ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

It is a peculiar kind of defeat — one dressed in the language of victory. Operation Epic Fury was sold to the world as a decisive strike to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Washington for precisely this moment. He got his war. What he didn’t get was the outcome he promised.

The US-Iran MOU is Israel’s strategic nightmare rendered in diplomatic text. And the consequences extend far beyond the terms of any single agreement.

• READ MORE: US strikes Iran after attack on vessel in Strait of Hormuz
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Left out of the room
Let us begin with the most humiliating fact. The MOU’s second paragraph mentions Lebanon three times and declares the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts — without once mentioning Israel.

A new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon has been announced, including the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar. Israel is excluded from that too.

Think about what that means. The country that triggered this war, that flew alongside American aircraft, that provided the intelligence Netanyahu boasted had been decisive — was not in the room when peace was made.

Washington negotiated Israel’s strategic future without Israel.

Vice-President JD Vance’s message to Israeli critics of Trump and the MOU was blunt: they need to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”. That is not the language of alliance. That is the language of managed irrelevance.

What Iran kept
The nuclear question — the ostensible casus belli for the entire war — remains unresolved.

The MOU suffices with rhetorical promises, deferring the actual mechanics of blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, with no guarantee of agreement on that most critical issue.

Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal? Untouched. The MOU offers no treatment of Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its patronage of regional proxies — leaving Israel to contend with those threats as before.

Iran’s financial position? All US sanctions on Iran have been lifted, giving Tehran immediate and significant financial relief — resources that will flow into rebuilding military capabilities.

Tehran emerged from this war battered but unbowed, its theocratic system intact, its strategic leverage demonstrated to the entire world.

Foreign Policy and The Atlantic described the outcome as a defeat for the United States and Israel. The BBC’s international editor assessed that while US and Israeli air forces scored tactical victories, they were not enough to avoid strategic defeat.

The death of the Abraham Accords
Let me be categorical: the Abraham Accords are dead.

That architecture — the crown jewel of American-brokered Middle East diplomacy, the grand bargain that promised Arab “normalisation” with Israel in exchange for security guarantees and Palestinian deferral — has been buried by the post-war regional reality now taking shape.

The Saudi-Iran reconciliation summit now gathering momentum tells the whole story.

Riyadh is actively convening Gulf states and Tehran around a new regional order. And at the centre of that order sits the Palestinian question — not deferred, not managed, but central.

Saudi normalisation with Israel, once dangled as the great prize Netanyahu sought, is now explicitly conditional on Palestinian statehood in terms his government categorically rejects and always will.

The Abraham Accords were premised on one fundamental assumption: that Arab states could be peeled away from the Palestinian cause by American inducements and Israeli economic partnerships.

The Iran war has demolished that premise. Arab publics watching Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran have made their governments’ calculations for them. No Arab leader can now normalise with Israel without paying a catastrophic domestic political price.

The Abraham Accords are not merely stalled. They are finished.

Some will argue that normalisation architecture, once built, has institutional momentum that survives political setbacks. This misreads what has changed. It was not merely the political temperature that shifted — it was the foundational premise of the entire enterprise.

The Abraham Accords assumed American power could permanently reshape Arab strategic calculations. The MOU has demonstrated that American power in the Middle East is now conditional, transactional, and self-limiting.

The architecture built on that power has no foundation left to stand on.

The dual hegemony: Iran and Turkey
Most analysts have framed Turkey’s rise as a consequence of Iran’s weakening — the great power stepping into the vacuum left by a damaged adversary. This framing is fundamentally wrong, and it misreads the emerging regional order.

My thesis is this: what this war has produced is not a Turkish replacement of Iranian power, but the consolidation of a dual hegemony over the Middle East — Iran and Turkey together, each dominant in its own sphere, each with its own tools of regional influence, and collectively forming the twin poles around which the new Middle East will organise itself.

Iran has survived this war with something more valuable than military capability — it has demonstrated to every state in the region that it possesses a weapon of genuine mass economic destruction in the Strait of Hormuz, with strategic leverage over both the Gulf region and the world economy that no military strike can eliminate.

Iran will rebuild. Its reconstruction will be funded by sanctions relief. And it will re-emerge as the dominant power of the Persian Gulf and the Shia arc from Baghdad to Beirut.

Battered, yes. Eliminated as a regional hegemon? Absolutely not.

Turkey simultaneously consolidates its own distinct hegemony — Sunni, NATO-anchored, commercially formidable, and diplomatically agile in ways Iran can never be.

Turkey maintains a permanent military base in Qatar. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among its largest defence clients, with Riyadh reportedly in final-stage discussions to join Turkey’s KAAN fifth-generation stealth fighter programme — which would make it the first Gulf state with a stake in an advanced combat aircraft project outside direct American control.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has already called for the formation of a Middle East security pact to build trust and stability across the region after the war.

Crucially, these two hegemonies are not necessarily in fatal conflict with each other. The restraint that Turkey and Iran have historically shown towards one another, particularly at moments of regional and global crisis, constitutes a managed rivalry — one that involves compartmentalisation, coexistence of competing strategic depths, and mutual calculation that outright confrontation serves neither.

They will compete, yes — in Syria, Iraq, and across the Levant. But they will also tacitly coordinate where their interests converge, above all in containing Israeli power and ensuring that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can dictate the regional order.

For Israel, this dual hegemony is a strategic nightmare of the first order. It faced Iran as a declared enemy — isolated, sanctioned, and manageable within a US-led containment architecture. It now faces two hegemonic powers operating across every theatre in which Israeli interests are engaged, one of them a NATO member with a domestically built defence industry and deepening Gulf partnerships that Israeli power cannot easily reach.

Israel traded a weakened, contained adversary for two formidable and rising ones.

Netanyahu’s shattered grand design
History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic vision. Behind the stated objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme lay a grander ambition — the consolidation of Israeli regional dominance, the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood, and the realisation of a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the sea, secured by Arab normalisation and American military backing.

That project is now in ruins.

Reports cited Israeli intelligence provided by Netanyahu as a decisive factor in Trump’s authorisation of Operation Epic Fury. He designed this war. He lobbied for it. He provided the intelligence that launched it. And the outcome — Iran surviving with its strategic leverage intact, Turkey ascending, a dual hegemony replacing the old order, the Abraham Accords collapsing, and Palestinian statehood returning irresistibly to the regional agenda — is the precise opposite of everything his grand design required.

The Greater Israel project required three things simultaneously: permanent American backing, Arab acquiescence, and the suppression of Palestinian nationhood. All three pillars have collapsed in the same season.

A recent poll shows that 92.1 percent of Israelis, including Jews and Arabs, believe Iran gained the most from the MOU, and 86 percent hold a negative view of the agreement.

Netanyahu faces elections in September or October. He went to war promising existential resolution. He faces the ballot box having delivered existential ruin.

The greatest blow: The loss of the American shield
But the deepest and most consequential damage inflicted by this war on Israel is not the MOU’s terms, not the dual hegemony, not the death of the Abraham Accords. It is something more fundamental.

Israel can no longer be assured of American support in future conflicts.

This is a tectonic shift in the foundations of Israeli security doctrine. Since 1973, Israel has operated on one unshakeable assumption: that the United States would underwrite its military adventurism, absorb its diplomatic costs, and stand between Israel and strategic consequences. That assumption is now shattered.

Trump refused to share a preliminary text of the MOU with Netanyahu, whose judgment he questioned using multiple expletives, while simultaneously describing Iranian interlocutors as “very rational people who were nice to deal with.” Washington did not merely negotiate over Israel’s head — it negotiated against Israel’s preferences, excluded it from the peace architecture, and then told it to accept the outcome.

The lesson every future Israeli government must now absorb is devastating in its simplicity: America will pursue its own interests. When those interests align with Israeli military action, Washington will partner.

When they diverge — as they did the moment the Strait of Hormuz closure threatened the global economy — Washington will deal. And Israel will not be in the room.

This is not a temporary rupture that a change of American administration will repair. It is a structural shift. The United States has demonstrated, in front of the entire world, that Israeli military adventurism carries costs that Washington will not indefinitely absorb. Every future Israeli prime minister will govern in the shadow of that demonstration.

A bleak horizon
Israel enters this new era already deeply wounded from within.

More than 150,000 people have left Israel in the past two years, and more than 200,000 since the current government took office in December 2022. This is not the normal ebb and flow of migration. A Knesset report described it as a “tsunami” — and those departing are disproportionately the young, educated, tax-paying professionals who constitute the backbone of Israel’s high-tech economy.

For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived — a negative net migration balance unprecedented in the country’s modern history. Population growth slowed in 2025 for the first time in decades, driven primarily by emigration alongside declining fertility rates and war-related mortality.

More than 25 percent of Israelis are now considering leaving. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.

For a state that defines itself as the ultimate sanctuary for world Jewry, this exodus carries a verdict more damning than any diplomatic agreement. Jews are leaving Israel because of Israel’s wars. The state founded to make Jews safe has become, in the eyes of growing numbers of its own citizens, a state that makes them perpetually and inescapably unsafe.

The economy mirrors the demography. The departure of high-tech workers — the engineers, physicians, and entrepreneurs who drove Israel’s “Start-Up Nation” identity — carries compounding consequences. Capital, talent, and tax revenue leave together. The sectors that remain are progressively more dependent on state subsidies and less capable of generating the growth that underwrites military spending.

A state in permanent war cannot indefinitely sustain a first-world economy, and the numbers are beginning to reflect that truth.

The only path forward: A Palestinian state
There is only one exit from this strategic catastrophe, and it requires Israel to face a truth it has spent 70 years refusing to acknowledge.

Israel’s long-term survival as a viable state — economically, demographically, diplomatically — now depends on a single political act: the acceptance of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

This is no longer a moral argument, though the moral case is overwhelming. It is a cold strategic calculation. The post-war regional order being assembled — the dual hegemony of Iran and Turkey, the Saudi-led Gulf reconciliation, the death of the Abraham Accords — has Palestinian statehood as its non-negotiable foundation.

Every regional power that matters has made this clear. The price of Israel’s reintegration into a workable Middle Eastern order, and by extension the restoration of something resembling normal economic and diplomatic life, is Palestinian statehood.

Without it, Israel faces permanent regional hostility, no prospect of Arab normalisation, a continuing haemorrhage of its most productive citizens, an economy under sustained pressure, and an American patron whose support is now conditional and transactional rather than unconditional and structural.

The Zionist founders understood something Netanyahu’s generation has forgotten: that Israel’s survival ultimately depends not merely on military power but on legitimacy — the legitimacy that comes from being a state that other states and peoples can live alongside.

That legitimacy has been catastrophically squandered. It can only begin to be rebuilt through justice for the Palestinian people.

The reckoning has arrived. And the path forward, however painful, is clear.

Accept Palestinian statehood — with East Jerusalem as its capital — or face a future of accelerating isolation, demographic decline, and strategic irrelevance in a Middle East that has irrevocably moved on.

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

The devastating United Nations report this week into the deliberate targeting and murder of Palestinian children by Israel is not very newsworthy in Australia apparently.

On Tuesday, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel released a harrowing report finding that Israel has deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children.

The 94-page report documented children being shot by snipers, targeted by drones, denied medical treatment, subjected to starvation and detained in conditions involving torture, sexual violence and severe abuse.

• READ MORE: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children — Al Jazeera
• Jale Moala: Why is the UN credible when Fiji agrees but not when it’s inconvenient?
• UN report must mark a turning point for accountability for Palestinian children

The commission concluded that the deliberate targeting of children was one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent.

These are extraordinary findings backed up by an in-depth investigation by a UN body, and one would think it would be of substantial public interest worthy of front-page headlines, but Australia’s mainstream media doesn’t seem to think so.

The ABC made somewhat of an effort by bringing on global affairs editor Laura Tingle to discuss the commission’s findings on its news programme. However, half of their article covering the report was dedicated to parroting Israel’s defence of the indefensible and was buried at the bottom of their website.

Guardian Australia was the only other mainstream Australian outlet to cover the UN report until yesterday. Again, it was buried, and the article has since been relegated to the bottom of its home page.

The Nine newspapers caught up two days late, with The Sydney Morning Herald framing it: “commissioned experts” (not simply the UN) had “accused” Israel … and repeated the “claim” of genocide. A significant portion of the article was dedicated to Israel’s denial of the report’s findings.

As for the rest of the media, Karl Stefanovic’s podcast interview with a right-wing racist grifter is apparently much more newsworthy.

Pacific Media Watch reports: Major New Zealand media outlets that covered the UN Commission of Inquiry report about the deliberate targeting of children included the public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and largest media website Stuff.

Also, leading advocacy groups in the country, such as Save the Children New Zealand, issued media releases urging global accountability in response to the report.

The Save The Children statement in New Zealand said the UN report must mark a turning point for the world to stop turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinian children and hold perpetrators to account.

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. Republished from Michael West Media with permission.

And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

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Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations.

And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Let me show you why.

The original theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative.

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply.

Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries.

The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

Mosaddegh and the ‘crime of democracy’
Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel.

He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian Parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration.

For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history.

They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

The Shah’s gilded cage
The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — 26 years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image.

When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

To mark the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of 50 lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital.

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France.

Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation.

The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

The estimated cost was anywhere between US$100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

Khomeini’s rational revolution
When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity.

He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together.

They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution.

The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

When America armed the man who gassed Iranian children
If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited.

The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win.

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew.

American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day.

It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.
Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging.

It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian “irrationality”. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

47 years of punishment
Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice delayed
When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine.

It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs.

They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

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

It’s interesting how readily many people in Fiji embrace the work of the United Nations when it supports local programmes such as climate resilience, development, governance and social inclusion.

Yet when the UN publishes reports critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, some of the same voices suddenly dismiss it as corrupt, evil or “fake news”.

Recently the UN published a report that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting children in Gaza.

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Facebook comments in response to the report have described the UN as the “enemy of Israel”, “a promoter of lies” and even an organisation that “stands for terrorists”.

The Fijian response raises an interesting question: Is the UN credible only when it says things we already agree with?

Or do we judge its credibility according to who its findings happen to criticise?

No institution is beyond criticism, including the UN. But it is worth remembering that it has maintained an office in Suva since Fiji’s independence, supporting everything from disaster recovery and climate resilience to governance, health and community development.

It seems odd to celebrate its work when it helps Fiji, yet dismiss it outright when its findings are politically or religiously inconvenient.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

Targeting of Gaza chidren                              Video: ABC News

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Iranians cautiously optimistic about thorny deal with US
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He doesn’t need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

Rubio:

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

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

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

— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good on the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) for its submission to the Royal Commission.

The New Zealand Jewish Council is so very different to the Jewish Council in Australia. The latter has far larger numbers and more clout, over there at least.

The NZ Jewish Council has clout and applies it. It is heavily involved in New Zealand media, some members are journalists, and it has long been running a hasbara propaganda campaign.

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• Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Other Israeli propaganda reports

‘The JCA submission says two important drivers of antisemitism are the “growth of far-right, neo-Nazi and conspiracist movements, which represent a significant and often overlooked threat to Jewish communities, and the aggressive actions of the state of Israel and conflation of Jewish identity with Israel”.’

— The Guardian

Freebies to Israel if you play the toxic game — dehumanise Palestinians, deem them all terrorists, and declare Israel the promised land for one people, not the other.

The New Zealand Jewish Council spreads lies. I know this for a fact. One of its key members who is lauded in New Zealand film and television defamed John Minto, a humanitarian, called him antisemitic, I challenged that and asked him to provide evidence.

Of course there was none. This man who is Jewish and influential in entertainment and journalism defamed Damien O’Connor and said he was antisemitic. Again I challenged him and asked for evidence. There was none.

Zionism inflates antisemitism
I have news for Zionists and their allies in the media who are doing this. Conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism inflates antisemitism. They know it.

It is not fair, is not sensible, rational or compassionate. It is baiting and inciting.

The NZ Jewish Council applies one law for Jews and one for Muslims, different standards completely. One can be the victim, the other is never the victim, in its view.

I previously supported the NZ Jewish Council when I witnessed media bias in a programme featuring a former Waffen SS officer who praised Hitler and claimed he did not know about what happened to the Jews. It was impossible not to know about the systemic murder of masses of Jews, then and now.

When the evidence points to the contrary, the journalist should call it, everytime. Evidence.

This Gaza genocide. More than 75,000 killed — children, little children, babies, women, aid workers, journalists. A target on their backs for being Palestinian.

I have been appalled at the NZ Jewish Council’s double standards, its staunch sense of entitlement, its clear political view that the only good Jews are Zionists, its supremacism.

Stalwart Zionists
The NZ Jewish Council is run by and supported by stalwart Zionists. It does not represent humanitarian Jews because it is Zionist, because it fails to call out a genocide which has murdered tens of thousands of infants, aid workers, and more journalists than World War One and Two combined and the total number of recent wars.

Genocide is not a conflict, it is not a war. The massacres have been carried out since the Nakba. It was always the plan.

Jews have fought against Zionism, literally. The Bund. Jews against Zionism.

Not all Jews are Zionists and the NZ Jewish Council fails to recognise it and support those who support all people equally.

I know about antisemitism. When I worked in a shop I was asked if I was Jewish, when I asked why the question was asked, I was told by the customer that they would never buy from a Jew. My grandfather’s people hid their Jewishness due to anti-semitism.

My aunt was yelled at in the street: ‘You black Jews are all the same’. I know the difference between antisemitism and pro-colonisation Zionism, one supports equality and the other robs other people of their rights.

I stand firmly with the most oppressed people in the world, Palestinians, and for the dismantling of the state of supremacism, apartheid and genocide, a state which always had a policy of steal the land, assimilate those who won’t resist, and exile and exterminate the rest.

And this is why I say it is antisemitic to support the Zionist state. When we free Palestinians we free ourselves from the chains of one kind of victimhood. The victimhood that leads people to become persecutors and create more victims. Zionism.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

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

Starmer spoke earlier on Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) June 17, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished from Drop Site News.

• The petition against deporting Trita Parsi

The streets of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, echoed with the sound of people power today.

From Aotea Square to the US Consulate on Customs Street, protesters marched shoulder-to-shoulder because they refuse to let Aotearoa become a supply chain for global conflict.

The protesters in the March for Peace were demanding that the New Zealand government refuse any “war mineral” deals with the US President Donald Trump’s administration.

• READ MORE: Iran says US must pressure Israel as deadly attacks on Lebanon test deal
• Eugene Doyle: Why I’ll be marching for global peace on June 20
• Other Gaza, Lebanon and Iran peace reports

“We will not allow our precious environment to be mined and destroyed to feed a military machine,” said a statement by the organisers Greenpeace Aotearoa with Anti-War Aotearoa (AAA).

“But our fight doesn’t end today. We need to send a direct, undeniable message to Jared Novelly, the newly confirmed incoming US Ambassador.

“As an oil billionaire and Republican donor, he is looking to our region to secure these minerals — and we need to stand united to tell him NO!

“Our whenua and moana are not for sale, and they are certainly not bargaining chips for foreign wars.”

• Take action now: Join the “no war materials” declaration

Video clip and images by Kerry Sorensen-Tyrer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now he has to settle for an agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not diplomacy. It is

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

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

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

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

So when Newman says the survivors are lying,

he is saying the Foreign Minister of Australia is lying.

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

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

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

That is not a government with nothing to hide.

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

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

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

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

Read that twice, because it is grotesque.

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

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

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

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

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) June 11, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 18, 2026

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

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

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

A member of the Aotearoa delegation on the Global Sumud flotilla humanitarian aid mission seeking to break the illegal Gaza enclave blockade imposed by Israel since 2007 clashed with New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters in a parliamentary hearing yesterday.

Peters was attempting to defend his heavily criticised government response to Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — while speaking to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee yesterday.

Peters was answering a line of questions from MPs on whether New Zealand had spoken strongly enough against Israel, when Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto) — a flotilla activist who was brutally abused by Israeli military after being kidnapped in the Mediterranean sea near Cyprus last month and detained — stood up and interrupted him.

• READ MORE: A world first: Australia will now investigate Israel over Gaza flotilla brutality
• France opens ‘war crimes’ probe into Israel’s treatment of Gaza activists
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists
• The Global Sumud Aotearoa dossier answering Israeli claims

“Is it New Zealand First, Winston? Or is it Israel First?” Ormsby asked.

He then asked whether New Zealand would sanction Israel, or “investigate Israel for the people that were on the flotilla who were brutally beaten and tortured?”

Ormsby and his fellow activists were then ordered by committee chair Tim van de Molen to leave the room. The video livestream feed was also cut during the protest.

Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation activists came to Wellington this week to challenge Peters over what they condemned as “government inaction following the abduction and mistreatment of New Zealand citizens” by the Israeli military forces in both May and last year.

Australia, France, other countries investigating
Unlike Australia, France, Spain, Malaysia, Türkiye and several other countries, New Zealand and Peters have failed to launch a government investigation into the mistreatment of New Zealand citizens.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP), under instruction from Foreign Minister Penny Wong have now launched an investigation into rape and torture by Israeli forces on Australian citizens who were detained in international waters.

“Knowing we were coming to Wellington, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent us an email yesterday asking us to provide information on what happened to our activists,” a spokesperson for Global Sumud Aotearoa, Rana Hamida, said.

‘Israel both criminal and judge’
“The message was that they would put this to the Israelis — in other words: they will leave it to Israel to be both the criminal and the judge. That’s not good enough.

“Malaysia, for example, is taking Israel to the International Court of Justice over the kidnapping and violence dished out to their citizens.”

Hāhona Ormsby, who endured multiple beatings by the Israelis after being seized in international waters and taken to Israel, said: “Calling in the Israeli ambassador and slapping him with a wet bus ticket over tea and scones does not count as meaningful action.”

The government has treated people like Ormsby as a “threat” while doing nothing to hold Israel to account, Global Sumud Aotearoa said in a statement.

“I had two detectives come and interview me this week to assess if I was a ‘threat’. Imagine that? I joined the Sumud flotilla armed with nothing other than aroha and I — a New Zealand citizen — get treated as the problem,” Ormsby said.

“But some Israeli soldier fresh from killing women, children, and babies in Gaza and Lebanon knows they can holiday in New Zealand with no questions asked.”

Global Sumud Aotearoa is demanding that the NZ government launch its own “non-Israeli-led investigation”. New Zealand should coordinate with other governments who had already launched inquiries into the attack on their citizens, the group said in its statement.

‘Interview the activists’
“A first step would be for the government to formally interview our returning activists. Second, the government should liaise with the Turkish authorities who sent planes to Israel to bring over 400 detained Sumud activists to safety in Istanbul.

“It should be noted New Zealand provided absolutely no support whatsoever to their citizens,” the statement said.

All the Sumud people who were flown out of Israel, including the New Zealand citizens, were given medical examinations and forensic interviews in Türkiye.

Some, including Hāhona Ormsby and fellow Kiwi Mousa Taher, received hospital treatment for their injuries.

“MFAT requesting medical records from Türkiye would be a useful place to start,” the Sumud statement said.

Global Sumud Aotearoa has widely distributed a detailed response to “Israeli propaganda that ludicrously suggested that the black eyes, broken noses and ribs inflicted on citizens from over 40 countries was an elaborate hoax”.

“The photo of the damaged face of New Zealand citizen Julien Blondel, beaten by Israelis in an attack in international waters on April 29, should have triggered immediate action by the NZ government,” the statement said.

“The Israelis, realising that New Zealand and other Western governments stood with them, not their own citizens, increased the level of violence in their June attack on over 50 vessels.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 14 clauses of the Iran MOU:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police have paid $10,000 to veteran activist John Minto after he was unlawfully arrested and pepper-sprayed at a pro-Palestinian protest in Christchurch in 2024.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) last year found Minto’s arrest was unlawful and an officer used excessive and unjustified force.

The payout follows negotiations between police and Minto following the authority’s findings.

• READ MORE: Other pro-Palestine protest reports

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national organiser Minto, then 70, was charged with obstructing and resisting police during a protest in Lyttelton on Waitangi Day 2024. Charges were later dropped.

Minto said he would donate the money to the group.

He said he was concerned police still disputed the authority’s findings.

A police investigation concluded the officer’s actions were lawful, but he had failed in his duty to provide aftercare after pepper-spraying Minto.

“I’m pleased this issue is now resolved but disturbed that even after the IPCA report, the police have not accepted responsibility for what in this instance was thuggish behaviour,” Minto said.

Writing to minister
He would write to Police Minister Mark Mitchell calling for law changes to make IPCA findings legally binding on police.

IPCA chair Judge Kenneth Johnston KC wrote to Minto last year and said the authority had found inconsistencies between the arresting officer’s account and video footage, which led the authority to “doubt the genuineness” of the officer’s version.

The authority did not accept the police explanation that Minto had moved from where he was standing or that the officer could have perceived Minto as a real threat.

Johnston said the authority considered the possibility of police charging the officer with assault, but could not rule out self-defence. Instead, the authority asked police to consider an employment process for the officer involved. Police declined to do so.

Minto was pepper-sprayed as police arrested another protester. Half an hour later he was himself arrested ostensibly for obstructing the earlier arrest.

The IPCA found there was no case for the obstruction charge and no grounds to suspect Minto had hindered the arrest of the other protester, “or indeed showed any intention of doing so”.

‘Standing lawfully’
“Our view is that you were standing lawfully on the footpath both prior and during the other protester’s arrest. The evidence does not show you advancing past where you were originally standing after being pushed by the officer who pepper sprayed you, and that you were not paying any attention to the arrest.”

Canterbury District Commander Superintendent Tony Hill said, at the time of the authority’s findings, that police were satisfied there were no employment or criminal matters to address.

“It is important to note that the officer involved was one of a group of other officers dealing with policing a large group of people, in a heightened and dynamic environment,” he said.

Police have been approached for comment on the payment to Minto.

By Andrew Brown in Sydney

This is the biggest story most Australians have not yet grasped.

Australian survivors of physical, psychological and sexual abuse by Israeli authorities met with Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Dr Anne Aly MP, a Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and a senior DFAT official on Monday.

As a result, the Australian government has committed to an independent investigation into the assaults, sexual assaults and torture of the Gaza Flotilla humanitarians.

• READ MORE: Family welcomes Australian investigation into IDF abuse claims
• France opens ‘war crimes’ probe into Israel’s treatment of Gaza activists
• Other allegations of Israeli brutality against Gaza flotilla activists

Read that again. Not an internal Israeli review. Not a department preparing a briefing note. Not a politician expressing concern.

An independent Australian investigation,

with the AFP at the table, into the conduct of the military and prison personnel of one of this country’s closest allies.

That is not normal. There is no comparable moment in the modern history of the relationship. A Western democracy, a reliable friend of Israel, has committed to formally investigating the Israeli state over what it did to that democracy’s own citizens.

That has not happened before. Anywhere.

Eleven Australians
The Australians were among humanitarian volunteers detained by Israel after attempting to deliver food, medicine and aid to starving civilians in Gaza. Eleven of them came home with allegations of physical abuse, assault and, in several cases, sexual assault.

And the investigation did not happen by accident. It happened because a handful of Australians refused to let it be buried.

Juliet Lamont and Neve O’Connor came home injured and traumatised, and instead of retreating into private recovery they kicked the door of the national conversation off its hinges. They put their names to sworn testimony. They sat through Senate estimates. They took their case to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

And when their own prime minister declined to meet them, Lamont’s response was devastating in its simplicity. If Australian survivors can be heard in The Hague but not in Canberra, something has gone badly wrong.

Today they were heard.

“We came here seeking justice for survivors of Israel’s abuse of Australian citizens,” Lamont said after the meeting. “Today we secured an Australian investigation. Believing survivors is the first step. Investigation is the second. Justice is the third.

“There must be consequences for Israel’s brutality.”

O’Connor put the stakes in their proper, global frame. “What happened to us is what Palestinians have been warning the world about for decades. The same methods. The same perpetrators. The same chain of command.

“This investigation matters not only because Australians were harmed. It matters because it exposes the nature of the state responsible.”

That is the heart of it. And it is why this is much bigger than 11 Australians and one flotilla.

Will Israel cooperate?
A credible investigation will need operational footage, body camera recordings, communications records, detention logs, medical records and witness statements. Material capable of establishing exactly what happened.

And this is where Israel is trapped. There are only two paths, and both are damning.

It can cooperate. Hand over the footage, open the logs, produce the records, name the personnel. If its account is true, that material exonerates it completely. A government confident in its own conduct does not hide the evidence. It rushes to produce it.

Or it can refuse. And if it refuses, every Australian is entitled to ask one question. Why? Why would a state that insists it did nothing wrong withhold the one thing capable of proving it? There is only one honest answer, and Israel knows it. You do not bury evidence that vindicates you.

You bury evidence that convicts you.

This is established behaviour. When the United Nations investigated the 2010 Mavi Marmara raid, Israel refused to let its soldiers be interviewed and ran its own inquiry instead. The pattern is decades old. Deny everything, investigate nothing independently, wait for the world to lose interest.

Israel denies
Israel’s ambassador maintains that participants were treated appropriately. Its prison service has issued a flat denial.

Yet National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted footage of detained activists handcuffed and forced to crouch as guards waved Israeli flags in their faces, and called himself proud of it. Let the evidence speak. A state with nothing to hide would already be couriering the files to Canberra.

What makes this explosive is who is asking the questions. Australia is not Iran, not South Africa, not one of Israel’s usual critics. It has spent decades as one of Israel’s most dependable friends.

When a loyal friend opens a file on you, the findings carry a weight no critics ever could.

Remembering Zomi Frankcom
Australians remember Zomi Frankcom. When the aid worker was killed in Gaza, the government accepted an Israeli internal review where it should have demanded answers. That impression has not faded. This time the government has committed to something different,

and it will be held to it.

Penny Wong has told the Senate she believes the women, calling their treatment horrific and unacceptable. Today she went further and committed her government to act. The question is no longer whether the allegations are credible. It is what Australia does with what it finds.

Sanctions. Travel bans. And the bluntest instrument of all. Australia could expel Israel’s ambassador and declare implicated officials persona non grata, putting them on a plane.

A few years ago the idea was fantasy. It is now a live question, and it sharpens with every day Israel stonewalls.

Australia breaks ranks
Understand what is truly at stake. For decades Israel has acted in the settled expectation that it answers to no one, underwritten by the certainty that its Western friends would always look away.

That assumption is what is now on trial in Canberra. The moment a trusted ally follows the evidence wherever it leads, the spell breaks, and other capitals discover they can ask the question too.

This is why the world is watching a story that began with a few small boats.

The 11 Australians have names. Neve O’Connor, Juliet Lamont, Zack Schofield, Surya McEwen, Sam Woripa Watson, Anny Mokotow, Bianca Pullman Webb, Ethan Floyd, Violet Coco, Gemma O’Toole and Helen O’Sullivan. They are not going away.

The era of impunity rested on a single belief. That no friend would ever break ranks. A friend just did.

Asia Pacific Report notes: Three New Zealanders on the Global Sumud Flotilla had similar allegations of brutality and inhuman treatment by the Israeli security forces, along with more than 300 people from more that 40 countries. France has opened a ‘war crimes’ investigation into Israel after the brutality.

So, the whole Iran war, like so much of life, has turned out to be exactly the opposite of what you thought: You initiate a regime change war against Iran. You kill its elderly cleric head of state. You blow up a girls’ school. You sink its ships. You decapitate its “Air Force,” whatever that was.

You unleash the full fury of the largest military in human history on this country and, in the end, almost inevitably, that country becomes stronger and the countries that attack it become weaker.

Again, only in real life do ironies like this exist, but they are everywhere. In fact, that is the story of life. The opposite happens.

• READ MORE: Trump says Iran MoU signed electronically, Hormuz to open fully on
• Tucker Carlson and John Mearsheimer react over Iran
• As deal is agreed with US, not all in Iran are convinced that peace is here
• Other Gaza genocide and Iran war reports

Who could have called this? Well, certainly almost no one in Washington saw this coming, because they’ve been talking about this war with Iran and the need to decapitate Iran and the need to do something about Iran: “America’s biggest problem is Iran, and their proxies, and the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas.”

Whenever they gather in Washington to talk about the world, Iran is at the top of the list of problems we must solve.

And in almost none of these gatherings has anyone piped up to say, “Well, wait a second, if we do that, the opposite will happen. Iran will become more powerful, and we will become less powerful.”

Almost nobody said that in Washington. Literally almost nobody. And if there is somebody, who is that person? There wasn’t one.

At least one realist
But there was at least one person outside of Washington who said this. His name is John Mearsheimer. He’s been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1982, for over 40 years.

And he studies international relations, the way that countries get along with each other, the balances of power regionally and globally. And he’s smart and he’s erudite, but above all, he is wise.

He draws obvious conclusions from longitudinal data sets. He looks at what happens over time and tries to understand what this tells us about the way nations behave and about the way people behave, about human nature, which is constant, it doesn’t change.

And because he is one of the very few people in the field of international relations who has this ability, married to personal bravery, he’s willing to say things that are unpopular, which is the rarest of all qualities in academia.

Because he has these two qualities, he has been maybe the only guy, or one of the very few guys, to call it right.

Back in 2007, he and a friend of his from Harvard called Stephen Walt wrote a book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, on the so-called Jewish lobby, AIPAC, and the whole constellation of non-profits in Washington that seek to steer the US Congress and the executive of the White House to giving Israel more money and more military aid, to changing the inherent priorities of American foreign policy, which are to protect and enhance the United States and to do things that are good for the population of America, to change that priority to protect Israel, to do what Israel wants.

The two of them wrote this fairly famous book about it back in 2007 and were immediately attacked, can you guess, as Nazis and anti-Semites. Well, turns out neither of them was a Nazi or an anti-Semite, just the opposite.

Normal liberals
They’re kind of normal liberals, not racist in any sense.

The charge itself is ludicrous. You notice what AIPAC is doing, so you’re an anti-Semite? It doesn’t make any sense; it’s a slur.

It’s slander designed to make you be quiet. And in most cases it works, which is why they keep doing it.

But in this one specific case, it didn’t work. Professor John Mearsheimer, who had tenure at Chicago, did not lose his job. And not only did he keep speaking, he upped the volume of his speaking and kept telling the world, though most people didn’t listen, what he had personally seen and how he interpreted that.

Why does the United States military go to war?

Mearsheimer, through close observation, concluded, well, in the modern era, mostly it goes to war, big wars, on behalf of Israel.

Tucker Carlson is an American conservative political commentator who hosts The Tucker Carlson Show.

Professor John Mearsheimer on genocide in Gaza and the looming defeat in Iran — recorded just before the peace deal.        Video: The Tucker Carlson Show

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tantura trailer.           Video: Journeyman Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-War Aotearoa and Greenpeace are calling on Kiwis to join the March for Peace on June 20 in Auckland. I will be marching.

I will be marching for many of the same reasons that compelled me to march against the Vietnam war in 1973 as a 12-year old — opposition to New Zealand participation in wars of aggression, solidarity with humanity and a belief that peace trumps war.

Soon after that first march, I attended my first rallies outside the South African Consulate in Wellington to protest the Apartheid regime.

• READ MORE: Trump says US-Iran peace deal to be signed today, Tehran disputes
• The March for Peace — why Greenpeace Aotearoa is teaming up with Anti-War Aotearoa  for peaceful protest to demand an end to NZ’s complicity in Trump’s warmongering
• Other peace reports

When history calls, you should answer the call
Two years later, as a 16-year-old, I marched on the final leg of the Te Hīkoi o te Motu, the Māori Land March led by the great Whina Cooper.

I vividly remember heading out into Wellington harbour in 1983 on a small yacht, part of a peace flotilla made up of kayakers, yachties and wind surfers, that tried to stop the USS Texas from berthing.

It won that battle that day but we won the war for a nuclear-free New Zealand.

Peace and Justice were the beating heart of all those causes.  It was about ordinary New Zealanders standing up and saying: Not in Our Name.

We didn’t want our soldiers killing Vietnamese people in Vietnam. We didn’t want our government or our sports people to support the racist South African regime.

We wanted to live in a New Zealand that honoured the Treaty of Waitangi and where both Māori and Pākehā stood shoulder-to-shoulder to build a better country for all New Zealanders.

The election of Norman Kirk’s government was made possible by the protest movement convincing enough New Zealanders that real change was needed.  One of the Kirk government’s first acts was to end our shameful participation in the Vietnam war.

We mobilised. We marched
After the sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior by the French government in Auckland Harbour in 1985, the peace movement went into overdrive. We mobilised. We marched. We took part in campaigns that drove real societal change.

Many of these changes reach down to the present day through legislation like the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, the 1985 revision to The Treaty of Waitangi Act, the Conservation Act 1987, the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986 (that means the Crown must act in a manner consistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi), and the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986.

Several of these gains are now under threat.

Marching for peace is a great way to show solidarity and to bring together great everyday New Zealanders.

As a side note: the greatest march I ever went on was the Wellington section of Te Hīkoi mō te Tiriti in 2024. Toitū Te Tiriti! It was as big a march as I ever attended in Aotearoa and it was for a cause that should matter deeply to us all.

No one should doubt that getting out and marching is also part of a process — sometimes long and hard — that can lead to powerful changes in national sentiment and put real pressure on political parties to return the country’s policy settings towards justice and a better, kinder, safer Aotearoa.

The organisers of the March for Peace are Greenpeace and Anti-War Aotearoa. They are united around respect for the United Nations Charter and rejection of any support whatsoever for US wars of aggression. I am proud to be counted in their numbers.

Gaza genocide ongoing
The genocide in Gaza and the West Bank has not stopped. The destruction of the communities of Lebanon is ongoing. The sovereign state of Iran is the subject of ongoing US-Israeli aggression in contravention of international law. Cuba is in danger.

We live under a government that has doubled spending on a war machine that — given our alliance with a rogue and hostile USA — will not make us safer. Global research shows the US is seen as the greatest risk to humanity today.

We live under a government that wants our military to be “interoperable” with the Americans. They are  negotiating with the US to give their war machine access to our critical minerals and allow foreign corporations to undertake seabed mining and other environmentally damaging activities.

We live under a government that has money for missiles but ignores the daily horror that 30,000 homeless New Zealand children must endure. Scrapping national subsidies for youth transport and getting rid of thousands of public service jobs whilst finding more and more money for a war on China is madness.

That needs to change. I feel exactly the same passion as I did as a 12-year-old whose political awakening was the US (and New Zealand) war of aggression against Vietnam — even if, at the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what the word “mobilisation” meant!

If you haven’t marched for a long time or if you have never marched but support this cause, here’s my invitation: head down to Aotea Square on June 20 and step forward to March for Peace.

Because marching matters.

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

Eight months on from the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza, the headlines may have moved on — but Israel’s assault has not.

The siege remains. The starvation continues. The displacement continues. The destruction continues.

“The Palestinian people, with their heroism and sacrifice, are fighting a struggle for all of us against a new wave of brutal colonialism.”

• READ MORE: Israeli attacks kill three in Gaza as post-‘ceasefire’ deaths hit 983
• Protesters at Auckland’s Defying Definitions of Woman and Man Bill prior to the Stop Wars Aotearoa rally
• Other Palestine reports

This week on The Tea, we speak to Dr Mads Gilbert, the award-winning Norwegian doctor and long-standing advocate for Palestinian liberation.

Having worked in Gaza for decades, Dr Gilbert offers a devastating account of what he describes as a deliberate campaign of deprivation — one designed to destroy the very foundations of life.

Water and food supplies have been strangled. Hospitals have been besieged and bombed. Doctors have been detained and killed. Every university in Gaza has been attacked.

Schools, ambulances, and civilian infrastructure have all come under fire. This is not collateral damage. It’s a deliberate process of deprivation — one that has systematically targeted the very foundations of life.

Also in the show:

• A remarkable story of survival: the world record in resuscitation from hypothermia;
• The Oslo Accords: corruption allegations and links to Jeffrey Epstein;
• The mystery of the missing Oslo documents;
• The so-called ceasefire? It’s a re-occupation line;
• UNRWA and the blockade preventing aid from reaching Gaza;
• Israel’s impunity and the failure of Western governments to act;
• The systematic targeting of hospitals, doctors and medical infrastructure;
• Horror and abuse inside Israeli prisons;
• Israel and the “weaponisation” of solidarity; and
• Palestinian resistance and the right to resist occupation

“The Palestinian people, with their heroism and sacrifice, are fighting a struggle for all of us against a new wave of brutal colonialism,” says Dr Gilbert.

He argues that: “if we are to take our responsibility seriously, we have to stand with them.”

Inside Israel’s war on Gaza                    Video: The Tea

It’s so pathetic watching Elon Musk’s groveling bootlickers fall all over themselves on social media to defend their favorite oligarch from criticism as he becomes the world’s first trillionaire.

They’re like “Don’t be mean to the trillionaire, just become a trillionaire yourself! All you need is luck, connections, wealthy parents, the ruthlessness to step on anyone who gets in your way, and a willingness to cooperate with murderous imperial institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA!”

Elon Musk is a military-industrial complex plutocrat who is balls deep in the US intelligence cartel and recently facilitated the US-Israeli attempted regime change operation in Iran.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley
• READ MORE: US, Iran edge closer to a deal, Trump says Hormuz will be ‘open to all’

You have infinitely more in common with the average person in Iran, Cuba, Lebanon or Palestine than you have with the world’s first trillionaire.

It’s so gross how many fawning admirers this freak still has. The trillionaire is not your friend.

❖

People who say “Zionism is just the belief that Jews should have a homeland” are hilarious. Zionism isn’t some abstraction; we can all see its material manifestations with our own eyes. We can all see that Zionism means genocide, apartheid, and nonstop wars and abuse.

This isn’t some kind of theoretical debate where we all get to have our own opinions about what Zionism is and what it entails. It’s 2026, not 1890. The facts are in and the case is closed, kids. This is what Zionism is. This is the only Zionism in existence. What you see is what you get. And what you see is quantifiably one of the most evil things happening on our planet.

❖

Some guy told me, “Why are you fine with the existence of approximately 50 Islamic nation-states, but the single Jewish one is apparently too many?”

I showed him an illustration of a nail stuck in somebody’s foot and said, “Why are you fine with an entire foot made of flesh, but a single metal spike is too much? The only possible explanation is that you have a seething hatred of metal. It can’t possibly be that you object to a foreign object being violently forced into a region where it does damage.”

He got upset and wound up telling me he hopes I get murdered by Mossad.

❖

Hasbara is so gross because it’s just Zionists throwing walls of language at you to convince you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

You see raw video footage of the most horrifying thing imaginable in Gaza, and then you see them in the replies going “This is actually fine and normal because words words words words words words words.”

You see a news report about Israel doing something astonishingly evil in Lebanon, and there they are underneath it going “There’s actually a lot more to the story because words words words words words words words.”

You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.”

You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words.

You see more and more mainstream news institutions reporting on the mountains of evidence of widespread rape and torture in Israeli prisons, and they saturate the airwaves claiming it’s an antisemitic blood libel because words words words words words words words.

The idea is to just pound your intellect with a firehose of verbiage until your inner sensemaker has been shredded and you’re too confused to form a coherent picture of what’s actually going on. It’s a disgusting, abusive, and profoundly unethical thing to do to people.

But the good news is it’s not working anymore. Language is immensely powerful, but its power has its limits. Israel’s behavior has become so transparently unacceptable that no amount of word magic can manipulate people into seeing anything other than what’s happening in front of their face.

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.

The US on Wednesday night destroyed civilian water utilities serving 20,000 Iranian people.

“The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” US Central Command said in a statement on X.

The punishment was “in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter,” the US Centcom said.

• READ MORE: Iran, US signal deal within reach as Israel continues attacks on Lebanon
• US bombs Iran’s water facilities: Why that’s so significant
• Israel-Gaza war death toll: Live tracker
• Global conflict tracker

So, one item of military transport (crew escaped without harm) is deemed equivalent to bringing harm and misery to 20,000 people.

And this was just hours before a so-called “peace deal” was announced as close to signing.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5 p.m. ET today at the Commander in Chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter. The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian…

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) June 9, 2026

Yes, it was war crime
Destroying water utilities is a war crime. Under Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, it is strictly prohibited to attack or destroy infrastructure essential to civilian life, including water installations.

And the US committed this war crime for what?

The truth is that the destruction of the helicopter was no big deal.

Who said that? Donald Trump did. “Wasn’t a big deal. The pilot is fine,” he told the press.

Even more galling is the fact that the Iranians downed the helicopter as part of its self-defence efforts against a US-Israeli war that has been deemed illegal by multiple countries and organisations, including many in the US.

The lack of “proportionality” is the key to understanding what is really happening in West Asia. Here are three examples with up-to-date statistics.

1. Compare Lebanon and Israel numbers
Lebanon reported this week that Israeli attacks have now killed at least 3696 people and injured 11,413 others since March 2. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced.

On the Israeli side, 29 soldiers and one civilian contractor have been killed in Lebanon, according to the military.

Just 29 soldiers on the Israel side. On the Lebanon side, even if we ONLY count women, children or medics killed by Israel, there have been 730. So far.

And before anyone is tempted to say that Lebanon’s figures are untrustworthy, let’s remember that Lebanon’s government has long been US-aligned and opposed to Hezbollah.

2. Compare Iranian and US numbers
How many times have we heard about the 13 members of the US armed forces who lost their lives as part of the attack on Iran? Each was given a lengthy obituary in multiple media, including the The Guardian.

Just 13. And what about the 2988 men and 511 women killed by the US and Israel in Iran, as reported on Wednesday?

They’re just statistics.

3. Compare Israeli and Gaza numbers
In recent days, Israel killed at least 11 more Palestinians in Gaza, including women and children, adding to a total of more than 72,000 lives lost. The majority have been women and children.

Since the beginning of the retaliation after the October 2023 attack, Israel has lost just 1152 personnel, identified by its government as soldiers, police, and security officials.

See what I mean about proportionality? The contrast between casualties on the US-Israel side and those they are targeting is startling.

This week, the richest nation on earth lost a helicopter.

“No big deal.”

Nury Vittachi is a Sri Lankan-born author, writer and political commentator based in Hong Kong. He has written the novel series, The Feng Shui Detective and non-fiction works.

The contest for influence in the Pacific is no longer confined to diplomacy, aid projects or infrastructure.

Increasingly, it is being waged through information, media and communications networks.

A recent report, Understanding China’s Footprint in the Pacific Island Media Landscape, paints a picture of a region where newsrooms are under financial pressure, audiences are migrating online and foreign powers are competing to shape narratives.

• READ MORE: Understanding China’s Footprint in the Pacific Island Media Landscape
• Why Australia’s cuts to news services in the Indo‑Pacific are a failure of soft diplomacy
• Other Pacific media reports

The findings are drawn from a major study conducted by researchers from the Washington DC-based Centre for Naval Analyses (CNA), a United States non-profit organisation specialising in security, strategic and public policy issues.

The report examined media systems and China’s engagement across 15 Pacific Island countries and territories between 2024 and 2025 through fieldwork, interviews and consultations with media practitioners, academics and policymakers.

The report was launched during a virtual panel discussion on May 20, 2026, featuring presentations by CNA researchers Heidi Holz, Genevieve Collins, John Mahoney and Darlene Onuorah.

They were joined by regional academics Dr Shailendra Singh, associate professor and head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific, and Professor Stephen Noakes, head of politics and international relations at the University of Auckland.

Broader questions
While the report focuses on China’s growing media footprint, it also raises broader questions about the future of journalism, media independence and information sovereignty in Pacific Island countries.

For Fiji, the findings are particularly significant. As one of the region’s largest media markets and a diplomatic hub for the Pacific, Fiji has become a focal point for Chinese engagement through media partnerships, journalist exchanges and government-to-government cooperation.

The report also argues that media organisations across the Pacific are facing some of the most challenging operating conditions in decades.

Researchers found widespread concerns about declining newspaper circulation, shrinking advertising revenues and the growing dominance of social media platforms. One Pacific media practitioner described the situation as “the worst in history” for the region’s media industry, while another said many newsrooms had become a “revolving door” because journalists frequently leave for better-paying jobs.

The report warns that these financial pressures are creating vulnerabilities that external actors can exploit through media assistance, training programmes and content partnerships, making media sustainability not only an economic issue but increasingly a geopolitical one.

At the same time, researchers concluded that China’s overall influence remains limited compared with the longstanding reach and credibility of Australian and New Zealand media organisations.

The report has sparked wider discussion among Pacific media leaders about foreign aid, editorial independence and the long-term sustainability of journalism in the region.

Support for democracy
Dr Singh argues that aid to the media sector is often portrayed as support for democracy and media freedom, but is also shaped by geopolitics, donor interests and soft power.

“Even media aid comes with strings attached, regardless of who the donor is or what they claim,” he said.

According to Dr Singh, the Pacific’s media crisis is not new. The region continues to experience high levels of journalist attrition, while journalism schools that train future reporters receive little attention from major donor-funded media programmes.

He argues that much of the support provided to the media sector is driven by strategic interests rather than long-term capacity building.

Dr Singh’s assessment mirrors one of the CNA report’s central observations — that foreign interest in Pacific media is increasingly being shaped by strategic competition, particularly concerns over China’s growing influence in the region.

Fiji Media Association general secretary Stanley Simpson says the issue is less about who is offering support and more about whether that support responds to the needs of Pacific media organisations.

“Too much ‘let’s help ourselves and give more money to ourselves so we can help the Pacific’ and not enough ‘let’s work with Pacific media so they can help themselves and be our partner’,” he said.

Inconsistent support
Simpson was responding to an article by Australian journalism academic Professor Alexandra Wake of RMIT University, who argued that Australia risks weakening its soft-power influence through inconsistent support for international broadcasting and regional journalism initiatives.

Dr Wake contended that trusted news services remain critical to regional stability, particularly as misinformation spreads and other powers expand their influence.

However, Simpson says the issue is not simply the amount of funding available, but where it is directed.

“We are looking for real funding and support that makes a difference,” he said.

“Not one-sided funding which seems to help Australian organisations more than Fijians.”

He argues that Fiji media organisations have repeatedly sought practical assistance such as cameras, editing equipment, software and broadcast technology, but have often been offered training programmes instead.

His comments highlight a recurring theme in the debate over media aid in the Pacific. While Australia remains one of the region’s most trusted media partners through the ABC and programs such as PACMAS, there is continuing discussion over whether media assistance is sufficiently aligned with Pacific priorities.

Simply struggling
For all the discussion about foreign influence, many Pacific media organisations are simply struggling to survive.

The CNA report notes that declining revenues, digital disruption and staffing shortages have weakened media resilience throughout the region. These challenges were compounded by the covid-19 pandemic and continue to affect both commercial and public-interest journalism.

Dr Singh says this financial pressure helps explain why Pacific organisations increasingly engage with a range of development partners.

While Australia is understandably reluctant to create dependency, he argues that Pacific media systems operate in small markets where economies of scale do not exist and long-term support remains necessary.

To illustrate the situation, Dr Singh cited veteran Tongan publisher and Pacific Islands News Association president Kalafi Moala.

“When you are drowning, you will grab at any hand that is outstretched. You don’t care whether it is China, Australia or America.”

That sentiment may help explain why China’s media engagement efforts have attracted increasing attention.

Digital media
According to the CNA report, China has expanded media cooperation agreements, journalist exchanges, training programmes and diplomatic engagement throughout the Pacific. Fiji has featured prominently in these efforts, including agreements on digital media cooperation and journalist training.

At the same time, the report concludes that Chinese state media outlets still have relatively limited reach among Pacific audiences. Broadcasters such as Australia’s ABC and New Zealand’s RNZ remain among the most trusted international news providers in the region.

Trust, however, cannot be taken for granted.

Simpson argues that Pacific media organisations demonstrated resilience during Fiji’s years of political restrictions and economic hardship, often with limited international support.

“When we were being beaten, threatened and censored, and almost closing down due to political and economic pressure, where was Australian support for the Fiji media?” he asked.

The question challenges traditional development partners to consider whether support for Pacific media has always matched their stated commitment to democratic values and press freedom.

Broader geopolitical contest
As the CNA report makes clear, Pacific media organisations now find themselves at the centre of a broader geopolitical contest.

Foreign governments will continue to compete for influence and aid priorities will continue to be shaped by strategic interests. Yet for Pacific journalists confronting shrinking revenues, digital disruption and rising public expectations, the more pressing issue is sustainability.

The real challenge is not who provides support, but whether that support genuinely strengthens Pacific media organisations, protects editorial independence and helps ensure they remain accountable to the communities they serve.

Alifereti Sakiasi is a journalist with The Fiji Times. Based in Suva, he primarily contributes to The Sunday Times, where he covers a wide array of human interest, social, cultural, and sports events. This article is republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

What is happening right now is [the] erasure of humans, trees and stones, and anything that is Palestinian, by settlers under the support of the military.

— Muntasir al-Maliki, a resident of Kufr Malik

Palestinian Bedouins lived for generations in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Zanuta (Zanuta), sustaining themselves through herding, farming and dairy production.

The village was designated as part of Area C under the 1995 Oslo II Accords, placing it under full Israeli military and administrative control.

Today, Zanuta is being eaten away by Israeli outposts and settlements and destroyed by  state-sponsored violence and terror.

• READ MORE: Amnesty International accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
• Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank Bedouin amd herding communities
• Other Gaza genocide, West Bank reports

Just 1km from Zanuta, Israeli settlers established an illegal outpost known as Meitarim Farm in 2021.

The settlers soon began a sustained campaign of violent attacks and threats against Zanuta’s residents.

They set fire to the villagers’ tents and classrooms, broke into their homes, beat them with rifles, threw stones at them, smashed their solar panels and windows, emptied their water tanks and pumped sewage onto their farmland.

The story of Zanuta reflects the fate of dozens of Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities already displaced or at imminent risk of displacement in Area C.

This report lays bare the scale and severity of the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting these communities, carried out in a context of apartheid and unlawful occupation and against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.

The report also demonstrates — contrary to what too many in the international community suggest — that the campaign is not the product of “rogue” settlers, settlers’ organisations or “extremist” government ministers.

In other words, settler violence is not an aberration but an integral part of an organised state policy.

The escalating violence in Zanuta followed decades of systematic discrimination by the Israeli authorities, including constant threats of home demolitions to force them to leave, a common practice adopted by Israel to enforce its system of apartheid.

Zanuta’s residents repeatedly reported settler attacks to the Israeli police, seeking protection, but no action was ever taken.

When the settlers from Meitarim Farm again raided the village on 21 October 2023, this time accompanied by Israeli forces, and threatened to harm residents if they did not leave, the community knew they had no choice but to flee.

In a rare move, in July 2024 and February 2025, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the police and military to facilitate the community’s return and protect residents from attacks.

The Israeli police and military ignored both rulings. Every attempt by residents to return was met with continued settler violence and the acquiescence of Israeli forces.

Digital evidence, interviews and satellite imagery from 30 March 2025 confirm the outcome: Zanuta no longer exists — it has been forcibly depopulated and extensively destroyed.

Meanwhile, the settlers received state backing to intensify their violent campaign. In April 2025, two Israeli ministers — Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock — held an event at Meitarim Farm where they distributed 19 state-funded all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), cameras and night-vision equipment to settlers living in outposts in the Hebron area.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why:

“The heroic and pioneering settlers who live here are doing Zionism, and they need security… We are here to build with them and to settle the land…”

… while praising settler land seizures and emphasising the role of ATVs in taking over Palestinian grazing land.

The report demonstrates that the ethnic cleansing campaign in Area C is state-sanctioned, state-driven and state-implemented; it seeks to accelerate the Israeli government’s annexation agenda and settlement expansion through war crimes and crimes against humanity.

As such, the report’s conclusions demand that the international community fully confront and name the Israeli state-driven project, and act decisively to prevent the destruction of Palestinian communities and the annexation of the West Bank.

Amnesty International’s legal analysis
Zanuta is one of 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank that have faced either full or partial displacement due to settler attacks and related access restrictions between January 2023 and April 2026, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In total, approximately 5910 people were forced to leave their homes, leaving behind them vast, depopulated areas. Most of the affected communities lie in Area C, which comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and has been central to Israel’s territorial and demographic quest for domination for decades because of its natural resources, vital grazing and agricultural land and small Palestinian population.

In late December 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party formed Israel’s 37th government in coalition with two ultra nationalist and religious political parties.

While state-supported settler violence has been a growing concern over the past three decades for Palestinian communities in the West Bank, there has been an unprecedented surge in the scale and intensity of attacks since then.

Tactics became particularly aggressive after 7 October 2023 when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel, killing approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians, and forcibly taking 251 others to the Gaza Strip where they were held as hostages and subjected to abuses.

Amnesty International found that these acts constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unparalleled magnitude, scale and duration and inflicted catastrophic levels of destruction, displacement and starvation on Gaza’s civilian population, committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

While most global attention focused on Gaza, Israel intensified its abusive policies and practices against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with government officials openly encouraging and supporting settler attacks.

Displacement and dispossession: war crimes and crimes against humanity
Ideologically motivated Israeli settlers have terrorised Palestinian communities through repeated raids on their homes and villages, beatings, death threats demanding they leave, persistent harassment, the destruction of property and village infrastructure, cutting off access to water and electricity, and theft of their livestock and belongings.

These practices deliberately intensified an already coercive environment aimed at forcibly displacing and dispossessing Palestinians, manifested in state policies of access restrictions, home demolitions and settlement expansion. Palestinians who have attempted to return have found their villages fenced off or destroyed, or have faced renewed settler attacks, harassment and intimidation, forcing them to flee again.

These settler attacks are the direct result of a state policy that integrated and enabled the settler movement’s vision of “Greater Israel”, an ideology that treats the area extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), as an integral part of Israel.

Senior Israeli officials in the 37th government have fully embraced this vision and explicitly encouraged, facilitated and condoned settler violence against Bedouin and herding communities as a deliberate tool of displacement with greater openness and force than their predecessors, as they pursued their goal of formally annexing the West Bank under Israeli law.

Since 1967, Israel has been enforcing its occupation through military orders and regulations.

The situation in the OPT, including in Area C of the West Bank, is therefore primarily governed by international humanitarian law (including the rules of the law of occupation); and international human rights law. The same international norms apply to occupied East Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel since 1967, despite Israel’s attempts to separate it from the rest of the West Bank through a regime of fragmentation and legal segregation.

In this report, Amnesty International presents conclusive evidence that these violations, perpetrated between January 2023 and December 2025, amount to the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer and the crime against humanity of forcible transfer or deportation, committed as part of a policy to ethnically cleanse Area C of the occupied West Bank by forcibly displacing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities and expanding illegal settlements at their expense.

Amnesty International uses the term ethnic cleansing in this report to describe a deliberate pattern of conduct aimed at permanently removing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities from specific areas of the occupied West Bank, in particular Area C.

While ethnic cleansing is not recognised as an independent crime under international law, Amnesty International uses the term in line with the UN Commission of Experts on Former Yugoslavia’s definition, which describes it as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

While this report covers the period between December 2022 and December 2025, these egregious crimes are ongoing and are part and parcel of Israel’s system of apartheid, as shown by Amnesty International’s continuous documentation and reporting of the situation on the ground.

• Read the full Amnesty International report

As FIFA Men’s World Cup begins, millions around the world gather to cheer for their favorite teams.

Let’s use the occasion to protest host nation the United States, the top supporter of Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime and financier of its military machine, and the US-Israeli imposed might-makes-right order.

Let’s raise our voices against those who seek to strip us of our right to self-determination.

• READ MORE: 20 years of the BDS movement
• Ban apartheid Israel from sports
• World celebrates, but Gaza watches the World Cup from a distance – Al Jazeera

FIFA and Trump believe a World Cup is enough to silence the cries of entire peoples. Force does not make right, and grand stadiums cannot silence history and our ongoing struggles.

Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, bombs Lebanese cities, strikes Yemen, joins the US in attacking Iran, and extends its expansionist ambitions to Syria, Iraq, alongside US threats against the peoples of Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela, and US-Israeli criminal interference across Latin America.

It is clear that this is the agenda of one system, operating on the principle that might makes right, and that whoever holds the weapons and the money controls the narrative and the fate of people across the globe.

Let’s not drop the ball during this period but escalate our efforts to isolate Israel’s genocidal settler-colonial regime and its supporters and use the World Cup to shine a spotlight on Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and FIFA’s complicity in normalising the US-Israeli might-makes-right order.

Let us amplify our calls to boycott Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime and all corporations and bodies affiliated with or supporting it, foremost among them Reebok, the official sponsor of the Israel Football Association, and all those who whitewash Israeli crimes with a brand name or sponsorship deal.

Sports arenas are not above politics; they are platforms for supporting the struggles of peoples for freedom and justice, including the Palestinian liberation struggle against colonialism.

Lets turn Trump’s World Cup on its head:
1. Join our global people-powered social media storm on June 11.
Let’s make sure Palestinian rights are front and center during the Men’s World Cup kick off. Let’s call out FIFA’s complicity in sportswashing Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and their sports and its normalisation of the US/Israeli might-makes-right order.

Join our Social Media Storm on June 11 from (8-9)pm occupied Palestine time.
Follow the BDS Movement and PACBI accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram throughout the World Cup and tweet with us using the hashtags: #FIFAWorldCup #DisruptFIFA #BoycottReebok #WeAre26 #WorldCup2026

2. Escalate our calls to Boycott Reebok
During Israel’s genocide, Reebok chose to sponsor the Israel Football Association and its illegal settlement teams, granting sporting legitimacy to an entity that international courts have ruled practices apartheid.

Every Reebok product you buy today is implicit support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and in Lebanon and beyond. Let’s boycott Reebok until it explicitly announces the termination of its sponsorship of Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid system.

Let sports arenas be free from apartheid, oppression and sportswashing, because right is not measured by the magnitude of power, but by the justice of the cause.

Stephanie Westbrook is organiser of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Trying to get my head around Pete Hegseth’s bonkers, deeply offensive D-Day memorial speech in which the US Secretary of War drew an equivalence between the Allies storming the beaches of Normandy — the largest seaborne invasion in history — with illegal immigrants seeking refuge in Europe.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies — beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

“Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said.

• READ MORE: Hegseth says Europe is being ‘invaded by dangerous migrants’ 
• Other war on Iran reports

“The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary.”

Most of the blowback against this speech has been in Hegseth’s staining the memory of a noble sacrifice of the Allies with a contemporary political reference.

But what is truly appalling and completely nuts is the comparison of illegal immigrants to Nazis.

Hegseth says that America saved Western civilisation, which has some truth,

But Nazism didn’t come from outsiders: it came from the belly of Western civilisation.

Crowning glories but . . .
Germany was one of the crowning glories of the West yet it murdered six million Jews and waged a war that killed many more.

The Allies were saving Europe from itself.

Ironically, while Hegseth was shooting his big fat mouth off in France over in Germany a member of a neo-Nazi party so far to the right that even the booming extremist Alternative for Germany have condemned them has narrowly lost a mayoral election Saxony.

Soon we won’t be laughing at Mel Brooks’ famous song “Spingtime for Hitler”. It’s happening in Germany now (even Chancellor Merz is worried)

All over the world — in the UK, in the United States, in Australia — we are blaming immigrants for our ills when we need to look inside our own countries for the heart of darkness that gave us the Holocaust and is threatening to unleash demonic forces again.

Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts. Republished from his FB page with permission.

Hegseth compared migrants to a ‘dangerous invasion’ at the graves of D-Day soldiers.

Here’s the reaction pic.twitter.com/WX7Pkq2wta

— The Daily Britain (@dailybritainonx) June 7, 2026

A New Zealand policy research and advocacy group released a detailed blueprint today for a fresh “independent” Te Tiriti and Pacific-based approach to foreign policy, and called for greater transparency in election year.

The current coalition government has “radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions” — including by moving the country away from a principled defence of its independent values to “unquestioning support” for the actions of the Trump administration, said Te Kuaka spokesperson Dr Marco de Jong.

“New Zealand’s slide under this government towards a tightly aligned, militaristic foreign policy is not inevitable,” he added.

• READ MORE: Other Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy reports
• Other Te Kuaka reports

Te Kuaka — a group made up of academics such as Dr de Jong and Dr Arama Rata, and lawyers with expertise in international and constitutional law like Fuimaono Dylan Asafo and Gabriella Brayne — released a policy brief, “A Foreign Policy Alternative for the 2026 New Zealand Election”.

The group refers to the need to revitalise “an independent, Te Tiriti-based, Pacific-centred, internationalist foreign policy”.

Last year has witnessed “tumultuous developments in world affairs” such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, US aggression in Venezuela, and US and Israel waging war on Iran.

Independent values
Te Kuaka’s policy brief says the current government “has radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions”, including by moving NZ away from a principled defence of its independent values and interests towards total, unquestioning support for the actions of the Trump administration.

The brief calls for:

• greater transparency around trade agreements;
• a War Powers Act to ensure parliamentary authorisation for going to war,;
• shifts in New Zealand’s approach to the Pacific towards non-militarisation;
• NZ intervention in support of South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel; and
• other changes.

“How New Zealand acts in the world has always mattered,” said Dr de Jong. “And we need our political parties speaking more openly about their plans on how to maintain and strengthen our independent foreign policy.”

The policy brief also calls for New Zealand to take more strident steps in relation to Indigenous self-determination in Kanaky New Caledonia and to support a human rights visit to West Papua.

The coalition government did not have a mandate for this “dramatic repositioning” in support of the Trump administration, Dr de Jong said.

Call for ‘greater clarity’
“Before the coming election we are calling for greater clarity from political parties about what the public can expect to see from them in relation to New Zealand’s position in the world.”

The policy brief notes that Te Tiriti o Waitangi has not been sufficiently honoured in foreign policy, and also proposes formalising requirements for Māori representation alongside official New Zealand delegations to international forums.

“We are in a rupturing world,” said Dr de Jong. “We need to ensure we’re not unthinkingly caught in the riptide of major powers’ priorities, and that instead we chart our own course, appropriate to our histories and our location in the Pacific.”

• Te Kuaka has previously published reports on conflict prevention and peace mediation, New Zealand’s positioning on AUKUS, and civilian casualties and the NZ Defence Force.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: China built the railway Iran needed — America’s strategy is obsolete
• How the US naval blockade has bled Iran of nearly $6bn in oil revenues — but rail may change this
• Other war on Iran/ceasefire reports

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

But railways could unlock it.

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

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

Britain took the warning seriously.

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

For 70 years, it worked.

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

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

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

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

Train schedules have increased by 300 percent weekly.

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

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

And China is simply going around it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is strategic foresight of a very high order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The railway is 10,400 km long.

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

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

Today the US and/or Israel have been attacking Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Venezuela.

The US is also strangling Cuba with an illegal economic blockade, threatening Greenland and preparing for war against China.

History shows that US invasions kill, injure and destroy ordinary people’s lives, homes, essential infrastructure — and they usually leave repressive regimes to rule.

• READ MORE: Israel kills 4 in Lebanon strikes after Trump warned Netanyahu to stop
• Te Kuaka advocacy group calls for NZ transparent, independent ‘Pacific foreign policy’
• Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The ordinary people of the US pay the price of these wars with their lives, taxes, poverty and are dependent on jobs that manufacture weapons.

US and Israel knew their attack on Iran would trigger an international oil crisis.

The result has been massively increasing oil and food prices and profiteering here in Aotearoa New Zealand, causing the greatest suffering for working class people especially the poorest in the country and world wide.

Why have the US and israel attacked Iran?

• To enforce US and Israeli domination and control of the Middle East region and the world’s oil resources; and
• To control world central trade routes and oil supplies to the main US economic rival — China.

Waiting on oil companies
Shamefully, the current NZ government refuses to oppose the illegal US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and fails to oppose the genocide still happening in Gaza. They just wait for oil companies to determine NZ’s supply, and help mega corporations to profit.

This government has no plan for making Aotearoa New Zealand more food and energy secure. But it is increasingly integrating the NZ military with the Australian and US war machines and preparing for the US-promoted “War with China”.

We are already in a cost-of living crisis, and rising fuel prices are adding to the price of food and other essentials. Kiwi families are struggling. Many people in town and country are facing huge price increases.

Some families have been getting the government’s limited support package. But 92 percent of households don’t get anything.

Don’t let this government drag us into war. Demand an independent foreign policy for Aotearoa/NZ.

• Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition rally and march to US embassy: 2pm, Saturday 13 June 2026, Aotea Square, CBD, Auckland

COMMENTARY: By May Pik

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Israel’s genocide in Gaza has not stopped, despite the ceasefire: Analysts
• Death toll in Israel’s war on Gaza rises to at least 72,980
• Other Gaza reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

Republished with permission.

The US Tsunami Warning Centre has issued advisories for parts of the Pacific following a massive earthquake off Mindanao in the Philippines.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck at a depth of 63km truck off the coast of Sarangani province on Monday morning, rocking many parts of Mindanao and triggering a tsunami warning.

• READ MORE: Live updates at Rappler: Magnitude 7.8 Mindanao earthquake
• Other Philippines disaster reports

The tremor caused damage to infrastructure, and prompted evacuations and school class suspensions.

The US warning centre has tsunami waves forecast to be less than 0.3 meters above the tide level for the coasts of:

• American Samoa
• Chuuk FSM
• Fiji
• French Polynesia
• Guam
• Hawai’i
• Kiribati
• Kosrae (FSM)
• Marshall islands
• Nauru
• New Caledonia
• CNMI
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Pohnpei (FSM)
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• Tonga
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Wallis Futuna
• Yap

The US Tsunami Warning Centre says government agencies responsible for threatened coastal areas should take action to inform and instruct any coastal populations at risk in accordance with their own evaluation, procedures and the level of threat.

Stay out of water
A tsunami advisory remains in effect for the Marianas — the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and Guam. Authorities are warning of hazardous ocean conditions and strong currents along coastlines.

The first tsunami-related sea level fluctuations could reach Guam from 12:45 pm local time, before spreading northward across the Northern Marianas, with estimated arrival times of 12:54pm in Rota, 1:02opm in Tinian and 1:04pm in Saipan.

Officials cautioned that actual arrival times may vary and that the first wave may not be the largest.

Forecast impacts include sea level changes of up to one foot above and below normal tide levels, minor flooding in some beach and harbour areas, and strong and unusual currents in harbours, bays and nearshore waters.

Hazardous conditions could persist for several hours or longer, the advisory said.

Authorities have urged residents and visitors to stay out of the water and away from beaches, harbours and shorelines until the advisory is lifted.

Continue monitoring
Emergency officials stressed that a full-scale evacuation had not been ordered and advised the public to continue monitoring official updates and instructions.

The advisory covers Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, including Saipan, Tinian and Rota.

Officials said they would continue monitoring the situation and issue additional bulletins as more information becomes available.

This story was first published on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But atonement is not a blank cheque.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A South Auckland-based cultural studio founded by Fijian artist-curator Vasemaca (FKA Ema) Tavola has hit back at a spate of pro-Israeli propaganda in her homeland with a bold new banner design championing “Fijians for Palestine”.

Tavola’s practice is aligned with the “politics of decolonisation and indigenous feminisms, motherhood, and histories of BIPOC art and activism in the Global South”.

Her Vunilagi Vou studio has posted this message in response to public reactions over Israel opening its first embassy in Oceania in Fiji last week in the face of protests in three cities — Suva, Auckland and Wellington:

• READ MORE: Palestine supporters stage pickets in 3 cities in Fiji, NZ protesting against new Israeli embassy
• Rabuka rules out military involvement with Israel in Mideast conflicts
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

“The inspiration struck and this new mini banner emerged. Born from the hideous task of monitoring the Facebook comment section from people boldly declaring mis-/disinformation, Zionist propaganda and outright hate speech in my own Fijian community, I wanted to perform a creative act that could neutralise the sadness of this moment.

“The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) famously said, ‘the act of sewing is a process of emotional repair’ and the sentiment has been the lifeblood of this ongoing series of mini banners. They are affirmations and dreaming, spells sewn with stitches, commitment captured in layers, trims, fringe and ric-rac — love letters to the future.

“Inspired and dedicated to Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network and the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre protests that have been happening in Suva to boldly and publicly declare that people in Fiji stand with Palestine, and the acts of some and the sycophancy of our government does not represent all of Fiji and all Fijians, as hard as that is to process for some Facebook users.

“The words on this mini banner are a truth that cannot be denied in a post truth era; Fijians are not a monolith and while many are spouting mind-boggling disinformation and vitriol against Palestinians and our fellow non-Indigenous Fiji people, there are many, many Fijians who stand for and with Palestine and reject the re-authoring of factual history and the monetisation of rage on platforms like Facebook.

“The social practice of this space has become a complete perversion of humanity.

The banner: Kaiviti Solidarity (2026) Cotton dobby, cotton towelling, rayon, bullion fringe trim, ric-rac and cowrie shells on 10oz canvas, 600x450mm

Fijian and Palestine flags — challenging hypocrisy
Vunilagi Vou also “reimagined” a publicity photo circulated of a photo of the Fijian and Israeli flags side by side with another image showing off the Palestinian flag.

“If the current Fiji government can make such a divisive and disturbing symbolic image using AI to announce the opening of an Israeli embassy in Suva, I’ll keep the prompts flowing and re-imagine this image.

“Fiji is a gloriously diverse, complex and resilient nation of people who are the living embodiment of a globally connected mix of cultures, histories and influences. We are not a monolith, and the current Fiji government’s relationship to Israel, engaged in the ongoing, intentional and systematic destruction of Palestinian people, is an embarrassment.

“We represent a range of views as Fiji people; many use the Christian Bible and its ideologies as a moral and ethical compass, and others who can see the hypocrisy of largely Indigenous people siding with the perpetrators of a genocide against Indigenous people.

“Trying to understand the geopolitical, historical, social, spiritual nature of South West Asia and North Africa, and our relationship with imperialism and the tools of colonisation, oil and capitalism, globalisation and climate collapse all feels like unravelling the world we know.

“So, Palestine, and our courage to learn and unlearn, critique why we know what we know, feels like a profound symbol and beacon for imagining a future that survives this current hellscape.

“A free Palestine is inextricable from a free West Papua. Systemic violence, colonial extraction, Indigenous erasure and murderous genocide, should never ever be normalised.”

COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal

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

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

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

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

But Palestine is not defined by its restrictions.

It is defined by its people.

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

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

And then there are the trees.

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

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

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

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

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

Fiji will not be “militarily involved” in any of the conflicts currently involving the State of Israel, says the country’s prime minister.

Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka made this reassurance yesterday, saying Fiji’s relationship with Israel would remain focused on development co-operation and strengthening bilateral ties, not military engagement.

Israel’s new embassy in Fiji — the first opened in Oceania — was officially opened yesterday with protesters against the diplomatic mission just across the street in the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC).

• READ MORE: Questions over regional tensions and public protests were raised in Fiji over Israeli embassy
• Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate across the road from new Israeli embassy
• Palestine supporters stage pickets in 3 cities in Fiji, NZ protesting against new Israeli embassy
• Fijian PM Rabuka rejects criticism over new Israeli embassy
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

“We don’t want Israel in our country,” declared Shamima Ali, chair of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights and an organiser of the Fijians For Palestine protest, reports Mai TV.

Protesters in New Zealand also picketed the Fiji High Commission in Wellington and the Fiji Consulate in Auckland.

Rabuka said Fiji’s interest in the partnership was based on development opportunities and the long-standing relationship between the two countries.

“We are looking at our own development and they are capable of giving us the development we need,” he said.

Training opportunities
He said Fijians had benefited from training opportunities in Israel over the years, including young people currently undergoing training there.

“Right now we have some young people undergoing training in Israel.

“Our own president did some training in his career path with the Native Land Trust Board at the time in Israel.”

 

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Rabuka said Fiji’s engagement with Israel had also been shaped by its long history of peacekeeping in the Middle East.

He said many Fijians had experienced the hospitality of the people and State of Israel through Fiji’s involvement in peacekeeping operations in the region.

Rabuka said the government would not allow the relationship to “become militarised”, as this would contradict Fiji’s wider regional position, including the “Ocean of Peace” concept for the Pacific.

Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar also stated that Israel would not ask Fiji for military support, saying Israel was capable of “fighting its own wars”.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

New Zealand protests against Israel
Pacific Media Watch reports that Rabuka staged two military coups in Fiji in 1987 and became known as the father of Fiji’s “coup culture” — four coups in two decades.

In New Zealand, protest pickets were organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) with about 20 people in a picket at the Fijian Consulate in Auckland’s suburb of Mt Roskill, and a dozen stood in pouring rain at the Fiji High Commission in Wellington’s CBD.

The Auckland protest featured a striking tropical banner warning “PM Rabuka don’t vote for genocide” in reference to Fiji’s persistent record of voting in support of Israel and the US in defiance of the overwhelming global condemnation of the Zionist state’s genocidal actions with impunity.

The Wellington protest featured scores of pairs of children’s shoes in recognition of killing more than 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children.

“High Commission staff complained to protesters about a Palestinian flag ‘invading’ high commission airspace over the brick fence at the front of the high commission,” said Don Carson, a PSNA organiser.

“Protesters got their message though with megaphones calling Fiji openly complicit with Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“They also left a collection of old shoes — throwing shoes is a gesture of contempt in the Arab World — in the rain outside the High Commission for the staff to have to clean up.”

• Israel is on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case brought by South Africa and supported by dozens of countries, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted on arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Indonesia has kidnapped and threatened Mama Yasinta Moiwend (Mama Sinta), one of the Marind tribe women featured in the controversial documentary Pesta Babi (Pig Feast), into denying the film and its message, claims a West Papuan advocacy group.

Pesta Babi, which focuses on the Merauke sugarcane megaproject and was premiered in New Zealand in March, exposes how Indonesia is destroying West Papua’s ancestral forest for profit.

“It is a moderate film, which does not show the real truth — that all West Papuans want freedom and independence instead of colonial ‘development’,” said the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.

• READ MORE: ‘Threat to democracy’ – Indonesian filmmaker slams military crackdown on Papua documentary
• West Papuan doco Pig Feast exposes oligarchs, food security crisis and ecocide under noses of military — film review
• Other Pesta Babi reports

“Despite this, Indonesia has done everything they can to destroy it.”

Since the screenings of the film in New Zealand and Australia, the documentary has been widely shown in Indonesia and stirred a military crackdown with attempts to block it.

Partners in the production of the film include the Papuan media group Jubi, Greenpeace  and Pusaka, a group committed to “fostering and advancing a just and equitable life” for Indigenous peoples and marginalised communities.

In a series of social media videos, Mama Sinta has publicly distanced herself from Pesta Babi, stating that she was “exploited by the filmmakers”.

She was later presented to a police station in Jakarta, where she filed charges against LBH Papua Merauke, an organisation involved in producing the film. Her family have stated they have not been able to contact her for the past week.

‘Why change her views suddenly?’
“Mama Sinta has clearly been kidnapped by the colonial TNI. Why else would she be in Jakarta, away from the community she has spent her life fighting to protect? Why else would she change her views so suddenly?” asked Wenda.

Against her will, the Indonesian state had forced Mama Sinta to issue a statement retracting her involvement in the film, he said.

“For West Papuans, this is not a new phenomenon. Indonesia has always used any means they can to divide our spirit: bribery, threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture.

“Those who they cannot silence they simply kill.

“Mama Sinta is just like the elders who were forced at gunpoint to vote against West Papuan independence during the Act of ‘No Choice’ [in 1969]. Merdeka remained in their hearts, even if they raised their hands against it.”

Wenda said Mama Sinta would have been afraid of “what would happen to her” if she did not agree to the TNI’s demands.

At a time when violence had ramped up across West Papua, with nearly 40 civilians “massacred in the past two months”, Papuans were aware of the dangers of speaking out.

“This is why she recanted.”

‘Terrified’ of public
“The Indonesian state response to Pesta Babi — from kidnapping its star to violently shutting down screenings of the film — clearly demonstrates their overwhelming fear of being found out.

“Indonesia is terrified that their own people, their youth and students, will discover what their government is doing to West Papua.

“The filmmakers deserve thanks for exposing Indonesia’s ecocide in Merauke. I call on them, and all Indonesian solidarity groups to stay strong: deepen your support for West Papua, oppose your country’s ongoing occupation, genocide and crimes against humanity.”

In an interview with RNZ Pacific last week, the film’s director, Dandhy Laksono, criticised the military crackdown over the documentary.

He said that Pesta Babi had been showing at about 1700 cinemas around Indonesia.

“We have recorded more than 30 incidents of the state apparatus stopping the screening — mostly by military, and then they are also using the civil servants — in the name of public order,” he said.

No public disorder
Laksono said there had been no public disorder from the film in parts where it had shown.

“It’s ridiculous, and thanks to the audience they defend the film quite hard, and they defend their rights to to watch and to absorb the information, about what has actually happened in West Papua.”

Wenda said the crackdown on the documentary was just one small example of Indonesia’s policy of repression in West Papua.

“They are only able to get away with their crimes because they have transformed West Papua into the Pacific North Korea: journalists are banned from entering, along with NGOs like Amnesty and the Red Cross.”

Six years had passed since Indonesia vowed to allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua — “and still they refuse access”.

Pro-Palestine protesters in Fiji and Aotearoa New Zealand staged pickets in three cities today in protest against Israel opening its first embassy in Oceania.

Before visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar formally opened the embassy in the Fji capital, about 30 protesters gathered at the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) — just across the street from the diplomatic mission — and 20 demonstrators picketed the Fiji consulate in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill calling for sanctions against Israel over its genocide in Gaza and invasion of Lebanon.

Other protesters picketed Fiji’s High Commission in the New Zealand capital of Wellington.

• READ MORE: Fiji police question protesters over picket against opening of Israel embassy
• Pro-Palestinian activists plan protest against ‘Israeli pond’ diplomacy push in Pacific
• Pro-Palestine groups plan coordinated protests in Fiji and NZ over Israel’s first Pacific embassy
• Fiji’s stance on Israel and new embassy stirs revived condemnation
• ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

Fiji police “intervened” during the Suva protest organised by the NGO Coalition of Human Rights and the Fijians for Palestine groups, reports The Fiji Times.

The protestors were asked to stop chanting slogans, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, and were criticised over their placards — such as “There is no doubt. It is a genocide in Gaza” and Palestinian flags.

The demonstration continued as a silent protest against the establishment of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Fiji, with protesters gathering to express their opposition to Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.

Several reporters were at the picket scene in Suva as police spoke to FWCC coordinator Shamima Ali, who is chair NGO Coalition of Human Right, in what witnesses described as “harassment”.

Critical of Public Order Act
Fijivillage News reports Ali has criticised the use of Fiji’s Public Order Act against pro-Palestine protesters, claiming the legislation was again being used to restrict people’s rights to peaceful protest.

Ali said the government had acknowledged concerns surrounding the Public Order Act and its broad powers, but reforms had yet to be implemented.

She questioned the decision by police to intervene in what she described as a “peaceful demonstration”, saying protesters were exercising their democratic right to express opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Professor Vijay Naidu commented in a social media post: “Fiji police had 7 twin cabs, two large paddy wagons to intimidate and suppress peaceful protesters gathered on a private property [the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre].

“Strange that police often claim, ‘no transport’ for not attending to calls regarding crimes.”

Israel is on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case brought by South Africa and supported by dozens of countries, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted on arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

in New Zealand, the picket outside the Fiji consulate in Auckland was also peaceful and quiet apart from a short speech and many toots of support by passing motorists.

Several banners and many Palestinian flags dominated both sides of Stoddard Road outside the consulate in the Tulja Centre.

Banners declared “PM Rabuka stop voting for genocide”– in reference to the lead role that Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s Fiji has played a leading role in Pacific votes in support of an isolated Israel in the United Nations — and “Stop the genocide in Gaza: Sanction Israel now — boycott Israeli goods.”

An organiser, Barry Lee of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), “Israel is regarded around the world as a war criminal, and there is ample evidence of their war crimes every day.

“Israel and the United States are the most warmongering states in the region. They have attacked all of their neighbours at least once, and they are currently killing people in Gaza, they have just stopped attacking Iran, and now they are attacking Lebanon as the United States is underwriting its supply of weapons to do so.”

PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said that while the rest of the world was distancing itself from Israel for its genocide in Gaza, illegal settlements on the West Bank and invasion of Lebanon, Fiji was deepening its ties with the Benjamin Netanyahu regime.

“It’s partly personal.  Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is grateful for Israeli support for his coup in 1987, when the rest of the world were distancing themselves from the Rabuka led military junta,” Tamimi said in a statement.

“But it’s mostly the result of intense diplomatic activity by Israel throughout the Pacific, its determined attempts to reverse the trend around the world to isolate Israel and its institutions.”

“Israel is working with US Christian Zionists to make the Pacific an Israeli pond, to deliver votes in the United Nations and embassies in Jerusalem.”

In the September 2024 landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution to order Israel out of the Palestinian Occupied Territory within 12 months, no fewer than seven Pacific countries, including Fiji, voted against, out of a world total of 14 votes against.

Since US President Donald Trump had defied the United Nations and opened a US embassy in Jerusalem in 2018 during his his first term in the White House, only a handful of countries had followed.

“Since then, only Kosovo, Honduras and Guatemala have joined the US.  That is, except for the Pacific — Papua New Guinea and Fiji are now in Jerusalem and they are soon to be joined by Samoa,” Tamimi said.

“It’ll be Samoa’s only country post outside the Pacific. Is Israel paying for it?”

At a joint media conference in Suva with Rabuka before the formal opening of the Israeli mission in Suva, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared Fiji was a “true friend of Israel”, reports FBC News.

Sa’ar said the embassy would serve as a platform to turn diplomatic ties into practical partnerships, with a focus on sectors that directly supported Fiji’s development priorities.

He added that Israel was ready to share its expertise in water management, renewable energy, agriculture and technology — areas that he said were increasingly important for Pacific island nations facing climate and resource pressures.

A protest led by the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre was held at their office today — located opposite FHL Tower where the new Embassy of Israel was due to be opened later in the day.

Police visited the centre and spoke to coordinator Shamima Ali.

The protest was taking place while similar pickets were being held at the Fiji consulate in Mt Roskill, Auckland, and High Commission in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

• READ MORE: Pro-Palestinian activists plan protest against ‘Israeli pond’ diplomacy push in Pacific
• Pro-Palestine groups plan coordinated protests in Fiji and NZ over Israel’s first Pacific embassy
• Fiji’s stance on Israel and new embassy stirs revived condemnation
• ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

When Fijivillage News questioned police, they said they were at the scene and had advised those present that they could not conducting any protest in a public place.

Ali has criticised the use of the Public Order Act against pro-Palestine protesters, claiming the legislation was once again being used to restrict people’s rights to peaceful protest.

Ali said the government had acknowledged concerns surrounding the Public Order Act and its broad powers, but reforms had yet to be implemented.

She questioned the decision by police to intervene in what she described as a peaceful demonstration, saying protesters were exercising their democratic right to express opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“Stop #Zionism poisoning the Pacific” rallies in #Fiji & #Aotearoa today protesting against #Israel opening its first embassy in Oceania on a controversial new #diplomacy bid to “win friends” for the rogue pariah nation. #asiapacificreport #embassyprotesthttps://t.co/cUmFowKvDl pic.twitter.com/uFwJP2paik

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 2, 2026

‘Threat to public safety’
Ali claimed police informed protesters that they were considered a “threat to public safety” under an assessment made by a police officer.

She challenged that assessment, saying the group consisted of men, women and children participating in a peaceful gathering.

She also criticised the deployment of police resources to monitor the protest, arguing that law enforcement attention should be directed towards more pressing public safety concerns.

Despite being instructed to stop chanting and remove “certain banners”, Ali said protesters intended to continue their demonstration.

She alleged that police specifically objected to banners carrying the slogan “from the river to the sea”, which has been used by pro-Palestinian groups around the world to support self-determination.

Ali also questioned the Fiji government’s position on Israel and claimed there had been insufficient public consultation on decisions relating to Fiji’s engagement with the Middle East country.

She maintained that the protest would continue peacefully and called for the Public Order Act to be reviewed or repealed.

Republished from Fijivillage News with permission.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, it is the very opposite.

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

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

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

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

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

Israel is working with US Christian Zionists to make the Pacific “an Israeli pond” to help deliver votes in the United Nations, warns the advocacy and protest movement Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

National spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in a statement today that PSNA would picket the Fiji High Commission in Wellington and Consulate in Auckland tomorrow at 12.30pm in protest over Israel opening its first Pacific Islands Embassy in the Fiji capital Suva later on Tuesday.

Tamimi said PSNA was acting in solidarity with a call for support from the Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network (Fijians4Palestine) in Fiji.

• READ MORE: Pro-Palestine groups plan coordinated protests in Fiji and NZ over Israel’s first Pacific embassy
• Fiji’s stance on Israel and new embassy stirs revived condemnation
• ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar arrived in Fiji today and is scheduled to cut the ribbon to open the embassy at 5pm.

Tamimi said that while the rest of the world was “distancing itself from Israel for its genocide in Gaza, illegal settlements on the West Bank and invasion of Lebanon,” Fiji was “deepening its ties with the [Benjamin] Netanyahu regime”.

“It’s partly personal. Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is grateful for Israeli support for his coup in 1987, when the rest of the world were distancing themselves from the Rabuka-led military junta,” Tamimi said.

“But it’s mostly the result of intense diplomatic activity by Israel throughout the Pacific, its determined attempts to reverse the trend around the world to isolate Israel and its institutions.

‘Working with Christian Zionists’
“Israel is working with US Christian Zionists to make the Pacific an Israeli pond, to deliver votes in the United Nations and embassies in Jerusalem.”

In the September 2024 landmark UN General Assembly resolution to order Israel out of the Palestinian Occupied Territory within 12 months, no fewer than seven Pacific countries, including Fiji, voted against, out of a world total of 14 votes against.

“It’s the same Pacific slant with embassies in illegally Occupied Jerusalem. The world would locate all their embassies in Tel Aviv because they didn’t recognise Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.

“Then Trump opened a US embassy in Jerusalem in 2018.

“Since then, only Kosovo, Honduras and Guatemala have joined the US. That is, except for the Pacific — Papua New Guinea and Fiji are now in Jerusalem and they are soon to be joined by Samoa,” Tamimi said.

“It’ll be Samoa’s only country post outside the Pacific. Is Israel paying for it?”

According to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), Israel previously had an embassy in Fiji in the 1970s and 1980s. But this was closed in the 1990s due to budgetary cuts, and its role was replaced by non-resident ambassadors.

“Our affinity and affection to Israel actually predates our official establishment of ties over half a century ago and dates back to 1835 when Christian missionaries came to Fiji and taught the Bible,” said Fiji’s Ambassador to Israel Jesoni Vitusagavulu.

“We have a deep appreciation for Israel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro-Palestine activist groups plan to simultaneously protest against the opening of the first Pacific embassy by Israel with pickets in the Fiji capital Suva and the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington next week.

Fijians for Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) are planning these coordinated protests in opposition to Tel Aviv opening the embassy in Fiji on Tuesday.

Ironically, the Fiji picket will be just across the road at the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre in downtown Suva with Palestinian flags “flying in the face of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar”, according to organisers.

• READ MORE: Fiji’s stance on Israel and new embassy stirs revived condemnation
• ‘He’s Māori!’ Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the Israeli prison system nightmare
• Other Fiji, Pacific ties with Israel reports

The opening is scheduled for 5pm on Tuesday and pickets will be happening at the same time at the Fiji Embassy in Wellington and also at the Fiji consulate in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill.

“The genocidal state of Israel is opening an embassy in Fiji’s capital, Suva,” said Fijians For Palestine in a social media post at the weekend. “Fiji cannot build its state on the graves of children. Fiji cannot develop on the blood of innocents. Free Palestine.”

The embassy launch in Suva follows Fiji controversially opening an embassy in Jerusalem last year in defiance of United Nations resolutions that have declared occupied East Jerusalem as part of the state of Palestine,

Fiji is regarded as a staunch supporter of Israel at the UN in the face the face of overwhelming resolutions against Israel.

Fiji move condemned
The Fiji role was condemned at a pro-Palestinian rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today.

“PSNA is responding to a call from Fijians for Palestine, to protest against the opening in Fiji of the Pacific’s first Israeli embassy,” organiser Anna Lee told protesters.

“Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar is scheduled to cut the ribbon in Suva to open Genocide Israel’s brand-new embassy at 5pm next Tuesday.

“The embassy opening represents a major advance for Israel’s determined attempts to reverse the trend around the world to isolate Israel and its institutions.”

The embassy move represents a major diplomatic advance for Israel’s determined attempts to reverse the trend around the world to isolate Israel and its institutions.

In the September 2024 landmark UN General Assembly vote to order Israel out of the illegally occupied Palestinian Territory within 12 months, no fewer than seven Pacific countries — including Fiji — voted against out of a world total of 14. In favour were 124 countries out of 193 member states.

In the UNGA vote the following September on recognition of Palestine, Fiji abstained. However, five other Pacific countries comprised half of the 10 votes against — again alongside the United States and Israel. In favour were an overwhelming 157 countries (81 percent).

Bid to ‘cajole votes’
“There is a clear, and thus far successful, attempt by Israel to use the US brand of Christian fundamentalism, to cajole votes and embassies out of the Pacific,” said PSNA’s Lee.

“The Pacific is our backyard. Our protests will show Zionist Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka that Palestine has many supporters.”

According to The Fiji Times, the new Israeli embassy will mark a “significant milestone in the growing relationship between the two countries and strengthening Israel’s diplomatic presence in the Pacific region”.

“The embassy will provide Israel with a permanent diplomatic presence in the Blue Pacific, a region that has attracted increasing attention from global powers seeking influence through development assistance, climate initiatives, security partnerships and economic engagement,” the newspaper reported.

“The development follows Fiji’s opening of its embassy in Jerusalem last year, making it one of a small number of countries with an embassy in Israel’s capital.”

Israel later announced plans to establish a reciprocal diplomatic mission in Fiji in 2026, citing Fiji’s “consistent support for Israel in international forums, including the United Nations”.

The opening of the embassy is also being viewed as part of Israel’s broader effort to increase its engagement with Pacific Island nations amid growing geopolitical competition in the region.

Diplomatic, legal implications
Fiji’s decision to establish an embassy in Jerusalem last year drew criticism from Palestinian officials and local activist groups, who argued that the move carried diplomatic and legal implications because of the disputed status of the city.

Today’s Auckland rally also featured Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian aid activists detained and tortured by the Israeli military last week, including Hāhona Ormsby and Mousa Taher, and speakers criticising New Zealand involvement alongside Israel in the  RIMPAC 2026 military exercises due in Hawai’i next month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few Palestinian refugees are ever allowed entry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The war on Iran is Washington’s Suez Crisis.

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

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

• The Chris Hedges Report

The Israeli military is illegally grabbing land across Gaza, Lebanon and Syria — with roughly 1000 sq km under their control, reports Al Jazeera English’s Open Source Unit.

In Gaza, the Israeli military cemented their most recent land grab following the “ceasefire” agreement signed on October 10, 2025, implementing a “yellow line” that put 200 sq km under Israeli control.

Since then, the Israeli military has constructed more than 40 sq km of earthen berms along the “yellow line” and is fortifying 38 military bases east of it, further corralling Palestinians into less than half of Gaza.

• READ MORE: Israel’s occupation of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria extends beyond what maps show
• Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize ‘70% of Gaza Strip’, violating ceasefire deal
• See maps of the land stolen by the Israeli military
• Other Gaza, Iran reports

This is the exact opposite of what was planned under the ceasefire. Instead of phased withdrawal required, the Israeli state is stealing Palestinian land.

Despite another “ceasefire,” the Israeli military has resumed its ground invasion of Lebanon, pounding southern Lebanon with more than 120 air ​strikes in one of the heaviest days of bombing in weeks, as its soldiers attempted to push deeper into Lebanon and expand ground operations beyond the ceasefire demarcation.

More than 3000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since the Israeli military invaded Lebanon on March 16, 2026. According to Israeli military maps, Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon covers about 569 sq km, almost 20 percent of the entire country.

In southern Syria, Al Jazeera estimates the Israeli military controls about 235 sq km, based on permanent infrastructure they have erected.

With no officially recognised borders, this control is harder to map, but analysis of outposts and repeated incursions suggests a broader operational zone stretching from Jabal al-Sheikh in the north to the Yarmouk River near the Jordanian border.

We all have a role to play in stopping Israeli land theft, carried out through mass killing and forced displacement of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians. Call on Congress and demand they fund people, not bombs.

• Fund People not Bombs

What’s the fallout from Israel’s land grab         Video: Al Jazeera Inside Story

The bank accounts of two New Zealanders have been frozen as police probe an extraordinary international case of two alleged Samoan hitmen who confessed to murdering a Sydney gang boss.

Joseph Vaa, 27, admitted on Vietnamese television to gunning down suspected “Coconut Cartel” ringleader Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia outside a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on May 21.

His associate, Steve Tofa, 23, also called Tafia in some news reports, then confessed to being his accomplice in the shooting.

• READ MORE: Samoan police investigate after pair admit killing ‘Coconut Cartel’ ringleader in Vietnam
• Other Samoan crime reports

Fiji police have since confirmed the pair, who are facing down a potential death penalty, transited through the island nation’s international airport.

Tovia died at the scene while his associate Sauni Sam, 27, is in intensive care in hospital with serious injuries.

Tovia is believed to be the mastermind behind Sydney’s Coconut Cartel, which reportedly broke away and declared war on the rival Alameddine gang earlier this year.

Samoa police have frozen the bank accounts of the duo as well as four other people as their investigations into the bizarre international case widen.

Urgent directive
Documents obtained by RNZ Pacific show the transnational crime unit issued an urgent directive to the Central Bank of Samoa (CBS) on Wednesday, ordering six accounts and transactions connected to them to be immobilised.

CBS governor Maiava Atalina Ainuu-Enari immediately ordered commercial banks to freeze accounts belonging to Vaa and Tovia “without delay”, as well as those belonging to two New Zealand nationals, a United States citizen and a Thai.

Those named in the order, issued on May 27 under Samoa’s money laundering laws, were Tafia Tovia (aka Steve Tofa), Vaa Soloa Vaa (aka Joseph Vaa), Connor Songkran Strickert, Fred Olivia Junior Papalii, Olini Atiua and James Tuisavailuu Atua.

The document states the request relates to “an ongoing investigation into a serious violent incident that occurred in Vietnam” and “two Samoan nationals alleged to have been involved in the shooting of another Samoan man, believed to be associated with organised criminal activity”.

In a further connection to New Zealand, three people have been stopped by police investigating the gang hit as they tried to board a flight from Samoa to Auckland.

The man, woman and child were bound for Auckland when they were arrested at Faleolo International Airport in Samoa on Thursday, 7 News Australia reported.

Pair used fake passports, false names – reports
A video on Vietnamese television channel VTV9 showed Vaa and Tofa, wearing black hoods and handcuffs, while being marched into a room by police to confess. The footage showed that the two were reading their confessions from a script.

Fiji police spokesperson Ana Naisoro told RNZ Pacific that the two “travelled through Fiji, using their Samoan passports”.

However, Naisoro declined to confirm local media reports that there had been a security breach, which was only discovered after overseas law enforcement agencies shared intelligence with Fijian border officials.

According to local reports, the suspects used fake passports and false names to transit through Fiji’s main international airport in Nadi.

Fiji police and immigration are now reportedly working closely with international police networks, including Interpol, to trace the pair’s movements during their short stay in the country.

Capital punishment
Australian drug policy researcher Dr Ben Mostyn told RNZ Morning Report the alleged hitmen could face execution under Vietnam’s capital punishment laws.

The Sydney University senior lecturer said the Australian and Samoan governments were opposed to capital punishment and could try to intervene.

“Often when you have these sort of dual citizens in foreign countries you can get diplomatic behaviour from both countries trying to intervene.”

But he said “quite a few” Australian nationals have been executed in Southeast Asia in the past, despite diplomatic efforts.

The duo were initially thought to be Australian but 7News reports they used fake passports and false names; Lang Kenny Trong Minh do and Justin John White, to travel to Vietnam. They were arrested at the Cambodian border less than three days after the shooting.

Dr Mostyn said police believed the killing was meant to send a message to the cartel, which was trying to separate from a larger gang.

Violence around the drug trade is not unusual in the Southeast Asia, he added.

Samoa authorities react
Authorities also identified Unalei Car Rentals in the Apia suburb of Vaitele as an “associated entity” linked to the investigation.

The order stated that the Financial Intelligence Unity (FIU) had grounds to suspect the transactions involved proceeds of serious crime, money landering offences or offences linked to the financing of terrorism.

The development comes after three people due to fly to Auckland on Air New Zealand were were stopped at Faleolo International Airport on Wednesday night.

Sources told the Samoa Observer that a man was given a stop order before boarding the aircraft. Video footage reportedly obtained by the newspaper shows a man dressed in black being escorted by police at the airport.

In a bizarre twist, the police later issued a statement saying they were seeking Strickert for questioning.

The Thai citizen claimed on Facebook that he had already been questioned by the police, was “willing to cooperate fully” and had “nothing to hide”.

‘Highly dangerous’
Lieutenant General Mai Hoàng, the director of the HCM City Police, said authorities would deal strictly with all lawbreakers operating within Vietnamese territory.

“If the subjects provide sincere declarations, they will receive the leniency of Vietnamese law,” he stated.

Local police said the alleged hitmen used “military-grade firearms” during the attack last Wednesday night outside the Cee’f seafood restaurant on Truong Dinh Street in Ben Thanh ward. Surveillance footage showed them fleeing on foot immediately afterwards.

Deputy director of police Nguyen Thanh Hung told state media that police used surveillance measures and digital mapping to trace their movements and escape route.

Investigators issued emergency detention orders against the two suspects and said at the time that they were “highly dangerous” and “prepared to resist arrest”.

The Khmer Times reported that during their initial interrogation, the suspects told police that they were acting on behalf of a individual based abroad.

They said they had arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in HCM city on May 14 and spent several days monitoring the activities of the two Australian victims.

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