydroelectric plants on the Arun, Marsyangdi and Trisuli. And the Bhote Kosi flood on July 8 last year was another alarm bell.

Strategy for survival
Arguing that this is not a problem we created, that we need to be compensated for historical carbon emissions, is for speeches at UN climate summits. There is no money coming for Loss and Damage. We are in this on our own, we have to craft our own strategy for survival.

This was not a “natural” disaster. Nothing about it was natural — not the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas buildup due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.

Our ancestors knew not to live next to Himalayan rivers. Nepal’s townships used to be located along high ridgelines, and floodplains were only used to grow food or grind grain. Bridges were temporary, and designed to be rebuilt after monsoon floods washed them away.

Economic desperation, outmigration from rural areas and proximity to roads have pushed people to settle along river banks — despite full knowledge of the risks. Hazard mapping of settlements along river banks enforced by local governments could have saved many lives last week.

Early warning will be of no help if homes are located right next to rivers flowing down from the world’s youngest and most seismically-active mountain range, now feeling the full impact of the climate crisis.

We have repeated this ad nauseum after every disaster: let us not put all our eggs in one basket. Instead of taking huge loans to invest in cascades of expensive hydroelectric plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, Nepal should opt for smaller projects across the country and spread the risk.

In one fell swoop on Wednesday morning, Nepal lost 440MW from 12 hydroelectric plants — 10 percent of the country’s total generation capacity. Transmission lines and substations located along the river corridor were destroyed.

A culture of fatalism can explain the lack of interest in preparedness for disaster that we know will happen, and with greater frequency in future. But that is no excuse. Even if previous governments ignored this, Nepal’s new administration with its technocrats and PhDs must take measures to address seismic and climate co-hazards.

Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This disaster also offers the chance for Prime Minister Balendra Shah and his government to demonstrate a proactive approach in search, rescue, rehabilitation and a preparedness strategy for the future.

We should not need a disaster to remind us to be prepared. By then it is too late for many people, as it tragically was this week. We failed to learn our lessons once again. This period of national mourning calls for Nepalis to be united, to show the same spirit of compassion and generosity that we saw in 2015.

Sonia Awale, editor of the Nepali Times. First published on 27 August 2026 and republished under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/03/minerals-military-strategy-draw-the-eye-of-trump-to-isolated-atoll-and-its-230-people/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:13:57 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133018 ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Milne

Isolation has been a challenge for the people of the atoll of Tongareva, 1300km north of the Cook Islands capital on Rarotonga.

Distance has made it difficult for the 230 residents to get supplies, or to travel for school and work. There are no scheduled flights; a ship visits every two months.

But isolation hasn’t been their greatest enemy; arguably, it’s engagement with the outside world that’s done them more harm. Ever since the crew of a passing English sailing ship, the Lady Penrhyn, dubbed the island Penrhyn in 1788, the people have suffered the colonial ambitions of distant empires.

• READ MORE: Pacific Islands Forum: Should outside nations be allowed at the leaders’ summit?
• US expected to announce major fuel security deal at Pacific Islands Forum
• Pacific leaders urged to be united behind 2050 climate action vision
• US pushes critical minerals agenda in Cook Islands with Penrhyn ‘lifeline’
• Other PIF reports

Missionaries brought new rules suppressing the language and faith and traditional cultural practices. Sailors brought disease that harmed the people and the plants.

An imported coconut blight led to a catastrophic famine that nearly depopulated the island.

The grimmest tragedy was in the 1860s, when London Missionary Society pastors sold 472 islanders for about five silver dollars a head, as slaves to Peru.

They boarded the Spanish and Peruvian ships with a promise of good pay and a safe return. It was a lie. Most died in exile.

Considering history
Islanders will be quietly considering that history, after news this week that the United States and New Zealand governments will invest $102 million in building a new deepwater port on the atoll, potentially providing a staging post for overseas naval vessels.

This is not new; the atoll was home to a US base in the Second World War. American GIs built port infrastructure and a 3000m crushed coral airstrip there.

It became a stopping point for the big Catalina flying boats; stripped hulks of American bombers still sit on the atoll as physical scars of the war. Children grew up who never knew their fathers — an emotional scar of the war.

There has long been talk — some supportive, some opposed — of a deepwater port in Tongareva’s big 233 sq km lagoon, reportedly 90m at its deepest point. Rarotonga businessman Charles Pitt argued in 2009 that the Americans should build commercial interests there, to give them a strategic position between China’s interests to the west in Sāmoa, and French Polynesia to the east.

Pitt warned that Chinese fishing interests were planning to open a business on Penrhyn — and it was always that potential for Chinese involvement that motivated the greatest concern in US-aligned countries.

In 2018, when I was editing the Sunday Star-Times, we reported on the front page that Cook Islands and Niue had “blindsided” NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters by signing up to China’s belt and road infrastructure lending scheme, and that there was talk of Beijing financing a deepwater port on Penrhyn.

It was a possibility that some in the islands would have welcomed, as I discovered when our family moved to the Cooks the following year. Henry Puna, the long-serving PM, told me the US had picked up and gone at the end of the war, and never really returned.

China had been “very present” in the Pacific.

America’s return ‘welcome’
“Unfortunately for a long time, America has not been,” Puna mused. “We would welcome America’s return.”

This all explains why US-aligned Winston Peters (on his return as foreign minister) reacted so angrily last year to Puna’s protegé and successor, Mark Brown, going to Beijing to sign a strategic partnership with China.

Accusing Brown and his officials of a lack of transparency, Peters cut $30 million core development support to the Cook Islands government, impacting on some basic health, education and tourism services.

Now, things have changed. The Cooks government had told me they would welcome America’s return. Well, this week they got it.

The announcement of the construction of a new port on Tongareva has been welcomed by the atoll’s MP, Vaine Wichman, who told the Cook Islands News it’s a “landmark investment”.

“Over 80 years after the wartime presence of US forces in Penrhyn, this investment is both historically symbolic and economically transformative,” she says. “Penrhyn was once part of the Pacific’s strategic defence network, and today this partnership reaffirms this.”

It comes just a week after the arrival of a new $5 million government-procured interisland passenger and cargo vessel, offering the hope of better, safer, more secure connectivity to all the remote outer islands.

A Peters ‘triumph’
Some see this as a political triumph for the mercurial Peters in the final weeks of his term as foreign minister; after playing hardball, he dragged the Cooks away from the influence of Beijing.

Others see it as a power play by Mark Brown, who has won the interest and investment of the world’s most powerful nation.

Most of all, none can ignore the opportunity this offers the Trump Administration — the strategic chance to be able to dock and stage operations from the centre of the vast Pacific basin. And ensuring China can’t.

Moreover, back in February, I reported that MFAT Chief Executive Bede Corry and his diplomats had discussed critical minerals developments with both the US and the Cook Islands. That’s now borne fruit for the White House.

Because this week’s deal opens the door (or the channel) to the $1 billion US-owned American Ocean Minerals Corp and Odyssey Marine Exploration, which agreed to merge this year.

And to Cook Islands Investment Corp’s new partnership with US firm Wetstone to fund offshore mineral exploration. It gives US firms first dibs on what I’ve described as the most lucrative treasure trove of undersea critical minerals in the EEZ of any country in the world.

Yet amid the political back-slapping, some Tongareva locals sound a note of caution. On the atoll’s Facebook group, administrator Ula Tini warns the US and China are readying for conflict — and the atoll has now been drawn into it.

Tongareva ‘been here before’
“Tongareva has been here before,” he says. “Our ancestors witnessed aircraft, military personnel and major infrastructure arriving on an island that much of the world probably knew very little about.”

Isolation, he agrees, has been one of the atoll’s biggest challenges. This port could help.

“But our people should still ask the hard questions… Could the facilities have future strategic or defence uses? How many jobs and business opportunities will actually go to Tongarevans? What environmental protections will be put in place for our lagoon, reef and marine resources?”

Tini wants his children and grandchildren to inherit more than a new port. That means ensuring that this time, the small community engages with the world on its own terms.

“What is Tongareva’s place in the future of the Pacific — and are we ready for it?”

Jonathan Milne is managing editor of Newsroom and a former editor of the Cook Islands News. This analysis was first published by Newsroom and is republished with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/03/the-british-state-has-lost-the-argument-even-as-it-rigs-the-trials-of-genocide-opponents/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:43:45 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132981 In a stinging rebuke to the judge, the jury members unanimously acquitted Tony Greenstein after just two hours of deliberation. As it turned out, it was not Greenstein on trial; it was British justice, writes Jonathan Cook.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

The British state rigged the trial of Tony Greenstein, a secular Jewish socialist and peace activist, to get him locked up for as much as 14 years — supposedly for “inviting support for Hamas”.

Fearful that the judge would punish his barrister for delivering a closing speech that properly defended him, Greenstein instead spoke directly to the jury.

For half an hour, he picked apart sham charges relating to three social media posts and a blog article he wrote against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza genocide reports

In doing so, he exposed the proceedings as a political show trial — one of a growing number, designed to silence opposition both to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and to the British state’s complicity in it.

In summing up, Judge Sarah Plaschkes said she had considered referring Greenstein for contempt of court. But instead she dismissed his eloquent, damning address to the jury as a “rambling speech delivered by an old man”.

At that point, presumably, she had no idea what impact Greenstein’s words would have on the jury.

In a stinging rebuke to the judge, the jury members unanimously acquitted him after just two hours of deliberation. As it turned out, it was not Greenstein on trial; it was British justice.

Hearing all the facts
Once given a chance to hear all the facts, not just the ones curated by the Crown, the jury accepted Greenstein’s arguments, including his accusation that the judiciary were readily conniving in the growing authoritarianism unleashed by the UK state’s complicity in genocide.

Which may explain why Greenstein’s landmark victory in a case with huge implications for free speech — and the right to speak out on the British state’s partnership in Israel’s genocide — was almost entirely ignored by the establishment media.

Had the jury found against him, you can be sure that same media would have covered the matter extensively, playing its part in sending a message to audiences that they should keep their heads down and avoid showing any solidarity with the Palestinian people or risk sharing Greenstein’s fate.

His acquittal, and the British state’s humiliation, was not a message the state — or the billionaire-owned media — wanted publicised.

What Greenstein’s closing speech managed to do was introduce something the British state and its judiciary have been carefully trying to strip out of the current wave of show trials of anti-genocide activists: important context.

Greenstein had to dismiss his barrister for the closing speech because, had the barrister spoken to the jury as Greenstein himself did, he would have most likely shared the fate of another distinguished lawyer, Rajiv Menon KC.

Menon is facing contempt of court proceedings over his masterful closing speech in the trial of six Palestine Action defendants, who were charged with multiple and serious crimes over their efforts to destroy killer-drones produced at a factory in Bristol operated by Israel’s biggest arms maker, Elbit Systems.

Refusal to convict
As a result of Menon’s speech — you can read the most important passages here — the jury refused to convict any of the defendants of any of the offences for which the state had put them on trial.

The judge in that case, Jeremy Johnson, was so eager to make an example of Menon — and intimidate other lawyers so they would be dissuaded from giving other Palestine solidarity activists a proper defence — that he managed to abuse the established legal procedure specifically designed for contempt of court referrals.

The Court of Appeal had to overturn his decision, though it allowed him to reapply for contempt proceedings against Menon, this time using the proper channels. Johnson did so.

The point is that judges like Johnson and Plaschkes — faithful servants not of justice but of the British state — know that no jury will convict activists trying to to stop a genocide if it is framed in those terms. So these judges must rig these trials to keep the jury as ignorant as possible of the relevant context: that the British state is persecuting peace activists for embarrassing it over its collusion in genocide.

That fact was, once again, only too evident during Greenstein’s trial.

Plaschkes was angry throughout the proceedings at Greenstein’s efforts to introduce context to the case. For the prosecution to succeed, she needed the jury to ignore many relevant things about Greenstein’s supposedly “Hamas-supporting” comment about a “ghetto uprising” in Gaza:

• the context that the one-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023 was a direct response to Israel’s preceding 16-year blockade of Gaza, denying its 2.3 million-strong population the essentials of life and turning the enclave effectively into a concentration camp;
• the context that, following the October 2023 breakout, Israel immediately launched a genocidal campaign of destruction against the enclave’s infrastructure and its civilian population;
• the context that, as a secular socialist, Greenstein has been a long-time critic of Hamas, as proven by a stream of articles he has written over more than a decade and that he cited to the jury;
• the context that, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he is deeply opposed to one people systematically oppressing another – all the more so given that Jewish Zionists have exploited their people’s historic victimhood to justify Israel committing contemporary crimes against Palestinians;
• the context of international law, which states that a people under occupation, the Palestinians, have a right to resist their oppression by Israel, including through the use of violence;
• the context that Greenstein had not even mentioned Hamas in posts that were the focus of the trial, or indicated any support for it – only his support for the right in law for Palestinians to resist Israeli crimes;
• the context that the British government proscribed the political wing of Hamas under the UK’s terrorism laws only in 2021, not based any new “terror” behaviour – in fact, four years earlier Hamas had rewritten its charter, showing a strong willingness to make concessions to Israel. No, the purpose of proscription was specifically to advance Israel’s goal of intimidating popular, international solidarity with the people of Gaza;
• the context that, in prosecuting Greenstein, the British government is destroying the very basis of the right to free speech, all to advance the interests of the demonstrably genocidal state of Israel;
• the context that the British state is not some dispassionate arbiter of justice in these prosecutions: it is aggressively colluding in Israel’s crimes. Its huge conflict of interest in silencing critics is the elephant in the room.

Greenstein told the jury:

Your [verdict] will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war.

Can it really be the law of England that any of them – that any of you – will be condemned to 14 years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever your answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

Masterclass speech
The whole speech is a masterclass in how to speak over the head of a complicit judiciary and prick the conscience of people who still have a moral backbone. I recommend you read it in full here.

The British government desperately wanted the scalp of a Jewish activist to show that no one is safe from the state’s long arm of persecution. It failed, which should be cause for relief and celebration among every person who opposes authoritarianism.

The defeats being handed to the British state by juries who hear the actual evidence are adding to the pressures on officials to find new ways to bypass the ancient right of trial by jury.

The government of Keir Starmer was determined to establish the precedent of scrapping jury trials. Faced with the unpopularity of such a move, his successor Andy Burnham has sounded hesitant about advancing the measure. But pledges he made while seeking the Labour leadership — and prime ministership — are proving to be worth little now that he is in office.

Meanwhile, courtier-judges like Johnson are finding ways to get around the reluctance of juries to convict anti-genocide activists of serious crimes.

Juries that convict activists of a relatively minor charge of criminal damage for smashing up killer-drones, assuming the defendants will get a few months in prison, are learning that they are thereby handing judges in these trials unlimited powers, in violation of the most basic principles of justice.

After the verdict, judges like Johnson are choosing to rewrite the charge sheet, adding retrospectively what they are bogusly calling a “terrorism connection”. That means they can sentence the defendants as “terrorists”, leading to far longer jail sentences and destroying the defendants’ lives in perpetuity.

Mark of a justice system
This is the mark of a justice system that no longer cares about evidence, fairness or jury verdicts. It cares only about visible punishment, about spreading terror through the courtroom.

We can fight back. Juries appear to be growing increasingly wary of these highly politicised trials the British state is staging to exonerate itself of its criminal activities and lock up its critics. As judges increasingly abuse the justice system to get the jail sentences demanded by the state, juries are likely to become much less willing to serve as an alibi for state repression.

This is no longer a struggle simply for the Palestinian people’s survival. It is a struggle for ourselves, for our right to have a voice, to have some say in how our societies are run and for whose benefit. It is a struggle to keep the forces of darkness at bay a little while longer.

And it is a battle none of us can afford to lose.

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

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/28/six-months-on-iran-is-still-standing-but-survival-is-becoming-more-costly/ Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:35:00 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132718 ANALYSIS: By Mahjoob Zweiri

It has been six months since the United States and Israel launched their coordinated military campaign against Iran on February 28. The war is easily cast as the latest turn in the long antagonism between Washington and Tehran, but that frame misses its immediate context.

Its real context is the aftermath of October 7, 2023: Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that followed spread across the region, wore down Iran’s network of allies, and pulled Israel and Iran into increasing confrontation, culminating in the 12-day war of June 2025 and the US-Israel campaign launched last February.

The bilateral track only sharpened this trajectory. Nearly eight years before the current war, Trump’s first administration launched “maximum pressure” aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero.

• READ MORE: Iran to draft conditions to open Hormuz following mediator requests
• Other War on Iran reports

When it failed to force political change, economic coercion eventually gave way to military force. Six months on, the campaign has come full circle, back to economic pressure applied with greater force. Economics, then war, then economics again.

At the 100-day mark, Tehran could plausibly present the outcome as a victory of survival: Its adversaries had failed to topple the system, and by its own measure that was what mattered.

Six months on, that claim is harder to sustain because the pressure has shifted to the terrain on which Iran has always been weakest. The question is no longer whether Iran can survive military attack, but whether it can withstand an economic siege with no sign of lifting.

A leadership hollowed out at the top
The most visible change is at the summit. After the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening strike, his son Mojtaba was appointed just more than a week later, a succession Tehran presented as proof of continuity and cohesion.

But six months on, he has yet to make a verified public appearance. His portrait is carried through city squares and at mourning ceremonies, and decrees are issued in his name, while rumours about his condition persist.

A leadership that once drew its authority from the visible presence of a single figure now rests, in part, on an absence.

The state has also had to rebuild its command structure in the middle of the war. The opening strike killed IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour and armed forces chief-of-staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, while other senior commanders were slain in the weeks that followed.

On August 10, decrees issued in Mojtaba’s name formalised a new military leadership, including Ahmad Vahidi as IRGC chief and Ali Abdollahi as chief-of-staff.

The appointments appear to favour loyalty and continuity over change and were widely read as a signal that Tehran did not intend to soften its posture. The deeper significance is simpler: A state still rebuilding its high command in the sixth month of a war is not doing so from a position of strength.

From maximum pressure to ‘Economic Outcast’
The clearest sign that the war has returned to its economic origins is the campaign Washington has intensified since suspending strikes in early August. US officials had already branded the broader effort “Economic Fury”; on August 24, the Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast, an expanded campaign aimed at severing Iran’s remaining financial links with the outside world.

Its instruments are familiar from the pre-war “maximum pressure” era but are being applied more aggressively: Secondary sanctions on those moving Iranian oil, measures against its “shadow fleet” and financial networks, and greater enforcement of international sanctions.

Iran’s oil exports, near 1.8 million barrels a day before the war, have fallen to below half a million; inflation is approaching 90 percent, with food prices more than double what they were a year ago.

Yet the siege lands on an economy whose troubles were never solely the work of sanctions.

Iran had long failed to insulate itself from an architecture built over decades, from US sanctions dating to the 1980s to United Nations Security Council resolutions since 2006.

Neither the 25-year, $400 billion partnership with China nor the strategic treaty signed with Russia in early 2025 delivered the stability Tehran sought. Before the war, Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian had acknowledged that sanctions alone could not account for the depth of the crisis and that governance bore its share.

The economic weapon works in part because the state it targets was already structurally exposed.

That pressure is now enforced at sea. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation on February 28 and, six months on, it has not reopened; the naval blockade that followed has fused with the closure into a single chokehold on Iran’s trade.

Diverging narratives in Tehran
That structural exposure is forcing a longstanding divergence into the open. For years, Iran’s leadership has explained its crises through two competing narratives: One, advanced by the political leadership, acknowledging failures of economic governance; the other, promoted by the security establishment, attributing unrest to external enemies.

Under the pressure of the siege, that divergence has sharpened into a disagreement over the war itself. President Pezeshkian, who signed the June memorandum with Washington, has spoken with growing candour about an economy giving way, saying this month that Iran’s difficulties have “multiplied several times over” as revenue has fallen.

On August 21, he argued that it would be “better to end [the war] today, while we are in a position of strength”, even as his government prepared Iranians for painful increases in fuel prices.

Parliament Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has put the danger more bluntly: “No matter how much military power we have, if the people are hungry and there is no financial circulation, economic growth, or national production, we will not endure.”

Yet he remains tied to the security establishment’s logic, insisting diplomacy carries weight only when backed by readiness for war and casting Washington’s economic turn as an admission of military failure.

That Iran’s two most senior civilian figures now say publicly that hunger, not bombardment, is the greatest threat marks a shift from the confident rhetoric of the war’s first months. It has not settled the argument over who is responsible, only raised its stakes.

Six months on, Iran’s leadership still measures the war by the standard it set at the outset: The system has not fallen, and everything else it considers recoverable. By that measure, survival remains a form of victory.

Pressure now falls on household
But the pressure now falls on the household and the market, where it is harder to answer with the language of resistance. The divide between a president urging an end to the war and a security establishment determined to outlast it is no longer concealed.

The war has also produced the terms of its own possible end. The closed strait and the blockade have become the centre of gravity for diplomacy. Reopening the strait and lifting the blockade are the levers each side holds over the other and the most plausible opening for negotiations that could bring the conflict to a close.

This leaves Iran with a difficult choice. To negotiate a settlement on terms Washington would accept risks provoking the internal fracture the hardliners fear; to hold out risks a bleeding economy and a winter that will test the state’s capacity to provide.

The war has also reinforced, within parts of the leadership, the conviction that only a nuclear capability could have deterred the initial attack, making any lasting settlement harder to reach.

Beneath these immediate pressures lies a more enduring pattern. The confrontation between Washington and Tehran has always been, at its core, a contest shaped by what the political elites of the two countries believe about each other and about the risks of dealing with each other.

On the Iranian side, US hostility has repeatedly deepened divisions within the political elite rather than compelling agreement, reinforcing its reluctance to make bold decisions about negotiating with the US.

Pressure intended to force Tehran’s hand has instead hardened the hesitation it sought to break, compounding Iran’s political and economic strains.

Six months into this war, that pattern is again on display: the campaign has come full circle to the economic weapon it began with, the Iranian elite is more divided, and the bold decision a settlement would require remains as distant as ever.

There is little sign that this cycle will end soon.

Professor Mahjoob Zweiri is an academic and senior political analyst specialising in Iran and Middle East politics. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and republished under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/27/long-time-coming-after-decades-of-struggle-is-bougainville-on-the-brink-of-statehood/ Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:30:23 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132668 ANALYSIS: By Johnny Blades of RNZ Pacific

We could be about to find out whether a part of the Pacific Islands will become the world’s newest nation.

After a seven-year wait, Papua New Guinea’s Parliament is today (Thursday, August 27) expected to finally table the question of whether to approve of independence for the country’s autonomous region of Bougainville.

In a 2019 referendum, an overwhelming 97.7 percent of Bougainvilleans voted for independence — but the referendum was non-binding and PNG’s national Parliament has the final say in whether to ratify this result.

• READ MORE: ‘This is a difficult task’: PNG parliament to finally address Bougainville vote
• Flashback: Bougainville: New Zealand’s part in a guerilla war — David Robie
• Other Bougainville independence reports

They are to debate the matter from today, before later putting it to a vote, with support from a three-quarters majority of MPs being the threshold required for ratification.

The decision is no small thing. Bougainville is around 2 percent of PNG’s total landmass, or 2.7 percent of PNG’s total population.

It may seem small, but in the New Zealand context, this would be a bit like giving up, in land mass terms, the Auckland region or, in population terms, like letting go of Dunedin City.

So it is a big call for a bunch of MPs to make.

Brutal civil war
No country is comfortable with ceding some of its territory. But in this case, the context is the legacy of a brutal civil war and ensuing crisis that played out during the 1990s, which brought not just Bougainville to its knees, but PNG too.

New Zealand played a central role in mediating a lasting peace — 2001’s Bougainville Peace Agreement ultimately provided for the referendum that took place in 2019, in which over 200,000 people from an overall population of around 300,000 cast their vote.

The tabling of the referendum result in Parliament has been a long time coming, and follows a series of consultations over the years between the PNG government and the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) over how the result would be processed.

It is already clear there is some reluctance among PNG MPs to set a precedent for other parts of the country to look to break away. But it is not easy to ignore the clear call for independence from almost 98 percent of Bougainvilleans.

However, PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape has pointed out that without economic independence, Bougainville would not be able to stand on its own feet. He has hinted at allowing for a period of time in which the region works on developing that economic self-reliance before the Parliament might then revisit the question of political independence.

In the eyes of many, economic self-reliance means re-habilitating Bougainville’s large Panguna copper mine, conflict over which sparked the civil war in the first place.

Development of Panguna
ABG President Ishmael Toroama is already pursuing the development of Panguna, and has signalled Bougainville’s intention to declare independence in 2030.

The Burnham Accord, signed by both parties last year in Christchurch, included an agreement for PNG and Bougainville to be bound by any decision of the Parliament and to maintain dialogue after that over the way forward.

So if Bougainville is not granted independence now, it does not necessarily mean it will not get independence at a later point. Either way, it could be the world’s next new country.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/26/adam-johnson-coverage-of-my-media-book-being-banned-proves-the-thesis/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:30:37 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132630 Waverley Council in Sydney has removed a book strongly critical of Israel from its library shelves for review after a survivor of the Bondi Beach massacre condemned its prominent display as “deeply insensitive”. The book’s author has defended his publication, saying the episode is a good lesson in how the smearing of Palestine and its defenders operates in mainstream Anglosphere media.

ANALYSIS: By Adam Johnson

Last week, JWire reported that my book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, had been “removed” from the Waverley public library in Sydney, Australia.

In covering the ban, some Australian media allowed pro-Israel propagandists to casually libel me as antisemitic, a false charge that is completely divorced from the content of the book, which is nuanced and fair and takes on universal themes of human dignity and opposition to colonialism and racism.

My first instinct was to merely post on social media about the banning, noting how absurd and racist the book ban defenders’ logic was, and move on with my life.

• READ MORE: How to Sell a Genocide has been removed from a library near Bondi – but libraries represent freedom of thought
• Waverley Council removes controversial Gaza book after Bondi survivor speaks out
• Other Israeli censorship reports

After all, my book is not the story — nor, if it were, would this be a particular interesting one. On the list of free speech suppressions and libel in the past three years over Palestine, this wouldn’t crack the top 10,000.

But news of the ban was subsequently picked up by The Guardian Australia, The Independent in the UK and the largest newspaper in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald. And given how poor the coverage of the banning has been, namely by the latter two outlets, I thought this episode could be a good object lesson in how the smearing of Palestine and its defenders operates in mainstream Anglosphere media.

The fact that you can sling around libel without evidence in the largest newspapers in Australia gives us a window into how discussion of basic Palestinian rights is shut down using the most sectarian framing possible.

Let’s break down three tropes featured in the coverage of my book banning that I also detail in the book itself. Forgive me if this is meta — and a touch self-indulgent — but there’s a reason there are striking similarities, and it’s because the Israel lobby and its aggressive PR apparatus more or less use the same script for every act of smearing, censoring, and intimidation.

So they’re worth taking this opportunity to unpack.

1. Feigned credulity: Taking pro-Israel crybully organisations at their word, rounding up to the most sectarian framing possible, and flattening Jewish identity and Zionist ideological activity.

The Independent and Sydney Morning Herald largely embrace the pro-Israel lobby’s framing that the removal of my book was prompted entirely by, or at least largely by, a “complaint from a Bondi attack survivor”. The Independent’s Stuti Mishra would adopt this framing in its headline: “Australian library pulls book on Gaza from shelves after complaint from Bondi attack survivor,” the article announces.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Melanie Kembrey would also accept this framing at face value in her reporting, writing that, “the move follows a report by Jewish news service JWire last week that a survivor of the Bondi Beach massacre had posted on Facebook that she was distressed to see the book displayed on the new-release ‘What’s Hot’ shelf of Waverley Library.”

What’s important to emphasise here is: we have no way of knowing that this is what caused, or even sparked, the removal of the book. This is just an assertion made by those seeking to ban it.

JWire reported, citing an alleged Facebook comment by the survivor in question, that her complaint is what prompted the book’s removal. But The Guardian reports that they were “unable to locate the Facebook post” in question.

More importantly, both Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent seemingly contradict, or at least undermine, this simplistic narrative, by mentioning elsewhere in their articles that, as The Independent noted, the library council “has received multiple complaints about [the book]”.

So was the book banned because a Bondi attack survivor complained, or was it due to the “multiple complaints”? Or was it both? If it was both, do we know which came first: the Bondi survivor complaint or the “multiple” other complaints from, presumably, unrelated parties?

The timeline is important because it suggests a fairly bog standard pro-Israel propaganda technique of front-loading censorship — and other oppressive and illiberal actions — in the most sympathetic and humane language possible. Obviously, “Pro-Israel Organisations Successfully Ban Book on Gaza” hits differently than “Library pulls book on Gaza from shelves after complaint from Bondi attack survivor.”

After all, what kind of heartless monster would want to upset a Bondi attack survivor?

Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive officer of the pro-Israel lobbying organisation ECAJ, was eager to praise my book’s removal from the library, telling The Sydney Morning Herald, “A book of this sort has no place on the shelves of a library, especially one within minutes of where Australians were slaughtered in large part due to the dehumanisation of Jews precisely through this sort of libel.

“I commend the individual who spotted the book, herself a survivor of the massacre, and acted to have it removed.”

Was Ryvchin one of the other “multiple” parties that demanded my book be removed? If so, was it prior to the aforementioned Bondi survivor’s complaint? Did The Herald inquire about his involvement in the campaign to remove the book? Did The Herald ask him to specify examples or provide any evidence of me “dehumanising” Jewish people, a false and libelous accusation?

They did not. He is simply presented as a neutral observer with no involvement in the censorship campaign.

I sent a request for comment to the Waverley library last week, to try and pin down the timeline of the “complaints”. They replied this morning but ignored the question, instead objecting to my use of the word “ban” but not denying it was, indeed, banned.

“Contrary to some media reporting,” the library’s manager informed me via email, “the council has not ‘banned’ the book. It remains a part of our collection; however, it is currently unable to be borrowed pending completion of a review.”

Ah, ok, it wasn’t banned, it’s just “currently unavailable to be borrowed”. Well never mind then. Hopefully this “review” goes my way! A group of organisers in Australia have started a petition calling on the library to restore the book and “protect the public’s right to read”.

But, again, it’s important to make clear that my book being “removed” from one public library isn’t the story. The story is that this is only one part of a broader censorship and bully regime that is rapidly escalating in the West.

This story comes in the context of a massive crackdown on Free Speech in Australia, in particular, which is overwhelmingly targeting pro-Palestine speech and being done in the name of “combating antisemitism”. As Jacob Mchangama and Samantha Barbas noted for MSNOW in January, “what began as a moment of national mourning [in the wake of the Bondi attack] has rapidly turned into one of the most sweeping expansions of hate speech laws and protest restriction powers in the country’s modern history.

Intended as an urgent response to antisemitism, new federal and state measures threaten to reach far beyond violence or direct incitement — reshaping how speech, protest and political dissent are regulated in the wake of terrorism.”

As I detail in said book, namely Chapter 8, “‘Antisemitism’ show trials and the smearing of campus protests,” framing suppression of Israel-critical speech in terms of sensitivity, anti-racism, and “fighting hate” is a textbook pro-Israel bully tactic.

Using liberalism against itself is a consistent and well-documented strategy from Zionist organisations to delegitimise, stigmatise, and brand as hateful those who are meaningfully critical of Israel and its regime of violence against Palestinians.

It’s useful here to distinguish The Guardian’s coverage from that of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent. The Guardian’s framing was mostly sceptical and fair. They sought comment from me, my publisher, and other critics of the book ban, and did not overly indulge the “Bondi survivor”.

I should also note that Sydney Morning Herald’s Kembrey did reach out to me for comment, but did so at 12:41 am central time and published her article a couple hours later. So alas, not being awake in the middle of the night costs me an original comment in The Herald. Though I doubt it would have mattered much in the overall credulous and uncritical orientation of the article.

The framing of the ban on my book as the ah shucks, entirely organic result of a “Bondi survivor,” without any interrogation of the source of these “multiple” other complaints, is doing 90 percent of the heavy lifting for the Zionist censorship lobby that was eager to not only praise the decision in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, but frame it in purely sectarian terms. That Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent ran with the simplistic and manipulative “Bondi survivor complained” framing, without an ounce of scepticism, shows how these Israel advocacy organisations score major PR victories before the text of the article or any reporting is even done.

2. Reducing claims of genocide in Gaza to a fringe, subjective opinion by a “self-described radical publisher” while omitting it is the overwhelming consensus of human rights and humanitarian organizations, as well as genocide scholars.

The reduction of mainstream opposition to Israel as an unserious or fringe position — while ignoring how widespread and obvious it is outside the corridors of beltway elite circles — is a trope I detailed in Chapter 9 of my book specially under the section, “The Atlantic And The Importance Of Policing Seriousness.”

All three articles framed the fact that Israel committed genocide in Gaza as a mere opinion of mine, without noting it is the broad consensus in the humanitarian and human rights world, as well as that of scholars tasked with studying and determining such matters.

While all three quoted me making this point, they did not report on the fact of this consensus. This isn’t just a vague feeling from a partisan leftwing media critic — it’s the majority academic assessment. They ought to have noted, as I detailed in my unpublished full comment to The Guardian, that genocide in Gaza is the determination of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, as well as Omer Bartov, Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University; Amos Goldberg, Israeli professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Raz Segal, Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and endowed professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, among dozens of other prominent Israeli and American scholars.

Instead of mentioning any of these liberal validators, that would have shown how fringe the book ban advocates’ position is and how mainstream my headline was, it is presented as a mere claim by the book’s author and we are then served up pat denials from Israel.

“Israel has repeatedly denied committing genocide in Gaza,” notes The Independent (though it does link to an article detailing UN’s claims of genocide). The Guardian writes that “Israel has repeatedly denied that it has committed genocide in Gaza” without highlighting the major humanitarian and human rights groups arguing otherwise.

The fact of Israel committing genocide in Gaza is overwhelming consensus among those tasked with documenting and determining such matters. Presenting this objective reality as my opinion, without citing the underlying evidence supporting it, is playing into the idea the “genocide” label is a fringe or emotionally charged label when it is anything but.

3. Casually conflating Palestine solidarity with antisemitism and ISIS-inspired violence.

The whole point of focusing on the Bondi survivor complainant is, of course, to conflate solidarity with Palestine with the Bondi attack, which was an ISIS-inspired massacre last December that killed 15 Australians (14 of whom were Jewish) and had absolutely zero to do with Palestine, Palestinians, or Gaza.

Indeed, the only major player in Palestine with significant links to ISIS is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who Israeli outlet Haaretz reported last year has been arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza to undermine Hamas and steal aid, a fact publicly confirmed by Netanyahu’s former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Despite it having no factual basis, conflation of Palestinian militants, civil society and advocacy with “ISIS,” as I note in Chapter 1 of my book, “‘40 beheaded babies,’ the ISIS-ification of Hamas, and how to prime the American public for revenge,” was crucial to propagandising Western audiences and using the blunt instrument of Islamophobia to build sympathy for the cause of open-ended Israeli violence.

None of the above outlets felt it necessary to note that there has been no proven link between the Bondi Attack and Palestine solidarity. The Australian government has spent millions attempting to find such a connection, but alas has come up empty.

Why should pro-Israel advocates be permitted to casually make such a conflation without any reporters noting these two things are wholly unrelated? Why is this conflation of ISIS and Palestine solidarity permitted to be repeated without any attempt to correct this misconception? Perceptions on the part of a handful of motivated actors is not sufficient reason to indulge their delusions.

Nevertheless, racist conspiracy theories conflating Gaza advocacy with violence inspired by a movement and cause that has zero to do with Palestinians, and is largely backed by Israel’s regional allies, is permitted without any pushback because these two things, in the Western, orientalist mind, feel vaguely related.

These are subtle interventions by the above outlets and, as I mention, far from the biggest crimes in Western media related to Palestine. I am not a free speech martyr, as some have alleged, nor do I seek to be. But I think it is useful to note how, when reporting on the banning of a book about media propaganda, we saw at least three of the very tropes detailed in the book being banned.

These subtle framings, while seemingly minor in isolation, add up. They go, before one even notices, from lazy tropes, credulous reporting, and racist assumptions to a narrative, a story. Just like that, the banning of a perfectly sober, rigorous, and nuanced book is framed as a small act of kindness for a terrorism victim.

And the author, who went out of his way to be nonsectarian, to examine universal humanitarian themes, and to highlight Jewish anti-Zionist activism, is accused of horrific dehumanisation in Sydney’s largest newspaper without any pushback or deeper reporting.

The overt suppression of free speech in Australia is another major escalation, and embracing this grimy, misleading, and libelous framing without much thought or scepticism — as The Independent and Sydney Morning Herald did — is yet another example of Western media’s role in selling genocide.

Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. Republished from the substack The Column under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/26/pacific-catastrophe-awaits-if-nations-not-alert-to-deep-sea-eco-threat/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:50:09 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132617 COMMENTARY: By Kalinga Seneviratne

In the past year there has been a scramble by the big powers to secure the continuing supply of “rare minerals” that are used in batteries driving electric cars and wind power turbines. There is a looming catastrophe awaiting the Pacific Ocean if countries in the region are not alert to the environmental threats facing the region.

Decades ago, greedy industrialists were polluting the air, and their governments refused to listen to scientific warnings of a looming climatic disaster, and now the island nations of the South Pacific are facing the brunt of climate change disasters.

If the current trends of digging out rare minerals from wherever you can find them continues, we will be left with oceans — especially the Pacific — where we cannot swim or fish, further threatening the livelihoods of many small Oceania nations.

• READ MORE: Pacific protesters against deep sea mining challenge US exploration ship
• Other Pacific deep sea mining reports

With the scramble for rare minerals extending to the deep seabed, a new geopolitical battle is hotting up in the South Pacific, where corruption and divisions among Pacific Island countries could be fermented by global powers battling to control the supply chain, with countries like Cook Islands, Kiribati and Nauru on the frontline.

Eliki Drugunalevu, a member of the research team that compiled the Pacific Ocean Climate Crisis Assessment (POCCA) to the COP 29 meeting in Azerbaijan in 2024, warned in an interview with In-Depth News that inaction by the United Nations to pause the march towards deep sea mining for precious metals would result in a “catastrophic impact” on the Pacific for the long term.

“People on the Pacific islands rely on the ocean not only for their sustenance but also for their economic survival,” he said.

“If the fish are not going to come in, they will have to fish in another community’s fishing grounds, that will have a butterfly effect and create conflict.”

‘Protected’ by ISA
The deep blue oceans are expected to be protected by an autonomous international organisation, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) as the “common heritage of mankind” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was adopted by the United Nations in 1982 and signed and ratified by 168 UN member states.

But the US has refused to sign the convention, objecting to articles restricting seabed mining.

Now the Trump administration seems keen to provide licences to American companies to mine the seabed in the Pacific, while the ISA which on July 31 concluded its latest two-week council and assembly meetings in Jamaica, is deadlocked in framing commercial exploitation guidelines — known as a Mining Code– for the seabed.

At the meeting, 45 countries called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on seabed mining, with Vanuatu in the Pacific proposing that such a pause be in operation until the risks are fully understood and the necessary scientific knowledge is available for a transparent process.

“Deep-sea mining is fraught with immense scientific uncertainty, [so] caution and common sense prevailed at this session, with member states rejecting a rushed adoption of the mining code,” noted Simon Candon, international media manager of Lisbon-based Oceano Azul Foundation in an interview with IDN.

With the US trying to undermine the UNCLOS and ISA, he added that “many countries used the assembly to unite against unilateral mining, agreeing that bypassing the ISA for commercial operations threatens ocean governance and the common heritage of humankind.

“But consensus could not be yet found on Vanuatu’s proposal.”

Onus on miners
Profesor David Schoeman, of the Ocean Futures Research Centre at Queensland’s University of the Sunshine State, argues that the onus should be on prospective seabed miners to provide empirical evidence that their activities will not cause harm to the ocean ecosystem.

“In terms of the type of evidence that could be provided, the gold standard would be a before–after, control–impact (BACI) study of simulated [small-scale] mining operations at select locations, with appropriate sampling of biotic and abiotic elements of the ecosystem over periods covering the anticipated recovery time of the system”.

Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ)  — a high seas area stretching over 4500 km between Hawai’i and Kiribati across to Mexico — is poised to become the first commercial seabed mining operation in the world if the US subsidiary of the Canada-based The Metals Company (TMC) succeed in getting an US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, licence to mine, in contravention of the UNCLOS.

Their application is currently under review.

Dr Felix Mallin, senior researcher of the Italian National Research Council told IDN that a test done in CCZ a few years ago with one machine alerted the scientific community to the damage to marine life in the deep oceans.

“While any commercial operation would be orders of magnitude bigger. Even if the scars left by modern technology were smaller, we would be looking at a much bigger aggregate damage across vast tracts of ocean floor,” he warns.

“For the Pacific, the fisheries link and the impact it might have on economic life is the one that should worry people most. Some modelling has projected tuna biomass in CCZ rising in coming decades, by up to about a third for skipjack, as global warming pushes stocks east, right into the zone where mining might take place.

‘Industrialising the water’
“So, if we are unlucky, we could be industrialising the water exactly where the region’s most valuable renewable resource is heading.”

While the ISA Mining Code negotiations drag on, Dr Mallin argues that what is needed is an environmental harm independent baseline study in the Pacific, “which no one wants to fund”.

He notes that the prospective seabed mining companies have plugged enormous financial resources into developing technology and lobbying, and if commercial returns are not forthcoming quickly, the investors could flee.

Thus, they are exercising enormous pressure on small Pacific Island states.

Nauru, a nation of 12,00 people, which was exploited by phosphate miners in the 1990s resulting in an environmental disaster to the land, is now been targeted by the seabed miners.

In 2021, Nauru said it would grant a commercial-scale seabed mining approval in their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) — granted under the UNCLOS — to a subsidiary of TMC, which rang alarm bells at ISA, and triggered an urgency to come up with a Mining Code.

The ISA called for a pause while the code is been negotiated, another arm of the UN has come up with another treaty, the Boundaries Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement which came into effect in January 2026.

Agreement ‘plugging gaps’
This agreement is designed to plug gaps in the UNCLOS, to safeguard seabeds outside a nation’s EEZ.

A controversy is currently brewing in the Cook Islands over US corporate designs to mine the seabed that belongs to the Pacific Islanders.

While Cook Islands has 240 sq km of land, it owns just under 2 million sq km of sea. Under UNCLOS it exercises full sovereign rights to explore, exploit, and manage the natural resources of the seabed and subsoil within its expansive EEZ.

Another Pacific nation, Kiribati’s EEZ covers over 3 million sq km via its far-flung islands, making it one of the largest oceanic territories in the world. They generate significant economic revenue through fishing access agreements with foreign nations to this zone.

It is believed that China is wooing Kiribati to gain future access to seabed mining in their EEZ.

It will be lucrative for such island nations to sell mining rights to the ocean seabed under their EEZ’s, but the problem is, no one knows what would be the long-term impacts of such mining on marine resources like fisheries, and the ocean environment in general.

“My fear is that places like Kiribati and the Cook Islands (with their small populations) will simply be bought off by US miners,” warns Michael Field, Auckland-based editor of South Pacific Tides.

“Pacific states will get just licensing money out of mining [as they do with fishing] but undersea minerals will not provide much in the way of jobs or revenue.

“Minerals, for example, extracted in the Cook Islands, will have to be refined, probably in Asia. The profits will come elsewhere but the environmental risks will be the exclusive property of Pacific people”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lankan-Australian journalist and international communication scholar. He is author of GeoPolitics and the Media in Asia and the Pacific: Pulling in Different Directions. This article was first published by IDN and is republished with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/24/china-daily-collaborations-media-education-and-pacific-outreach/ Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:54:36 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132556 COMMENTARY: By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report

Some years ago when I headed the Pacific Media Centre that I founded at Auckland University of Technology, we ran a postgraduate internship programme at the China Daily in Beijing.

It was part of a professional development exposure platform that also included Jakarta in Indonesia and the Manila in the Philippines, along with several media and university journalism campus outlets in the Pacific, including the University of the South Pacific.

There was nothing else comparable at other journalism programmes in New Zealand, and now there are no opportunities of this kind after the closure of the PMC in 2021.

• READ MORE: China’s growing grip on the Solomon Islands’ fragile media sector
• New Zealanders’ Perceptions of Asia 2026
• Other reports on China and media in the Pacific

But there was some eyebrow raising about our collaboration over China Daily’s soft diplomacy role at the heart of Chinese media as part of its growing outreach into the Pacific along with the global Belt and Road development policy.

Linked to our Asia Pacific journalism studies course with support by the Asia NZ Foundation, these three-month internships provided a good insight into how Chinese media operated for New Zealand journalists graduating with an eye on an Asia-Pacific media future.

“Advanced studies in comparative journalism and media globalisation” and the “political economy” of the countries studied were important parts of our course.

A glimpse of how some media operate outside of the Western bubble.

‘Polishers’ of reports
The journalistic role that the students faced while they were at the China Daily were initially of a subeditorial or copy-editing nature — they were called “polishers” of English-language reports. But as time when on, the opportunities grew, including reporting assignments, feature writing, and broadcasting.

On exchange, we also hosted professional journalists from the China Daily on our journalism papers. Overall the collaborative experience was positive. But the stakes are much higher now.

The China Daily was founded as an English daily in 1981 and although it is owned and published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Publicity Department — the “Propaganda Department” — it is not an “official mouthpiece” of the CCP establishment.

In 2011, it celebrated 30 years of publishing during our collaboration.

China Daily has usually enjoyed a more “liberal” face than most other Chinese state media.

For example, coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was generally sympathetic to the student protests and at least one account claims that some of its journalists joined in the demonstrations. Also, the paper’s coverage of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002-2004 was more fact-driven and balanced than the “official” state media.

China Daily has also published sponsored inserts in such global newspapers as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the US and Le Figaro in France.

Massive operation
Published out of a large headquarters in Chaoyang district, it is a massive operation by New Zealand standards, publishing the best part of a million copies daily, two-thirds of the copies via special editions reaching at least 150 countries.

But the most visible face of the newspaper in New Zealand and the Pacific these days is online at the China Daily website.

China Daily has often framed its Pacific outreach through official editorials, youth forums and diplomatic rebuttals. It publicises green energy ties, criticises “foreign alarmism regarding regional expansion”, and argues that organisations such as the Pacific Islands Forum must back the one-China policy.

As the Chinese media outreach into the Pacific has been growing in recent years, the rivalry between Beijing, Washington and Canberra has been ratcheted up with accusations of “editorial interference and influence” in some countries, such as Kiribati and Solomon Islands, at least until the change of government in Honiara in May when Matthew Wale ousted the pro-China leadership in a general election.

In an in-depth report just two months before the election, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders warned that since Honiara had established diplomatic relations with China in 2019 the Pacific country had become a “strategic arena for Beijing’s influence”.

“By capitalising on the economic fragility of the local media sector, China has stepped up conditional funding, editorial partnerships and influence programmes to disseminate its narratives,” RSF said, calling on the Solomon Islands’ government to make the viability and independence of the media sector a priority.

Outreach invitation
The China Daily has stepped up its outreach initiatives in the Pacific lately as evidenced by an email to me four days ago inviting me to write an op-ed for the publication’s Opinion section. And the deadline is tomorrow.

Signed by an editor of the newspaper’s Opinion Department, the invitation said: “In early September, a high-level forum on media cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region will be held, bringing together senior media professionals and experts to discuss how the region’s media can better foster dialogue, trust and mutual understanding.

“We would be honoured to invite you to contribute an opinion article of around 800 words for publication in China Daily.”

The invitation continued:

“As a reference, we have outlined several possible directions:
1. In the age of AI, how can Asia-Pacific media rebuild public trust?
2. From ‘reporting Asia’ to ‘telling Asia’s stories’: Can Asia-Pacific media move beyond Western narrative frameworks?
3. From “information competition” to media cooperation: How can Asia-Pacific media promote greater mutual understanding across the region?

These topics are only suggestions. We would be delighted if you chose to write on another angle that better reflects your current research or interests.

“Rather than opening with abstract concepts or institutional frameworks, we encourage authors to begin with something timely and tangible: a recent news event, a real-world development, or an everyday experience that readers immediately recognise.

‘Drawing in’ readers
“Once readers are drawn in, the article can naturally expand to explain the broader policy, economic, technological or geopolitical forces behind it. In our experience, this narrative structure makes complex issues far more engaging for a broad international audience.

“The strongest pieces usually build around one central argument, moving from the concrete to the conceptual, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and from today’s headline to its longer-term implications.

“We particularly value articles that combine the immediacy of current events with original analysis, clear storytelling and practical insights, rather than offering a comprehensive survey of every aspect of the topic.

“In addition to the written article, we would also be delighted if you could record a short video commentary of around one minute.

“A simple self-recorded video using a mobile phone would be perfectly fine. A vertical format with a clean and quiet background would be ideal; there is no need for professional filming or editing, as our team will handle the post-production.”

The invitation continued in the same vein.

Concluding, the email said: “As our production schedule is quite tight, we would greatly appreciate it if you could send us both the article and the video by August 25, 2026.”

My reply? You are reading it right here on Asia Pacific Report.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/08/24/segals-speech-code-meets-the-law-justice-fagan-wrecks-canberras-israel-exception/ Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:35:01 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=132539 The Israel lobby wrote itself a dictionary. Governments adopted it, regulators enforced it and police made arrests under it. Then it met a judge who required evidence, and it collapsed in an afternoon. Andrew Brown on Australia’s Fagan judgment for Michael West Media.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Justice Desmond Fagan’s Supreme Court decision in the State of New South Wales v Farhat wrecks the architecture designed by Antisemitism Special Envoy Jillian Segal, adopted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and enforced across Australia.

Australians have been instructed that hostility towards Israel is hostility towards Jews. The lobby never won that argument. It changed the dictionary instead.

Albanese supplied the imprimatur. NSW Premier Chris Minns supplied the muscle. David Crisafulli criminalised protest slogans. Peter Malinauskas carried the doctrine into the South Australian Parliament.

• READ MORE: NSW ‘seeking urgent advice’ on controversial court ruling that found anti-Israel vandalism was not antisemitic
• A judgment that challenges the IHRA definition of antisemitism
• Other Australia antisemitism reports

Different parties. Different states. The same obedient genuflection.

The vandal who wasn’t an antisemite
Mohommed Farhat was a vandal for hire. He caused more than $110,000 in damage, torched a vehicle and painted “Fuk Israel” across Woollahra.

Justice Fagan found Farhat was recruited and did not know what some slogans meant. Yet the State wanted him branded an antisemite and shackled with 55 terrorism supervision restrictions.

Fagan refused. His judgment is an autopsy of how propaganda becomes administrative fact. Police, prosecutors, the Crown Solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions repeated an unexamined claim until repetition replaced proof.

The label was false and “injustice to the defendant” followed.

Then he turned to the definition. The IHRA formulation promoted by Segal and embraced by Canberra was, he found, “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from the reality of common usage”.

Promoting it sought to change the settled meaning of “a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years” and to “graft” onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism ”a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel”.

Fagan cited Pew polling showing 74 percent of Australians unfavourable towards Israel, rising to 79 percent this year, and inferred a “humanitarian reaction to Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”.

A definition that tars four in five Australians is not detecting hatred.

It is outlawing majority opinion.

Antisemitism, Fagan said, is simply “hostility to Jews for their Jewishness”. It is real, repugnant and must be confronted. Israel is a foreign state. Zionism is a political ideology. Neither is entitled to immunity from condemnation.

Protecting Jewish Australians is essential. Protecting a foreign government from criticism is not.

The lobbyist who wrote the law
Segal became Special Envoy after leading the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose published mission includes defending Israel, encouraging Zionism and lobbying governments for positions favourable to Israel.

The referee was recruited from one team’s front office.

She may hold those views. She may not launder them through the Commonwealth and receive them back as law.

Albanese outsourced the dictionary to a protagonist, then adopted her every recommendation despite warnings from Jewish and civil liberties groups that it would punish lawful advocacy for Palestine.

Not consultation. Capitulation, formalised in a press release.

The government’s response commits the Commonwealth, states and territories to implementing Segal’s programme. National machinery of compliance, and the premiers queued up to install it.

Minns, Crisafulli, Malinauskas
Minns expanded police powers and created new speech offences. Crisafulli criminalised two protest slogans, with two years in prison where words might reasonably cause somebody to feel menaced, harassed or offended.

Offended. The decay of liberal democracy, compressed into one word.

Malinauskas backed IHRA through the South Australian Parliament, then pressed Adelaide Writers’ Week to dump Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. David Gonski, whose name once meant needs based schooling, now fronts an Antisemitism Education Taskforce with Segal at his side.

The Australian Public Service Commission says IHRA applies in federal workplaces. AHPRA adopted it across 16 professions and more than 960,000 practitioners. A reference tool held over a doctor’s registration is not a dictionary but a threat to a livelihood.

Fear is the cheapest police force ever deployed.

Executive policy cannot rewrite ordinary language. A circular cannot create law. Parliament never enacted IHRA, so the court gave it no force. Not a High Court ruling, but a preview.

Eighteen police, one shirt
I have been the test case.

On 3 November 2024, NSW Police arrested me at Bondi for wearing “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionism”. I threatened nobody and damaged nothing. I was handcuffed, held six hours, fingerprinted and DNA tested by force over my objection.

Three charges followed, with bail conditions that ran more than a year. At one point I was banned from the eastern suburbs. My home in Surry Hills sat 400 metres from the boundary. One wrong walk meant arrest and up to 12 months in a cell awaiting a hearing.

For a shirt.

All three charges collapsed in December 2025 once my lawyers raised the implied freedom of political communication.

On April 6 this year, as many as 18 officers surrounded me at Bondi over the same shirt, among them Odin squad taskforce officers and two senior officers from area command. Overhead, a drone and a helicopter. On standby, an ambulance and two caged wagons.

Odin is a tactical unit for crowd management, high visibility policing and high risk operations. The high risk operation that morning was a shirt. I took it off. They arrested the shirt. A penalty notice arrived a week later.

Fagan has not decided my remaining matter, but he has demolished its pretence. He found the sprayed “Fuk Israel” was “crude political expression of contempt” for a foreign state, not hatred of Jews. If those words stayed political when painted during a crime spree, they cannot become Jew hatred worn peacefully on cotton.

The obscenity was never the shirt. It was the state power assembled around it.

Segal supplied the language. Albanese supplied the authority. Gonski took the classroom, AHPRA the professions, Minns the handcuffs, Crisafulli the statute book, Malinauskas the Parliament and the festival stage.

Justice Fagan supplied something none of them could survive: the law.

• Editor’s Note: the NSW Government is considering appealing Justice Fagan’s decision.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist. Republished from Michael West Media with permission.

]]>