Decolonisation – Asia Pacific Report

‘Ten minutes of terror’ – Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s ‘Black Wednesday’

APR editor — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:38:15 +0000

AMY GOODMAN: As the US and Iran prepared to hold ceasefire talks in Pakistan today, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon.

The death toll from Israel’s massive attack on Wednesday topped 300. More than 1150 people were injured. In a span of 10 minutes, Israel struck 100 sites across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The Financial Times described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as, “one of the deadliest single bombing campaigns in the history of a country wracked by decades of war and destruction”.

Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

Foreign ministers of Pakistan and France condemned what they called “serious ceasefire violations made in Lebanon”. CBS News reports Trump initially agreed Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, but his position changed after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US is expected to host talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday. As Israel continues to attack Lebanon, Hezbollah has retaliated by firing missiles at Israel.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the secretary-general spoke.

STÉPHANE DUJARRIC: With the announcements of the ceasefire between Iran and the United States, the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a grave risk to the ceasefire and efforts towards a lasting and comprehensive peace in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the war began in late February, Israel has killed more than 1530 people in Lebanon, including at least 130 children. In Beirut, grieving families gathered at hospitals to identify bodies after Israel’s attacks on Wednesday.

MOHAMMED: [translated] I had dropped off my sister. She went up into the house. I went on a little trip, and they hid. I came back and didn’t find the building.

I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family, any of them. I found my brother, and his son was in the rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s an award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. Her latest piece in New York magazine, headlined “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rania. Why don’t you describe those scenes of a day of carnage in Beirut? We have a four-second delay, so we will wait.

Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s Black Wednesday Video: Democracy Now

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday. It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously, and not just in the capital Beirut, but also in other parts of the country.

They targeted very densely populated parts of the capital, neighbourhoods in the capital that were themselves hosting people who had been displaced from other parts of the country. In the Beqaa, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery were targeted. In Beirut, workers at a well-known roastery were removed by Civil Defence personnel as charred corpses.

So, it was a very, very ugly day. And as we speak, the — I can’t say “rescue,” because there’s — unfortunately, the people are dead, but search teams continue to try and locate and find and retrieve the remains of people who were killed in the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel will “continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required,” but later said he’s approved direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible. Can you talk about what’s happening with these negotiations?

You had the Belgian foreign minister who had come to Beirut to meet with the Lebanese President Aoun, and the bombing hit very close to their quarters, as he was congratulating the Lebanese president on saying that he would directly negotiate with Israel, then condemned the attack and said Lebanon had to be included with the ceasefire.

Can you take it from there? What’s happening now? Where do you understand these talks will take place?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the first thing is that the talks remove Lebanon from the wider ceasefire talks that are due to take place between Iran and America tomorrow. That has many Lebanese worried, because they wonder: What sort of leverage does Lebanon have? It doesn’t exactly have a Strait of Hormuz, whereas Iran seems to have a stronger negotiating position.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made it quite clear. He said that Lebanon, the Lebanese government, will negotiate for Lebanon, and that nobody else will do so.

So he has very clearly drawn the line between whatever Iran negotiates and what he hopes his government will be able to negotiate with the Israelis. Now, the Iranian foreign minister has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition of tomorrow’s talks, so it’s unclear whether or not they are going to go ahead.

So, in addition to the question of what sort of leverage does Lebanon have, some Lebanese are also worried because there is a precedent. There is a 15-month so-called ceasefire, where the — this is the second war in less than two years — and there was a 15-month ceasefire between the two.

During that period, the Lebanese government was supposed to negotiate indirectly with Israel, through something called a “mechanism” — which was US and French-led — to ensure that each side fulfilled its requirements under the terms of that ceasefire. During those 15 months, Israel continued to occupy five hilltop positions that it had newly seized in the war.

It was supposed to withdraw from them under the ceasefire. It didn’t. It was supposed to withdraw its troops back across its border under the ceasefire. It didn’t. So the Lebanese government was unable to get Israel to adhere to any of the conditions of the ceasefire. So some Lebanese wonder what it will be able to achieve now.

In addition, I have to say that the — just the mere fact of direct talks not only breaks a taboo here in Lebanon, it also breaks a very longstanding law. Since the mid-1950s here, it is considered an act of treason to have any direct interaction with an Israeli.

But the Lebanese president himself, General Joseph Aoun, about a month ago, called for direct talks with Israel, breaking that massive, massive taboo. He had four conditions for these talks that were supposed to be followed sequentially. The first condition was an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Condition number two was that the Lebanese Army is strengthened. Third was that the Lebanese Army would continue its efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

And then fourth was the direct negotiation. So it looks like the Lebanese state has jumped over the president’s own — you know, three of his conditions to go straight to the fourth one.

So, Hezbollah, for its part, has said it does not think that Lebanon should be negotiating under fire, because it puts it in the weaker position. Some Lebanese fear that this is a ploy by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prolong the war under the pretext of, you know, having these talks under fire.

The proponents of the talks, I have to say, say that it is an issue of Lebanese sovereignty that Lebanon will negotiate any sort of deal with the Israelis. They also say that Lebanon is not a card for the Iranians to wield or to use in any negotiations. And they point out that, well, you don’t exactly talk to your friends to make deals; you talk to your enemies.

So, it’s a very, very divisive issue. The Hezbollah secretary-general is due to give a speech where he will, no doubt, address the issue of the talks. And there’s supposed to be a protest here in Lebanon, just behind me, actually, in front of the Grand Serail, which is where the prime minister’s office is, against the idea of these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to the questions you raise in your latest New York magazine piece, “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.” First of all, “How much of Lebanon is Israel prepared to destroy while claiming to target Hezbollah and its infrastructure, and will the world just watch as it does so?”

And your second question: “Can Israel even defeat Hezbollah militarily or is it, as many Lebanese suspect, trying to exact so painful a price from fellow Lebanese that they turn on the group, plunging the country into civil strife?”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Israelis have made no secret of what they want to do in Lebanon. Officials, from the defence minister, Smotrich, the finance minister, they have all talked about Lebanon being part of their Greater Israel project. They have talked about seizing and occupying southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which, at its deepest, is about 30 km away from the Israeli border.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that he wants to turn that area, that lush, verdant agricultural area, into a wasteland that resembles what the Israelis did in Gaza. He has threatened that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from there will not be allowed to return.

So, that’s what the Israelis have indicated that they want to do.

In terms of what they’re able to do, they have, according to Israeli media reports, had to scale back some of those ambitions because of the fierce resistance that they’re facing on the ground from Hezbollah fighters.

Let me give you the example of a town in southern Lebanon called Khiam, where there are Israeli forces in this town, but they have been fighting for weeks and weeks to try and take control of it, and they have been unable to.

So, according to the Israeli media reports, they now say that they want to occupy about a three-to-four-kilometre strip of territory. And Hezbollah will, no doubt, fight and try and prevent them from doing that, too. So, that’s what the Israelis want to do.

In terms of Lebanese turning on each other, Israeli officials called up — there are a couple of Christian villages down in the south. There are also Sunni. There are Druze, as well as the Shiite villages down south. It’s a mixed area.

And the Israeli officials called up some of those Christian towns, where the people refuse to leave their territory, and told them, “Listen, do not shelter your Shiite neighbours; otherwise, you will come under attack.”

So, that’s a very clear sort of indication of what the Israelis are sort of hoping to foment in terms of civil strife and turning, literally, neighbour against neighbour.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip from a Beirut resident. Naim Chebbo survived a bombing on Wednesday, said he’s now afraid to sleep. He said he wants the fighting to stop, and blamed Hezbollah.

NAIM CHEBBO: [translated] We want peace. We don’t want problems with anyone anymore. Eighty percent of Arab countries have peace with Israel. Why doesn’t Lebanon have peace, so that we can end all these problems?

As long as Hezbollah is in Lebanon, Israel will strike Lebanon. That’s it. Hezbollah is not defending Lebanon. It’s defending Iran’s agenda. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, how common or typical is this comment of a Lebanese who survived the bombing on Wednesday, Israel’s bombing?

RANIA ABOUZEID: The Lebanese are very divided over the issue of Hezbollah and its weapons, and they always have been, but more so now in this recent war, because it started on March 2, and Hezbollah lobbed about six rockets into Israel, claiming that it was in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as, “in defense of Lebanon.”

So, many Lebanese saw it as a war of choice almost by Hezbollah.

Now, Hezbollah and its supporters say that after those 15 months of a ceasefire — that wasn’t really a ceasefire, because, according to the UN, Israel violated Lebanon’s sovereignty about 15,000 times during that period. There were thousands of attacks, resulting in the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese.

So, Hezbollah supporters say they were patient for those 15 months, and now they have chosen to respond.

But, certainly, there are Lebanese who are very angry with Hezbollah. They don’t want any war. I mean, no Lebanese wants war, even the hundreds of thousands of displaced, many of whom might be Hezbollah supporters. Everybody wants to go home.

You know, war is not the option for anybody. But it’s a question of: Under what circumstances, for example, will Lebanon negotiate with Israel? Will it be under the Iranian umbrella in these talks tomorrow, or will it try and forge another path? And which is better?

I mean, look, there are some Lebanese who don’t care if aliens will negotiate on behalf of Lebanon as long as it can secure a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to, finally, ask you about what’s happening on the ground. According to the World Health Organisation, some of Lebanon’s hospitals may run out of lifesaving medical supplies within days and attempt to treat patients wounded by the Israeli airstrikes. This is WHO representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar.

DR. ABDINASIR ABUBAKAR: There are some shortages, some of those essential chronic medications, the insulin, but also some of the, you know, dialysis supplies.

If the current situation and the current demand actually continue and the current escalation continue, probably the country may be facing a very real risk of critical shortage, including trauma supplies, surgical materials, blood products, chronic medications.

And any other further disruption could seriously hinder the ability of providing timely, adequate care for both emergency and ongoing health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, your final comments on what you think is about to happen? And do you think Iran will insist on including this in the ceasefire, joined by many countries around the world who are saying Lebanon has to be included, or, as you write in your column, “many Lebanese are wondering whether Iran will forsake Hezbollah and allow Lebanon to be pounded”?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Very difficult to tell, Amy. That’s the honest truth. But, you know, Iran also has its considerations. If it does forsake Hezbollah and goes it alone, well, then, you know, Hezbollah is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. There are other allies in the region who will see this and wonder if Iran might forsake it, too.

So it’s a question of its broader network. There are the Houthis in Yemen. There are various militia groups in Iraq who will be watching very carefully to see what Iran does, if it stands by its ally, Hezbollah, or if it doesn’t.

There are also — it also has domestic considerations. You know, Iranians have been pounded now for weeks and weeks. They want a reprieve. They don’t want to return to war.

So, the Iranians will be juggling those, their own sort of conditions, as well, in terms of what their ultimate stance is with regard to heading to the negotiations with or without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Rania, I mean, you are there in Beirut. Israel struck central Beirut, southern Beirut, gone beyond the Litani River to the Zahrani River, some are wondering if they’ll take over that whole land, about a fifth of Lebanon. But you, yourself, are you afraid to walk in the streets?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It depends on what streets, Amy. It depends on where, what part of Lebanon, because that’s the thing about Wednesday’s attack, is that it shattered the sense that any place is safe, because you just don’t know.

The neighbourhoods that were targeted were very far, for example, from the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has some institutions — not that that justifies striking a very densely, you know, populated area. The southern suburbs are home to hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was anybody’s guess. Like, why target a street with a roastery? Why target during rush hour when children were leaving school and civil servants were heading home? So, that’s the thing. The sense of safety anywhere has been shattered.

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

Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious

APR editor — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:50:32 +0000

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank cheque to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967. Common Dreams reports.

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarised as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after the First World War.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favour Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).

Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to the Third World War. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorise and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.

American views clear
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavourably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

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

Republished under Creative Commons.

‘Heinous’ Israeli attack kills Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah in genocidal Gaza war

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:15:30 +0000

Pacific Media Watch

Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah has been killed in an Israeli drone strike in the Gaza Strip, the Qatari television news channel reports.

The air strike caused the car to burst into flames, sources told Al Jazeera.

Israel has been targeting journalists in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023.

The Gaza Government Media Office said at least 262 journalists had been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since then.

In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “strongly condemns the heinous crime of targeting and killing Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent, Mohammed Wishah”.

“This constitutes a new and flagrant violation of all international laws and norms, and reflects a continued systematic policy of targeting journalists and silencing the voice of truth,” it said.

“As Al Jazeera mourns its correspondent Mohammed Wishah, who joined the network in 2018, it affirms that his killing was not a random act but a deliberate and targeted crime intended to intimidate journalists and prevent them from carrying out their professional duties,” the statement continued.

Israeli ‘ceasefire’ violations
Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, says the fact that Wishah was killed while travelling on the main road in Gaza City shows “the situation is getting much more dire in light of the ongoing Israeli military’s ‘ceasefire’ violations”.
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“It’s nearly six months since the US-brokered ‘ceasefire’ came into effect, and the Israeli violations continue – targeting journalists like Wishah, who has been covering the genocidal war since day one,” he said.

Attacks on Gaza – Al Jazeera reporter killed Video: Al Jazeera

The Gaza Government Media Office says the Israeli military has committed about 2,000 violations since the “ceasefire” took effect.
‘Systematic targeting’

The office also said the killing of Wishah was an example of the “systematic targeting and assassination of Palestinian journalists” by Israel.

It called on the International Federation of Journalists, the Arab Journalists Union and media bodies worldwide to “condemn these systematic crimes against Palestinian journalists and media workers in the Gaza Strip.”

The office appealed to the international community and relevant organisations to “stop these repeated attacks,” prosecute those responsible in international courts, and “exercise serious and effective pressure to stop the crime of genocide” and protect journalists in Gaza.

More than 72,000 people have been killed and over 171,000 others injured in the Strip since October 2023. The assault was halted under a US-backed ceasefire that took effect last October.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 733 Palestinians have been killed and 2034 injured in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire.

Wishah was killed after the Israeli attack hit a car he was travelling in on al-Rashid Street, the coastal road that runs west of Gaza City. Image: AJ screenshot APR

How Trump’s White House demands as prerequisites for stopping bombings bit the dust

APR editor — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:22:24 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Yanis Varoufakis

Having launched an illegal, destructive war that brutally struck the entire planet’s economy (and confirmed once again Europe’s combination of irrelevance and hypocrisy), and after threatening Iran with genocide and “civilisational annihilation,” President Trump ultimately backed down on everything.

Like a Roman Emperor during the Empire’s declining years would declare victory and stage triumphs in Rome following massive defeats of his legions at the hands of Gothic warriors, so now does this modern American Nero struggle to convince us that he “won”.

In reality, Iran now decides which vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, charge them tolls for so doing.

The demands of the White House, which Trump had set as prerequisites for stopping the bombings, have bitten the dust.

The surrender of Iran’s enriched uranium, the demand for the destruction of Iran’s missiles, the vain hopes for regime change, the designs on Iranian oil — all of these goals were forgotten.

What has not been forgotten, and will not be forgotten, are the 180 schoolgirls that the US murdered on the first day of their attack by striking their school — along with the thousands of other killed and maimed civilians.

False sense of relief
Lest the world be overtaken by a false sense of relief, it is crucial to brace ourselves for the long-lasting economic repercussions of Trump’s idiotic war.

Make no mistake: the shockwaves of economic hardship caused by the US attack on Iran may wane but it will not be averted.

The wave of soaring prices, the blow to employment, the increase in interest rates and foreclosures will not disappear with this ceasefire.

On the contrary, because of the oligarchic cartels that also see this crisis as an opportunity, it will take political pressure by the many on the very few to reverse the negative consequences of this criminal war, as well as all the various crises that preceded it.

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

Ignoring genocide – the bill for Australia’s silence has arrived

APR editor — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:29:12 +0000

There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Michael West Media reports on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman, a Palestine peace activist, and a regular contributor to Michael West Media. This article is republished with permission.

The Iran War series by Andrew Brown:
1. The Iran war and the price of Albanese’s complicity

2. Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk

3. This isn’t journalism – Australia’s Bowen beat-up and the Iran war

4. Ignoring genocide: The bill for Australia’s silence has arrived

Mass Easter resignations within Tahiti’s pro-independence ruling party

APR editor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:43:07 +0000

By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

A rift within French Polynesia’s ruling party Tavini Huiraatira deepened during Easter weekend with a mass resignation from a group of 14 members.

The resignation was tendered by a group of young members of the local Territorial Assembly.

In their resignation letter, the members of the local parliament, writing to Tavini’s historic 81-year-old leader Oscar Temaru, insist that their decision was “carefully considered” and “does not question the respect we have [towards Temaru].”

READ MORE: Other French Polynesia reports

The mass resignation reduces Tavini’s majority to 22 within the Territorial Assembly (out of a total of 57 MPs).

This also means Tavini no longer has an absolute majority within the House.

The Assembly is scheduled to convene at its next sitting this week on 9 April 2026.

Crucial Assembly meeting on Thursday
Any motion of no confidence requires the approval of at least 35 MPs.

The other components of the Assembly include 16 from the opposition pro-France (autonomists) and 5 others who are independents.

The 14 resigning MPs belong to a group of “moderate” members of the Tavini, who were mostly elected at French Polynesia’s last territorial elections in May 2023.

Tensions have since surfaced between the newly-elected members of the “new generation” and the founding members of the Tavini, including party president Oscar Temaru and the party’s number two, Antony Géros (who is also the Speaker of the Territorial Assembly).

At the recently-held municipal elections, Géros lost his position of Mayor of the small city of Paea and in the capital city of Pape’ete, pro-autonomy figure Rémy Brillant won — well ahead of two pro-independence figures, Tavini-backed Tauhiti Nena (who secured 11.03 percent of the votes) and 25-year-old Tematai Le Gayic, 25 (who scored much better with 23.3 percent).

In the wake of the municipal elections, Le Gayic was the first to signal the split with his party.

The next territorial elections are scheduled to be held in 2028.

The group of dissident MPs is perceived as close to Brotherson, 56, who became French Polynesia’s President in May 2023.

Géros was not chosen at the time.

Less confrontational approach
Brotherson has since embodied a less confrontational approach, especially with regards to his perceived good relationship with the French government, as opposed to a more confrontational approach from his party’s historic leadership.

Among the most often cited causes of the rift between Tavini’s old guard and the younger group of MPs are such issues as French Polynesia’s undersea mineral resources exploitation (which Temaru favours, as a key to the French Pacific territory’s independence).

French Polynesia’s Territorial Assembly in session . . . Image: Assemblée de la Polynésie française/RNZ Pacific

The younger Tavini MPs, as well as French Polynesia’s Tavini President Moetai Brotherson (who is also Temaru’s son-in-law), are opposed to this exploitation of resources.

This anti-deep sea mining exploitation is also the official stance of the French government, which is warning of potential environmental damage from such operations.

Brotherson’s general stance over independence is also more nuanced and contrasts with the party’s support for a short timeline and process.

Since the resignation, Tavini has held several “emergency” meetings in a bid to reconcile the two opposing factions.

But none of those have been conclusive.

Some of the views expressed by militants support a resignation from Brotherson, which he is opposed to.

Others recommend a one-on-one meeting between Temaru and Brotherson to try and iron out their differences.

“If nothing comes out of this meeting, then Tavini Huiraatira will take action on April 9,” the party wrote on social networks at the weekend.

“If we start entertaining diverging views of the party’s objectives, we’re in trouble”, an irate Géros told local media.

Biblical references
Temaru and his son-in-law have separately commented on the Easter weekend crisis.

On Good Friday, they both used biblical, religious metaphors and direct references to Easter.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” said Temaru, quoting crucified Jesus Christ during his Easter martyrdom.

But he also admitted there were “reasons to be worried”.

Meanwhile, Brotherson posted on social networks: “While some are meeting in tribunal mode, on this Good Friday, I prefer to leave it to God.”

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

At least five Papuans reported dead as violence explodes in Dogiyai

APR editor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:55:04 +0000

RNZ Pacific

Reports from West Papua say as many as five people have been shot dead in Dogiyai regency in an alleged retaliatory attack after a policeman was killed.

A joint police and military operation was launched in the regency in Indonesia’s Central Papua province to respond to the killing, by apparent stabbing, of a police officer — a Papuan — in Kamu District’s Moanemani town on Tuesday.

According to Papuan news media outlet Suara Papua and the Human Rights Monitor group, security forces are alleged to have indiscriminately opened fire in a series of villages in Moanemani.

The Papua-based human rights and peace NGO Solidaritas Rakyat Papua, cited by Suara Papua, reported that four Papuan civilians including a 12-year-old boy, were shot dead by the security forces, and another four were injured, adding that one police officer was earlier killed and another injured.

However, Human Rights Monitor reported that at least six Papuans were shot dead in the alleged retaliatory operation, while at least two others sustained gunshot injuries.

The Indonesian Embassy in New Zealand confirmed the officer’s death, attributing it to an “armed criminal group”, the government’s label for West Papuan independence fighters.

But it said it was not yet able to confirm further casualties as the incident was still being investigated.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) statement claimed on Thursday that at least five Papuans had been killed in the unrest in Dogiyai. The dead Papuans were named in the statement.

The embassy accuses the ULMWP of often claiming its members as civilian casualties.

Human Rights Monitor said the violent crackdowns occurred amid escalating tensions and heavy deployment of security forces across Dogiyai Regency in the past month.

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

Richard David Hames: When will we make war untenable for the power elites?

APR editor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:08:22 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Richard David Hames

An Easter message. There’s no mystery about why wars start. They happen because someone, somewhere, decides that negotiation is more dangerous to them than to the people being bombed.

Look at what was happening this “Good” Friday. Iran. Gaza. The West Bank. Lebanon.

Thirty-six days of missiles and a Strait of Hormuz sealed shut while oil companies post record profits and defence contractors book forward orders through 2031. No one in those boardrooms is losing sleep over a negotiated settlement.

That would be the one outcome they cannot monetise.

The choice of war over negotiation is always deliberate. It’s what happens when the institutions built to make negotiation workable — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the mechanisms of international law — are systematically defunded, vetoed into paralysis, or simply disregarded by those states powerful enough to ignore them without consequence.

When accountability is optional, war is always cheaper than compromise. For the people making the decision, not for the people paying for it in blood.

And here is what makes this moment different from others: we’re not even pretending anymore. Israeli ministers speak of erasure openly. American officials wave away civilian casualties with the language of collateral necessity.

Actions become shameless
The international community issues statements of concern and then approves the next arms shipment. The gap between what is said and what is done has closed — not because the words have become honest, but because the actions have become shameless.

Negotiation requires recognising the humanity of the other party. That’s precisely why it’s rebuffed. You can’t negotiate with someone you have spent 20 years or more dehumanising. Make them monstrous enough and war stops requiring justification. It becomes necessary.

But nothing about this is inevitable. Wars end when the people with the power to end them decide the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of stopping.

That calculation is being made right now, every day, by people who are not dying. The question is not when they will choose peace. It’s when the rest of us will make their continuing refusal untenable.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

Protesters condemn Luxon govt for failing to condemn illegal war on Iran

APR editor — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:55:43 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

New Zealand’s government was taken to task today for its lack of a principled stand against Israel’s Gaza genocide and the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran.

Several speakers at a rally in the heart of Auckland expressed disappointment and anger at Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s failure to condemn the war of aggression against Iran, one of the major supporters of Palestinian self-determination and justice.

The speakers from several cultures were scathing about New Zealand’s weak stance in the rally at Te Komititanga Square with a theme of “Welfare not warfare”.

The criticism comes as US President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking a record $1.5 trillion in “defence” spending for the coming year along with massive social cutbacks, according to a White House details released yesterday, while New Zealand’s budget allows for an unprecedented NZ$12 billion four-year plan to overhaul the country’s military.

Bibi Amena, a twice-displaced refugee from Afghanistan who has experienced the devastation of war and lost family members while resisting the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, said the illegal assassination of a high profile head of state and respected figure among Shia Muslims around the world should have been condemned.

“At the very least our government should have condemned America and Israel in the strongest words possible,” she said.

New Zealand should have distanced itself from America and Israel “and their crumbling empire”.

Helen Clark quoted
She quoted former prime minister Helen Clark who at the beginning of this war described New Zealand’s response as “a disgrace” and that it was in the country’s best interests to keep advocating for international law.

“No War With Iran” protesters in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today. Image: Asia Pacific Report

“New Zealand is not a mighty country, and if we trample international law and forego an independent foreign policy, we are left at the mercy of countries far bigger and far stronger than us,” Amena said.

“Let’s be loud and clear when we say that Israel and America’s war on Iran is illegal — it’s illegitimate, unprovoked and immoral.”

A Tehran-born psychology student, Ali Reza, who migrated to New Zealand in 2013, was also strongly critical of the government’s weak stance over the war.

“Some politicians seem to have trouble with their spines. Iran has many excellent spinal surgeons who could help them with that.”

Ali Reza (right) with MC Achmat Esau speaking in Te Komititanga Square today . . . “Some politicians seem to have trouble with their spines. Iran has many excellent spinal surgeons who could help them with that.” Image: Asia Pacific Report

He praised the Palestinian resistance in the face of the 76th years “brutality, occupation, mass murder and mass displacement” by Israel.

“Meanwhile, the Sudanese people were suffering through a devastating civil war caused by the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and its master Israel. The enemy’s lies set records displaying psychotic levels of manipulation and exploitation,” he said.

“The enemy renewed their specialisation in the discipline of evil wrongdoings, pioneering in numerous fields, followed by their murderous campaign in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, all funded by the United States.”

Choice for Aotearoa
Leeann Wahanui-Peters of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) called for a choice for Aotearoa — one between “the security of our whānau and the lies and profits of warmongers and their masters in Wall Street, the City of London, and the shadow bankers of Black Rock and company”.

“A choice between a home, a warm home and weapons,” she said. “A choice between a future of justice, peace and prosperity for all and a past of war and exploitation for the few.

“For decades, we have been told that the world is dangerous and that the only way to be safe is to spend more on the military.”

“This is a lie,” Wahanui-Peters said.

PSNA’s Leeann Wahanui-Peters . . . “The greatest threat to the safety of a child in Aotearoa isn’t a missile from a distant land.” Image: Asia Pacific Report

“The greatest threat to the safety of a child in Aotearoa isn’t a missile from a distant land. It is the coldness of a house their parents can’t afford to heat, or living in a car.

“It is their hunger in their stomach because their school lunch has been cut. It is the despair of a future with no jobs and no hope.”

And yet, said Wahanui-Peters, New Zealand’s “coalition regime” chose to be “fiscally irresponsible” and chose military assets ahead of the best interests of the country’s people.

A Palestinian and a Tino Rangatiratanga flag fluttering in the breeze at today’s rally in Auckland. Image: Asia Pacific Report

‘Gateway for hell’
Bibi Amena said New Zealand’s silence over Israeli crimes in Palestine “opened the gateway for hell” in Iran.

“In the past 30 days of aggression, Israeli and American bombs have slaughtered over 3000 innocent Iranian children, women and men.

“They have attacked and destroyed energy and water supplies, civilian infrastructure, oil facilities, schools and hospitals. All of these attacks are illegal under international law.

“So why has our government remained silent? Why do we allow America and Israel to commit war crime after war crime with impunity?”

Amena referenced the first day of the illegal war on Iran, an American Tomahawk missile targeting a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab, killing more than 160 girls aged between 7 and 12.

She ended her speech with a short quote “which went viral on social media” by Professor Foad Izadi from the University of Tehran: “Iran is fighting the Epstein class of the world, that either rapes little girls, or bombs little girls.”

Organisers of the Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition said there would be a major rally with the theme “No More Wars” in Auckland’s Aotea Square and a protest march to the US Consulate next Saturday, April 11, at 2pm.

A “Boycott Israeli Apartheid” banner at the Auckland rally today. Image: Asia Pacific Report

French National Assembly rejects New Caledonia’s constitutional reform

APR editor — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:50:31 +0000

By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

A Constitutional Reform Bill dedicated to New Caledonia was rejected on Thursday by the French National Assembly (Lower House) without debate, by a gathering of opposition parties by a score of 190 to 107.

The rejection came in the form of the endorsement of a preliminary Bill filed by a left wing opposition, Emmanuel Tjibaou, on behalf of the GDR group (Gauche démocrate et républicaine).

The “prior rejection motion” means that if the rejection motion is adopted, then it closes the current sitting on the matter and the Bill would then have to come back to the other House of Parliament, the Senate, following the “shuttle” rule.

Tjibaou, who is an indigenous Kanak pro-independence leader, is one of the two MPs representing New Caledonia in the Assembly.

French Assemblée Nationale rejects a Constitutional Bill for New Caledonia on Thursday. by 190-107. Image: Assemblée Nationale/RNZ Pacific

The text was originally tabled for a vote to be held on 1 April 2026, but this was later delayed by one day, following an announcement by Speaker Yaël Braun-Pivet.

However, on Thursday, during a sitting that only debated motives from the government and its Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou, the rapporteur Philippe Gosselin and representatives from all parties present, it quickly became clear that most of the opposition parties were going to support the rejection motion, and vote against the text without further debate.

The sitting only lasted 01 hour 40 minutes.

Kanak Emmanuel Tjibaou speaking at the French National Assembly during the debate on Constitutional reform Bill for New Caledonia. Image: Assemblée Nationale/RNZ Pacific

Tjibaou, speaking in support of his rejection motion, stressed that the Constitutional Bill, in his view, was “not consensual”, because his party, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) was opposed to the text and that the Bill “did not seek to reach a compromise” between all stakeholders.

Tjibaou said this was in contradiction to the previous Matignon-Oudinot (1988) and Nouméa Accord (1998), which initiated a decolonisation process for New Caledonia.

The present Constitutional Bill derives from talks held in July 2025 and January 2026 between New Caledonia political stakeholders and the French government. This was on two occasions — in the small city of Bougival in July 2025 and later in January 2026 in Paris, at the French Presidential palace of Élysée, and the French ministry of Overseas territories in Rue Oudinot.

Hence the name of Bougival-Élysée-Oudinot (BEO) for a text and an expanded project.

The project also envisions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, with a correlated “New Caledonia Nationality” available to people who are already French citizens.

Other participating parties pro-France and pro-independence (two pro-independence members of FLNKS) have since split to create their own “UNI” (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance).

They have maintained their commitment to the BEO process, including their legislative adaptation (in the form of a Constitutional Amendment and an “organic Law”, which would de facto become New Caledonia’s constitution).

Tjibaou: ‘a logic of assimilation’
But the BEO text, in August 2025, was unequivocally opposed by the FLNKS, one of the main components of the pro-independence movement.

The FLNKS later explained it saw these, as well as a planned process of transfer of more powers from Paris to Nouméa, was, in their view, just a “lure” of independence.

Tjibaou said on Thursday the text was at best “symbolic”.

“To us, this amounts to a perennial status within France… It’s a logic of assimilation… It cannot be compared to a decolonisation in accordance with the UN resolutions and the international law”, he told MPs.

He called on local elections to be held sooner than later, currently no later than 28 June 2026.

Tjibaou said it was ironic that “a pro-independence” should tell the Minister that “when our Kanak country is damaged, it is also France that is damaged”… Because “when you make decisions that are leading us to chaos, you are also jeopardising France’s place in the Pacific”, he said at the tribune.

Moutchou: ‘There is no other agreement’
Moutchou, in her reply, said the rejection of the Bill would have repercussions on New Caledonians’ everyday life.

She stressed what New Caledonians needed, after the riots of May 2024 and a severe economic downfall since, was “visibility”, especially on the part of economic stakeholders who needed stability in order to restore confidence and investment.

Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou speaking at France’s National Assembly Constitutional reform Bill for New Caledonia. Image: Assemblée Nationale/RNZ Pacific

“There is no other agreement. The Bougival process was approved by 5 of the 6 political parties of New Caledonia.

“Some are mentioning the absence of FLNKS. I’ve always maintained the principles of transparency, dialogue information for all. And the door was never closed”, she said.

“And the politics of the empty chair cannot dictate the future of a territory.

“So what do we do? How much longer do we have to wait… To be responsible, we move on with those who are here… Consensus does not mean unanimity, consensus is not perfection, it’s a point of equilibrium”, she replied to Tjibaou.

“And while we have this text that is not perfect, but opens a way, those who say, ‘we will wait and see later’ risk bringing us back to a confrontational situation”.

Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou . . . the rejection of the Bill will have “repercussions on New Caledonians’ everyday life”. Image: Assemblée Nationale/RNZ Pacific

Metzdorf’s disappointment
The other MP for New Caledonia, pro-France Nicolas Metzdorf, also took to the tribune to express disappointment.

“I don’t know what more we should do. After the 2024 riots, you asked us to find a political agreement. We did this and we made big concessions, we, the non-independentists. We did this for the good of New Caledonia.

“Then you said we had to meet again to further clarify… On Kanak identity and the self-determination process. So now we are back with two political agreements.”

“And now you are sending us back home without a debate… You know, New Caledonia may be far from Paris, but tonight, many are watching this debate on TV and they’re thinking ‘What will happen to us?”

“Many have lost their home, their work, but even worse, they have lost hope to live in peace in New Caledonia”.

“What I am asking (MPs) today is just to have the common decency to debate on this (Bill)… These agreements are being supported by the majority of New Caledonia’s political class (including the moderate pro-independence parties within the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance), but also by the economic and business sector.”

“I’m asking for a vote on these accords and I’m asking to organise a consultation of New Caledonia’s people, because at the end of the day, we are the only legitimate ones to decide on our future.”

What now?
Following the rejection vote on Thursday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said all parties that had signed the Bougival-Elysée-Oudinot Accord would meet “next week”, because this is what was agreed in case of a deadlock.

Commenting on future options, Metzdorf told French media in Paris that “all options are now on the table”.

After the National Assembly’s rejection, another possibility was to bring the text back to the Upper House (the Senate).

Another option (that was almost implemented a few months ago, but later abandoned) would be to bring back a process of “consultation” directly in New Caledonia in the form of a de facto referendum for or against the Bougival process.

But the sensitive issue of who is eligible to vote at local elections remains for the looming provincial elections (which would now have to be held no later than 28 June 2026).

Pro-France parties are still determined to have those restrictions changed to allow the “frozen” electoral roll to be more open, if not fully “unfrozen”.

This could be the subject of separate negotiations between New Caledonia’s opposing parties in the coming days.

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

Thousands take to Nouméa streets ahead of French Parliament debate on New Caledonia

APR editor — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:30:03 +0000

By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

Thousands took to the streets of the capital Nouméa on Tuesday — hours ahead of a scheduled French Parliament debate in the National Assembly in Paris to discuss the French Pacific territory’s political future.

An estimated 2500 came in support of local Association Un Coeur, une Voix (UCUV–One Heart, One Voice) to oppose the prospect of the next local elections (to elect New Caledonia’s three provinces) being held under the current “frozen” electoral roll, which excludes people who have not resided in New Caledonia before 1998 or their direct descendents.

During a one-hour peaceful march in downtown Nouméa, the participants were brandishing tricolour blue-white-red flags and other placards denouncing what they described as “second-class citizens” treatment and their perceived condition of self-styled “victims of history”.

READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The march was designed to send a clear message to French MPs ahead of debates on New Caledonia later this week.

“I’m sorry for using harsh words, but it’s like we’re being robbed [of our rights],” UCUV president Raphaël Romano told local Radio Rythme Bleu.

“And now we have those MPs who are going to decide for us. They’re going to use New Caledonia for their own national political gains . . . and make a mess”.

“If [MPs] can’t find an agreement, then they should let New Caledonians choose.

“It’s a shame for democracy, it happens nowhere else in the world”, Romano told local media.

His movement is strongly supported by several prominent pro-France parties, including Le Rassemblement and Les Loyalistes.

He said the situation affected all ethnic communities in New Caledonia.

“Those who can’t vote are men and women from all walks of life, all ethnic groups who live together in peace, every day,” he said.

“It’s hard enough to try and recover from the May 2024 riots, where people have lost their businesses and their job.”

The 2024 riots caused 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (almost NZ$4 billion) in material damage.

They were also initially triggered by peaceful protests against a plan to have the French constitution modified, especially regarding the electoral restrictions.

The protests turned violent and out of control in Nouméa on the very day debates started in Paris.

The “freeze” was enforced in 2009, as part of the Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998.

Originally designed as a temporary measure, the restriction currently excludes up to 40,000 people, many of them born in New Caledonia.

Christian Téin, president of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) . . . opposed to the draft Bougival-Élysée-Oudinot (BEO) pact. Image: LNC

‘Counter demonstrations’
Meanwhile, pro-independence movements have called for other “counter-demonstrations” outside of Nouméa.

One gathering took place on Tuesday, including in the outer Loyalty Islands of Lifou, while another demonstration is scheduled on Wednesday, in Koné (North of the main island, Grande Terre).

The voting restriction measure was originally included in the 1998 Nouméa Accord as a measure to prevent any erosion of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak population’s voice.

The proposed text derives from talks held between New Caledonia political stakeholders and the French government.

This was on two occasions: in the small city of Bougival in July 2025 and later in January 2026 in Paris, at the French Presidential Élysée Palace and the French Ministry of Overseas Territories, Rue Oudinot.

Hence the name of Bougival-Élysée-Oudinot (BEO) for a text and an expanded project.

But the BEO text, in August 2025, was unequivocally opposed by the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), the main component of the pro-independence movement.

Other participating parties — pro-France and pro-independence (two pro-independence members of FLNKS have since split to create their own “UNI” [Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance]) — have since maintained their commitment to the BEO process, including their legislative adaptation (in the form of a Constitutional Amendment and an “organic Law, which would de facto become New Caledonia’s constitution).

The project also envisions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, with a correlated “New Caledonia nationality” available to people who are already French citizens.

The FLNKS later explained it saw these, as well as a planned process of transfer of more powers from Paris to Nouméa, as just a “lure” of independence.

Reacting to the UCUV march, FLNKS said the “freeze” was ruled constitutional by France’s Constitutional Council in September 2025 and could only be changed if a “consensual” agreement was found.

But FLNKS considers the BEO-derived text “is not a logical continuation of the Nouméa Accord”.

The BEO-derived Bill, if adopted, could eventually replace the Nouméa Accord.

But it is now still undergoing legislative process.

The French Senate endorsed it on February 24, with a comfortable right-wing majority.

But this week, the same text is to be debated in the Lower House of Parliament, the National Assembly, which has been divided since the July 2024 French national snap election following President Macron’s decision to dissolve Parliament.

Current predictions are that since there is no clear majority within the Lower House, the Bill, which comes in the form of a Constitutional Amendment (with the capacity to replace the Nouméa Accord) is likely to be rejected.

The opposition to the current right-wing group comes from the left (far-left La France Insoumise -LFI-, the Socialists (who say the Bill is “heavy with threats and dangers”), the Communists, the Greens) and Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN).

Last week, the Constitutional Bill came before the National Assembly’s Law Committee and suffered an initial rejection.

Parliamentary debates in the National Assembly are scheduled to begin on Wednesday (1 April 2026, Paris time) and could last for the next three days.

‘Barrage’ of three thousand amendments
Some opposition parties, especially the democratic and republican left (GDR, Gauche démocrate et républicaine, to which the pro-independence New Caledonian Kanak MP Emmanuel Tjibaou belongs) have already filed on the agenda a “prior rejection motion” to withdraw the Bill.

Some of those expressed strong reservations because the process and ensuing Bill was opposed by FLNKS and that, therefore, there was no unanimity.

Meanwhile, since last week, in a previously used barrage tactic, LFI has also filed over 3000 amendments.

Restrictions still apply under Nouméa Accord — French Constitutional Council
UCUV has been fighting for years to defend their rights, in front of what they term a “denial of democracy”.

Last year, they took their case to the French Constitutional Council, which ruled that in the present situation, the electoral roll “freeze” for local elections was part of the Nouméa Accord which was part of the French Constitution.

UCUV president Raphaël Romano said they now have no other option but to take their case before the European Court of Human Rights, even though they admit their hopes are “very weak”.

He said the deadline was 4 April 2026.

If the Constitutional Bill is rejected by Parliament, a new proposed calendar for implementation will automatically become obsolete.

And local provincial elections that have already been delayed three times since May 2024 will have to be held not later than 28 June 2026, instead of the proposed December this year.

If the BEO-derived text is rejected, then the Nouméa Accord applies again and the planned provincial elections will have to be held under the restricted — “frozen” — electoral roll system.

“The provincial elections will not be held under a frozen electoral roll. It’s just not possible”, Romano said.

Deadlock, imbroglio: what now?
Other possible alternative scenarios could include re-submitting a new, revised Bill, dedicated to the electoral roll, or organising a “consultation”, a de facto referendum with eligible New Caledonians.

Under the French parliamentary principle of the “shuttle”, the text could be sent back to the Senate.

Under the BEO text, people eligible for voting at local provincial elections can either be born in New Caledonia or having resided there for an uninterrupted 15 years (for the first five years of enforcement, then the minimum residence period would be reduced to 10 uninterrupted years).

From the French government’s point of view, an agreement on New Caledonia’s institutional future is the only solution to bring back stability and economic “visibility” for local and foreign investors.

“Everything is on the table to get things moving”, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told French media last week.

Overseas Minister Naïma Moutchou is still advocating for the benefits a parliamentary approval would bring to New Caledonia in terms of a “framework” for economic recovery.

France has earmarked some 2 billion euros in a “refoundation” pact, structured to put the economy, social services and the crucial nickel mining industry back on track, provided necessary reforms are carried out.

“Let’s give a chance to this process, because in New Caledonia, the alternative to an open political process is never quiet: it’s uncertainty and, over there, it always ends up weakening civil peace,” she told Parliament last week.

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

Māori radio network says funding cuts threaten survival of iwi stations

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:31:01 +0000

By Pokere Paewai, RNZ Māori issues reporter

New Zealand’s national Māori radio network, Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori o Aotearoa, is considering litigation over a potential loss of government funding which it says threatens the survivability of iwi radio stations.

Chairperson Peter-Lucas Jones (Ngāti Kahu, Te Rārawa, Ngāi Takoto, Te Aupōuri) — who was also chief executive of Far North iwi broadcaster Te Hiku Media — told current affairs series RUKU Māori radio was a right under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, not a government handout.

Recent and proposed actions targeting iwi stations, implemented primarily through Te Māngai Pāho (TMP), disregarded the treaty and exposed the Crown to credible legal risk, he said.

READ MORE: Other Māori broadcasting reports

“This issue is not about resisting change, iwi radio stations have themselves funded transitions to digital platforms and new media without Crown support.

“The issue is whether the Crown can, through an intermediary, dismantle a treaty remedy without Māori consent.”

There are more than 20 iwi radio stations across New Zealand, from Te Hiku in the North to Tahu FM in the South.

Stations receive funding through Te Māngai Pāho to promote Māori language and culture.

Time-limited funding
TMP currently has $16 million of time-limited funding, equal to almost 25 percent of their total annual funding, which is due to expire on June 30.

Te Māngai Pāho said that while 2026/27 appropriations would not be confirmed until the Budget announcement in late May, the impact of this funding loss would be felt across the whole Māori media sector.

“Te Māngai Pāho is consulting with the Māori media sector, including iwi radio, on the future of our funding allocations. We have requested feedback to understand how any reduction of funding will be felt across the sector.

“Feedback will inform the board’s final decisions around funding allocations. We understand that the stability of iwi radio stations and content creators is threatened by this funding cut.”

Jones said iwi stations unanimously agreed at a special general meeting they would not accept any decrease in funding and would consider legal action in response to any cutbacks.

“Decisions taken by TMP that materially affect iwi radio funding, structure or autonomy remain Crown actions for treaty purposes.

“The Crown cannot discharge its Treaty obligations by delegation and then rely on that delegation to insulate itself from responsibility.”

Rapidly changing audience
The iwi radio network said it had been grappling with a wide range of issues including, rapidly changing audience expectation and emerging technologies, numerous siloed media outlets and an inadequate investment in workforce development affecting the ability to grow and retain a skilled workforce.

The Turituri – “be quiet” – sign at Wellington station Te Ūpoko o te Ika. Image: RNZ/Te Aniwa_Hurihanganui

Minister for Māori Development Tama Potaka said Māori media, including iwi radio, played a critical role in supporting te reo Māori revitalisation and connecting whānau and communities across Aotearoa, shaping public understanding by sharing Māori stories and te reo directly with whānau.

He said no final decisions had been made through the consultation between TMP and the Māori media sector and it was premature to confirm impacts on funding levels, services, or jobs, including claims about specific percentage reductions.

“Earlier financial support of $16 million in time-limited funding was put in place under the previous government and is now coming to an end. The current consultation process is focused on how best to manage that transition within existing funding,” he said.

“As Minister, I do not direct or intervene in Te Māngai Pāho’s operational funding decisions. Those are matters for the board.”

Potaka said the Crown’s role was to ensure a strong and sustainable system for te reo Māori revitalisation.

High quality content
“I expect the consultation process to reflect the importance of Iwi radio and the role it plays in communities across the country, while ensuring funding is used effectively to deliver high-quality content on platforms that meet audience preferences.

“Māori media entities continue to adapt to changes in funding and audience behaviour, and I expect decisions to prioritise value for money while supporting strong te reo Māori outcomes.

“Any organisation is entitled to raise concerns or seek legal advice. However, there is an established independent process underway, and it is important that process is allowed to run its course.”

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

Israel passes extreme death penalty law targeting only Palestinians

APR editor — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:36:16 +0000

By Minnah Arshad of Zeteo

Israel’s Parliament has approved a one-sided death penalty measure to execute Palestinians.

It is one of the most extreme laws in the nation’s history, and will exacerbate the far-right government’s illegal system of apartheid.

Some members of the Knesset, including ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, were seen wearing noose pins in the Knesset yesterday, and celebrating with champagne on live TV after the bill passed.

Ben-Gvir said hanging is “one of the options,” as is execution by the electric chair or euthanasia.

The law was passed with 62 votes to 48 in its final reading.

The bill drew international condemnation ahead of its passage, including from the European Union, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and Amnesty International. Human rights groups have vowed to challenge the bill in Israel’s Supreme Court.

The legislation, which has garnered broad public support in Israel, authorises executions for “terrorists” who kill “with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel,” according to Haaretz — effectively ensuring it won’t apply to any of the settlers who routinely murder Palestinians.

‘Confessions’ by torture
In military courts in the occupied West Bank, execution by hanging will now be the default punishment for terrorism. Only Palestinians are tried in these courts, and 96 percent of people are convicted, though cases are largely built on “confessions” extracted through torture.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians condemned the bill yesterday ahead of the vote as an “extreme escalation in Israel’s genocidal policies against Palestinians”.

“The progression of the legislation marks not just a profoundly unjust and illegal act of discrimination under international law, but a far more sinister escalation of Israel’s apartheid legal systems,” the center wrote.

Israeli Knesset death penalty for Palestinians. Video: Al Jazeera

Israel is currently imprisoning about 9500 Palestinians, according to the human rights group B’Tselem, and about half of them are held under administrative detention.

According to the group, the Israel Prison Service has already started to prepare designated execution facilities.

B’Tselem on Sunday called the bill “another official killing mechanism” that will further normalise the slaughter of Palestinians, as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and intensifies attacks in the occupied West Bank.

Human rights violation
“The death penalty is a total violation of the most basic human rights, primarily, the right to life,” B’Tselem wrote.

“Israel enforces a comprehensive policy of killing and oppression against the Palestinian people in all the territories it controls. The Death Penalty Law gives Israel’s apartheid regime yet another tool for advancing that policy.”

On top of Monday’s bill, the Knesset is also considering another death penalty measure to impose on alleged October 7, 2023, attackers.

According to Amnesty International, that bill would effectively expand the unilateral powers of military judges and eliminate judicial safeguards.

A Palestinian Forum of New Zealand meme protesting against the new Israeli law. Image: Maher Nazzal

How the US, Israel and Iran are controlling their media narratives

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:55:46 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Majdoline Al-Shammouri in Beirut

In the ongoing United States and Israel war on Iran, it appears that all the countries agree on “controlling” the media.

Despite differences in their political systems, all three governments follow an approach that prioritises “national morale” and “operational security” over press freedom and the flow of information.

This approach redefines the concept of fake news and extends its authority to managing public sentiment, making coverage more “positive” and “optimistic”.

READ MORE: Three journalists killed in Israeli strike on marked press car in Lebanon

The goal is unified: to turn media into a state mouthpiece that tells only the official narrative of the war.

The Trump administration’s political pressure
In the US, media restrictions don’t appear as direct bans on journalism, as in more authoritarian systems. Instead, pressure comes through political and regulatory channels, alongside attempts to shape the war narrative against Iran.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters they could lose their licences if they aired what he described as “false news” about the war.

In a post on X on March 14, Carr said stations airing “misleading” information had the opportunity “to correct course” before licence renewal. He added: “The law is clear: broadcast stations must operate in the public interest, or they will lose their licences.”

Later, President Donald Trump said he was extremely pleased to see Carr review licences of “corrupt” and “unpatriotic” news organisations because they “coordinate with Iran” and “should face treason charges”.

Regulatory pressure is accompanied by a political and media campaign to shape a specific image of the war.

Trump attacked major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for reports of damage to US military aircraft at a Saudi base, calling them “degenerate journalism” that wanted the country to “lose the war”.

This pressure has also extended to the military.

At a Pentagon press conference, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth accused the media of downplaying the success of the military campaign against Iran, criticised coverage of operations, suggested alternative headlines for television reports, and named CNN specifically, saying its performance would improve if ownership and management changed.

In an incident bordering on the absurd, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon barred journalists from attending war briefings after Hegseth’s team objected to his appearance in previously taken photos, restricting access to Pentagon photographers.

Nevertheless, pressures did not start with the war on Iran.

In October 2025, the Department of War announced a new policy regulating journalists’ work inside the Pentagon, requiring official approval before publishing any information, even if it was not classified.

The Trump administration justified the restrictions as necessary for national security. Hegseth said access to the Pentagon was “a privilege, not a right,” while Trump argued the limits were needed because the press was “dishonest”.

Measures included removing dedicated offices for some media outlets and replacing them with shared facilities under a new rotation system.

Israel kills three Lebanese journalists Video: Al Jazeera

Israel’s approach
In Israel, media restrictions during war take a different form that is based on strict military censorship and obstructing journalists in the field, in addition to targeting media institutions in Iran and Lebanon.

This month, the Israeli military censor issued new instructions to foreign media limiting coverage of rocket attacks within Israel.

These included banning live broadcasts during sirens, forbidding filming missile interceptions or impact sites near security installations, and preventing the publication of exact impact locations or reposting videos from social media without prior approval.

Authorities justified the restrictions as a way to prevent opponents from using media coverage to “improve missile strike accuracy”.

Israeli forces detained CNN Türk reporter Emrah Cakmak and cameraman Khalil Kahraman during a live broadcast from Tel Aviv following an Iranian missile attack, confiscating their phones, camera, and microphone, and accessing a password-protected phone without permission.

The journalists stated that their equipment was not returned.

On the same day, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karai announced stricter measures against foreign media violating military censorship instructions, adopting a policy of “zero tolerance”.

Authorities also detained Turkish journalists Ilyas Efe Ünal and Adam Metan while crossing from Egypt into Israel on March 4. Metan said they were interrogated for about six hours before being released.

The following day, Haifa municipal police attempted to remove international media teams covering war-related events, including CNN, Fox News, BBC, Anadolu Agency, and Al Arabiya, despite journalists following military censorship rules.

Days later, on March 8, Israeli police prevented Al Araby TV correspondent Abdelkader Abdel Halim from continuing coverage in Haifa, with an officer captured on video saying that “filming is prohibited in Haifa.”

Israeli strikes also targeted media institutions in Lebanon and Iran, and have killed five journalists in Lebanon in the past month — three of them (including a woman) just yesterday in a targeted assassination.

According to Reporters Without Borders, two-thirds of all journalists killed around the world last year were by Israel, mostly in Gaza.

Several Lebanese media outlets were hit during Israel’s raids, including Sawt Al-Farah radio in Tyre, Al Nour radio, and Al Manar TV in Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs. And in a separate strike, Saksakiyah media centre in southern Lebanon was also targeted.

In Iran, strikes hit the state-run Radio Dezful offices in Khuzestan, the headquarters of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting in Tehran, a communications centre near the building, as well as the Kurdistan Network TV building in Sanandaj, and the reformist newspaper Sazandegi in Tehran.

Iran’s internet shutdown
If the US uses regulatory tools and Israel relies on military censorship and field restrictions, Iran’s model is based on direct control of information flow. Hours after the US-Israeli aggression began, authorities cut the nationwide internet.

Journalists said the outage hampered communication with sources, sending reports and photos, and verifying field information, while a limited number of users, including state media, retained restricted access through a government-controlled “white internet”.

As the war continued, Tehran tightened legal restrictions on media coverage.

The judiciary criminalised filming or covering US or Israeli strikes in Iran, considering the publication of such material as potential “evidence of cooperation with an enemy“.

Confrontations escalated with calls to target opposition media.

The Tabnak website published an article urging the armed forces to target Iran International TV and suggesting taking action against the channel’s offices and the homes of some staff.

Security agencies carried out a series of arrests in several provinces for sending photos and information about strikes to foreign media, including Iran International, classified by Iran as a “terrorist channel”.

Majdoline Al-Shammouri is a writer based in Beirut. This article was translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari and was first published by The New Arab here.

War on Iran: The French senator who said what everybody was thinking

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 02:24:02 +0000

COMMENTARY: Pacific Media Watch

A French senator walked into the Luxembourg Palace, opened his mouth, and basically set the whole room on fire. Politely. In a suit.

Claude Malhuret didn’t yell nor wave his arms. He just listed things… calmly, methodically, like a doctor reading a very long and very depressing diagnosis.

And by the time he was done, the entire Trump administration had been reduced to a punchline that wasn’t even trying to be funny.

He started with an apology. Why? Because a year ago, he said, he had compared Trump’s presidency to Nero’s Court. He was wrong.

“It’s the miracle court,” he corrected himself on Friday.

And then he started naming names.

A former heroin addict running the Ministry of Health. A climate skeptic in charge of the economy. A TV host with a drinking problem commanding the armed forces. A lobbyist who used to work for Qatar now sitting as Attorney General. A woman who openly admires Putin in charge of national intelligence.

‘Clown in a palace’
Malhuret quoted a Turkish proverb for the occasion… “When a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king — it is the palace that becomes a circus.”

Nobody needed to ask who or what he meant. They just smiled.

And you know what? He wasn’t even being cruel. He was just being truthful and very accurate. Which, somehow, made it worse.

Then came the part that made people’s jaws drop a little.

Every time the Epstein files resurface, he said, bombs go off somewhere in the world. A new military strike. A fresh crisis.

Convenient timing. Every single time.

Malhuret didn’t call it a conspiracy. He just pointed at the pattern and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

Gulf investments
The US$400 million Boeing jet from Qatar got a mention. The Gulf investments. The stock market moves that only a small circle of insiders seemed to profit from.

Any one of these, Malhuret said, would have triggered impeachment proceedings in France.

“But we are not here,” he added. “We are in MAGA’s America.”

Here’s what makes this 5 minute speech different from the usual political noise. Malhuret didn’t just wave his hands and say “America bad.” He went person by person, scandal by scandal, conflict by conflict — and built a picture so complete that by the end of it, you couldn’t really argue with any individual piece without defending the whole rotten structure.

It’s the kind of speech American senators could give. If they wanted to. If they weren’t so busy trying not to offend anyone.

The world is watching. While Americans debate whether the speech was fair or too harsh or whatever, the rest of the planet has already formed its opinion.

One man. One very powerful seat. And a world that keeps catching fire while everyone argues about the Epstein files — which, funny enough, never quite get released fully, do they?

“Trump, the Mar-a-Lago golfer, is the only bull in the world who walks around with his own china shop. When a clown takes over the Palace, he doesn’t become King. It’s the Palace that becomes a circus”

French senator Claude Malhuret once again nails it. You won’t hear a better… pic.twitter.com/q2mpL7XFtK

— Alex Taylor (@AlexTaylorNews) March 27, 2026

Jonathan Cook: Does the tail wag the dog? How both sides are missing the bigger picture

APR editor — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:53:09 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog.

Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled I srael and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

Americans’ sympathies in the Middle East crisis. Source: Gallup World Affairs surveys

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

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

Why is the West dancing to Israel’s tune? What’s leading us to disaster

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:58:19 +0000

DOCUMENTARY: Double Down News

The Middle East is in flames. Britain is being dragged into an illegal war, the aims of which are entirely unclear, reports Richard Sanders of Double Down News.

“It’s a war of choice, and the man who chose it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, yet again, is the West dancing to Israel’s tune?

“I’ve made a number of videos exposing Israeli crimes. This one is different. It’s directed at conservatives and people generally who support the state of Israel.

“I believe our indulgence of Israel is not just morally wrong. It’s against the interests of the US and the UK and ultimately against the interests of Israel itself.

“It is leading us all to disaster. Palestine is the place you come thundering, crashing into the buffers, the limits of the Western liberal moral imagination.

“The tragedy and complexity of Israel is that it’s both a product of the most unspeakable racism and a cause of it. Zionism was born from the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, from a desire for a safe haven, a territory where Jews would for once be the hosts and not the eternal guests.

“It was framed as a return to a historic biblical homeland. and for its supporters. These two factors give it an entirely different complexion morally from other enterprises where predominantly European populations have settled far-flung parts of the world.

Dispossession and subjugation
“There’s no doubt that the Zionist dream has enormous emotional power. The problem, of course, is the other side of the equation, the people. It was inflicted upon the Palestinians whose experience of dispossession and subjugation was no different from that of countless other peoples subjected to European colonialism.

“In fact, arguably, it’s been considerably worse than many, precisely because of the licence and indulgence granted to the Israeli state.

“Let’s lay out the bold, indisputable facts. In 1948, more than 80 percent of the Palestinian population of what became Israel fled their homes. Now, if you want to believe this was not an act of deliberate ethnic cleansing, fine.

“What’s undeniable is that they were never allowed to return. In 1947, they were there. In 1949, they were not. The granting of the vote to that small fragment of the Palestinian population that remained provided a democratic fig leaf for the new state, one that was blown away once the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967.

The End of Israel Documentary: Double Down News

“There Palestinians have no right to vote for the political entity, the state of Israel that controls their lives. Jewish settlers, on the other hand, occupying the same territory do.

“Even in East Jerusalem, which as far as the Israeli government is concerned has been formally annexed to Israel, Palestinians cannot vote. Political rights depend upon ethnicity. That is not democracy.

“Israel is and has always been a state whose defining feature is that it’s structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. What else does the term a Jewish state mean?

‘Elephant in the room’
“This is the elephant in the room. the simple, blindingly obvious, undeniable fact that the Western political media class has decided that we must never mention or acknowledge, despite the fact that all of the world’s leading human rights organisations, including the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have denounced Israel as an apartheid state.

“Now scour the history of the modern world. No people has ever resigned itself to being second class citizens in their own country. Spend just 10 minutes at a checkpoint in the West Bank and you get it.

“The disfiguring dehumanisation, the humiliation of elderly men and women forced to stand in the sun for hours waiting for 18-year-olds to search them.

“The brutalisation of young men in particular, the daily control of rage that is the lot of every Palestinian. It is simply emotionally, psychologically intolerable.”

Watch the full Double Down News video

‘Torture and genocide’ – UN expert Francesca Albanese denounces Israeli abuse of Palestinians

APR editor — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:37:52 +0000

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

READ MORE: Trump talks up deal with Tehran as Iranian missile, drone attacks continue
Other US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Palestine genocide

According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report. Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

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

Rift widens within French Polynesia’s ruling party following municipal election losses

APR editor — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:39:35 +0000

By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

A rift within French Polynesia’s ruling Tavini Huiraatira party has widened this week, pitting the leadership “old guard” against a younger generation embodied by the territory’s President, Moetai Brotherson.

The main reason for the rift is the outcome of the recent French municipal elections, especially in the capital city of Pape’ete.

Since the Tavini party came back to power after the 2023 territorial elections, Brotherson brought with him a new wave of young MPs, who sometimes were questioning the traditional political line.

READ MORE: Other French Polynesian reports

This was often regarded as “radical” (in favour of a quick independence process), defended by the party’s iconic 81-year-old president Oscar Temaru and his close associates, including Territorial Assembly Speaker Antony Géros.

At the recent municipal elections, Géros was one of the most symbolic of Tavini casualties. He lost his stronghold city of Paea at the first round of votes to pro-autonomy Tapura Huiraatira leader Tepuaraurii Teriitahi, who secured more than 50 percent of the votes, making it unnecessary to hold a second round of polls.

Even though Temaru was re-elected Lord Mayor in his stronghold of Faa’a at the first round, other Tavini-held municipalities also suffered significant setbacks.

But it was in Pape’ete that the divisions between the two Tavini antagonistic trends materialised most visibly.

Two Tavini candidates
While no Tavini member was in a position to claim the lead (the new Lord Mayor remains an “autonomist”, in favour of continuing the current relationship with France under an “Autonomy” status), there were two Tavini candidates and lists — one officially endorsed by the party, under the name of Tauhiti Nena, who secured 11.03 percent of the votes.

The other was not officially endorsed but it fared much better. It was led by 25-year-old Tematai Le Gayic and received 23.3 percent of the vote.

Since the kick-start of the municipal elections campaign, Le Gayic’s list (Tutahi ia Pape’ete) was openly backed by Brotherson.

In his already long political career, despite his young age, Le Gayic’s was French Polynesia’s representative MP (2022-2024). He was once known for being the youngest French MP ever elected in the French National Assembly.

This week, the debate is now out in the open, sparking a controversy between the two antagonistic Tavini trends.

Adding fuel to fire, in an open letter to Temaru earlier this week, widely publicised through social networks, he announced his decision to leave Tavini and, as a member of the Territorial Assembly, will from now on sit as an independent member.

Family business
Brotherson reacted to the decision, saying Le Gayic’s move was a “responsible” decision.

Brotherson also belongs to the Tavini Huiraatira, a party led by his father-in-law Temaru (Brotherson’s wife, Teura, is Temaru’s daughter).

Since 2023, other young, newly-elected Tavini MPs had already voiced their questions about the party political line.

This was the case of Hinamoeura Cross-Morgant, a young female MP who has tried to get a few bills tabled in the Assembly.

She was later subjected to sanctions from the party, ranging from suspension to outright eviction.

Since then, she has been sitting as an independent MP.

Reactions from the other side (pro-autonomy) of the political spectrum were also swift.

Nicole Sanquer, who heads “A Here Ia Porinetia” party (and leader of the opposition in the current Assembly), said there were many subjects of discord within the Tavini Huiraatira which were never addressed.

“What we’re expecting now is the creation of a new group within the Assembly. You ask me, I call this the beginning of a political crisis”, she told local media.

Brotherson ‘not surprised’
Brotherson, 56, regarded as a moderate, favours a non-confrontational approach to the independence subject, vis-à-vis France.

He said the recent municipal election results were “catastrophic” and that the Tavini party he belongs to was now disconnected from reality.

He said he was not surprised at Le Gayic’s resignation.

“It was predictable. Tematai Le Gayic has been asking for Tavini’s support for months in his bid to contest (the municipal elections) in Pape’ete.

“He’s not the first one and unfortunately I think he won’t be the last if the party doesn’t react.”

“You don’t win elections through posturing,” he added, stressing the need to stay in touch with bread-and-butter issues when it comes to elections, especially municipal ones.

“Because voters simply don’t feed on ideology.”

He warned that as new territorial polls will take place in 2028, if the Tavini does not address the issue, it would face more “explosive” results and setbacks.

Speaking to local media Tahiti Nui Television on the recent municipal election results, Temaru admitted a few “tactical and strategic mistakes”.

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

The murderous, absurd ‘feminism’ of the US-Israeli war on Iran

APR editor — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:33:52 +0000

US and Israeli officials invoking women’s rights to push their war on Iran should look at their war in Gaza and at home before making claims.

COMMENTARY: By Eman Hillis

Displaced from my home in northern Gaza, I sit reading reports of the Iran war as my little sister, 6, struggles to walk across the room. Two months into the ceasefire, an Israeli soldier shot her in the head.

On my phone, a video of US politician Tommy Tuberville criticising the Iranian regime for “treating women like dogs” plays.

Another follows, showing Matt Schlapp suggesting the girls killed in a school bombing in Iran are better dead than living a “barbaric life”. To top it all, Israel celebrated International Women’s Day in Persian, posting an AI video of fake US, Israeli, and Iranian women frolicking together.

Watching these statements and videos from Gaza, where women have been subjected to relentless violence throughout the more than two-year genocide, the sudden concern for women’s rights is difficult to take seriously.

I was among the hundreds of thousands of women displaced by Israel in Gaza. I experienced the suffering that Israel, backed by the US, subjected us to, and watched other women endure.

One month before the third US veto of a proposed ceasefire in Gaza, a sudden midnight strike hit the apartment next to where I was sheltering in Khan Younis. Human remains were scattered about — half of one man’s body was hanging on what had been a window on the seventh floor, the other half on a bus in the street.

No women were killed, but I watched them weep for loved ones, denied the chance to mourn them or even gather and bury the remains.

Fleeing women dragged children
The tanks then rushed in. Dozens of women, children, and men ran through the street — some women still weeping for those who had just been killed. Most of them dragged two or more children by the hand.

I was running with a woman who held a baby she had given birth to one week earlier, crying and gasping for breath. The tanks were advancing toward us, firing shells at a hospital nearby, while drones above us strafed us indiscriminately.

The violence did not stop with the killings and displacements. Israel made life even more miserable for women, without using missiles. It cut off water, then prohibited the entry of sanitary pads and painkillers, turning women’s periods into a living hell.

Israel’s policy of starving Gaza has raised miscarriage rates among women to 300 percent.

Israeli soldiers set dogs on Palestinian women, assaulted pregnant mothers, and threatened them with rape — all of this with US support and under the protection of six US vetoes.

“Terrorist organisations have brought disaster upon you,” was one of the most common statements that Israeli leaflets repeated in Gaza and Lebanon before launching a brutal attack on a certain area. The line was often followed by “for your safety, leave the place” or “the IDF has no intention of harming you”.

The language is moral and protective, suggesting the action about to follow is a “rescue mission,” not an act of war.

US uses similar rhetoric
The US has long used similar rhetoric to justify its political ambitions abroad. In Iraq, it claimed to be saving the international community from “weapons of mass destruction.”

It claimed to be saving civilians from oppression by “terrorist organisations” when it backed Israel in its wars against Palestine and Lebanon.

In Afghanistan, the US-led invasion was often justified from a “feminist” lens to “rescue” women oppressed by the Taliban.

Now, the same strategy is being deployed against Iran. Women’s rights are weaponised as a pretext for airstrikes, sanctions, and military invasion.

Hundreds of Iranian women, including pregnant mothers, have been killed in US and Israeli strikes. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed, displacing millions of women and their loved ones within the country.

This is not to suggest that Iranian women enjoy full rights in their country, but feminism cannot be achieved through bombs.

This US and Israeli rhetoric contradicts a fundamental principle of feminism. By assuming that women are unable to fight and speak up for their rights, they deny women’s right of self-determination.

Struggling to address women’s rights
Notably, the same governments that attempt to act as the “saviours” of women struggle to address women’s rights at home. Israel, which struggles to curb incidents of sexual harassment against women, has been commodifying female soldiers to garner public sympathy during the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, one in five women in the US has experienced completed or attempted rape in their lifetime.

For women who have lived through US and Israeli wars, claims of defending Iranian women ring hollow.

The blood of more than 16,000 Palestinian women killed during the two-year genocide has not yet dried, yet the US and Israel present themselves as the guardians of women’s rights.

Those who kill and oppress other women cannot claim to defend women’s rights elsewhere. True feminism cannot defend the humanity of women in one place and ignore it in another.

Eman Hillis is a Gaza-based journalist and fact-checker reporting on war and disinformation from the ground during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This article was first published by The New Arab.

Activist journalist Terry Bell – a life defined by unwavering commitment to justice and democracy

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:00:53 +0000

OBITUARY: Radio 786

Anti-apartheid campaigner Terry Bell has died at the age of 84. A lifelong activist, journalist, and educator, Bell’s life was defined by his unwavering commitment to justice and democracy.

His early journalism career spanned several South African newspapers, where he also helped found the non-racial South African Journalists’ Union.

Bell was deeply involved in underground activism, editing the clandestine publication Combat. Detained under the 90-day law in 1964, he fled into exile in Zambia the following year. There, he worked as chief reporter for the Times of Zambia before being granted asylum in the UK.

READ MORE: Terry Bell, struggle stalwart and journalist of ‘impeccable principles’, dies at 84

In London, he studied international affairs, edited Anti-Apartheid News, and worked at the Daily Worker.

Bell’s activism took him across continents, from Zambia to New Zealand, where he helped launch the Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1972.

In 1979, he and his wife, Barbara, established the primary division of Somafco in Tanzania, drafting the ANC’s first primary school curriculum. Disillusioned by abuses within the ANC, the Bells resigned in 1982 and later supported striking miners in Britain.

Returning to South Africa in 1991, Bell settled in Cape Town, choosing not to rejoin the ANC. Instead, he advocated for democratic socialism, urging citizens to “Vote ANC, but build a socialist alternative”.

From 1992, he edited Africa Analysis and contributed incisive labour columns to Business Report, Fin24, and City Press.

He was also a regular contributor to Radio 786’s programming, and was a staunch voice advocating for the rights of Palestinians.

His writing combined sharp analysis with a deep empathy for workers and marginalised communities. Bell remained a freelance journalist and commentator until his final years, never ceasing to challenge injustice.

Terry Bell’s life reminds us that resistance, even in exile, can shape nations and inspire generations.

Republished from Radio 786 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Tributes pour in for Lionel Jospin, ‘father’ of the Nouméa Accord

APR editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:22:54 +0000

OBITUARY: By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

Political leaders and institutions have paid tributes for Lionel Jospin, the “father” of the 1998 Nouméa Accord, who died at the weekend aged 88.

Jospin was a socialist prime minister who played a significant role in supervising the signature of the 1998 Accord, which paved the way for increased autonomy for the French Pacific territory.

Ten years after the signing of the 1988 Matignon-Oudinot agreements which contributed to restoring civil peace after half a decade of quasi civil war, the Nouméa agreement was more focused on furthering the process.

READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin . . . played a significant role in supervising the signature of the 1998 Accord, which paved the way for increased autonomy for the French Pacific territory. Image: Wikipedia

Its emphasis was to ensure a gradual transfer of more powers from Paris to Nouméa, the creation of a local “collegial” government, the setting up of three provinces (North, South and Loyalty islands) and the notion of “re-balancing” resources between the North of New Caledonia (mostly populated by the indigenous Kanak population) and the South of the main island, Grande Terre, where most of the economic power and population are based.

There was also the embryonic concept of a New Caledonia “citizenship”. One of the cornerstones of this re-balancing was the construction of the Koniambo nickel processing factory, in the North of the main island.

But the project is now dormant after its key financier, Glencore, decided to mothball the plant due to a mix of structural cost issues and the rise of other global nickel players, especially in Indonesia.

In 1988, the Matignon Accord was negotiated and signed by then French Socialist PM Michel Rocard.

Agreement signed
A decade later, it was under Jospin that the Nouméa agreement was signed between pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur and pro-independence umbrella leaders, including Roch Wamytan (Union Calédonienne).

The Nouméa Accord also designed a pathway and envisaged that a series of three referendums should be held to consult the local population on whether they wished for New Caledonia to become independent.

The three referendums were held between 2018 and 2021.

Although the pro-independence FLNKS called for a boycott of the third referendum in December 2021, the three results were deemed to have resulted in three refusals of the independence.

Since then, under the Accord, political stakeholders have attempted to meet in order to decide what to do under the new situation.

Since July 2025 and later in January 2026, negotiations took place and produced a series of the texts since referred to as “Bougival” and “Elysée-Oudinot”.

But the FLNKS has rejected the proposed agreements, saying this was a “lure” of independence and only purported to make New Caledonia a “State” within the French realm, with an associated “nationality” for people who were already French citizens.

Celebrated accord preamble
One of the most celebrated passages of the Nouméa Accord is its preamble, which officially recognises the “lights” and “shadows” of French colonisation.

The approval of the 1998 text came as a result of tense negotiations between the pro-independence FLNKS and, at the time, the pro-France RPCR was the only force defending the notion of New Caledonia remaining part of France.

RPCR has since split into several breakaway parties.

FLNKS has also split since the riots that broke out in May 2024, materialising a divide between the largest party Union Calédonienne (now regarded as more radical) and the moderate PALIKA and UPM pro-independence parties.

In 1998, some of Jospin’s key advisers were Christian Lataste and Alain Christnacht, who later served as High Commissioners of France in New Caledonia.

“He was someone who was negotiating, was discussing and who respected his interlocutors and the Kanak civilisation,” Nouméa Accord signatory Roch Wamytan told local public broadcaster NC la 1ère.

‘Obtaining solutions’
“He also had this method for obtaining solutions and a consensus, out of a contradictory debate”.

PALIKA party (still represented by one signatory, Paul Néaoutyine) also paid homage to Jospin, saying they would remember the late French leader as a “statesman”, a “man of his word” who managed to foster a “historic compromise”.

“Through the Nouméa Accord, he managed to see the realities of colonial history and open the way for emancipation,” the party stated in a release.

“The historic (Nouméa) accord was a major step in (New Caledonia’s) decolonisation and re-balancing process,” New Caledonia’s government said in an official release on Tuesday.

“It allowed to set the foundations of a common destiny between (New Caledonia’s communities, founded on the recognition of the Kanak identity and the sharing of skills”, the release went on, stressing the importance of a “climate of dialogue, respect and responsibility, which are essential for New Caledonia’s institutional and political construction”.

‘One of its greatest’ — Macron
In mainland France, tributes have also poured from all sides of the political spectrum.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed “a great French destiny”.

“France is aware it has lost one of its greatest leaders,” former French President François Hollande wrote on social networks.

Manuel Valls, who was Overseas State Minister between December 2024 and late 2025, said as a young adviser in the late 1980s and later on, he had been inspired by both PMs Michel Rocard and Lionel Jospin when he was fostering negotiations and the resumption of talks between New Caledonia’s antagonist politicians in 2025.

The Nouméa Accord is still deemed valid until a new document is officially enshrined in the French Constitution.

Attempts to translate the Bougival-Elysée-Oudinot into a constitutional amendment are still underway in the coming days, this time through debates at the French National Assembly (Lower House), with a backdrop of parliamentary divisions and the notable absence of any conclusive majority.

In February 2026, the French Senate endorsed a Constitutional amendment bill to enshrine the project into the French Constitution.

But the text now required another endorsement from the Lower House, the National Assembly, and later another green light, this time from the National Assembly, then both Houses of the French Parliament (the Senate and the National Assembly, in a joint sitting of the French “Congress”.

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

Fiji’s human rights watchdog raises concerns over new Israeli embassy plans

APR editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:21:29 +0000

RNZ Pacific

Fiji’s human rights watchdog has warned that the country’s pro-Israel foreign policy and diplomatic engagement works against its international obligations and could be enabling “genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity” in Gaza.

The Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission (FHRADC) released a statement on Tuesday in response to the Fiji government announcing plans to establish a resident embassy for Israel in Suva.

The FHRADC said that the announcement “raises important questions” and is calling on the government to uphold its human rights obligations “in all aspects” of its diplomacy.

READ MORE: Other Israeli-Fiji relations reports

As a state party to the Genocide Convention, Fiji is bound by international human rights law and international humanitarian law, the FHRADC said.

It added under the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the country “is obligated to support international efforts to prevent genocide” and ensure those responsible for such crimes are held responsible.

“This includes ensuring that Fiji’s foreign policy and diplomatic relations do not assist, enable, or legitimise conduct by parties or states involved in serious violations of international law.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 said that claims are “plausible” that the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under the Genocide Convention are being “violated . . . by Israel’s large-scale military operation in Gaza” a position firmly rejected by Israel, which has maintained its actions are necessary for self defence against Hamas.

“The duty to prevent genocide is a jus cogens obligation, a non-derogable principle of international law,” FHRADC commissioner Alefina Vuki said.

Legal responsibility
She said according to international law every state had “the legal responsibility to intervene and prevent the intentional or deliberate destruction of a group of people”, suggesting Fiji had failed to do this.

“No government can ever justify or excuse its failure to carry out this responsibility. States must ensure diplomatic relations that uphold, rather than undermine the duty to prevent genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity,” she said.

Fiji opened its permanent diplomatic post in Jerusalem in September last year.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said at the time that the opening of Fiji’s embassy in Jerusalem “reflects our desire to build bridges — not walls — between nations, cultures, and peoples”.

Fiji’s UN AMbassador Filipo Tarakinikini presents his credentials as the new Fiji non-resident Ambassador to Israel to Israeli President Isaac Herzog in April 2025. Image: FB/Fiji Govt

Fiji is one of a handful of countries to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv, which is controversial.

Israel claims the entire city as its undivided capital, while Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Diplomatic actions
According to FHRADC, the Fiji government has the “sovereign prerogative to determine bilateral relations”.

However, Vuki said Fiji must ensure that its “diplomatic actions do not violate international norms relating to occupation, self-determination, and the protection of civilian populations”.

“Any strengthening of bilateral relations must be carefully balanced against Fiji’s responsibilities as a member of the international community,” she said.

The FHRADC has offered to provide “independent and technical advice” to support the Fijian government with its foreign policy to keep it aligned to its international human rights commitments.

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

‘Israel First’ – ex-Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy on why Netanyahu led Trump into illegal Iran War

APR editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:01:34 +0000

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by, for the first time in six years except for yesterday, Juan González, also in New York. It’s great to be with you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thanks, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

As the US and Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran enters its 25th day, President Trump is claiming that Iran has begun negotiations with the United States, but the Iranian government has dismissed the claim as “fake news”, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate financial and oil markets.

Over the weekend, Trump threatened to, quote, “obliterate” Iranian power plants if Iran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night. But on Monday, Trump reversed course, extended his deadline to five days and repeatedly claimed the US was now in productive conversations with Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “With Iran, we’ve been negotiating for a long time. And this time, they mean business. And it’s only because of the great job that our military did, is the reason they mean business. They want to settle, and we’re going to get it done, I hope.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Earlier in the day, President Trump claimed he might personally take joint control of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran’s next ayatollah.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “It will be jointly controlled.”

REPORTER: “By whom?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Maybe me. Maybe me.”

REPORTER: “You want the United States to be in control of the Strait of Hormuz?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Me and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is, whoever the next ayatollah — look, and there’ll also be a form of a — a very serious form of a regime change.

“Now, in all fairness, everybody has been killed from the regime. They’re really starting off. There’s automatically a regime change.

“But we’re dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. The people within know who they are. They’re very respected.

“And maybe one of them will be exactly what we’re looking for. Look at Venezuela, how well that’s working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find somebody like that in Iran.”

AMY GOODMAN: Despite Trump’s claims of US-Iran negotiations, US Central Command says US forces, “continue to aggressively strike,” Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran has retaliated by striking other Gulf nations and Israel. Israeli officials said Iran has launched seven missile barrages since midnight, targeting Tel Aviv and other cities. The Israeli military said one of the missiles that hit Tel Aviv carried a 220-pound warhead. Israel’s Health Ministry said nearly 4800 people have been injured by Iran’s attacks on Israel since the war began.

We go now to London, where we’re joined by Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. His recent piece for Zeteo is headlined “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.”

Well, Daniel Levy, thanks so much for being with us again. Why don’t you explain that headline?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, good to be with you, Amy and Juan.

Netanyahu himself and other Israeli leaders, although he’s been at the helm for much of the last three decades, have, during an awfully long period, told us Iran is at the precipice of becoming a nuclear power.

By the way, we should always remind ourselves, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. But they’ve been telling us, “It’s imminent. We have to act now.” And they’ve been trying to pull successive American presidents into that war, to launch such a military campaign.

They’ve never succeeded. You have had American presidents across the decades, from whichever party has been in power, who have created an extremely indulgent, permissive environment for Israel in the region, and in particular when it comes to Israel’s consistent war crimes against the Palestinians.

What you have not had is a president who could be led into this kind of a military operation. And we’re seeing right now, in almost the last month of this war, precisely why. But this president is made of different stuff, less serious stuff, apparently, and Netanyahu saw his opportunity.

But the reason, I think, why this was of such significance for Netanyahu is we are in a new era. It’s not an era of a Pax Americana with — alongside all that indulgence of Israel, there were still certain brake mechanisms. This time, Israel sees us in an era of what I would call a Pax Greater Israel.

This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region, seizing parts of Syria or of Lebanon, trying to finish an eradicationist approach to the Palestinians. And crucially, to do that, you have to weaken Iran militarily, to remove some kind of deterrent.

You can only do that with the US, so you need to pull the US into this war. If that means further accelerating American decline and even accelerating Israel’s loss of support in America, then it’s a price to pay. It’s kind of “use it or lose it,” because those things are happening anyway.

In saying all of this, I don’t want to suggest that America has no agency in this. There are things to do with the Trump administration, the neocons, the people who still have positions of influence in the US that have brought them into this. But that’s what Netanyahu is trying to achieve, to achieve Greater Israel, domination in the region, including the weakening of the Gulf, which is intentional, at the expense of America bleeding further reputational, political, economic assets in this war.

Trump’s ‘Israel First’ Iran War Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel Levy, you’ve also written that, quote, “The idea that this is a war to serve American rather than Israeli interests resonates primarily in three spaces: the gullible, the true believers (especially of end times religious [thinking]), or those who are paid-up members of Israel’s echo chamber.” Could you elaborate?

DANIEL LEVY: Yes. I think there is a lot of attention being paid to this question of who does this serve. Now, you can make the case that you also have a US government that is locked into its own kind of logic of war.

You have, if I may suggest, a decline anxiety in the US. You have an attempt to reassert primacy and preponderance. I don’t think that is or can go well. You have Marco Rubio, for instance, telling the Europeans, “Join us in the next Western century of imperial domination.”

That can perhaps play out in the Western Hemisphere — the crime committed with the kidnapping of a leader in Venezuela, the illegal blockade on Cuba. But if you travel too far afield to find monsters to slay, and if you have an incoherent strategy and an incompetent administration implementing that strategy, then things are going to go very badly wrong, which was entirely predictable in this illegal war of choice launched by the US and Israel.

And therefore, if you look at this, and even if you factor in the attempt to assert American interest, this war would not have happened if Israel’s leader had not been there whispering in the president’s ear, making the case.

[There were] seven bilateral meetings in the first 13 months of the second Trump term between Trump and Netanyahu, two meetings in the eight weeks leading up to the launching of this illegal war, daily phone calls, we are told, now information coming out in The New York Times that the Mossad apparently bamboozled Americans with the idea that if you could decapitate some of the regime leadership, the Mossad could foment a coup on the streets, that you could arm Kurdish groups from the outside to take geographical parts of Iran to start dismantling the central state.

You really have to be, therefore, either extremely gullible, as I suggested, or a true believer that, well, this is high risk, but it’s worth it, because what maybe you’re ideologically committed to, the Greater Israel cause, maybe that comes from a place of evangelical dispensationalist belief in the end times, or you simply are part of an echo chamber whose wheels are greased very consistently.

And we see that play out over so many years in American politics. That’s what I’m suggesting. And I do think that the attempt to suggest this is more than Israel first, that somehow this serves America’s interest, are not going to go well, and Israel will pay a tremendous price for that over time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — there appears to have been a shift in the last few days in how the Israeli government permits damage within Israel from Iranian attacks to be publicised by the press, because, clearly, during the first two weeks of the war, Israel essentially prevented any kind of images, from the US media especially, going out to the world.

Now, in the last few days, it’s almost as if Netanyahu and the government want their own people and the rest of the world to see some of this damage. I’m wondering your thoughts about this. Has there been a change in approach or tactics by the Israeli government?

DANIEL LEVY: So, I’m not so sure. I think it’s an interesting question to dwell upon. But what one might be seeing is an inability, and therefore a degradation of credibility if Israel tries to claim that none of this destruction is happening — in other words, an inability to prevent those images from coming out — when those strikes are now causing very significant damage. I don’t want to exaggerate that, either. I don’t think that is what causes this unnecessary war to come to an end.

But what one perhaps has to look to is, if you remember, early on in the war, one of the real questions, as this became a war of endurance, almost a war of attrition, was: Could the US and Israeli side sufficiently deplete Iran’s missile-launching capacity before Iran both sufficiently degraded the interception capacity on the Israeli and US side — so they have to be a bit more selective in terms of what they use the interceptors for, because they can’t take everything out and they are going to run out — and also Iran apparently holding back some of its heavier kit, because in its strategy, it assumed this could go on for a long time, and it had to have a plan for week one, week two, week three? And so, I think, to the extent to which we’re seeing more images, it is likely because that equation hasn’t played well for the US and Israel, and because we’re seeing more damage being done.

I think you have a war where Israel has a strategy. It’s an extremely ambitious overreach strategy in terms of not regime change, but regime collapse, state collapse, implosion, the dismantling of the Iranian state, where Iran has a strategy of escalating horizontally, testing American endurance and holding out and winning that way.

But I think you’d be really hard pushed to find a coherent strategy on the US side.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of President Trump speaking to reporters about US aims in negotiations.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “No nuclear bomb, no nuclear weapon, not even close to it, low key on the missiles. We want to see peace in the Middle East. We want the nuclear dust.

“We’re going to want that, and I think we’re going to get that. We’ve agreed to that. … If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want.

“And it’s also great for Israel, and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Daniel Levy, you are a former Israeli negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers. If you can respond to what he’s saying, and also to what Iran is saying, that the idea that there’s any negotiation going on is fake news intended to “manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped,” said the speaker of Iran’s parliament?

DANIEL LEVY: So, there are a couple of things going on here, and I want to try and disentangle those. First of all, the question of: Are negotiations taking place? And what I think is very clear is that there are channels of communication via third countries.

Those have been available all the time. Partly, one has to understand that countries in the region, who were not a party to launching this war nor to the decision to go to war, who, in fact, cautioned against this war, in the Gulf and elsewhere, they are feeling tremendous blowback and taking hits from this war, and they are keen to bring it to an end.

There may be some who, for some reason, still believe America can do the job and that they should trust America’s competence and coherence in attempting to do so. I think most are not in that camp. They know the cost is too high, and they are experiencing daily what it means to rely on America for your security, and the answer is not good.

So, there are a number of states, also beyond that — Türkiye has been super active, Pakistan, for instance, Egypt — who are maintaining open channels with both parties and obviously sending messages, because, by the way, the whole world is suffering from this — higher fuel, food, fertiliser prices, etc. So there are active channels. Are they talking directly? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I also think it doesn’t matter very much.

What matters is the question you kind of raise there, Amy, which is: Are these talks, first of all, intended to produce an outcome? Was this another American deployment of diplomacy as a ruse?

We saw in the lead-up to this war that America played with negotiations, attempted that as a distraction, but actually intended to go for the military option. So, is this trying to buy some time while the US waits for a third aircraft carrier, more of your taxpayer dollars, to be deployed in the West Asia-Middle East region?

Was this a Monday-morning pre-stock market intervention on the part of the president? Because if there’s one thing he does pay attention to, it’s that. So, was he trying to calm the markets, give himself a few more days, or is this a serious attempt to chart a path to deescalation?

If it is the latter, then that would have to include an acknowledgment that in negotiations you have to listen to the other side. You have to take into account their interests. If you go in with maximalist positions, often designed by the worst elements of maximalism in your administration and by the Israelis intentionally trying to make sure that talks cannot succeed, then — guess what — the talks won’t succeed.

So, if you think you can impose on Iran in these talks things that you couldn’t achieve in your military assault or things that they weren’t willing to accept beforehand, then the talks are doomed to fail.

The one thing that may be working to our benefit is not who might host these talks. It’s certainly not the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff might be involved, because that would be very bad news indeed, given their record of failure, if they’re the only people.

But the one piece of good news is that the loose and perhaps nonexistent relationship between what Trump says and the realities out there in the real world, that relationship means that Trump can claim what he likes, because what we’re probably looking for is three victory speeches, given in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington, DC.

They won’t align. They won’t match up. But they might allow for a cessation and then for some of these issues to be addressed afterwards.

But as long as that doesn’t happen, we still have to contend with the fact that Israel has been driving a lot of the escalatory logic in this war. It will continue to attempt to prevent a ceasefire. It’s not alone. There are certainly American sources trying to do that, as well.

Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here. And we have to contend with the fact that each time you try and get a “mission accomplished” victory image, you might escalate, leading to a further cycle of escalation, and then that can collapse any putative path out of this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Daniel Levy, we only have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you — while the war is continuing in Iran and Israeli forces are in Lebanon, the settlers in the West Bank continue to perpetuate violence against Palestinians, and the IDF continues to attack Palestinians in Gaza. I’m wondering your sense of how this has basically faded from the international view while the war against Iran continues.

DANIEL LEVY: Well, I wish I could say that it needed the war in Iran in order to shift attention away from this, in order for Israel to be able to continue to not be held accountable and to get away with these daily violations of international law and with these appalling atrocities against the Palestinians, but it didn’t take the war.

Israel is doing that, and it will continue to do that unless and until it is held to account, it is contained and deterred. And, of course, you also see 1 million displaced in Lebanon and the attempt, apparently, to reestablish a zone of Israeli domination there, still in control of territory in Syria, as well.

But I also want to challenge this notion that the problem in the West Bank is the settlers. There is no armed settler militia without the IDF. The settlers roam the West Bank with the active backing of Israel’s military.

Occasionally, they may call a handful of people to account and say, “No. Stop.” But most of the occupation and the entrenchment of a matrix of control and an apartheid regime, that is run not by lone settlers. That is run by the Israeli state. That is run by the IDF.

It is the IDF and the Israeli state that run that regime of control, that also, as you mentioned, despite the so-called ceasefire, are in control of about 60 percent directly of Gaza, carrying out daily military assaults, daily killings of Palestinians in Gaza, still not allowing the necessary humanitarian assistance or shelter into Gaza, and, in parallel, conducting the largest military intervention in the West Bank, the largest displacement and destruction, often focused on refugee camps, like Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur al-Shams, that we have seen since 1967.

I think this will ultimately end very badly for Israel and generate tremendous blowback. But in the meantime, it is again the Palestinians bearing the brunt.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we want to thank you so much for being with us, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll link to your piece in Zeteo, “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.” You can follow Levy’s writings on his Substack.

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

From nuclear to climate crisis survivors: unfinished business in the Pacific

APR editor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:35:16 +0000

COMMENTARY: By David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire

The legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific is unfinished business. From the 1997 disappearance of journalist Jean-Pascal Couraud to the 2025 return of the Rainbow Warrior, these stories are part of a continuous struggle for justice.

In the Pacific, the “Atomic Age” and the climate crisis are not competing issues, they are the same fight for habitability and truth. To face our future, we must first address the lingering shadows of the past.

In “French” Polynesia, there are concerns about the mysterious fate of former anti-nuclear investigative journalist Jean-Pascal Couraud, known as “JPK” (his byline), who was editor of the now closed Les Nouvelles de Tahiti newspaper.

Early in 2015, a judge upheld prosecution against three men accused of a kidnapping that led his death in Tahiti in 1997.

More than a decade earlier, JK’s family lodged an allegation of murder with the police following claims that he had been assassinated by a (now disbanded) local presidential militia. An investigating commission had alleged that three men, Rere Puputauki, Tino Mara and Tutu Manate, had abducted JK and dumped his body at sea.

The Rainbow Warrior III arrives in Majuro on 11 March 2025 on the start of the six-week nuclear justice research voyage marking four decades since the evacuation of Rongelap. Printed on the T-shirts of the Marshall Islanders welcoming the Greenpeace flagship is an Eyes of Fire photo by the author of the late Rongelap Senator Jeton Anjain and Greenpeace International executive director Steve Sawyer, who was the campaign coordinator for the Rongelap mission. Image: © Bianca Vitale/Greenpeace/Eyes of Fire

Twenty two years later, the family are still waiting for justice, and fed up with France’s “investigation”. When the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985 is set against its broader political context in the Pacific, it can be seen that this event was much more than the dramatic, isolated episode against the Greenpeace flagship as portrayed by most New Zealand media.

An “Eyes of Fire” video project in 2015, which included more than 40 student journalists, also demonstrated the importance of a continuing interpretation of these events for the future of Aotearoa New Zealand and its citizens. The students looked back at the past, but were asking questions relevant to the present and future when they interrogated me and my Greenpeace colleagues involved in the Rongelap voyage.

My own baptism in French nuclear arrogance and perfidy was thanks to the late Swedish activist, researcher, and writer Bengt Danielsson, who was awarded the 1991 Right Livelihood Award for “exposing the tragic results… of French colonialism”. He and his wife Marie-Thérèse Danielsson wrote the classic and chilling books Moruroa, Mon Amour and Poisoned Reign.

In 2021, a French investigation team published a book and website that introduced new revelations about the nuclear testing programme and its health and environmental harm inflicted on Tahitians. The book, Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie, by Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, and the associated website Moruroa Files, were a forensic analysis of about 2,000 French government documents declassified in 2013.

The author, David Robie, with Marie-Thérèse and Bengt Danielsson in Tahiti Nui in 1985 while on assignment for Fiji’s Islands Business magazine. Image: © John Miller/Eyes of Fire

Consistently lied about the tests
According to former Auckland University of Technology scholar Ena Manuireva, who was born in Mangareva (an atoll near the French nuclear testing sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa), these publications confirmed what Tahitian people already knew: “That since 1966, the French government has consistently lied about and concealed the deadly consequences of their nuclear tests, which they now seem to acknowledge, to the health of the populations and their environment.”

Following the third test after French nuclear bombs began in the Pacific, on 7 September 1966, local Tahitian lawmaker John Teariki challenged then French president Charles de Gaulle by saying: “No government has ever had the honesty or the cynical frankness to admit that its nuclear tests might be dangerous. No government has ever hesitated to make other peoples — preferably small, defenseless ones — bear the burden.”

“May you, Mr President, take back your troops, your bombs, and your planes.”

De Gaulle ignored the advice. And it took another 30 years and 190 further tests before France stopped its ruthless nuclear pollution in the Pacific.

France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) was reported in early 2025 to have spent 90,000 euros in a big public relations campaign in a vain attempt to discredit the research in Toxique and the Moruroa Files, according to documents obtained by the investigative outlet Disclose.

The CEA published 5000 copies of its booklet, titled ‘Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences’ and distributed them across Oceania.

The Rainbow Warrior bombing, with the death of photographer Fernando Pereira, was a terrible tragedy. But a greater tragedy remains in the horrendous legacy of Pacific nuclear testing for the people of Rongelap, the Marshall Islands and “French” Polynesia; associated military oppression in Kanaky New Caledonia; and lingering secrecy.

Nuclear powers have failed the Pacific
More than eight decades on, the “Pacific” nuclear powers have still failed to take full responsibility for the region and adequately compensate victims and survivors for the injustices of the past.

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), Melanesian Spearhead Group, other pan-Pacific agencies, and the Australian and New Zealand governments still have much work ahead. New Zealand and the PIF states should have vigorously supported the lawsuits of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the International Court of Justice and the United States Federal Court last year. This was an opportunity lost.

New Zealand and the PIF states should now require full investigation of nuclear testing in French Polynesia and seek a more robust compensation programme than currently exists. New Zealand and the PIF states also need to take a less ambiguous position on decolonisation in the Pacific, give greater priority to that issue and seek a “re-energising” of the activities of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation.

This is especially important in relation to “French” Polynesia, Kanaky New Caledonia and the end of the Bougainville transitional political autonomy period with a unilateral declaration of independence slated for 1 September 2027.

Decolonisation is also a critical issue that has a bearing on New Zealand’s relations with Indonesia, particularly over the six Melanesian provinces that make up the region known in the Pacific as “West Papua” and Indonesia’s growing politically motivated role in the region over climate change aid.

A massive new transmigration programme under current President Prabowo Subianto is taking place at the same time as Jakarta’s “ecocidal” deforestation regime intensifies in the Melanesian region with the destruction of millions of hectares of tropical rainforest.

“The wealth of West Papua — gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine. Palm oil from Merauke — has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta,” says a West Papuan leader, Benny Wenda.

The Grey Lynn Library nuclear justice talk poster for 24 March 2026. Image: Grey Lynn Library

Taking the lead
It is critically important that New Zealand and the PIF states take a lead from the Melanesian Spearhead Group — at least those states other than Fiji and Papua New Guinea, which have both been co-opted by Indonesian bribery through economic aid.

They should take a more pro-active stance on West Papuan human rights and socio-political development, with a view to encouraging a process of political self-determination and a new, more credible United Nations supervised vote replacing the 1968 “Act of No Choice”.

With regard to climate change issues, it is essential to address the lack of an officially recognised category for “climate refugee” under international law. It is also important to seek an international framework, convention, protocol and specific guidelines that can provide protection and assistance for people crossing international borders because of climate change.

The existing rights guaranteed refugees — specifically the right to international humanitarian assistance and the right of return — must be extended to “climate refugees” or climate migrants.

This issue should be acted on systematically and with a practical vision by the PIF with the Australian and New Zealand governments. Australia and New Zealand need to respond to Pacific Island States’ (PIS) concerns over climate change and global warming with a greater sense of urgency and resolve.

Regional and country specific climate change plans and policies are needed to deal with large numbers of Pacific refugees or climate-forced migrants, in the event of worsening climate-change scenarios in the future.

This is especially important for New Zealand, as a country with a significant Pacific population (442,632 — 8.9 percent, 2023 NZ Census) with island communities well integrated into the national infrastructure and as a country that is well placed to welcome more Pacific Islanders.

In April 2025, the New Zealand government announced plans to double defence spending as a share of GDP over the next eight years under its long-awaited Defence Capability Plan.

Trump-inspired global arms race
However, the priority appeared to be New Zealand joining a new Donald Trump-inspired global arms race while the country faced no threat, at the expense of the climate crisis, nuclear free and Pacific peace-making capacity that have forged the country’s global reputation.

Speculation was also rife about the possibility of New Zealand joining a second tier of the controversial AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the US, which would raise geopolitical tensions with little benefit for the Pacific region.

As Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson has remarked, the people of Rongelap changed the course of history for Pacific nuclear justice by taking control of their destiny with the help of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior.

However, the relocation of the islanders four decades ago has revealed that the legacy of nuclear tests remains unfinished business.

“In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament,” says former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.

“New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

“On the fateful last voyage,” reflects Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, “the crew of the Rainbow Warrior, look at us in black and white through the lens of time, and lay down the wero — the challenge. They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific.

“Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?’

To Ngāti Kura kaumatua Dover Samuels, the Rainbow Warrior was “probably the biggest battleship that ever traversed the oceans of the world. But she wasn’t armed with guns, she was armed with peace”.

An edited extract from the final chapter of New Zealand journalist Dr David Robie’s recent book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing. He sailed with the Greenpeace crew to Rongelap Atoll for the evacuation of the nuclear health-damaged community and remained on board for 11 weeks. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa.

David is speaking about the Rainbow Warrior and nuclear justice tomorrow, 24 March 2026, at Grey Lynn Library, 6-8pm, as part of EcoFest.

‘From the river to the sea’ – swimming against the Queensland tide

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:40:05 +0000

A CAUTIONARY TALE: By Jim Dowling

Both my son Franz and I have been arrested, separately, for suspected thought crimes relating to Palestine and Israel.

We dared to display in public the words, “from the river to the sea”, using or displaying such words now being illegal in Queensland.

I say “thought crimes” because neither of our displays mentioned Palestine or Israel. So obviously they can only conclude we must have been illegally thinking the “wrong thoughts” about this conflict.

For nearly two years a group of us have been gathering weekly outside the office of Boeing in Brisbane, to draw attention to their terrorist activity in making missiles, fighter jets, attack helicopters and other weapons of mass destruction, used in present conflicts, especially the Gaza genocide.

When the Queensland government made it illegal to use the words “From the River to the Sea” in public, I went to the usual Wednesday action with a large placard saying “From the River to the Sea, Brisbane will be Free — of Boeing”.

Eventually police came and arrested me. My arresting officer asked me what the words on the banner meant. I gave him a good rave about Boeing and why we wanted them nowhere in Brisbane, from the river to the sea.

He took a while trying to get me to “incriminate” myself by making reference to Palestine etc. Eventually, after exposing the farcical nature of the law, I was happy do so.

Interrogated by ‘anti-terrorism squad’
He took me to the watchhouse where I was interrogated about my thought crimes by the “Anti-terrorism squad” (that is not a joke by the way).

This gave me a good chance to explain why we wanted Boeing out of Brisbane, and a lot more — about free speech, terrorism, nonviolence, etc. After an hour and a half they let me go.

I go to court on the April 14.

Now, 42 hours later at 7am, the same ever vigilant anti-terrorism squad raided Dorothy Day house of hospitality, with a team of eight officers.

Franz immediately confessed to his thought crimes, and actual crimes of displaying a banner on the side of the house reading, “From the river to the sea — come and get us [Premier] Crisafulli”.

Now I guess it is an exaggeration to call this elite squad “ever vigilant”, as the banner had been on the wall of the house for over a week. And, being on a main road and very visible from said road, there is no telling how many innocent citizens may have been infected by the thought crimes emanating from it.

Once at Dorothy Day house, the police searched all the rooms for? Hmm, illegal thinking maybe.

Phone and laptop confiscated
Anyhow, as I said, Franz broke down and confessed, so they eventually left everyone else alone. They confiscated Franz’s phone and laptop — probably the main reason for the raid.

They also took the banner and the very paints used to commit the crime. I asked Franz if they took the paper placed under the banner during the painting process. But they did not.

Now, they could find out a lot of information from Franz’s phone and laptop. They could find out who were being infected by these thought crimes, and how far they were spreading.

Perhaps they could investigate the words of the songs on Franz’s laptop sung by his church choir, to see if there was anything about rivers or seas. Perhaps, with names and phone numbers of his fellow choir members they could instigate more raids. (I know for a fact some choir members weren’t even born in Australia!)

In the end the police told Franz they would let him know next Tuesday, if or what he would be charged with.

You can read the ABC news report of the raid of Dorothy Day house here. You can also see him interviewed on Brisbane’s Channel Ten news on March 20 (if you can find it — ABC Tiktok video removed).

So there you have it. Another week in the state’s never ending battle against terrorism. Or is it a battle against a few pathetic people who believe they are the ones resisting terrorism?

Is it terrorism to say “from the river to the sea”, or is it terrorism to slaughter tens of thousands of innocents with the help of Boeing, Pine Gap and the Australian government? You decide.

Jim Dowling is a human rights, free speech and anti-war activist from Brisbane, Australia.

Wenda condemns ‘cruel’ arbitrary arrests of West Papuans in Tambrauw

APR editor — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:59:30 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

An exiled leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has condemned Indonesia’s “cruel and humiliating” arbitrary arrest of 12 West Papuan local farmers in Tambrauw Regency this week and has demanded their release.

According to Human Rights Monitor, the arrests took place on March 18, after Indonesia conducted military operations in the Fef and Bamus Bama districts.

People were dragged out of their homes, tortured, and detained without any warrants or explanation.

“This is how Indonesia treats West Papuans, as less than human,” said ULMWP interim president Benny Wenda in a statement.

“The 12 men arrested in Tambrauw have been labelled TPNPB [West Papua National Liberation Army] and stigmatised as terrorists and criminals by the Indonesian colonisers.

“But who is the real terrorist? These men are the customary landowners, simply defending their forest, their homes, from the military who come to destroy everything.”

Wenda said the Indigenous people had been living there for thousands of years — “long before Indonesia invaded and stole our sovereignty.”

He added: “They didn’t go to Jakarta; Indonesia came to them with bombs and guns.”

Indonesia ‘stolen our resources’
Wenda asked who was the real criminal.

“The people of Tambrauw have been tending their gardens in peace for generations. It is Indonesia who has come and stolen our resources, torn down our forest to plant rice and sugar so people in Jakarta can eat.

“There is no real development in West Papua, only business for Indonesia.”

Wenda said that when he looked at the pictures of the arrested Papuans with their hands tied, forced face down on a police station floor, he saw his own people.

“They represent all West Papuans — humiliated and degraded in their own land.”

Wenda said Indonesia could never defeat the Papuan spirit.

“You can arrest us, torture us, kill us, but the spirit of freedom lives on in every West Papuan,” he said.

Experienced trauma
“Whether they are in the bush, the city, in exile, or even working in the Indonesian government, every West Papuan has experienced trauma at the hands of the Indonesian military and police.

“Every single one of us has an uncle who has been killed, a mother who has been raped, or a brother who has been tortured in police custody.

“We all long for merdeka [freedom]. That is why Indonesia has deployed over 80,000 security forces to terrorise our land — because they are terrified of our desire for freedom.”

As well as demanding that the 12 Papuans be released, Wenda said Indonesia must also finally allow foreign journalists to report on West Papua and immediately facilitate a visit to West Papua by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Such a visit has been promised since 2018, and demanded by 113 countries, including all member states of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), Organisation of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS), and the European Commission.

Ian Powell: Iran, US imperialism and the New Zealand lapdog

APR editor — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:40:03 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Ian Powell

When Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, was assassinated in the opening stages of the US-Israeli war against Iran, I didn’t mourn.

Khamenei was not someone who deserved to be mourned notwithstanding my contempt for the increasing use of assassination by aggressor nations; in this case the United States and Israel.

Having said this, had either US President Donald Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu been assassinated I would have “not mourned” them even more.

On the other hand, along with thousands of residents in the Iranian city of Minab a mass funeral, I did privately mourn for the at least 165 schoolgirls and staff killed in the opening hours of the US-Israeli strikes when one of their missiles hit a girls’ elementary school.

Two words distinguish Iran from United States and Israel
Understanding what distinguishes Iran from both the United States and Israel begins with two uncomplimentary words — repression and genocide.

Repression is the action of subduing someone or something by force. This can include suppressing thoughts or desires in people so that they remain unconscious. Iran’s theocratic political system is unquestionably repressive.

If, in some way, you question the regime or the governing values enough there is a high risk of repression. Keep your head down and you are likely to be safe. If not then you are likely to be in danger.

In contrast, genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Bodies on display at Murambi memorial site on February 23, 2003 in Murambi outside Gikongoro, Rwanda. About 800.000 mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in about one hundred days in 1994, and about 100.000 prisoners accused of the genocide are still in prison awaiting trial. Rwanda is currently trying to cope with these huge problems and some prisoners that confessed to crimes can be tried in village trials, known as Gacacas.

" data-medium-file="https://politicalbytes.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/genocide-getty.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://politicalbytes.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/genocide-getty.jpg?w=612" />

Bodies on display at Murambi memorial site on February 23, 2003 in Murambi outside Gikongoro, Rwanda. About 800,000 mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in about 100 days in 1994, and about 100.000 prisoners accused of the genocide are still in prison awaiting trial. Rwanda is currently trying to cope with these huge problems. Image: politicalbytes.blog

Genocide a characteristic of Israel and US government policies
Israel’s policy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland now incorporates genocide as the main means of achieving this objective, particularly in Gaza which is there for all to observe.

While Israel is the practitioner of genocide in Gaza, the United States is the enabler and main funder. This is in terms of both funding weapons supplies and political support for Israel’s brutal military occupation of this small remaining piece of Palestinian land.

Without this US support there would be no genocide in Gaza; like the West Bank, just ongoing repression.

While it is right to condemn repressive actions by the Iranian government, it is mindbogglingly immoral for these genocide supporting governments to make any judgment call on Iran, let alone declare war on the country.

Understanding the Islamic Republic
As discussed above, the Islamic Republic is a repressive government towards those who oppose it in some public way. But repression is not its only characteristic.

Iran comprises a diversity of ethnicities and religions. Image: politicalbytes.blog

Iran is a highly diverse nation. While 61 percent of its population are Persian, there are more than 20 ethnic groups in total. Major minority groups include Azeris (16-24 percent), Kurds (7-10 percent), Lurs (2-6 percent), Baloch (2 percent), Arabs (1-3 percent) and Turkmens (2 percent).

As many as 99 percent of Iranians in the Republic are Muslim, predominantly Shia (90-95 percent) with the remainder comprising the Sunni minority.

While the Islamic Republic state is dominated by Shia Islam, there are recognised minority religions which are granted reserved parliamentary seats. These include Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.

An exception is the Baháʼí faith, a world religion was founded in the 19th century mainly in Iran. It may be the second largest non-Muslim religion in the country.

Many Iranian Baháʼí have a previous Muslim background and are subjected to persecution. However, this is an inherited persecution that goes back to the mid-19th century.

Iran is not repressive towards minority ethnic groups because of their ethnicity. Azeris, for example, are not repressed because they are Azeris; only if they “put their heads above the barricades” so to speak.

The same can be said for Sunni Muslims and non-Muslim religions, except for Baháʼí whose repression is historical, predating the Islamic Republic by over a century.

But if the Republic is only seen as despotic, then an entire historical legacy explaining so much more than this is lost.

Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilisations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to the 5th century BC.

In spite of invasions by foreign powers, such as the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, the Iranian national identity was repeatedly asserted and preserved despite several changes in its dynastic empires.

The Pahlavi dynasty legacy
In 1925, Reza Khan established the Pahlavi (and last) dynasty. Following a military coup he became the new dynasty’s first Shah. In 1941, however, he was overthrown with his son Mohammad-Reza becoming the second and last Pahlavi Shah.

Initially there were hopes of a constitutional monarchy. However, in 1951. Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq got sufficient parliamentary support to nationalise the British-owned oil industry.

In response, Mosaddeq was briefly removed from power in 1952. But, due to a popular uprising in support of him, he was quickly but reluctantly reappointed by the Shah. This enabled Mosaddeq to briefly exile the Shah in 1953 after surviving a subsequent failed military coup.

However, in August 1953, Mosaddeq was deposed by a successful US-supported military coup that was also actively supported by Britain.

The Shah then returned to power ruling Iran as a brutal autocracy with strong US support until the 1979 revolution and the Shah’s final overthrow.

Oil was central to the Shah’s policies. His government entered into agreement with an international consortium of foreign companies which ran the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years, splitting profits 50-50 with Iran. However, Iran was not allowed to audit the companies’ accounts or have members on their board of directors.

The Iran that the Islamic Republic inherited in 1979, on the one hand, had never been colonised; unlike much of Africa and Asia, for example. It had a proud national identity. On the other hand, under the Pahlavi dynasty, particularly in its last 25 years. it had become subservient to the United States and the oil companies.

The Shah’s autocratic regime was overthrown by a powerful mass popular movement. Among the forefront of this unstoppable movement were those that came to lead the new Islamic Republic.

The republic was the consequence of this popular will. While today there is strong internal Iranian opposition to the leadership of the Republic, there is also strong internal support for it

“Ayatollah” Donald Trump in an Oval Office religious ceremony (White House) . . . Iran isn’t the only “theocracy”. Image: politicalbytes.blog

In 1979, Iran’s political system had changed from an autocracy to a theocracy. But there was more to it than this.

The hated legacy, under the last Shah, of the interests of Iranians being subservient to that of US imperialism, was powerful. In no small part this shaped the Islamic Republic’s politics. It was reinforced by US support for Iraq’s protected war against Iran in the 1980s.

Further, whereas the Shah held openly expressed racist views on Arabs, the republic saw it differently.

In particular, it intuitively supported Palestinian self-determination which put it at odds with Zionist Israel.

Iran also empathised with countries with quite different political systems, such as secular Cuba, that had been subjected to continuing US hostility and shared Iran’s antipathy towards US imperialism and supported for Palestine.

While your enemy’s enemy may not be your friend, nevertheless there may be principled shared interests.

Understanding the United States and its imperialism
Imperialism put simply is a policy of extending a powerful country’s economic power, exploitation of, and influence over other countries. Historically this has been through colonisation, invariably by the use of military force.

Historically the biggest imperialist power was the British Empire which, by the early 20^th century, included much of Africa and Asia (and beyond).

The United States is now the world’s strongest imperialist power.

The United States began as an imperialist power in the early 20th century, particularly in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Since the Second World War it has become, by far, the biggest imperial power reinforced by the most powerful military.

Put simply, capitalism is an economic system relentlessly driven by the maximisation of wealth accumulation. Imperialism is the highest and most extensive form of capitalism.

In this context, particularly since 1953, Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was a complicit pawn willingly exploited by US imperialism.

This ended in 1979 by the popular will that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic; something US imperialism has never forgiven and the republic has never forgotten.

In other words, the US-Islamic Republic relationship is a recipe for continuous conflict and has reached its highest point with the current US-Israel initiated war.

False confusing justifications for the US-Israel war
The failure of the United States (and Israel) to acknowledge the above discussed escalating conflict to the point of outright war between them and the Islamic Republic has led to their muddled and changing false justifications for the war.

The truth of the matter is that the war centres on the republic’s firm opposition to US imperialism and support for Palestinian self-determination. The use of deceitful justifications is a public relations attempt to fudge this truth.

One false argument is that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. However, in the short war last June, the US and Israel boasted that they destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.

What is the lie — what they said then or what they now say? More likely it is both. After all Israel is the only country possessing nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Further, unlike Iran, it isn’t a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In fact, there is only one nuclear power in Middle East — Israel. But while Israel is ignored, Iran hypocritically is the focus of deceitful accusations and intense pressure, and now war.

Another false justification is that the US, in particular, wants to save Iranian lives by ending the repression. It is barely worth the time rejecting this claim from supporters and practitioners of genocide.

Further their bombing has already killed more than 1400 Iranians (a reported 30 percent are children) and rising. More than 17,000 have been injured including over 1000 children. Hypocrisy at its peak.

A related occasional justification is restoring democracy. But the Islamic Republic is more democratic than the outright autocracy it replaced and no less democratic than the ruthless US ally Saudi Arabia; admittedly they are both low thresholds.

Joe Kent’s resignation as Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre has severely damaged Trump’s credibility. Image: politicalbytes.blog

Perhaps the most damming indictment of the claimed justifications is the recent resignation of Donald Trump’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent.

Explaining this dramatic decision, Kent referred to his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran. These included that, despite Trump’s claims, there was no imminent threat from Iran and that the US was “manipulated” by Israel.

Consequently Kent advised that he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war against Iran. Both optimistically and bravely he urged the President to end it.

In fact, Trump’s disingenuousness and underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance and fightback have made a ceasefire improbable for some time.

Iran already agreed to a ceasefire in June. But the US and Israel broke it even though diplomacy discussions were underway.

US, Israel can’t be trusted
Why would Iran agree to another ceasefire just to give the US and Israel enough time to regroup and start another war against a combative but weakened Iran.

Iran now believes that the US and Israel can’t be trusted and it would be better to try to further weaken them instead. After all, what does Iran have to lose!

Words like reaping and sowing come to mind!

Since the mid-1980s successful New Zealand governments have had an independent foreign policy.

US-Israel war against Iran has implications for New Zealand’s economic recovery. Cartoon: Slane, Listener

However, especially under the current government, we have drifted back towards being aligned with our former position of being a United States lapdog.

This observable drift was further escalated by the government’s response through Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (in an embarrassingly mashed way) and Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

US military bases located around Iran. Map: politicalbytes.blog

In summary, while maintaining a loud silence on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran, they condemned Iran’s own bombing response in those neighbouring Arab countries with US military bases.

These US bases would be akin to Iran having its own military bases in Canada and/or Mexico (perhaps Cuba; just saying).

There has been considered media coverage of the government’s response to the war beginning with Bryce Edwards’ Democracy Briefing (March 1): How should NZ respond to the US bombing Iran.

Christopher Luxon fumbles and flounders in toe-cringingly style

Edwards was followed by two Sam Sachdeva Newsroom articles (March 2 and 3): Trump poses headache for NZ and Luxon’s fumbling, floundering response.

To complete this considered coverage was international relations expert Professor Robert Patman, also in Newsroom (March 3): Risky Iran attack gamble.

However, it took former Prime Minister Helen Clark to demonstrate the type of political leadership we deserved to have (having herself demonstrated this over the disastrous US-led war in Iraq nearly two decades ago).

Her uncompromising criticism of the government’s response included calling it a “disgrace” (March 1): Government response a disgrace.

Being a US lapdog doesn’t protect NZ from the war on Iran. Cartoon: Emmerson, NZ Herald

While Clark didn’t use the term “lapdog” to describe the government’s position, if she had she would have been right.

Repressed by Iranian government – but terrified of regime collapse
The insights of Iranians critical of the Islamic Republic’s repressive nature but even more critical of the US-Israel bombing of Iran are invaluable.

Below is an extract from a Facebook post (March 2) from an Iranian man’s YouTube channel. Consistent with the theme of my comments above, this Iranian expresses the paradox Iranians involuntarily now find themselves in — caught between an internal repressive regime and external narcissistic warmongers.

In his words:

“As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political — it’s existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions.

“Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore — because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed.

“But here’s the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse — because we’ve watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation.

“So no, we don’t trust the US or Israel. Not because we support our regime — but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘”liberated” nations in the Middle East.

“Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation — they’re collapse.

“A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned — too well — what happens when superpowers decide to “help”.

“In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more.”

The final word — and what a word it is
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American author most known for her internationally acclaimed debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. It has been translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries.

In her own courageous and insightful words:

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves.

Nothing you can tell be about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.

That does not mean that I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.

If your vision of liberation is only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.

These words are more than eloquence; more than heart rendering. They convert complexity into simplicity; they are powerful; they speak truth to power.

They deserve to be the last word in this article.

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

Australian charities funding Israel’s illegal settlements ‘untouchable’, says Labor govt

APR editor — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:40:43 +0000

The Labor government has told the Senate that Australian charities don’t have to comply with international law, nor will they be compelled. Michael West Media reports.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Stephanie Tran

The Albanese government has rejected a proposal to strip tax-deductible status from Australian charities found to be supporting illegal occupations, amid mounting scrutiny over donations flowing to Israeli settlements and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Michael West Media has identified 5 charities either sending money to the IDF or to parties associated with illegal West Bank settlements in Occupied Palestine.

The proposed amendment, introduced by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, would explicitly bar organisations from receiving deductible gift recipient (DGR) status if they are found to have supported an “illegal occupation”.

READ MORE: Gulf energy sites targeted after Israeli attack on key Iranian gasfield

“The fact that people are sending money to support the war crimes of the Israeli military and to expand illegal, violent settlements in the West Bank is bad enough, but that Australian taxpayers are subsidising these settlements is completely outrageous,” Faruqi said.

“Supporting these heinous crimes deserves investigation, not a tax deduction.”

The amendment, circulated in the Senate as part of the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025, would insert a new provision into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 denying DGR endorsement to any entity that has “advocated, prepared, planned, assisted in, financed, fostered, supported … or contributed to the establishment, maintenance or expansion of the illegal occupation”.

It would also empower the foreign affairs minister to formally declare what constitutes an “illegal occupation” for the purposes of the law.

An illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Inset: Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Assistant Minister for Charities and Treasury Andrew Leigh. Composite image: Michael West Media

Charities funding illegal settlements
This year, MWM released a series of investigations revealing that Australian charities are funnelling tax-deductible donations to projects linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law, as well as to initiatives supporting IDF soldiers.

In the Senate debate on the amendment, Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne cited the findings of the MWM investigations.

She highlighted figures showing that Jewish National Fund Australia had remitted more than $125 million to Israel since 2009, while the United Israel Appeal Refugee Relief Fund had transferred approximately $376 million since 2013 via Keren Hayesod, with a portion of these funds used for settlement expansion and IDF-linked programmes.

Allman-Payne also referenced the activities of the Chai Charitable Foundation, which earlier this year hosted fundraisers for organisations providing direct support to IDF soldiers and settlement communities, including in Tekoa and Hebron, before removing the campaigns following questioning by MWM.

“It is obviously of significant concern if there are charitable organisations in Australia that are funnelling funds to illegal occupiers and illegal settlements,” Allman-Payne told the Senate.

She noted that the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) had received 896 complaints relating to 88 charities in connection with the Israel-Gaza conflict between October 2023 and December 2025.

“Given that these donations are tax-deductible . . . that effectively means taxpayers are subsidising illegal occupation and militarisation,” she said.

Government rejects amendment
In response, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher stated that the government would not support the Greens amendment, arguing that existing regulatory frameworks already prohibit unlawful conduct by charities.

“There is no DGR category or purpose that allows charities to support illegal activities at home or abroad,” Gallagher said.

She pointed to the ACNC’s governance standards, which require charities to operate lawfully and remain accountable, as well as external conduct standards governing overseas activities.

However, Gallagher acknowledged a key limitation: those standards require compliance with Australian law, but

do not extend to conduct under international law.

Charities operating overseas must take “reasonable steps” to ensure proper governance and compliance with Australian legal obligations, including sanctions, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws, she said.

Organisations found to be in breach risk losing their charitable registration, which can in turn lead to the loss of DGR status.

Referral for investigation
Gallagher suggested that concerns about specific organisations should be referred to the ACNC for investigation.

Faruqi said the government’s position amounted to wilful inaction.

“The Labor government clearly wants to keep its head in the sand and is looking the other way while this happens,” she said.

“This is just another example of the government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

“It is two-faced for the Government to say it supports a Palestinian state while effectively subsidising its destruction.”

Minister Gallagher and Andrew Leigh (Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury) were contacted for comment.

Regulatory obligations
A spokesperson from Leigh’s office provided the following response:

“The government expects all registered charities to meet their regulatory obligations and to obey all Australian laws. This is a condition of maintaining charitable status.

“The ACNC is the independent regulator of charities and complaints involving conduct that could harm people or involving the misuse of a charity for terrorism purposes or to foster extremism are a compliance priority for the ACNC.

“The ACNC already has powers to revoke the charitable status of charities involved in serious illegal activity.”

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

Activists plan ‘largest flotilla yet’ to break Israel’s siege of Gaza

APR editor — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:19:51 +0000

By Joshua Carroll

A global coalition of activists is preparing to launch the largest ever flotilla of aid ships aimed at breaking Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), made up of civil society and grassroots groups from South Africa, Spain, Ireland, Türkiye, Norway, Brazil, France — and Aotearoa New Zealand — is planning to sail again in spring this year.

In October 2025, Israeli forces kidnapped the crew members of 41 aid ships as they approached the shores of Gaza.

Activist Greta Thunberg and Novara Media contributor Kieran Andrieu were among those detained for several days and subjected to violence and abuse by guards that they said amounted to torture.

Organisers did not specify how many ships would be involved this time, but in February the Nelson Mandela Foundation said there would be more than 100 boats.

Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, was among those who took part last year.

“Following the sailing of FFC’s Madleen boat in June 2025, a wave of new initiatives emerged, expanding the movement into a broader international effort to send not just one boat, but fleets, and not just a mission, but a coordinated, sustained challenge to Israel’s siege and violent settler colonial policies,” the FCC said in a statement.

“Our actions aim to uphold international law and to support the Palestinian people’s rights to freedom of movement, self-determination, and dignity.

“With our governments fueling genocide and failing to uphold their legal and moral obligations, the people of global civil society are rising together in larger and larger numbers.”

Despite agreeing to a ceasefire in October last year, Israel has continued its genocide in Gaza, attacking and killing civilians there on an almost daily basis, while severely restricting the entry of food, medicine and other essentials into the strip.

“This flotilla is collective action on a massive global scale — uniting activists, legal experts, parliamentarians, medical professionals, engineers, artists, journalists, and other people of conscience across the world,” the FCC said.

Joshua Carroll is a writer and journalist, and a contributor to Novara Media.

#MyAgendaSumud #GlobalMovementtoGaza #gazzesanageliyoruz #globalsumudflottilla pic.twitter.com/NX1mdhC0Vo

— GlobalSumudflotilla (@1ElegantFriends) October 1, 2025

Iran’s ‘Samson option’ : Deterrence restored or nothing – the logic behind Tehran’s next move

APR editor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:00:52 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Kevork Almassian

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, you don’t need to be a military analyst to understand what just happened. You only need to understand what the world runs on.

Oil. Gas. Shipping lanes. Insurance rates. Container schedules. Energy prices that decide whether factories hum or go dark, whether households heat or freeze, whether governments fall or survive.

This is why serious analysts have been saying for years that Hormuz is not a “threat” Iran invented for propaganda; it is a structural red line that the US and its allies kept treating like a bluff because they could not imagine a regional actor actually pulling the lever that exposes a vulnerability — dependence.

And this is why what we are watching now is a massive US miscalculation that will be studied later the way the Iraq invasion is studied today, with the same disbelief that decision-makers could be so arrogant, so blind, and so certain that the other side would fold.

Because Washington didn’t only miscalculate Iran’s will. It miscalculated geography, logistics, and blowback. It miscalculated the fact that the US empire in the Middle East is not a fortress; it is a web of exposed arteries: bases scattered across Gulf monarchies, troops housed in predictable locations, air defenses that are expensive and finite, radars and communications nodes that can be degraded, and a regional order that can be shaken with one choke point.

You can see the arrogance in the assumptions. For years, Iran warned that if its survival is threatened — if the US and Israel push the conflict into an existential zone — Hormuz becomes part of the battlefield. Washington heard that and filed it under “Iranian theatrics,” because the American political class is addicted to the idea that their enemies always bluff, while they alone possess the right to act.

But Iran was not bluffing. Iran was describing the rules of an environment where deterrence is the only language that keeps you alive.

Hormuz was always the red line
The Strait of Hormuz is the world economy’s pressure point, and the fact that it remained open for years was not proof of Western strength. It was proof that Iran understood escalation control, because keeping Hormuz open — even while under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and constant threats — was Iran’s way of signaling restraint.

The West interpreted that restraint as weakness.

That’s the miscalculation.

Washington assumed Iran would keep absorbing blows, keep taking “limited strikes,” keep responding in contained ways, because Washington has lived for decades inside a fantasy where escalation is something the US controls.

But in a real war environment, you don’t get to decide the boundaries alone. The other side gets a vote. And Iran’s vote is written in the geography of the Gulf.

Iran’s ‘Samson option’
I used the phrase “Samson option” not to be dramatic, but to describe the logic of a state pushed into a corner: if the enemy wants you neutralised, disarmed, and humiliated, you don’t respond only with missiles; you respond with the full spectrum of leverage you possess — military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological.

Iran’s leverage is not limited to striking targets. It includes making the war economically unbearable for everyone who enabled it. It includes turning a regional conflict into a global cost spiral. It includes demonstrating that the “free flow of energy” is not a natural law; it is a contingent privilege that can evaporate when a state is pushed past its red lines.

This is what the West still struggles to internalise. It thinks deterrence is only about bombs and bases. Iran thinks deterrence is about making aggression unaffordable.

And Hormuz is how you make it unaffordable.

The three “solutions” don’t solve anything
Once Hormuz becomes the choke point, you immediately hear the same three proposals recycled through Western media.

First: “military escorts”: The idea that you can escort tankers through the most militarised, most surveilled, most missile-saturated corridor on earth as if this is a piracy problem. But escorts do not remove risk; they merely concentrate it.

They turn commercial shipping into military convoys, and that increases the probability of a clash that escalates further. You can escort 10 ships. Can you escort everything, every day, indefinitely, under constant threat? And at what cost in interceptors, drones, naval assets, and insurance panic?

Second: “ceasefire”: The idea that Washington can call a pause and re-freeze the conflict after crossing lines that Iran considers existential. But a ceasefire is not a magic reset button; it is a negotiation outcome.

And Iran is no longer interested in ceasefires that reproduce the same cycle: war, negotiations, pause, then war again. Iran has learned — painfully — that diplomacy has been weaponised against it.

Third: “capitulation”: The fantasy that Iran will disarm itself and accept a future where it is strategically naked. This is the most delusional solution of all, because it assumes Iranians are incapable of reading the regional record.

Iraq disarmed and was invaded. Libya dismantled its programme and was destroyed. Syria gave up its chemical file and was still ripped apart. In that record, capitulation is not peace. Capitulation is an invitation.

So no, none of the three “solutions” solves the crisis. They only reveal the empire’s problem: it assumed it could impose costs without paying them.

Even The New York Times admits miscalculation
One of the most interesting developments is how even mainstream reporting — carefully framed, carefully sourced — has begun to concede what was obvious from day one: the Trump administration and its advisers miscalculated Iran’s response.

The New York Times, in the sections I cited, points to something the propaganda refuses to admit: Iran is not acting like a decapitated regime. Iran is adapting. It is learning. It is targeting vulnerabilities, not staging symbolic retaliation.

It is degrading key radar and air defence systems, hitting communications infrastructure, and shifting the battlefield away from the tidy “Israel–Iran” framing into a wider map that includes US assets and allies across the Gulf.

That matters because for years the West comforted itself with the idea that the Iranian response would be predictable and containable. The NYT reporting suggests the opposite: Iran is adjusting its tactics as the campaign evolves, hitting systems that matter to US coordination and defence, and doing so without the old “ample warning” pattern that allowed the US to frame everything as controlled.

In other words, Iran is making the environment less manageable for the US, which is exactly what deterrence looks like when you cannot match the empire symmetrically.

The miscalculation wasn’t only military
There is another layer that people avoid saying out loud, but it’s central: the US and Israel did not only miscalculate Iran’s missiles; they miscalculated Iran’s society.

Even Iranians who dislike the Islamic nature of their political system can still connect a basic dot: wherever America and Israel intervene, the country becomes worse.

People don’t need to love their government to recognise a foreign assault on their nation. This is why the fantasy of “decapitation + instant uprising” is so dangerous: it projects Western wishful thinking onto a society that is being attacked and then expects the society to celebrate its attacker.

That is not how national psychology works under bombardment.

‘They want Iran’s energy’ is the quiet part out loud
Now we come to the part that explains the deeper imperial logic behind all this: energy.

I referenced the mindset openly circulating among the empire-adjacent influencer class: the idea that “we need Iran’s energy for AI projects,” that the AI race with China will be decided by securing energy inputs, and that therefore this war is not only Israel’s war, but “our war”.

This is imperial logic in its purest form. It doesn’t even bother to hide behind democracy or human rights. It says: we need your resources for our future, and if you will not give them to us under cooperative terms, we will take them under coercive terms.

And here is the thing these people cannot understand, because their mindset is trapped in a 19th-century colonial reflex: cooperation is possible.

China shows that cooperation is possible. China buys resources, builds infrastructure, creates contracts, offers development pathways, and yes, does it for its own interests, but it does it through exchange, not through looting. The US model, by contrast, is too often: bully, sanction, destabilise, bomb, then pretend it’s about “order”.

So when I say this war has gone “too wrong” for Washington even to benefit from Iranian energy later, I mean something very simple: you do not kill people, destroy families, and then expect business as usual. You don’t kill children and then expect Iranian society to say, “Sure, let’s partner with you.”

This is where imperial arrogance collides with a proud, dignified Iranian society.

How Trump miscalculated Video: Syriana Analysis

Iran’s demands are not cosmetic
Now the crucial point: why Iran won’t stop now.

Iran is not continuing this because it “loves war”. It is continuing because the war created leverage, and Iran’s leadership understands that if you stop now, you waste the leverage you paid for in blood and risk.

This is why Iran’s demands are emerging with clarity.

First: deterrence restored. Not just for Iran, but for the wider deterrence ecosystem that includes Hezbollah. Iran wants to punish its enemy to a degree that makes future attacks psychologically and strategically unthinkable.

Second: US bases constrained or removed. Iran is not naïve; it knows it may not expel the US from the region overnight. But it can force a new reality where US installations become purely defensive or are reconfigured in ways that reduce their offensive utility against Iran.

In plain language: if Gulf monarchies host bases that are used to strike Iran, those bases become part of the battlefield, and Iran is signaling it wants to break that model permanently.

This is why the Iranian foreign minister’s tone matters, and why voices like professor Marandi’s matter: the message is no longer “we can negotiate and return to normal.” The message is “normal is what created this war, and we need a new security architecture.”

‘Deterrence or nothing’ framework
This is where Amal Saad’s analysis captures the logic cleanly: deterrence or nothing; total war or total ceasefire.

Her point is that the old conflict-resolution framework doesn’t apply, because Iran is not seeking a temporary suspension of hostilities; it is seeking to alter the bargaining space itself. Tehran rejects the framework in which negotiations are essentially arms control over Iran, and insists instead that the real issue is US-Israeli aggression and the regional order that enables it.

That is why Iran refuses a ceasefire that simply resets the cycle.

And that is why the US miscalculation is so profound: Washington thought it could strike under a cover of “diplomacy,” then return to negotiation as if diplomacy were a neutral channel. Iran now treats that as subterfuge, and it wants to make the weaponisation of diplomacy costly enough that it cannot be repeated.

Why Iran won’t stop now
So we return to the simple truth: Iran won’t stop now because stopping now would mean relinquishing the leverage it has finally acquired — militarily, economically, psychologically — at the very moment when the US and Europe are feeling pain they cannot hide.

Trump was elected on promises of prosperity. Now energy prices surge, markets shake, global supply lines tighten, and allies panic. From Tehran’s point of view, this is the rare moment when the empire is vulnerable enough that Iran can increase its demands instead of being forced to accept humiliating ones.

And when you understand that, you understand why this isn’t ending with a tidy “ceasefire” press release. Iran believes that if it accepts another temporary arrangement, it will simply be attacked again when the West finds a better moment.

So the choice Iran is presenting is brutal but clear: a settlement that restores deterrence and rewires the regional security order, or continued pressure through the one lever that forces the world to pay attention.

Hormuz.

Washington assumed it was a bluff.

Now the world is learning what happens when a red line is real.

Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis. This article was first published on his Substack Kevork’s Newsletter and shared via Collective Evolution.

Thousands urge NZ prime minister Luxon to condemn illegal US-Israeli war on Iran

APR editor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:11:09 +0000

Greenpeace Aotearoa

Thousands of people have signed a petition demanding New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon stand up and condemn the illegal attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel.

Greenpeace delivered the petition to opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins in Wellington today.

Standing on the steps of Parliament, Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman said: “This war is plainly illegal — it is not an act of self-defence nor is it sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

“While we have come to expect that the US government approach to international law is more honoured in the breach than the observance, nonetheless international law is critical for the security of everyone on the planet but especially for a small nation like New Zealand.”

Dr Norman said Luxon was expected to advocate in favour of international law and hence condemn “this reckless illegal war”.

“Silence in the face of injustice is complicity, and thousands of New Zealanders agree that Luxon should be standing up to bullies like Trump, who is attempting to destroy any possibility of a rules-based international order.”

Greenpeace delivered the petition to the Parliament opposition who have been open about their condemnation of Trump’s illegal war.

Fossil fuel price war link
Greenpeace also made the link from this illegal war to the escalating price of fossil fuels.

“This illegal war has disrupted oil, gas and fertiliser supplies, exposing Luxon’s Trump-like obsession with outdated fossil fuels, leaving New Zealanders paying the price,” said Dr Norman.

“Luxon has collapsed the EV market by killing the clean car discount, making it cheaper to import gas guzzling cars. He’s ended public transport subsidies for young people, blocked funding for cycleways, but wants to spend billions of dollars to build new roads.”

The Prime Minister now wanted to expose the country even further to the volatile global fossil fuel market by charging New Zealanders a gas tax to build an LNG import terminal.

“The Luxon government should be investing in renewable energy and the electrification of transport to insulate New Zealanders from energy supply shocks and rising energy prices, as well as cutting climate pollution,” said Dr Norman.

Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Israel caught in a permanent state of war mindset – peace is taboo

APR editor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 02:31:12 +0000

INTERVIEW: C.J. Polychroniou and Idan Landau

Israel’s war on Iran is a direct result of a political culture that depends for survival upon a permanent state of war, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau in the interview that follows.

He observes that Israeli society on the whole has embraced a fascist mindset, “reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety,” and thus intolerance for dissent.

Subsequently, peace is a taboo and there is total indifference to genocidal acts and human casualties. Moreover, there is very little hope for a different trajectory, argues Landau, “as long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its actions.”

Landau is professor of linguistics and head of the department of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs and has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserve.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Since the Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, the Netanyahu government embarked on a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, expanded Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank and thus encouraged settlers to escalate West Bank terrorist attacks, exchanged fire with Hezbollah and the Houtis, then attacked Iran in what has been dubbed as the 12-Day War, and finally persuaded US President Donald Trump to go to war with Iran.

What is Israel’s endgame in terrorising the Middle East, and how has permanent war impacted Israeli society and the Israeli psyche?

IDAN LANDAU: I think the whole point of permanent war — I agree this is the most appropriate concept to use here — is that there is no endgame. Permanent war, with ever growing economic, emotional and political costs, is exactly what keeps the Israeli right-wing in power; it feeds on anxiety, paranoia and visions of imminent destruction (interestingly, our own and our enemies’ destruction, equally vivid).

Not being able to concentrate on and fully understand what’s going on is also crucial; the Israeli public is extremely underinformed about key issues, like the fraudulent nuclear talks in Geneva, the far-reaching proposals by the Lebanese government, etc. The media — always complicit, these days criminal — bombards us with caricatures of our surrounding countries.

That said, I think there is one constant, never-changing endgame lurking behind all the upheavals: The expansionist project in the West Bank. Not just Smotrich but a dedicated section within the Likkud, of right-wing religious settlers, are working tirelessly on this project, actually from the first week after October 7.

Plans for resettlement of Gaza combined with increased settlement in the West Bank (specifically, the northern Samaria, surrounding Jenin and Tulkarem) were immediately aired and pushed forward by the settlers’ lobby together with their MK partners.

The surge we now see in ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank is inherent to the overall vision of this government, and it was stated as such even before October 7 — that only gave it a huge impetus.

The impact on Israeli society is perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all. Political discourse has been reduced to hollow slogans. Every single issue in foreign affairs in framed as either “existential threat” or “unavoidable use of military force.” There’s absolutely no room for talk about non-violent paths (“peace” is a taboo even on the left).

The Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of Hamas/Iran/Hezbollah/Houthis, in short, different guises of Amalek. Much of that, as I noted, is fueled by the deliberate absence of facts and evidence for rational conduct on the part of our enemies.

Israelis live in a peculiar state of mind: total disbelief in the possibility of normal life, clinging on to the very ideology that perpetuates this state of mind.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel has actual and perceived enemies. But is Benjamin Netanyahu alone the actual problem behind Israel’s permanent state of war? I mean, even most of Israeli opposition supported the genocide in Gaza and it’s doing the same thing now with the war against Iran.

IDAN LANDAU: Netanyahu is the most able consolidator of all the dark impulses of Israeli society, but of course he didn’t make up anything on his own. If you go back to Begin’s speeches in the 1970s-1980s, they also constantly invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate justification for whatever Israel does.

The Messianic drive to settle the greater Israel predates Netanyahu, as well as the overall brutal, racist degradation of Palestinians inside and outside Israel. You can go on and on — nothing is new here. At most, as you note, it is the subservience of the “opposition”; I don’t recall anything like it in the past.

If you look at the governments that went to wars in 1973 and 1982, they faced considerable opposition, within the Knesset and outside of it, on the very issue of whether the war was justified (in 1973, it was clearly preventable; in 1982, it was pure imperial vanity). None of that is left today.

Which is why the temptation of permanent war is so strong: You’re guaranteed to make the willful silence of the opposition also permanent.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces are using Gaza tactics, attacking hospitals and killing medical staff, while in Iran they have engaged in what has been rightly described as chemical warfare on account of strikes on fuel depots. Isn’t the country concerned at all about its blatant assault on international law and that it has turned into a pariah state in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the people across the globe? What happened to Israel’s labor party which combined socialism with nation-building?

IDAN LANDAU: As to the Labour Party, I always say that one should not speak ill of the dead. A handful of members of Knesset (MKs) that are obsessed with displays of liberal values and with welfare legislation when genocide is in full force and Apartheid shifts from de facto to de jure.

The other “opposition” parties are either led by generals (Golan, Eizenkot) who offer zero alternatives to military dominance, or by right-wing neoliberals (Bennet, Lapid). The only representatives of left values in the Knesset are the Arab MKs.

As to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), my impression is that Israelis are unconcerned insofar as Uncle Sam is, and it sure looks like he is, thoroughly unconcerned. The Trump administration vindictively sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) judges presiding over the Israeli case, and quite explicitly stated that IHL does not apply to the US and its allies.

There’s a lot of duplicity in Israeli discourse regarding the so-called “Principle of Complementarity”; the official response to the ICC described the “independent and robust judicial system” of Israel, which investigates any suspicions for wrongdoings. Most Israelis simply think that the rules don’t apply to us since they don’t apply to Hamas (they do apply to both parties; I already said that Israelis are shrouded in disinformation).

But even the liberals that appeal to our own “independent and robust judicial system” look ridiculous in face of the massive cover-up we witness from the beginning of the genocide; the dropping of charges against the five torturers/rapists in Sde-Teiman is but the latest instance.

Hundreds of heinous crimes did not even yield any charges.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Courageous voices against war and violence can be heard here and there across Israeli society and peace activists have organised scores of demonstrations in cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem to express their opposition to the war in Iran.

Are anti-war demonstrations really seen as a threat to national security by the Netanyahu government and even segments of the Israeli citizenry?

IDAN LANDAU: These things happen and they do lift our spirit. In honesty, I don’t think anyone views them as “a threat to national security,” that’s fascist talk. The public atmosphere is just incredibly intolerant, with or without the presence of the police, with or without any legal process.

Just try to voice your opposition to the war — any war, pick your favourite — out in the street, and you’re sure to be harassed and probably beaten by random pedestrians within 15-20 minutes. So I think it is a typical fascist all-embracing violent climate, reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety.

The mere verbal expression of “sacrilegious” opinions is seen as a personal threat to our carefully maintained peace of mind; so tenuous and feeble, that it cannot even stand to face dissent.

Point it out to Israelis and urge them to make out what it means for their confidence in what their state is doing that they must violently banish any expression of doubt and criticism (this is now the position of many journalists as well!) — well, see if you get an answer.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel censored reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Is the same thing happening now with the war in Iran?

IDAN LANDAU: Luckily, the IDF doesn’t control the entrance and exit to Iran. So we don’t have the brute force censorship, instead it’s the good old “filter and distort and leave out the context” censorship.

They would report civilian casualties only if forced (because it’s getting too much international media), and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the “human shield” trick is now applied reflexively, before any facts are even known.

In this sense, as all human right organisations pointed out, the Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalised by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so makes it so.

In this context, one can watch civilian suffering in Iran with a level of detachment and blame it all on the IRGC. We should remember, though, that the Iranian regime is no more scrupulous in its choice of targets in Israel — the war crimes are on both sides.

Yet I cannot say that Israeli media covers the wider civilian effects of the war on Iranian citizens in any serious way. Pretty much 95 percent of what we get are silly, heroic odes to our courageous pilots and genius cyber fighters.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In your view, is there a pathway towards peace in Israel? Is permanent peace even possible for Israel?

IDAN LANDAU: Ultimately there can’t be any other solution; wars eventually end, consuming nations. I just don’t think it will be “Israel” as we now know it that will see the fruits of peace.

It will be a totally different entity, somehow letting Jews and Arabs live together as equals. That’s not possible within the current regime. Sadly, the shift to non-violence only occurs after the level of death and suffering is insurmountable to both sides.

No one knows when that will be. As long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its policies, it won’t change trajectory.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centres in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

Idan Landau is an Israeli social justice activist and professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University.

Saige England: Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists

APR editor — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:30:31 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Every week, health prevailing, I march with our Palestinian friends and their supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand. And my country is one which — under Britain — was colonised.

Colonisation perpetrates injustices against indigenous people. This legacy is still felt by Indigenous people today.

All around the world we must dismantle our unfair systems. A fair system ensures that everyone has a flourishing start in life. But our systems are linked to Israel — and Israel demonstrates that colonisation is still practised.

“No peace without justice, no justice without right to return.” Image: SE

Israel headed by megalomaniacs ruling with a muscular thug army is proof that the Empire has not stopped because the Western Empire has supported this.

Far too many Western journalists report from the perspective of the abuser rather than the victims. They need to ask, “what if it was my child, my wife, my mother, my brother, my grandfather, suffering like this? What if I was forced from my home?”

Journalists must report from the perspective of people who are pleading for the right to breathe rather than reporting from the perspective of the landlord killing people when they resist eviction.

They must use their imagination to exercise empathy in reporting. Only then will they report the truth and only then will the real narrative emerge.

Colonisation unchecked
Colonisation is not checked, rather it is supported by countries engaged in Empire building.

Like South Africa under apartheid, Indigenous people are oppressed and if they resist they are dispensed with, in other words, exterminated.

But this system is enabled rather than disabled. The rampant megalomania is enabled by the US, Britain, Germany, and other nations.

Tens of thousands of children, women, and men have been robbed of life and the journalists I once worked alongside in conflict zones are complicit if they do not report this as a human rights atrocity.

We — journalists — must report on the evil that is the expansion of empire and we must report on it from the perspective of the victims not the perpetrators.

The extermination of Palestinians and expansion of Israel is clearly supported by the legs of the octopus — the countries that make up this Western Empire.

Standing by and reporting from anything other than the perspective of the victims is akin to standing by and watching slaves being bound, gagged and shipped under the name of empire.

Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists. They must have the gumption to attack the rotten policies practiced in our own time.

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.

As Israel keeps bombing Iran, Palestinians face growing violence in West Bank

APR editor — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:32:50 +0000

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! speaks with Iranian Israeli political activist Orly Noy, editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call, about her recent article, “Longing for My Tehran.”

“It’s been a very emotional time since the beginning of the war, not just because we are constantly running in and out of shelters,” says Noy, “but because this time, the footage of the bombing that I grew accustomed to seeing for over two years from the genocide in Gaza was now coming from my homeland.”

Noy also comments on Israeli political support for the war on Iran, saying “the very few attempts to protest against the war were brutally crushed by the Israeli police.”

Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is also increasing. “Up until now, our worry was about the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Now it is just about executing Palestinians, both by the army and by the settlers,” says Noy.

Transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

As we continue to look at the US and Israel war on Iran and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, we go now to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Orly Noy. She’s an Iranian Israeli political activist and editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call.

She is also the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her new piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Longing for My Tehran.”

Orly, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could talk about this piece you’ve written and why you chose to write it now, “Longing for My Tehran”?

ORLY NOY: Yeah. I mean, as you can imagine, it’s been a very emotional time since the beginning of the war, not just because we are constantly running in and out of shelters, but because this time, the footage of the bombing that I grew accustomed to seeing for over two years from the genocide in Gaza was now coming from my homeland — from my hometown, Tehran, the city where I was born and grew up in.

The cries of people were in Farsi this time, which was — which hit, you know, much closer to my heart. And for me as a writer, as someone whose main tools to understand the world are words, I started writing mainly in order to make some sense of this madness, first of all, to myself.

And then I was asked to publish something, so I sent this. But this was really an attempt to, you know, bring some sense into this chaos that is now our lives here.

Report from Jerusalem. Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: Orly, you have talked about the majority of Israelis supporting the war at the moment. But there is opposition. Can you talk about the Israeli objective, and at the same time this threat to turn Iran into Gaza and this increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank?

ORLY NOY: Yeah, so, there is — I mean, like every circle of violence that Israel initiates, mostly against Palestinians, there is always a margin of protest and of objection. It’s not small, but it exists.

This time, any attempt — the very few attempts to protest against the war were brutally crushed and dispersed by the Israeli police, which have now become almost entirely — almost like the private militia of the Minister for Homeland Security, the Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir.

It is not against the law. It is not illegal to protest. Still it is not illegal to protest in Israel against the war. But trying to please the Kahanist minister, the police very brutally dispersed these protests almost immediately after they began.

In the West Bank, the situation is beyond — I mean, it’s terrifying beyond anything that words can express. You mentioned in your opening the execution of the four members of the Bani Odeh family, including the two parents and two very young kids, in the village of Tammun.

We published yesterday a heartbreaking, really disturbing, one of the most disturbing pieces I’ve edited in my entire career as a journalist, where in one of the villages in the north of the Jordan Valley, settlers gathered the entire inhabitants of this Palestinian little village in one tent and tormented them brutally, hit them, severely sexually abused one of the Palestinian men, and all the while forcing the children to watch them as they torture the older members of the community.

These things have turned into almost daily events. Palestinians are now really — I mean, you know, up until now, our worry was about the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Now it is just about executing Palestinians, both by the army and by the settlers.

This is the reality now. They are just executing Palestinians in broad daylight, and nothing is being done about it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’m afraid, Orly, we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us. Orly Noy is an Iranian Israeli political activist and editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call. She’s also the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her new piece, which we’ll link to, in The New York Review of Books is headlined “Longing for My Tehran.”

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons licence.

Chris Hedges: The world according to Gaza – it’s only the start

APR editor — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:02:47 +0000

The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources — as the Venezuelans know — are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponised.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished.

The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Levers of power
Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in The World After Gaza.

“The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil — the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilised societies — cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers.

They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse.

No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorise the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

‘Intoxication of power’
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in 1984. “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes.

In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery we face
The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.

Virtues of empathy
They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.

Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting licence revoked, as the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country.

They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

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

US, Fiji intervene for Israel in South Africa’s Gaza genocide case at ICJ

APR editor — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 05:13:55 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

The United States and Fiji have filed separate declarations of intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging the country is committing genocide in Gaza.

While the US explicitly rejects the allegation that Israel is committing genocide, Fiji raises issues about how the 1948 Genocide Convention should be interpreted.

The 34-page Fiji declaration was filed on March 12 and is signed by Ambassador Ilaitia Tamata, Fiji’s Permanent Representative of Fiji to the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, reports The Fiji Times.

In the declaration, Fiji said it was exercising its right under Article 63(2) of the ICJ Statute to intervene as a party to the Convention, arguing that the case raises important questions about how it should be interpreted.

The filing confirms that Fiji has appointed its Permanent Representative to Israel, Ambassador Filipo Tarakinikini, as agent for the proceedings.

The Fiji filing was made alongside separate interventions by Namibia and Hungary, according to a press release issued by the court on Friday, reports Middle East Eye.

All four states submitted declarations under Article 63 of the ICJ statute, which allows countries that are parties to a treaty under dispute to intervene in order to present their interpretation of that treaty.

Iceland, Netherlands also file
Earlier on Thursday, Iceland and the Netherlands also filed declarations under Article 63.

South Africa filed the case in December 2023, accusing Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention through its military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 that year.

Pretoria argues that Israel’s conduct — including mass killings, destruction of infrastructure and the imposition of conditions of life threatening the survival of Palestinians in Gaza — amounts to genocide.

Israel denies the accusation and claims its war is justified by considerations of self-defence.

The US submission on Thursday stands out among most interventions for directly defending Israel against the accusation brought by South Africa. Taking sides in a case is highly unconventional under Article 63 submissions.

“It’s very unusual for an intervening state (US) to use language like that,” explained Professor Gerhard Kemp, a scholar of international law.

“States normally stick to the legal issues, which can even be helpful for both sides. But terms like ‘false’ or ‘wrong’ don’t really move the needle,” he told Middle East Eye.

“They are probably aimed at a different audience.”

US argues genocide claim ‘false’
In its declaration, Washington argues that allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza are “false” and urges the court to apply a strict legal threshold when determining genocidal intent.

It says, uncontroversially, that genocide can only be established where there is clear proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Whatever happened to South Africa’s case at the ICJ?

That intent should only be inferred when it is the only reasonable explanation for the conduct in question, it says.

The submission argues that the ICJ must be fully convinced before determining an act is genocide, due to the exceptional gravity of the crime. It also says civilian casualties and destruction during armed conflict do not by themselves prove genocidal intent.

“The United States submits that the Court should maintain its standard for inferring intent. Lowering the standard risks broadening the application of the term ‘genocide’ such that it no longer carries its original weight and meaning, and invites attempts to misuse the Genocide Convention as a gateway for bringing extraneous disputes before the Court,” the US claimed.

Hungary and Fiji’s submissions similarly advance legal arguments that align closely with Israel’s position in the case.

Narrow interpretation
Hungary’s declaration calls for a narrow interpretation of genocide and emphasises that civilian casualties and destruction during armed conflict do not in themselves demonstrate genocidal intent.

Fiji’s intervention likewise urges the court to apply an extremely high evidentiary threshold for genocide, and cautions against relying heavily on reports by international organisations or non-governmental groups when assessing allegations.

By contrast, Namibia’s declaration focuses on a broader interpretation of the Genocide Convention and emphasises how genocidal intent may be inferred from patterns of conduct and cumulative evidence.

Namibia argues that acts such as the denial of humanitarian aid, repeated displacement and deprivation of basic necessities could fall within the Convention’s prohibition on deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a protected group.

Its submission also stresses that genocide can be committed through omissions, including a refusal to allow or facilitate life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians under a state’s control.

Third-state interventions
The new filings add to a rapidly expanding list of states seeking to intervene in the proceedings.

Since April 2024, similar interventions have been submitted by Colombia, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Turkey, Chile, the Maldives, Bolivia, Ireland, Cuba, Belize, Brazil, the Comoros, Belgium and Paraguay in support of the South African argument.

Palestine and Belize have also sought to intervene under Article 62 of the court’s statute, which allows states to apply to participate in proceedings if they believe they have a legal interest that could be affected by the court’s decision.

Under Article 63, intervening states do not become parties to the dispute. Instead, they are permitted to present their interpretation of the treaty at issue — in this case the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The interpretation adopted by the court in its eventual judgment will also be binding on those states.

The case has become one of the most closely watched disputes ever heard by the ICJ and has drawn an unusually large number of third-state interventions, which have reached 22.

The court has already ordered Israel in legally binding provisional measures to take steps to prevent acts that could violate the Genocide Convention and to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Israel ignores court orders
Israel has repeatedly ignored the orders.

A final ruling on whether Israel has breached the Convention is expected in 2028. But it could take longer, depending on the length of hearings and the two parties’ adherence to deadlines.

On Thursday, Israel was scheduled to submit its counter-memorial, or arguments in response to South Africa’s accusations, after several deadline extensions by the court.

The court has yet to announce that Israel has filed its evidence, however.

During its devastating onslaught, Israel has so far killed more than 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children. It has also destroyed most of the enclave’s homes, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, rendering it largely uninhabitable for its 2.3 million civilians.

A UN commission of inquiry concluded last September that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

The UN report’s authors, including legal experts Navi Pillay and Chris Sidoti, told Middle East Eye that the report used evidence and a similar methodology in its analysis to that which will be used by the ICJ.

From the gauntlet to stopping the Iran war, Carolan makes action plea

APR editor — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:55:04 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

A peace advocate urged people in New Zealand today to get behind a “Stop Wars Aotearoa” campaign to oppose the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran and expand beyond solidarity with Palestine.

In the 127th week of protest against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and occupied West Bank, socialist trade union organiser Joe Carolan called on protesters to redouble their efforts.

Speaking in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square, he praised a public meeting in Mt Eden this week that heralded the start of a rolling peace movement that echoed the efforts in a bid to halt the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq — “a war based on a lie” about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Carolan drew comparisons between his native Ireland and the colonisation of New Zealand.

Apart from Christianity, the colonisers “needed another pretext to civilise great unwashed”. Militarism.

He paid tribute to “anyone who ran the gauntlet outside the public meeting on Wednesday that we held at the Mt Eden War Memorial Hall where we remember the price of wars — in fact working class lives — both here and abroad”.

“And we should remember the dead and not go to war again — that’s the whole point of a war memorial hall.

‘Ran the gauntlet’
“But those of us who ran the gauntlet of the people waving Israeli flags and lecturing us about human rights, waving the American flags and lecturing us about women’s rights when the place is run by rapists and pedophiles obviously – know it’s Operation Epstein Fury now.

“An operation so [US President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu can both avoid what is coming to them which is a long time in prison until they die.”

Union organiser Joe Carolan . . . “Many people didn’t . . . condemn the murder of 170 school students – young women.” Image: Asia Pacific Report

Netanyahu is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Israel is on trial for genocide with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case brought by South Africa and 14 other countries.

“Many people didn’t show shock at all in the West, and condemn the murder of 170 school students — young women — that you guys purport that you want to liberate.

“You killed them. You liberated them from their lives and their blood is on the hands of those [US and Israeli] forces.

“And also Iran is a gigantic country of 90 to 100 million people. Of course, it’s not a monolithic country, there are people with many different views.

“I’ll give you two words in Irish, you might have heard them before, about who should determine Iran’s future, and that’s Sinn Féin — ‘Ourselves Alone’.

Tayyaba Khan . . . marking the 2019 mosque massacre in Christchurch. Image: Asia Pacific Report

‘Run own revolution’
“Nobody has the right to determine the future of any nation, except the people who live in that nation themselves, including whether how they run their own revolution or how they run their own democracy.”

Sinn Féin is also an Irish republican political party, founded in 1905, striving for self-determination and ending British rule in Northern Ireland.

Tomorrow Te Komititanga Square is hosting an Irish cultural festival to mark the lead up to St Patrick’s Day on March 17.

Tayyaba Khan of Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA) spoke about the mosque massacre in Christchurch on 15 March 2019 when a lone Australian gunman murdered 51 Muslims at Friday prayers in New Zealand’s worst case of terrorism. The gunman is serving a life sentence for his crimes.

Khan also remembered the survivors and their struggle to rebuild their lives.

Other speakers today highlighted how the rally was reminding the New Zealand government and the public that many in the country were totally opposed to the continuing genocide in Palestine.

“There is no ceasefire in Gaza and the US and Israeli Zionists continue to drive the Palestinian people out of their ancestral homes and land to colonise the region,” said a protest flyer.

“To everyone in the square today we invite you to join with us and the many peoples around the world in condemning the unlawful US and Israeli military assault on Iran.”

According to the Al Jazeera death toll live tracker, 1444 people have been killed in Iran, at least 15 in Israel, 11 US soldiers and 19 dead in Gulf states.

“We stand in solidarity with all the people of Iran and across the Middle East, particularly Palestine, including Gaza and Lebanon,” said rally MC Leeann Wahanui-Peters.

Two women protesters with a “Hands off Iran” placard at today’s Auckland rally. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Al-Quds Day marked
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people around the world marked Al-Quds Day yesterday. This is marked annually to show support for Palestine and oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.

Reporting from the huge Tehran rally, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said Iranians hoped to both show their support for Palestinians and express “defiance and resilience” amid the US-Israeli attacks.

“They think that by killing us, we will be afraid, that by dropping bombs on our heads, we will be afraid. No, we stand by our country,” a woman demonstrator told Al Jazeera.

Another protester said Iranians had shown in their confrontation with the US and Israel that “the wall of oppression can be broken”.

“Today, with their presence in different squares, the people showed that it is possible to overcome injustice and break the wall of oppression,” he told Al Jazeera.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian was also seen at the rally in the Iranian capital — shaking hands with people and posing for selfies — along with other Iranian officials, including Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Charges dropped against 5 soldiers accused of sexually assaulting Palestinian detainee in Israel’s ‘Guantanamo’

APR editor — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:26:17 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

The Israeli military prosecution has controversially cancelled the indictment of five soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in southern Israel, reports Anadolu Ajansi.

“In light of significant developments that have occurred since the indictment was filed in the Yemen Field case, the military prosecution has decided today to cancel the indictment,” the Israeli army said in a statement yesterday.

The torture case dates back to July 2025, when Israeli soldiers tortured and sexually assaulted a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention facility, causing serious injuries and a tear in the rectum.

Earlier, Israeli news media outlets, including the public broadcaster KAN, claimed that Israel released the tortured detainee on October 13, 2025, to the Gaza Strip as part of a group of prisoners released under the exchange deal with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

Sde Teiman, which literally means “Yemen Field” in Arabic, is an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.

Interrogators there have become notorious for physical and sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees from Gaza to the extent that it has been dubbed “Israel’s Guantanamo” in reference to the infamous US detention facility in Iraq.

The Sde Teiman prison has witnessed widespread violations against Palestinian detainees, including severe beatings, prolonged restraint, and medical neglect, which have killed people, according to Palestinian and Israeli media and human rights reports.

Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses is in the Western media’s DNA

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:13:51 +0000

COMMENTARY: By John Minto

I came across this statement from an independent media source this week:

“The mainstream media is doing what it always does in wartime: manufacturing consent, sanitising atrocities and platforming war criminals.”

It came to mind immediately when I read The Times newspaper obituary for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which was reprinted in the Christchurch Press at the weekend.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was murdered by the US-Israel in the initial strikes of their illegal bombing and killing campaign in Iran — an assault that rips up international law and trashes the United Nations Charter.

The obituary was a straight piece of Western propaganda which did nothing to hide its blatant disinformation (deliberate misinformation). It may as well have come straight from an Israeli propaganda unit — it may well have for all I know — with its demonisation of the Iranian leadership.

The Times claimed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “…approved the development of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme that could, if ever completed, threaten Israel’s very existence, destabilise the Middle East and imperil global oil supplies”.

This is an obvious lie. Israel’s Prime Minister — and well-known war criminal — Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying for 30 years that Iran is just a few weeks or months away from producing a nuclear weapon.

The fact is that all credible analysts, including inside US intelligence, agree Iran never decided to pursue nuclear weapons and the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) has never detected such a programme. In fact, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared nuclear weapons to be “religiously forbidden under Islamic law”.

The rest of the obituary is riddled with similar untruths and distortions in a ham-fisted justification of US/Israel’s assault on Iran. If The Times has set out to undermine confidence in Western media reporting on West Asia (Middle East) this would be an excellent example.

Platforming war criminals
How much Western media time and space has been given to Trump and Netanyahu in the past 11 days to spread lies and disinformation direct to Western audiences? And how much time has been given to the Iranian leadership, UN officials or international experts to debunk the US/Israeli justifications for war?

Meanwhile, the media have platformed Iranian New Zealanders, who oppose the Iranian leadership and support the appointment of the former Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, to lead the country.

The previous Shah’s rule was a brutal dictatorship where tens of thousands were murdered or imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police, the Savak. The Shah’s dictatorship was backed by the US and Western interests till its overthrow in 1979.

The new proposed Shah is no different from his father, posing with Netanyahu and celebrating the bombing and killing in Iran.

So why has our mainstream media given so much attention to Iranians here who celebrate death and destruction in Iran alongside people waving the Israeli flag — a symbol of genocide and apartheid — and inviting Destiny Church to join them. A real horror show!

And when it comes to women’s rights, why is the Western media so happy to denounce restrictions on clothing for women in Iran but ignore Israel’s denial of rights to Palestinian women in Gaza whom Amnesty International this week says face the erosion of health and safety in Gaza in a “deliberate act of war targeting women and girls”.

A pro-war protest with imperial Iran and Israeli flags outside the Stop Wars Aotearoa public meeting in Auckland last night. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Sanitising atrocities
And why has the Western media all but ignored the US/Israeli missile attack on the girls school in Iran killing at least 165 children? Imagine if this were an attack on a school in Israel or the US? Imagine the apoplectic outrage. Imagine the rush to sanctions and war?

This attack and murder of Iranian girls is sidelined for the same reason Israel’s genocide in Gaza killing tens of thousands of women and children is being downplayed.

Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses, justifications or explanations for them is in the Western media’s DNA.

The Press and Western media take all their stories from Western sources such as Reuters and Associated Press news agencies and Western newspapers such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. They would never dream of including stories from Al Jazeera or any Palestinian news sources.

I would once have lamented the loss of mainstream media reporting on issues but it’s no longer possible to pretend it is in any way a force for good.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Ramzy Baroud: Israel’s greatest weapon was fear – and it’s now failing

APR editor — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:46:12 +0000

Israel’s war on Iran reveals a deeper crisis: the collapse of a psychological doctrine built on fear and invincibility. The Palestine Chronicle reports.

ANALYSIS: By Ramzy Baroud

Israel’s military strategy has long relied on psychological dominance and deterrence built on overwhelming violence.
Massacres during the Nakba helped establish fear as a strategic tool to weaken Palestinian resistance.
Doctrines such as the Dahiya Doctrine and “mowing the grass” reinforced Israel’s image of invincibility.
The Gaza genocide and regional escalation have severely weakened Israel’s psychological deterrence.
The war on Iran may accelerate the collapse of Israel’s most important strategic asset: fear.

Wars are rarely fought only on battlefields. They are also fought in the minds of societies, in the perception of power and vulnerability, and in the political imagination of entire regions.

Israel understood this principle early in its history, and psychological dominance became a central component of its military doctrine.

From the earliest years of the Zionist project, the idea that power must appear overwhelming was openly articulated. In 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that Zionism would only succeed once the indigenous population became convinced that resistance was hopeless.

Only when Palestinians realised they could not defeat the Zionist project, he argued, would they accept its permanence.

The Nakba reflected the logic
The events surrounding the Nakba of 1947–48 reflected this logic. Between 800,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes, as hundreds of villages were destroyed or depopulated.

The expulsions occurred through a combination of direct military assault, forced displacement, and the collapse of Palestinian society under war.

Massacres played a crucial role in spreading fear. The killings at Deir Yassin in April 1948, in which more than 100 civilians were killed by Zionist militias, quickly reverberated across Palestine. But Deir Yassin was only one among many massacres that occurred during that period.

Killings in places such as Lydda, Tantura, Safsaf, and numerous other villages contributed to a climate of terror that accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian communities.

The psychological impact of these events was enormous. News of massacres spread from village to village, convincing many Palestinians that remaining in their homes meant risking annihilation.

The lesson was clear: war could function not only as a tool of conquest but as an instrument of psychological domination.

The Doctrine of Fear
Over time, this approach evolved into a broader strategic culture that emphasised deterrence through overwhelming violence. Israel’s wars were designed not only to defeat enemies militarily but to reinforce a perception that resistance against Israel would always end in devastating consequences.

Israeli leaders have frequently expressed this philosophy openly. In the early years of the state, Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most influential military figures, famously declared that Israelis must be prepared to live by the sword.

The remark captured the belief that Israel’s survival depended on constant readiness to use force and on maintaining a reputation for military ruthlessness.

Decades later, Israeli leaders continued to frame the country’s identity in similar terms. In the mid-2000s, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel as a “villa in the jungle,” a phrase that reflected a worldview in which Israel saw itself as a fortified island of civilisation surrounded by hostile and supposedly barbaric surroundings.

This perception reinforced the idea that Israel must always project overwhelming strength. Any sign of weakness, according to this logic, would invite attack.

The doctrine took more concrete form in the early 21st century. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli strategists articulated what later became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed during the conflict.

The doctrine advocated massive and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure associated with resistance movements.

The purpose was not only to destroy military targets but to inflict such devastation that entire societies would be deterred from supporting resistance groups.

A similar philosophy guided Israel’s repeated wars on Gaza. Israeli strategists began referring to these periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass.” The phrase suggested that Palestinian resistance could never be permanently eliminated but could be periodically weakened through short and devastating military operations designed to restore Israeli deterrence.

For decades, this strategy appeared to work. Israel’s military superiority, combined with unwavering American support, reinforced an image of invincibility that shaped political calculations across the Middle East.

But psychological dominance depends on belief, and belief can erode.

Gaza and the crisis of deterrence
The first major rupture in Israel’s aura of invincibility occurred in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after years of occupation and sustained resistance from Hezbollah. Across the Arab world, the withdrawal was widely interpreted as the first time Israel had been forced to retreat under military pressure.

Israel attempted to restore its dominance in the 2006 Lebanon war, but the outcome again challenged the image of decisive Israeli military superiority. Despite massive bombardment and ground operations, Hezbollah remained intact and continued to launch rockets until the final days of the conflict.

Yet the most profound blow to Israel’s psychological doctrine occurred decades later with the events surrounding October 7 and the war that followed.

Israel’s response to October 7 was the devastating Gaza genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or wounded, and nearly the entire Strip was destroyed,

The scale of violence was unprecedented even by the standards of previous Israeli wars on Gaza. Yet the objective was not merely military retaliation or collective punishment. It was also an attempt to restore the psychological balance that Israel believed had been shattered.

This logic had been expressed years earlier by Israeli leaders. During Israel’s earlier war on Gaza in 2008–09, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni openly suggested that Israel must respond in a way that demonstrates overwhelming force: When Israel is attacked, “it responds by going wild — and this is a good thing”.

In other words, war itself functioned as psychological theatre. But the Gaza genocide produced a very different outcome.

The myth begins to collapse
Modern wars unfold not only through military operations but through images that circulate instantly across the world. During the Gaza genocide, countless videos spread across social media showing Israeli armoured vehicles — including the once-feared Merkava tanks — being struck by relatively simple Palestinian anti-tank weapons.

For generations, Israel’s military power had been associated with technological invincibility. Suddenly, millions of viewers were witnessing something entirely different: a powerful army struggling against resistance fighters operating under siege conditions.

The war on Iran has intensified this psychological transformation.

For decades, Israeli society — and much of the region — believed that Israel’s territory was protected by an almost impenetrable defensive shield. The sight of waves of Iranian missiles striking targets inside Israel has therefore carried enormous symbolic weight.

These images challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in Middle Eastern politics: that Israel is militarily untouchable.

At the same time, other actors are exploiting this shift in perception. Hezbollah continues to maintain significant military capabilities despite repeated Israeli attacks. Palestinian resistance groups remain active despite the devastation of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Ansarallah in Yemen has disrupted shipping routes in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, demonstrating how even non-state actors can reshape strategic realities.

Existential frame
Israeli leaders themselves increasingly frame the current confrontation as existential. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described the war as a struggle for Israel’s survival, echoing earlier language about living by the sword.

Yet the deeper crisis may not be purely military. Israel remains one of the most heavily armed states in the world. But the aura of invincibility that once magnified that power is fading.

Once fear begins to disappear, restoring it becomes extraordinarily difficult.

And that may be the most important consequence of the war on Iran — not the destruction it produces, but the collapse of the psychological doctrine that sustained Israeli power for decades.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, Before the Flood, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include Our Vision for Liberation, My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). This article was first published by The Palestine Chronicle and is republished here with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

The reporting on Iran and Gaza the US-Israel war machine can’t control

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:51:35 +0000

Drop Site News

Right now, the United States and Israel are continuing their bombardment of Iran.

As the confirmed death toll climbs past 1330 and hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods are hit daily, the media apparatus that sold you the Iraq war and denied Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians for the last two years is now running the same playbook.

The Atlantic is laundering Netanyahu’s reputation as a “conflict-averse” leader while he tells the world this war lets him do what he’s “yearned for” for 40 years.

Bari Weiss is tweeting fire emojis at pro-war clips, falsely suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons, and devoting journalistic resources to tracking the Instagram likes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife.

CNN is giving unchallenged airtime to International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli officials claiming American soldiers have an “obligation” to die for Israel.

And that’s before the cable news network is taken over by Paramount, the Weiss operation run by the nepo-son of Larry Ellison, the single largest donor to Friends of the IDF.

The BBC, meanwhile, leads with nine dead in Israel while relegating some 180 children killed by the US in a girls’ school in Minab to a footnote.

This is what the legacy media machine looks like in wartime. It has always looked like this.

And it is exactly why we launched Drop Site less than two years ago.

On the ground reporting
While Weiss and CBS were manufacturing consent for this war, Drop Site has had reporters on the ground reporting the facts.

In just the last week:

Reza Sayah reported from Tehran on a double-tap bombing that killed over 20 people at a popular square during Ramadan, connecting the tactic to US strikes in Afghanistan, and Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
Drop Site correspondent reported from Minab, where a missile struck a girls’ elementary school and killed 180 children, and from Lamerd, where a sports hall full of teenage girls was bombed during practice.
We were among the first outlets on the ground verifying the strike in Minab as US and Israeli propagandists sought to deny and deflect.
We have consistently obtained exclusive information from senior Iranian officials who have contradicted claims by Trump, claims that have just as consistently fallen apart under scrutiny.
We exposed the fabricated CIA narrative about “tracking Khamenei for months” to his “secret location” — his secret location was his office, and he had refused to relocate.

Republished from Drop Site News. Subscribe to this independent news service.

West Papua’s humanitarian crisis stalls Prabowo’s ‘global peacemaker’ credibility bid

APR editor — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:57:22 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Ali Mirin

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has increasingly presented himself on the international stage as a mediator and promoter of peace.

Yet this global diplomatic posture raises a critical question: how credible is Indonesia’s claim to peace leadership while a prolonged humanitarian crisis continues in West Papua?

In late February 2026, Prabowo offered Indonesia’s services to mediate rising tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, even stating he was prepared to travel to Tehran if both parties agreed to dialogue.

The message was reinforced when former Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla met Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Boroujerdi, on 3 March 2026 to reiterate Indonesia’s readiness to facilitate diplomatic engagement.

In response, Iran publicly welcomed the gesture but tempered expectations.

Iranian officials insisted that any meaningful mediation must include condemnation of US and Israeli military actions, warning that diplomatic initiatives without political clarity may have limited effectiveness.

The exchange highlighted both Indonesia’s aspiration to play a larger diplomatic role and the complexities of international conflict mediation.

Peacebroker limitations
However, Indonesia’s attempt to position itself as a global peace broker has already faced significant limitations. In 2023, Prabowo proposed a peace plan for the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The proposal, which included controversial suggestions such as a demilitarised zone and a referendum in disputed territories, was quickly rejected by Ukrainian officials. The response exposed the limited influence of Indonesia’s mediation efforts in conflicts far beyond Southeast Asia.

While presenting himself internationally as a peacemaker, critics argue that Prabowo has largely paid lip service to human rights at home, particularly regarding the unresolved crisis in West Papua.

Indonesian protesters denounce US link over Iran war Video: Al Jazeera

While Indonesia promotes its diplomatic role in international conflicts, violence and instability continue to affect civilians in West Papua.

On 11 February 2026, only weeks before Prabowo’s international mediation initiative gained attention, a small civilian aircraft operated by Smart Air came under gunfire shortly after landing at Korowai Batu airstrip in Boven Digoel, West Papua.

A spokesperson linked to the military wing of Free Papua Movement (TPNPB- OPM) later claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that the aircraft had allegedly been used to transport Indonesian security forces.

The roots of the crisis stretch back to the early 1960s, when Indonesia invaded and took control of the territory following the withdrawal of Dutch colonial administration.

Act of Free Choice controversy
The subsequent 1969 referendum, known as the Act of Free Choice, remains one of the most controversial political processes in modern Southeast Asian and South Pacific history.

Rather than a universal vote, approximately 1025 selected representatives voted under significant political and military pressure.

Many Papuans and international observers argue that the process failed to meet internationally recognized standards for self-determination. As a result, the legitimacy of the referendum continues to be contested, and its legacy remains a central grievance fueling decades of political resistance and armed conflict.

For many analysts and human rights advocates, the Papua conflict cannot simply be framed as a domestic security problem. Instead, it represents a protracted humanitarian and political crisis that has yet to find a comprehensive and inclusive resolution.

In this sense, the issue has become what some observers describe as a long-standing wound within the Indonesian state.

Such incidents highlight the tragic reality faced by ordinary Papuans, who often find themselves caught between military operations and Papuan resistance attacks.

Civilians bear the brunt of a conflict that has persisted for decades without meaningful political dialogue capable of addressing its underlying causes.

Rising internal displacement in West Papua
According to reports by human rights organisations and humanitarian groups, displacement in West Papua has increased significantly in recent years.

The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has risen dramatically, from roughly 55,000 at the end of 2023 to more than 103,000 by October 2025. Many displaced communities face severe shortages of food, healthcare, education, and basic security.

These figures reflect a broader systemic failure to protect civilians and provide sustainable solutions for affected communities. Despite decades of development initiatives and official rhetoric emphasising stability and prosperity in Papua, the lived reality for many residents remains defined by insecurity and displacement.

Prabowo’s own military history also continues to shape international perceptions of Indonesia’s human rights record. During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor between 1975 and 1999, Prabowo served as an officer in Indonesia’s elite special forces, Kopassus.

Human rights organisations have linked him to operations accused of abuses against civilians during that period.

Following the 1999 referendum that ultimately led to East Timor’s independence, the United Nations supported investigations into violence carried out by Indonesian-backed militias and security forces.

Although Prabowo was never tried or convicted by an international court, activists and some Timorese leaders have long argued that senior Indonesian officers should have faced deeper scrutiny.

Shaping of credibility
In international diplomacy, credibility is often shaped not only by external initiatives but also by a state’s domestic human rights record. When internal conflicts remain unresolved, claims to global moral leadership can face heightened scrutiny.

Prabowo was also involved in military operations in Papua during the 1990s. One of the most widely discussed incidents was the 1996 Mapenduma hostage crisis in the highlands of what is now Nduga Regency.

Human rights organisations have documented allegations of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces during that period.

Additional controversies have surrounded claims that aircraft bearing the emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross were misused during operations. Such allegations, whether proven or not, continue to raise questions about adherence to international humanitarian law and contribute to lingering distrust among Papuan communities.

Taken together, these historical and contemporary dynamics create a sharp contrast between Indonesia’s global diplomatic ambitions and the unresolved realities within its own borders.

In international diplomacy, credibility is closely tied to domestic consistency.
It is difficult to advocate peace abroad while unresolved grievances and allegations of human rights violations persist at home.

For Indonesia, genuine leadership in global peacemaking would require more than diplomatic offers on the world stage. It would involve confronting the deeper structural issues underlying the conflict in West Papua.

Ensuring accountability
This would include ensuring accountability for past abuses, protecting civil liberties, and opening inclusive political dialogue that allows Papuans to meaningfully participate in shaping their own future.

Without such reforms, Indonesia’s peace diplomacy risks being perceived less as principled international engagement and more as a form of strategic public relations. The gap between Jakarta’s diplomatic rhetoric and the lived experiences of Papuan civilians remains stark.

Ultimately, Indonesia’s credibility as a global peacemaker will depend not only on its willingness to mediate conflicts abroad but also on its ability to address the long-standing humanitarian and political crisis within West Papua.

Until that gap is bridged, Indonesia’s aspirations for global diplomatic leadership will continue to face serious questions about legitimacy and moral authority.

The continued instability in West Papua also has broader regional implications for the Pacific, where several governments and civil society groups have increasingly raised concerns about the humanitarian situation faced by indigenous West Papuans.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan from the Kimyal tribe in the highlands bordering the Star Mountains region of Papua New Guinea. He holds a Master of Arts in international relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.

West Papuan doco Pig Feast exposes oligarchs, food security crisis and ecocide under noses of military

APR editor — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:41:04 +0000

REVIEW: Asia Pacific Report

West Papuan diaspora, academics, students and community activists warmly applauded the screening of the new investigative documentary, Pesta Babi (Pig Feast): Colonialism in our Time, in its pre-launch international premiere in New Zealand last night.

It was shown for the first time back in West Papua at the southeastern town of Merauke, which is centred in the vast denuded rainforest area featured in the film, and also in the capital Jayapura on Friday.

Dramatic footage of scenes of village resisters against the massive destruction of rainforest in one of the three largest “lungs of the world”, shipping of barge-loads of heavy machinery, vast swathes of forest scoured out for rice and palm oil plantations, and of a traditional “pig feast” — the first in a decade — gripped the audience from the opening minute.

This is the largest forest conversion project in modern history — turning 2.5 million ha of tropical forest into industrial plantations under the guise of “food security” and the “energy transition”.

“It is a powerful film, rich with data and stories drawn from the lived experiences of masyarakat adat [Indigenous people],” comments Dr Veronika Kanem, a New Zealand-based Papuan academic and researcher, who was at the premiere with a group of her students.

“The film is also grounded in research conducted by Yayasan Pusaka, along with other national and local organisations.” She is pleased that her home village Muyu is featured in the film.

The storytelling focuses on the experiences of five Papuans and their communities. Image: Stefan Armbruster

The audience was also treated to Q&A session with the film director, Dandhy Dwi Laksono and producer Victor Mambor, an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of Jubi Media, who first visited New Zealand 12 years ago.

Documented collusion
Investigative filmmaker Laksono gained a reputation for his 2019 documentary Sexy Killers, released just before the Indonesian general election year and documented the collusion between the political establishment and the destructive coal mining industry.

He was arrested later that year over tweets he posted about state violence in Papua.

Laksono and Mambor, along with co-director Cipri Dale, make up a formidable investigative team.

The storytelling focuses on the experiences of five Papuans and their communities:

Yasinta Moiwend was startled when, on a quiet morning, a massive ship docked at her village pier. The vessel carried hundreds of excavators and was escorted by military forces.

It was the first convoy of 2000 heavy machines to arrive in Papua under a National Strategic Project for food production, palm-based biodiesel, and sugarcane bioethanol.

Yasinta, a Marind Anim woman in Merauke, never realised that her village had been chosen as the ground zero for what would become the largest forest conversion project in modern history.

Vincen Kwipalo, from the Yei community, was likewise shocked when his clan’s land was suddenly marked with a sign reading: “Property of the Indonesian Army.” Only later did he learn that the land had been seized for the construction of a military battalion headquarters, at the very moment when a sugarcane plantation company was also encroaching on his ancestral forest.

Red Cross Movement
Threatened by the same project, Franky Woro and the Awyu community in Boven Digoel erected giant crosses and indigenous ritual markers on their land.

Known as the Red Cross Movement, this form of resistance has spread among Indigenous groups across South Papua.

More than 1800 red crosses have been planted to confront corporations and the military—both physically and spiritually. Though a Christian symbol is central to the movement, local Church pastors condemned it as not part of the church.

Film director Dandhy Dwi Laksono (right) and producer Victor Mambor talk to the audience at the Academy Cinema in Auckland last night. Image: Stefan Armbruster

Dr Kanem says the film could have explored why the Awyu and Marind people chose to use the red cross, a symbol strongly associated with Christian values?

“Why did they not use their own cultural attributes or symbols instead?” she adds.

Laksono says: “Pig Feast combines detailed field recordings with in-depth research to examine the power structures behind the operation.

“It exposes how government and corporate entities — collaborating with military and religious groups — advance international and national goals of ‘food security’ and ‘energy transition’ at the expense of Indigenous communities and landscapes.”

Multinational corporations
The documentary illustrates the networks of Indonesian elites, oligarchs, and multinational corporations that benefit from the project, providing a vivid depiction of the political ecology of Indonesian governance in Papua.

Pig Feast reveals how the system of colonialism remains intact today.

Asked at the screening how dangerous was the film making, Mambor described the hardships their small crew faced to “find the truth” under the noses of the Indonesian military.

He said they walked up to 17 km a day at times to get the exclusive footage obtained for the documentary.

International journalists are banned from West Papua and a 2019 resolution by the Pacific Islands Forum calling for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua to investigate allegations of human rights abuses has been ignored by Jakarta.

The film reveals how 10 companies — all owned by one family — gained the backing of three presidents.

The Jhonlin Group, owned by oligarch Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad (aka Haji Isam), ordered about 2000 excavators from Chinese company SANY, considered one of the largest orders of its kind in the world, to clear one million hectares.

Massive military involved in operations in West Papua — as shown in the film . . . Jakarta has second thoughts on Gaza “peacekeepers”. Image: Jubi Media screenshot APR

‘Second thoughts’ on Gaza
Q&A moderator Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), notes the massive military involved in the operations in West Papua — as shown in the film — and how Israel has been counting on Indonesia forming “the backbone” of the planned “International Stabilisation Force” for the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza with about 8000 troops because of its experience in “suppressing rebellion”.

“However, since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran it seems that Jakarta has now had second thoughts,” he said.

Indonesia has suspended all discussions on the so-called “Board of Peace” initiative launched by US President Donald Trump, citing the military escalation in the Middle East, reports Anadolu Ajansi.

Critics had argued that joining a council led by the Trump administration could undermine Indonesia’s longstanding support for the “free Palestinian” cause.

Indonesia’s Ulema Council, the country’s top Islamic scholar body, had also called for an immediate withdrawal from the Trump initiative.

West Papua youth leader and Pusaka environmental activist Dorthea Wabiser and international law researcher Kerry Tabuni. Image: Asia Pacific Report

The filmmakers and documentary will now go to Australia for screenings in Sydney, Melbourne and hopefully Brisbane.

West Papua updates
Earlier in the day, at a two-day West Papua Solidarity Forum at the University of Auckland, several speakers gave updates and an analysis on political and social developments in the repressed Melanesian region.

Among speakers were Papuan environmental campaigner for Pusaka Dorthea Wabiser, longtime Aotearoa and West Papua human rights campaigner Maire Leadbeater, Papuan cultural advocate Ronny Kareni , Hawai’ian academic Dr Emalani Case, Ngaruahine researcher Dr Arama Rata, PNG academic at Waikato University Nathan Rew, West Papuan scholar Kerry Tabuni, Green Party Pacific peoples and foreign affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono, and forum organiser Catherine Delahunty of the West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau and West Papua Action Aotearoa.

Catherine Delahunty introduces Viktor Yeimo in a video link message. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Viktor Yeimo, international spokesperson of the KNPB (National Committee for West Papua) and PRP (Papuan People’s Petition), and several Papuan community spokespeople shared messages by video link.

Yeimo spoke about how many students, activists, journalists, church leaders and communities of faith in West Papua faced risks when they spoke about justice and political rights.

“To ignite a large log, one must first find many small pieces [kindling],” he said. “Each piece alone cannot produce a great fire, but together they create enough heat to ignite something much larger.”

He said one pathway involved meaningful political reform within Indonesia, including stronger protection of Indigenous rights and genuine regional autonomy.

Another pathway involved inclusive political dialogue between the Indonesian government and legitimate representatives of Papuan society, like ULMWP (United Liberation Movement of West Papua).

A third pathway existed within international law, “it is the possibility of a self-determination process supervised by an international institution [such as the United Nations].”

He pointed to the progress of the self-determination processes of Bougainville and Kanak New Caledonia for example.

Yeimo said Papuans wanted to build a Pacific future “grounded in justice and solidarity”.

A Papuan rapper spoke on screen saying he wasn’t afraid of the repression of authorities, “but they seem to be afraid of me and my music.”

Pesta Babi (Pig Feast): Colonialism in our Time, directed by Dandhy Dwi Laksono and Cypri Dale; produced by Victor Mambor (Jubi Media, 2026, investigative documentary 90min).

West Papua Solidarity Forum organiser Catherine Delahunty and Green Party Pacific peoples and foreign affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono . . . only politician to front up, but he has long been a supporter of the West Papua cause. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Devastating new ‘ecocide’ film to premiere at West Papua solidarity forum weekend

APR editor — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:30:22 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

A new documentary film on the devastating “ecocide” happening in West Papua will be screened as a world premiere at a weekend solidarity forum in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau this weekend.

The 90min feature film, Pesta Babi (“Pig Feast”) — Colonialism In Our Time, produced by award-winning Papuan journalist Victor Mambor and directed by Dandhy Dwi Laksono, tells a story about the impact of the Indonesian government and military on the lives of thousands of Papuans trying to protect their rainforests from destruction.

It also relates the plight of thousands of internal refugees in the Melanesian region.

The peaceful resistance of local communities is revealed in the documentary as they face up to 54,000 Indonesian troops and large corporate entities make big profits at the expense of an ancient culture.

Dorthea Wabiser of the environmental and human rights group Pusaka, will speak on the deforestation and displacement of communities in the south-eastern district of Merauke where Indonesia is destroying 2.5 million ha of rainforest for palm oil, sugar cane, biodiesel, rice and other crops.

Military force is deployed to silence any dissent from communities.

“Pesta Babi” (Pig Feast). Trailer: Jubi Media

Solidarity group hosts
The solidarity group West Papua Action Aotearoa with West Papua Action Tāmaki are hosting the two-day public forum on March 7 and 8 with the speakers from West Papua including environmental champions and filmmakers who operate in militarised zones at considerable risk to their personal safety.

Also, a media talanoa featuring Jubi Media founder Victor Mambor and others will be hosted by the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub on March 9.

“The forum is an important event with a number of speakers and filmmakers from West Papua telling the hidden stories of the Indonesian occupation of their country,” said organiser Catherine Delahunty.

‘Kōrero with Victor Mambor’ . . . media forum open to the public, Monday, March 9. Poster: APMN

The climate impact of their destruction was incredibly serious as was the use of the military to enforce an end to traditional life, food sources, and forests, she said in a statement.

“These people are our Pacific neighbours with a devastating story to tell that our government and others across the world have chosen to ignore,” she said.

“They have a right to come here and to be heard despite the media bans in Indonesia and the desire of successive New Zealand governments to ignore structural genocide in our region.

NZ citizen kidnapped
“Only when a NZ citizen was kidnapped by Papuan soldiers did the government show any interest in West Papua, and this quickly faded once he was safely released thanks especially to West Papuan efforts.”

Other speakers at the forum include veteran activist and writer Maire Leadbeater, Green MP Teanau Tuiono, Hawai’an academic Dr Emalani Case, journalist and author Dr David Robie, Dr Arama Rata of Te Kuaka, and PNG academic Dr Nathan Rew.

Forum Day One (public sessons), Saturday, March 7: Old Choral Hall, University of Auckland, 7 Symonds St, 9am–4pm.
World Premiere of “Pesta Babi” (The Pig Feast) documentary with Q&A – The Academy Cinema, Lorne St, CBD (below the Auckland Public Library), March 7, 6-8.30pm.
Forum Day Two (solidarity development), Sunday, March 8: The Taro Patch, 9 Dunnotar Rd, Papatoetoe.
Media Talanoa, Monday, March 9: “Kōrero with Victor Mambor: West Papua: Journalism as Resistance” – Whānau Community Centre and Hub, 165 Stoddard Rd, Mt Roskill (Next to Harvey Norman), 6-8pm.
Further information: Catherine Delahunty, West Papua Action Tāmaki and West Papua Action Aotearoa. Tel: 021 2421967

Alternative Jewish Voices: Stop this Iran catastrophe!

APR editor — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:06:52 +0000

Alternative Jewish Voices — Sh’ma Koleinu

We, Alternative Jewish Voices, deplore Israel and America’s illegal war of aggression against Iran. We also condemned the repression of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that does not justify this war.

International war will only bring — is already bringing — more civilian death and destruction. We support the right of the Iranian people to determine their own future.

America and Israel again attacked Iran in mid-negotiation, three days after Iran’s Foreign Minister, Sayed Abbas Araghchi tweeted: “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

No one has offered the slightest contrary evidence.

This war of aggression violates international and US domestic law. After the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime”.

We see around us the world they were trying to avert: Israel has waged genocidal war on a trapped community and bombed six countries that were not at war.

This morning, Israel is occupying parts of Lebanon. Russia has invaded and pounded Ukraine for four years. Pakistan is bombing the cities of Afghanistan. US President Donald Trump doesn’t know what to grab next.

Imperial ambitions
We regard the attack on Iran as the latest enactment of longstanding imperial ambitions. How many countries has America tried to bomb into submission? How many times did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bomb the blockaded population of Gaza before America gave him the green light and the weapons to commit outright genocide?

This week, benefiting from the distraction of Iran, Israel has yet again sealed Gaza behind a total blockade. Aid agencies are again counting the days until they again run out of food.

Netanyahu boasts on camera that this war is “what I have yearned to do for 40 years”. Beware of men who prefer the risks of war to those of peace. Chaos and civilian misery are their signatures, but we share responsibility for their impunity.

Even after the horror of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon acquiesces to more war and speaks as if Trump and Netanyahu are trustworthy public officials.

Luxon’s appeasement disgraces us. We must not support this unfolding disaster, not materially and not out of the side of the Prime Minister’s mouth. We must say “No” in a bold, principled voice; joining states like Spain and Denmark.

As this fire spreads, we must also peer through the headlines and focus on the people of Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Civilians need protection, intervention and an end to the games of these warmongers.

We urge our morally vacuous government to stand with the civilians, the law and our future.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Sh’ma Koleinu is a collective of anti-Zionist Jews from the Far North to Dunedin. It has a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity, whether religious or secular or cultural. It is part of a movement for collective liberation, in Aotearoa and in Palestine.

Critics say weak NZ response over US-Israel attacks on Iran a ‘disgrace’

APR editor — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:43:41 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

New Zealand’s weak response to the unprovoked and illegal United States and Israel attacks on Iran at the weekend has stirred strong criticism from many quarters.

A former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, who also held a top United Nations position for eight years, labelled the government’s response “a disgrace”.

“In the absence of an imminent threat to the security of the United States and Israel, their armed attacks on Iran are illegal under international law,” she said. “They have no legitimate claim to invoking a right of self-defence.”

Clark was a Labour prime minister in New Zealand from 1999 to 2008 and administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) from 2009 to 2017.

Other critics of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ joint statement today condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel and on US assets in the Gulf States included the opposition Green Party, a geopolitical strategic analyst, and a Palestine justice advocate, warning that Washington and Tel Aviv were risking a risky power vacuum in Iran and chaos across the Middle East with democracy unlikely to succeed.

Luxon and Peters singled out Iran for criticism in their statement while virtually ignoring the fact that Israel and the US had initiated hostilities with their sudden attack, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior regime figures, while Washington was still engaged with Tehran in negotiations about a possible nuclear agreement.

pic.twitter.com/xOrzfHdhng

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) February 28, 2026

“We condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s indiscriminate retaliatory attacks on Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan,” they said. “We cannot risk further regional escalation, and civilian life must be protected.”

In Clark’s response, she also shared on social media a statement from The Elders, an independent advocacy group linking senior public figures including herself, which condemned the military strikes by the US and Israel as a “threat to regional and global security”.

“History shows that wars to force regime change deliver neither democracy nor stability,” said The Elders chair Juan Manuel Santos.

In absence of an imminent threat to security of US & Israel, the armed attacks on Iran are illegal under international law. The Iranian regime is a vicious theocracy which has caused huge trauma to its people. But that isn’t a reason for a breach of Iran’s sovereignty. @TheElders pic.twitter.com/zBeJn9jQ1m

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) February 28, 2026

“Trump and Netanyahu’s unilateral attack on Iran must be condemned as an illegal and unprovoked act against the people of the region and any genuine pathway to peace,” opposition Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said.

“This latest escalation in aggression is part of a decades-long pattern of behaviour of the US dragging the region into more wars, violence, and bloodshed.”

“First the US kidnaps the president of a sovereign state after killing more than a score of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence of wrongdoing,” said 36th Parallel Assessments director Dr Paul G Buchanan. “Now it kills the head of state and supreme religious leader of another sovereign state, teaming up with a regime credibly accused of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank in order to do so.”

He said the “selective unilateral application of force” without imminent threat from either country “demonstrates two things: 1) the US and Israel have gone rogue; and 2) in doing so they have set a dangerous precedent for others to follow suit (think China with regard to Taiwan)”.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-leader John Minto compared the current crisis with 1951 when Iran held its first democratic elections and elected its first democratic government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister.

“Two years later the US and UK put in place Operation Ajax which overthrew this democratically elected government because the Iranians had nationalised the extraction and export of Iranian oil.

“How dare the Iranians take control of their own resources!” Minto added in a statement.

“This first democratic government in Iran was replaced by the autocratic rule of the US-friendly Shah.

“Today the US and Israel have attacked Iran yet again because Iran supports the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom from Israel’s genocidal occupation of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing and theft of Palestinian land.

“The US and Israel have never been interested in the democratic freedoms of Iranians. They want Iranians to live under the dictatorship of a US-bought leadership — just as the people of Arab countries across the Middle East suffer today.”

Marilyn Garson: Waking up to terror in this new world of impunity

APR editor — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:10:41 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Marilyn Garson

Look around this morning.

America and Israel, nuclear-armed states have attacked Iran.

Israel, which has never declared its nuclear stockpiles nor its borders, has spent 2.5 years committing genocide against Gaza, a trapped community with no significant defensive weapons.

Israel has bombed six countries which are not at war with it. America funded it and elected Donald Trump to lead the violence from the front.

America and Israel pontificate about other states’ fitness to hold nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-armed Russia has invaded and battered Ukraine for four long years. Nuclear-armed Pakistan has begun to bomb the cities of Afghanistan, a state which lacks even an air force with which to defend its people (not that the Taliban care for the lives of their people).

We awake in the world that wise, caring people worked to avert for over a century; a world of impunity and gleeful slaughter by the already-overarmed.

People tried to minimise the risk and the harm of war with a few basic agreements. They dared to intervene for the protection and survival of civilians, doctors, journalists. They wrote laws to criminalise aggression and genocide.

All this is going up in smoke, and not one of the aggressors/provocateurs/genocidaires has a viable claim of self-defence.

How many people wake up in terror this morning (if they slept at all last night) in this new world?

Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent. Republished from her Facebook page with permission.

NZ rally slams Five Eyes intelligence ties hours before US-Israel attack on Iran

APR editor — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:00:36 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

Speakers at a pro-Palestine rally in central Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today were highly critical of the erosion of New Zealand’s once proud nuclear-free and independent foreign policy.

They also warned against being tied into a United States that is pivoting a hostile policy towards China, New Zealand’s major trading partner.

Ironically, just hours after the rally ended news broke of the unprovoked and illegal attack by Israel and the US against Iran barely eight months after a 12-day war last year.

With a theme posing the question “Is New Zealand a peace loving nation or a cog in the US war machine,” the speakers concluded at Te Komititanga Square that indeed the Pacific country was a “US war machine cog”.

Physicist Dr Peter Wills, a long-time activist and advocate for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, focused on New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

He said the Five Eyes relationship has superseded ANZUS “or anything else”, saying while the pact formalised in 1946 used to be intelligence, now it was the name of a five-nation military grouping.

“That’s the Anglo-Saxon countries,” he said. “Us good English-speaking people, you know, the white imperialists and colonialists of the world – the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and little old New Zealand.

“We’re all a part of it.

Eavesdropping on countries
“It used to be an intelligence agreement because they would talk about what they have listened to with other countries by eavesdropping on their radio communications and so on.

“But now everything has become so integrated, they have become the centre of war fighting.”

An Auckland protester with a “fake ceasefire” banner criticising the almost daily violations by Israel in Gaza. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Explaining further, Dr Wills said: “And so they have this thing that they call C-5, which is command control for communications, computers and cyber.”

He said a top priority project was to make up a globally integrated “all domain” command and control system, which was hoped to be in place for next year.

The project had been discussed in Portsmouth, UK, in May 2024. Its purpose was to track friendly and enemy forces and send orders for attack.

“All domains – navy, land, air and space forces,” said Dr Wills, an honorary professor.

Globally integrated intelligence and military actions could be launched and directed anywhere in the world.

Protesters at today’s pro-Palestine rally in Te Komititanga Square. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Countering China
It was electronic infrastructure for a superpower confrontation – to “develop a credible and effective combined all-domain command and control capability for operations to counter China”.

For Five Eyes officers overseeing these new digital and AI war-fighting systems at the Portsmouth meeting, a key objective was building the capability for confrontation with China.

“This means NZ following the US into military conflict with China,” Dr Wills said.

“We are involved in GIDE – Global Information Dominance Experiments, a new one is prepared every three months.

“And we will align with whatever is chosen by Five Eyes, either British or American.”

From an American point of view, said Dr Wills, New Zealand was a US ally, eager to play a role, “however small we are, to supporting the US around the globe”.

They also wanted NZ to get rid of its anti-nuclear legislation and return to ANZUS. This was the view of senior military officers and senior foreign affairs and intelligence officials

US ‘instability and bullying’
However, the majority of New Zealanders saw the US as a “source of instability and bullying” of New Zealand over its nuclear stand.

Dr Wills said New Zealand was influenced by the Anglo-American alliance today on many fronts, such as:

NZ Navy ships transiting “provocatively” through the South China Sea;
Being pressured to double military spending,;
Being pressured to join the “anti-China” AUKUS alliance;
The recent opening of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Wellington; and
New Zealand playing an increasing role in space warfare.

But Dr Wills warned people “don’t give up – they haven’t won, not even with their arguments”.

He also called on people to become better informed, such as reading Nicky Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars.

Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and his mokopuna (saxophone) . . . their rendition of “We Are All Palestinians” was dedicated to activist and Kia Ora Gaza co-founder Roger Fowler who died last Saturday. Image: Asia Pacific Report

NZ’s nuclear-free stance
Other speakers included nuclear-free New Zealand historian and activist Maire Leadbeater, who outlined the early trajectory of the country’s opposition to French nuclear tests in the Pacific by dispatching a frigate to Moruroa, and the campaign to declare New Zealand nuclear-free.

She said New Zealand had led the way in the 1970s and 1980s and could take a principled independent foreign policy stand again.

The rally also invoked the spirit of Kia Ora Gaza co-founder and campaigner Roger Fowler, who died last Saturday and who was farewelled at a “celebration of life” ceremony at Ngā Tapuwae Community Centre in Mangere East on Wednesday.

Veteran Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and his grandson on the saxophone played a rousing rendition of the popular song “We Are All Palestinians”, created by Fowler, and South African-born activist Achmat Esau read out his poem, “Roger, I Did Not Know” in tribute.

Local plumber Hannah Spencer beats both Reform and Labour to win UK byelection

APR editor — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:06:56 +0000

Novara Media

In a spectacular triumph, Britain’s Green Party has won the Gorton and Denton byelection in Greater Manchester.

Local plumber Hannah Spencer has now become the party’s fifth MP — a historic victory for the ascendent Greens, who ran a campaign of national hope and international solidarity against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The byelection result is also a huge upset in Britain’s political status quo.

The Labour party, which won the seat with more than 50 percent of the vote in 2024 and held the seat for many years, was pushed into third place behind Reform UK. No more.

After coming third behind the Greens and Reform, questions over the future of the party’s leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, now grow increasingly urgent.

Meanwhile, Reform UK came second. On their own terms, a result.

Clear defeat by Left
And yet, a clear defeat by the Left. Its candidate, Matt Goodwin, along with the party as a whole, will now be taking stock, disappointed that a major target constituency has rejected them.

The Greens stormed the seat and Spencer won a majority of more than 4000 despite a race sullied by dirty tricks and cynicism from a Labour Party that appeared desperate at every turn.

Tactics included an invented electoral organisation and misinformation over polling. A last ditch effort to transport Starmer to the constituency may have amounted to a final and fatal backfire.

This is the second byelection loss to the Green Party since Labour’s general election victory in 2024.