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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The official Naza documentary trailer.                  Video: Madman Films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote for the three progressive parties — Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori — in next month’s general election if you want to see a principled Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy stance based on international law and justice.

Here is how Aotearoa New Zealand’s political parties stand on the Palestinian solidarity movement’s four key demands this election:

This year’s election provides the movement a crucial opportunity to educate and encourage the public to elect representatives who will take a stand for justice and be accountable to us, the people.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Party reports

Rating footnotes:
However, Opportunity wants any goods and services produced inside the Zionist state to be “unaffected” by sanctions.

Te Pāti Māori, the Greens and Labour have committed to comprehensive sanctions, using a framework based on the Russia Sanctions Act.

The language of this Bill would offer the solidarity movement the possibility to organise together for wider-ranging sanctions (eg. targeting complicit states and international financial backers of the genocide and occupation).

While Te Pāti Māori has had the clearest and strongest position on Palestine and related issues throughout the past 3 years, their campaign is calling for electorate votes only.

Te Pāti Māori is encouraging voters to cast their party vote for the Greens or Labour.

The Opportunity Party’s commitment to sanctions targets goods produced in illegal settlements and travel bans on individuals. Opportunity would consider divesting public money if it fit UN criteria of supporting the illegal occupation.

This scorecard is endorsed by Justice for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and Dayenu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded this year’s prize to Navi Pillay for her lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability.

Following a long and distinguished career as a human rights-focused jurist, South African-born Pillay was appointed chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2021.

Quite predictably, within hours of the announcement of her award, President Trump said he should have won eight “Noble” (sic) prizes, that the decision was an indelible stain on Norway, and he would impose fresh sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) established to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

• READ MORE: Nobel Peace Prize honours Navi Pillay for lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability
• A triumph for global justice – why Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize is beyond reproach

Happy to do his master’s bidding, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US would punish the choice of Pillay by “dismantling the ICC brick by brick, … we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate”.

In lockstep with his US patron, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared the choice of Pillay “a gross weaponisation of the Nobel Peace Prize…  If there was an award for lies, hatred and blood libel, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender, she’d be a front runner”.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has said nothing. Despite repeated claims to respect international law, a fearful silence is the best Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong can offer, a tactic suggesting a

cowardly sheltering behind the diatribes from Trump and Netanyahu.

A champion of human rights
In complete contrast to the Netanyahu criminality invective, Judge Pillay has promoted universal human rights, advocated respect for humanitarian law and, through her kindness and generosity, has represented the ideals of a common humanity.

Citations explaining Navi Pillay’s record explain why she is regarded as a champion of peace with justice and why so much is at stake in this controversy over her Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Committee explained their choice: “For her efforts to promote peace and international law.” … “History has shown that a world operating without the rule of law is unjust, unwise, and inhumane.”

A year earlier, Navi Pillay received the Sydney Peace Prize whose citation included reference to “a lifetime of advocating for the fundamental human rights of women”, due recognition of Judge Pillay’s campaigns to abolish female genital mutilation and forced child marriages.

Where is the gratitude?
Navi’s lifetime work has included a period as a judge on the ICC, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and chair of the UN Commission inquiring into war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Ever since her appointment as the first coloured, female judge to be appointed to the South African High Court, Navi Pillay has spoken and acted courageously.

Such a virtue has prompted ire from Israel and silence from Australia.

In her report to the UN, Judge Pillay concluded, “The State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Reference to Australian human rights abuses
Judge Pillay has also condemned Australia’s mandatory detention policy, repeatedly criticised offshore processing arrangements and the Northern Territory’s “imperialist, discriminatory attitude towards Indigenous communities”.

To tolerate criticism and still manage to act generously usually requires a touch of courage. In which case Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong still have a chance to congratulate Navi Pillay, if only because they regard themselves as champions of international humanitarian law.

Penny Wong’s silence is particularly notable, given her support for Venezuelan 2025 Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who handed her prize to Donald Trump.

An Australian government statement of support for the UN, for the Nobel Committee and for Navi Pillay’s humanity-saving achievements would still be invaluable.

But support for the Nobel choice of Navi Pillay cannot be expressed by silence.

COMMENTARY: By Nick Bollinger

I have to confess to a degree of imposter syndrome.

I was the wrong age and in the wrong place to be any part of this visionary organisation.

When the small group first gathered in the 1970s to plan what would be the foundations of the Ponsonby People’s Union (PPU), I would have been 12 or 13 and just starting secondary school at Onslow College in Johnsonville, near Wellington.

• READ MORE: From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice — David Robie
• Honouring the people’s fight against hardship, repression and racism — Tony Fala
• Other Ponsonby People’s Union reports

But even then, it would have been hard not to notice that there were things going on, out in the world beyond our school walls, that were challenging the way society was being run; that sought fairness and justice and peace.

For the past five or six years New Zealand had been involved in a war, waged by America against the Vietnamese, and it didn’t take much to see that this was completely wrong. There were marches through town on Friday nights, organised by people just a few years older than me; some who our government were trying to force into military training, perhaps even to fight in this unjust war.

And these were some of the first activities that me and my Onslow friends would join in on, that could be seen as part of the challenge to the powers that governed our society.

There were other things happening too that I wanted to be part of. Some were deadly serious, like the movement against nuclear weapons or apartheid in South Africa. And there were others that just looked like more fun than the mainstream version of life in New Zealand that was being offered – rock concerts and festivals, communes, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Hope, ideas, action
It was a time of hope, ideas, and action.

It felt, however loosely, like a movement.

It looked to me like an attempt to change the world.

And in many ways I think it did.

Sometimes that things that changed would change back again, as the forces of the establishment regrouped. Some things may have had destructive side-effects that no one really questioned enough at the time.

But there were also lives that were meaningfully improved, perhaps even saved, because of the ideals and the efforts of people who, in different ways, made up this movement.

It would take me a good few decades to get around to it, but a few years ago I set out to write a history of all of this, which I loosely termed the counterculture (because that is how other historians around the world had defined it — and versions of this movement did take place all over the world.)

Just too young
As I had been just too young to really be more than an observer, I wanted to fill in some gaps in my experience. I wanted to know more about the people who had driven the movement in this country, where their ideas had come from, how they had developed them and put them into action and, ultimately, what had happened as a result.

I began interviewing people who had been involved – whether it had been in the protest activities, or the early bookshops, or the music festivals.

And I would always ask these people who they thought I should talk to; who else had been involved and might have valuable stories to share?

A name that would come up with amazing frequency was that of Roger Fowler.

Now as I’ve said in the introduction to this book, Roger would no doubt have been embarrassed to find his name in the first sentence because – as I discovered when I met him – his ethos was always one of co-operation, the power of people working together to achieve a common goal rather that the celebration of the individual.

As I worked on my project I began to see that sometimes a shared energy and sense of purpose can help unite a group of likeminded people who might not otherwise have found a focus for their own energies.

And I’m sure that for many people that is what Roger provided, and that was one of his great gifts.

Roger was involved in many, many causes and projects, both before and after the PPU, but it’s the PPU that we’re celebrating here today and it is a great example of something he achieved and how it was achieved.

Jumping Sundays
When I completed my book about the counterculture in Aotearoa, I named it after something else Roger was involved with, something perhaps more frivolous but which seemed to me to be a symbol of those times: I called it Jumping Sundays, which was the name by which people referred to the Sunday afternoon people’s festivals that took place in Albert Park, and where Roger would often perform with his band, the Frank E. Evans Memorial Lunchtime Entertainment Band.

In Jumping Sundays, I attempted, perhaps over-ambitiously, to look at all the aspects of this movement and show some of the connections and even contradictions between its different facets. So there’s a chapter on the Vietnam War but also one on communes; a chapter about alternative media – the underground newspapers and the Resistance Bookshop (something else Roger was involved with) – but there are also chapters on drugs and sex and rock’n’roll.

To fit it all in, I had to compress an awful lot of information. I believe that in the index to Jumping Sundays there are four entries for the People’s Union, but really it adds up to just a couple of pages in which I couldn’t do much more than outline how this organisation came about, who was involved and a few of the things that they did.

So I’m very glad that this new book has been put together from the memories and stories and writings and photographs of the people who were actually there. It’s like zooming in on those few paragraphs I wrote and expanding it to show us all the detail and colour that I could only hint at.

I’m hoping other people today will talk about some of the specific things the Ponsonby People’s Union achieved – whether it was providing cheap food for hungry families or staging occupations of substandard housing when landlords needed an extra nudge; the bus visits to prisons, or the way they worked with other groups like the Polynesian Panthers to fight racism on this city’s streets.

But the final thing I’d like to say is that, looking back on the counterculture era, in all its different dimensions, which ranged from the revolutionary to the ridiculous, the PPU for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most practical, principled, and inspiring example of countercultural ideals put into action.

This book is a reminder of what is possible. I believe that back then they used to call it “survival pending revolution”.

And we’ve never needed that more than now.

Nick Bollinger is a Wellington-based writer, historian, broadcaster and critic. He was a music columnist for The Listener for more than 20 years, has written for Mojo and been the voice of Radio New Zealand’s music review programme The Sampler.

Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.

Thousands of people took to the streets across Aotearoa New Zealand on Saturday, standing in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Global Day of Action. Yet where was the media coverage?

From Auckland to Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and communities across the country, people turned out to demand justice, freedom and an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

These are not insignificant gatherings. These are people exercising their democratic right to protest, raising their voices against injustice and demanding accountability.

• READ MORE: Aotearoa marches, vigils kick-off ‘global day of action’ for Palestine with mass protests in dozens of countries
• Tens of thousands join pro-Palestinian march in New Zealand — coverage in 2025
• Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

When thousands take to the streets for Palestine, that is news. When their voices are barely heard, that raises serious questions about media priorities.

Whose voices are being amplified, and whose are being pushed to the margins?

New Zealanders deserve journalism that reflects what is happening in their communities — not selective silence when the issue is Palestine.

The media cannot claim to represent the public while overlooking thousands of people demanding justice.

Palestine is not going away. Our voices are not going away. And neither is our demand for justice.

Do your job. Cover the protests. Let the public see what is happening.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Mass pro-Palestine protests across at least 60 countries in more than 250 locations worldwide were launched as part of a Global Day of Action beginning in Aotearoa New Zealand today.

Thousands of people took part in solidarity rallies and marches in the three largest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — and vigils and actions happened at least 23 other places around the country.

An estimated 15,000 people, including representives of more than 50 organisations and movements backing the global action took part in the march up Queen Street from downtown Te Komititanga Square next to the Waitemata transport hub to Albert Park.

• READ MORE: Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

Giant banners proclaiming “Genocide is a crime — Free Palestine” and “Global March for Palestine – NZ Sanction Israel now” were carried by lead marchers, and posters displaying slogans such as “The genocide feeds on the silence”, “Freedom for Palestine”, and “Bombing and shooting kids is not self-defence — Free Palestine” were carried throughout the crowd.

One cardboard poster said “The intifada is global now” and another “The Epstein class are killers”, referring to allegations in the United States against members of the elite, including President Donald Trump.

A counter-protest was staged by supporters of Israel and the Shah’s regime in Iran — waving Israeli, Lion and Sun flags of the ousted monarchy, Stars and Stripes and Union Jack flags — but this was dwarfed by the pro-Palestine rally.

Police kept the peace and 1News reported just one minor incident.

Detained and tortured
Before the march began, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a coalition of groups, two protesters who had been on Gaza freedom flotillas in humanitarian aid efforts to break the siege and had been detained and tortured by Israeli security forces talked of their experiences.

Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto), son-in-law of the late Kia Ora Gaza activist Roger Fowler, condemned a recent “Indigenous” delegation from New Zealand hosted by Israel and said this was undermining Tangata Whenua solidarity with Palestinians.

“We know what settler colonialism is,” he said.

Youssef Sammour, a Palestinian Christian who has joined three peace flotillas to Gaza, spoke about the question being asked by millions of people around the world: “How is this still happening?”

“For three years, we have watched the destruction of Gaza. Homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Entire families erased. Children killed, maimed, orphaned and left to starve.

“Premature babies intentionally left to die in their incubators. The videos. The images. The screams.

“For 78 years, Palestinians have been fighting for their freedom, dignity and the right to live in our own land.”

In Albert Park, representatives of opposition parties pledged their support for a change in government policy in active support for Palestine if elected on November 7.

The Labour Party foreign affairs spokesperson Vanushi Walters told the crowd that New Zealand could not stand by in the face of genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and ongoing violations of international law.

The party has made it clear that a Labour-led government would recognise the State of Palestine, including diplomatically with presentation of credentials, impose economic sanctions on Israel via new laws similar to the Russian Sanctions Act, support South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and ensure our Super Fund and ACC divest from companies identified by the UN as operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Today was the third anniversary of protests against the Israeli genocide.

Major global protests
Meanwhile, the Middle East Eye reports that capital cities across the globe will see major protests and actions in support of Palestine today, according to the Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP).

The statement says that more than 200 organisations will be mobilising for a mass “synchronised Global Day of Action”, involving civil society groups, trade unions, student federations and human rights networks across 60 countries.

The global event is organised by GAFP alongside the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and Global Coalition Against Occupation of Palestine (SANED).

The Global March for Palestine action in Christchurch Ōtautahi today. Video: PSNA

“As governments actively fund, arm, and protect Israel from any legal accountability, grassroots movements are refusing to allow this genocide to become normalised as the status quo,” GAFP wrote.

It added that the event “marks a decisive shift, moving beyond symbolic protest toward direct civil intervention to shut down public complicity and demand systemic accountability for Israel’s war crimes and genocide”.

Anas Altikriti, secretary-general of the Global Alliance for Palestine, said that the third anniversary marking Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza was a “stark, devastating reminder of the unbearable terror and suffering that the Palestinian people had been forced to endure every single day for three years”.

“As world powers remain silent and complicit, civil society is rising,” he added, saying that the global demonstration is a a direct response to “this ongoing horror”.

‘Global conscience’
Altikriti described the event as a “declaration that the global conscience will not stand idly by as a genocide is normalised”.

“We are taking to the streets to demand total accountability, an immediate end to the siege, and a free Palestine.”

Participating organisations in more than 250 locations worldwide are expected to shut down civic squares, encircle government buildings and blockade corporate entities directly tied to military supply chains.

“The objective is clear: render normal commerce and political diplomacy impossible while Israel’s genocide continues uninterrupted.”

As well as mass protests in major capitals worldwide, in cities like Athens and Modena, the coalition indicated that “actions will extend across multiple days with cultural sit-ins, public teach-ins, and large-scale visual projections highlighting Israel’s war crimes directly onto government and corporate buildings”.

“Three years into Israel’s genocide, the global movement for Palestine has grown in power, unity, and resolve,” the statement added.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

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

He is being abandoned even by his closest allies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to be rid of him.

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

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

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

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

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

The antagonism is, in part, personal.

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

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

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

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

But, of course none of this came to pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all patent nonsense.

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

None dissented. All engaged in genocidal incitement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And inside the ghetto came Israel’s attacks:

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

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

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

Then Palestinians tried peaceful resistance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 2023: Israel killed another 33 Palestinians.

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

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

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

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

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

It came after decades of illegal occupation.

And what followed is genocide by Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It does not.

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

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

Palestine Forum of New Zealand stands with Palestinians in Aotearoa and around the world, remembering generations of dispossession and struggle, honouring those who have been lost, and reaffirming the Palestinian people’s enduring demand for freedom, dignity and justice.

We remember. We resist. We remain.

Palestinian history did not begin yesterday, and it will not end today.

• READ MORE: October 7: How three years of Israel’s genocidal war have changed Gaza

For generations, Palestinians have remained connected to their homeland, their families, their culture and their identity despite displacement, occupation and profound loss.

Our story is not defined by a single day.

It is a story of steadfastness, memory, resilience and an unwavering determination to see Palestine free.

From the river to the sea, and across the diaspora, we will continue to speak, organise and stand for justice.

Survived for generations
Palestinians have survived generations of displacement, dispossession and attempts to erase their history and identity. Yet we remain.

Remembering is not about looking backwards. It is about understanding why Palestinians continue to demand freedom and justice and why the world must not look away.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand calls on Aotearoa New Zealand to stand consistently for human rights, international law, Palestinian self-determination and accountability, and to recognise that Palestinian lives, land, history and dignity cannot be treated as secondary or expendable.

We will not be silent. We will continue to speak, organise and advocate. We will continue to stand alongside Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the diaspora.

For us, remembrance is also resistance. Every Palestinian story preserved, every family connection maintained, every child taught their history, and every voice raised for justice is an affirmation that Palestine and its people cannot be erased.

The Palestinian struggle is a struggle for the right to live freely, safely and with dignity in the land to which generations of Palestinians remain connected.

We remember.

We resist.

We remain.

And we will continue to work for a future in which Palestinians are free.

Palestine will be free.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand will be the first to kick off a Global Day of Action next Saturday marking 1100 days of Israeli genocide with a rally and march in the heart of the country’s largest city.

Many other protests will be carried out across the country in a wave of solidarity for the people of Palestine suffering from genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP) has issued an urgent call for support worldwide for upholding international law.

• READ MORE: Challenging apartheid, defending human rights and amplifying global solidarity for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“In Aotearoa New Zealand, our kaupapa/purpose is to build a landmark demonstration here as part of this worldwide global mobilisation for Palestine, with demonstrations in every major city,” the local organisers for a grand coalition of activist groups, churches and solidarity movements.

“Why does it matter? This mobilisation marks three years — 1100 days — of Israel’s systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Media contact Rana Hamida for the Global March for Palestine Coalition (Tāmaki Makaurau) said: “International law is not optional. On October 10, we the people of the world and here in Aotearoa, demand an end to the violence, complicity and the enabling of a system that fuels crimes against humanity.

“New Zealand has the responsibility to stand on the right side of history, and we will hold our elected government accountable.”

Ceasefire ‘fiction’
The coalition’s statement said that despite diplomatic language and the “fiction of a ceasefire, the bombing of Gaza has not stopped”.

More than 74,200 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including more than 18,000 children, and about 70 percent of buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.

In the West Bank, land seizures and forced displacement continue.

The protest coalition said the New Zealand government had refused to “act meaningfully against this genocide. This is complicity.” The following “lack of action” was cited:

• Silence on illegal land seizures — Even when 22 countries, including Australia, Britain and Canada, condemned the latest West Bank land seizure, New Zealand stayed silent;
• Refusal to recognise Palestine — The coalition had the chance to recognise Palestine alongside Australia, the UK and Canada, but refused, calling it a matter of “when, not if” — then did nothing;
• Blocking sanctions — Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill was denied even a first reading;
• Failure to support the ICJ case — The government does not support South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which centres on Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza;
• Refusal to ban IDF holiday visas — The government will not alter the Working Holiday Scheme with Israel;
• Ignoring Rocket Lab and Black Sky concerns — The Palestine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa raised concerns with then Defence Minister Judith Collins in November 2024; she refused to investigate. On 12 August 2026, court proceedings were filed in the High Court of Wellington challenging the government’s approval of BlackSky satellites launched from the Rocket Lab site at Māhia, for spying for Israel over Gaza;
• Ongoing military cooperation — The NZDF sent its largest contingent in a decade to RIMPAC 2026, alongside Israel and the US; and
• Denying evidence of illegal abduction and torture. The government has dismissed evidence that Israel illegally abducted and tortured New Zealand citizens and tangata whenua during the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian mission, including videos posted by Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir himself showing him taunting and abusing detained flotilla participants.

23+ protests nationwide
More than 23 demonstrations will take place across the motu/nation on October 10, from Whangārei in the north to Waihōpai Invercargill in the south — making this one of the largest coordinated days of action for Palestine ever seen in this country,” said the protest coalition statement.

“In Tāmaki Makaurau alone, more than 50 organisations have endorsed the Auckland rally and march, which will assemble at 2pm at Te Komititanga/Britomart Square before marching to Albert Park,” the statement said.

Groups taking part include 350 Aotearoa, Alternative Jewish Voices, Amnesty International Aotearoa, Auckland Peace Action, Banners for Palestine, Bayan Aotearoa New Zealand, Council of Islamic Organisations of New Zealand, Dayenu: New Zealand Jews against Occupation, Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa, ISO – University of Auckland, Justice for Palestine, Kaiāwhina, Kia Ora Gaza, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, Palestinian Forum of New Zealand, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Pax Christi Aotearoa, Polynesian Panther Party Aotearoa, Stop Wars Aotearoa, Students’ Justice for Palestine, Toitū te Tiriti, and Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Aotearoa.

The march will feature speakers spanning human rights and social justice organisations, political parties, Palestinian families and performances from local artists.

The protesters are demanding:

• Sanction Israel immediately and isolate the apartheid regime. Introduce comprehensive sanctions now, particularly targeting companies supporting illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This includes imposing an immediate arms embargo, supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, and backing Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill;
• Uphold international law and end impunity. This includes supporting South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice;
• Recognise the State of Palestine;
• End complicity in military supply chains. Halt the export of surveillance technology and other dual-use goods that aid Israel’s military operations, including the launch of BlackSky satellites from Rocket Lab’s Māhia site;
• Expel the Israeli Ambassador and stop the diplomatic cover;
• Revoke the IDF holiday visas programme;
• Permit Palestinian families to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, as was done for Ukrainian families; and Exit RIMPAC and Five Eyes for a robust, independent foreign policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investigating war crimes in Gaza                     Video: Al Jazeera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro-Palestine protesters targeted Christchurch’s Te Pae Convention Centre yesterday to highlight the National Aerospace Summit’s alleged ties with Israeli military.

The protesters from Peace Action Ōtautahi started their action at Victoria Park from 7am, Allied Media reports.

Police said two men, aged 56 and 23, had been arrested after vehicles were allegedly used to block emergency entrances to the aerospace summit.

• READ MORE: Two arrested as anti-Israel protesters target New Zealand Aerospace Summit
  
• Protesters block Aerospace Summit in Christchurch in 2025
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Last year 30 people were arrested during a similar protest.

The protesters aimed to raise public awareness of what it said were ties between the aerospace sector, the United States military, and Israeli Defence Force, which has been condemned worldwide for its almost three years of genocide in Gaza killing at least 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Along with Palestinian flags, protesters’ banners declared “Stop arming Israel”, “No weapons in Ōtautahi,” “Keep space for peace”, “If the [NZ] government won’t shut down war criminals, the people will”, and “Sanction Israel for genocide”.

About 600 delegates were reportedly attending the summit, with speakers and delegations from the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Representatives from the European Union and European Space Agency were also taking part.

Police Superintendent Lane Todd said officers respected the right to peaceful protest, but “will not tolerate actions that threaten public safety or intimidate others exercising their lawful rights”.

A Peace Action Ōtautahi spokesperson said its “Swarm the Summit” protest concerns centred on the dual-use nature of aerospace technology and links between some summit exhibitors and military operations.

Palestinian lawyer Muhammad Dahleh says moves to exclude Palestinian-led parties and candidates from Israel’s elections this month amount to “institutional discrimination,” arguing that the disparity is rooted in Israeli law, reports Al Jazeera.

His comments come as a hearing in the Israeli Supreme Court is under way this week to consider the decision to disqualify the country’s main Arab-majority political lists from the elections on October 27.

“Basically, it’s institutional discrimination, but it goes back to the legislation itself,” Dahleh told Al Jazeera in an interview from occupied East Jerusalem.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza, Palestine reports

He said Israel’s Basic Laws barred parties that denied the country’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, as well as parties or candidates deemed to support armed struggle by a hostile state, or an organisation designated by Israel as a “terrorist organisation”.

“That’s what they are using now against the Arab or the Palestinian parties inside Israel,” Dahleh said.

He contrasted their exclusion with the treatment of extremist Israeli politicians accused of making inflammatory statements against Palestinians.

“This discrimination, as I said, it’s institutionalised. It’s set in the law itself,” Dahleh said.

Gaza death toll hits 74,000+
Meanwhile, the eath toll from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has risen to 74,040, according to the Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Eight people have been killed and 26 wounded in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip over the latest 24-hour reporting period, according to the ministry.

The ministry said 1439 people had now been killed and 5052 wounded since a “ceasefire” took effect in October.

Israel has killed at least 74,040 Palestinians and wounded 175,168 since October 2023 when its genocidal war on Gaza began, the ministry said.

Al Jazeera has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack against the network during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the news channel reports.

In a statement on Friday, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “categorically rejects” Netanyahu’s remarks, regarding them as the latest example of Israel’s “sustained campaign against Al Jazeera and its journalists”.

In his address at the UNGA on Thursday, where he attacked critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu singled out Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s remarks about the network in his address to the UN General Assembly
• Al Jazeera decries ‘unfounded’ Israeli claims about its Gaza journalists
• ‘Baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide’ – Mayor Mamdani hits back after Netanyahu’s attacks during UN speech
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

He called the network one of the world’s “toxic media outlets” that intends to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel”.

Al Jazeera said Netanyahu wanted to stop the outlet from “reporting facts from the ground, documenting events, providing context and ensuring that a range of voices and perspectives are heard”.

Further rejecting Netanyahu’s verbal assault, Al Jazeera said the fact that “such rhetoric was delivered from the podium of the United Nations is a matter of particular concern, given the threat such rhetoric poses to the safety of Al Jazeera journalists working in the field”.

“This rhetoric cannot be separated from the heavy toll borne by Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza,” the network’s statement added.

Israel’s war on journalists -targeting Al Jazeera               Video: Al Jazeera

270+ journalists killed in Gaza
More than 270 journalists have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal onslaught. At least 12 of the victims had been reporting for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera said the network “has lost a number of journalists and camera operators while they were carrying out their work. Some were subjected to campaigns of incitement and vilification before being targeted”.

Of the more than 75,000 people killed in Gaza, at least 706 are family members of journalists of Palestinian journalists, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

Israel has repeatedly cracked down on Al Jazeera and used pressure campaigns against Qatar.

Two years ago, Israel’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the network’s broadcasts. This came after Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the government to temporarily close down foreign media outlets it deemed a “threat to security”.

“These measures do not target Al Jazeera alone; they also undermine the right of every person to access truthful information and independent journalistic coverage,” Al Jazeera said on Friday.

It added that “the role of journalism is to provide the world with facts and context, while respecting the right and ability of individuals to assess sources and form their own opinions.”

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from Al Jazeera.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit back after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium to accuse him of supporting Hamas and making Jewish New Yorkers “feel unsafe” — remarks that came after delegates from scores of countries walked out of the chamber to protest against the far-right fugitive’s presence.

Refuting allegations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — where Israeli forces have killed more than 75,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,500 children, since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023 — Netanyahu said: “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you.”

“Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the prime minister claimed. “It’s no wonder … You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Pezeshkian speaks from the heart, but with legal, moral and strategic clarity
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

“And that’s exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”

Mamdani issued a statement later saying: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide of Palestinians.

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are accused of murder and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated them.

Third country arrest
While neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC, the treaty states that people from nonsignatory states who commit alleged crimes in states that are party to the treaty — as Palestine is — can be arrested in third countries and subsequently tried by the court.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Abbas and Netanyahu address the UNGA     Video: Al Jazeera

Mamdani has said that Netanyahu should be arrested and brought before the Hague-based tribunal for trial, but that he lacks the legal authority to apprehend the prime minister in New York.

The International Court of Justice — also located in The Hague, Netherlands — is currently processing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

The case is based on what the ICJ called the “plausibility” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The court has issued a series of provisional orders for Israel to adhere to the Genocide Convention — orders that critics say Israel has simply ignored.

Last year, an independent UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and other experts, including many Israeli and diaspora Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others.

As Netanyahu prepared to deliver his UN speech on Thursday, delegates from a reported 77 nations walked out of the chamber in protest.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” the prime minister said. “Thank you very much.”

While some observers applauded the display of solidarity with Palestinians, others expressed disgust that Netanyahu was allowed to address the world body and that he has not yet been brought to justice.

War criminal Netanyahu has completely isolated Israel at the world stage – When he came today to UN General Assembly podium to speak, there was mass walkout and he was booed. Shamelessly, he called them ‘moral cowards’! pic.twitter.com/w5Oo78SeJv

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

UN failure to stop genocidal war
“The head of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, a fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, was allowed to enter the US and to address the UNGA today, without arrest,” said Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in protest of what he described as the world body’s failure to stop Israel’s genocidal war.

“Netanyahu insulted delegations, openly celebrated the regime’s many crimes, bragged about its terrorist pager attacks on Lebanon, repeated the regime’s debunked genocide propaganda, defended the illegal occupation of Palestine and Syria, lied incessantly, called violent, racist, illegal Zionist settlers ‘peaceful’ and ‘honorable people,’ labeled human rights defenders as ‘antisemites,’ even arrogantly attacked American citizens and officials for speaking out against the regime’s crimes,” he continued.

“This violent psychopath cannot hide behind [US President Donald] Trump’s skirts forever,” Mokhiber added. “He (and his collaborators) must be captured and brought to justice. And the UN must finally act to isolate the regime and hold it accountable. ”

Referring to Netanyahu’s address and Trump’s threat on Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran during his rambling, lie-laden General Assembly speech, University of Colorado Law School associate professor Maryam Jamshidi said on social media, “Between Trump threatening Iran w/annihilation and Netanyahu bragging about Israel’s pager attacks, the UN podium has become a venue for promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Meanwhile, people took to the streets of New York to protest Netanyahu’s presence in the city, US complicity in Israeli crimes, and to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside UN headquarters in Turtle Bay for a sit-in demonstration led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Demonstrators blocked roads while chanting slogans including, “Netanyahu you can’t hide, you are wanted for genocide!”

As Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Among those reportedly arrested were progressive congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; actors Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, and Cynthia Nixon; New York state Assemblymember Emily Gallagher (D-50); Democratic New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés; former Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; and Palestinian American political activist Linda Sarsour.

“I will never, ever be silent,” Sarsour said on Facebook. “I will never just accept the world as it is. I want history to record for future generations of Palestinians that we fought. At every turn. In every way. When it was easy and when it was hard.”

“I want Palestinian girls in Gaza to see me in my hijab and my unapologetic Palestinian blood fighting for them to live FREE,” she added. “This is bigger than all of us. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in The Hague, not the United Nations.”

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams on a Creative Commons licence.

President Masoud Pezeshkian came to New York with a written text. After hearing US President Donald Trump at the same rostrum the day before, he set it aside, telling delegates he had prepared a speech before the US president called Iran a terrorist state.

He was, by most accounts, the first leader to speak at the UN in person in the middle of a war with the United States.

Speaking from the heart is why the historic address will be heard well beyond the hall. It should not hide how precise it was — legally, morally and strategically.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

He opened with photographs of dead children, victims of American and Israeli bombs, and a direct reply: “We have been the victims of terrorism.

“We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists.”

Palestinians know this inversion well. A people defends itself, and the aggressor calls the defence terrorism. Anyone who has watched the last seven months with clarity will recognise it.

He answered the bullying Trump had put on display, musing aloud about “annihilating” Iran, by standing on the ground of law. Everything said against Iran from that podium, he argued, contradicted the UN Charter.

Use of force, threats forbidden
He is right. Article 2(4) forbids not only the use of force but the threat of it, and a head of state weighing the annihilation of a fellow member state before the General Assembly is as plain a threat as the Charter’s drafters could have imagined.

Iran asks for no special treatment, only the sovereign equality the Charter promises every member. On the nuclear file, his formula was “no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”

That is the NPT’s own bargain: the treaty bars non-nuclear states from acquiring the bomb, and its Article IV guarantees the “inalienable right” of every party to peaceful nuclear energy “without discrimination.”

He was equally plain that Iran built its defences to guarantee that any strike on its cities is answered. In Nicaragua v. United States, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that international law places no limit on a sovereign state’s armaments beyond what it accepts by treaty.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian displays images of Iran’s martyred Leader and the several children murdered in the US-Israeli attacks on Iran during his UNGA address.

Follow Press TV on Telegram: https://t.co/GHI09iAGh2 pic.twitter.com/eGDt1DDAHA

— Press TV (@PressTV) September 23, 2026

He also took apart the Israeli-made story that Iran’s political establishment is on the verge of collapse, and that Iranians would welcome foreign invaders. For seven months people have been in the streets daily in support of the defence effort.

The same fact answers Trump’s claim that the Iranian state has killed tens of thousands of its own people. A population does not rally under bombardment behind a government it regards as its killer.

Naming the war crimes
Then he named the war crimes. He showed images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab and of a sports hall in Lamerd where children had been playing. A weapon that scatters tens of thousands of tungsten fragments cannot be used on a school or a gymnasium without striking indiscriminately.

A UN fact-finding mission reported this month that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in the February 28 strikes. The US delegate left the hall during this passage. Pezeshkian drew the parallel with Gaza, where the ICJ has ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and former defence minister.

He turned next to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Israel stays outside the NPT and accepts no comprehensive safeguards, although the Security Council called on it in Resolution 487 of 1981 to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, and the General Assembly repeats the call every year.

Israel has struck the capitals of its neighbours in breach of the Charter and carries out a documented pattern of war crimes, yet keeps its weapons with impunity. Iran, which has acted only in self-defence for two centuries, is sanctioned and attacked instead, although its facilities remain under an IAEA safeguards agreement.

On Hormuz, he described a strait closed to Iran even as it serves to ship missiles and weaponry into the surrounding region. The law of the sea does not allow this.

The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which Washington invokes but has never ratified, requires ships passing through a strait to refrain from any threat or use of force against the states bordering it. Under the older rule of innocent passage, a ship serving an attack on the coastal state is no longer in innocent passage at all.

Will not be shut out
Iran will not be shut out of its own waters while others use them to make war on it.

He closed on the indivisibility of security: it exists for everyone in the region or for no one. The idea has a long pedigree. European states wrote it into the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and restated it in 1999, pledging not to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.

“We want strong neighbors,” Pezeshkian said. Iran has always been open to diplomacy, “without accepting the language of force.”

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

After facing public scrutiny, some of the members of different Māori delegations to Israel have spoken out about the trip.

The trips were reported to have been organised and funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with conflicting claims over whether they were fully or partially funded. The Israeli Embassy has declined to confirm the details.

The trip was advertised under the banner of “business and innovation”.

• READ MORE: ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Māori delegation’s Israel trip under scrutiny over funding and itinerary
• Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission of Inquiry finds
• Other Gaza reports

But questions remained on why Māori leaders were going to Israel, while its government is committing a genocide in Gaza.

‘The other side of the story’
One of the people who have just recently come back from the trip was Iwi leader Renata Hakiwai, who believed the trip was to promote Israel and to “provide the other side of the story”.

He claims the trip was partly due to personal reasons as well.

“I have interest in business technology and innovation, and the cohort was about business technology and innovation,” he said.

“As a child, you learn around the Bible, and as a Christian, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good opportunity for me to visit some of these sites’.”

Before going, Hakiwai stated he had “anti-Semitic thoughts”, but his mind was changed after the visit.

He called himself a “truth seeker” and pointed to social media’s algorithm for people believing certain stories over others, which was one of the reasons he went.

“One thing I found is that you get an algorithm on TikTok or social media, and it can totally consume someone’s brain with a certain subject, and I had to check myself.

“I started learning the other side, and some of the history, and some of the reasons as to why things have been happening, and that’s sort of the reason why I thought, ‘Actually, I need to go and hear what’s on the ground and some of the truths’.

“And so it changed my mind totally.

“I haven’t swung right to the other side, but I think my view is probably a little bit more balanced.”

Hakiwai admits he did not speak to any Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, but did visit the Gaza Envelope, an area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip.

When asked by Te Ao with Moana whether he could present a balanced view without speaking to people in Gaza and the West Bank, he instead pointed to the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.

“I think to myself, if my daughter or my young fellow or kids were at that concert, I would want ultimate revenge.

“Obviously, Israel came down hard. Have they come down too hard? Potentially,” said Hakiwai.

“I didn’t read too much into the UN stuff, because I even know at the UN there’s opposing views depending on what side of the board you sit on,” said Hakiwai.

He also said he did not believe a two-state solution would work because of Hamas.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN finds        Video: UNNews

‘They didn’t really like being asked the hard questions’
Indigenous lawyer Maui Solomon was invited on the trip but was later excluded for asking “hard questions”.

“I was maybe half an hour talking with [the organiser], and I just did not have a good vibe because I was asking the hard questions. And to be fair to Riki [Manarangi], actually, he said, ‘Ask the hard questions’. But yeah, they didn’t really like being asked the hard questions,” he told Te Ao with Moana.

Solomon said he had already intended not to go before being kicked out of the group.

He claims to have tried showing those in the delegation what happened to Māori who supported Palestine in Israel.

“I also posted to the group a video of Hāhona Ormsby, a Māori who had been there as part of the flotilla delivering aid into Gaza. He says in that video that he was captured, he was bound, he was beaten, he was tortured, he was kneed in the genitals. And he was singled out because he was Māori. He’s got a full mataora.

“As a result of that, I was excluded because I was ‘fear-mongering’.

“So I was merely highlighting what some of the concerns were, but then I was accused of just buying into all of the fear-mongering, and someone accused me of being an algorithm.”

He believes the trip was to promote the people of Israel as “Indigenous”, not a “business and innovation” trip.

“I’d also heard that Israel had been bringing Indigenous peoples from Australia and Canada and the United States over there.

“But that’s what seems to be the agenda is for the State of Israel to say they have the support of Indigenous peoples around the world, and therefore they are also Indigenous.

“Some of the comments I’ve heard from former delegates who have been there is exactly that. It’s all been pro-Israel, State of Israel, and that they are Indigenous to the region, so whether there’s been a brainwashing going on or whatever?”

Solomon said it’s concerning that the Israeli government was reaching out to Aotearoa.

In saying that, adding that he might have gone if there was more transparency and the delegation was allowed to enter Gaza to see what was happening first-hand.

‘I want to make decisions myself’
Former Broadcaster Neil Waka went on the 2025 delegation after being shoulder-tapped to join.

He told Te Ao with Moana he “hesitantly” said yes.

Waka said he did not regret going to Israel, despite the deaths happening in Gaza — more than 75,000, mostly women and children, have been killed since October 2023.

“People are very ferocious about their thinking around Israel and Gaza. I know they are, but I don’t have to agree with them because they think a certain way, and I certainly don’t follow trends.

“I want to make decisions myself over whether or not I believe certain things, and it all came back to the ideologies to me.

“It just came back to this organisation wants a complete eradication of Israel. This organisation wants to just exist,” said Waka.

When questioned on whether he spoke to any Palestinian people in their own space, Waka immediately said: “No, I never wanted to”.

“For me, personally, I didn’t trust that that was a place [Gaza] that I’d be safe.”

Similar to Hakiwai, the former broadcaster doesn’t believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“Yeah, look, some people can say it is, but a genocide is the absolute ethnic cleansing or eradication of a people. That’s not happening.

“That’s just not happening because Israel has the power to do that if they wanted to. Now, if they did that, if they threw in nukes and just cleaned up the whole of Gaza, evil. They’re not doing that.”

He instead blames the current state of Gaza on Hamas, not Israel.

Te Ao with Moana pointed out similarities between Waka’s talking points and those of the Israeli government.

“I’m just going on what my feeling is. Did I feel comfortable being there all the time? No. Did I feel comfortable that I could talk to whomever I wanted to? Yes. Do I agree with everything that happens on both sides? No.

“I don’t think anyone’s perfect in this. What I find the most fascinating is that one side is being globally attacked.”

First published by Te Ao Māori News and republished with permission.

• Watch Te Ao with Moana on Māori+, every Monday at 8 pm.

A West Papuan advocacy movement has praised the “Pacific family’s bravery” in standing up for human rights in West Papua and has appealed to the region’s leaders to protest over the latest massacre at this week’s UN General Assembly in New York.

“Justice and peace in West Papua can only come through international pressure,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.

“On behalf of the ULMWP and the West Papuan people, I wholeheartedly condemn the brutal massacre of six West Papuan civilians by the Indonesian military in Yahukimo.”

• READ MORE: Papuan civilians shot in latest security forces violence in Yahukimo
• Other West Papua reports

Wenda said in a statement that this latest massacre demonstrated how vital it was that Pacific nations maintained their pressure on Indonesia to allow a UN Human Rights visit.

Last month, the Pacific Islands Forum reaffirmed its 2019 call for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be allowed into West Papua, while Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders suggested that Indonesia’s associate membership would be reviewed if no visit took place.

Ten Papuan gold-panners were reported to have been shot — six of them killed — by Indonesian security forces in Samboga Village, Yahukimo Regency on September 18.

The men were already being monitored by drone as they left the panning site in the evening, and were shot as they encountered a roadblock on the public road into the village.

Bodies held back
No warning shots were fired and there was no exchange of fire between the Indonesian military and the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPNPB). The victimes were named as: Yonas Aje, 22; Pilatus Porpom, 25; Daniel Timuka, 19; Kani Borpom, 20; Yanus Patika, 28; and Elli Timuka, 28.

According to a TPNPB press release, the victims’ bodies had yet to be evacuated by churches or humanitarian groups because the site remained under control of the military.

“The viciousness and cruelty of the Indonesian coloniser knows no limits — not only do they kill civilians at will, they also refuse to release their bodies to their families,” Wenda said.

“These 10 civilian gold miners were victims of the Indonesian occupation twice over.

“First, they were dispossessed by the takeover of their ancestral lands. Second, they were murdered for trying to make a living in the new world the occupation has created.

“Their names are added to the more than 60 West Papuan civilians murdered by the Indonesian state in 2026 alone.”

Death sentence condemned
The ULMWP also condemned the death sentence handed down to Karel Fatem, an Indigenous West Papuan TPNPB member who was set to become the first political prisoner executed by the Indonesian state in more than a decade.

“The TPNPB are not criminals or terrorists, they do not bomb or attack in Java or Sumatra: they are the West Papuan home guard. It is not the TPNPB who turned West Papua into a killing field,” said Wenda.

“There have always been West Papuans who defend themselves, their environment, their mountains and their forests. We demand that the Indonesian courts immediately reverse its sentence and frees all West Papuan political prisoners.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Israeli actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in a blistering speech at the United Nations General Assembly, reports Al Jazeera.

In a address that saw the Israeli delegation walk out and Palestinian representatives applaud, Erdogan spoke of Israel’s continuing war crimes in Gaza and the escalation of illegal settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank.

“With the support of [US President Donald] Trump, we contributed to a ceasefire. But despite this so-called ceasefire, more than 1300 civilians have been murdered in Gaza,” he said.

• READ MORE: Erdogan accuses Israel of ‘genocidal mindset’ at UNGA

Although Hamas and other Palestinian groups have accepted the second phase of the October ceasefire framework agreement, he said “Israel is not putting an end to its actions in Gaza, and the West Bank is going through the most challenging time as the illegal Israeli settlers occupy the region”.

Erdogan described Gaza as “the most inhumane, most shameful concentration camp of our time”.

“We face a genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing. No one with humanity, mercy or conscience can turn a blind eye,” he added.

Gaza situation ‘very dire’
Salman Shaikh, a former UN official who has spent time in Gaza and the founder of The Shaikh Group, said “Erdogan is absolutely right”.

He told Al Jazeera that the situation in the enclave was indeed “very, very dire”, adding that the comments made by the Turkish president during his UNGA address were significant.

“What was significant in Erdogan’s speech was [this idea] that we can’t let what is happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank become a normalised situation,” said Shaikh, adding that Türkiye was an “indispensable regional and international actor spanning many geographies and organisations”.

French President Emmanuel Macron told the UN General Assembly that the situation in Gaza was “shameful”.

“What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza? Some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries. The spectacle, it is shameful. Shame on all of us,” Macron said.

He also commented on the US-Israel war on Iran, stressing that the Strait of Hormuz should not be used for “blackmail” and that the waterway’s reopening “is a priority”.

Echoing his earlier remarks at the UN General Assembly, the US President Donald Trump once again threatened Iran with “annihilation”.

“We’ve isolated Iran financially and hopefully they’ll do the right thing fast,” he said. “There will be a time when it’s too late, and we won’t have the chance of letting them survive as a nation.

“I would like to see that, and I can tell you that people around this table would like to see it,” he added in a meeting with GCC and Arab leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Guterres warns against ‘ethnic cleansing’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Israeli violence, displacement and illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank were undermining prospects for peace and raising the risk of “ethnic cleansing”.

“Violence, displacement, and settlement expansion by Israel in the occupied West Bank are bulldozing the path to peace and raising the specter of ethnic cleansing,” Guterres said in his address to the 81st UN General Assembly.

“We cannot allow the two-state solution to disappear before our eyes,” he added.

This is a photo of me in the desert in Saudi Arabia 19 years ago. Was I covered? You bet.

I recall receiving a letter from a white feminist friend who told me my feminism must have been skewed by my experience in the Middle East.

Actually I met so many feisty feminists in the Middle East and I found a Middle East very different to the one I’d seen on the mainstream media.

• READ MORE: Other Saige England reports

My Middle East was a Middle East of moons and stars and tents and light garments draped like tents. My Middle East was the Middle East of palaces in the desert and mysterious winds.

Were there things that were wrong there? Yes. Just as there are in the US. But I saw and experienced much that was good. I rose in my employment, I managed and supervised and I met other women who were managers and supervisors.

As one Italian woman said: “It is easier for me to rise as a woman here.” I found that too. I found work easily in Qatar. I found it difficult here in Aotearoa to rise, no matter how well I did in terms of qualifications and awards.

New Zealand is only free if you don’t write about certain matters. If you don’t rock the boat. If you aren’t too much — too pro the environment or too pro indigenous rights. I still write about those aspects of life.

Relatively speaking
There, in Qatar, I worked with women who were covered and women who were uncovered. Relatively speaking.

I met women who covered from choice. I met women who were forced to cover (and that is wrong). I met women who were conservative and who didn’t cover. I met feminists who covered. I met women who wore the veil and the abbaya because they were radical — it was a way of giving the finger to the US.

Speaking of the US — US military bases were everywhere. The US had invaded Iraq. The military wives often drank a lot.

I interviewed US soldiers and found them worrying. Their education had been conservative, fundamentalist, narrow.

Many US soldiers were bright but they supported the US nuclear bombing of Japan, they supported nuclear everything. They thought all Arabs and environmentalists were terrorists.

When I first arrived, the Twin Towers had been bombed and I’d heard lots of reports about Al Qaeda. I used to leap into taxis vowing that I was not American. I was told that “it is ok, lady, we aren’t like those crazies” (people who blow up buildings).

The people I met were peaceful hospitable people. The women I met wanted careers.

Issues were the same
One of my friends, an Aussie, was a psychologist. I asked her if the problems her female clients faced were different — did Western expat women have different issues to Qatari or Lebanese or Egyptian or Pakistani women? Nope. The issues were all the same: “Is my husband cheating on me?”, “Are my children OK?”

When I arrived in Qatar the divorce rate of the local population was 51 per cent. Many young women chose not to marry.

In Qatar and Bahrain women covered, or didn’t, by choice. Some told me they wore the garments because they were easy and affordable. They could dress up after uni but they could just grab the robe by day. Some wore the veil on a bad hair day. Oh, there were a raft of reasons.

What saddens and sickens me is that I’m often not believed about this. I’ve been accused of betraying the feminist cause. The kind of feminists who don’t ask other women what they want. Those kind of feminists tell me I compromised.

But I felt the compromise when I attended a tupperware party here where the whole room except me launched into racist jibes about Indians. Ye Gods, spare me.

Back here, a few years back, I befriended Fatin who came from Singapore and who lived here in Aotearoa while studying. Fatin was bright and so lovely, so open and kind and free. A poet. She read 30 books in a year. She loved the author, Elif Shafak, a favourite author of mine. We bonded.

But Fatin was often abused in Ōtautahi by people who told her she shouldn’t be wearing the veil or the robe. They felt sorry for her, they said. Fatin said she felt sorry for them for judging others.

‘No judgment’ . . . a favourite
“No judgement” was one of Fatin’s favourite sayings. I learned so much from her. Sadly, she had to leave because she couldn’t gain a residency visa.

Women wear clothing for all sorts of reasons. What concerns me far more than what we wear is unnecessary body surgery. I saw boob jobs and lip jobs, and jaw-broken jobs in the Middle East just as I see them in the West.

I see women manufacturing themselves as products to please men. It makes me sick. Don’t do it. Don’t. Be yourself.

I wore the robe and the veil that hot day in Saudi because it kept the sun and the hot dry wind off my face and body. Like so many women, I was naked underneath. I felt that warm wind caress me.

I loathe the men who make women wear what they don’t want to wear. I’ve always resisted that. I didn’t throw out my hippy skirt when my ex wanted me to, I kept it, cherished it, I sparkled and shone. But I’ve also felt shamed by women who tell me I shouldn’t bother using a towel to shield myself while getting dressed on the beach or while camping.

My choice sometimes is to cover. Sometimes the robe feels good. I like the feeling of having my own wee house and being safe underneath. That is my choice. If I lived differently or had different experiences or had never been abused in this Western world perhaps I would think differently but that is my experience.

I fight the predators in my own way. And I know that freedom is not here yet.

Western abuse insidious
The abuse in the West is insidious. It is often denied. We believe we are free but we are not free. There is another form of control.

Women are bombarded with social messages that tell us to straighten our noses or lighten our skin. They are everywhere.

They appear on my feed as they probably appear on yours.

I’ve aged in an age where I’ve watched young women pout and lie and become “influencers” selling all sorts of fake garbage and sadly, faking themselves. It isn’t good for their mental health. It isn’t good at all. Are they free? I don’t think so.

How do we unpick the social fabric of inequity especially when it tells us we are free.

Freedom is the freedom to choose. Freedom is the freedom to vote. Freedom is the freedom to use our voices and to wear what we want to wear. Freedom is the freedom and the choice not to turn ourselves into objects for the pleasure of others.

Freedom is the freedom to not be raped or abused or killed. Freedom is the freedom to love and learn. Freedom is the freedom to work — to work outside or inside and not be pressured to do both.

Women deserve freedom.

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.

A national advocacy group congratulated the Invercargill City Council for voting today to end procurement of goods or services from companies profiting from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

Invercargill is the seventh local body to pass similar motions sanctioning Israel, said the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The other bodies are Christchurch, Nelson and Palmerston city councils, Environment Canterbury and Environment Southland while the capital, Wellington, has banned investment in Israeli government bonds.

• WATCH: The Invercargill City Council debate
• READ MORE: Other NZ sanctions against Israel

“Thank you, Invercargill,” said PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi in a statement. “You represent the best of New Zealand. You have stood up while our [Christopher Luxon National Party-led coalition] government sits on its hands.”

“Palestine will remember your simple but significant stand for Palestinian human rights just as it will remember the complicity of the New Zealand government.”

Today’s resolution ends the council’s purchase of goods or services from companies on a UN Human Rights Council list which are accused of supporting illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Mayor Tom Campbell moved a motion to oppose the Palestine Solidarity motion. But seven councillors in a row spoke against his motion and in favour of sanctioning Israel.

Voted as council policy
Campbell’s motion was decisively lost and the resolution was voted in as council policy.

“The greatest problem in Israel/Palestine is that Israel has never been held to account for its war crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide being live-streamed from Gaza,” Tamimi said.

The Invercargill City Council debate on the illegal Israeli settlements.   Video: ICC

“By itself, the Invercargill resolution won’t force Israel to give Palestinians equal rights, but it is an important step for this country to apply BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) on Israel as requested by Palestinians civil society.

“PSNA expects more councils to have similar votes in the coming weeks.”

Republished from PSNA.

Last Saturday, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was in the middle of a speech when he stopped talking, wiped his eyes with a small towel, and apologised to the crowd.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I just remembered our brothers and sisters in Palestine. They are being slaughtered, they are bombed, they are attacked again and again. And we seem powerless to help them.”

He was speaking at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor in Ponorogo, East Java, one of Indonesia’s oldest Islamic boarding schools, marking its 100th anniversary.

• READ MORE: Indonesian president chants ‘Free Palestine’ at reception
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Later, the Palestinian ambassador gave him a keffiyeh, the scarf that symbolises Palestine. Prabowo cried again, then chanted “Free Palestine” several times, saying a strong Indonesia can help its oppressed “brothers and sisters.”

It was an emotional moment. But Palestinians in Gaza do not need tears from a school celebration in East Java. They need action.

Start with what Prabowo still seems to believe should happen to Palestine: a two-state solution, the old idea that Israel and a Palestinian state can exist side by side in peace, and the official position of most governments for 30 years.

But does anyone who matters still actually want it?

No longer trust a plan
Palestinians do not, not in the form it has taken for decades. After two years of bombing that flattened Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people, most no longer trust a plan that leaves their security and borders in the hands of others.

Israel does not want it either. Israeli leaders have expanded settlements in the West Bank for years, cutting Palestinian land into pieces too small and scattered to ever become a real state.

So, when a leader cries and repeats “two-state solution,” we should ask him plainly: after everything the world has watched in Gaza, do you still believe Israel wants peace?

A United Nations commission of inquiry has documented what it calls genocide there. Tears mean little if the plan behind them is the same formula that failed for 30 years.

If the two-state solution is dead, silence is not the answer. A real solution could mean equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea, in one state. It could mean a Palestinian state with real borders, a real army, and control of its own resources, not the walled-off pieces offered so far.

Prabowo Serukan “Free Palestine” dan Dikalungi Keffiyeh oleh Dubes Palestina

Baca di https://t.co/eb1EK6hS2z pic.twitter.com/SIlYusMkha

— Kompas.com (@kompascom) September 19, 2026

What matters most is who decides. A solution designed for Palestinians in a boardroom, not with them at the table, is not a solution.

That is also the problem with the “Board of Peace,” set up by world leaders to oversee Gaza’s future once the fighting quietens down. A board made mostly of foreign powers, without Palestinians in control of their own land.

This is not liberation
It is not liberation, but another arrangement where outsiders decide the fate of a people who have already had enough decisions made for them. Indonesia has a proud history of standing against colonialism, and supporting this goes against everything it claims to believe.

But the deepest problem is closer to home. While Prabowo cries in public for Palestine, Israeli companies continue quiet business on Indonesian soil. Ormat Technologies, an Israeli-founded energy company, won a geothermal concession in Halmahera, North Maluku, earlier this year, and is now developing it.

If the President is serious, he needs to look at his own country’s companies, mines and energy concessions, and ask: are we still doing business with the people responsible for Gaza?

Indonesia is the largest Muslim majority country in the world, with real economic weight and moral standing on this issue. It does not officially recognise Israel and has long supported Palestine at the UN.

That gives Prabowo something rare among world leaders: the credibility to actually do something, not just say something.

A scarf wiped across wet eyes will be forgotten by next week. A serious investigation into which Indonesian entities still profit from ties with Israel, followed by real consequences, would not be.

Neither would it be forgotten if Prabowo used Indonesia’s voice to push for a real solution, instead of recycling a peace process that has already failed.

Crying is human. Leadership is different. Palestinians have watched enough leaders cry for them while nothing changes.

If Prabowo wants his tears to mean something, he should turn them into policy: investigate the companies his own country still does business with, and back a future for Palestine that Palestinians actually choose.

• Indonesia also has a decolonisation issue since 1969 over its Melanesian provinces in the Papuan region — known as West Papua among Pacific nations.

Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East. Republished from Middle East Monitor.

COMMENTARY: Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy answers some emerging criticisms.

• READ MORE: Gaza documentary ‘NAZA’ Sets US theatrical release through self-distribution model

I watched NAZA. (Unlike 99 percent of people expressing their very strong opinions).

So here are my takes, which will make a lot of you very angry.

1. “Is the film antisemitic blood libel against the IDF?”

No, it is literally a series of confessions by IDF war criminals themselves, so that claim is laughable.

2. “How can Yuval and Rachel betray their country?”

Our loyalty must be to justice and humanity, not to systems of power that privilege us. It is your duty to resist your country if your country is committing genocide.

3. “Is the film good?”

Yes. And the vast majority of you will learn something new about the mechanics of the Gaza genocide, even if you’ve been following it closely. And for the people who haven’t been following — who will watch it now because of the festival award — it may be absolutely eye opening.

Democracy Now! features Yuval’s speech.                   Video: Democracy Now!

4. “Is the film good for the justice movement?”

It’s very good for the Palestine justice movement that a film on the Gaza genocide is getting so much attention. It forces the mainstream to confront Israel’s crimes once again, which is especially important now when the attention is dying down because of the so-called “ceasefire”.

The activist scene is still very focused, but the mainstream attention is decreasing, and NAZA winning festivals around the world will do a great job returning the conversation to what matters.

5. “Why didn’t they release the evidence as articles instead of a film?”

They did, over the course of the past three years Yuval published some of the most valuable investigative journalism on the Gaza genocide in +972 Magazine. The fact that you all didn’t know about it is all the more evidence for why this film was needed to be made.

6. “Is the film beyond reproach?”

Every piece of art, journalism or activism must be subject to criticism. And from the activist standpoint there is only one metric that’s important — its material impact. Not the identity of the artists, not the form, and not even the content. Only the material impact.

7. “The film protects war criminals, instead of delivering them to international courts.”

Providing a anonymity to whistleblowers is an essential part of investigative journalism. I also have sources in the IDF and the settler movement that I keep anonymous. Getting 24 people charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — and likely never prosecuted — is much less useful than getting their testimonies heard by the entire world.

8. “The film didn’t show anything new, all of this has been reported by Palestinian journalists.”

This is largely true, as stated by Yuval himself. Nonetheless, confessions of the perpetrators are adding to the body of evidence of the Gaza genocide, and confessions always hold more weight than accusations. For many, this may be THE tipping point, unfortunately.

9. “Why not just upload it to the internet instead of going to festivals?”

Social media videos, written articles, feature films and many other formats cannot replace one another. They work for different audiences and achieve different goals.

Festivals bring the film to an audience that wouldn’t watch it on the internet, and provides credibility to a very damning account of the genocide.

10. “Yuval Abraham is too Zionist/too anti-Zionist.”

Yuval’s politics is beside the point. You can disagree with someone and still find their work valuable.

A comprehensive pressure campaign at all levels is very important for the Palestine cause.

Andrey X Khrzhanovskiy is an independent journalist and human rights advocate working in the West Bank. Follow his on-the-ground reports about settler and IOF violence.

Thousands took part in today’s Greenpeace-led March for Nature in the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Tāmaki Makaurau.

Critics of the coalition government’s controversial proposed Conservation Amendment Bill say this would allow selling off of conservation land, weaken environmental protections, and put short-term profit ahead of people and endanger the future of the planet.

“If Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” said Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party MP.

“This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Organisers of the rally — partnered by Forest and Bird — in Albert Park followed by a march down Queen Street say 35,000 people took part.

Placards and banners declared “Honour Te Tiriti [of Waitangi],”More hoot, less loot,” “Hands off conservation land”, “You can’t rehabilitate exploited land”, and “I’m $hane . . . bribe me!” in apparent reference to an unpopular minister.

Plenty of Palestinian flags were among the marchers. This rally coincided with the 155th consecutive week of protest over Israel’s genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

• Photographs: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
  
• More images/videos

Greenpeace March for Nature

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York joined by Democracy Now! cohost Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

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

AMY GOODMAN: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us by the end of the decade.” That was the warning last week from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that set off an escalating debate over how to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems.

• READ MORE: AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
• Other AI reports

Coxon spoke to the BBC:

COXON: So it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who were involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction.

And many of the people who are sort of deep in the weeds on actually coding the thing believe that there is like a greater than 10pc chance or even greater – some smaller, but they all have different numbers – for a probability that humans might die.

And they all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei also called for the pace of development of artificial intelligence models to slow down. In an essay, he wrote that within six to 12 months a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

He wrote, “The scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.” But President Trump has rejected growing calls for placing regulatory guardrails on the AI industry and has called concerns over AI a “hoax”.

On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chip maker Nvidia, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles. Huang put the president on speakerphone.

PRES. TRUMP: The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It’s bigger than the Internet.

And the AI, you know, much more so. And they are just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen.

And that could be political people; it could also be China. And we’re not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax. And [crosstalk]—

JENSEN HUANG [laughs] You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir.

AUDIENCE: [applause]

PRES. TRUMP: No, we’re not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: As the debate over AI intensifies, the award-winning journalists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book out today that is connected to all of this. It is titled End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

It examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability, wars and the climate crisis. They will join us in a minute but first, here is a short excerpt from a video that was released with the book.

ASTRA TAYLOR: End-times fascism is not a monolith. It’s a dangerous and fractious alliance of three main groups.

NARRATOR: Religious end-timers.

ROBERT JEFFRESS: From the very beginning it has been clear that god has a special plan and purpose for the nation of Israel.

NARRATOR: Tech end-timers.

SAM ALTMAN: You know, I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime there will be great companies created.

NARRATOR: Ethnonationalist end-timers.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: America is fighting with Israel for a common goal – to protect our future, to protect civilisation against these barbarians.

PERSON: That was a good take right there.

PERSON: Seig fucking Heil, let’s fucking go!

PERSON: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

PERSON: Uh—

PERSON: You’re hesitant.

PERSON: Yeah, well, I—

PERSON: End-times fascists haven’t just given up on liberal democracy. They’ve given up on the possibility of a shared future for all of us.

PERSON: The most powerful people in the world –

PERSON: – are preparing for the end of the world –

PERSON:  – an end they themselves are both accelerating –

PERSON: – and profiting from.

ELON MUSK: [laughs]

PERSON: We have imagined Armageddon so many times it can almost feel inevitable. Except it’s not. So, which side are you on?

PERSON: The side of bunkering down, abandoning Earth and profiting from apocalypse? Or staying loyal to this planet and its people—

PERSON: Who are you aligned with? Who are you protecting?

PERSON: – and making life here better?

‘End Times Fascism’      Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: A short video released in conjunction with the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World written by our guests in studio for the hour.

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, best-selling author of a number of books including Doppelganger and No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein is also an associate professor and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist and documentary filmmaker, the co-founder of the Debt Collective and author of several books including The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

Thanks so much for spending the hour with us. Naomi, start off with a title, start off with End Times Fascism, why you chose this.

NAOMI KLEIN: First of all, thank you for having us here, Amy. It’s great to be launching the book on Democracy Now! It just came out this morning, as you said. And I think we have a long tradition of launching books together. We decided to call it End Times Fascism because we are trying to understand what is the same and what is different about our moment of far-right extremism.

We know that far-right parties with lineages to the fascists of the 20th century are rising to power around the world. We just saw a fateful election in a German state, the first time the far right has won an election since the Second World War. We’re seeing very disturbing polls in France, for instance.

And we’re seeing more and more open fascist expressions in the United States from very powerful people in government and in tech.

But we don’t believe that this is simply a rerun. We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanisation, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis. This is not news to Democracy Now! listeners and viewers that we live in a time of a climate breakdown and collapse.

We have tools like nuclear weapons, that were not known to Hitler and Mussolini, that have the ability to inflict apocalyptic levels of violence that were beyond their reach.

Fascism always emerges during times of systemic crises, and it actually emerges as a way to protect capitalism from systemic change. So if we think about 20th century fascism in Europe after the First World War, there was a rising socialist response to the wreckage of the First World War and then to the Great Depression.

And fascism rises up — we call it “capitalism threat response” or “capitalism with bared teeth” — to make sure all of that popular public anger is pivoted toward the scapegoat. In our time, as we see these global crises — that could lead to systemic change or there can be this what we are calling “end times fascist” response that says, “let it burn,” and now it’s a fight for who’s going to survive the future.

Now it’s about building — as you saw in that film that we were fortunate to work with a great team of filmmakers on — it’s about building the bunkers and the rocket ships and the escape hatches. For religious end-timers, it’s literally about the bunker in the sky; it’s about the idea of the rapture.

But that is almost like a template for these more secular stories that are also a kind of a rapture, but we call it in the book a “wealth rapture”. If you’ve got resources, you can rapture yourself away from the impacts of those threats that we are all in. So that’s why we call it End Times Fascism. It hasn’t won yet.

The reason we wrote the book is because people are fighting back. And we think if we are able to look at this very frightening reality with clear eyes, the more it is exposed to the light, the less popular it is because in fact those people cherish our one and only home and want to stay and want to make it better.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, how is this different, for example, if in the 1950s and 1960s when at the height of the Cold War there were Americans, especially upper-class Americans, building bomb shelters, convinced that there was going to be a nuclear war, and the rest of the population eventually began to organise in an anti-nuclear movement that peaked in the 1980s and that led really to capitalism being forced to restrain itself to some degree in terms of arms control treaties?

Why is this different than back then?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Juan, I guess it’s different because the people we’re calling end-times fascists are systematically dismantling that precise international infrastructure. One of the things that all those three factions all agree on — whether it’s the religious fundamentalists, the tech extremists that we heard from in that video, or the ethnonationalists — they don’t agree on everything but they all agree they want to get rid of the United Nations.

They all believe that that is the sort of antichrist of their story. Sometimes they literally call it the antichrist. And that chapter that you are describing, which we write about in the book, Juan — and I would actually love to bring Astra into the conversation because she went pretty deep into this research on the history of bunkering in the United States and how people shifted the tide, because we actually think that’s a really inspiring story that we need to know better.

Can I bring in Astra, my incredible co-author?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sure.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Thank you so much. Again, thanks for having us. Yeah, it is — very quickly, in the 1950s, the government policy was to encourage people to build their own bomb shelters in their backyard, and that was the response to the nuclear threat. Only around 1 percent, 2 percent of households did that, in part because people revolted at the idea of protecting themselves and letting their neighbors perish.

And there was a massive debate in magazines like TIME magazine, LIFE magazine that was around the idea of “gunning thy neighbor”. People said, “We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to be hiding in a hole in the ground with guns pointing outwards and turning the people we care about away.”

That is part of the genesis of the movement for nuclear disarmament. It was ordinary people who put the right solution on the table, which is let’s get rid of nuclear bombs; let’s not turn on each other and bunker down. There’s a lesson in that for today.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s so interesting because what they understood at the time is like either you bunker — either you just protect you and yours — or you get at the root cause of the crisis and you say, “Actually, we can’t live with these weapons.” Right? It’s just—”It’s too dangerous.”

As you both know, the nuclear disarmament movement had tremendous successes. In many ways, we argue in the book that it was a victim of its own success because many people in the disarmament movement believed that they had won so many victories that now the people in charge were just going to finish the job, because so many thousands of nuclear warheads were successfully disarmed that it seemed like there was a new era.

The majority of the stockpiles were disarmed but not enough, and now there is a rearming and AI is being embedded in the nuclear arsenal. Which is why at the end of the book we call for a triple disarmament movement.

In fact, Juan, we have something that you might be interested in — a new coinage in the book — which is “the Stephen Miller test”. Basically the argument that we’re making is that eventually, the most powerful tools, the most powerful weapons, will meet the worst people in the world, and if you don’t want those tools to find themselves in the hands of Stephen Miller, then the tools should not exist.

That applies to nuclear weapons. It applies to AI. It applies to the wealth concentration itself, which we believe should be now understood as a WMD. That this level of wealth that has accumulated at the top of our economy has itself become a weapon of mass destruction.

And so we need to be disarming the wealth bombs, the tech bombs, and of course, the bomb-bombs. Because we are now seeing that these very dangerous, completely immoral people who seem to have such a casual attitude — and we see this from Donald Trump’s most recent post, just a kind of shrug in the face of apocalypse — they will find — they exert a magnetic pull towards one another.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to follow-up and ask either one of you if you want to answer this, because I did read the book in the last couple of days and really found it to be tremendously well written. At the same time, though, there were some concerns I had. For instance, there is very little mention of the rise of a multipolar world, of how the rise of East Asia, especially, the shift of the world’s industrial working class to China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, along with Brazil and Mexico — in the view of many, that is the single biggest impediment to US economic dominance, of the capitalist markets’ expansion.

And that’s also the biggest threat that many of these end-timers, as you label them, are concerned about. They are concerned about China, yet China and its impact on US hegemony and capitalism is not mentioned at all in the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that the threat of China is really, really central to the unimpeded AI rollout. It’s really the only argument they have. We do write about that in the book, but you’re right, it’s not the central focus of the book. We are more focused on the United States and the way in particular this is being pushed through Latin America, because we think there — and Europe.

But the threat of the multipolar world I do think is central, because the only argument that Donald Trump really has in the face of the threats that are now being articulated from inside the house, from inside the companies, is “But China, but China; if we don’t build it, they will.”

It’s completely untrue that deregulated AI has to be built the way it’s being built or else China will build it. China is much more open to regulating these technologies, to rules within the multilateral system. It’s the US that has been blowing up these agreements.

And when the Doomsday Clock was reset this year, it was a really — I mean, it’s always pretty harrowing, but this year it was particularly so; they moved it forward four seconds — and described not just the threats, whether it was biological weapons, nuclear weapons, AI, but the way the US government under Donald Trump was going after all of the international agreements that governments like China had been a party to, and just saying, “We don’t need them.”

So I think it’s the tools and the dismantling of any attempt to constrain those tools.

ASTRA TAYLOR: It’s also about the narrative that the people in power are telling themselves. We’re tracking how there’s a certain embrace of apocalyptic narrative, of Armageddon, of the end times, that doesn’t — every government in the world doesn’t have that narrative, right? It’s something that’s very powerful in certain branches of the United States political class, in Israel, in parts of Latin America.

We’re not saying that it applies to every country around the entire world, and so that’s one reason that that isn’t — there are some very powerful international players that aren’t central to the thesis.

AMY GOODMAN: Astra and Naomi, you write about Peter Thiel, saying, “Today a staggering number of his former colleagues and acolytes occupy powerful positions in every part of the Trump Administration. The most consequential of them is JD Vance.” If you can explain, who is Peter Thiel? What does it mean to have his inner circle populating the inner circle of the United States?

And talk about all of these figures that are so much in the news now, that were standing behind President Trump during his inauguration, people who were opposed to him before, who took him off their platforms. We are talking about people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg and others.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yes. Peter Thiel is a powerful billionaire and venture capitalist who has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He is part of the PayPal mafia so he founded PayPal with David Sacks, who was Trump’s former AI and crypto czar. And also Elon Musk, of course, who is now the president of SpaceX; everybody will know him.

Peter Thiel is quite interesting because he has been on the far right very proudly for a long time since he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he and David Sacks actually wrote a book against political correctness. And he has been on the vanguard of being very much against democracy, very — quasi-libertarian but now just explicitly authoritarian — and has written things like “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.”

He was one of the first figures in Silicon Valley to come out for Trump in 2015.

And as we write in the book and, as you said, many of his protégés are now in positions of power and the most influential one is JD Vance. JD Vance has written about how his life changed when he saw Peter Thiel give a lecture. This lecture inspired Vance to go to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist — not a very illustrious one — and that’s where he met critical figures who would fund his political rise, including Thiel who gave what was a record-breaking donation of $15 million and kind of launched and made possible Vance’s bid to become a senator of Ohio.

And it was Peter Thiel who also brokered the meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Vance was able to apologise for calling Donald Trump “Hitler”. So Vance is of course one of those figures who used to be opposed —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that? That Vance said —

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, Vance was once — he was once for green energy. He was against Donald Trump who he said misleads people and offers empty promises like building a wall which won’t actually improve people’s lives. But he’s also quite an opportunist, and Peter Thiel brokered peace among those two, and now we know Vance as the VP.

J.D. Vance is also critical in our book because he is who helped bring together the AI industry and Donald Trump. We remember from Donald Trump’s first term that he was against Big Tech. He was railing against Big Tech all the time. Thanks to JD Vance who hosted a dinner at David Sacks’ house, Trump got on the AI train. It was a fundraiser but it was also a pitch session.

Vance’s Silicon Valley brethren told Donald Trump that AI would be good for the economy but it would be very good for the fossil fuel sector. And now we see that the Trump administration is all in on AI and not much else.

So when we look at the famous image of the second Trump inauguration and we see all those tech execs given their front seats and they’re lined up, our position is that it was the promise of generative AI eating the economy that actually turned them fascist and caused this incredible alliance with the Trump regime that we’re seeing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, that alliance has served them incredibly well. It has produced the first trillionaire. It has produced companies that are claiming valuations roughly equivalent to the entire US economy. And what they wanted from Donald Trump was exactly what they got: a frontier.

You hear this phrase used all the time now — ”frontier AI” — but if you think about what a frontier is, a frontier is a Wild West. It has no rules. And what they were upset about under the last administration was that there were some, you know, not radical, very simple rules like you have to label deepfakes, guardrails against precisely the scenarios that they are now talking about in terms of integration with weapons systems, and the prospect of a rogue AI.

So all of this was on the table years ago. There were discussions at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that they’re always using China as the bogeyman of why they have to roll out AI without rules. China has many more rules regulating AI than the United States has,
including rules around not allowing children to have these like personal relationships with AI where there’s confusion about whether or not you are talking to a friend or a robot or a therapist or whatever it is.

First of all, that’s a lie, and that’s just the fact that people are not educated about what China is doing that is allowing people to fall for this line of, like, “Oh, no, if we don’t do it, China will.” They just simply don’t know how China is regulating this.

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about is — and we have to be aware of how active this push was for the frontier, because now of course these CEOs are all coming forward and saying “Please regulate us, we’ll regulate ourselves, we know we need to be regulated,” as if they weren’t the ones who not only demanded this Wild West frontier but bankrolled it and created the strategic alliance with Donald Trump so that he would deliver it to them.

And now they’re realising, “OK, maybe we’ve gone too far and have to look more credible.” And Donald Trump is going, “No way.”

Why is he saying, “No way”? Because he has tanked the entire US economy and the only thing he has going for him is the AI stock bubble, and he’s terrified of this bubble bursting all over him before the midterm elections or before the next presidential.

He also is very invested in it personally. He’s richer than he has ever been because of the rampant corruption of this administration, the money he has made from crypto but also many different ways that he and his family are invested in AI.

So that’s why he’s doing these frantic things like calling Jensen Huang on stage to say, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do anything.”

But if you’ll allow me, I was really struck because there’s this myth that — these sort of parables of the technology slipping out of the hands of the men who built it, right? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein. Creating a monster right?

That’s the myth that they’re all telling. “Oh no, we’ve created this powerful monster. It’s out of our hands and now it’s going to destroy us.” I would argue that that myth really is coming true but the monster is not AI; it’s Donald Trump.

They created Donald Trump, he is their monster, he’s out of control and he just won’t stop. And they’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe it is going too fast.”

[MUSIC BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. We are spending the hour with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. I want to go back to the video that was released in conjunction with the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: On a mountaintop in the dead of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision. They had seen a gleaming city bathed in golden light.

The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name.

PERSON: New Gaza.

JARED KUSHNER: So, we’ll see if these things work. They never usually work.

NAOMI KLEIN: The mountaintop in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were US real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location. Look at this beautiful piece of property.

PERSON: Let’s just plan for catastrophic success.

NAOMI KLEIN: Out of the horrors of a live-streamed genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully formed.

PERSON: We’ve already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition.

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the video that was released with the book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. It is by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I want to talk about Gaza right now. We are coming off — in Venice right now you have two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, who just came out with a film called NAZA and now members of the Israeli government are threatening to take away their citizenship, and it was based on the commentary of high-level Israeli officials, unnamed, talking about the killing in Gaza deliberately. Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and the use of AI to do so. I actually haven’t seen the film. I’m definitely looking to see it. But it underlines what we already know thanks to Palestinian journalists at huge personal cost in the documenting of a livestream genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Over 250 of them killed in this last two years.

NAOMI KLEIN: And as we say in the film, this is the story that the Trump administration is telling, is that out of apocalypse there will be this paradise. There will be what they are calling “New Gaza”. We begin the book with it because it is such an extreme distillation of the story.

And I believe it’s the most dangerous story ever told. It’s a biblical story. It’s deeply encoded in our culture whether we’re religious or not. And the story is first comes the flood, first comes the apocalypse, first comes the mass death — and out of the mass death, the great cleansing, the fury of god, comes the golden city, the paradise, for the chosen few.

That story, which — it’s the story of the flood and the ark; it’s told in its most violent form in the book of Revelation — for people who believe in it literally, it has confused the difference between bad and good. It has kind of flipped the switch, where when we see the things in our world that should be warning us, telling us we need to act, we are in a time of crisis, it is an emergency — whether it’s climate disasters, whether it’s covid, that things are breaking down — that what is seen instead are signs.

“Oh, no, what it means is that we’re entering the end times.” And while that may be bad for many people, it’s actually very good for the chosen few.

That’s why we started with this myth of New Gza . . . there is no paradise that is coming out of the apocalypse in Gaza but that is the story that the Trump administration is telling. It’s a privatized paradise that they’re proposing to build. They are using this kind of biblical narrative but of course it’s all for profit because it’s the Trump administration. They want to build luxury condominiums over a mass grave. And you saw there that it’s a literal story.

We do think that the Board of Peace is significant in the sort of evolution of the privatisation of the state, the fact that the Trump Administration is not just attacking the United Nations and defunding the United Nations but trying to replace the United Nations with something called the Board of Peace, which Trump would be head of for life, that they would control — they would give themselves immunity.

This is part of what we mean by bunkering, by escaping. It’s like they see the state as a mine site. They see the United States as a place that they can extract from. Not just extract wealth and resources — and we’re watching them do that — but also extract other things that matter to them, like legal immunity. Right? I mean, the Board of Peace gives them that.

So that’s why we start with that. And it brings together these different parts of the coalition. Because there are religious extremists, both Christian Zionists and messianic Jews, who really do believe that Gaza, Iran — mean that the Messiah is coming. Like the more violent, the better.

And you’ve covered on the show officers in the US military lodging complaints that their officers are telling them that they should welcome apocalyptic levels of violence in Iran because it means that Jesus is returning.

But it’s not just the religious extremists. It’s also the secular versions of the story. We don’t think Trump believes in the biblical version of this story, but we do believe he believes in a kind of a wealth rapture. And when you see those AI-generated images of new Gaza and Trump sharing them, you can see how these stories have distorted his brain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the little time we have left, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resistance movements, the people’s movements against this growing fascism, and also perhaps deal with some of the critiques of let’s say of Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, who basically insists that the fascist movement in the United States, the mass base of it is really the middle class, those people driven out by the Walmarts and the Targets from small businesses, and franchisees and others who have been driven down by the growth of these top-end monopoly capitalists and who have now turned to a fascist movement for their salvation.

ASTRA TAYLOR: To answer the second part first, fascism is always a movement of the injured powerful. It is a movement that creates vertical solidarity between political and corporate elites and people who are not the worst off but feel that they’ve lost status and directs their sense of insecurity downwards further towards vulnerable scapegoats — towards immigrants, towards trans kids, towards feminists — instead of upwards at the oligarchs and the politicians.

So that’s how we understand Elon Musk buying X or what was Twitter, right, is that it was a way for him to control a media ecosystem and help direct that rage downwards at the left and at the vulnerable instead of letting it be harnessed towards people like him.

So I think that that’s right, if fascism creates what we call a vertical solidarity to protect capitalism, to protect the status quo. That’s certainly true of fascism in the past and it’s certainly true today.

What we have to do to build the resistance is create that horizontal solidarity, to not scapegoat the vulnerable, to build our own coalition and find our own unusual bedfellows. I think you see that in the resistance to fascism that’s growing in the United States and around the world.

One thing — Naomi said this — the people we’re tracking — end-times fascism is not a coherent ideology necessarily. It’s not a monolith. It’s a fractious alliance of these three groups: the religious end timers, the tech accelerationists, the ethnonationalists.

But what they have in common is this sense that things are going to be increasingly unstable. We say that they’re both building their arks and they’re causing the floods. They’re accelerating collapse. They’ve decided to just bring it on and abandon this shared world in their various fantasies about bunker nation or ascending to heaven or the digital class.

So the resistance fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place. We describe them at one point in the book as traitors to creation. And we don’t use that word “traitors” lightly. We are saying they’re not traitors to the flag or the nation but actually to life on Earth, to our shared humanity, our shared planet.

And I think we see that commitment to what we call “hereness” in the book in the movement against data centers that is sweeping the nation, in the resistance to ICE where people are saying, “No, I’m going to defend my community, defend my neighbors” and people standing up and fighting for labour rights, which fascists are always attacking.

Fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers.

And so we see the resistance growing all over the world, but I think that the data center revolt is the main one for us because it really draws new lines and shows people — is bringing people together who a year ago or a couple of years ago might have been fighting over culture war issues.

Now they’re saying, “Well, actually, we have a lot in common because there’s a class of people who actually want to replace us with robots. Maybe we should be on the side of humanity against the machines.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Including those small business people, Juan, who you were referring to. This is why it really is an opportunity to form those new alliances. Because Donald Trump has betrayed many of the people who did vote for him the first time. The trouble, of course, is that many powerful Democrats are also taking money from the large tech companies and so are not willing to harvest what has been called by a comedian in I believe it was Madison — ”the most bipartisan issue since beer” is the opposition to these tech companies.

But in order to gain political advantage from that huge bipartisan issue, you have to be willing to go against your donors or not take their money in the first place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, the business model of these AI fascists, if they were to be able to prevail, throw millions of people out of work, how will they make their money? Because obviously Henry Ford, back in the days of the early monopoly capitalism, believed you had to give workers a living wage so they could consume the products that you produced.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m not sure it’s all that thought through. I think that they think they’re mainly going to be selling products to other businesses in the short term. But this is why, Juan, it is a bubble, and it is a process of extraction, and the bubble is rigged to explode all over working people and their pensions right now.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think they also think that they’ll make a lot of money hooking up with the government and the military. There is a quote from Alex Karp — who is a colleague of Peter Thiel, CEO of Palantir — and he said — we quote him in the book saying, “If these tech companies think they’re going to take everybody’s jobs and then not work with the military, they are” — I’m going to change what he said and say — ”they are foolish.”

What he’s saying is essentially if you’re planning to build a technology that causes a job apocalypse, you are also going to have to align with the state and help build the mechanisms to police and control and contain the masses of dispossessed human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with the end of your book: “We didn’t choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful but we have reached a choice point. We can either follow end-times fascists into oblivion or we can commit to building the unruly, boundary-crossing movement they so deeply fear, one that wrests away their weapons, holds them accountable for their crimes, and defends the paradise of here.”

Those are the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book out this week, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

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

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand (PFNZ) has appealed to the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi (NZCTU) to follow the lead of the UK trade union movement and take meaningful action in support of Palestinian rights.

The call follows a key decision by the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing more than 5.3 million workers, which has unanimously backed a motion supporting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The motion calls for action to oppose what it describes as the “catastrophic destruction” of Gaza and Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

• READ MORE: UK trade unions back motion to boycott and sanction Israel
• Other BDS sanctions reports
• The BDS movement

It includes calls for an end to military cooperation and arms deals with Israel, wide-ranging sanctions, divestment from companies complicit in violations of international law, and support for trade union-led workplace action.

The Palestine Forum said in a statement it was time for the New Zealand trade union movement to now have the same conversation.

“New Zealand workers and trade unions have a long history of standing up for justice, human rights and workers’ rights internationally,” said Maher Nazzal, founder and spokesperson of the forum.

“The UK trade union movement has taken a clear position that solidarity with Palestinian workers cannot stop at statements. It is calling for collective action against complicity.

Consider ‘meaningful action’
“We are asking NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi to consider what meaningful action New Zealand’s trade union movement can take.

“This is not about asking one organisation to speak for everyone. It is about opening a serious conversation within the New Zealand labour movement about what solidarity with Palestinian workers and the Palestinian people should look like in practice.”

The PFNZ is calling on NZCTU to:

• publicly consider and support Palestinian-led BDS initiatives;
• review trade union investments, procurement and relationships to identify links with companies involved in or benefiting from violations of Palestinian rights;
• support measures to end military and economic complicity with violations of international law;
• strengthen solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and workers;
• support workplace and union-led initiatives for Palestinian rights; and
• raise these issues with the New Zealand government, including the need for stronger action concerning the occupation, settlements and settler violence.

International partners
New Zealand has already joined international partners in sanctions targeting individuals and entities involved in financing and enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Forum said in the statement that the question was now whether New Zealand’s civil society and trade union movements were prepared to build on that position.

“Workers’ solidarity has always crossed borders,” Nazzal said.

“Palestinian workers and trade unionists are part of the global labour movement. When workers elsewhere face injustice, trade unions have historically understood that solidarity means more than words.

“We encourage NZCTU to engage with its affiliated unions, Palestinian representatives and civil society organisations and consider following the example now being set by the UK trade union movement.

“The UK has shown that trade unions can act collectively. We are asking New Zealand’s trade union movement to consider doing the same.”

The New Zealand government has so far declined to join the United Kingdom and announce sanctions on goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The UK is one of 12 countries, including France and Canada, which have announced similar trade restrictions or an intention to do so. The goal is to rescue an eventual two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

The sanctions are in response to what UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians […] perpetrated by settler terrorists”, with the Israeli military “complicit” in those actions.

• READ MORE: Pioneer of Palestine protest in NZ warns against the IDF ‘obscenity’ becoming normalised
• Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine
• Other Israeli illegal settlements in Palestine reports

While condemning the increase in illegal settlements, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand “has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues”.

To do so would be complex and require a full policy process. We are not in a position to do that ahead of the election.

The official response to the UK initiative can be questioned on several grounds.

First, New Zealand has used trade measures in the past to address foreign policy issues, most notably against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Imports of gold, oil and gas are prohibited and there is a 35 percent tariff on all imported Russian goods.

Second, while New Zealand needs to adopt special legislation to impose sanctions outside the United Nations regime, the Russian Sanctions Act — passed in 2022 just three weeks after the invasion of Ukraine — shows it can be done swiftly.

The precise nature of the sanctions may be complex to implement, as the UK has acknowledged. But the intent comes first.

Third, the proximity of a general election should not prevent New Zealand complying with its obligations under international law — especially when the opposition Labour Party has indicated it strongly supports adopting sanctions.

Israeli settler colonialism, explained in 15 seconds https://t.co/WFNekm8uhK pic.twitter.com/j0xgONzYyy

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) September 15, 2026

Saving a two-state solution
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, dates from 1967 and was characterised as a “flagrant violation of international law” by the UN Security Council in 2016.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel’s actions amount to an illegal annexation of territory and are contrary to the prohibition on the use of force and the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Despite this, Israel has built around 160 settlements housing 700,000 people since 1967. In the past 18 months, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated more than 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers (with 20 Israelis killed by Palestinians in the same period), and more than 6000 Palestinians displaced.

In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a plan to construct 3000 settlement homes east of occupied East Jerusalem, known as the E1 settlement plan. This would split the West Bank and isolate East Jerusalem, which Palestine regards as its capital.

This is intentional. Smotrich has asserted the E1 settlement plan “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”. In August this year, Israel opened tenders for the construction of 1200 settlement homes, prompting the UK sanctions response.

These UK sanctions go further than the limited restrictions on arms exports to Israel introduced in 2024 (extended in 2026), targeted sanctions on individual settlers and Israeli ministers, and even the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state in 2025.

While trade more generally between Israel and the UK is unaffected, Israel has reacted furiously, closing the British consulate in Jerusalem (which operates as the de facto British Embassy in Palestine) and banning 12 British MPs from entering the country.

Israel in Panic: The Truth About UK Sanctions Revealed! @Lowkey0nline pic.twitter.com/61NhAACTh0

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) September 14, 2026

Support for a rules-based order
All states have an obligation under customary international law to cooperate to bring an end to serious breaches of certain fundamental rules, including the prohibition on the use of force, illegal occupation of territory, and the right of self-determination.

The International Court of Justice explicitly highlighted this obligation in its 2024 Advisory Opinion which stipulated that states must not recognise Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They must also “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” concerning the territories.

For New Zealand, joining trade (and other) sanctions adopted (or slated to be adopted) by 12 other countries would be an appropriate way to comply with this obligation.

Not doing so further risks undermining the international rules-based order on which New Zealand relies to protect its interests in trade, security and the environment — at a time when that order is under extraordinary strain.

New Zealand is already an outlier, given its refusal to join the 157 countries — including Australia and a majority of European countries — that have recognised Palestine as a state.

To join the UK and other nations sanctioning goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in no way denies the existence of Israel itself as a state.

But by adopting comparable sanctions, New Zealand would strengthen the global response to Israel’s illegal activities, demonstrate regional leadership, and reassert support for the international rules-based order more generally.

Karen Scott is a professor of international law at the University of Canterbury and has produced more than 70 edited books/journal articles and book chapters in the fields of international environmental law, law of the sea and Polar law. She was president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

At least two people were shot and several arrested in the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville on Sunday after unknown people set fire to equipment belonging to an Indian company poised to reopen one of the world’s largest untapped copper and gold reserves.

The arson attack targeted a mining camp belonging to Lloyds Metals and Energy Ltd, an Indian company that was controversially chosen by Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama to reopen the long-shuttered Panguna mine, which is estimated to hold $160 billion in precious metals.

The attack, which sparked a shootout and retaliation, came three weeks after an OCCRP investigation raised questions about Toroama’s decision to choose Lloyds.

• READ MORE: Mining company’s equipment targeted in Panguna arson attack
• Bougainville president condemns ‘terroristic acts of violence’ at Panguna mine
• Other Panguna mine reports

The investigation revealed that Toroama had signed a memorandum of understanding with Lloyds shortly after accepting an offer from its managing director for the president’s wife to travel to India and have a life-saving kidney operation at no cost.

It also quoted an expert and some locals warning that anger over the Indian company’s involvement could erupt into violence.

Bougainville is a semi-autonomous region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that is seeking to become the world’s newest sovereign nation. Its roughly 300,000 residents voted overwhelmingly for independence in 2019, but the results were only tabled last month in PNG’s Parliament, which must ratify the measure.

Toroama, a former combatant in the decade-long civil war that led to Panguna’s closure, was re-elected last year on a promise to reopen the mine. It is Bougainville’s only economic engine capable of funding independence.

While some traditional landowners support Toroama and his plan to partner with Lloyds, others are opposed.

Armed group arrived
The incident began at around 4 am on Sunday, when an armed group arrived at a Lloyds camp near the entrance to Panguna, threatened unarmed security guards and proceeded to burn machinery and equipment, according to Samson Kaissy, chairman of the Panguna Landowners Interim Council and a supporter of Toroama.

Kaissy said the group was made up of unauthorised gold panners angry over being displaced by the mine’s reopening.

He said armed police arrived about two hours later and engaged in a shootout with the attackers, at least one of whom was shot before escaping into the bush.

It was not immediately clear if anyone was killed. Two officials — one national and another local — who spoke on condition of anonymity told OCCRP that two people had died in the shootout, though that could not be verified.

Seven people were arrested, they said, a figure confirmed by Kaissy.

Robert Lobona, one of the dozens of small-scale miners who have long worked in the shuttered mine pit, said that ex-combatants aligned with Lloyds and Toroama had responded to the incident by destroying his sluicing equipment.

“We don’t have anything now,” he said by telephone. “They poured fuel over all the equipment and houses and the generators and burnt them all.”

Burnt tents, makeshift houses
Kaissy said Lloyds security guards responded to the arson attack by going into the mine pit and burning the tents and makeshift houses belonging to unauthorized gold panners who had already fled the area.

Rose Tamou, a Panguna resident and traditional landowner, told OCCRP that her husband Tony was assaulted and taken from their home today on Monday by ex-combatants aligned with Lloyds and Toroama.

“They just came and hit him for nothing and took him away,” she said. “We don’t know where [he is]. I am looking for a car now to go to the Lloyds base and look for him.”

Neither Lloyds nor Toroama responded to requests for comment. Toroama previously told OCCRP that Lloyds had hired ex-combatants from the civil war to provide security at Panguna.

Toroama struck a defiant tone after the incident.

“The government and people of Bougainville will not be intimidated by individuals or factions seeking to undermine our efforts to redevelop the Panguna Mine,” he said in a statement.

Republished from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Israel is holding 37 Palestinian journalists in its prisons, including 19 under administrative detention without charge or trial, says the Palestinian Prisoner Society.

The nongovernmental advocacy group said all 37 journalists were detained following the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023.

It said Israel continues to target Palestinian journalists through arrests, prison sentences, solitary confinement and prosecution over their work and freedom of expression.

• READ MORE: West Bank: RSF condemns Israeli army over escalating violence against Palestinian journalists
• Other Palestinian journalist reports

Among the latest detainees are journalists Muath Ammarna and Sabri Jibrin, who were arrested last Thursday after Israeli forces raided their homes in Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.

The group said Ammarna had been repeatedly targeted by Israeli authorities and was now being detained for the third time over his journalistic work.

It also cited the case of journalist and writer Mahmoud Fatafta, who was sentenced to 48 months in prison over what Israel described as “incitement,” one of the harshest sentences issued in such cases, according to the statement.

The society said Israeli authorities increasingly use “incitement” charges against journalists, alongside administrative detention based on what authorities describe as “secret files”.

Administrative detention
Nineteen journalists from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are currently held under administrative detention, accounting for 51 percent of all detained journalists, it added.

The group also highlighted the case of journalist Bushra al-Tawil, 33, who was transferred from Damon Prison in northern Israel to solitary confinement at Ramla Prison in central Israel.

It accused Israeli authorities of intensifying isolation and other restrictive measures against female Palestinian prisoners, alongside food deprivation, denial of medical treatment and poor sanitation conditions.

The society said detained journalists faced the same conditions as other Palestinian prisoners, including hunger, medical neglect, torture, abuse, solitary confinement and denial of basic rights.

Journalists are also targeted through killings, enforced disappearances and direct attacks while carrying out their work, it added, describing this as part of a systematic policy aimed at restricting Palestinian reporting and documentation of Israeli crimes and violations.

The occupied West Bank has seen daily Israeli army raids and escalating attacks by occupiers since the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023.

The attacks have included killings, arrests, demolitions, attacks on homes, vehicles and mosques, destruction of agricultural land, restrictions on farmers, displacement of Palestinians and expansion of illegal settlements.

​​​​​​​On Thursday, the Palestinian Prisoner Society said Israeli forces detained more than 100 Palestinians across the West Bank over the previous week, bringing the number of West Bank detainees since October 2023 to more than 25,000, in addition to thousands detained from Gaza.

Republished from Anadolu Ajansi.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori has begun with an election promise from the Green Party to invest an additional $200 million in the language over four years.

Of that, $30 million annually would go towards te reo Māori education and professional development for teachers, while $20 million would be shared between Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori and Te Mātāwai.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said sustained investment was needed for te reo Māori to flourish in homes, schools and communities.

• READ MORE: Other te reo Māori reports

“Te reo Māori is a taonga. The Green Party will proudly fund te reo Māori initiatives to thrive for generations to come,” she said.

“Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori is a time to celebrate our reo, acknowledge the generations of people who got our reo to where it is now, and advocate for the future of our reo.”

The Greens said the teacher-training funding would be used to develop programmes with schools and communities, following the end of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori.

That programme provided free te reo Māori learning to the education workforce and received $108 million between 2021 and 2024 as part of a wider $120 million package of language initiatives. Its funding was redirected by the coalition government in 2024.

16,000 participants
An independent evaluation found Te Ahu o te Reo Māori improved participants’ language capability, confidence and use of te reo in education settings. More than 16,000 people participated in the programme.

The government has since launched Te Ataarangi, a digital te reo Māori professional-development programme intended to reach 50,000 teachers. Education Minister Erica Stanford said in February that the programme would provide practical, self-paced language support from Term 2 this year.

Davidson accused the government of failing to adequately fund community language revitalisation and waging a “culture war” against the use of te reo Māori.

“Our reo must be treasured, and the Green Party will make sure that it is,” she said.

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka dismissed the Greens’ announcement as “an election promise to spend more money”.

“Our government’s focus is on achieving results, more people speaking te reo Māori, more often and in more places,” he said.

Potaka said Te Taura Whiri, Te Mātāwai, Te Puni Kōkiri and Manatū Taonga were funded to undertake their existing roles and work programmes, but the government had no additional funding to announce.

Government ‘strategic reset’
He also confirmed the refreshed Maihi Karauna, the Crown’s Māori language revitalisation strategy, was a “strategic reset” rather than a new Budget initiative.

Potaka said the strategy retained the Crown’s long-term reo Māori goals to 2040 and would be followed by a coordinated action plan intended to make better use of existing investment.

He rejected Davidson’s allegation that the government had waged a “culture war” against te reo Māori, pointing to its investment in Māori media and kapa haka.

“We can have a legitimate debate about how public money is best invested without questioning anyone’s commitment to te reo Māori,” Potaka said.

“What matters is whether that investment produces lasting growth in the number of people learning, speaking and using the language.”

Education Minister Erica Stanford has also been asked for comment.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News

A pioneer of Palestine protest in Aotearoa New Zealand today warned against the IDF slaughter “obscenity” becoming accepted as normal in the world.

“It’s a particular obscenity watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Lebanon and for the world to get used to it — as our government does … voices, platitudes, and no action,” said Janfrie Wakim of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

“Today we also want to remember those Palestinians who died in Shabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut — a massacre that occurred in September 1982.

“How many people remember?”

• READ MORE: Labour would prioritise recognition of Palestine, sanctions on Israel
• Bruce King’s record of today’s Palestine events
• Other Palestine reports

Wakim, along with her late husband David, organised monthly Palestinian banners protests in Customs Street for 25 years and was coordinator and spokesperson for the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) and backing “freedom flotilla” missions before PSNA was formally set up.

A former chair of PSNA, she has also long supported the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement in opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories.

Speaking in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square and acknowledging the protests against settler-colonialism at Takaparawha-Bastion Point in 1982 — “whose chief stands with us behind us” — Wakim gave a rundown on the Shabra and Shatila massacres that killed between 1300 and 3500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shias the same year.

Three months earlier, Israel had launched a massive invasion of Lebanon “spearheaded by the notorious defence minister Ariel Sharon who wanted to destroy the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] based there at the time”.

‘Laid siege in Beirut’
“They laid siege to the part of Beirut where the PLO was headquartered near the Shabra and Shatila camps where Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba [‘the Catastrophe’] lived.

In early September 1982, a ceasefire deal had been negotiated by US President Ronald Reagan’s administration between the Lebanese Phalangist militia and the PLO, which then evacuated from Lebanon to Tunisia.

The PLO had been given written reassurance from the US that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians they were leaving behind would be safe, said Wakim.

“Known for their brutality, they murdered mostly women, children and the elderly — many were raped and mutilated.

“Israel did nothing to stop the massacre, in fact it encouraged it until the Phalangists left on September 18.

‘Truly horrifying’
“This was truly horrifying — and there was condemnation and outrage around the world. Here [in New Zealand] included. That was the time when my husband David and I became involved actively with the local PHRC.”

Wakim said that after 18 years occupying southern Lebanon, leaving 18,000 killed, Israel withdrew its military forces in 2000 but attacked again in 2006 and also in 2024.

“Today we remember that hideous event 44 years ago and the victims,” Wakim said.

“The devastating trauma that each family witnessed and has borne in subsequent decades.

“The killing continues [today] with increasing ferocity mass displacement, destruction of homes and infrastructure and war crimes as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross have proven.”

Wakim quoted from an article by the Palestinian writer and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre:

“Though Israeli massacres are meant to bring an end to Palestinian resistance, instead they unwittingly fuel it.

“While Israel continues to act with impunity, Palestinians continue to resist.

“This is not just the lesson of Sabra and Shatila, but also the bigger lesson of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Lost opportunity for arrest
Wakim also spoke of a “crushing” opportunity lost by New Zealand in 2006 to arrest an alleged Israeli war criminal under universal jurisdiction.

“Former Israeli general and war minister Moshe Ya’alon, who faced charges of war crimes committed in Lebanon, visited New Zealand on a fundraising mission,” she said.

“Acting on a tip-off, in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction, and with help from a variety of legal experts, I successfully sought a private prosecution for his arrest and was delighted when a District Court judge agreed to issue a warrant for his arrest.

“Unfortunately, this reaction turned to dismay when the arrest did not proceed because the Attorney-General at the time, Michael Cullen, intervened. He quashed the warrant and allowed Ya’alon to leave the country.

“It was a crushing disappointment.”

The overall death toll of the Gaza genocide by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) since October 2023 has risen to 73,470, with at least 174,540 wounded, according to the latest available figures.

Since the “ceasefire” last October, at least 1344 people have been killed and 4464 injured while at least 815 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, according to the Health Ministry.

Critical of UK policy
Another speaker at the rally, Barry Lee, a long-time social justice activist since the Vietnam War, condemned the weaknesses of UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s dramatic “blind eye” change in British policy towards Israel last week.

The UK announced what it called “sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements”, noted Lee.

The UK sanctions would ban settlement goods but also act against companies and individuals providing services for settlement expansion.

“Sounds great but we shouldn’t get too excited about this because as Dana Paterson’s letter in yesterday’s Herald stated its ‘too little too late’,” he said.

“But when you look at the fine print you see that this only applies to banning transactions with the so-called ‘illegal settlements’.

“This is a qualification which the Zionists, being highly skilled in devious deception, will most likely circumvent by concealing or manoeuvring so that the area of origin is concealed.”

However, this did not stop Britain from being “one of the greatest arms suppliers’ to Israel.

“And it doesn’t stop UK investment and trade with Israel which helps fuel the Zionist economy.”

Lee did acknowledge a couple of points of the new policy:

• The settlements are illegal under international law, and there has been a rise in violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank by settlers in recent months.
• That “The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists”.

Illegal settlements target
However, Miliband was careful to point out that that “the sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel”.

The Foreign Secretary stated that “Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse, members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians”.

“This is pathetic. The Zionist regime has done more than ‘turn a blind eye’. Israeli soldiers have protected the so called settlers.

“And leading government figures, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, have stated openly that they support the settlements. He has vowed to continue establishing the settlements — illegal under international law.

Lee criticised the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for recently passed legislation to allow the so called area E1 settlement which will effectively cut the West Bank territory in half and undermine Palestine’s quest for statehood.

“Without this official support the settlements would not happen,” Lee said.
He described the current coalition government as being “completely politically and morally degenerate”.

“Like its Western ‘friends’, it is still waffling about the so-called ‘two-state solution’. There is no two-state solution — the Israelis ruled that out decades ago.

“And it was never a solution. Israel is occupied Palestine. The only solution is a secular one state — where all ethnicities and religions live together in equality.”

Kites for freedom in Gaza
After the downtown rally, a linked Global Sumud Aotearoa Kites for Freedom in Gaza action was staged at Mission Bay Beach.

This annual event honours the 12,000 children who flew kites on the Gaza beach to set a world record for simultaneous kite flying. More children were killed in the first five months of Gaza’s genocide than took part in the record.

On August 25, an official of the US-led so-called “Board of Peace” supervising the “ceasefire” in Gaza said: “All militant activity in Gaza must stop, including the flying of kites.”

Organisers of the Mission Bay event said the Israeli military was trying to deny one of the last fun-making events by “banning” flying kites in the ruins of Gaza.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

The section 18C case Zionist Federation of Australia’s CEO Alon Cassuto brought against high profile Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis in the Federal Court has been discontinued with no order over costs.

There is no finding that Kostakidis breached Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. No apology has been ordered. No corrective notice will be published.

There was no judgment. What Mary Kostakidis got instead was a short consent order noting that the man who sued her had decided not to go on.

• READ MORE: Australian Zionists drop case against ‘truth’ journalist Mary Kostakidis
• Other Mary Kostakidis reports

The ZFA calls the matter “resolved”. Cassuto filed the case. Kostakidis spent two years preparing to fight it. Then Cassuto dropped it. The person who walked out of the courtroom was the one who chose to walk into it.

The complaint concerned two posts in which Kostakidis shared and commented on a speech by the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Cassuto said the material was “racially offensive”.

Mary denied endorsing anything and argued that a journalist has to be able to report what the people fighting a war are saying.

She is a former prime time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS over two decades. Her journalism spans geopolitical issues, democracy and press freedom.

Kostakidis told Michael West Media, “This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression.”

Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial.

Lawfare
Cassuto says he got what he wanted because Mary Kostakidis had already issued a qualified apology. He leaves out the timing. She made that apology before he went to the Federal Court.

He called it insincere and sued anyway. Two years on, he points to the same apology as his reason for stopping. That is a man looking for the exit.

Call it what it was. This was “lawfare”. The court process was the weapon, and the target was wider than one journalist.

Every editor and journalist with something to say about Israel was meant to be watching.

From the outside, each move looks separate. A complaint here. A referral there. A story in a friendly newspaper, then a writ. Put them side by side, and you see a structure built to make criticism of Israel expensive enough that most people decide it is not worth the trouble.

The letters are polite. The threat underneath is not. Legal bills keep arriving, and behind them the possibility of losing everything.

A case like this does not need to succeed to do its job. Once defending your own words puts your house at risk, the process is the punishment.

Defence won
Kostakidis’s defence put it plainly: the case was designed to discredit her and to frighten others into shutting up. “I have spent two years doing nothing but preparing my defence in a case aimed at silencing me,” she wrote.

For an ordinary Australian, she said, that could have meant losing their home.

Each new demand ate into her time and her savings. She could have gone quiet. Instead, she kept publishing and

kept her eyes on Gaza while most of the Australian media looked away.

Ordinary people chipped in to fund her defence. Her lawyers and her husband stayed beside her. But the name on the writ was hers, and so was the house. She did not fold.

The ZFA’s parting statement threw in fresh accusations and described her commentary as repugnant. None of it was ever tested. It reads less like the words of a winner than a door slammed on the way out.

The brutality and effectiveness of the Zionist cancelation of people’s livelihoods and opportunities for criticising the conduct of the State they worship. Their own conduct is responsible for their reputation. The response to the reputation: ‘Antisemitic tope!!!’ “Blood… https://t.co/u68vBi4Y9G

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 11, 2026

The moral high ground is Mary Kostakidis’s
There is a deeper problem for the lobby, and no writ will fix it. It is impossible to stand on a hill of infant bones and claim the moral high ground. The army of pedants and lawyers trying to trauma-clean the crime scene is doomed to fail. Resentment rises with every scrub.

Will the Zionist lobby ever learn?

Legal attack dogs bark loudly, and often that is all it takes. Then someone stands still and says, fine, put your evidence in front of a judge. The barking stops.

“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth, fearlessly, and to hold power to account,” Mary Kostakidis wrote, calling the outcome “a win for press freedom, which has prevailed”.

She also thanked Jewish and Israeli people who have opposed the destruction of Gaza, saying:

Our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism.

The determination to erase Palestinian voices.
‘We Never Paid Him a Dime’: Palestine Chronicle Editor, Lawyer Respond to Lawsuit over Slain Gaza Journalist – Palestine Chronicle https://t.co/DQs3sUGaYN

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 12, 2026

Standing with Jewish Australians
Mary Kostakidis did not beat Jewish Australians. She beat an organised lobby whose power rests on making criticism of Israel personally costly. A great many Jewish Australians stand with Palestinians and refuse to have their identity yoked to the conduct of a foreign government.

Small wins matter because of what they do to the next person. A journalist sees that someone survived and files the story. An activist feels less alone. Fear moves through a community quickly. So does nerve.

None of this makes Mary Kostakidis infallible. Heroism has never required that. It requires knowing the cost and standing there anyway.

Lawfare is a muzzle made of good manners. Mary Kostakidis has torn a hole in it.

Martin Luther King Jr once famously quoted 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”

It does not bend on its own. It bends because people like Mary Kostakidis lean their whole weight on it.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and a Palestine peace activist. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/12/australian-zionists-drop-case-against-truth-journalist-kostakidis/ Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:33:57 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133434 The Zionist Federation of Australia has withdrawn its case of “racial hatred” against Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis, who called it a victory for free speech, reports Consortium News.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Joe Lauria

After a two-year legal battle to punish a prominent Australian journalist for her public criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) has withdrawn its case.

“This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression,” Kostakidis said on X. “Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial.

“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth — fearlessly — and to hold power to account. This is a win for press freedom, which has prevailed.“

Kostakidis, who anchored the SBS national news for nearly 20 years, was a high-profile target for the Zionist Federation in its quest to silence outrage over Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Alon Cassuto, the ZFA chief executive who brought the case against Kostakidis, claimed on X that he withdrew it on Thursday to deprive her of a platform. He wrote:

“I do not intend to spend another year taking Ms Kostakidis’ repugnant commentary from the dark corners of the internet and giving it a Federal Court platform in her pursuit of martyrdom. My job here is done.”

The majority of his statement was a continued attack on the journalist. He claimed that the action he brought against Kostakidis was satisfied by an apology she had issued. But that was two years ago and he pursued his case against her nonetheless.

What he did not mention is a recent series of court decisions in Australia by judges who upheld the right to criticise Zionism, which appears to have weakened his chances of winning.

Kostakidis had also won approval for full discovery of ZFA communications.

In claiming victory, Kostakidis wrote:

“Watching a people live stream their own genocide while the international community responsible for creating this mess offers the victims sympathy and the perpetrators bombs, diplomatic cover and impunity, has been disgusting.

“Thank you to the Jewish and Israeli people all over the world raging against this in recognition our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism.

“Australia must stop disregarding the Orders of the International Court of Justice which were clear: we are obliged under international law to take meaningful action to prevent genocide in Palestine and to do all in our power to bring about an end to apartheid.

“Hypocrisy, double standards and a lack of courage are aiding the destruction of a framework intended to protect against the worst excesses of state power.”

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London.

Breaking: Zionists legal proceedings against me have been withdrawn after a 2 year battle.

This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression. Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly…

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 10, 2026

In citizen responses to this article published by Consortium News:

Anthony Kevin (September 11, 2026):

Whatever Cassuto’s rationalisations for their withdrawal, the Australian Zionist cause is bound to suffer big reputational damage over this. I am sure Joe Lauria is right that they ended the case because after the recent decision by NSW Supreme Judge Fagan, they were going to find it a hard case to sustain.

Especially as Zionist Israel keeps on humiliating and exploiting Australian governments and elites.

Mary was looking more and more like Joan of Arc. And the Zionists more and more like Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition.

Graeme D (September 11, 2026):
Mary stood where no Australian legacy MSM dared stand. Sycophants one and all, so ready to bend.

She showed courage and a dedication to telling the truth about a genocide when Australian legacy outlets banned journalists from using that word, even after the ICC unequivocally declared that a “plausible genocide” was being perpetrated.

Mary stood where most MPs feared to stand.

As Hunter S. Thompson — another fearless journalist — wrote, “anyone who goes to caught takes a wolf by the ears.”

Mary did this, and is one of the few to “win” at probably a heavy personal cost.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/11/pacific-islands-forum-leaders-in-koror-heavy-on-reaffirming-but-light-on-tasking/ Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:03:10 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133400

ANALYSIS: By Tess Newton Cain and Stefan Armbruster

With a Chinese ballistic missile test in July as prelude, the familiar China-Taiwan tensions and preparations for the Pacific pre-COP in October and COP31 the following month, the annual Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) returned to Palau last week for the first time in 12 years, and north of the equator for the first time since Pohnpei in 2016.

Preparations for the 55th PIFLM were still underway as delegates arrived in Koror. An expected 2000 people soon choked the town as motorcades shuttled VIPs between hotels and venues.

Attendance speculation dominated the early part of the week. The leaders of Fiji, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Samoa and Vanuatu were absent, and barely anyone mentioned that New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon, chair from 2027, only planned to attend the retreat.

• READ MORE: Pacific Islands Forum: Is Australia out of touch with the Pacific and climate?
• Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

Kiribati, close to Beijing, sent the Director of Foreign Service and former ambassador to China, David Teaabo, but he was not in the room for the retreat, where the missile response was thrashed out, and Kiribati was initially omitted from acknowledgements at the closing session, which Teaabo called “protocol-wise … not good”.

Matthew Wale, Prime Minister of Solomon Islands and outgoing PIF chair, added to the drama: met on arrival on the evening of Saturday, August 29, by journalists asking about a no-confidence motion lodged in Honiara that day, he flew home in the early hours of Sunday. (The motion was withdrawn on September 7.)

Invited back were the Forum’s 21 dialogue partners, excluded from last year’s meeting in Honiara over China-Taiwan tensions, along with the sole “development partner”, Taiwan. At the opening ceremony, China’s envoy Qian Bo and Taiwan’s foreign minister Lin Chia-lung were seated in the same room.

The week culminated in the communiqué, 76 paragraphs under headings tracking the thematic areas of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Leaders endorsed “revised Communiqué drafting procedures”, but the document is increasingly flabby and lacks forward momentum: “reaffirmed” appears 38 times and “endorsed” 20; “agreed” 14 times, twice only in principle; “tasked” once.

‘Partnership streams’
Leaders agreed on the placement of partners in the two “partnership streams” created by last year’s Leaders Policy on Partnerships, the communiqué’s only words on the subject. As the Secretariat explains it, Tier 1 “strategic partners” keep leader-level access, while Tier 2 “sectoral partners” engage only at ministerial level on specific issues, with placements reviewed after a year.

Secretary General Baron Waqa will now write to the countries concerned. The communiqué does not name them, but the ABC and SBS report that the 13 strategic partners are China, the United States, Japan, France, India, Indonesia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Singapore, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

That leaves in the second stream Türkiye, the host of COP31, and Thailand, whose prime minister is coming to the pre-COP, and six others. Their reactions will be watched closely.

The Belau Declaration for Urgent and Inclusive Climate Action to Keep 1.5°C Within Reach was issued the day after a sobering UNEP report confirmed that the target will be overshot, as the declaration itself concedes.

It restates the Pacific position more strongly for the pre-COP and COP31 but sets out no pathway for returning the issue to centre stage globally; that job is deferred to the leaders’ meeting in Tuvalu that sits alongside the pre-COP proper, which Fiji co-hosts.

After Australia failed to secure a Pacific COP31, the consolation prize of a pre-meeting had been sold as a chance for world leaders to see Pacific climate impacts firsthand.

Fiji’s foreign minister, Sakiasi Ditoka, revealed that the leaders of Antigua and Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Thailand, Maldives and Timor-Leste would come, along with a handful of ministers. Leaders do not usually attend pre-COPs, but the media presented the low turnout as a major embarrassment.

Australian sticking point
For some, Australia’s own contribution remains the sticking point. Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister, Ralph Regenvanu, was typically forthright, telling the media that Australia was “not doing enough” and must end fossil fuel expansion.

He spoke on the day Australia’s new environmental regulator approved an extension of the BHP Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji coal mine to 2055, its first coal approval since it began operating on July 1, and by the Climate Council’s count the 37th fossil fuel project approved since Labor took office in 2022.

The Chinese missile, fired from a submarine, crossed the exclusive economic zones of several Forum members, including the Federated States of Micronesia, Naoero (formerly Nauru) and Kiribati, before coming down near the Kiribati-Tuvalu boundary.

Leaders “registered concern” and called for at least 24 hours’ notice of future tests from all states, presumably including the United States, though neither China nor the US is named.

But with Kiribati absent from the retreat and Naoero’s President, David Adeang, dissociating his country from the paragraph in a footnote, the consensus was undermined. Naoero, which switched recognition to Beijing in 2024, was the sole formal dissenter among the 18 members.

There was some movement on West Papua. Prodded by the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), the PIF agreed to facilitate a dialogue with Indonesia and a mission of “interested Leaders”, destination unstated, in consultation with the MSG Secretariat, reporting back in 2027.

The Forum’s envoys, appointed in 2023, Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and PNG’s James Marape, are to press Indonesia on the long-sought visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the invitation for which was originally extended by Indonesia in 2018 but still not granted.

Indonesia may face ‘review’
The MSG wants the visit by 31 December 2026, when Indonesia’s presidency of the UN Human Rights Council ends, or it will review Indonesia’s associate member status at its 2027 summit.

Leaders also approved terms of reference for a Renewable Energy Commissioner, first agreed in 2023, to sit within the Pacific Community (SPC) with dual reporting to SPC and the Forum Secretariat, funded by an initial A$1.89 million from Australia. Once appointed, the commissioner is to advocate for investment in renewables and coordinate the push towards 100 percent renewables, cutting dependence on imported diesel.

AI and digital sovereignty formally joined the regional agenda with the endorsement of the Pacific Digital and Artificial Intelligence Technology Principles, “the Pacific’s first collective regional position on artificial intelligence”, which will inform a governance framework in 2027.

The Pacific Pact on Gender and Climate Action is also new, committing governments to strengthen women’s representation in climate delegations, ministerial portfolios and governance bodies. Asked at the final press conference how that would happen with only one female leader among the Forum’s 18 members (Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine), after some confused looks, PIF chair Surangel Whipps said Palau was traditionally a matrilineal society where the women “decide who’s chief“, and predicted that “a new woman president is not far away”. (When Whipps invoked the influence of leaders’ wives, Luxon said, “That’s not the same, mate”.)

The closing press conference also exposed issues yet to reach the leaders’ agenda, none of them in the communiqué: a growing HIV crisis, which civil society groups complained was left off the health agenda; the future of Bougainville as it moves towards independence from Papua New Guinea; and the ambitions of Guam and American Samoa, associate members since 2024, for full membership despite their status as US territories.

The next PIFLM will be held in New Zealand in 2027, and the one after that in Naoero, the missile-testing dissenter, followed by Marshall Islands in 2029, Vanuatu in 2030 and French Polynesia in 2031.

Whether the intervening 12 months produce action on the commitments made in Koror, or another communiqué heavy on reaffirming and light on tasking, remains to be seen.

Dr Tess Newton Cain is an Associate of the Development Policy Centre and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. Stefan Armbruster is an award-winning journalist with 30+ years experience covering Australia and the Pacific. Formerly head of news (Pacific) at RFA/BenarNews and SBS correspondent; previously with BBC, ABC, Dow Jones and CNBC. This article is republished from ANU’s Development Policy Blog under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/11/take-thailand-back-thais-protest-against-disrespectful-israeli-tourists-in-bangkok/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:16:27 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133388 By Wan Taufiq in Bangkok

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok yesterday to decry the behaviour of Israeli tourists and declare that their country is “not for sale” as part of a campaign dubbed “Take Thailand Back”.

The demonstration, organised by former media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul, follows a spate of incidents involving Israeli tourists accused of upsetting local people and disrespecting their customs.

Israelis have also been accused of illegal landholding, running illegal businesses, as well as setting up houses of worship without proper permission from authorities.

• READ MORE: Other protest against Israel reports

Protesters held up placards saying “Save Thailand” and “This is not the promised land”, as well as placards telling Israelis to behave in their country.

“Hospitality does not equate to submission to exploitation, and courtesy is not an open licence for anyone to act with impunity on our sovereign soil,” Sondhi was quoted by news media as saying.

“The patience of the Thai people has reached a limit,” he added.

The 78-year-old also submitted a letter to the Israeli embassy and urged Thailand’s government to take action against the “culture of disdain towards their [Thai] hosts”, according to The South China Morning Post.

A Phuket protest
Another protest is scheduled to take place on the southern Thai island of Phuket outside the tourist destination’s Chabad centre.

On Tuesday, Thailand summoned Israel’s ambassador to raise concerns about the behaviour of Israeli tourists in the country.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow met with Israeli Ambassador Alona Fisher-Kamm in Bangkok, where the minister underscored the country’s policy on foreign visitors.

Protests in Bangkok over Israeli tourists. Video: Al Jazeera

Sihasak said after the meeting that tourists were welcome to visit Thailand, but that did not mean that “tourists of any nationality can do whatever they want here”. The minister said that incidents involving tourists had upset locals, particularly in the southern provinces of Phuket and Phang Nga.

According to Israeli media, Fisher-Kamm was preparing to raise concerns about alleged hostility towards Jews in the country and proposed preparing guidelines for Israelis visiting the Southeast Asian state.

The document could be distributed through the Israeli embassy in Thailand, according to the report.

A number of incidents involving Israeli tourists have made headlines in Thailand in recent years, particularly following the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023. Thailand, along with other Southeast Asian countries, has become a popular destination for Israeli soldiers after their service in the army.

In July, Thailand’s Interior Ministry expanded its investigations into foreign businesses after an Israeli tourist confronted officials during an inspection of a Jewish Chabad House, saying: “Don’t you know this is Israeli territory?”

The remark, which was widely reported at the time, sparked an angry response from the country’s interior minister.

In November 2025, an Israeli couple was arrested on the island of Koh Phangan after being filmed having sex at a public waterfall.

Israeli tourists have also been caught on video in altercations with business owners over unpaid bills, leading some businesses to adopt “no Israeli” policies.

Republished from The New Arab.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/australia-snubs-torres-strait-in-melanesian-spearhead-group-bid/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:56:01 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133368 By Stefan Armbruster and Jennifer Enosa for the Torres News

Australia is seeking observer status at the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) but has not committed to giving a role to Torres Strait Islanders, its own Melanesian population.

Responding to questions from the Torres News at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) in Palau last week, Minister for Pacific Island Affairs Pat Conroy confirmed the federal government was applying.

“We’re obviously keen to make that happen, because we see value in having the people of Australia as an observer through the Australian government at the Melanesian Spearhead Group,” Conroy told a press conference in Palau.

• READ MORE: Pacific Islands Forum: Is Australia out of touch with the Pacific and climate?
• West Papua: The Pacific’s new test of Indonesia’s sovereignty narrative
  
• The Pacific’s cocaine highway: will Australia’s $600m deal really help?
• Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

The MSG was founded in 1986 with the primary purpose of supporting decolonisation and self-determination for Melanesian people.

Its current membership includes the governments of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), representing the Kanak independence movement of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), which is seeking independence from Indonesia, holds observer status but has previously sought full membership.

On the sidelines of the PIF leaders meeting, newly appointed MSG Director-General Dr Anna Naupa told the Torres News the Pacific sub-regional group was preparing for a mid-term review of its 25-year 2038 Prosperity for All strategy.

Engaging with ‘Melanesian brothers and sisters’
“All our Indigenous people, wherever we are within our vast Melanesian communities, should certainly be part of conversations about anything to do with our Melanesia and this is something that we hope to pursue when we come to review the plan,” Dr Naupa said.

Asked if the Torres Strait could apply for observer status, she responded that it could be considered.

“The MSG in its structure is around states and the FLNKS, the movement, and recognition of different types of observers and associate members, but that does not preclude us from engaging with our Melanesian brothers and sisters more broadly,” she said.

Since the 1936 Maritime Strike, Torres Strait Islanders have sought various forms of self-governance and autonomy, including calls in the 1980s to cede from Australia due to “neglect” of their people and region.

Australia has engaged with the MSG in recent years but not with or through its Torres Strait Islander citizens.

“I can’t comment about the past but what I can say is that because of our attention to our Indigenous Melanesian peoples, that is the preference,” she said.

In 2025, Conroy was a guest at the 23rd MSG Leaders’ Summit held in Fiji, the first time an Australian minister has attended their meeting.

Non-commital on ‘greater voice’
He would not say if he supported Torres Strait Islanders having a greater voice in the Pacific or a seat at the MSG table.

“Obviously, there’s a process that is going through where the Melanesian Spearhead Group considers whether Australia would be an observer at the MSG,” he said.

MSG has flagged that it will also review Indonesia’s associate membership in 2027 if it does not enable a visit by the UN Human Rights Commissioner to investigate abuses in its Papuan provinces.

Australia has in recent years faced criticism from UN human rights bodies for some states blocking visits to prisons to investigate conditions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander detainees.

Stefan Armbruster is also the news development lead of Pasifika TV. Jennifer Enosa is a reporter for Radio 4WM and TIMA (Torres Strait Media Association). This article is republished from Torres News with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/easy-decision-naoero-becomes-third-pacific-islands-forum-member-with-jerusalem-embassy/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:22:16 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133361 By RNZ Pacific reporters

Naoero, formerly known as Nauru, has opened its embassy in Jerusalem, becoming the third Pacific Island nation to do so.

Naoero’s Vice-President Lionel Aingimea said it sent a message to the world about where the island nation stood.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Israel had committed to sending Naoero medical equipment and water purification systems.

• READ MORE: Why most Pacific government’s stand with Israel
• Other Pacific and Israel diplomacy reports

Sa’ar visited Suva in June after the Fiji government opened its own embassy in Jerusalem last year in a ceremony attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Papua New Guinea opened an embassy there in 2023.

Sa’ar said earlier this year that Samoa was also expected to open its Jerusalem embassy this year.

Aingimea said opening an embassy in Jerusalem was a “major political decision”.

‘Strengthening of Israel ties’
“We see opening an embassy here in Jerusalem not only as a strengthening of our ties with Israel, but also as a message to the world of where we stand,” he was quoted as saying in a statement released by the Israeli government.

“There was never a thought in the minds and hearts of Naoero that we would open an embassy here in Jerusalem this year,” he said.

“What changed it? It was born in discussions between myself and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar in Fiji. I took it to Cabinet, and Cabinet endorsed it. It was an easy decision to make.”

He added that Naoero’s support for Israel had been “unwavering”.

“Naoero is historically one of Israel’s most reliable and consistent diplomatic allies at the United Nations.

“The United States stands at 93 percent of its votes supporting Israel, the Federated States of Micronesia at 88 percent, and Naoero at 71 percent. Mark my words: that 71 percent will increase very quickly.

“True friends stay consistent through both good times and hard trials, and that is who Naoero is to Israel.”

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/maori-delegations-israel-trip-under-scrutiny-over-funding-and-itinerary/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:19:14 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133351 Te Ao Māori News

A delegation of Māori leaders visiting Israel under the banner of “business and innovation” faces public criticism over its timing and purpose, while questions remain about how the trip was organised and the full extent of its funding, itinerary and engagement with Palestinian organisations.

The visit comes as New Zealand criticises the Israeli government’s actions in the occupied West Bank but stops short of joining international moves to ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements.

Northland Regional Council chair Pita Tipene is among those who have visited Israel in recent days. The trip is taking place against the backdrop of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, escalating Israeli settlement activity and settler violence in the West Bank.

• READ MORE:  Labour would prioritise recognition of Palestine, sanctions on Israel
• Peters’ ‘hot air’ over Israeli settlement trade ban rules out of step with world
• Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative claims deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to evade settler-colonial characterization — Arama Rata
• Other Gaza reports

In September 2025, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has rejected that finding.

Former delegate says Israeli ministry funded the visit
Te Ao Māori News understands prospective delegation members were told the visit would focus on “business and innovation”.

Riki Manarangi, who travelled to Israel as part of a Māori delegation in November 2025, said he heard “through the grapevine” that another delegation was planned for 2026 and volunteered to recommend potential participants.

“I wasn’t formally approached or asked to organise anything,” he said.

“I reached out to a few people I thought would be a good fit and asked if they’d be keen to be considered. Some went, and some declined.”

Manarangi said he approached several people he believed would suit the delegation’s business and innovation focus but was not responsible for deciding who would participate.

He said Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs organised and funded the visit.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs over there are the ones who organise and fund it,” he said. “They cover basics … transport, accommodation, and kai.”

Asked who helped coordinate the current visit, Manarangi described Yifat Goddard as “like the programme lead” and said she was unpaid.

Goddard, an Israeli-New Zealander, also proposed the November 2025 Māori delegation that Manarangi joined, according to an account published by the “Indigenous Embassy” Jerusalem. Te Ao Māori News has asked Goddard for comment and has not yet received a response.

The Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem said it had no involvement in the current delegation and had not been approached to help organise, recruit for, fund or facilitate it. It said it learned of the visit second-hand and through social media.

MFAT notified after delegation was underway
New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it had no involvement in the visit.

“The Israeli government advised MFAT it was hosting the group once the visit was underway,” a spokesperson said.

MFAT did not say which arm of the Israeli government contacted it, what “hosting” involved or whether it was given information about the delegation’s funding.

Te Ao Māori News has requested further information under the Official Information Act, including correspondence about the visit and details of when and how MFAT was notified.

The Israeli Embassy’s initial response did not confirm who initiated or funded the delegation, what costs the Israeli government covered or how participants were selected.

It also did not identify which Israeli government officials or organisations the group was meeting or say whether the itinerary included engagement with Palestinians or Palestinian organisations.

Instead, the Embassy said it was pleased delegates had been able to visit Israel and “see the country for themselves, rather than relying solely on the picture presented through the media”.

It said delegations travelled throughout Israel, met Jewish, Arab, Druze and Bedouin Israelis, and were free to hear a range of views.

“Israel is a democratic country. Visitors are free to ask the questions they wish, to say whatever they want, and to make up their own minds,” it said.

Te Ao Māori News has since asked the Embassy to confirm Manarangi’s account, including Goddard’s role, whether international flights were covered and which Israeli government body administered the funding. It has not yet responded to that follow-up.

The New Zealand Israel Innovation Hub declined to confirm whether it was involved in the current visit.

It described the delegation as a “tremendous success”, saying that the assessment was based on social media posts and second-hand feedback. The hub said the visit had inspired plans for three Māori Innovation and Technology Delegations in 2027.

The first would focus on Northland Māori communities and educational outcomes. The hub also invited a representative from Whakaata Māori to consider joining one of its future delegations.

Pita Tipene says he will respond after returning to Aotearoa
Tipene declined an interview while overseas, saying he had received requests from several media organisations.

“I’ve responded by saying that I’ll speak my truth when I set foot home,” he told Te Ao Māori News.

Tipene has, however, responded publicly to criticism of his presence in Israel.

“It’s horrible and gut-wrenching, and it must stop!” he wrote.

“I am not pro-Israel — I am pro-peace and humanity, as the killing and destruction is happening across national boundaries here in Gaza and in other nations.

“I’m not here to judge, but I’m not immune to the gravity of what’s happening here either.”

Northland Regional Council said it had no involvement in the visit.

Chief executive Jonathan Gibbard said Tipene was travelling in a personal, non-council capacity and the council had not funded, organised or endorsed the trip.

Gibbard said the travel was not related to council business.

Other current delegates approached by Te Ao Māori News have not responded to requests for comment.

An invitation some Māori leaders declined
Some invited Māori leaders declined to participate. Te Ao Māori News understands concerns were raised during planning about the trip’s funding, its political context and whether delegates would have opportunities to hear directly from Palestinian communities.

Manarangi said prospective delegates who raised concerns were offered meetings with representatives of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and encouraged to participate. He said nobody was excluded because of concerns about Israel or Palestine, and those who did not travel had chosen to withdraw.

“There are plenty of people over there who are openly critical of the Israeli government, no different to here in Aotearoa; that’s just what living in a democracy looks like,” Manarangi said.

Te Ao Māori News continues to seek responses from others involved in facilitating the visit.

NZ condemns settlement expansion but does not join import-ban push

Questions about the delegation come as the United Kingdom, France and Canada move to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The three countries were among 12 that issued a joint statement warning that unprecedented settlement expansion and settler violence were rapidly undermining the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Israel responded with retaliatory measures against the UK, including ordering the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem, which serves Palestinians.

New Zealand did not sign the statement and said it was not in a position to introduce an import ban before the election.

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters issued a “standalone” statement on Wednesday saying New Zealand was “deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in the West Bank”.

“There has been a marked escalation in Israel’s actions, jeopardising the prospect of a durable peace,” Peters said.

“Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are a violation of international law. Expanding settlements undermines prospects for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict.”

“New Zealand strongly opposes actions that advance annexation or threaten the forcible displacement of Palestinians,” he said.

“Such measures are incompatible with international law and risk perpetuating the cycle of violence and insecurity.”

A spokesperson for Peters said New Zealand had not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign-policy issues. Introducing an import ban would require a full policy process that could not be completed before the election.

New Zealand had previously imposed travel bans on 38 people over extremist settlement activity, including two Israeli ministers, with the latest three bans announced in June.

New Zealand had earlier joined an international statement specifically opposing the Israeli Government’s E1 settlement plan, warning it would divide the West Bank and further undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.

Israel faces international legal scrutiny over Gaza conduct
Israel’s conduct in Gaza is also under scrutiny before two international courts.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

The ICC found reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.

The warrants are not findings of guilt, and neither man has been tried or convicted by the ICC. Israel has rejected the court’s jurisdiction and denies the allegations against Netanyahu and Gallant.

Separately, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel remains before the International Court of Justice. The court has not issued a final judgment determining whether Israel committed genocide.

The full funding arrangements, selection process and itinerary for the current delegation remain unconfirmed. It is also unclear how the proposed 2027 delegations would be funded, structured or opened to participants.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/pacific-islands-forum-is-australia-out-of-touch-with-the-pacific-and-climate/ Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:21:06 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133339 ANALYSIS: By Teuila Fuatai of RNZ Pacific

On the second day of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Palau, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked about the potential participation of Torres Strait Islanders in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — one of the forum’s three sub-regional groups.

Albanese, alongside his ministers Chris Bowen and Pat Conroy, was holding a press conference at the leaders’ meeting venue in Koror. Bowen holds the climate portfolio while Conroy is Australia’s Minister for Pacific Island affairs.

Conroy responded on behalf of his prime minister.

• READ MORE: West Papua: The Pacific’s new test of Indonesia’s sovereignty narrative
  
• The Pacific’s cocaine highway: will Australia’s $600m deal really help?
• Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

“I was honoured to be the first Australian minister to attend a Melanesian Spearhead Group as an observer in Fiji [in June 2025],” Conroy began.

“Obviously, there’s a process that is going through where the Melanesian Spearhead Group consider whether Australia would be an observer at the MSG. We’re obviously keen to make that happen because we see value in having the people of Australia as an observer through the Australian government at the Melanesian Spearhead Group.”

No mention of the people of Torres Strait Island was made, even after the reporter attempted a follow-up question.

The MSG, which as a starting point acknowledges Torres Strait Islanders as part of its Melanesian family, holds a different view.

The group’s newly appointed Director-General Dr Anna Naupa, speaking to reporters the previous day, said the MSG’s preference was for Australia to include its Melanesian communities, like Torres Strait Islanders, when engaging with it.

“Because of our attention to our Indigenous Melanesian peoples, very much that is the preference, is that we bring and we connect our communities with each other,” Dr Naupa said.

It is a difference in outlook that reflects some of the wider challenges to Australia’s engagement in the Pacific region.

Sometimes the subtleties and nuances of regional politics can be lost or completely dismissed by the Australians.

Climate contradictions
Other times it feels like Australia does not fully appreciate — outwardly at least — how closely watched it is by smaller Pacific nations.

For example, one of the major developments at the leaders’ meeting was the release of a report from the UN Environment Programme, which stated that overshooting the Paris Climate Accord goal of 1.5C was now unavoidable.

It came a day after Albanese’s government supported the opening of a new fracking project in the Northern Territory.

It was also confirmed during the week that Albanese’s government had approved the expansion of an open-cut coal mine in Queensland.

Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu, fresh from a climate media briefing on the UN report release, pointed the finger squarely at the Forum’s largest member in Koror.

“Australia is a great partner for the Pacific in helping adaptation and renewable energy pathways, and that’s all good,” he said.

“But as I said … in the press conference, fossil fuels remain the primary driver [of rising temperatures]. And if you expand fossil fuels, you’re not recognising the declaration you signed up to yourself, which is Boe, which says it’s the greatest single threat to the peoples of the Pacific.

“So that is a contradiction that Australia needs to find a way out of,” Regenvanu said.

Climate featured heavily
Similar to previous years, climate change featured heavily in the leaders’ meeting communique this year.

Leaders signed off on the Belau declaration for urgent and inclusive climate action to keep 1.5C within reach through it. As part of that, the Boe Declaration was recalled.

Leaders also reaffirmed that “climate change remains the single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods, wellbeing and future of the peoples of the Pacific”.

For his part, Albanese did not miss a beat when questioned about whether his government’s commitment to the climate crisis was geniune.

“We all need to do more,” he told reporters.

He also made the point that Pacific leaders understood Australia’s current reliance on fossil fuels and “have respect for the position that we’ve taken” — directly contradicting Regenvanu’s words.

“They also understand with the transition [away from fossil fuels] — because they’re dealing with it as well — that the transition can’t happen overnight, that it requires strategies and policies to be put in place,” Albanese said.

It’s not new for countries in the Pacific to have different outlooks — but when it comes to these regional big issues, there’s a gap between the Australian view and those of the Pacific islands that may suggest a lack of understanding of the latter by the former.

Security arrangements
In regard to traditional security, Australia’s been building an array of treaties and bilateral agreements with different partners across the region over several years and particularly in recent months.

These include the Ocean of Peace Alliance or Veitacini Treaty with Fiji, which other parties may eventually join, the Nakamal agreement with Vanuatu, the Pukpuk treaty with Papua New Guinea, the Nauru-Australia Treaty and the Falepili Union with Tuvalu.

Despite that, it will likely have come away from this year’s forum feeling slightly short-changed because there were signs of a handbrake being applied on this security stuff, amid concerns from Pacific islanders about where it’s all heading, and how quickly it’s going that way.

As part of the Forum’s peace and security agenda, the Joint Heads of Pacific Security (JHOPS) which is headquartered at Australia’s Department of Defence, has been tabled under the review of the regional architecture.

The JHOPS brings together the heads of police, military, customs and immigration agencies from across the region. Japan and the US are observers.

Civil society group Pacific Action Network on Globalisation (PANG) has raised serious concerns about the insertion of JHOPS and a regional deployment framework into the forum-led security architecture.

Its main concern is the lack of scrutiny over the process, and the potential legal structures that may result which lock Pacific nations into security arrangements they hadn’t foreseen or agreed to.

Further consultation needed
In Koror, PANG along with the Pacific Regional NGO Organisations Alliance was represented by Joey Tau.

He told RNZ Pacific he was pleased leaders had only agreed in principle to recognise JHOPS as part of the Forum-led security architecture, noting in the communique that further consultation would be needed.

Similarly, the Waqa Moana maritime security initiative targeting illicit drug trafficking, backed heavily by Australia, was only agreed to in principle by leaders, with the overall decision seeking more consultation.

To add to that, the proposal from the Solomon Islands for a regional security treaty, which Australia’s said it was open to, has been kicked down the road. Leaders chose to note the proposal and acknowledged further consultation among members.

Overall, as Tau, pointed out, there are still major questions over the direction of the reform of the forum’s regional architecture, and the processes and people guiding it.

“We’re in a state where, not only external parties, but member states who are part of the whole architecture are driving security agreements, compacts, initiatives, without proper consultation,” he said.

For Australia, which has steadily increased its activity and engagement in the region, particularly around security, it may be questioning where exactly the speedbumps emerged at last week’s Forum leaders’ summit.

The resourcing it brings will always afford it a seat at the table, and there is no doubt its investment in the Pacific in areas such as sport, particularly rugby league has gone down well.

But understanding how to discuss contentious issues and negotiate in Pacific circles are not skills that come automatically with “big ticket” agreements and promises — they are honed through relationships, experience and being in the room.

Time in the region will also let you know that more often than not, decisions turn on a dime, as the absence of several leaders from the forum showed last week. It’s all part and parcel of politics in the Pacific region.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/10/labor-and-coalition-vote-down-bill-to-strip-tax-breaks-from-charities-funding-israel-war-machine/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:18:56 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133319 Australia’s Labor and the Coalition have voted down a Greens amendment to strip tax breaks from charities funding illegal Israeli settlements and the IDF. Stephanie Tran reports for Michael West Media.

By Stephanie Tran

The Labor Government has joined with the Coalition to vote against a Greens amendment which would have stripped deductible gift recipient status from Australian organisations found to be supporting an illegal occupation by funding Israeli settlements and organisations linked to the IDF.

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi introduced the amendment in the Senate this week, arguing that Australian taxpayers should not subsidise organisations whose funds support illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Genocide is a war crime. Ethnic cleansing is a war crime.

“But in this country, you can send money to fund those war crimes, and you’ll receive a tax deduction,” Faruqi told the Senate.

• READ MORE: Other Australian charities and genocide reports

Both Labor and the Coalition opposed the amendment.

Faruqi referenced investigations by Michael West Media which revealed that Australian charities registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) were hosting fundraisers linked to the IDF and Israeli settlements in the West Bank while benefiting from Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status.

“These charities are helping to bankroll the genocide in Gaza by channelling funds to organisations linked to the IDF and to violent illegal settlements off the back of Australian taxpayer money.”

The proposed amendment would have amended the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to provide that an entity would not be entitled to DGR endorsement if it had supported an “illegal occupation”.

Last month, the UK Charity Commission launched an investigation into charities in England and Wales donating funds to illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine.

ACNC rules ‘don’t extend to … international law’
Faruqi said the amendment was necessary because the existing regulatory framework did not adequately address conduct that breached international law.

“By maintaining DGR status for these supposed charities, the government says that this violence is okay. That is what this government is doing. That these murders are okay. That this ethnic cleansing is okay,” she said.

“How can supporting ethnic cleansing, settler occupation, and murdering Palestinians be ensuring the safety of vulnerable individuals overseas? It cannot, and the ACNC has not been able to answer these questions.”

When she previously moved the amendment in March, Labor senator Anthony Chisholm told the Senate that the ACNC’s external conduct standards did not extend to conduct under international law.

Faruqi said that meant charities could continue to fund activities that are unlawful under international law while retaining their tax concessions.

“Labor is more than happy for those who participate in, sustain, and fund the illegal occupation of the West Bank, an occupation that Labor itself has recognised as illegal, yet it gets a tax deduction,” she said.

Labor Senator Tim Ayres said, “charity registration can be revoked by the ACNC where the governance and external conduct standards are not met”.

However, Ayres reiterated the government’s previous position that “the external conduct standards don’t extend to conduct under international law.”

Subsidising illegal occupation
Faruqi challenged Ayres over whether the ACNC was investigating specific organisations identified in the MWM investigations.

She cited the Chai Charitable Foundation, which received more than $19 million in tax-deductible donations in 2025 and had hosted campaigns for organisations that publicly stated they provided direct support to IDF soldiers.

She also referred to reporting by MWM which revealed that the Foundation had hosted fundraising campaigns linked to settlements in Tekoa and Hebron in the West Bank.

Faruqi also cited investigations into United Israel Appeal Australia, which reported $50 million in revenue in 2024, and funded the Lone Immigrant Soldier programme, which provides support to immigrants serving in the IDF. The organisation has also funded settlement-related activities in the West Bank.

“Minister, do you know if the ACNC is investigating these organisations?” Faruqi asked.

Ayres heads off allegations
Ayres responded that “the ACNC is an independent regulator and it’s accountable for the work that it does on an independent basis”.

When Faruqi pressed him on whether he should know whether the organisations were receiving tax deductions and whether the allegations demonstrated that existing safeguards were insufficient, Ayres said he could not respond to questions about individual organisations.

Faruqi challenged the government over the external conduct standard requiring charities operating overseas to take reasonable steps to protect vulnerable people.

Palestinians living under occupation, displacement, and genocide

“are clearly vulnerable people. Australians are deeply distressed that tax-deductible donations may be supporting organisations connected to the very forces and settlements harming them,” she said.

“Minister, why won’t the government listen to those concerns and support this amendment, so that it can be crystal clear that Australian tax concessions cannot be used to subsidise what your own government recognises as an illegal occupation? What is the problem here?”

Ayres said the government’s “approach in relation to the broader question has been very clear”.

“I don’t really understand the relationship that you’re trying to draw between the purposes of this piece of legislation, which is about DGR status and a whole range of things,” he said.

Escalating settler violence
The amendment comes as violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has escalated, with two Palestinian teenagers murdered last week by Israeli troops.

Sixteen-year-old Khalil Abu Alia and 19-year-old Omar al-Nassan were killed in the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir after settlers entered the village under police and military escort.

Abu Alia, who was about to begin year 11, was shot in the neck while standing on the doorstep of his home. Al-Nassan, who had recently graduated from the same school, was also shot and died before reaching hospital.

The two teenagers were among five students from the same school killed in Israeli attacks this year. The other victims included a 17-year-old Palestinian youth footballer and two 14-year-olds.

At the same time, Israeli forces demolished the homes of 12 Palestinian families in Khirbet al-Taban in the South Hebron Hills, leaving all 70 residents homeless, including 28 children, according to Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

The organisation said the community was the 66th Palestinian community to have been wiped out since October 2023.

“These are whole worlds and lives extinguished in evil, depraved, and violent attacks that have become part of everyday life for Palestinians,” Faruqi said.

Coalition, Nats, Labor, One Nation — same deal
The Coalition also opposed the amendment.

Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie accused Faruqi of conflating support for the IDF with criminal conduct and criticised what she described as

abhorrent anti-Semitic comments.

“Listening to Senator Faruqi, it would seem that supporting the IDF or the families of the IDF is somehow now a crime in Australia,” McKenzie said.

She said the Coalition would not support the amendment and “look forward to voting no as soon as possible”.

Faruqi, meanwhile, argued that the amendment was about preventing Australian tax concessions from supporting activities Australia itself recognises as unlawful.

“The International Court of Justice, in 2024, called on parties, states such as Australia, to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of illegal situations created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories,” she said.

“Labor allows Australian charities to funnel money to support ethnic cleansing, apartheid, violence, and occupation.”

She accused Labor of hypocrisy

over its position on Palestinian statehood and Israeli settlement expansion.

“It is completely disingenuous for the government to say it supports a Palestinian state while effectively subsidising its destruction,” Faruqi said.

“Supporting these heinous crimes deserves a criminal investigation, not a tax deduction.”

“Labor says they mourn the death of Zomi Frankcom, but in the same breath, they hand tax benefits to those who support the murderers.”

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.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/labour-would-prioritise-recognition-of-palestine-sanctions-on-israel/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:27:11 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133311 By Russell Palmer of RNZ

Labour is calling the government’s stance on Israel an “embarrassment” to the country, and says it is failing to meet its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention.

Britain, France and Canada are set to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, with British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying Israel is turning a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

However, New Zealand has not followed suit, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters saying New Zealand has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues.

• READ MORE: Peters’ ‘hot air’ over Israeli settlement trade ban rules out of step with world
• Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said that if Labour was in government, New Zealand would be joining the sanctions against Israel.

He said the government’s position on Gaza had also been “weak for the last three years” and it was failing to fulfill its responsibilities as a signatory to the international protocol against genocide.

“The current government’s position on Israel is an embarrassment to the country,” he said.

“We should be sanctioning Israel along with like-minded countries like the UK, Canada, and France. These are our friends who are now saying that what Israel is doing is wrong and they should be sanctioned for it.”

He said Labour would also be formally recognising Palestine.

“New Zealand’s missing in action when it comes to taking a principled stance on what’s happening in Gaza. There is an unfolding genocide happening.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said the foreign minister’s statement was the government’s position.

‘There is an inconsistency in what we’re saying’, says academic
Waikato University law professor Alexander Gillespie said the government was wrong not to join the trade sanctions, saying there was an inconsistency in New Zealand’s approach.

“The Europeans have it right. New Zealand’s response is that we don’t like blanket bans, and that with the 38 settlers that we’ve got travel bans on, that that’s a targeted approach,” he said.

He said when it came to Russia and Ukraine, it was justifiable to do so with an International Court of Justice opinion to support it, and New Zealand did use trade to influence foreign policy.

“So there is an inconsistency in what we’re saying right now.”

He said imposing sanctions on Israel would take “a considerable amount of work” but “if they want to do it, they can do it”.

“You’ve just seen that with 12 other countries that have joined together to do it, but where New Zealand’s positioned itself is with Australia where we’ve decided not to do that right now, and there will be political reasons for that.

“Partly it’s got to do with the non-recognition of Palestine, because if you recognise Palestine, you ultimately agree to the self-determination of the Palestinian people, and that would mean you’ve got to do more against illegal annexation than other countries.”

He said New Zealand had good rhetoric around supporting a two-state solution but the measures taken against Israel were “nowhere near as strong as … other countries”.

He pushed back on the suggestion that imposing sanctions could escalate the situation for those in the Palestinian Territories, saying “I don’t think you could escalate the situation much more than where it is now”.

Where it might get complicated was if US President Donald Trump decided to back Israel and introduce further trade tariffs against countries sanctioning the occupied territories.

‘Remember what happened last time’, says ACT
ACT leader David Seymour noted while the government was concerned about settlements that breached international law, New Zealand was “a trading nation — we don’t generally use trade bans to make political points”.

He said the conflict in the Middle East “changes at such a rate of knots I don’t think anyone really knows where it’ll be at next week”.

“We’ve got eight weeks before the next election, but it does remind me that just before the last election, we saw that absolutely barbaric and disgraceful attack by terrorists of innocent people at a music festival, and if we’re going to talk about the run-up to the election, sometimes we should remember what happened last time.”

Govt ‘just find excuses not to do something’, say Greens
The Greens’ Foreign Affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono said the government’s statement was weak, and trade sanctions would be a good step forward.

“What has our government done? Nothing. All it does is follow what the US does, and as Israel’s strongest ally as well, and we don’t hear anything from this government as well.

“There was an opportunity for the government to do something meaningful when other like-minded countries were recognising the state of Palestine, and this government dipped even though the official advice to the Minister for Foreign Affairs was to recognise the state of Palestine — and he didn’t.

“It’s a weak statement. It’s a pattern of behaviour of weak non-action from the government, and it’s disappointing.”

Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has had a member’s bill in the ballot since December 2024, and has been pleading for support on it from across the aisle — which would see it skip the biscuit tin ballot — for well over a year.

With Labour promising its support, Swarbrick a year ago was punished by Parliament’s Speaker for a week after saying if they could find “six of 68 government MPs with a spine we can stand on the right side of history”.

This story was first published on

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/peters-hot-air-over-israeli-settlement-trade-ban-rules-out-of-step-with-world/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:52:55 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133300 Asia Pacific Report

A pro-Palestine national advocacy and protest group has accused New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as being “derelict in its duties” if it is unable to identify and ban products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) made this statement today following announcements by the United Kingdom, France and Canada that they would ban imports of products which originated from the settlements. Nine other countries have pledged to follow up.

MFAT is reported to have stated a ban “would be complex and require a full policy process” and so New Zealand could not do this — at least until after the general election on November 7.

• READ MORE: Palestine Forum condemns NZ for talk, no ‘meaningful action’ over illegal Israeli settlements
• NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in the statement Palestinian support groups had been urging the government to identify imports from the occupied Palestinian Territory for more than 20 years, on the basis that settlement goods were falsely labelled as a “Product of Israel”.

“Then in July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that UN members must ‘distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967’, as a means of ending the occupation,” she said.

“That’s plenty of time for MFAT to work out how to deliver a trade ban.”

Tamimi said there was ample precedent for import bans.

“The sanctions New Zealand imposes on Russia include oil, gas, coal and gold. Other Russian imports are prohibitively tariffed.

“There were comprehensive import bans on apartheid South Africa.

“So statements, like those made by ACT Leader David Seymour, that New Zealand is ‘a trading nation — we don’t generally use trade bans to make political points’, is quite untrue.”

Tamimi said MFAT was also falsely claiming that New Zealand was sending a clear signal to Israel that New Zealand condemned settler violence, and the Israeli government must control it, and it must not expand settlements.

“The government has banned a small bunch of rabid settlers from entering New Zealand, along with two ministers,” she said.

“But it also sent a clear message at the same time, in June last year, by stating that that it was just two ministers, and the ban was specifically not ‘designed to sanction the wider Israeli government’.”

“Yes, the message is clear to Israel — the New Zealand criticism is meaningless hot air.”

 

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/09/09/palestine-forum-condemns-nz-for-talk-no-meaningful-action-over-illegal-israeli-settlements/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 05:07:34 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=133258 Asia Pacific Report

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the New Zealand government to follow France, the UK, Canada and nine other countries to impose restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Twelve countries have now announced measures targeting trade connected to Israeli settlements, signalling growing international concern over the continued expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

However, both Australia and New Zealand failed to join the 12 countries in their ban.

• READ MORE: NZ joins call to end Israeli settlement expansion, but not import ban
• UK, France, Canada to ban imports from Israeli settlements — NZ critical but stops short of joining
• UK bans goods from Israeli West Bank settlements in ‘comprehensive reset’: What that really means
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

“Where is New Zealand?” asked Maher Nazza, chair of the Palestine Forum, “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have expanded for decades, involving the transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied territory and the development of homes, businesses and infrastructure on land claimed by Palestinians.

“Settlement activity is not simply a political issue. It has significant economic dimensions. Goods produced in settlements enter international markets, while businesses and institutions can become connected to, and benefit from, settlement activity.”

Maher said in a statement New Zealand should not be importing or supporting an economic system that contributed to the entrenchment of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

“If the government is serious about international law, human rights and Palestinian self-determination, it must move from statements to action.”

Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the government to:

• Ban imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank;
• Prevent New Zealand companies and institutions from supporting or profiting from settlement activity;
• Review government procurement, investment and trade relationships linked to settlements; and
• Join international efforts to impose meaningful economic measures against the settlement enterprise.

Israel furious over new UK sanctions          Video: Novara Media

Nazzal said the question for the New Zealand government was straightforward: “If France, the United Kingdom, Canada and other governments are prepared to take action, why isn’t New Zealand?

“New Zealand should not wait for others to act.”

He said that if 12 countries could take action, New Zealand could too.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territories were a violation of international law and expanding those settlements undermined prospects for a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict.

“New Zealand strongly condemns violence by settlers against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability for those responsible.”

The UK has announced sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements and says Palestinians face ‘ethnic cleansing’ in parts of the occupied West Bank. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls it a ‘seismic shift’ after years of UK ‘complicity’, but says it is only the beginning. pic.twitter.com/b4Vh9e2vhx

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 8, 2026

In Australia, independent Senator David Pocock said it was really disappointing Australia had not joined the UK, France, Canada and others in expanding sanctions on the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“The UK PM was clear: this is about the unacceptable actions of the Israeli government, not the Israeli people and about refusing to just stand by and watch the horrors being perpetrated against Palestinians,” he said.

“Australia should show the same courage and stand for international law, Palestinian rights and a secure future for both peoples.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese praised the UK  government for announcing the sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements and saying Palestinians faced “ethnic cleansing” in parts of the occupied West Bank.

She described it as a “seismic shift” after years of UK “complicity”, but added it was only the beginning.

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