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

— Muntasir al-Maliki, a resident of Kufr Malik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Read the full Amnesty International report

SPECIAL REPORT: By Ben Bohane

South of Vanuatu, in deep ocean teeming with fish and birdlife, lie two contested islands being fought over by Vanuatu (population 350,000) and France, which has the largest EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) in the world, totalling 11 million square kilometres.

Little wonder Vanuatu is framing this as a “David versus Goliath” fight. Vanuatu calls these islands by their ancient kastom names: Umaenupne and Umaeneg.

On most maps, however, they are called by what British sea captains named them: Matthew and Hunter islands. France has controlled them since 1965.

• READ MORE: France in the Pacific and decolonisation
  
• Other Ben Bohane articles at Asia Pacific Report

France derives much prestige, wealth and a permanent UN Security Council seat thanks to its overseas territories and vast maritime domain, spread across multiple oceans. Now some politicians and security analysts in France are worried these two islands taken from Vanuatu before its independence in 1980 could prompt sovereignty claims in other jurisdictions, from Mexico to Madagascar, if Matthew and Hunter are returned to Vanuatu.

Responding to a story in Le Figaro newspaper that discussed the possibility of French President Emmanuel Macron ceding these islands as a “major symbolic turning point”, French far-right politician Marie Le Pen tweeted in December last year:

“Let’s be clear: national sovereignty is not negotiable and cannot be surrendered. The French people do not expect Macron’s government to carve up our overseas territories, which are real levers of power, influence and economic development, behind their backs, but to give itself the means to protect and defend them.”

Rising in Parliament in late May, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat issued a response of sorts. He thundered that France was “dragging its feet” on negotiations following two postponements and was withholding relevant historical documents relating to France’s claim.

A commitment, but no resolution
French President Macron agreed to formal negotiations to resolve the issue when he visited Vanuatu in 2023, saying it could be “resolved by Christmas”. He renewed this commitment in a meeting with Prime Minister Napat in July 2025.

Years later, there is still no resolution. PM Napat warned:

“We will not take a passive approach. And we will not abandon our claim. We will defend our sovereignty with determination…
“We have carefully evaluated all of the legal options that are available to us. We are trying the diplomatic pathway, but we are also ready to change strategy as soon as is necessary.”

The escalating rhetoric comes after diplomatic confrontations embroiling France, Vanuatu and Kanaky New Caledonia. A trade delegation from New Caledonia arrived in Port Vila in May to boost economic ties but was quickly overshadowed by a diplomatic spat when one of the delegation, the new president of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) movement, Christian Téin, met with Vanuatu’s PM Napat.

Vanuatu has long supported independence for its indigenous “Kanaky” neighbours and meetings between Vanuatu and the FLNKS are quite routine. But when Téin affirmed to the local Daily Post newspaper in a front page splash that “Matthew and Hunter islands belong to Vanuatu” then France’s ambassador weighed in on social media and the New Caledonia government suspended all trade ties with Vanuatu.

Again, this is nothing new — indigenous Kanak chiefs have long recognised Vanuatu’s claims to Matthew and Hunter islands, declaring they had no kastom links to them and France should not have included them as part of New Caledonia, which France did in 1965.

Chiefs signed Keamu Accord
In 2009 Vanuatu and Kanak chiefs signed the Keamu Accord acknowledging that Matthew and Hunter belonged to Vanuatu.

France finds itself battling on three fronts in the Pacific at the moment — rising independence movements in New Caledonia, Tahiti (French Polynesia), and now an increasingly heated dispute with Vanuatu over Matthew and Hunter islands.

Vanuatu claims its southern islanders from Tanna, Aneityum and Futuna were regularly visiting these two disputed islands long before the first European got wet in the Pacific Ocean. These islands weren’t of much interest to British and French ships navigating the seas of the 18th and 19th century due to their small size and remoteness.

Both are volcanic but only Matthew remains an active volcano. Matthew (Umaenupne) was first named by British sea captain Thomas Gilbert in 1788 who named it after the owner of his ship. Gilbert would later bequeath his name to the Gilbert and Ellice islands which today form the nation of Kiribati.

Hunter (Umaeneg) island was named by British captain Thomas Fearn aboard his trading ship Hunter in 1798. It is thought he also named it Hunter to honour Vice-Admiral John Hunter who was then the Governor of NSW in Australia, the second after Arthur Phillip.

Hunter Street in Sydney and the Hunter Valley are similarly named after him.

The dispute over the islands primarily has its origins in the actions of another Australian named Bob Paul, who was a planter and aviation pioneer living on Tanna Island in the 1950s and 1960s, back when Vanuatu was known as the “Condominium of the New Hebrides” and jointly administered by Britain and France.

‘He did a lot for our island’
Today Bob Paul is well remembered by chiefs on Tanna, including Peter Marcel, president of the Nikolaten Council of Chiefs. He told me that “Bob Paul was the first to show us how to run a business, how to run trade stores and bring in tourists. He did a lot for our island”.

In 1962, Paul flew over Matthew and Hunter islands and assessing from his map the two islands had not been claimed by anyone, he decided to claim them for himself and his flying friend Henri Martinet.

“It was a bit of a lark when he claimed them” says Paul’s son Brett from his home in Queensland, who remembers an idyllic childhood growing up on Tanna. “But my father always believed the islands ultimately belong to Vanuatu.”

Paul and Martinet’s claim in 1962 prompted the British and French Resident Commissioners to make inquiries about who the islands belonged to.

The British consulted their Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Admiralty. They also asked France and Australia.

The French then made internal inquiries and concluded that, based on its own internal investigation, France considered the islands to be part of New Caledonia. Britain was content with that view, and together they wrote to the Joint Court to advise that the islands belonged to New Caledonia.

Paul and Martinet’s claim was struck off.

Ni-Vanuatu never consulted
At no stage in the process were any Ni-Vanuatu consulted, so the decision was made by European colonial powers before Vanuatu’s independence. France’s claim to sovereignty over Matthew and Hunter islands has been recognised internationally ever since they were handed to them in 1965.

Vanuatu’s claim is rooted in kastom (culture) and its ancient connections to the islands, long before the first French sailor turned up on their shores. Vanuatu enshrined their own sovereignty over the islands in legislation upon the declaration of their independence.

Many would also argue that any deal done by Britain and France in the colonial period, with no consultation of the Indigenous population, is legally null and void today.

While a European mindset focuses on the strategic and resource value of such islands, what they ignore is the kastom value of these islands to Vanuatu. Matthew and Hunter islands play a crucial role in the kastom and spiritual life of Vanuatu’s southern islanders.

Indeed these islands aren’t just “rocks in the sea” but the home of their god Matjajiki. Chiefs from Vanuatu’s southern islands claim the two islands also contain ancient cemeteries where their ancestors had elected to be buried close to their god Matjajiki and were tabu for any visitors.

More importantly, chiefs say they need Matjajiki as the spirit who brings their food and fish.

“Matjajiki works to bring life to our gardens for six months every year — he is our gardening spirit. After the annual yam harvest he eats the first yam, drinks some kava and goes to rest for the rest of the year on Umaenupne and Umaeneg,” says chief Peter Marcel on Tanna. “Without the power of Matjajiki, nothing would grow.”

Veneration of ancestral spirits
While the islanders all identify as Christian, their veneration of ancestral spirits and the benevolent work of Matjajiki is at the heart of their identity. Magic stones can still be found in their gardens and rituals of thanks still performed through the cycle of yam planting and harvesting.

Matthew and Hunter are important places in the cosmology and some even say survival of southern Vanuatu.

France’s possession of these islands has cut the ability of Ni-Vanuatu from visiting and paying respect to their god. When a boat carrying chiefs in 1983 to plant the Vanuatu flag and perform kastom rituals arrived at the two islands, they were intercepted by a French navy ship and forced to turn around. No chiefs or ships from Vanuatu have been allowed since.

According to Tony Tevi, a geologist who is Vanuatu’s Director of Oceans and Marine Resources, geology and tectonic plates affirm Vanuatu’s ownership since “Matthew and Hunter sit on the Pacific plate, not the Australian plate which New Caledonia is on. Also there are no volcanoes in New Caledonia but plenty here in Vanuatu”.

For him, a further “insult” comes from France conducting military exercises on the islands every year, using a place reserved for the gods as target practice.

“The French military visit every year with their patrol boats to claim ‘effective occupation’ and do their live firing exercises on the very place — the very place! — that for us in Vanuatu is one of the most sacred and important places. That is very unacceptable”.

Vanuatu and France are expected to resume their next round of negotiations, in Paris, at the end of this month.

Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist, producer and policy analyst who has reported the Asia-Pacific region for nearly 30 years. He has contributed articles to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Hegseth says Europe is being ‘invaded by dangerous migrants’ 
• Other war on Iran reports

“The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary.”

Most of the blowback against this speech has been in Hegseth’s staining the memory of a noble sacrifice of the Allies with a contemporary political reference.

But what is truly appalling and completely nuts is the comparison of illegal immigrants to Nazis.

Hegseth says that America saved Western civilisation, which has some truth,

But Nazism didn’t come from outsiders: it came from the belly of Western civilisation.

Crowning glories but . . .
Germany was one of the crowning glories of the West yet it murdered six million Jews and waged a war that killed many more.

The Allies were saving Europe from itself.

Ironically, while Hegseth was shooting his big fat mouth off in France over in Germany a member of a neo-Nazi party so far to the right that even the booming extremist Alternative for Germany have condemned them has narrowly lost a mayoral election Saxony.

Soon we won’t be laughing at Mel Brooks’ famous song “Spingtime for Hitler”. It’s happening in Germany now (even Chancellor Merz is worried)

All over the world — in the UK, in the United States, in Australia — we are blaming immigrants for our ills when we need to look inside our own countries for the heart of darkness that gave us the Holocaust and is threatening to unleash demonic forces again.

Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts. Republished from his FB page with permission.

Hegseth compared migrants to a ‘dangerous invasion’ at the graves of D-Day soldiers.

Here’s the reaction pic.twitter.com/WX7Pkq2wta

— The Daily Britain (@dailybritainonx) June 7, 2026

A New Zealand policy research and advocacy group released a detailed blueprint today for a fresh “independent” Te Tiriti and Pacific-based approach to foreign policy, and called for greater transparency in election year.

The current coalition government has “radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions” — including by moving the country away from a principled defence of its independent values to “unquestioning support” for the actions of the Trump administration, said Te Kuaka spokesperson Dr Marco de Jong.

“New Zealand’s slide under this government towards a tightly aligned, militaristic foreign policy is not inevitable,” he added.

• READ MORE: Other Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy reports
• Other Te Kuaka reports

Te Kuaka — a group made up of academics such as Dr de Jong and Dr Arama Rata, and lawyers with expertise in international and constitutional law like Fuimaono Dylan Asafo and Gabriella Brayne — released a policy brief, “A Foreign Policy Alternative for the 2026 New Zealand Election”.

The group refers to the need to revitalise “an independent, Te Tiriti-based, Pacific-centred, internationalist foreign policy”.

Last year has witnessed “tumultuous developments in world affairs” such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, US aggression in Venezuela, and US and Israel waging war on Iran.

Independent values
Te Kuaka’s policy brief says the current government “has radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions”, including by moving NZ away from a principled defence of its independent values and interests towards total, unquestioning support for the actions of the Trump administration.

The brief calls for:

• greater transparency around trade agreements;
• a War Powers Act to ensure parliamentary authorisation for going to war,;
• shifts in New Zealand’s approach to the Pacific towards non-militarisation;
• NZ intervention in support of South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel; and
• other changes.

“How New Zealand acts in the world has always mattered,” said Dr de Jong. “And we need our political parties speaking more openly about their plans on how to maintain and strengthen our independent foreign policy.”

The policy brief also calls for New Zealand to take more strident steps in relation to Indigenous self-determination in Kanaky New Caledonia and to support a human rights visit to West Papua.

The coalition government did not have a mandate for this “dramatic repositioning” in support of the Trump administration, Dr de Jong said.

Call for ‘greater clarity’
“Before the coming election we are calling for greater clarity from political parties about what the public can expect to see from them in relation to New Zealand’s position in the world.”

The policy brief notes that Te Tiriti o Waitangi has not been sufficiently honoured in foreign policy, and also proposes formalising requirements for Māori representation alongside official New Zealand delegations to international forums.

“We are in a rupturing world,” said Dr de Jong. “We need to ensure we’re not unthinkingly caught in the riptide of major powers’ priorities, and that instead we chart our own course, appropriate to our histories and our location in the Pacific.”

• Te Kuaka has previously published reports on conflict prevention and peace mediation, New Zealand’s positioning on AUKUS, and civilian casualties and the NZ Defence Force.

COMMENTARY: By May Pik

The Israeli narrative is mostly told through the perspective of Zionist talking points, making it uncomprehensible as to how a people that went through genocide can turn into the perpetrators of another.

Today, I want to tell another narrative — the story of brainwash and indoctrination I was exposed to growing up in Israel. I want to be clear that I do not in any way excuse the people of Israel for their part and responsibility.

Yes, I was indoctrinated, used and manipulated by my country and its government, but I also had the obligation to question my upbringing, to think for myself, to break away, speak out and stand for justice.

• READ MORE: Israel’s genocide in Gaza has not stopped, despite the ceasefire: Analysts
• Death toll in Israel’s war on Gaza rises to at least 72,980
• Other Gaza reports

That remains my obligation, and that is why I wanted to speak here today. This knowledge can make us better prepared in fighting against Zionists and their ambassadors.

Looking back I can see how my history was heavily tied to Zionism, yet growing up I didn’t know what the word Zionism meant. My maternal grandmother, named Ziona (from the word Zion), arrived in Palestine in 1933 on a ship as a nine-month-old baby.

My maternal grandfather grew up in Jerusalem to a religious family, going seven generations, but converted to Zionism and joined the notorious “Stern Gang”, a Jewish terrorist group, at age 16.

My mother was born in 1957 and grew up in a poor developing town in the desert, to a patriotic, proud family. She met my dad, a new immigrant from South Africa, a young Zionist eager to start a new life away from apartheid — a bit ironic.

They met as two young 20-year-olds in the beautiful village of Ayn Hawd, a Palestinian village which was ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, and was turned into a bohemian village for Jewish artists.

Jerusalem neighbourhood
After my parents divorced, my father went to live in villages on the margins of the West Bank which I did not know were illegal settlements. And I, as a six-year old girl, went on to live with my mother in Gilo, a Jerusalem neighbourhood, built in the 1970s as part of the never-ending illegal expansion of Jerusalem into 1967-occupied Palestinian land.

My high school, overlooking the ancient city walls, used to be a primary school for Palestinian children before 1948. I remember the lone large olive tree at the entry to the school — a lasting monument to a story that nobody told me.

As a child I learned at school how we, Jewish people throughout history were faced with existential threats. Every April, the Passover texts reminded us of our escape from the evil pharaoh in Egypt.

Every May a two-minute siren marked the Holocaust memorial day, followed a week later with another siren blasting in memory of fallen soldiers of the IDF, ending with military parades and huge firework displays celebrating our long awaited Independence Day.

An unspoken but felt thread connected the victimhood of the Nazi death camps to the deaths of Jewish soldiers in the battlefields of Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, and to the redemption in the form of the Jewish state.

This repeating cycle of memorial days traumatised and retraumatised us, from kindergarten age to old age, with horrific stories and pictures of starving children in concentration camps and of young innocent-looking men who lost their lives in battle, making sure the lesson is well learned and never forgotten.

Memorial day ceremonies at school were rehearsed weeks prior, perfecting the right tone of voice as we recited the same poems and songs, as a rite of passage.

Sad patriotic songs
All radio stations played sad patriotic songs, TV programmes were dedicated to the memories of those who were sacrificed. Everyone dressed in white shirts and blue pants, the colors of our flag.

When the sirens sounded, everybody in the streets, everywhere in the country, stood still with bowed heads, sharing the grief of our victimhood in pride.

History lessons taught us that Palestine was a big desert with few scattered “Arab” villages.

But the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” did not exist in the Israeli vocabulary, (it still doesn’t). Instead they were all just “Arabs”, with no distinct Palestinian nation, history, or language.

Arabs that have many other Arabic-speaking countries nearby to migrate to, if they only chose to let us Jews have our one and only promised land and country.

Growing up as an Israeli child I was never told about the Nakba, I never even heard the word. I wasn’t told about the expulsions, the massacres and the facts of the occupation.

To Israelis, 1948 was a story of a heroic war, of one small Jewish army, against five big Arab armies, where only through our brilliant ingenuity we managed to defeat the Arabs and win our country.

Atrocities quietly buried
We were taught that Palestinians voluntarily ran away from their homes. Nobody told me that the pine trees were planted to cover the evidence, that the maps were re-drawn, the names changed, atrocities quietly buried. It was a methodical campaign of erasure that was invisible and very effective.

Today I find it hard to grapple with the countless lies I was taught as “facts” by my parents, teachers, and elders. Lies such as “we [the Israelis] want peace — they [the Arabs] want to throw us to the sea”, “they attack, we defend ourselves”, and “We are civilised, they are barbaric and primitive”. Lies were repeated and implied in every aspect of our culture, in literature, cinema, newspapers, popular music.

It was the narrative told day in and day out, generation after generation.

I recall, as a child, my best friend’s father shouting in front of the TV news — “Death to Arabs!” a slogan written as graffiti on street walls.

As a teen growing up in Jerusalem during the period of the second Intifada, life was filled with fear and suspicion, with no context given to bombs exploding in buses and cafes, with no understanding of the reality Palestinians were facing under the brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, without mentioning the death toll on the other side — 10 times higher.

Again we were the victims, the only victims, of senseless barbarism or of acts of religious fanatics, in a vacuum of history and reality.

At age 16 I received my first order to appear for military selection where we were sorted based on motivation and test scores.

Legally mandatory
I wasn’t sure I wanted to join the army, but it was legally mandatory, and while there were loopholes, the social repercussions for evading service were serious, and for my family, like most families, it went without saying that I would go. It was every citizen’s basic moral obligation.

So at age 18 just two months after graduating from high school, I was conscripted into the IDF. Entering the admission base as an individual and leaving on a bus-to-bootcamp, near Gaza, as a number.

Yelled at and abused by commanders from the very first moment, forced into immediate unquestioning obedience to any command, no matter how absurd. This training was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin of a young person’s empathy and independent thinking, if there was any left.

The bootcamp lasted a month, at the end, a swearing-in ceremony, having to proclaim to devote all our strength and even to sacrifice our life to preserving the State of Israel and its freedom.

I ended up serving at the Heritage Unit of the Ordnance Corps, but in reality, my role in the army consisted mainly of making coffee for arrogant officers, while trying my best to do as little as I could and get as many sick leaves as possible.

This was a typical army service for Israeli women. I hated wearing the uniform, resented being the property of the state — as we were explicitly told we were — and was disgusted by the chauvinistic demeaning attitudes so commonplace in the army.

I was not yet aware of the bigger picture, I only knew I despised this system for what it was doing to me. After two miserable and depressing years it was finally my last day of service. I didn’t even return to the base to say goodbye as was customary, I wanted nothing to do with it.

Nihilistic Tel Aviv lifestyle
For the next few years while getting my degree, I immersed myself in a nihilistic Tel Aviv lifestyle of not caring about anything other than my own little bubble. I resented the society I was part of, that was rude, arrogant, and full of open contempt for humanistic values.

A society where people don’t want to know what’s happening just a few kilometers away, in fact they don’t even want to know what’s happening to their nextdoor neighbour.

Glimpses of reality on the other side of the fence pierced my bubble from time to time like the eerie soundtrack in the film The Zone of Interest. There was a horrible reality just a few kilometers away and it wasn’t long before my bubble would finally burst.

It was only in my mid-20s, when I met Rod, who later became my dear husband, that I summoned the courage to start challenging my upbringing. To finally begin to see what was always in front of my eyes.

It was very hard to come to terms with. Rod once said it was like waking up and realising you have been sleeping all your life, and everything you thought existed was in ruins, everything collapses. I was left with nothing. I always believed we — the people around me, my parents, teachers, neighbours, friends — were the good ones, that we were all seeking peace, that the only problem was that the Palestinians were sabotaging it.

That all the wars were imposed on us. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

Undoing years of indoctrination took effort and time. There was a part of me that fought against it and another part that pushed me to carry on learning. The pull towards escapism was strong, but reality kept calling on me not to run away.

Coming to terms
The process of coming to terms with the facts took many years with different layers to peel off, some a lot harder to let go of. The crimes of the Nakba were a lot harder to admit than the crimes of 1967.

So-called leftists in Israel distance themselves from rightwing settlers living in the 1967 Occupied Territories and admit that settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are barriers to peace — but they would never question Jews living in stolen houses in Jaffa, Jerusalem or Haifa — the parts of Israel that are considered “legal” by the United Nations.

It took me, too, a much longer time to see the entirety of the land as Palestinian land. It was hard to admit to myself that, no matter where I lived in Israel, I was a settler colonialist too. That despite my family being “good” Israelis, they were still all Zionist, still sent their kids to serve in the army, still believed in our God-given right to steal other people’s land, control and subjugate other people for the sake of our so-called safety. It was built into our DNA.

With my awakening however, came the price. I no longer felt I had a homeland, I was now disgusted by the Independence Day celebrations. Memorial days seemed highly cynical, the places I used to love were now haunted by knowledge of the past.

A beach I fondly remembered from my childhood was the site of the atrocious Tantura massacre. My best friend’s partner, an army pilot, was now not a hero but a murderer, who took part in bombing families in Gaza. And so many other friends and family members that participated and supported it.

In my family, Passover eve was annually celebrated in an uncle’s house in a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. I was now confronted with the irony of celebrating freedom while putting Palestinians under curfews and closures.

At the same time, Israeli society was becoming increasingly militant, racist and intolerant.

Confronting hostile responses
Confronting family members with my opinions was met with hostile responses. At one point it was suggested I go to live in Gaza. At work, I overheard my bosses, jovial at the news of a Palestinian family set on fire by settlers.

It was becoming increasingly unbearable, I felt like I was suffocating. And then in 2014, Gaza was getting “mowed down” once more. Again thousands of innocent people were being bombed by the state I was part of.

The racist rhetoric by politicians, media and the public was getting more and more explicit, critical voices were more and more censored and crushed, and it was suggested to Rod he may lose his job at the hospital if he continued to express his views on social media.

We decided to leave. We were now parents, and we were sickened at the thought of our son growing up in a place like that. Even though it was the only country we knew as home.

In my first years in New Zealand, I didn’t want to think about Israel. Sometimes it entered my dreams, usually bad ones. Sometimes songs in Hebrew that we played at home and that I used to love, would remind me of everything I ran away from.

Ties to family dwindled to almost nonexistent. I thought I was done with it, but it came back to find me. On October 7, 2023, I woke up to the news reporting of the attacks.

Within a few minutes of letting the news sink in, I looked up at Rod and I said: “They let it happen”. I remembered the military term “Quality Terror attack” — a terror attack that is big enough to give the pretext for a major pre-planned military attack on the Palestinians. It was clear that a huge massacre was going to happen, the poor people of Gaza, I knew, stood no chance.

Death toll climbed
As weeks turned into months and years, the death toll climbed from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands, with images of utter destruction, limbless, parentless children, the starvation that was so reminiscent of the Holocaust, I realised this is Israel’s “final solution”. Gaza was turned from a concentration camp into an extermination camp.

Evidence to the sick society were the countless social media posts of gleeful IDF soldiers, as they slaughter, burn, blow up, steal, and then ridicule, laugh, and joke. This disgrace, side by side with the self-righteous sanctimonious moral bullshit I grew up on, in my native tongue, repeated mindlessly by family members, past friends, then in English in Western media, offering moral cover.

I was sick to my stomach and deeply ashamed. The question “where are you from” became more dreaded than ever. But while I was shocked by the genocide, I was not surprised: I understood that this was the natural conclusion of the racist ethnic cleansing project called Israel.

As years went on I came to learn more about the colonial roots of the evil I knew from Palestine. I read about tactics the British had used in their colonies, so strikingly similar. In fact, it was the British Major-General Orde Wingate who taught the British tactics to the Jewish militias in the 1930s. Moshe Sharet, a general in 1948, said, “He [Wingate] taught us everything we know”. Martial law, the taking over of homes, administrative detentions, torture, land confiscations.

Our world today is still guided by the core beliefs and values learned and internalised over centuries of European white supremacy, with their so-called higher sense of morals giving them the right to dominate lesser races, to plunder the world and enslave its indigenous populations.

These racist sentiments did not vanish with the breakdowns of the old empires. They permeate, brew and simmer under the surface all the time.

Winston Churchill once said: “I do not admit … for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.”

‘Outpost of civilisation’
Echoing this was Theodor Herzl, the father of the Jewish Zionism, who said in 1896 that the Jewish state would be “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.

Just this month [May] the Minister of Regional Development, Shane Jones, said that New Zealand’s new trade agreement with India would lead to a “butter chicken tsunami coming to NZ”.

Indoctrinated for generations; we hardly question the West’s morals, of who is virtuous and who is a savage. Who gets to control and subjugate, who has to submit, who is allowed to defend himself, who is denied the right to resist.

This sickness, these notions, are what allowed the genocide in Gaza to unfold. And it is this beast, this inhumane system built for the exploitation for profit for the few and the so-called reasoning of supremacy that justifies it, that we need to eradicate in order to create true social equality, to free all of us, and free Palestine.

I still have hope when I see the brave flotillas sailing to Gaza.

I still have hope when masses of people go out to the street all around the world.

I still have hope when dock workers refuse to load weapons destined for Gaza.

I still have hope thanks to all of you here today. Let’s carry on in spirit of Sumud.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

Republished with permission.

Germany learnt to its huge cost and embarrassment last week that supporting Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East leads only to opprobrium from the international community.

A country which had been a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for decades lost in its bid for re-election to Portugal and Austria.

It is a great setback for Germany which aspires one day to be a permanent member.

• READ MORE: Did Germany lose its UNSC seat because of support for Israel?
• Germany’s UN defeat: What went wrong?
• Why Germany wants a seat at the UN Security Council
• Other Palestine at UN reports

Germany may not want to admit it, but the defeat was in every way tied to its unstinting support for Israeli genocidal operations and policies in Gaza.

If America is Israel’s staunchest supporter, then Germany comes second.

A “universal morality” has enveloped the world. It is a morality that does not condone genocide or the stealing of other peoples’ lands, as Israel has done for decades.

It is a morality which demands the creation of a Palestinian State so that the Palestinians are not refugees in their homeland.

Lesson to Israel supporters
Let Germany’s defeat be a lesson to all those nations who support Israel. Don’t be foolish and stand on the wrong side of history.

Germany built its postwar identity on Never Again. It atoned. It paid reparations. It taught its children the truth. For that, it deserves credit.

But atonement is not a blank cheque.

The Holocaust was more than 80 years ago. The sins of fathers cannot be visited upon their children forever — and acknowledging past wrongs cannot become the excuse for ignoring present ones.

That isn’t moral courage. That is moral cowardice in a noble disguise.

Gaza is burning. Lebanon was devastated. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has spoken. And Germany looks away.

Did support for Israel cost Germany a UN Security Council seat?   Video: DW News

Routine rotating seat
For decades, Germany secured its rotating seat on the UN Security Council as a matter of routine.

Last Thursday, for the first time ever, it lost — humiliated at the UN General Assembly by nations that saw through the pretence.

France, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Canada and Australia have found their backbone and recognised Palestinian statehood. Germany could not.

Never again was supposed to mean never again — for anyone.

• In addition to the five permanent members — the US, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom — there are 10 non-permanent members who rotate every two years. Since 1987, Germany, one of the world’s most economically powerful countries, had been elected to the body every eight years. That streak is now over.

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

COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal

Walking into Palestine is not just a journey across geography, it is a confrontation with memory, identity, and everything you were told, and everything you discover for yourself.

The first thing that stays with you is the wall. It does not feel like a distant structure you read about in reports; it rises suddenly into your view, stretching across the landscape like a scar that refuses to fade. Concrete slabs stacked high, covered in layers of paint, messages, names, grief, humour, and resistance. It divides not only land, but daily life.

On one side, movement feels controlled, measured, observed. On the other, life continues stubbornly, beautifully, and painfully.

The borders are not just lines on a map. They are checkpoints, gates, pauses in time. You wait. You are asked. You move forward or you don’t. People pass through them with a kind of practised patience that comes only from living a life where waiting is normal. And yet, even there, you see dignity in the eyes, in the silence, in the quiet determination to continue.

But Palestine is not defined by its restrictions.

It is defined by its people.

People who greet you as if you have always belonged there. People who carry history in their voices without needing to announce it. People who laugh in ways that refuse to be diminished. There is warmth that does not depend on comfort — it exists even in hardship.

You hear stories in taxis, in shops, at doorways, in fields. Stories of loss, yes, but also of endurance, education, love, and return.

And then there are the trees.

Olive trees are older than nations. Their trunks twisted like they have been holding secrets for centuries. Some stand alone on rocky hillsides, others form quiet groves that feel almost sacred. They do not move quickly. They do not need to. They belong in a way that cannot be negotiated. Each tree feels like a witness.

The rocks are everywhere grey, pale, sharp, ancient. They shape the hills, the terraces, the pathways. They feel like the bones of the land itself, exposed and unhidden. And between them, the soil dry in some places, fertile in others holds both struggle and promise.

And the sand… especially when the wind carries it. It softens everything. It moves across roads, settles on stone, touches skin without asking permission. It reminds you that land is never still. It remembers everything that passes over it.

To visit Palestine is to realise that it is not a place that can be reduced to headlines or borders or walls. It is a living presence, layered, wounded, resilient, and deeply human. It stays with you long after you leave, not as a memory you can place neatly in the past, but as something that continues to speak inside you.

Maher Nazzal is an activist, advocate and digital creator for a Free Palestine. He is a spokesperson for Palestine Forum of New Zealand and former co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published on Nazzal’s Facebook page and is republished with permission.

In 2015, the John Key government announced a cooperation agreement that would see NZ Aid pay for Cuban doctors to be taught English in New Zealand before their deployment to the Pacific Islands as part of the communist island’s Medical Brigades.

Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that has been under continuous US economic sanctions since 1962, has sent more than 400,000 healthcare professionals to 155 countries over the last six and a half decades.

Since 1960, when an earthquake devastated Valdivia in Chile, Cuban doctors have been on the frontlines of medical emergencies around the globe.

• READ MORE: Other Cuban reports

They were there for the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in South Africa for the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and Italy during the outbreak of covid.

In any given year the country has had more health professionals working in aid programmes abroad than the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK combined.

The National government and Cuba were unlikely bedfellows. The conservative party’s founding constitution in 1936 committed it to combating communism and socialism.

But the communist nation’s medical assistance programme has been a spectacular success when it comes to providing healthcare to those most in need, and the cooperation agreement was a concrete acknowledgement of that.

Soft power, hard currency
Cuba’s overseas doctors programme is both an exercise in what is sometimes called soft power and a source of desperately needed hard currency.

Economists are divided over whether the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege” but there’s no debate over the power it gives the US government to inflict economic devastation on its perceived enemies.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet published an article that found that economic sanctions — the majority being unilateral imposed by the US — had caused more than 560,000 deaths every year between 2010 – 2021.

In total, the study attributes 38 million deaths – half of them children – to sanctions since 1970.

No country on earth has been under US sanctions for longer than Cuba. A 1958 arms embargo was expanded to include all goods four years later.

The laws and regulations governing the embargo have been described as the “oldest and most comprehensive US economic sanctions against any country in the world.”

Cuba not only survived those sanctions, but its commitment to investing in healthcare at home saw it achieve lower infant mortality rates over a sustained period than the US, while matching it for life expectancy.

Massively impressive
To describe that as impressive is to massively understate the achievement. Life expectancy and low infant mortality normally correlate very closely with a country’s relative wealth.

The US’s GDP per capita has been about eight times that of Cuba for decades.

During the Cold War, trade with the communist bloc helped insulate Cuba from the full impacts of the embargo. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the island nation facing catastrophic shortages of oil, food and basic goods.

A deal struck between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, in 2000, to swap Venezuelan oil for Cuban medical professionals was critical to the island nation surviving the crippling US sanctions regime.

That ended with the US’s imposition of a maritime blockade of Venezuela following its “arrest” — kidnapping is a more accurate term — of its president, Nicolas Maduro, in January of this year.

The longest running US sanctions regime in history has become a near total siege resulting in a devastating health crisis.

The UN reports that more than 100,000 patients are awaiting surgeries due to power outages.

“Shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine and medical supplies are severely disrupting emergency care, blood banks, laboratories, immunisation programmes and maternal and child health services.”

Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours have forced hospitals to suspend non-emergency operations. There’s no fuel for ambulances or private cars, so people struggle to get to health services even in an emergency.

Infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1000 live births. At least half of those deaths are directly attributable to US sanctions.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Cuba a “severe national security threat” due to its military ties to China and Russia. (The US has around 800 military bases in 80 different countries. Neither China nor Russia has a base in Cuba although both are said to have spy facilities — presumably not unlike the ones the US has in New Zealand and Australia.)

And in an effort to illustrate the “heinous nature” of the Cuban government, the US last week issued an arrest warrant for its former Defence Minister, 94-year-old Raul Castro, for the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes off the coast of Cuba.

The planes were flown by the Brothers of the Rescue, a group that both rescued Cubans attempting to flee the island and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana.

The then President, Fidel Castro, declared the planes a threat to Cuba’s national security.

Many would take issue with that claim, but it is surely as credible as the US claim that the 57 boats it has sunk in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean since September last year, killing 194 people, were a threat to US national security.

The US accuses Cuba of human rights abuses, including those of medical brigade doctors who it says are victims of human trafficking and forced labour.

This would make Cuban doctors, surely, the only victims of forced labour anywhere to be given a free tertiary education before being trafficked to jobs paying significantly more than if they stayed at home.

(The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated that around 800,000 prisoners in the US produce more than $11 billion in goods while being paid just pennies an hour.)

None of the US’s explanations/accusations can be taken seriously. So, what else could be driving the ramping up of its decades old campaign to topple the Cuban government?

Noam Chomsky called it “the threat of the good example.” A poor country showing it’s possible to redistribute resources and defy Western dominance is simply unacceptable and must be crushed.

One showing that, for a fraction of the cost of what most Western countries spend on “defence,” it can be a superpower in the supply of medical assistance to the Global South is it seems doubly unacceptable.

And then there’s the threat to the bottom-line of US corporations.

ExxonMobil is currently before the courts seeking $1 billion in compensation for the nationalisation of its refineries in 1959.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a US company — Havana Docks Corporation — that claims its waterfront property had been seized by the Cuban government in 1960. It will likely open the floodgates to similar claims.

In 1971, the government commission that first certified that the Havana Dock Corporation’s property had been unlawfully confiscated did the same for 6000 other companies with “legitimate” claims to property worth a combined $1.9 billion ($9.3 billion in today’s term).

Every year for the last three decades, New Zealand and Australia have joined a large majority of UN General Assembly member states in voting for a non-binding resolution demanding an end to the US blockade. (Last year’s vote was opposed by the US, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine.)

But as that blockade is being tightened to the point of catastrophe, and with the US threating an armed invasion both governments have remained mute.

It’s shameful. Doubly so given that New Zealand’s last National government acknowledged Cuba’s contribution to the alleviation of suffering caused by poverty and scarcity with its cooperation agreement.

The people of Cuba are now suffering unprecedented poverty brought on by scarcity due to an entirely man-made disaster. We know who the culprits are, but not only do our governments remain silent, they continue to be slavishly committed to military cooperation and integration with one of the world’s leading enablers and purveyors of violence.

• Our governments may be silent but civil society isn’t. Here’s a link to an international petition and a NZ one. To keep up with what’s happening in Cuba and solidarity actions in Aotearoa follow the New Zealand Cuba Friendship Society on Facebook.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on his Substack Towards Democracy.

While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security.

Security now clearly is shaped in a global context. The world’s geopolitical issues affect us all, not just those near sites of military engagement, as wars on Ukraine and Iran show.

So it’s misleading to consider security as simply a national or even regional issue, though people within range of military missiles and drones suffer the most horrendously.

• READ MORE: New Zealand in ‘big trouble’ amid growing global uncertainty, US-China relations, expert says
• Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World — Luxon speech

We would agree, as Luxon claims in closing remarks, that we have values worth defending.

What kind of a world and what network of values do we most want to defend? And how can we do this without compromising those same values?

Does anyone really believe that cultural and political values such as democracy are best defended by doubling military spending as he proposes? Or that 20th century national security perspectives and “bomb them to hell” strategies are fit for purpose today, while nuclear arsenals grow month by month, no longer restrained by arms control agreements?

We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order”. Australia, now our only officially acknowledged defence partner, is closely linked militarily with the US.

Exercises against ‘enemy’
Last year. NZ’s navy joined US and Israel in regular RIMPAC military exercises, to prepare for war against those labelled “enemy”. Judith Collins justified this on the basis that the US sent the invitations; NZ didn’t create the guest list. (Jack Tame interview, The Nation).

Clearly it’s time to weigh up our bedfellows more judiciously, and what values their actions, rather than their words, show they are defending.

It’s hard to see how one defends values like democracy by preparing for war alongside nations whose “Ministries of War” commit and enable genocide in Gaza, threaten to add Canada and Greenland to the US real estate portfolio, and bomb weaker nations back to the Stone Age, while kidnapping presidents of other nations if US corporate interests could benefit.

Luxon is right in stating that this is a historical inflection point, and the way in which we react, along with other nations, will determine “what kind of world comes next”.

How are our values best defended? With weapons and threats? Or by joining like-minded nations to call out all who undermine the values, rules and institutions that endeavoured since the end of World War Two and the United Nations Charter to enhance genuine human security worldwide?

Only ethically grounded values, policy and strategies, supported by inspired multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution skills, can promote such values and the multilateral order which supported them.

War is a barbaric, blunt tool from a past age which cannot deal with worsening 21st century existential threats which need global collaboration to solve, if most of humanity is to survive the future.

We owe it to our descendants to defend ethical values appropriately to build the foundations of a world that is fit for them.

Frances Palmer is a peace and conflict studies advocate and commentator. She was a SCF nurse in Vietnam and Khmer refugee camps 1975, 1980. Palmer wrote history resources for schools on “Cambodia, Faces of Violence, Hegemony & Holocaust” and “Aotearoa NZ 1980s-1990s, Participation & Resistance to International War”. This article was first published at Scoop.

A woman whose great-grandparents — all eight of them — were Girmitiya labourers has put their stories into her debut novel.

The result is Banjara, a novel partly based on what she found, which is told through the eyes of two women more than 100 years apart.

Author, Shana Chandra told RNZ Nine to Noon she knew her grandparents were Girmitiya, but nothing of their origin stories.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji literature reports

“I knew that they were part of this larger geopolitical movement under colonialism, but I didn’t have their personal stories,” she said.

“I didn’t know where they came from in India. I didn’t know what made them vulnerable to coercion. I didn’t even know their names. So really, writing the story was a way for me to write their origin story not only for me, but for them.”

Chandra said the former head of New Zealand’s Girmitiya Foundation told her that Indo-Fijians were prohibited from writing about indenture.

“It felt very important for me to write this origin story, because there was so much silence – I think, because there was so much shame over what happened.

‘Angry about the silence’
“And it was my way of saying to my ancestors, they no longer need to be silenced, and… thank you, in a way, because I used to be quite angry about the silence, but then I realized it was their gift to me, and their gift to all of us — they didn’t want us to be burdened with what they endured.”

Chandra said a lot of research went into the book, but historical records only tell so much.

“When I saw my great-grandmother’s immigration pass, she boarded the Hereford, which is actually the same boat that Avani, my character, boards in the book.

“She was only eight when she boarded, and she boarded the boat with her younger brother, her older sister and her father, and there was actually no record of her mother being on board. So because of the way indentureships were partitioned with men on one side and women and children on the other, I know that those women on board would have helped my great-grandmother and her siblings survive in a myriad of ways.

“One day, I just had this compulsion to wake up and say all of those women’s names because I knew that they would have helped them survive.”

There were shocking discoveries, too. One immigration pass was that of a 15-day-old baby who had died.

“And on the left-hand side, written in cursive writing by a colonial official, was that her mother had suffocated her. And though I know that could be true, there was something about that intuitively that just didn’t sit right in my body.”

Real oral histories
Chandra later came across a post from a site called Cutlass Magazine, featuring real oral histories.

“One about a woman who said that when her grandmother was indentured, the women on board had to hide the children because crew members would find them a nuisance and want to throw them overboard.

“And there was an actual story from an indentured man who kept on repeating the same story, how on his ship that had a particularly rough passage, the captain came, took a newborn baby and fed it to the sea as a sacrifice.

“Even just me writing the names of those women afterwards, just burst into tears… It was important to weave those other stories, those oral histories, into the book to show that other side of history.”

Chandra believes a lot of labourers were duped into signing the labour agreements, and many were promised a “paradisical island full of abundant opportunity”.

“But what they actually faced …was hard labour up to 14 hours a day or over six days a week. And a lot of them were subjected to brutal physical and sexual abuse.

“At one point, Fiji had the highest suicide rate in the world due to indenture.”

The ‘women’s gang’
Chandra said there was “amazing forms of resistance” from the women.

“There’s something known as the women’s gang.

“These women would form these gangs, and they would go to known abusers and use the only thing, only weapons they had, which was their bodies, and retaliate and beat their abusers. So my book really showcases that female solidarity.”

She said it was tough to navigate all the cultural practices and language of the time to be accurate. But what also became important was the “emotional truth”.

“That emotional honesty was almost just as important, because that’s what it’s really trying to capture, but I was lucky. When I was writing this novel, it did feel like something larger was guiding my hand. So I do partly dedicate this novel to my ancestors, who felt like they were conspiring with me from the heavens.

“I think what’s so amazing to me is that, and this is what I hoped the book would do — it would provide an emotional landscape for other Indo-Fijians to rebound off and to start talking about these stories.”

• Shana Chandra will be appearing as part of the Auckland Writers’ Festival next month.

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

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

The journalist, professor and peace activist Dr David Robie, was one of a media party on the ill-fated voyage of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before its sinking by French security operatives in Auckland Harbour.

He wrote a definitive book about the lead-up in the region to the fatal sinking of the ship with limpet mines; unmasking of the plot made in Paris; attempts to obtain justice and a long aftermath with demands for empowerment by former “colonial” people to prevent such outrages in their island homelands.

The book is Eyes of Fire, first published in 1986, then successively updated as the story unfolded, with new facts and consequences of the outrage coming to light.

It ran to three revised editions, the latest out now to commemorate 40 years since the attack took place. It therefore marked 40 years since the death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese-born Dutch national, aged 35, father of two children, Marelle and Paul, drowned on board after the second of two blasts that hit the ship.

Eyes of Fire is a highly professional work of journalism, built out of investigation and documentation of facts, then fashioned into an accessible read; illustrated also with easy-to-comprehend maps and diagrams, showing where the ship travelled and where the bombs were planted against its hull, plus photographs from a copious accumulation built up as the Greenpeace movement generated publicity for its actions worldwide.

Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
One section describes the Rainbow Warrior, appreciatively and affectionately: a former fisheries research vessel, a trawler type, 50-metres in length, with some difficulty converted for sail as well as power, made into a “proud campaign ship”, painted a strong green with a long rainbow-emblem along the sides.

“The wheelhouse was rather lumpy and unattractive but the rest of the ship was appealing. She had a high North Sea prow, graceful sheerline and round-the-corner stern.”

For the record…
The Rainbow Warrior sailed from Hawai’i on the Pacific Voyage — taking on board seven journalists and some leading figures from the Pacific communities, to the Marshall Islands — where it evacuated the inhabitants of a nuclear afflicted island, Rongelap, to an uninhabited island Mejatto on Kwajalein Atoll.

Pacific distances are great. They transported 350 people — with house lumber and belongings — in four trips, 250 km there and back.

The islanders were suffering from contamination by the infamous upwind explosion of the experimental thermonuclear weapon, Castle Bravo, in 1954 — causing thyroid disorders, cancers and constant miscarriages and birthing disorders.

Dissatisfied that health officials sent by the United States administration were more interested in research than care, they decided to leave. The key instigator was the late Marshall Islands legislator Senator Jeton Anjain. He was one of two Pacific Islands leaders with prominent roles in Robie’s narrative.

The other was Oscar Temaru, a nuclear-free town mayor in Tahiti, also elected as the territory’s President on five occasions.

Temaru, now 81, spoke for many when he said:

“The sad truth is that the only ones who tried to help us are the Greenpeace ecologists…”

According to folklore among Greenpeace founders, a native American woman named “Eyes of Fire” told of a legend that where there was dispossession and despoilation of the land and culture, in time mythical warriors — deliverers — would come, who would mend and restore both. So the peaceship offering aid would be a “Rainbow Warrior”.

The author, Robie, in his news despatches for Radio New Zealand and other media (for which he was awarded the 1985 NZ Media Peace Prize, judged the evacuation project a change for Greenpeace towards humanitarian work connected with environmental destruction:

“This isn’t a game or the sort of action publicity stunt that Greenpeace would do so successfully.”

But the next part of the journey was another dramatic action, in Marshall Islands, at the US missile testing base on Kwajalein Atoll. A party from the ship went ashore, got through perimeter wires and hoisted a banner inscribed “Stop Star Wars” onto a space tracking dome, escaping before the arrival of security guards.

The banner was a reference to the American Strategic Defence Initiative, “Star Wars”, testing for which had increased the heavy traffic of missiles of different levels at the Kwajalein range (dubbed by the empire as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Site).

The scene was then being set for the tragedy as the vessel made its way 5000 km to Auckland through friendly territory, calling in at Kiribati, the country hosting the former Christmas Island base for British nuclear tests (1957-58), and Vanuatu, where the leader of the then five year-old Republic, Father Walter Lini, a champion for a nuclear free Pacific, organised a big public welcome.

The strike
Celebration fitted the mood of the “Warrior” crew a lot of the time, in this account; a group of 11 skilled and idealistic younger people, sharing a mission they considered important to the world, and enjoying it as an adventure. They wanted to protect nature and promote peace, never violent, but charismatic, given to direct action, often enough dangerous.

They had others on board — in the case of David Robie, for an extended time, 11 days, time enough to get to know the characters and introduce them to readers in his book.

A further leg of the voyage was intended, to take them to Moruroa Atoll — where France was continuing with underground nuclear testing — as flagship for a flotilla of protest boats. In the event, the flotilla sailed, led by another Greepeace ship, Greenpeace III. One boat was arrested penetrating the 12-kilometre territorial limit around the atoll, where a series of tests was about to begin.

The planned disruption of activities on Moruroa may have been the death warrant for Rainbow Warrior — a solution to the riddle of what purposes its destruction was supposed to serve.

As the ship made its way towards Auckland, two French infiltrators got to work in that City, penetrating the Greenpeace operation. A group of military divers from a training base in Corsica was en route to New Zealand on a charter boat and two officers of France’s security service, DGSE, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, flew in under cover as a honeymoon couple.

Rainbow Warrior came in on Sunday, 7 July 1985, surrounded by an escort of small boats and was sunk at the dock in shallow water just before midnight on 10 July.

Divers using an inflatable boat set off the two explosions. Prieur and Mafart were spotted picking up one of the divers on a beach by men doing night watch at their boat club, who got the number of their vehicle, enabling the police to apprehend them, and begin a tortured process to try and secure justice.

Aftermath
Updating of the book takes in the negotiations over holding Prieur and Mafart, their eventual transfer to France and subsequent early release; the fate of other conspirators spirited home, promoted, decorated, “looked after” in early retirement; intensive and large scale work by the New Zealand police to find out about the charter boat carrying some of the divers, said to have transferred them onto a submarine, the Rubis; and investigative work by the French press to sheet home responsibility for the attack.

Very soon after Rainbow Warrior was sunk, the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, was sacked and the head of the DGSE Admiral Pierre Lacoste resigned. The book has a positive impression of the replacement Minister, Paul Quiles and the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, who admitted the obvious — that it had been done by French agents and was apologetic.

Subsequent negotiations between New Zealand and France, under United Nations auspices were made very difficult; a formal apology was avoided for some time; eventually both New Zealand and Greenpeace received financial packages in compensation and exemplary damages.

After the 1996 death of François Mitterrand, French President at the time, an investigation by Le Monde turned up circumstantial evidence that he knew of the attack in advance and a statement by Lacoste that he had approved it. Fabius evidently had not known.

Mitterrand’s motive was said to have been realpolitik — to support nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union in tandem with the US, which supplied France with highly strategic computer technology.

Reviewer intercession…
Mitterrand, as a highly equivocal and manipulative politician, walked a tightrope, always watching his soft electoral margins — in this case knowing there was 60 percent support for nuclear testing in France.

In office for four years in 1985, it may have been a new government still failing to face down entrenched security identities, undisciplined, considering themselves to be “deep state”, attached to violent solutions, with potential to go rogue.

Most of Robie’s work here is a narrative, a strong true story, but it has space for analysis, and in particular registers the correlation between devastation brought by the nuclear testing, and colonial management and manipulation of islands affairs.

The post-war wave of independence had come to the Pacific, though not to French Polynesia nor New Caledonia. In addition, the United States still held its Micronesian dependencies in trust or, for Sovereign states, via signed compacts of free association, accompanied by substantial aid payments.

France’s position against independence is incentivised by maintaining colonies of more than 200,000 settlers; and in New Caledonia, the nickel deposits, around 15 percent of world resources, as well as the 200 kilometre territorial zone off the long coast of Grande Terre island, opening onto as yet unsurveyed undersea resources.

For the Americans, the priority has been both weapons testing and maintaining a strategic barrier against Russia, then China.

Old problems, future challenges
These considerations help to address the always unanswered question of what the plotters thought they had to gain. The book suggests a clumsy and excessive attempt to stop the ship leading a flotilla to Moruroa Atoll as most likely.

It goes on to identify same-old patterns of resistance in latter-day moves, successful, to get better recognition of the impacts of nuclear contamination and in the moves through international forums — such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, South Pacific Forum, United Nations agencies, the international courts — to get recognition and action on the impacts of climate change.

Pacific communities mindful of the rising seas, and other problems like impacts on sea-life, have struggled to get a hearing, finding, again, that “great powers” outside the region which hold resources that can help hold off the crisis, hold back their response.

Nuclear testing in the atmosphere was made to stop in 1974; tests underground on the atolls continued to 1996, leaving a very brief interregnum before global warming reared its head.

The current edition of Eyes of Fire has a prologue by Helen Clark, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1999-2008, a staunch keeper of the faith in a nuclear-free Pacific. Saying, “storm clouds are gathering”, she warns against renewed militarisation especially with Australia and perhaps other Pacific states acquiring nuclear submarines under the 2021 AUKUS agreement.

It is time for “de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific”, writes Clark in her contribution to the new edition. With its peace policy, New Zealand wanted to be “a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering”.

Clark warns withdrawal of funding from the United Nations, led by the US, is a new threat: “Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.”

David Robie reports on the 40th anniversary commemoration of the 1985 events by Greenpeace, sending the new purpose-built ship, the new Rainbow Warrior, sometimes known as Rainbow Warrior III, to carry out independent radiation research. He follows up the lives and careers of the crew members and the islanders they worked with, several of whom have passed away.

While the writer’s own message, as in much good journalism, emerges from true handling of the facts, Robie does privilege a quotation from the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, Russel Norman, on the crew of Rainbow Warrior, to close the story:

“They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific. Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?”

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press), 2025, 225 pages.

Dr Lee Duffield reported on Australia’s dispute with France over atmospheric testing for ABC News in Sydney and then from Paris as the ABC European Correspondent. His work entailed monitoring police actions against Kanak activists in New Caledonia, including the killings on Ouvéa Island; confrontations with French Ministers over the test programme; and negotiations between France and New Zealand, in Paris, on Rainbow Warrior, especially the jailing then early release of Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart. He later taught Journalism at QUT in Brisbane and was a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. Dr Duffield is also one of the co-owners of Independent Australia, and the chair of its editorial board. This review is republished from the Independent Australia with permission.

As an Iranian living in New Zealand, I wake up every morning to the quiet green hills and the calm sea, but my mind is always thousands of kilometres away in Iran.

The news from home hits differently when you are far away. You feel helpless, but you sometimes also see things more clearly.

For years, I have watched the same old story from Washington and Tel Aviv: they want to change the regime in Iran. Not because they care about Iranian freedom, but because they want more power in the Middle East, control the oil routes, control the region, control everything.

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They tried it openly in the 12-Day War last year. They bombed, they threatened, they hoped the whole system would collapse. It didn’t. And now they are trying again, waiting for the Iranian people to rise up and do their job for them.

But it is not happening, and it will not happen.

From my small house here in New Zealand, I talk to family back home almost every day. They are tired, yes. Life is hard with sanctions, constant threats and bombings.

But Iran isn’t run by stupid people. The authorities in Iran have planned for this for a long time. If top figures are targeted, there is a chain ready to continue. It is not a secret. They have built it step by step.

Americans, Israelis don’t understand
The Americans and Israelis don’t seem to understand this because they do not know the religious and cultural soul of Iran. Without that knowledge any plan is blind. You cannot bomb a country and expect surrender when the children in every school learn about resistance from the first grade.

Take Imam Hussein, for example. Most people in New Zealand and other countries have probably never heard the name, so let me explain it simply. Imam Hussein was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

In the year 680, in what is now Iraq, he and just 72 of his loyal companions including women and children stood in the desert of Karbala against an army of tens of thousands sent by a tyrannical ruler. They were cut off from water for days. They knew they would be killed.

Yet Imam Hussein refused to swear loyalty to a corrupt leader. He chose death with dignity over a life of submission. Every year during the month of Muharram, Iranians mourn this event not as a defeat but as the ultimate symbol of resistance.

We cry, we march, we tell the story to our children: standing for justice is worth any price.

That lesson is not ancient history. It is taught in schools today as a living example of how a small group can defy an empire. How do you expect a nation raised on that story to give up when missiles fall?

We have many such examples from the revolution to the war with Iraq to every pressure since. According to many political analysts, this is exactly why the West keeps making the same mistake.

They don’t see the culture
They look at Iran through their own eyes. They see maps and weapons and money. They do not see the culture that turns every attack into fuel for survival.

The diaspora is another story. When I first came to New Zealand years ago, the Iranians overseas were split into two main groups. One part supported the Islamic Republic, the other part, mostly louder in the West, wanted the return of the monarchy and backed the king in exile. They argued online, but at least the lines were clear.

Now everything is different. The attacks on Iran have created real splits and even anger among those who used to be against the regime. Some of them trusted Trump and Netanyahu. They said on social media and in interviews that the bombs would bring freedom.

Instead, the bombs are bringing destruction, dead civilians, ruined houses, fear in the streets.

Now you see fights breaking out in the comments, in the Persian TV channels, even in family online group chats. The ones who still wave the old flag blame the Islamic Republic for every death.

But many others who once hated the government are saying, “This isn’t freedom. This is an attack on our country.” They feel betrayed. They realise the “liberators” they cheered for only wanted a weaker Iran they could control.

And the war does not look like it will end soon. I speculate it will drag on in this strange way that gets tighter then loosens a bit, then tightens again. Iran will keep using its asymmetric tools: missiles that reach far, drones that are cheap, friends in the region who act when needed.

The system will not fall
The economy will suffer, people will suffer more, but the system will not fall. The Iranian people have closed ranks around the idea of independence. Those in the diaspora who hoped for quick regime change will stay disappointed. The ones who begged for American and Israeli action are now watching their own relatives bury the dead and should be asking themselves what “freedom” really means when it comes with foreign bombs.

Living here in New Zealand, I sometimes feel guilty for the safety I have. I go to work without air-raid sirens. But every time I see the news, I remember why Iran will not break.

It isn’t because the government is perfect. Far from it. It is because the alternative they are being offered is not freedom. Instead, it is humiliation and loss of dignity.

The Americans and Israelis think they are playing chess. They do not realise they are fighting a nation that has turned resistance into a religion, a culture, a memory passed from mother to child for centuries.

I do not know how long this round will last. Maybe months, maybe years of shadow war. But one thing is clear from my quiet corner in New Zealand: regime change from outside will not come.

The Iranian people have decided, consciously or not, that they will decide their own future, even if it is painful. The planners in Washington and Tel Aviv should study Karbala again. They might understand then why their plans keep failing.

Kaveh is an Iranian who has been living in New Zealand for many years. Having travelled across many different countries, he takes great pride in contributing to various communities through his professional work and community activities in New Zealand. Republished with permission from Eugene Doyle’s Solidarity website.

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

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

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

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

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

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

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

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

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

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

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

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

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

It never does.

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

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

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

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pain is no longer abstract.

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

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

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

That fiction is now dead.

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

None of that is over there.

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

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

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

Complicity is not passive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That shelf life has expired.

Vietnam survived Nixon’s madman theory and the world survived the era of mutually assured destruction. Now we face the moment of two super-empowered shitheads. There is nothing nicer to call them.

Who will stop two self-obsessed, very old men, already dedicated to tearing down humanity? Today Trump openly declares his intention to destroy a civilisation. They are apparently only able to see war personally, Netanyahu as the climax of 40 years of dreaming, and Trump as his arbitrary prerogative.

In lockstep they destroyed Gaza’s homes, places of learning and culture, health and modernity. They murdered civilians with abandon and drew pictures of capitalist castles on the beach — and still they failed, just as their over-armed predecessors have failed from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

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People still live, in great need of our action.

The scorched-earth vision of Trump and Netanyahu rolls onward. Now in Iran and again in Lebanon, they make war on civilian homes and infrastructure. They destroy families and livelihoods, places of beauty and culture, the bridges that connect us, the industries that rebuild and the energy that lights the darkness.

They desecrate all of our religions. The list of their crimes grows daily.

These two evil despots are content to erode the world’s supplies of power, fertiliser, manufacturing components. They are oblivious to the lives they imperil in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine — and countless other people who they will kill around the world by hunger and hardship.

Anything to rule, even over a landscape of bones and dust. They will fail but they must not be allowed to play this out.

We are beyond disgust. We are witnessing the end of an order indeed: America’s empire is flailing in its death throes. How many people will Trump take down with it?

Weighed down with dread, we have no words but these: someone, everyone, stop them!

Republished from Sh’ma Koleinu — Alternative Jewish Voices.

Trump may have backed down for now, but he’s shown how unhinged he is by threatening the death of a “whole civilization.”

I’m heading back to DC to try and get answers for the American people. Congress needs to return to the Capitol immediately and vote to end this war. https://t.co/vZLXb0anhq

— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) April 8, 2026

Minister,

You are about to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a time of real global tension.

Moments like this define countries.

My great-grandfather fought fascism.

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In 1935, when fascist Italy invaded my country of birth, Ethiopia, then Abyssinia, Emperor Haile Selassie warned the world at the League of Nations. Many countries hesitated. New Zealand didn’t.

Under Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, we called for sanctions. We chose principle over power.

We used to be clear about our principles in international politics. We stood against apartheid. We stood against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

In the 2010s, New Zealand went across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia asking for support to sit on the UN Security Council — not as a powerful country, but as a voice for the powerless.

Many countries trusted us and backed us. And for a time, we honoured that trust.

On 23 December 2016, under [then Foreign Minister] Murray McCully, we backed a UN resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal under international law. There was pressure. We stood firm.

On 25 March 2026, the UN voted to recognise slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as among the gravest crimes against humanity. Most countries supported it. New Zealand stepped back.

And as of 2026, we still refuse to recognise the State of Palestine while genocide unfolds in Gaza.

Minister, the current global tensions make this even more important. New Zealand is clear on international law when it comes to Iran. We must be just as clear when it comes to the United States and Israel.

As a small trading nation, our economic, diplomatic and security interests depend on international law being applied consistently. If we pick and choose, we weaken that system and we weaken ourselves.

Our reputation was built by standing up and punching above our weight, even when it was uncomfortable.

That is where our soft power came from. We have the potential to be a superpower in soft power.

Right now, we risk losing that by moving closer to powerful countries, even when they are in the wrong.

Minister, take that history with you into that meeting. Be clear. Be consistent. Stand for international law everywhere, not just where it is easy.

People in New Zealand and around the world are watching. And history has a long memory.

Nureddin Abdurahman is a Tangata Tiriti from Addis Ababa 17 years ago and a Wellington City Councillor. He first won a seat as a Paekawakawa/Southern Ward councillor in 2022 and was re-elected in 2025.

This is a war of narratives with the United States administration trying to push forward its narrative of “victory” while the Iranian administration or establishment is trying to push its narrative of being suppressed and under attack.

The Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, has clearly said in an open letter to the American people that Iran has never started a war, and that Iran has no hostility towards American citizens.

He invited the people of America to look beyond politics and rhetoric and reconsider the realities of the past and present.

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He said that as the Iranian people harboured no enmity towards other nations, including the people of America, Europe, and neighboring countries, attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and the targeting of our people would have consequences beyond the country’s border.

“What we do in response is based on the legitimate right of self-defence, not an act of aggression,” he said.

So, given the fact that the Iranians have already denied that they’ve asked for a ceasefire, now we see the president is trying to present a narrative, a complete different narrative, and at the end, showing and preserving Iran’s right to defend itself.

President Pezeshkian urged a shift away from confrontation with Tehran, questioning both US policy priorities and the “machinery of misinformation” about his country.

“Is ‘America First’ truly among the priorities of the US government today?” Pezeshkian asked.

Judge Iran on experience
He also called on Americans to judge Iran by the experiences of those who had visited the nation of some 90 million people and the achievements of Iranian immigrants.

“Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants — educated in Iran — who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West.

“Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?,” he asked.

President Pezeshkian said “the world stands at crossroads”, and argued that continuing on a path of hostility toward Iran was “more costly and futile than ever before”.

He described the choice between confrontation and engagement as “both real and consequential,” warning that its outcome will “shape the future for generations to come”.

The Iranian president questioned whose interests were being served by US military action against Iran, framing it as costly for both Iranians and Americans.

“Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behaviour?” he asked.

Iran President’s open letter to the American people          Video: Al Jazeera

“Does the massacre of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country ‘back to the Stone Age’ serve any purpose other than further damaging the United States’ global standing?”

President Pezeshkian also questioned the role of Israel in the war, asking, “Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime?”

“Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar — shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?”

Ali Hashem reports for Al Jazeera.

The full open letter by Iran’s President Pezeshkian to the American people:
To the people of the United States of America, and to all those who, amid a flood of distortions and manufactured narratives, continue to seek the truth and aspire to a better life:

Iran — by this very name, character, and identity — is one of the oldest continuous civilisations in human history. Despite its historical and geographical advantages at various times, Iran has never, in its modern history, chosen the path of aggression, expansion, colonialism, or domination.

Even after enduring occupation, invasion, and sustained pressure from global powers — and despite possessing military superiority over many of its neighbors — Iran has never initiated a war.

Yet it has resolutely and bravely repelled those who have attacked it.

The Iranian people harbour no enmity toward other nations, including the people of America, Europe, or neighboring countries. Even in the face of repeated foreign interventions and pressures throughout their proud history, Iranians have consistently drawn a clear distinction between governments and the peoples they govern. This is a deeply rooted principle in Iranian culture and collective consciousness — not a temporary political stance.

For this reason, portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts. Such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful — the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain military dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets. In such an environment, if a threat does not exist, it is invented.

Within this same framework, the United States has concentrated the largest number of its forces, bases, and military capabilities around Iran — a country that, at least since the founding of the United States, has never initiated a war. Recent American aggressions launched from these very bases have demonstrated how threatening such a military presence truly is. Naturally, no country confronted with such conditions would forgo strengthening its defensive capabilities. What Iran has done — and continues to do — is a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defence, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression.

Relations between Iran and the United States were not originally hostile, and early interactions between the Iranian and American people were not marred with hostility or tension. The turning point, however, was the 1953 coup d’état — an illegal American intervention aimed at preventing the nationalisation of Iran’s own resources. That coup disrupted Iran’s democratic process, reinstated dictatorship, and sowed deep distrust among Iranians toward US policies.

This distrust deepened further with America’s support for the Shah’s regime, its backing of Saddam Hussein during the imposed war of the 1980s, the imposition of the longest and most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, and ultimately, unprovoked military aggression — twice, in the midst of negotiations — against Iran.

Yet all these pressures have failed to weaken Iran. On the contrary, the country has grown stronger in many areas: literacy rates have tripled — from roughly 30 percent before the Islamic Revolution to over 90 percent today; higher education has expanded dramatically; significant advances have been achieved in modern technology; healthcare services have improved; and infrastructure has developed at a pace and scale incomparable to the past.

These are measurable, observable realities that stand independent of fabricated narratives.

At the same time, the destructive and inhumane impact of sanctions, war, and aggression on the lives of the resilient Iranian people must not be underestimated. The continuation of military aggression and recent bombings profoundly affect people’s lives, attitudes, and perspectives. This reflects a fundamental human truth: when war inflicts irreparable harm on lives, homes, cities, and futures, people will not remain indifferent toward those responsible.

This raises a fundamental question: Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war? Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behaviour? Does the massacre of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country “back to the stone ages” serve any purpose other than further damaging the United States’ global standing?

Iran pursued negotiations, reached an agreement, and fulfilled all its commitments. The decision to withdraw from that agreement, escalate toward confrontation, and launch two acts of aggression in the midst of negotiations were destructive choices made by the US government — choices that served the delusions of a foreign aggressor.

Attacking Iran’s vital infrastructure — including energy and industrial facilities — directly targets the Iranian people. Beyond constituting a war crime, such actions carry consequences that extend far beyond Iran’s borders. They generate instability, increase human and economic costs, and perpetuate cycles of tension, planting seeds of resentment that will endure for years. This is not a demonstration of strength; it is a sign of strategic bewilderment and an inability to achieve a sustainable solution.

Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is it not true that Israel, by manufacturing an Iranian threat, seeks to divert global attention away from its crimes toward the Palestinians?

Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar — shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?

Is “America First” truly among the priorities of the US government today?

I invite you to look beyond the machinery of misinformation — an integral part of this aggression — and instead speak with those who have visited Iran. Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants — educated in Iran — who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

Today, the world stands at a crossroads. Continuing along the path of confrontation is more costly and futile than ever before. The choice between confrontation and engagement is both real and consequential; its outcome will shape the future for generations to come.

Throughout its millennia of proud history, Iran has outlasted many aggressors. All that remains of them are tarnished names in history, while Iran endures — resilient, dignified, and proud.

Museums around the world present the story of war in different ways. The Imperial War Museum in London includes military history, the Holocaust, women’s roles in the two world wars, wartime artwork and the political issues of the time.

This museum records both civilian and military experiences, looking at the impact of war on people’s lives. Its Crimes Against Humanity section has a continuous film about genocide and ethnic violence in our time.

The Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam focuses on the Dutch experience during the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany during World War Two, and features personal stories of those who lived during that period.

• READ MORE: Up close and friendly with Vietnam’s war resistance Củ Chi tunnels and museum
• Scars on the Heart exhibition at Auckland Museum
• Museum’s attempt to show ‘both sides’ of the Second World War
• Nuclear-Free Pacific exhibition opened – calls for inspired peace and regionalism

National museums in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh musealise the memory of the 1947 Partition in different, selective ways, with oral history, survivor testimonies, and personal artefacts to document the displacement and trauma of the subcontinent’s division.

How does our own war museum remember war?

Visitors to Auckland’s War Memorial Museum find that the top floor is dedicated to the memory of New Zealand soldiers killed in World Wars One and Two.

The WWI Hall of Memories contains a sanctuary, used for commemoration. In this space are medals and badges of units in which men and women from the Auckland Province served, and British badges that acknowledge those who joined British units.

Roll of honour
In the WWII Hall of Memories, carved into marble is the permanent roll of honour of men and women from the Auckland Province who died in both World Wars, and in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam.

The Scars on the Heart exhibition covers New Zealand’s civil wars of the 1840s and 1860s, the Anglo-Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Asian wars and New Zealand’s involvement in United Nations peacekeeping missions. Items on display include letters, diaries, photos, clothing and firearms.

There is a recreation of a bivouac shelter at Gallipoli and a Western Front trench from WWI.

This year, the greatest number of active armed conflicts since the end of the Second World War is taking place. The Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight on January 27 — the closest it has ever been to midnight.

Funding for nuclear weapons programmes is increasing and the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, with US President Donald Trump having no interest in renewing arms limitation agreements.

Remembering the destructive and tragic consequences of war should be central to the role of museums in their telling of stories about war. However, unfortunately, around the same time as the recent removal of asbestos from the museum, some of these vital stories have been removed.

They include evidence of civilian war trauma installed in the 1990s by then head curator Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Pugsley to show impacts of war on civilians. Another removal has been the 1968 “Letter from a Vietnam Hospital” by the New Zealand surgeon and surgical team leader in Vietnam, Dr Peter Eccles-Smith, and a photo of a woman and a child who were victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb in 1945.

No record of NZ nuclear protests
There is also no longer any text or photos showing New Zealand’s official protests against French nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific.

In addition to the reinstatement of these particular items, a more encompassing telling of stories about war at Auckland Museum than at present could include the portrayal of New Zealand’s resistance to international wars, the work of civilian and army medical personnel, photos of injured soldiers and civilians, photos and placards of anti-war demonstrators, stories of conscientious objectors, portrayals of victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and photos and stories about the nuclear-free movement in NZ and the Pacific, including the fateful journey of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior across Oceania into Auckland Harbour.

Auckland Museum’s 2025 plan included “Enabling commemoration opportunities to reflect the community while exploring themes of conflict and peace; and commitment to broadening our commemorative narrative to be inclusive of diverse experiences and events relevant to our communities.”

This year is 30 years since the International Court of Justice declared that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally contradict international law. Next year, 2027, will be the 40th anniversary of NZ’s nuclear-free legislation, a fitting time for Auckland Museum to launch an exhibition that could include NZ’s official and civil society opposition to nuclear weapons.

Veteran peace activists hope to forge a constructive working relationship with Auckland Museum to help portray people’s experience of war more fully, and create a peace gallery to tell the story of NZ’s peace history.

Audrey van Ryn is a peace activist and writer. In 2009, she created the Auckland Peace Heritage Walk on behalf of the United Nations Association of NZ. She is currently secretary of Community Groups Feeding the Homeless.

• If interested, please contact Dr David Robie of the Asia Pacific Media Network

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Māori broadcasting reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The skies over Tehran and Natanz may still carry the lingering haze of joint US-Israeli bombing operations.

Yet the world, filtered through the dominant lens of Western media, continues to be fed a singular narrative: the latent danger of Iran’s uranium enrichment, perpetually described as being “one step away” from a nuclear warhead.

Amid economic sanctions, UN Security Council resolutions and preemptive military strikes that have devastated Iran’s civilian and military infrastructure, there exists a deafening silence surrounding the Middle East’s most tangible arsenal of weapons of mass destruction: Israel’s nuclear stockpile.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera’s defence editor Alex Gatopoulos explains how things stand in the war on Iran
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In reality, the region’s security architecture is not threatened by a nuclear capability that might exist in the future, but by one that has existed for more than six decades.

In Israel’s Negev desert stands the Dimona complex — a black box untouched by International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, immune to sanctions and maintained as one of the international community’s most tightly guarded open secrets.

This contradiction represents perhaps the most blatant manifestation of global double standards, preserving Israel’s nuclear privilege above international law.

History shows that Israel’s nuclear ambitions were not merely a reaction to external threats but part of a broader geostrategic design to secure regional hegemony. Since David Ben-Gurion articulated the post-Holocaust doctrine of “Never Again,” nuclear capability has been framed as the Samson Option — a last-resort deterrent ensuring Israel can devastate the region if its existence is threatened.

 

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Bombshell deception
Yet this privilege did not emerge organically. It was constructed through deception, clandestine procurement networks and sustained diplomatic protection from great powers — the same powers that now present themselves as global guardians of nuclear non-proliferation.

Israel’s success in maintaining its status as the Middle East’s sole nuclear power rests on its policy of amimut, or nuclear opacity. Through this doctrine, Israel enjoys the strategic advantages of nuclear deterrence without incurring the political or economic costs.

This has fundamentally distorted regional discourse. The world is compelled to treat with alarm a state that formally adheres to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, albeit under scrutiny, while tolerating another that refuses to sign the treaty and is widely believed to possess hundreds of nuclear warheads.

The turning point that legitimised this international hypocrisy came in 1969. In a secret White House meeting, US President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir forged an understanding that would shape US foreign policy for decades.

Washington would cease pressuring Israel to sign the NPT or allow inspections of Dimona, provided Israel maintained a low profile and refrained from overt nuclear testing.

In effect, the US became a diplomatic shield for Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons programme — an irony for a country that has repeatedly invoked nuclear concerns to justify interventions elsewhere.

This marked a stark departure from the era of John F Kennedy, the only US president willing to confront Israel’s nuclear ambitions directly. For Kennedy, nuclear proliferation was a personal nightmare threatening global stability.

He warned Ben-Gurion that US support could be seriously jeopardised if independent inspections of Dimona were not permitted. Following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, such pressure evaporated under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, replaced by a pragmatic accommodation that allowed Israel’s “bomb in the basement” to quietly expand.

This privilege has enabled Israel to develop an advanced nuclear triad:

• Jericho ballistic missiles;
• modified F-15I fighter jets; and
• Dolphin-class submarines capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

With estimates ranging between 90 and 400 warheads, Israel possesses not only a deterrent but a potent instrument of diplomatic coercion.

When Arab states, led by Egypt, have consistently called for a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East, the US and its allies have routinely blocked such initiatives to preserve Israel’s exceptional status.

This nuclear privilege has also created what many non-Western diplomats describe as a compliance trap. States like Iran, signatories to the NPT, face intense scrutiny and economic punishment for procedural deviations.

Meanwhile, Israel — operating outside the framework of international law — enjoys access to the most advanced military technologies from the West. This systemic inequity fuels instability, signaling that the most effective path to avoiding international pressure is not compliance but power.

Architecture of sabotage
To maintain its nuclear monopoly, Israel has pursued an aggressive geostrategic doctrine that routinely violates the sovereignty of other states. Known as the Begin Doctrine and formalised in 1981, it asserts that Israel will not allow any Middle Eastern country to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

This is an extraordinary claim of authority: a state with undeclared nuclear weapons asserting the right to destroy the nuclear capabilities of others, even those intended for peaceful purposes, under the banner of “self-defence”.

Its first manifestation came with Operation Opera on June 7, 1981, when Israeli fighter jets destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Despite UN condemnation, the precedent was set: Israel effectively assumed the role of the region’s unilateral nuclear enforcer.

This pattern was repeated in 2007 with Operation Outside the Box, which destroyed Syria’s Al-Kibar facility. These preemptive strikes were driven by a clear calculation that major global powers would continue to grant Israel impunity, regardless of overt violations of international law.

Against Iran, this architecture of sabotage has reached unprecedented levels of sophistication and lethality. Over the past two decades, Israel has waged a shadow war involving the assassination of nuclear scientists in Tehran — sometimes using remotely operated weapons — as well as cyberattacks such as Stuxnet, which crippled thousands of centrifuges at Natanz.

These operations have often been conducted in close coordination with US intelligence, underscoring how Western non-proliferation policy has frequently functioned as an instrument to preserve Israel’s military dominance.

The escalation culminated in the Rising Lion campaign in 2025 and Operation Epic Fury in 2026. Backed by the Trump administration, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been targeted through large-scale airstrikes that largely disregarded the risks of radiation exposure to civilians.

Israel justified these actions by claiming that diplomacy had failed.

Yet this narrative omits a critical reality: Israel has consistently undermined diplomatic efforts, including by seizing Iran’s nuclear archives in 2018 to help justify the US withdrawal from the JCPOA.

The objective has never been merely to prevent an Iranian bomb but to preserve Israel’s monopoly on power.

Shadow alliance
The portrayal of Israel as a small, self-reliant state under constant siege is a carefully constructed myth. The history of its nuclear programme is one of covert international collaboration involving countries that now lead global anti-nuclear campaigns.

Without technological assistance from France, heavy water supplied by Norway via the United Kingdom and uranium sourced from Argentina, the Dimona facility would never have materialised.

France, now a vocal critic of Iran, played a central role by supplying a reactor and a plutonium reprocessing plant in 1957, partly as repayment for Israel’s support during the Suez Crisis.

Even more striking was Israel’s nuclear collaboration with apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. As two internationally isolated regimes, they developed deep military ties. Declassified documents suggest that Israel’s Shimon Peres once offered to sell nuclear warheads to Pretoria.

This partnership likely culminated in the 1979 Vela Incident, when a suspected atmospheric nuclear test was detected in the Indian Ocean. Despite strong evidence pointing to a joint Israeli-South African test, the Carter administration chose to obscure the findings to protect its ally.

Such collaborations demonstrate that, for Israel, international norms are secondary to strategic imperatives. While aiding a racially segregated regime’s nuclear ambitions, Israel simultaneously leveraged its diplomatic influence to block cooperation between its adversaries and other states.

This pattern persists today in the form of cyber and surveillance technologies exported to authoritarian regimes in exchange for diplomatic support.

Western backing has also extended to high-level intelligence operations to secure nuclear materials. In the 1968 Plumbat Affair, Israeli intelligence reportedly hijacked 200 tons of yellowcake uranium through a front-company scheme involving a cargo ship in Antwerp.

Rather than triggering sanctions or legal consequences, the operation was widely regarded as a remarkable intelligence success. Over time, the international community normalised such state-level misconduct, creating a skewed moral framework in which the security of one nation is deemed more important than the integrity of international law.

Deep double standard
Today, when the international community speaks of nuclear threats in the Middle East, the subject is invariably Iran. Yet the most immediate and substantial threat — Israel’s nuclear arsenal — remains untouchable.

This double standard has evolved into a kind of doctrine in global diplomacy, in which allegiance to Israel’s security necessitates the suspension of logic and justice. How can a state with hundreds of unmonitored nuclear warheads be framed as a stabilising force while another under strict IAEA oversight is cast as an existential threat?

This hypocrisy is especially evident in the NPT’s application. Intended as a universal instrument, it has instead functioned in the Middle East as a mechanism to constrain Arab states and Iran while allowing Israel to expand its nuclear capabilities unchecked.

The US has consistently used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block resolutions targeting Israel’s nuclear programme. Such policies not only undermine Washington’s credibility but also erode the very foundations of international law. When laws apply only to the weak, they become instruments of domination rather than justice.

Middle Eastern security will not be achieved through bombing Natanz or assassinating scientists in Tehran. As long as Israel is permitted to maintain its nuclear monopoly under the protection of Western double standards, the region will remain locked in a cycle of proliferation pressures.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others will inevitably seek their own nuclear capabilities to counterbalance Israeli dominance. Israel’s strategy of “mowing the grass” may delay conflict, but cannot resolve it.

The time has come for the world to stop feigning ignorance about Dimona. Any serious conversation about peace in the Middle East must begin with dismantling Israel’s nuclear privilege and demanding universal transparency.

Without equal pressure on Israel to join the NPT and place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, the rhetoric of non-proliferation is little more than diplomatic theatre. Regional security can only be built on a foundation of equality, not under the shadow of a nuclear monopoly sustained by global hypocrisy.

Ronny P. Sasmita is a senior international analyst at the Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution, a Jakarta-based think tank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

But the story is more complicated than that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: The End of Israel: The Ultimate Evidence — Richard Sanders
• Tehran vows to extract ‘heavy price’ for Israeli hits on two nuclear sites
• Other Israeli wars on Palestine and Iran reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Israel                                     Documentary: Double Down News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Watch the full Double Down News video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished from Radio 786 in Cape Town, South Africa.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three referendums were held between 2018 and 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RPCR has since split into several breakaway parties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANALYSIS: By Ramzy Baroud

• Israel’s military strategy has long relied on psychological dominance and deterrence built on overwhelming violence.
• Massacres during the Nakba helped establish fear as a strategic tool to weaken Palestinian resistance.
• Doctrines such as the Dahiya Doctrine and “mowing the grass” reinforced Israel’s image of invincibility.
• The Gaza genocide and regional escalation have severely weakened Israel’s psychological deterrence.
• The war on Iran may accelerate the collapse of Israel’s most important strategic asset: fear.

READ MORE: Hormuz fears spike; Israel kills 19 in Lebanon; Gulf states face Iran raids
Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports

Wars are rarely fought only on battlefields. They are also fought in the minds of societies, in the perception of power and vulnerability, and in the political imagination of entire regions.

Israel understood this principle early in its history, and psychological dominance became a central component of its military doctrine.

From the earliest years of the Zionist project, the idea that power must appear overwhelming was openly articulated. In 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that Zionism would only succeed once the indigenous population became convinced that resistance was hopeless.

Only when Palestinians realised they could not defeat the Zionist project, he argued, would they accept its permanence.

The Nakba reflected the logic
The events surrounding the Nakba of 1947–48 reflected this logic. Between 800,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes, as hundreds of villages were destroyed or depopulated.

The expulsions occurred through a combination of direct military assault, forced displacement, and the collapse of Palestinian society under war.

Massacres played a crucial role in spreading fear. The killings at Deir Yassin in April 1948, in which more than 100 civilians were killed by Zionist militias, quickly reverberated across Palestine. But Deir Yassin was only one among many massacres that occurred during that period.

Killings in places such as Lydda, Tantura, Safsaf, and numerous other villages contributed to a climate of terror that accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian communities.

The psychological impact of these events was enormous. News of massacres spread from village to village, convincing many Palestinians that remaining in their homes meant risking annihilation.

The lesson was clear: war could function not only as a tool of conquest but as an instrument of psychological domination.

The Doctrine of Fear
Over time, this approach evolved into a broader strategic culture that emphasised deterrence through overwhelming violence. Israel’s wars were designed not only to defeat enemies militarily but to reinforce a perception that resistance against Israel would always end in devastating consequences.

Israeli leaders have frequently expressed this philosophy openly. In the early years of the state, Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most influential military figures, famously declared that Israelis must be prepared to live by the sword.

The remark captured the belief that Israel’s survival depended on constant readiness to use force and on maintaining a reputation for military ruthlessness.

Decades later, Israeli leaders continued to frame the country’s identity in similar terms. In the mid-2000s, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel as a “villa in the jungle,” a phrase that reflected a worldview in which Israel saw itself as a fortified island of civilisation surrounded by hostile and supposedly barbaric surroundings.

This perception reinforced the idea that Israel must always project overwhelming strength. Any sign of weakness, according to this logic, would invite attack.

The doctrine took more concrete form in the early 21st century. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli strategists articulated what later became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed during the conflict.

The doctrine advocated massive and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure associated with resistance movements.

The purpose was not only to destroy military targets but to inflict such devastation that entire societies would be deterred from supporting resistance groups.

A similar philosophy guided Israel’s repeated wars on Gaza. Israeli strategists began referring to these periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass.” The phrase suggested that Palestinian resistance could never be permanently eliminated but could be periodically weakened through short and devastating military operations designed to restore Israeli deterrence.

For decades, this strategy appeared to work. Israel’s military superiority, combined with unwavering American support, reinforced an image of invincibility that shaped political calculations across the Middle East.

But psychological dominance depends on belief, and belief can erode.

Gaza and the crisis of deterrence
The first major rupture in Israel’s aura of invincibility occurred in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after years of occupation and sustained resistance from Hezbollah. Across the Arab world, the withdrawal was widely interpreted as the first time Israel had been forced to retreat under military pressure.

Israel attempted to restore its dominance in the 2006 Lebanon war, but the outcome again challenged the image of decisive Israeli military superiority. Despite massive bombardment and ground operations, Hezbollah remained intact and continued to launch rockets until the final days of the conflict.

Yet the most profound blow to Israel’s psychological doctrine occurred decades later with the events surrounding October 7 and the war that followed.

Israel’s response to October 7 was the devastating Gaza genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or wounded, and nearly the entire Strip was destroyed,

The scale of violence was unprecedented even by the standards of previous Israeli wars on Gaza. Yet the objective was not merely military retaliation or collective punishment. It was also an attempt to restore the psychological balance that Israel believed had been shattered.

This logic had been expressed years earlier by Israeli leaders. During Israel’s earlier war on Gaza in 2008–09, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni openly suggested that Israel must respond in a way that demonstrates overwhelming force: When Israel is attacked, “it responds by going wild — and this is a good thing”.

In other words, war itself functioned as psychological theatre. But the Gaza genocide produced a very different outcome.

The myth begins to collapse
Modern wars unfold not only through military operations but through images that circulate instantly across the world. During the Gaza genocide, countless videos spread across social media showing Israeli armoured vehicles — including the once-feared Merkava tanks — being struck by relatively simple Palestinian anti-tank weapons.

For generations, Israel’s military power had been associated with technological invincibility. Suddenly, millions of viewers were witnessing something entirely different: a powerful army struggling against resistance fighters operating under siege conditions.

The war on Iran has intensified this psychological transformation.

For decades, Israeli society — and much of the region — believed that Israel’s territory was protected by an almost impenetrable defensive shield. The sight of waves of Iranian missiles striking targets inside Israel has therefore carried enormous symbolic weight.

These images challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in Middle Eastern politics: that Israel is militarily untouchable.

At the same time, other actors are exploiting this shift in perception. Hezbollah continues to maintain significant military capabilities despite repeated Israeli attacks. Palestinian resistance groups remain active despite the devastation of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Ansarallah in Yemen has disrupted shipping routes in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, demonstrating how even non-state actors can reshape strategic realities.

Existential frame
Israeli leaders themselves increasingly frame the current confrontation as existential. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described the war as a struggle for Israel’s survival, echoing earlier language about living by the sword.

Yet the deeper crisis may not be purely military. Israel remains one of the most heavily armed states in the world. But the aura of invincibility that once magnified that power is fading.

Once fear begins to disappear, restoring it becomes extraordinarily difficult.

And that may be the most important consequence of the war on Iran — not the destruction it produces, but the collapse of the psychological doctrine that sustained Israeli power for decades.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, Before the Flood, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include Our Vision for Liberation, My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). This article was first published by The Palestine Chronicle and is republished here with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

• READ MORE:  Death toll in Israeli strike on southern Iran school rises to 165
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• Luxon defends NZ’s position on Iran attacks – same as Australia
• Neither preemptive nor legal, US-Israeli strikes on Iran have blown up international law
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Roger Norman Fowler: 12 September 1948 – 21 February 2026

Roger Fowler, an activist legend of social justice solidarity movements from Bastion Point to resisting apartheid and racist rugby tours and freedom for Palestine, has died after a long illness. He was 77.

Described by some as a “true Tāne Toa”, his protest warrior courage and his commitment to a bicultural and cross-cultural vision for Aotearoa New Zealand, was perhaps best represented by his “Songs of Struggle and Solidarity” vinyl album launched last year.

The first of 14 tracks on the album produced by Banana Boat Records, was “We Are All Palestinians”, which has become an anthem for the Gaza solidarity movement for the past 124 weeks of protest against the Israeli genocide.

• READ MORE: Showing their aroha for the activist ‘power couple’ of Māngere East
• Honouring the people’s fight against hardship, repression and racism — Tony Fala
• Other Roger Fowler reports

Ironically, this was sung yet again by a group in Te Komititanga Square yesterday within hours of his death.

It was written by Fowler after the Viva Palestina solidarity convoy from London to Gaza in 2010.

Fowler led the Kia Ora Gaza team of six Kiwis who drove three of 135 aid-packed ambulances – funded by New Zealand donations — into the besieged enclave. This was followed later by two other land convoys and three Gaza Freedom Flotillas.

In April 2026, a massive new siege-breaking Sumud Flotilla to Gaza with 100 boats and carrying some 1000 activists is being planned.

Gaza solidarity rallies
In spite of failing health in recent months, Fowler was frequently seen at Gaza rallies, speaking and singing in his rousing voice.

Close comrade and friend, John Minto, co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), paid tribute to his contribution in a statement today.

“Roger has been a legend of the solidarity movement for many decades as the founder and co-cordinator of Kia Ora Gaza which delivered aid to the besieged Gaza strip by land and by sea,” he said.

“He was a man of great integrity and character with passion for justice. He will remain a guiding light for the solidarity movement here.”

Co-chair Maher Nazzal presented Fowler an award for his contribution to Palestinian solidarity last September.

Another comrade from the 1990s onwards, Tony Fala, recalls his “dauntless courage, tireless optimism, boundless energy, and vast strategic capacity was profoundly inspiring.”

“Roger was one of the humblest and kindest people I have ever met. He could build coalitions and strengthen community bonds with ease. He sought what brought people together, not what kept them apart.

Belief in ordinary people
“He believed in ordinary people and possessed a deep, instinctive understanding of justice. He was strong yet carried no ego.”

Fala praised Fowler’s commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Te Ao Māori community life, describing him as a “born oral historian”.

“He gave selflessly to every cause he committed himself to and would move mountains to achieve victory for the struggles he served.”

“We Are All Palestinians.”                              Video: Banana Boat Records

In the weeks before his death, he and his whanau were working hard to complete a history of the socialist Ponsonby People’s Union, “Struggle and Solidarity”, due to be published soon. Fowler met his future wife, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngati Porou and Ngāpuhi), then while they were activists campaigning to stop landlords evicting tenants.

Based in the working-class suburb of Ponsonby, the union activists campaigned alongside the Polynesian Panthers and ACORD (Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination)  to defend civil liberties, fight slum landlord evictions, and oppose the Dawn Raids against Pacific Islands overstayers.

Fowler had seen the last proofs of the collaborative book before he died and was very happy.

Activist author Dean Parker once described Fowler as “the Great Helmsman of the legendary Ponsonby People’s Union, brave hero of so many struggles”.

Fowler had lived for almost four decades in Māngere East, a multicultural quarter of South Auckland.

He was manager of the Māngere East Community Learning Centre and an executive member of Out of School Care Network.

Impressive community tribute
In 1999, he was a recipient of the Queen’s Service Medal for his “public services” and the people of Māngere East paid an impressive tribute to him with a daytime concert last November.

One of his best remembered local campaigns was the community coalition in 2010 that saved Māngere East’s Postshop.

A one-time bus driver, Fowler strongly campaigned for public transport.

He was also involved with amateur theatre for several decades, including Auckland Light Opera, “The Aunties” children’s theatre and Manukau Performing Arts.

Fowler was a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the 1970s and he was part of the anti-apartheid movement for 15 years.

In 1969, along with a large group of activists — including Alan Robson, Pat Bolster and Graeme Whimp — he opened the first Resistance Bookshop in Queen Street and he was co-director for a time.

“The bookshop became a focus for radical political actors in Auckland in 1969 and the early 70s,” recalls Robson, now an academic at the University of Papua New Guinea.

‘He gave us hope’
Activist Del Abcede, a supporter of Kia Ora Gaza and the Palestine movement, recalls: “Roger did so much for social justice and humanity and yet he was so humble, gentle, kind and unassuming — one of a kind.

“I’ll always remember with fondness snippets of short but meaningful conversations with him.

“Memories of him will live forever — like a light at the end of the tunnel. He gave us hope.”

In fact, the whole whānau have inspired hope — his wife Dr Lyn Doherty (they were married at the Bastion Point protest), tamariki Tawera Fowler, Hone Fowler, Maia McGregor, Kahutia Fowler, and their mokopuna.

During his lifelong protests, Fowler was arrested and jailed four times and with colleagues he set up a free prison visiting service in 1972 for Paremoremo and Waikeria.

The last track on Fowler’s album is titled “The Final Song” but his music will be long remembered as the hallmark of the legacy and life of an extraordinary community and social justice activist.

• Roger Fowler’s life will be celebrated at Ngā Tapuwae Community Centre, 255 Buckland Road, Māngere, 10-2pm, Wednesday, February 25.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in The Jerusalem Post today [February 2024]: “‘Antisemitic’ UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel.” We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back against the narrative that to support victims of Israel is to somehow be antisemitic.

Back in November 2023 as the Israeli exterminations of Palestinians were ramping up, I had the privilege to hear and speak to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

She visited Wellington as part of a long-scheduled visit to Australia and New Zealand and spoke to government ministers, relief organisations, journalists and packed halls of citizens who shared a sense of horror at what was playing out in Gaza.

• READ MORE: UN staffers back Francesca Albanese, condemn European ministers for attacks
• French filmmaker explains why he backs Francesca Albanese amid pressure to resign
• European states must retract outrageous attacks on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
• Other Gaza reports

Her speeches were filled with knowledge and forensic clarity, only matched by her decency and sense of humanity — which extended to great courtesy shown to a lone and agitated Israeli supporter at a meeting I attended.

In issuing the banning order, two Israeli ministers stated: “The era of Jews being silent is over. If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the special envoy.”

This is of course a vulgar lie told by ministers actively pursuing genocide. These two indeed aren’t silent: the scream, roar and boom of their shells, missiles and snipers’ bullets have shouted to the world how far the Zionist state has descended into the bowels of depravity.

The Jewish diaspora are anything but silent too — I have been immensely impressed by the courage and persistence of Jewish people worldwide who have shunned the fiction that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. I hear them loud and clear chanting with righteous indignation, “Not in our name!”

Francesca Albanese rejects false accusations            Video: Al Jazeera

Albanese’s riposte
What really steamed the ministers and momentarily deflected their attention from the slaughter of innocents was Albanese’s riposte to a casual lie by French President Emmanuel Macron: “October 7 was the largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”

Albanese responded, quite rightly, surely self-evidently: “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” She also stated her respect for the victims of the attack.

When courageous people are attacked by malign and powerful actors, it takes moral clarity and steely determination to walk into a sea of troubles and oppose the true villains. We all need to do that now — and not remain silent.

In the past couple of months Israel has, with the complicity of the white-dominated Western countries, tried to destroy UNRWA, the primary UN organisation providing relief to the Palestinian people, as they endure this genocidal siege.

Because of Israel’s powerful allies, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has kept mum and ignored the vast number of human rights atrocities committed by Israel. (Editor: The ICC subsequently issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity on 21 November 2024).

The Israelis have also hoicked and spat out their contempt for the International Court of Justice. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir commented, “Hague Smague — The ICJ has only proven what everyone already knew, that it is only seeking to prosecute the Jewish nation”.

Traducing the ICJ in this way is another attempt to gaslight us all. If we can do one decent thing it would be to get our governments to raise their voices in defence of the brutalised and besieged United Nations.

Stuck in settler colonial regime
Albanese told audiences on both sides of the Tasman: “When I speak of human rights, I speak of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are stuck in a settler colonial regime; this is what we have to solve together.”

She went on to say, “ I will always stand with the victim.”

There is good reason to try to silence Francesca Albanese. She is an authority in the detail of the dehumanisation inflicted on the Palestinians. She has seen the daily lack of proportionality, the discourse of genocide, the military and administrative controls, the deprivation of sanitary services, food and medicine, the surveillance technology, the casual killings, the financial chocking of a people, the way the Israelis are eating up Palestine inch by inch as the West looks the other way.

In short, more than most people she understands the structural system of oppression that is denying the Palestinians the right to exist as a people — culturally, economically, politically. She is a humanist and the exact opposite of an antisemite.

Albanese is one of legions of good people besieged by Israel and its allies. The racist white elites in Europe and the USA are more than happy to adopt a definition that conflates anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, using the recently-minted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a tool to silence (that word again) defenders of Palestinian rights.

When the right-wing of UK Labour set to work to oust Jeremy Corbyn, they succeeded, deploying an antisemitic slur. By the time the purge had finished, thousands of Labour progressives had been eliminated from the party membership, including large numbers of Jewish progressives.

The Labour Files, a must-see Al Jazeera documentary, based on a data dump of internal Labour files, uncovered the astonishing statistic that if you were a Jewish member of the UK Labour party you were seven times more likely to be expelled for antisemitism than a non-Jew.

Dustbin of dirty tricks
It’s high time we kick this ghastly trope, this despicable manoeuvre equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism into the dustbin of dirty tricks. Jewish people have suffered persecution for their faith over the centuries. It does their memory a huge disservice — not least because now it is quite clear that genocide is the highest stage of Zionism.

For the record: I have Jewish friends who I invite to read and critique my articles before publication. They are not self-hating Jews, they are not antisemitic, and nor am I. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish people worldwide who are appalled at what is being done in the name of Judaism.

Francesca Albanese said something else memorable that evening: “History is also made of watershed moments, when things change. Let’s make this one of them.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Scoop on 14 February 2024.

Citizen journalists bring to our attention the truths that we need to know. Being a witness to such truths is different to doom scrolling. It is about awareness.

This is about knowing the truths that the people who run this deteriorating world, want to hide.

Victims everywhere are begging to be heard and seen. And some people are revealing these truths. Some are trained in journalism, some are freelancing because the mainstream is not the clear clean truth stream, and some are self-trained.

• READ MORE: Amnesty calls for independent probe of ‘shocking’ Australian police violence against peaceful protesters
• Other articles by Saige England

The role of filming and reporting the truth is vital in an era when books are banned, when the names of predators are redacted, when the people at the top are part of an oligarchy that supports murder and rape.

A couple of years ago — almost to the day — I was pepper sprayed by a frontline policeman for filming police brutality against peaceful protesters standing on the footpath in Lyttelton Aotearoa New Zealand.

In that situation police seized people and hurled them to the ground. In other instances, as with human rights activist, John Minto, they seized baffled people and hauled them onto the road.

The men and women in blue vests and black gloves, formed a scrum over each seized civilian. They pummelled and beat them viciously, and hauled them into vans. Minto suffered a gash down his forehead.

Nightmares last longer
Others had similar wounds and thanks to the direct illegal use of pepper spray, many suffered a sense like glass in their eyes. In my experience, those painful symptoms lasted weeks. The nightmares lasted longer.

Early last year, I was banned from my own Town Hall for witnessing the State of the Nation speech by Winston Peters. One of that leader’s loyal fans complained that I was taking notes. I produced my press card. Made no difference.

I witnessed a leader inciting hatred. Witnessing. The security guards banned me. The police upheld the ban. I am a multi-award winning reporter who has reported from conflict zones around the world. And I see the conflict increasing.

In the United States, in Europe, in Australia, in Aotearoa New Zealand, what are we learning?

The right to support the right of all human beings to live on their land is decreed a crime by our leaders. Why? Because some have more than others and they want to protect their “more” and push others to have less, even nothing.

These are the actions of totalitarian capitalist regimes intent on retaining power over the land, the rivers, and all the waterways.

We see it in the US with ICE killing a woman who was poet and a mother, we see it in the killing of a nurse, and all the disappearances, people — including children — hauled off streets and “disappeared”.

Police kicking 2 women
We see it with police kicking and beating two women wearing abayas in the Netherlands. If they are assaulting women in public we can be certain they are also molesting women behind the public gaze.

We see totalitarian push back against human rights in Germany and France, Australia and New Zealand.

Let’s call this flagrant attack on democracy what it is.

It is imperialism. Yes I know, it sounds like I’m recalling Thatcher. But hey she never went away. Her Daddy abused her friends and she loved him. Thatcher was an abuse enabler.

Like Blair. Like Trump. Like other abusers who hold power. It is no surprise that many of these leaders who were raised by power hungry predators, become predators. They exploit others.

Really it is a very simple equation. Democracy is impossible under financial imperialist capitalism.

Imperialism upholds the right of one people to reign supreme over another. We aren’t talking about something that ended over a hundred years ago. We are talking about something that is being perpetuated now.

Shameful exploitation
And by now, those of us who are descended by people who usurped and enslaved, are coming to a difficult conclusion — that it is shameful, this history of exploitation.

As one Quaker researcher said: “What I have learned is that if my ancestors were not as radical for human rights as I have hoped, I can at least be different, be radical for human rights now.”

Greed, predatory behaviour is handed down from predator to predator. It used to favour the oldest son. Now it just faces those prepared to sell out to buy in.

Mercenary capitalist entrepreneurs control society and they govern our countries. The brutes who exploit are connected.

So back to the streets. Back to what some reporters saw and reported and what others who aren’t real reporters, failed to report.

Let’s pick apart the claims of incitement. Incitement for what?

Chanting crime
The authorities in NSW deem that it should be a crime for any citizen to chant these words.

From.

The.

River.

To.

The.

Sea.

What next? Will Jews be told they can no longer chant in Hebrew: le shana haba b’yerulashaem. See the parallel.

Next.

Year.

In.

Jerusalem.

Every year Jews around the world chant — as they have for decades and decades — the vow that next year they will be in Jerusalem. They lived in Europe. They lived in the US.

And this they chanted.

Perhaps that is why it bothers Zionists and supporters of genocide. But it wasn’t a return.

Jews who recite this are Europeans and Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.

When they talk of exile, they are talking in mythological proportions, invoking the Bible and tribalism, Goliath and David.

Zionist regime supreme
But one group is reigning supreme. The Zionist regime has pushed thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, and murdered tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands, and still this genocide continues.

But has New South Wales deemed it a crime for Jews to chant “next year in Jerusalem”?

No.

Nor should it. People have the right to chant.

But let’s understand the real history, rather than the propaganda pumped out by a multi million dollar US-Israeli think thank.

Thanks to very real anti-semitism, Europe did not want to rehome Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Britain helped out with an imperialist Zionist strategy that pushed Palestinians out of their homes.

Some Jews fled, refused to do what had been done to them. Good on those Jews. And good on those Jews around the world who stand for societies that care and share, that don’t steal and kill.

I am worried about the implications of any law that bans a chant by exiled people. Will it become a crime for any group of people to chant about their desire to return to lands from which they were exiled?

Governments around the world are leaning that way. They stomp down on Indigenous people, on refugees, on immigrants. They protect their excessive power and privilege.

Blaming immigrants
It’s very popular among these regimes to blame immigrants who come from land that was raped and raided by imperialism. Just tune into our ageing playboy Winston Peters.

Make no mistake under regimes such as this, no one is safe. No one.

It is clearly a crime for others to stand alongside those who have been oppressed and exiled, so will it one day be deemed a crime to talk about ALL the stolen children? Like the stolen indigenous children? The children born in a certain place, on certain land, near a river, near the sea.

Will it be a crime to talk about those abused in state homes?

Will the imperialist histories be redacted? Oh they are. The narrative is changed. The victims can barely survive.

I witnessed some of this so I can remind myself and I can remind you.

When I first went to Israel in 1982 the Begin regime invaded Lebanon. Desecrated people dreaming under cypress trees.

The Israeli Offence Force assisted then, in the genocide, of around 3000 children, women, and men — Palestinians — in refugee camps.

Evil massacre
It was a bloodbath, an evil massacre carried out under stealth, at night. The victims did not have a chance. They had no one to defend them. They were murdered by mercenary Israeli soldiers.

One Israeli soldier, Ari Folman, later made a film, Waltz with Bashir which depicts how he came to realise he was among the soldiers who surrounded the camps and fired flares to illuminate the area for the Lebanese Christian Philangist militia.

Like most soldiers, he was only “following orders”. It haunted him.

The ghosts of every massacre carried out by every totalitarian state like Israel haunt the world. And every regime that supports it is responsibile.

Imperialism is the bloodstain that won’t wash out until the notion of super and special entitlement due to race or class or religion is extinguished.

It is racist and classist and it is wrong.

I wrote my novel The Seasonwife because I wanted to show the truth — that people down the bottom rungs of the class system were exploited by those at the top to exploit indigenous people.

Criminalised the poor
We need to know these truths. And they can be proved. Settler colonialism is not a pretty policy, it was dreamed up by a country that created poverty and criminalised the poor. It sent them out to do its dirty work. Oh some rode on those waves but others were submerged. And Indigenous people lost their rights.

Here in Aotearoa a Treaty was forged, a treaty which clearly gives Indigenous people the right to rangatiratanga. And successive legal acts pushed indigenous people down, breached the principles of that partnership.

When one partner is the abuser the partnership is not equal.

We must remember the crimes of imperialism. We must. Because the past is now.

The massacres of Palestinians is an extension of every colonial crime. The crimes are connected: slavery; forced servitude; exile due to poverty; apartheid, assimilation, extermination.

It is a thread from this ocean to that river to that ocean. From here to there. From Europe to the Levant and the Middle East. All the greed-mongers benefit.

The crimes against Palestinians have been going on for more than seven decades. Research the Nakba. Before the British aided and mounted a violent rape-and-kill takeover, Muslims and Jews and Christians worshipped alongside each other in Palestine. It is easy enough to find documentary evidence of this pleasant land on YouTube.

Look at it now. Look at the difference between Haifa or Tel Aviv and Gaza.

Standing against supremacy
Any Jew who has a soul, who has a conscience, will not stand for the slaughter of innocents or for the creation of a white apartheid supremely state. In the US most Jews are against this, and increasingly so are Jews in Australia and New Zealand, standing up against the supremacy of Zionism.

And Christians need to stand too. It is KKK fundamentalist to support the extermination of people. There is nothing holy in supporting theft and expulsion and the gunning down of women, children, and men.

When we invoke laws that support genocide we create a soul-less compassionless society.

A truly Humanist, Animist, any Values-based system will create a society with laws that uphold rather than extinguish, human rights.

It was a white Australian male who used his inheritance to kill 51 people praying at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand. The Iman who greeted him at the door welcomed him as “a brother”.

It was a Muslim man who risked his life and suffered terrible injuries while tackling two ISIS-inspired extremist gunmen at Bondi Beach in Sydney. That Muslim man stepped in front of a gun to defend Jewish children, women, and men.

I met many such kind, brave, peace-loving men when I lived in the Middle East and I experienced the utmost hospitality from Muslims.

I differentiate between all people and their regimes.

Greed in common
The regimes that uphold human rights violations are all connected. They all have one thing in common: greed.

Their rulers are predators.

Israel is a US-supported state responsible for mass murder, for genocide, for apartheid, for stealing children decade after decade.

Every government that has failed to denounce that State of Hate is acting against the right of people — all people — to real and precious freedom.

Once again, I call down my Jewish ancestors who experienced, as I have, anti-semitism — in standing against the supremacism that is Zionism.

I stand with Jews Against Zionism. I stand with Jews for Peace. I stand with Jews Against Genocide.

I stand with Jews who support the right of Palestinians to return. Yes to the land, yes to that beautiful river, and to that precious sea. I stand with their right to live where they want to live.

Right to protest
And I stand with the right of all citizens to protest. I stand with the right of citizen journalists to film and report human rights violations.

In my social media posts I continually put aggressive impulsive patriarchal police on notice. I let them know that violence by people who are supposed to protect, is unacceptable.
Their actions could lead to them being incarcerated.

Maybe not now, not yet, but one day. Their violent actions could certainly lead to them being jobless.

Their violent actions will be seen over and over again. The truth won’t be erased.

And I say this to mainstream reporters, please do your job. Join a union and oppose the patriarchy that presents propaganda as truth. Some reporters on the ground in Sydney who said they saw violence by the police and no violence from protesters, but the BBC and RNZ changed that narrative.

News presenters who were not present at the scene presented a skewed version provided by their government. They became a mouthpiece for propaganda. And in doing so they supported totalitarianism.

Reporters must not be mouthpieces for what one commentator so aptly described as the Broligarchy. Predators.

Out of police
The policeman who pepper sprayed me, two years ago, when I took footage of assaults against peaceful civilians by violent police, is no longer in the force. Perhaps he has joined the great raft of unemployed.

I would like to think he can be educated into compassion, that he can learn, that the hard look in his eye will one day be softened when he holds a brown grandchild in his arms.

Think twice police. Think twice reporters. Think twice every one who reads this.

Would you want your children to support all human rights? Do you think words like river and sea and return should be banned? Do you think the colour of the grass and the colour of a rose should be denounced as evil?

Do you think people should have the right to live on their land unmolested? Do you think the land and the waterways should be respected or bombed to dust, drained for its minerals?

Do you believe in freedom? If you do, then know that those who are upholding the right of one people to strip the rights of others, will not leave it there.

These totalitarian leaders are united. As one commentator put it, they are the broligarchy. They are connected. They are predators. And they will use force to shut you up and shut you down.

But I hold hope.

Moral weapon — the truth
Every citizen journalist who films human rights crimes being carried out by the arm of the government is armed with a valuable moral weapon: the truth.

Every citizen journalist reporting these truths is a hero.

The truth might be redacted, those who speak it or shout it might become victims, but in calling it out, they fall on the side of freedom and they will be remembered.

Freedom will come. Because it must. The greed mongers who rule must not prevail.

When the truths of victims is heard, the predators lose the narrative, and then they lose their power.

We are all connected in the lifestream of this tiny, precious blue planet. A spark is born and that spark is creativity, it is the spark that rises from destruction and despair.

Never stop witnessing
Harmony. Peace, and Tranquility is possible if our goal is cooperative living.

So be a witness, and never stop witnessing. Raise your voice, raise your heart and your soul. We are all connected and related because we are all brothers and sisters and cousins, spinning on this spinning orb, sparks in the eye of the universe.

Sparks of creativity are born in societies where nurturers are valued rather than predators and exploiters.

In such a world, peace will prevail.

One fine day.

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.

Speakers contrasted and condemned settler colonialism strategies in Aotearoa New Zealand and Israel’s illegal occupation and genocide in Palestine at a feisty solidarity rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today — a day after Waitangi Day, the national holiday marking the 1840 signing of Te Tititi o Waitangi between 46 chiefs and the British crown.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto was one of the speakers after attending an earlier rally at Kerikeri and then driving 240 km with four fellow activists to join the Auckland protest.

“Colonisation in the present resonates with every Māori family. So here we are in that process of decolonisation, a slow process — it’s happening within Māoridom, and it’s happening in the Pākehā world,” Minto told the crowd.

• READ MORE: Why the Treaty Principles Bill had to go down
• Isaac Herzog is accused of inciting genocide in Gaza. He shouldn’t be welcomed to Australia
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“I was so delighted that when the Treaty Principles Bill came in we had that huge hikoī in Wellington,” he said.

“For those of you who know Wellington, we were in Manners Street towards the end of the march.

“And we got word that the rally had started in Parliament. We still had a kilometre to go. The streets were jammed with people, Pākehā, Māori, migrant people — Indigenous people from all over the world, all saying ‘no’.

“New Zealand is not a European country. We have an Indigenous people here and we want to work in partnership through the Treaty of Waitangi.

‘Weak prime minister’
“And what we have now, again, we’ve got a government that is — we have a weak prime minister, and we have got leaders of strong rightwing parties, that’s Winston Peters from New Zealand First, and that other guy from ACT . . .

“You know, whatever his name is . . .” Minto said jokingly. The crowd reeled of David Seymour’s name with a mocking tone and cries of “one term government” with a general election due on November 7.

Among other speakers was Janfrie Wakim, a longtime advocate for Palestine and one of the founders of the Auckland-based Palestine Human Rights Campaign founded in the 1970s, which later evolved into the PSNA in 2013.

She gave a “high fives” message of praise for protesters supporting the cause of Palestine justice and self-determination in this 122th week of demonstrations since October 2023.

Wakim also lauded the “kaimahi” — the workers who turned up each week to set up and pack up.

She said the colonisation of Aotearoa and Palestine had similarities — “but also some differences and decolonising is our task here in Aotearoa and in Palestine.”

Wakim paid tribute to Annette Sykes — “a wahine toa and heroic lawyer” advocate for Māori iwi — who wrote recently “decolonising is not erasing history but rewriting who controls the narrative”.

‘Enriching empires’
“Classic colonialists set out to exploit resources and enrich their empires,” Wakim said.

“European imperial powers dominated the past 500 years and they exited when their empires collapsed,” she said, naming Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain.

However, she added, “settler colonialism is different — it remains and is ongoing. All settler-colonial states seek more territory and fewer Indigenous people by ‘ethnic-cleansing’.”

“Settler colonialists sought to recreate Europe in the lands they invaded and they needed to eliminate the local native populations living there — think Australia.

“That is the story of Palestine.

“Settler colonialism is a structure not an event. And Zionists built their structure on that platform.”

Wakim said early Zionists knew well that Palestine was populated. They knew that the land had to be “emptied” to allow European Jews to establish their settler-colonial project.

Nakba refugees
She referred to the 1948 Nakba — “the catastrophe” — when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by Israeli militias. They became refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria but with a UN-backed right to return.

More than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed and their land stolen by the Israelis.

Wakim also told of the Zionists’ racist narrative dehumanising the Palestinians and their relationship to the land”.

“But nothing compares with what Israel is doing today — the brutal, ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing we have been witnessing and continue to witness.”

Wakim said the Zionist structure was built on a weak foundation that was crumbling — “not fast enough but the cracks are widening as is Israel’s reliance on one superpower which itself is in decline”.

She said Palestine and Palestinians remained steadfast and resisting the injustices.

“As here in Aotearoa, they are actively working across the world in solidarity with others to expose the lies and change the narrative and unite people of all nations, ethnicities and religions.

BDS movement growing
“BDS — [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] is growing slowly but surely.”

She said Israel was imploding and she called on New Zealand to renew its “lead on social justice issues”.

“We may be small, but we can be powerful,” she added.

Another speaker, kaiāwhina Kerry Sorensen-Tyrer, spoke of her encounter that day at Te Komititanga Square with three IDF soldiers from Israel “holidaying” in New Zealand. After a brief exchange, she photographed them and reminded the crowd to be vigilant and to report information to the PSNA’s IDF hotline.

“We do not want you in Aotearoa,” she said of the soldiers and their role in a genocidal war on Gaza to loud cheers from the crowd.

Donald Trump is a classic example of why you don’t let bullies prosper. “Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of ‘the rules-based international order’  — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are objects, we are mere “things” to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”. 

I wrote that in January 2025 in this article that I reproduce today. It provides a useful backgrounder, including historical precendents, to help us navigate through the times we are living through right now.

• READ MORE: Denmark sends more troops to Greenland amid tensions with Trump
• Other Greenland reports

What do Panama, Canada and Greenland have in common? Could Trump be getting the US back to brass tacks, to a core strategy of dominating the Western hemisphere? Possibly, and he may be blowing away the fraudulent rhetoric about rules-based international order, territorial integrity, international law and the crusade to expand democracies.

Trump said this week that the US is prepared to use military force to assert control over Panama and Greenland.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes.  People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but even if they do they should give it up because I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said.

The world’s largest island is bigger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. It’s literally bigger than Texas (300 percent bigger) — and the US wants it.

A greater risk
Think about that.  The US may pose a greater risk to the territorial integrity of the European Union than the Russians do. If they get antsy with the US, Trump will “tariff them”.

The Danes, like the rest of Europe, are frightened of the US. In response to Trump’s Greenland gambit, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen timidly said this week that Denmark was “open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can cooperate, possibly even more closely than we already do, to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled”.

To ensure American ambitions are fulfilled. And this was the country that gave us the Vikings. If Ragnar Lodbrok, Eric Bloodaxe or Bjorn Ironside had been around when Donald Trump Junior swooped into Nuuk for his photo op, his skull would have been used as a drinking tankard for a blót sumbl feast that same evening.

Top independent strategists have for years despaired of the strategic brainlessness of US foreign policy — the Midas Touch in reverse, as Professor Mearsheimer calls it.  Wherever they went — from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza — Americans embroiled themselves in conflicts of little strategic worth and left behind piles of bodies, millions of implacable enemies and a litany of failures.

Trump’s rough woo-ing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism — a shift in US policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests.

That’s quite appropriate for a man who counts President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) as a role model. There is a whiff of the Rough Rider (Roosevelt’s cavalry which kicked over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898) about Trump’s recent utterances.

Outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York you could see a magnificent statue of Teddy Roosevelt, cowboy kerchief around his neck, six-shooter hanging off his hip, astride a proud steed with two bare-chested Noble Savages — an African and an American Indian — walking on either side of the Great White Man.

Punkish metal spikes
I particularly like the slightly punkish metal spikes sticking out of his hair to stop birds crapping on his head.  After 82 years, the City finally woke up to the fact that this was a racist, colonialist trope and took the statue down in 2021.

It is ironic that just four years after doing so an even bigger monument to Roosevelt is going up: Trump redux is lifting entire passages out of the Roosevelt playbook.

Roosevelt greatly increased the influence and interests of the United States, building on the recent seizures of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Cuba and Guam.  He wanted to Make America Great and to do so he would,”speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Big stick diplomacy – the willingness to use the military – was increasingly unleashed to assert US hegemony and business interests.

General Smedley D Butler, author of War is a Racket, spent his entire 33-year career (1898-1931) enforcing the rules as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and his successors. Smedley eventually realised he was fighting as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Like thousands of Marines he fought for the US in countries up and down the Americas, Caribbean and Asia, including Cuba (1898), Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and China.

President Roosevelt’s greatest legacy was the building of the Panama Canal. The US intervened militarily in Panama to drive out the Colombians and “liberate” Panama so the US could build the Canal.

‘Literally as one man’
He said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man” — to which a senator retorted, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt!”

Is history repeating itself — as tragedy or comedy?  If Trump’s threats all sound either nuts or 19th century it’s because it is both those things — which doesn’t mean they won’t happen.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  I think Trump has a very good point for a number of reasons (clue: none of them relate to international law or respect for the sovereignty of nations).

Greenland has a ton of energy, fishing and mineral resources the Americans would love to lay their hands on. The Arctic maritime routes are slowly opening and if you look at a map of the Arctic you’ll realise the USA has very little real estate, to use Trumpspeak, up there and Russia has a vast amount.

The third reason is equally important: incorporating Canada and Greenland into the US would give the country an enormous boost at a time when it is slipping behind China in all critical areas.

According to the IMF, the Chinese have already overtaken the US in share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (19-15 percent).  By 2035 this gap will likely explode out to 25 percent to 14 percent in Beijing’s favour.

How should the US respond?  Its current China containment strategy of sanctions, tariffs and threats are failing as China’s manufacturing and tech sectors greatly outperform the US.

Losing its proxy war
Military planners say the US would almost certainly lose a conventional war against China over Taiwan; the US is already losing its proxy war in Ukraine. A course correction seems inevitable.

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of “the rules-based international order” — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are “objects”, we are mere things to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”.

Trump is refreshingly candid: he wants stuff and he’s prepared to dispense with the preachy posturing that we got with Blinken and Biden.  America is not your friend.

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

This article was first published at Solidarity on 11 January 2025 under the title “A man, a plan, a canal:  Trump might be on to something”.

The Nobel Peace Prize “handover” episode at the White House has sparked shock and criticism in Norway, where the honour is awarded.

Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, said Trump’s acceptance of the medal showed that he was a “classic scapegoat who will adorn himself with other people’s awards and work”.

Professor Janne Haaland Matlary, a former politician, called the incident “completely unheard of” and said it reflected a lack of respect for the prize on [Mariá Corina] Machado’s part.

• READ MORE: White House says Nobel Trump omission was ‘politics over peace’
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“It’s a meaningless act, because you can’t give away an award. It’s the award itself, the honour of getting it. So this is very pathetic, I have to say,” she said.

Venezuelan opposition leader Mariá Corina Machado handed over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to US President Donald Trump during a meeting at the White House last week, describing the gesture as “a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.”

Speaking to Fox News later, Machado said Trump “deserves it”, adding that “it was a very emotional moment”.

Trump, who had aggressively lobbied for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize by citing what he claimed were efforts to halt eight wars, later posted on social media that Machado had left the medal with him to keep.

He called it a “wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”

No legal or symbolic standing
The Nobel Committee, however, was quick to clarify that such a transfer has no legal or symbolic standing.

According to the Norwegian Nobel Institute and the Nobel Committee, once awarded, a Nobel Peace Prize cannot be transferred, shared, or reassigned. This rule is a core principle of the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, as laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will.

In an historic humiliation for America, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is forced to issue a statement making clear that No, a Nobel Peace Prize extorted from a duly awarded winner by an authoritarian president who has militarily seized her country as an oil colony, doesn’t count. pic.twitter.com/dvZrvb16Rn

— Jesse Lee (@JesseCharlesLee) January 10, 2026

While a laureate is free to dispose of the physical medal or prize money as they wish, the official title and honour of being a Nobel Peace Prize recipient permanently belong to the chosen laureate and cannot be passed on.

As a result, Machado remains the official 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Trump may possess or display the medal, but he does not become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her efforts to “promote democratic rights in Venezuela” and to steer the country away from dictatorship and toward democracy.

When the prize was announced in October 2025, she dedicated the honour to the Venezuelan people and to Trump, praising his backing of Venezuela’s democratic movement.

Other Norwegian reaction
Raymond Johansen, secretary-general of Norwegian People’s Aid and a former city council leader, described the situation as “unbelievably embarrassing and damaging” to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Writing on Facebook, he warned that “the awarding of the prize is now so politicised and potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimise an anti-peace prize development.”

US analyst Eirik Lokke said the move appeared to be an attempt by Machado to curry favour with Trump, despite the US president having repeatedly claimed that she lacked sufficient support or respect within Venezuela to lead the country.

Online reaction was equally scathing. Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote on X, “I just can’t understand how Trump feels no embarrassment over accepting someone else’s prize.”

Another user, @JoJoFromJerz, posted, “If you can ‘give’ your Nobel Peace Prize to someone like Donald Trump, you clearly didn’t deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.”

Others mocked the gesture. “When the Nobel Peace Prize becomes transferable, it stops being a prize and starts being a joke,” wrote @jeetensingh. “She’s not giving it, she’s buying him,” another user, @Zenantics2, commented.

Some, however, defended Machado. One user argued, “I actually think she may be displaying the kindness and wisdom that led to her getting the peace prize in the first place. It’s just a silly medal.

“And it might ease some of the suffering of her people.”

Purple Heart ‘gift’ incident
MS NOW political commentator Steve Benen wrote that the Machado “gift” to Trump was a similar incident to when the President had received a Purple Heart award from a retired military colonel.

“Trump wants the accolades without the sacrifice. He apparently prefers a model in which others do the heavily lifting and then generously turn over their honours to him, without him having to do anything to merit the award he covets,” Benen wrote.

Despite the symbolic handover, Trump has continued to back Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez over Machado, provided she aligns with Washington’s interests — particularly continued access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

I have seen the masked goons who terrorise our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta.

Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt.

• READ MORE: Ian Powell: The Nicolás Maduro kidnapping, US imperialist expansion and implications for New Zealand
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I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria.

I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.

I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.

Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.

Terror works.

The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

Doors closing fast
But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.

ICE, our Americanised Gestapo, is being birthed.

Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organising to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government.

It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence.

It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.

If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.

Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible.

Sporadic resistance
Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks.

“Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

“After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organising, community and dissent.

Effective state terror
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation”.

Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.

The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.

“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings.

So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.

The authoritarian state cannibalises the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens.

Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.

Violent kidnappings
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador.

They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalise a visa.

Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.

Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.

ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants.

It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.

New detention centres
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.

ICE agents, intoxicated by the licence to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.

None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarised police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam.

The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.

Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.

Césaire writes:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!”

And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civiliSation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Democracy’s last gasps
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”

Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.

Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonised — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals.

They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

What have we become if to survive in our so-called “free world” we must turn a blind eye to cold-blooded genocide, must arm ourselves to oppose our major trading partner, must support a contrived war to defeat an adversary that no longer exists, (lest its new form otherwise achieves its potential) must sanction some and not others, trade with some and not others — and now must, yet again, be silent as another sovereign nation is brazenly plundered for its wealth.

US President Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela is not a “police operation” against a criminal “fugitive,” nor is it part of an “escalating pressure campaign” against a hostile regime.

It’s none of the things that the White House and our media claims, faithfully copying and pasting stories supplied by The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.

• READ MORE: Trump says Venezuela to hand over up to 50m barrels of oil to US
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Blithely asserting the right to “run” Venezuela and “take” the country’s vast oil reserves, in a textbook example of the 19th century colonialism, Trump’s actions brazenly violate international law and numerous entrenched conventions. And all of it whitewashed by our media in euphemistic pseudo-legalese, to impress those gullible enough.

With Trump not only flouting the US Constitution but no longer even pretending that this is about anything other than the theft of another country’s resources, bragging that US oil companies will begin “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” what does it say about us that we accept such brigandry?

How, in God’s name, have we allowed ourselves to be swayed by the dribblings of a scurrilous misogynist, the associate of a convicted paedophile and a creature so altogether odious that, in any other context, we wouldn’t be seen dead with him?

Brandishing his big black marker, Trump, the unabashed narcissist, has changed the US Constitution from; “We the People . . . ” to now read: “ME the People”!

When can we expect those we have entrusted to defend the principles we claim to represent, to stand up and say something?

Or is it simply a matter of us being too gutless ourselves, too intimidated, too craven, to break ranks, step forward and say: “The Emperor has no clothes!”

Malcolm Evans is an independent New Zealand award-winning cartoonist and commentator.

Vinzons is a quiet coastal town in the eastern Philippines province of Camarines Norte in Bicol. With a spread out population of about 45,000. it is known for its rice production, crabs and surfing beaches in the Calaguas Islands.

But the town is really famous for one of its sons — Wenceslao “Bintao” Vinzons, the youngest lawmaker in the Philippines before the Japanese invasion during the Second World War who then took up armed resistance.

He was captured and executed along with his family in 1942.

• READ MORE: Filipino radio storytelling and community empowerment — a Vinzons update
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One of the most interesting assets of the municipality of Vinzons — named after the hero in 1946, the town previously being known as Indan — is his traditional family home, which has recently been refurbished as a local museum to tell his story of courage and inspiration.

“He is something of a forgotten hero, student leader, resistance fighter, former journalist — a true hero,” says acting curator Roniel Espina.

As well as a war hero, Vinzons is revered for his progressive politics and was known as the “father of student activism” in the Philippines. His political career began at the University of Philippines in the capital Manila where he co-founded the Young Philippines Party.

The Vinzons Hall at UP-Diliman was named after him to honour his student leadership exploits.

Student newspaper editor
He was the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian, the student newspaper founded in 1922.

At 24, Vinzons became the youngest delegate to the 1935 Constitutional Convention and six years later at the age of 30 he was elected Governor of Camarine Norte in 1941 — the same year that Japan invaded.

In fact, the invasion of the Philippines began on 8 December 1941 just 10 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i.

The invading forces tried to pressure Governor Vinzons in his provincial capital of Daet to collaborate. He absolutely refused. Instead, he took to the countryside and led one of the first Filipino guerilla resistance forces to rise up against the Japanese.

His initial resistance was successful with the guerrilla forces carrying out sudden raids before liberating Daet. He was eventually captured and executed by the Japanese.

The exact circumstances are still uncertain as his body was never recovered, but the museum does an incredible job in piecing together his life along with his family and their tragic sacrifice for the country.

One plaque shows an image of Vinzons along with his father Gabino, wife Liwayway, sister Milagros, daughter Aurora and son Alexander (no photo of him was actually recovered).

According to the legend on the plaque:

“Wenceslao Vinzons with his father disappeared mysteriously – and were never see again. The Japanese sent out posters in Camarines Norte expressing regret that on the way to Siain, Quezon, Vinzons was shot while attempting to escape. ‘So sorry please.’

“The remains of the body of Vinzons, his father, wife, two chidren and sister have never been found.”

The Japanese Empire as portrayed in the Vinzons Museum. Video: APR

Imperial Japan showcase
One room of the museum is dedicated as a showcase to Imperial Japan and its brutal invasion across a great swathe of Southeast Asia and the brave Filipino resistance in response.

A special feature of the museum is how well it portrays typical Filipino lifestyle and social mores in a home of the political class in the 1930s.

When I visited the museum and talked to staff and watched documentaries about “Bintao” Vinzons’ life, one question in particular intrigued me: “Why was he thought of as a ‘forgotten hero’?”

According to acting curator Espina, “It’s partly because Camarines Norte is not as popular and well known as some other provinces. So some of the notable achievements of Vinzons do not have a high profile around in other parts of the country.”

Based at the museum is the town’s principal Tourism Officer Florence G Mago. She is optimistic about how the Vinzons Museum can attract more visitors to the town.

“We have put a lot of effort into developing this museum and we are proud of it. It is a jewel in the town.”

SPECIAL REPORT: By Kristo Langker in Kiwirok, West Papua

While DropSite News usually reports on, and from, parts of the world where the US war machine operates, in this story, the weaponry in question is made by a multinational French weapons manufacturer and Chinese manufacturer.

However, you will see the structure is the same — the Indonesian government using drones and helicopters to terrorise and displace the people of West Papua, while the historical reason imperial interests loom over the region stems from a US mining project in the 1960s.

The videos in this story are well worth watching — exclusive interviews with the guerilla group fighting off the drones and airplanes with bows and arrows.

On 25 September 2025, Lamek Taplo, the guerilla leader of a wing of the West Papua National Liberation Army (Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat, or TPNPB), left the jungle with his command to launch a series of raids on Indonesian military posts.

Indonesia had established three new military posts in the Star Mountains region in the past year, according to NGO Human Rights Monitor, with sources on the ground telling Drop Site News that nearby civilian houses and facilities — including a church, schools, and a health clinic — had been forcibly occupied in support of the military build-up.

5 Indonesian soldiers shot
Despite being severely outgunned, the command shot five Indonesian soldiers, killing one, while suffering no casualties themselves, according to Taplo and other members of his group.

The raids continued for three more days. The command shot the fuselage of a helicopter and burned five buildings that Taplo’s group claimed were occupied by Indonesian security forces.

Taplo was killed less than three weeks later by an apparent drone strike. During an October 13 interview a week before his death, Taplo, a former teacher himself, told Drop Site why TPNPB targeted a school:

“It’s because they (Indonesian military) used it as their base. There’s no teacher — only Indonesians. I know, because I was the teacher there, too . . .  Indonesia sent ‘teachers’. However, they’re actually military intelligence.”

Indonesia has laid claim to the western half of New Guinea island since the 1960s with the backing of the US. For the past year, the Indonesian military has ramped up its indiscriminate attacks on subsistence farming villages, especially those that deny Indonesian rule.

The military presence has been growing exponentially after the October 2024 inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto, who is implicated in historic massacres in Papua from his time as commander of Indonesia’s special forces — called Komando Pasukan Khusus or “Kopassus”.

According to witnesses interviewed in Kiwirok and its surrounding hamlets, and documented in videos, there are now snipers stationed along walking tracks, and civilians have been shot and killed attempting to retrieve their pigs.

Indonesian retaliated
Indonesia immediately retaliated against TPNPB’s September attacks by sending two consumer-grade DJI Mavic drones, rigged with servo motors, to drop Pindad-manufactured hand grenades.

One drone targeted a hut that Taplo claimed did not house TPNPB but belonged to civilians.

No one was killed as the grenade bounced off the sheet metal roof and exploded a few meters away. The other drone flew over a group of TPNPB raising the Morning Star flag of West Papua but was taken down by the guerrillas before a grenade could be dropped.

Ngalum Kupel TPNPB celebrating the capture of a drone. September 28, 2025.

• Watch video by Ngalum Kupel/TPNPB at the Drop Site link

Holding the downed drone and grenade, Taplo likened the ordeal to Moses parting the Red Sea for the escaping Israelites: “It’s like Firaun and Moses . . .  It was a miracle.”

Then joking: “The bomb (grenade) was caught since it’s like the cucumber we eat.”

Over the next few weeks, a series of heavier aerial bombardments followed.

Video evidence
Videos taken by Taplo show two Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft darting through the air, followed by the thunderous sound of ordnance hitting the mountains.

Despite the fact that thousands of West Papuans have been killed in bombings like these since the 1970s, Taplo’s videos are the first to ever capture an aerial bombardment from the ground in West Papua, owing to the extreme isolation of the interior.

In fact, many highland West Papuans’ first contact with the outside world was with Indonesian military campaigns.

Ostensibly a counter-insurgency operation against a guerrilla independence movement, these bombings are primarily hitting civilians — tribal communities of subsistence farmers.

The few fighters Indonesia is targeting are poorly armed lacking bullets, let alone bombs — and live on ancestral land with their families. The most ubiquitous weapon among these groups remains the bow and arrow.

Taplo told Drop Site the bombings began on Monday, October 6.

“Firstly they (Indonesia) did an unorganised attack: they dropped the bomb randomly . . .  they just dropped it everywhere. You can see where the smoke was coming from.

“Even though it was an Indonesian military house, they just dropped it on there anyway. That was the first one; then they came back. The first place bombed after was a civilian house; the second was our base.”

Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano bombing and strafing the mountains. October 6, 2025

• Watch the video by Lamek Taplo and Ngalum Kupel, TPNPB, at DropSite News

Former Dutch colony
West Papua was a Dutch colony until 1962, when Indonesia, after a bitter dispute with the Netherlands, secured Washington’s backing to take over the territory.

Just three years after Washington tipped the scales in favour of Indonesia in their dispute with the Netherlands, the nationalist Indonesian President Sukarno was ousted in a US-backed military coup in 1965.

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists (or suspected leftists) were killed in just a few months by the new regime led by General Suharto.

Indonesia’s acquisition of West Papua is often treated as an event peripheral to this coup, yet both events held a symbiotic relationship that would become the impetus for many of the mass killings perpetrated by Indonesia in West Papua.

Forbes Wilson, the former vice-president of US mining giant Freeport, visited Indonesia in June 1966, and in his book, The Conquest of Copper Mountain, he boasts that he and several other Freeport executives were among the first foreigners to visit Indonesia after the events of 1965.

Wilson was there to negotiate with the new business friendly Suharto regime, particularly regarding the terms of Freeport’s Ertsberg mine, which was set to be located under Puncak Jaya — the tallest mountain in Oceania.

This mine eventually became the world’s largest gold and copper mine and Indonesia’s largest single taxpayer. The mine’s existence was one of the primary reasons Indonesia gained international backing to launch a vicious Malanesian frontier war against the native and then-largely uncontacted Papuan highlanders.

The “war” continues to this day, though it is largely unlike other modern conflicts.

Like frontier ‘wars’
Instead, the concerted Indonesian attacks are most comparable to the US and Australian frontier wars. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest and most well-armed militaries, is steadily wiping out some of the world’s last pre-industrial indigenous cultures and people.

West Papuans have fought back, forming the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM) and its various splinter armed wings, whose most prominent one is the TPNPB.

Due to the impenetrable terrain of the mountain highlands, the Indonesian military has difficulty fighting the TPNPB on the ground, often instead resorting to indiscriminate aerial bombardments.

The TPNPB’s fight is as much about West Papuan independence as it is an effort by localised tribal communities and landowners using whatever means to prevent Indonesian massacres and land theft.

“No army has ever come to protect the people. I live with the people, because there’s no military to protect my people,” Taplo said in a video sent just before his death.

“From 2021 until this year 2025, I have not left my land; I have not left the land of my birth.”

In October 2021, the Indonesian military launched one of these bombing campaigns in the remote Kiwirok district and its surrounding hamlets in the Star Mountains — deep in the heart of the island of New Guinea.

Little information
Because of this isolation, very little information about these bombings trickled out of the mountains — save for a few images of unexploded mortars and burning huts.

Only a handful journalists, including the author of this article, have been able to visit the area, and it took years and multiple visits to the Star Mountains for the full scale of the 2021 attacks to be reported.

It was eventually revealed that the Indonesian assaults included the use of most likely Airbus helicopters that shoot FZ-68 2.75-inch rockets, designed by French multinational defence contractor Thales, and reinforced by Blowfish A3 drones manufactured by the Chinese company Ziyan.

These drones boast an artificial intelligence driven swarm function by which they litter villagers’ subsistence farms and huts with mortars improvised with proximity fuzes manufactured by the Serbian company Krušik.

A largely remote, open-source investigation by German NGO Human Rights Monitor revealed that hundreds of huts and buildings were destroyed in this attack. More than 2000 villagers were displaced, and they still hide in makeshift jungle camps.

“The systematic nature of these attacks prompts questions of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute,” the report noted. Additionally, witnesses interviewed by this author gave the names of hundreds who died of starvation and illness after the bombings.

With little food, shelter, weapons, or even internet to connect them to the outside world, many of the thousands of Ngalum-Kupel people displaced since 2021 are displaced again — likely to die without anyone knowing — mirroring countless Indonesian campaigns to depopulate the mountains to make way for resource projects.

Long-term effects
The impact of the latest wave of attacks in October 2025 is likely to be felt for years, as the bombs destroyed food gardens and shelters and displaced people who were already living in nothing more than crowded tarpaulins held up by branches, while having already been forced to hide in the jungle after the 2021 bombings.

“It is the same situation with Palestine and Israel — people are now living without their home,” said Taplo.

On 6 October 2025, Indonesia retaliated further, deploying two aircraft that aviation sources confirmed to be Brazilian-made Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprops. These planes were filmed bombing and strafing the mountains.

Drop Site confirmed that some of the shrapnel collected after these attacks is from Thales’s FZ 2.75-inch rockets — the same rockets used in the 2021 attacks.

In January this year, Thales’s Belgium and state-owned defence company, Indonesian Aerospace, put out a press release titled: “Indonesian Aerospace and Thales Belgium Reactivate Rocket Production Partnership,” which boasted the integration of Thales designed FZ 2.75-inch rockets with the Embraer Supertucano aircraft.

Though these were not the only ordnance deployed, some of the impact zones measured over 20m, and the shrapnel found in these craters was far heavier and larger than that from the Thales rockets.

Shrapnel ‘no joke’
“It’s no joke. It was long and big. It could destroy a village . . . ” said Taplo before picking up a piece of shrapnel around 20cm long.

“This is five kilograms,” he said, weighing the remnants.

Inspecting Impact zone from bombings on 6 October 2025.

• Watch the video by Ngalum Kupe/TPNPB here.

A former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site that the large size of the shrapnel and nature of the scarring and cratering indicate that the bomb was not a modern style munition. It was most likely an MK-81 RI Live, a variant of the 110kg MK-81 developed and manufactured by Indonesian state-owned defence contractor Pindad.

“This weapon system is unguided, and given the steep terrain, it is unlikely that a dive attack could easily be used, providing the enhanced risk of collateral damage or indiscriminate targeting given the weapons envelope,” the specialist said. Pindad did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Photos from a February Pindad press release about the development of the MK-81 RI Live show these bombs loaded on an Indonesian Embraer Supertucano.

A week later, Indonesia hit again. At around 3am, on October 12, a reconnaissance aircraft flew over the camp where Taplo’s command and their families were sleeping, waking them just in time to evacuate before another round of bombs were dropped == again, most likely the MK-81 RI Live.

Bomb strike on video
Taplo captured the bomb’s strike and aftermath on video. Clearly shaken, he makes an appeal for help, saying “UN peacekeeping forces quickly come to Kiwirok to give us freedom, because our life is traumatic . . .

“Even the kids are traumatised; they live in the forest, and seek help from their parents, ‘Dad help me. Indonesia dropped the bomb on the place I lived in.’”

• Indonesia bombing Kiwirok on 12 October 2025. Watch the video by Lamek Taplo.

On the morning of October 19, a drone dropped a bomb on a hut near where Taplo was staying. Initially, the bomb didn’t detonate, leaving enough time for civilians to evacuate the area.

After the evacuation, Taplo and three men returned to remove the ordnance, which then detonated and instantly killed Lamek Taplo and three others — Nalson Uopmabin, 17; Benim Kalakmabin, 20; and Ike Taplo, 22.

Speaking to Drop Site just hours after Taplo was killed, eyewitnesses say the drone was larger than the DJI Mavics deployed earlier and were similar in size to the Ziyan drones from 2021.

Photos taken of the remnants of the bomb show the tail of what was most likely an 81mm mortar.

“The presence of drones — similar to that of DJI quadcopters and [with] improvised fins for aerial guidance — have been employed [just as] ISIS used those weapons systems in Syria,” the former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site.

Plea to Pacific nations
On October 26, civilians in Kiwirok sent an appeal to the government of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island nations. So far, there has been no response, despite these bombings occurring on Papua New Guinea’s border.

The last communication Drop Site received from Kiwirok indicated that the bombings were continuing and the mountains still swarmed with drones — limiting any chance of escape.

Pictures posted on social media in November by members of Indonesian security forces, those stationed in Kiwirok, give some insight into the level of zeal with which Indonesia is fighting this campaign.

An Indonesian soldier can be seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull wearing night vision goggles, a gun, and a lightning bolt forming a cross behind it. The caption reads “Black Zone Kiwirok.”

Another photo shows soldiers sitting in front of a banner which reads “Kompi Tempur Rajawali 431 Pemburu” — a reference to the elite “Eagle Hunter” units set up in the mid 1990s by then-General Prabowo Subianto to hunt down Falantil guerillas in Timor Leste.

As there has been no record of these units being deployed in Papua — nor of an “Eagle Hunter” unit made up of soldiers from the 431st Infantry Battalion — it is unclear whether these banners are just Suharto-era nationalism on display, or if they signify that these units have been revived.

On his final phone call with the outside world, just before the signal cut out, Taplo vowed to continue the TPNPB’s fight: “We will fight for hundreds of days . . .

“We will fight . . .  This war is by God. We have asked for power; we have prayed for nature’s power. This is our culture.”

Republished from DropSite News.

REVIEW: By Amit Sarwal of The Australia Today

Forty years after the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, award-winning journalist and author David Robie has revisited the ship’s fateful last mission — a journey that became a defining chapter in New Zealand’s identity as a nuclear-free nation.

Robie’s newly updated book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, is both a historical record and a contemporary warning.

It captures the courage of those who stood up to nuclear colonialism in the Pacific and draws striking parallels with the existential challenges the region now faces — from climate change to renewed geopolitical tensions.

• READ MORE: Other Rainbow Warrior reports
• Information about the Eyes of Fire book

“The new edition has a completely new 40-page section covering the last decade and the transition in global emphasis from ‘nuclear to climate crisis survivors’, plus new exposés about the French spy ‘blunderwatergate’. Ironically, the nuclear risks have also returned to the fore again,” Robie told The Australia Today.

“The book deals with a lot of critical issues impacting on the Pacific, and is expanded a lot and quite different from the last edition in 2015.”

In May 1985, the Rainbow Warrior embarked on a humanitarian mission unlike any before it. The crew helped 320 Rongelap Islanders relocate to a safer island after decades of radioactive contamination from US nuclear testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls.

Robie, who joined the ship in Hawai’i as a journalist, recalls the deep humanity of that voyage.

Humanitarian voyage
“The fact that this was a humanitarian voyage . . .  helping the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, it was going to be quite momentous,” he told Pacific Media Network News.

“It’s incredible for an island community where the land is so much part of their existence, their spirituality and their ethos.”

The relocation was both heartbreaking and historic. Islanders dismantled their homes over three days, leaving behind everything except their white-stone church.

“I remember one older woman sitting on the deck among the remnants of their homes,” Robie recalls.

“That image has never left me.”

Their ship’s banner, Nuclear Free Pacific, fluttered as both a declaration and a demand. The Rainbow Warrior became a symbol of Pacific solidarity, linking environmentalism with human rights in a region scarred by the atomic age.

On 10 July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was docked at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf when two underwater bombs tore through its hull. The explosions, planted by French secret agents, sank the vessel and killed Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.

Bombing shockwaves
The bombing sent shockwaves through New Zealand and the world. When French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius finally admitted that his country’s intelligence service had carried out the attack, outrage turned to defiance. New Zealand’s resolve to remain nuclear-free only strengthened.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark contributes a new prologue to the 40th anniversary edition, reflecting on the meaning of the bombing and the enduring relevance of the country’s nuclear-free stance.

“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of Fernando Pereira was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific,” she writes.

“It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through.”

Clark warns that history’s lessons are being forgotten. “Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those storm clouds gathering,” she writes.

“New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific.”

Clark’s message in the prologue is clear: the values that shaped New Zealand’s independent foreign policy in the 1980s — diplomacy, peace and disarmament — must not be abandoned in the face of modern power politics.

Geopolitical threats
Robie adds that the book also explores “the geopolitical threats to the region with unresolved independence issues, such as the West Papuan self-determination struggle in Melanesia.”

Clark’s call to action, Robie told The Australia Today, resonates with the Pacific’s broader fight for justice.

“She warns against AUKUS and calls for the country to ‘link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace, which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence.’”

When Eyes of Fire was first published, it instantly became a rallying point for young activists and journalists across the Pacific. Robie’s reporting — which earned him New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize 40 years ago — revealed the human toll of nuclear testing and state-sponsored secrecy.

Today, his new edition reframes that struggle within the context of climate change, which he describes as “the new existential crisis for Pacific peoples.” He sees the same forces of denial, delay, and power imbalance at play.

“This whole renewal of climate denialism, refusal by major states to realise that the solutions are incredibly urgent, and the United States up until recently was an important part of that whole process about facing up to the climate crisis,” Robie says.

“It’s even more important now for activism, and also for the smaller countries that are reasonably progressive, to take the lead.”

For Robie, Eyes of Fire is not just a history book — it’s a call to conscience.

“I hope it helps to inspire others, especially younger people, to get out there and really take action,” he says.

“The future is in your hands.”

The Rainbow Warrior returned to Aotearoa in July to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing. Forty years on, the story of the Rainbow Warrior continues to burn — not as a relic of the past, but as a beacon for the Pacific’s future through Robie’s Eyes of Fire.

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. (Little Island Press, 2025, 245 pages).

Sitiveni Rabuka, the instigator of Fiji’s coup culture, took to the witness stand for the first time today — fronting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Suva.

The TRC was set up by Rabuka’s coalition government with the aim of promoting truth-telling and reconciliation regarding political upheavals dating back to 1987.

The five-member TRC began its work earlier this year. It was led by Dr Marcus Brand, who was appointed in January, and has reportedly already finished his role.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports

Rabuka had stated earlier this year he would “voluntarily appear” before the commission and disclose names of individuals involved in his two racist coups almost four decades ago.

The man, often referred to as “Rambo” for his military past, has been a permanent fixture in the Fijian political landscape since first overthrowing a democratically elected government as a 38-year-old lieutenant-colonel.

But now, at 77, he has a weatherbeaten face yet still carries the resolute confidence of a young soldier. He faced the TRC commissioners, wearing a tie in the colours of the Fiji Army, to give a much-anticipated testimony by Fijians locally and in the diaspora.

He began by revisiting his childhood and the influences in his life that shaped his worldview. He fundamentally accepted the actions of 1987 were rooted in his racial worldview.

Protecting Indigenous Fijians
He acknowledged those actions were a result of his background, being raised in an “insulated” environment (i.e. village, boarding school, military), and it is his view that he was acting to protect Indigenous Fijians.

Asked if the coups had served their purpose, Rabuka said: “The coups have brought out more of a self-realisation of who we are, what we’re doing, where we need to be.”

“If that is a positive outcome of the coup, I encourage all of us to do that. Let us be aware of the sensitivity of numbers, the sensitivity of a perceived imbalance in the distribution of assets, or whatever.”

But perhaps the most important response from him came toward the end of the almost 1hr 50min submission to a question from the facilitator and veteran journalist Netani Rika, who asked Rabuka: “Do you see the removal of immunity for coup perpetrators from the [2013] Constitution as a way towards preventing a repeat of these incidents [coups]?”

“There should be [a] very objective assessment of what can be done,” Rabuka replied.

“There are certain things that we cannot do unless we all agree [to] leave the amendment to the [2013] Constitution open to the people. If that is the will of the people, let it be.

“At the moment our hands are tied,” confirming indirectly that the removal of immunity for coup perpetrators is off the table as it stands.

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

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

I sat in a cafe listening to one man telling another how to get more out of his workers — “his team”, kind of the way people talked about workhorses until some of us read Black Beauty and learned that sentient creatures have feelings, both animals and people.

I hope that people will wake up to the need to unite, to pull together. The best decluttering is decolonising.

Maybe Zohran Mamdani’s win is a sign that will herald a new era, an era when socialists can beat “the money men”. Maybe it’s time when we will all wake up to a different possibility. Maybe other values will be recognised.

• READ MORE: Other Saige England reports

Virtues do not come from wealth. Capital, capitalism (the key is in the word) is a system of exploitation. It was designed by merchants to make some rich and keep others poor. That’s the system.

Maybe you were not taught that? Of course you were not taught that. Think about it.

I listened to William Dalrymple being interviewed by Jack Tame last Sunday and I thought Jack — who I used to respect a lot before he failed to tackle genocide with Israel’s representative for genocide here in Aotearoa — I thought he, Jack, looked like a possum in the headlights when Dalrymple said that Donald Trump had a precursor in Benjamin Netanyahu and called genocide a genocide.

I like to think Jack and others like him (because I have been like them too) will learn to learn about the history of all people and not view history as an inevitable story of winners and losers.

Winners are exploiters
The winners are exploiters and if we want to save the planet we need a massive game change.

The legacy of colonisation.      Video: TVNZ Q&A

Look at the stats of the land that was taken for expansion and how that expansion was used to justify the extermination of one people to prop another people up. The stats, the real statistics show who was there before, show people lived on the land with the land and the waters.

Capitalism is a system of expansion and exploitation. It flourished for a while on slavery and it flourished for a while on settler colonialism, and it flourished for a while on keeping workers believing the story that they were working for greater glory when their take home pay did not equal the value of their labour.

And there is a difference between guilt and remorse. We can learn from the latter. The former, guilt, stagnates, it leads to defence and offence.

We need to recognise that we don’t need to prop up a dying system that flourishes on making some weak and others stronger.

We need to learn to change — those of us who were wrong can admit it and go forward differently. We can realise that the system was designed to make us fail to see the threads that connect all people. We can wake up now and smell the manure among the roses.

Good shit helps things grow, bad shit is toxic contaminated waste that turns things inwards, makes them gnarly.

Monsters are connected
Unfortunately, those who behave like monsters are connected not just to some of us but all of us.

We need to open our minds and our hearts to a different value system. We need to decolonise our senses.

If you defend a bad system because right now you are one of the few on a decent pay scale then you are part of the problem. You are the problem. You have been conned. A system is only fair if it is fair for all people.

Learning history gives us a map said Dalrymple (author of The Golden Road which tells the story of how great India was BEFORE it was stolen by Britain — how that country gave the world numbers and so much more) and we need to learn how the map was drawn.

As someone who reads history to write history, I encourage us all to read widely and deeply and to research so that we do not stop thinking and analysing, and so we can tell wrong from right.

Do not be neutral about wrongs as some historians would suggest. It is more than OK to call a wrong a wrong. In fact it is vital. Take a new lens into viewing history, not the one the masters have given you.

We miss seeing the world if we fail to think about who drew the map, how it was drawn up by men who carved up the world for the Empires intent on creating a golden age by enslaving most of the people to prop up those at the top.

World map’s curling edges
We need to look under the curling edges of the world map drawn up by the exploiter. We need to find the stories of those who were exploited and who had been part of the creation story of this planet before they were exploited.

Those of us who are descendants of colonisers also — many of us — descend from those who were exploited.

The stories of British workhouses, of the system of exile via banishment, of the theft of women’s rights, of the extreme brutal forms of punishment, the stories of the way the top class pushed down and down on the people of the fields and forests and forced them to serve and serve, these real stories are less well known than the myths.

Myths like the story of King Arthur are better known.

Some myths have been created as a form of propaganda. We need to unpick the stories that were told to keep us stupid, to keep us ignorant.

It is time to stop following the trail of crumbs to Buckingham Palace, or at least to see where the trail really leads — to pedophiles who preyed on others, to predators — not just one but many, to people brilliant at reconstructing themselves — creating some fall guys and some good guys and making some people villains.

That story is a lie that protects and processes dysfunction.

Acting on the truth
Blaming one part of the system prevents us from realising and acting on the truth that the whole system is one of exploitation.

This was always a horror story disguised as a fairy story. One crown could save so many poor. The monarchy is not a family that produced one disfunctional person it is the disfunction.

It promotes the lie that one group of people deserve wealth because they are better than another. What a sick joke.

So let’s back away from societies made by men who want to profit from others and get back to nature.

Let’s look on nature as a sister or mother — a sister or mother you love.

Let’s look at the so called natural disasters like climate change. Look at how they have been created by “noble men” and “noble women” and ignoble ones as well. Disasters that can be averted, prevented.

Who suffers the most in a natural disaster? Not the rich.

How do we heal?
So how do we hope and how do we heal? We see the change. We be the change.

I like listening to intelligent insightful people like Richard D Wolff and Yanis Varoufakis:

Mamdani beats the money men.      Video: Diem TV

Personally, for my mental and physical health I’ve been sea bathing, dipping in the sea. I join a group of mainly women who all have stories, and who plunge into nature for release and relief, to relieve ourselves from the debris. Uniting in nature.

I’ve learned that every day is different. The sea is always changing. No two waves are the same and they all pull in the same direction.

We are part moon, part wave, part light, part darkness. We are the bounty and the beauty.
I do have hope that we will all unite for common good. Sharing on common ground. The word Common is so much better than Capital.

If you are working for the kind of people that are discussing how to get more out of you for less, then unite.

And if you know people who are being exploited in any way at all unite with them not the exploiter. Be the change.

By helping each other we save each other. And that includes helping our friend and exploited lover: Nature.

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.

Timor-Leste Prime Minister Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão has paid tribute to the “courageous and determined” contribution of Australian journalist Robert Domm to the struggle of the Timorese people in gaining independence from Indonesia. He died last Friday.

Domm was remembered for meeting in secret with the then Timorese resistance leader Gusmão in an exclusive interview.

“The government and people of East Timor are deeply saddened by the passing of Robert Domm, whose courage and determination helped bring to the world the truth of our fight for self-determination,” Gusmão’s statement said.

• READ MORE: Death of journalist Robert Domm — PM Xanana recognises his contribution during resistance
• Other Timor-Leste reports

“In September 1990, when few in the world were aware of the devastation in occupied East Timor, or that our campaign of resistance continued despite the terrible losses, Robert Domm made the perilous journey to our country and climbed Mount Bunaria to meet with me and the leadership from FALINTIL.

“He was the first foreign journalist in 15 years to have direct contact with the Resistance.

“Your interview with me, broadcast by the ABC Background Briefing programme, broke the silence involving Timor-Leste since 1975.

“He conveyed to the world the message that the Timorese struggle for self-determination and resistance against foreign military occupation was very much alive.

Merchant seaman
“Robert Domm visited East Timor in the 1970s, then under Portuguese colonial control, as a merchant seaman on a boat crossing between Darwin and Dili, transporting general cargo and fuel.

“He returned in 1989, when Indonesia allowed tourist entry for the first time since 1975.

“He returned in 1990, allegedly as a “tourist”, but was on a secret mission to interview me for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

“Robert Domm’s journey to find me took extraordinary courage. His visit was organised by the Timorese resistance with, as he later recalled, “military precision”. He involved more than two hundred people from Timore who guided him through villages and checkpoints, running great risk for himself and the Timore people who helped him.

“He was a humble and gentle Australian who slept next to us on the grounds of Mount Bunaria, ate with us under the protection of the jungle and walked with our resistance soldiers as a comrade and a friend. I am deeply moved by your concern for the people of Timore.

He risked his own life to share our story. His report has given international recognition to the humanity and the resolve of our people.

“Following the broadcast, the Indonesian military carried out large-scale operations in our mountains and many of those who helped them lost their lives for our freedom.

Exposed complicity
“Robert continued to support East Timor after 1990. He spoke out against the occupation and exposed the complicity of governments that have remained mute. He was a co-author, with Mark Aarons, of East Timor: A Tragedy Created by the West, a work that deepened the international understanding of our suffering and our right to self-determination.

“He remained a friend and defender of East Timor long after the restoration of independence.

“In 2015, twenty-five years after his maiden voyage, Robert returned to East Timor to commemorate our historic encounter. Together, we walked to Mount Bunaria, in the municipality of Ainaro, to celebrate the occasion and remember the lives lost during our fight.

“The place of our meeting has been recognised as a place of historical importance.

“In recognition of his contribution, Robert Domm was awarded the Order of Timor-Leste in August 2014. This honour reflected our nation’s gratitude for its role in taking our struggle to the world. Robert’s contribution is part of our nation’s history.

“Robert’s soul now rests on Mount Matebian, next to his Timorese brothers and sisters.

“On behalf of the government and people of East Timor, we express our deepest condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Robert Domm. His courage, decency and sense of justice will forever remain in the memory of our nation.”

“The Past is not dead; it is not even past.”

William Faulkner was right: past events continue to inform and shape our world.  With powerful forces gathering to reassert US dominance over not just Venezuela but the entire Western hemisphere, the vexed issue of local elites, for example Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado and her backers, enlisting an imperial power in domestic broils, is again top of the agenda.

Back in the 1980s I studied in France.  The most thrilling lecture of my university career was an outline of the significance of the Battle of Valmy, a crucial win for the young French Revolution.

The lecture was given by the distinguished historian Antoine Casanova.

• READ MORE: Other Venezuela reports

The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.

At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!”  “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).

Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.

To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.

Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered.  The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.

French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later.  A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly —  told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”

Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.

Some of my fellow students at L’Université de Franche-Comté were South and Central Americans who had fled political persecution. Their stories were my first exposure to the concept of “death squads”.

This was a time when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were drenched in blood as a pitiless struggle was waged by the US and the local military and financial elites on one side, and coalitions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers and various progressives on the other.

Repeated US interventions to support companies like United Fruit Company went hand in hand with brutal suppression of peasant workers. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratic progressive Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a war — the Guatemalan Genocide or The Silent Genocide — in which 200,000 were killed and tens of thousands more “disappeared” over the succeeding three decades. Amnesty International estimated 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Maya people.

In 1980, while I was in France, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down mid-service by a killer working for El Salvador’s military dictatorship. A quarter of a million people braved the junta to attend his funeral.

Romero’s fate was sealed when he appealed to US President Jimmy Carter to end aid to El Salvador’s military dictatorship.

Death squads follow
Whether we look at the Iran Contra scandal, Reagan’s funding of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 or any of dozens of such organisations, the pattern is clear: where the US wishes to assert control via elites, death squads follow. The State Department and CIA spent decades building and evolving El Salvador’s National Security Agency. They helped compile lists of leftists, intellectuals and all sorts of people who were then eliminated by the regime’s death squads.

While I was getting an education in history, literature and politics, tens of thousands were killed in Argentina by the US-backed Junta during the “Dirty War”. Similarly in Chile, from the US-promoted military takeover forward, being a social worker, teacher or trade unionist could be a fatal occupation.

Sadly, as most people my age know, one could go on and on and on about US covert activity to destroy democratic movements and foster alliances with the most vicious oligarchs on the continent.  That is why I fear for Venezuela and I have zero confidence in any political leader who calls for US direct military and paramilitary (via CIA) action in her own country.

For these reasons and more, I shuddered when I heard Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado praising Donald Trump and urging him to continue his pressure campaign, saying only Trump can “save Venezuela”.

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.

Praising a man who is indiscriminately killing your own citizens is not, in my estimation, a good look for either a Nobel Peace laureate or a patriot. Francisco Miranda would roll in his grave.

The price of freedom from foreign powers is often counted in millions of lives and centuries of struggle; it should not be given away lightly.

The Maduro government has its fans and its detractors; both can mount solid arguments.

One thing I believe is firmly in its favour, however, is that, for its many faults, it is a national project that seeks to resist dominance from foreign interests, foremost the US.  I will give the last word to Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (28 March 1750–14 July 1816):

“I have never believed that anything solid or stable can be built in a country, if absolute independence is not first achieved.”

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

Today marks 108 years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and New Zealand pro-Palestinian protest groups have condemned this infamous date in rallies across the country.

“Britain promised a land that wasn’t theirs to give,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair Maher Nazzal.

“That single act of colonial arrogance set in motion more than a century of displacement, occupation, and suffering for the Palestinian people.

• READ MORE: More than a century on: The Balfour Declaration explained
• Israel blocks vast majority of Gaza aid agreed under ceasefire deal
• Other Gaza reports

“For Palestinians, the Balfour Declaration is not history; it’s a living injustice that continues today.

“It’s time for truth and accountability,” Nazzal declared in a post today.

“It’s time for the world, including Aotearoa New Zealand, to stand firmly for justice, equality, and the right of Palestinians to live free on their land.”

Reporting on the Auckland rally and march yesterday, Bruce King said Janfrie Wakim, a longtime stalwart of pro-Palestine activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, had criticised the Balfour Declaration that had promised Palestine as a Jewish state.

‘Mendacious, deceitful’
She quoted the late British journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk calling it “the most mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document in British history”.

Opposition Labour MP and shadow attorney-general Vanushi Walters outlined discussions over sanctions legislation against Israel in preparation for the party winning next year’s general election.

The opposition Labour Party currently leads in most opinion polls.

Greens MP Ricardo Menéndez protested against the NZ government having signed a free trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this year.

This week, the rebel RSF (Rapid Support Forces) fighters that the UAE is accused of backing overran the city of El Fasher, capital of Darfur in Sudan, and carried out massacres of civilians, reports the United Nations.

Al Jazeera reports the Balfour Declaration (Balfour’s “promise” in Arabic) turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine into a reality when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” there.

The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the brutality that the emerging Zionist state of Israel inflicted on the Palestinian people.

It is regarded as one of the most controversial and criticised documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades.

Israel has waged a two-year war on the besieged enclave of Gaza killing more than 68,000 people, including 20,000 children. Israel has killed more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire began on October 10.

EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE: By Chris Hedges

Fifteen years ago today a contingent of six New Zealanders drove three aid-packed ambulances into Gaza as part of the epic international Viva Palestina 5 solidarity convoy of 145 vehicles — to a rock-star reception from locals.

The featured PressTV report includes a short interview with Kia Ora Gaza team volunteer Hone Fowler.

Kia Ora Gaza was established from a series of public meetings to organise Kiwi participation in international efforts to end the siege of Gaza and promote practical solidarity for Palestine.

• READ MORE: Other Kia Ora Gaza reports

This followed the Israeli commando raid on the Mavi Marmara-led peace flotilla in international waters in 2010 which resulted in the deaths of 10 civilian peace activists.

Since then Kia Ora Gaza has organised or supported many projects.

Many more reports, photos and videos of this historic siege-busting convoy can be seen by by scrolling back to October 2010 on the Kia Ora Gaza website.

Israel and the West pretend they want a real peace in Israel-Palestine yet the Israelis have beaten unconscious the man most likely to help realise a sustainable end to the conflict: Marwan Barghouti.

The ethnocentrism of Western culture is such that 20 Israeli hostages received vastly more coverage than thousands of Palestinian hostages, nearly 2000 of whom were released as part of the recent exchange.

These prisoners, physically emaciated, most emotionally shattered, many children, most having never been charged, some held for decades, emerged from the Dantesque Inferno of the Israeli prison system. Most had some kind of disease, commonly scabies, due to the infested and infected conditions of the gulag.

• READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Saving Palestine’s Marwan Barghouti is our duty
• ‘We fear for my father’s life’: Marwan Barghouti’s son to Al Jazeera

Five Palestinian detainees released and exiled to Egypt brought with them terrible news: the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti — the person most likely to lead a free Palestine — had recently been beaten unconscious by his captors.

According to the Times of Israel, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who oversees the Israeli Prison System says he is “proud that Barghouti’s conditions have changed drastically”.

What Nelson Mandela would say about the beating of Marwan
Marwan Barghouti — Palestine’s most loved and revered leader, a living symbol of the resistance — was beaten unconscious by 8 Israeli guards, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners on arrival in Cairo. The attack left the 66-year-old with broken ribs and head injuries.

When called on to demand his protection, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western leaders yawned and looked the other way. That response defined the depths that the Western world has reached in its permissiveness of violence towards Palestinian prisoners.

Marwan Barghouti is commonly referred to as the Palestinian Mandela, a man who has the attributes to not only unite the many Palestinian factions but also negotiate a lasting peace, if given the opportunity.

Mandela couldn’t have been “Mandela” without him surviving and being released — which is a tribute to the ANC and other fighters for freedom, as well as to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns that finally convinced the regime to negotiate.

The same was true of the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland which saw the release of prisoners that one side considered terrorists. The British also came to accept that negotiation with leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the IRA was essential precisely because they had the street credibility to deliver peace.

It is worth pointing out that Mandela said he was not personally beaten during his 27 years of captivity by the racist South African apartheid regime.

Barghouti, who has spent the last 23 years in prisons has had at least four beatings by the Israelis in the past three years alone. The Israelis have shown nothing but contempt for the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, Red Cross requests, or any benchmark of human decency.

They are our “friends and allies” with whom we share values.

‘He has been in a struggle for 50 years’.           Video: TRT News

Rules on prisoner treatment
After leaving Robben Island to eventually become South Africa’s first black President, the convicted terrorist and revolutionary Prisoner 46664 helped author the Nelson Mandela Rules on prisoner treatment, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. He had seen the mistreatment of many of his comrades by racist white South Africa, a close ally of most of our governments.

The scale of what is being done by Israel in its mass torture centres would be beyond anything Mandela could have imagined. Unlike morally repellent leaders like New Zealand’s Luxon, UK’s Starmer, France’s Macron or Germany’s Merz, he would never have failed to act.

A central tenet of the Mandela Rules is that people behind bars are not beyond human rights. Countries — and, yes, that includes Israel — must adhere to minimum standards such as, “No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”

Recently released Palestinians, most in shocking physical condition, talked of having to drink toilet water, beatings, being denied medical treatment, constant humiliations, including sexual violence, committed by the Israelis.

This kind of behaviour has long been documented by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and largely ignored by the mainstream media.

The Israelis, never forget, are our close friends, with whom we share “values”.

I have written a number of articles about Marwan and, to avoid repetition, I recommend those unfamiliar with his astonishing story to read them. My last article, Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty, in August, was part of a global push to prevent Marwan facing further mistreatment. I was shocked at the time to see the video that Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir posted to show the power he personally had over Marwan whose physical condition had obviously deteriorated to a terrible extent. Now he has been beaten, for the fourth time.

“It is a clear declaration that they are threatening my father’s life,” his son Arab Barghouti said this week.

Prisons are ‘Israeli sadism in a nutshell’
One person who watched the release of the prisoners last week was veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, correspondent on the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz.

“It was a kind of parade of skeletons,” Hass said. “These last two years, it’s like the Israeli prisons have become Israeli sadism in a nutshell,” she told Democracy Now!.

“The way that prisoners were treated during these two years is unprecedented in Israel. They didn’t only come out emaciated; they came out ill, sick. Some of them have lost limbs. It’s indescribable.”

Hass’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, her mother surviving nine months in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now, along with all of us, she is witness to genocide.

She makes the fine observation that people aren’t born cruel; they become so. I would add: we in the West helped the Israelis become so depraved by ignoring their abuses for so long. Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is a case in point.

In the UK Parliament on October 14, Green MP Ellie Chowns asked Starmer:

“Can I ask the Prime Minister what recent representation his government has made in the last few days to secure the immediate release of Mr Barghouti, given his widespread popularity as a unifying voice for Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom, and therefore his potential crucial role in securing a meaningful and lasting peace in the region?”

Starmer is an avatar for the West: complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Starmer, who has less human decency in his entire being than Nelson Mandela had in one nostril hair, refused to even mention Barghouti by name. His lawyerly reply:

“Thank you for raising the individual case. We offer to provide such further information as we can, as soon as we can, in relation to that particular case.”

Western leaders, including in my own country, have refused to even reply to requests that petitions/insistences be made to the Israelis to save the great Palestinian leader. They have shown more empathy for the remains of deceased Israeli hostages crushed under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis, hypocritically blaming Hamas for not releasing the remains fast enough!

Such is the moral calibre of our leaders.

None of them, it should be pointed out, had anything to say when footage appeared of Israeli soldiers committing gang rape at Sde Temein Prison last year. Not only were the men not punished but by week’s end they had been blessed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Meir Mazuz who assured one of the rapists that he had done “no wrong” and “In another country they would have given him an award”.

Never forget, the Israelis are our close friends and allies with whom, our leaders tell us, we share values.

‘Israel doesn’t want peace – they want ethnic cleansing’
Such is Marwan Barghouti’s standing that he is respected by all Palestinian factions and acknowledged as a unifying figure, a peacemaker and someone who should be leading Palestine not getting his head punched by Israeli thugs.

“That’s why they see him as a danger,” says his son, Arab Barghouti. “Because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence.

“He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community as well. But they’re [Israelis] not interested in any political settlement; they’re only interested in ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.”

True words, those — and they demolish the fake narrative peddled by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.

The Israelis have killed so many Palestinian negotiators, so many Palestinians leaders that the opposite is now clear: the Israelis and the West are the true enemies of peace.

I’ll give the last word to another Palestinian. I dedicate it to Keir Starmer, Christopher Luxon, Anthony Albanese and all those other leaders who stand deaf, dumb and blind to Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of Palestinian souls still suffering in Israeli captivity:

“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’

– Matthew 25, King James Bible

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we’ve reported, the Gaza ceasefire deal is in effect. Phase one of the US.-backed 20-point plan is underway. Hamas has released all 20 living captives. Israel has released almost 2000 Palestinians in Ramallah and now in Khan Younis in Gaza.

Yesterday, President Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset and then co-chaired a so-called peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not among the 20 or more world leaders who attend. He was invited but said he was not going.

• READ MORE: Opposition Israeli lawmakers interrupt Trump and call for recognition of Palestinian statehood
• Joy as Palestinians prisoners freed after Israeli captives released
• Trump addresses the Knesset and speaks of ‘historic dawn for new Middle East’

For more, we’re joined by the Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and the chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. Among his books, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, almost 20 years ago, and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Pappé, if you could start off by responding to what has happened? We’re watching, in Khan Younis, prisoners being released, Palestinian prisoners, up to 2000, and in the occupied West Bank, though there families were told if they dare celebrate the release of their loved ones, they might be arrested.

And we saw the release of the 20 Israeli hostages as they returned to Israel. Hamas says they’re returning the dead hostages, the remains, over the next few days. Israel has not said they will return the dead prisoners, of which it’s believed there are nearly 200 in Israeli prisons.

Your response overall, and now to the summit in Egypt?

ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. First of all, there is some joy in knowing that the bombing of the people in Gaza has stopped for a while. And there is joy knowing that Palestinian political prisoners have been reunited with their families, and, similarly, that Israeli hostages were reunited with their families.

But except from that, I don’t think we are in such an historical moment as President Trump claimed in his speech in the Knesset and beforehand. We are not at the end of the terrible chapter that we have been in for the last two years.

And that chapter is an Israeli attempt by a particularly fanatic, extremely rightwing Israeli government to try and use ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza to downsize the number of Palestinians in Palestine and impose Israel’s will in a way that they hope would be at least endorsed by some Arab governments and the world.

So far, they have an alliance of Trump and some extreme rightwing parties in Europe.

And now I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with the Palestinians. And what you told us about the way that the celebrations were dealt with in the West Bank and the incineration of the sanitation center shows you that nothing has changed in the dehumanisation and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country.

I hope the world will not stand by, because up to now it did stand by when the genocide occurred in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: We have just heard President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset. He followed the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. I’m not sure, but in listening to Netanyahu, I don’t think he used the word “Palestinian.” President Trump has just called on the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu.

Your thoughts on this, and also the possibility of why Netanyahu has not joined this summit that President Trump is co-chairing? Many are speculating for different reasons — didn’t want to anger the right, that’s further right than him. Others are saying the possibility of his arrest, not on corruption charges, but on crimes against humanity, the whole case before the International Criminal Court.

ILAN PAPPÉ: It could be a mixture of all of it, but I think at the center of it is the nature of the Israeli government that was elected in November 2022, this alliance between a very opportunistic politician, who’s only interested in surviving and keeping his position as a prime minister, alongside messianic, neo-Zionist politicians who really believe that God has given them the opportunity to create the Greater Israel, maybe even beyond the borders of Palestine, and, in the process, eliminate Palestinians.

I think that his consideration should all — are always about his chances of survival. So, whatever went in his mind, he came to the conclusion that going to Cairo is not going to help his chances of being reelected.

My great worry is not that he didn’t go to Cairo. My greatest worry is that he does believe that his only chance of being reelected is still to have a war going on, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Iran or in the north with Lebanon.

We are dealing here with a reckless, irresponsible politician, who is even willing to drown his own state in the process of saving his skin and his neck. And the victims will always be, from this adventurous policy, the Palestinians.

I hope the world understands that, really, the urgent need of — and I’m talking about world leaders rather than societies. You already discussed what is the level of solidarity among civil societies. But I do hope that political elites will understand — especially in the West — their role now is not to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their role now is to protect the Palestinians from destruction, elimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. And nothing of that duty, especially of Europe, that is complicit with what happened, and the United States, that are complicit with what happened in the last two years — nothing that we heard in the speeches so far in the — in preparation for the summit in Egypt, and I have a feeling that we won’t hear anything about it also later on.

There is a different way in which our civil societies refer to Palestine as a place that has to be saved and protected, and still this irrelevant conversation among our political elites about a peace deal, a two-state solution, all of that, that has nothing to do with what we are experiencing in the way that the Israeli government thinks it has an historical moment to totally de-Arabise Palestine and eliminate and expunge the Palestinians from history and the area.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli historian, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has hinted that the country may “hold its first-ever referendum” following a landmark Supreme Court opinion aimed at amending the 2013 Constitution.

On Friday, the nation’s highest court ruled that thresholds for constitutional amendments should be lowered — requiring only a two-thirds majority in parliament and a simple majority of voters in a referendum.

The ruling followed a three-day hearing in August, after Rabuka’s Cabinet, in June, had sought clarification on making changes to parts of the Constitution.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji constitution reports

Submissions came from the State, seven political parties, the Fiji Law Society, and the Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission.

Rabuka said that the Supreme Court’s opinion established a “clear and democratic pathway” for his government’s constitutional reform efforts.

“This opinion provides clarity on matters of constitutional law and governance. It will now go before Cabinet for further deliberation, after which I, as Head of Government, will announce the way forward,” he said in a statement.

However, the Fiji Labour Party, while welcoming the Supreme Court’s opinion, expressed concerns over the lowering of the current “75 percent double super majority requirement” to amend the constitution.

Fijians of Indian descent make up just over 32 percent of Fiji’s total population.

Indo-Fijians ‘particularly vulnerable’
Labour leader and former Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry said that the Indo-Fijian community felt “particularly vulnerable” due to the nation’s race-based political tensions, which have resulted in four coups.

He noted that the coalition’s “unwillingness to spell out the constitutional changes it was contemplating” had made Indo-Fijians “apprehensive”.

“It is for this reason that Labour had submitted that constitutional changes should be left to political negotiations with a view to achieving consensus, and stability,” he added.

But Rabuka dismissed Chaudhry’s concerns on Monday, saying that his “argument does not stand”.

“In a referendum, every community is part of the decision. Indo-Fijians, like all other minority groups, vote as equal citizens,” he said.

He said that any government wanting to change the constitution would need support from the whole nation.

“This forces proposals to be fair, broad, and inclusive. Discriminatory ideas would never survive such a test.”

‘Generalised statements’ criticised
Rabuka said Chaudhry should refrain from making “generalised statements”, adding that he does not have the mandate to speak for all Indo-Fijians.

“Chaudhry says change should only come through political negotiations and consensus. But that usually means a few leaders making deals in closed rooms. That gives a small group of politicians’ veto power over the entire country, blocking needed changes and leaving Fiji stuck,” he said.

“A referendum is the opposite of backroom politics. It is open, transparent, and gives the final say to the people themselves. That is real democracy. That is what the Coalition Government welcomes entirely.”

While Rabuka’s People’s Alliance Party wanted the 2013 Constitution thrown out and replaced with the previous 1997 Constitution, he said the former Prime Minister should “move past the old style of politics and recognise that Fiji may now hold its first-ever referendum”.

“That would be a historic step, one that strengthens democracy for every community, not weakens it.

“As your Prime Minister, I give my assurance to all Fijians that this process belongs to you.”

When Voreqe Bainimarama walked out of Parliament after his government lost by a single vote on Christmas Eve in December 2022, he told reporters who swarmed around him in the capital, Suva: “This is democracy and this is my legacy [the] 2013 Constitution.”

Visibly shellshocked
His most trusted ally Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, looking visibly shellshocked at FijiFirst’s loss of power, said at the time: “We hope that the new government will adhere to the rule of law.”

Sayed-Khaiyum is widely viewed as the architect of the 2013 Constitution, although he disputes that claim.

Critics of the document, which is the country’s fourth constitution, argue that it was imposed by the Bainimarama administration

Meanwhile, the country’s chiefs want the 2013 Constitution gone. In May, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) unanimously rejected the document as “restricting a lot of work for the iTaukei (indigenous Fijians)”.

Following the Supreme Court opinion, the head of of GCC told local media that the 2013 Constitution lacked cultural legitimacy and undermined Fiji’s democratic capacity.

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

COMMENTARY: By Asofou So’o

Although seven political parties have officially registered to contest Samoa’s general election this Friday, three have been politically visible through their campaign activities and are likely to share among them the biggest slice of the Parliament’s 51 seats.

The question on everyone’s lips is: which one of them will win enough seats to form the next government without the assistance of possible coalition partners?

The three main political parties are the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), the Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party and Sāmoa United Party (SUP), under the leadership of Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi (Tuila’epa), La’aulialemalietoa Leuatea Polata’ivao Schmidt (La’auli) and Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa (Fiamē) respectively.

• READ MORE: Other Samoan general election reports

La’auli and Fiamē were both long-serving members of the HRPP until their defection from that party when Tuila’epa was prime minister to form the FAST party before the last general election in April 2021.

Fiamē and La’auli became the leader and president of the FAST party respectively while Tuila’epa continued his parliamentary career as the leader of the opposition following the election.

A falling-out between La’auli and Fiamē in January 2025 resulted in the break-up of the FAST into two factions with Fiamē and the 14 ministers of cabinet of her caretaker government establishing the SUP following the official dissolution of Parliament on June 3.

La’auli, now leader of the FAST party, has retained the support of the remaining 19 FAST members of Parliament.

First to publicise manifesto
HRPP was the first political party to publicise its campaign manifesto, launched on June 23. Its promises include:

• a $500 cash grant per year for every family member;
• tax cuts; expansion of hospital services;
• a new bridge between Upolu and Savai’i Islands;
• disability benefit enhancements;
• a $1000 one-off payment at the time of birth to help families cover essential costs for newborn babies;
• an additional $1,000 one-off payment upon completion of infant vaccinations (Hexa-B and MMR-2) at 15 months; and
• zero-rating of Value Added Goods and Services Tax (VAGST) on essential food items.

The FAST party’s manifesto, launched on July 12, reflects a strong focus on social welfare and economic revitalisation. It promises:

• free public hospital services;
• monthly allowances for pregnant women and young children;
• cash top-ups for families earning under $20,000 per annum;
• an increase in the retirement age from 55 to 65;
• VAGST exemptions on essential goods;
• development of a $1.5 billion carbon credit market;
• establishment of a national stock exchange; injection of $300 million into Sāmoa Airways; and
• the expansion of renewable energy and district development funding.

FAST’s signature campaign promise in the last general election was giving each electoral constituency one million tala for them to use however they wanted. That amount will increase to two million tala this time around.

Officially registered on 30 May 2025 and launched on June 5, the SUP launched its campaign manifesto on July 15. It promises:

• free education and hospital care;
• disability allowances and increased Accident Compensation Act payouts;
• land restitution to villages;
• pension increases; and
• expanded services for outer islands that were not reached during Fiame’s premiership — all with a focus on restoring public trust in government.

‘People first’ party
SUP is promoting itself as a people-first party focused on continuity and ongoing reform.

The three main parties are following the practice established by the FAST party in the last general elections in 2021 where all party election candidates and their supporters tour the island group to meet with constituencies and publicise their manifestos.

As part of this process, the HRPP has been branding various FAST claims from last general election as disinformation.

It had been claimed, for example, that the HRPP was moving to cede ownership of Samoan customary land to Chinese people, that the HRPP presided over a huge government deficit and that, as Prime Minister, Tuila’epa was using public funds to send his children overseas on government scholarships.

At the HRPP rallies, Tuila’epa did not mince words in labelling La’auli a persistent liar, asserting that La’auli had been involved in several questionable and unauthorised dealings during the three-year life of the last FAST government, and that La’auli alone was responsible for the break-up of the FAST party when he refused to step down from cabinet following the Ministry of Police’s lawsuit against him in relation to the death of a young man on the eve of FAST general election victory in 2021.

Fiamē, equally, blames La’auli for the unsuccessful completion of the FAST government’s parliamentary term when he refused to step down from cabinet following the Ministry of Police’s lawsuit against him.

Convened caucus meeting
After refusing to step down, La’auli convened a FAST party caucus meeting at which a resolution was passed to terminate the party membership of Fiamē and four other ministers of her cabinet. The split between Fiamē and La’auli culminated in the defeat of Fiamē’s budget and the abrupt dissolution of Parliament.

HRPP said at their rallies that, should they win government, they would pass a law to prohibit roadshows as they do not want “outsiders” influencing constituencies’ voting preferences.

Furthermore, these road shows are costly in terms of resources and time, and are socially divisive.

Instead, they prefer the traditional method of choosing members of Parliament where political parties restrict themselves to compiling manifestos, leaving constituencies to choose their own preferred representatives in Parliament.

Given that the HRPP was the first political party to publicise its manifesto, they probably have a valid point in suggesting that other political parties, in particular the FAST party and SUP, have not come up with original ideas and have instead replicated or added to what the HRPP has taken some time to put together in its manifesto.

Given the political visibility achieved by the HRPP, FAST and SUP through their campaign road shows and their full use of the media, it is to be expected that collectively they will win the most seats.

Furthermore, owing to the FAST party’s turbulent history, HRPP is probably the front-runner, followed by FAST, then SUP. It is unlikely that the smaller parties will win any seats; likewise the independents.

Enough seats main question
The main question is whether HRPP will have enough seats to form a new government in its own right. Coalition government does not seem to work in Samoa’s political landscape.

The SNDP/CDP coalition in the 1985-1988 government and the last FAST quasi-coalition government of 2021-2025 (FAST depended on the support of an independent as well as pre-election alliances with other parties to form government) all saw governments fail to deliver on their election manifestos and provide needed public services.

Perhaps a larger question is how the three parties might fund their extravagant campaign promises.

The HRPP leadership is confident it will be able to deliver on the main promises in its manifesto — compiled and costed by the HRPP Campaign Committee, consisting of former Government ministries and corporations CEOs (Finance, Custom and Inland Revenue, National Provident Fund, Electoral Commissioner, President of the Land and Titles) and a former senior employee of the Attorney-General’s Office — within 100 days of assuming government.

The other two main parties, FAST and SUP, are equally confident.

The public will have to wait and see whether the campaign promises of their preferred party will be realised. Right now, they are more interested in whether their preferred party will get across the line.

Dr Asofou So’o was the founding professor of Samoan studies at the National University of Samoa from 2004 before being appointed as vice-chancellor and president of the university from 2009 to 2019. He is currently working as a consultant. This article was first published by ANU’s Development Blog and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

So here we are, 2025, and Israel has finally achieved what no terrorist group, no hostile neighbour, no antisemitic tyrant ever could: it has become the most dangerous country on earth — for its own people.

Not because of rockets or boycotts, but because its government has decided that the only way to secure the future is to annihilate everyone else’s.

The Zionist project — once sold as a miraculous refuge for a persecuted people — now stands revealed as a 70‑year experiment in ethnic cleansing, wrapped in biblical entitlement and armed with American money.

• READ MORE: No let-up in Israeli attacks as world condemns man-made famine in Gaza
• Rallies across NZ honour Gaza Strip journalists, condemn own news media
• Other war on Gaza reports

The current phase? Bulldozers in the West Bank, tanks in Gaza, and a prime minister whose personal survival depends on keeping his citizens permanently terrified and morally anesthetised.

Netanyahu and his coalition of zealots have at last clarified Israel’s mission statement: kill or expel two million Palestinians, and call it “security.”

Reduce Gaza to rubble, herd the survivors into tents, and then — here’s the punchline — offer them “resettlement packages” in Libya or South Sudan, as though genocide could be rebranded as humanitarian outsourcing.

And the world? Still dithering over whether to call this behaviour “problematic.” As if sanctions and isolation are reserved only for the unlucky states without lobbyists in Washington or friends in European parliaments.

Israel is begging to be treated as a pariah, but we keep dressing it up as a partner.

The most awkward truth of all: Jews in the diaspora now face a choice. Condemn this grotesque betrayal of Jewish history, or keep defending the indefensible until Israel itself becomes the nightmare prophecy it was meant to escape.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and mentor and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack.

Protesters in their thousands have been taking to the streets in Aotearoa New Zealand demonstrating in solidarity with Palestine and against genocide for the past 97 weeks.

Yet rarely have the protests across the motu made headlines — or even the news for that matter — unlike the larger demonstrations in many countries around the world.

At times the New Zealand news media themselves have been the target over what is often claimed to be “biased reportage lacking context”. Yet even protests against media, especially public broadcasters, on their doorstep have been ignored.

• READ MORE: UN declares Israeli-made famine in Gaza; 2 people starve to death in 24 hours
• New Zealand must move beyond empty statements on Gaza
• First-hand view of peacemaking challenge in the ‘Holy Land’
• New Zealand journalist documents Palestinian life under occupation
• Other Cole Martin reports

Reporters have not even engaged, let alone reported the protests.

Last weekend, this abruptly changed with two television crews on hand in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland days after six Palestinian journalists — four Al Jazeera correspondents and cameramen, including the celebrated Anas al-Sharif, plus two other reporters were assassinated by the Israeli military in targeted killings.

With the Gaza Media Office confirming a death toll of almost 270 journalists since October 2023 — more than the combined killings of journalists in both World Wars, and the Korean, Vietnam, and Afghan wars — a growing awareness of the war was hitting home.

After silence about the killing of journalists for the past 22 months, New Zealand this week signed a joint statement by 27 nations for the Media Freedom Coalition belatedly calling on Israel to open up access to foreign media and to offer protection for journalists in Gaza “in light of the unfolding catastrophe”.

Sydney Harbour Bridge factor
Another factor in renewed media interest has probably been the massive March for Humanity on Sydney Harbour Bridge with about 300,000 people taking part on August 3.

Most New Zealand media has had slanted coverage privileging the Tel Aviv narrative in spite of the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to answer charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the country is on trial for “plausible genocide” in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Both UN courts are in The Hague.

One independent New Zealand journalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for two periods during the Israeli war on Gaza – last year for two months and again this year – is unimpressed with the reportage.

Why? Video and photojournalist Cole Martin from Ōtautahi Christchurch believes there is a serious lack of understanding in New Zealand media of the context of the structural and institutional violence towards the Palestinians.

“It is a media scene in Aotearoa that repeats very harmful and inaccurate narratives,” Martin says.

“Also, there is this idea to be unbiased and neutral in a conflict, both perspectives must have equal legitimacy.”

As a 26-year-old photojournalist, Martin has packed in a lot of experience in his early career, having worked two years for World Vision, meeting South Sudanese refugees in Uganda who had fled civil war. He shared their stories in Aotearoa.

‘Struggle of the oppressed’
This taught him to put “the struggle of the oppressed and marginalised” at the heart of his storytelling.

Martin studied for a screen and television degree at NZ Broadcasting School, which led to employment with the news team at Whakaata Māori, then a video journalist role with the Otago Daily Times.

He first visited Palestine in early 2019, “seeing the occupation and injustice with my own eyes”. After the struggle re-entered the news cycle in October 2023, he recognised that as a journalist with first-hand contextual knowledge and connections on the ground he was in a unique position to ensure Palestinian voices were heard.

Martin spent two months in the West Bank last year and then gained a grant to study Arabic “which allowed me to return longer-term as New Zealand’s only journalist on the ground”.

“Yes, there are competing narratives,’ he admits, “but the reality on the ground is that if you engage with this in good faith and truth, one of those narratives has a lot more legitimacy than the other.”

Martin says that New Zealand media have failed to recognise this reality through a “mix of ignorance and bias”.

“They haven’t been fair and honest, but they think they have,” he says.

Hesitancy to engage
He argues that the hesitancy to engage with the Palestinian media, Palestinian journalists and Palestinian sources on the ground “springs from the idea that to be Palestinian you are inherently biased”.

“In the same way that being Māori means you are biased,” he says.

“Your world view shapes your experiences. If you are living under a system of occupation and domination, or seeing that first hand, it would be wrong and immoral to talk about it in a way that is misleading, the same way that I cannot water down what I am reporting from here.

“It’s the reality of what I see here, I am not going to water it down with a sort of ‘bothsideism’.”

Martin says the media in New Zealand tend to cover the tragic war which has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians so far — most of them women and children — and with the UN this week declaring an “Israeli-made famine” with thousands more deaths predicted in a simplistic and shallow way.

“This war is treated as a one-off event without putting it in the context of 76 years of occupation and domination by Israel and without actually challenging some of these narratives, without providing the context of why, and centring it on the violations of international law.”

It is a very serious failure and not just in the way things have been reported, but in the way editors source stories given the heavy dependency in New Zealand media on international media that themselves have been persistently and strongly criticised for institutional bias — such as the BBC, CNN, The New York Times and the Associated Press news agency, which all operate from news bureaux inside Israel.

‘No independent journalism’
“I have heard from editors that I have reached out to who have basically said, ‘No, we’re not going to publish any independent or freelance work because we depend on syndicated sources like BBC, CNN and Associated Press’.

“Which means that they are publishing news that doesn’t have a relevant New Zealand connection. Usually this is what local media need, a NZ connection, yet they will publish work from the BBC, CNN and Associated Press that has no relevance to New Zealand, or doesn’t highlight what is relevant to NZ so far as our government in action.

“And I think that is our big failure, our media has not held our government to account by asking the questions that need to be asked, in spite of the fact that those questions are easily accessed.”

Expanding on this, Martin suggests talking to people in the community that are taking part in the large protests weekly, consistently.

“Why are they doing this? Why are they giving so much of their time to protest against what Israel is doing, highlighting these justices? And yet the media has failed to engage with them in good faith,” he says.

“The media has demonised them in many ways and they kind of create gestures like what Stuff have done, like asking them to write in their opinions.

“Maybe it is well intentioned, maybe it isn’t. It opens the space to kind of more ‘equal platforming’ of very unequal narratives.

“Like we give the same airtime to the spokespeople of an army that is carrying out genocide as we are giving to the people who are facing the genocide.”

Robert Fisk on media balance and the Middle East.    Video: Pacific Media Centre

’50/50 journalism’
The late journalist Robert Fisk, the Beirut-based expert on the Middle East writing for The Independent and the prolific author of many books including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, described this phenomena as “50/50 journalism” and warned how damaging it could be.

Among many examples he gave in a 2008 visit to New Zealand, Fisk said journalists should not give “equal time” to the SS guards at the concentration camp, they should be talking to the survivors. Journalists ought to be objective and unbiased — “on the side of those who suffer”.

“They always publish Israel says, ‘dee-dah-de-dah’. That’s not reporting, reporting is finding out what is actually going on on the ground. That’s what BBC and CNN do. Report what they say, not what’s going on. I think they are very limited in terms of how they report the structural stuff,” says Martin.

“CNN, BBC and Associated Press have their place for getting immediate, urgent news out, but I am quite frustrated as the only New Zealand journalist based in the occupied West Bank or on the ground here.

“How little interest media have shown in pieces from here. Even with a full piece, free of charge, they will still find excuses not to publish, which is hard to push back on as a freelancer because ultimately it is their choice, they are the editors.

“I cannot demand that they publish my work, but it begs the question if I was a New Zealand journalist on the ground reporting from Ukraine, there would be a very different response in their eagerness to publish, or platform, what I am sharing.

“Particularly as a video and photojournalist, it is very frustrating because everything I write about is documented, I am showing it.

‘Showing with photos’
“It’s not stuff that is hearsay. I am showing them with all these photos and yet still they are reluctant to publish my work. And I think that translates into reluctance to publish anything with a Palestinian perspective. They think it is very complex and difficult to get in touch with Palestinians.

“They don’t know whether they can really trust their voices. The reality is, of course they can trust their voices. Palestinian journalists are the only journalists able to get into Gaza [and on the West Bank on the ground here].

“If people have a problem with that, if Israel has a problem with that, then they should let the international press in.”

Pointing the finger at the failure of Middle East coverage isn’t easy, Martin says. But one factor is that the generations who make the editorial decisions have a “biased view”.

“Journalists who have been here have not been independent, they have been taken here, accompanied by soldiers, on a tailored tour. This is instead of going off the tourist trail, off the media trail, seeing the realities that communities are facing here, engaging in good faith with Palestinian communities here, seeing the structural violence, drawing the connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank — and not just the Israeli sources,” Martin says.

“And listening to the human rights organisations, the academics and the experts, and the humanitarian organisations who are all saying that this is a genocide, structural violence . . . the media still fails to frame it in that way.

‘Complete failure’
“It still fails to provide adequate context that this is very structural, very institutional — and it’s wrong.

“It’s a complete failure and it is very frustrating to be here as a journalist on the ground trying to do a good job, trying to redeem this failure in journalism.”

“Having the cover on the ground here and yet there is no interest. Editors have come back to me and said, ‘we can’t publish this piece because the subject matter is “too controversial”. It’s unbelievable that we are explicitly ignoring stories that are relevant because it is ‘controversial’. It’s just an utter failure of journalism.

“As the Fourth Estate, they have utterly failed to hold the government to account for inaction. They are not asking the right questions.

“I have had other editors who have said, ‘Oh, we’re relying on syndicated sources’. That’s our position. Or, we don’t have enough money.

That’s true, New Zealand media has a funding shortage, and journalists have been let go.

“But the truth is if they really want the story, they would find the funding.

Reach out to Palestinians
“If they actually cared, they would reach out to the journalists on the ground, reach out to the Palestinians. The reality is that they don’t care enough to be actually doing those things.

“I think that there is a shift, that they are beginning to respond more and more. But they are well behind the game, they have been complicit in anti-Arab narratives, and giving a platform to genocidal narratives from the Israeli government and government leaders without questioning, without challenging and without holding our government to account.

“The New Zealand government has been very pro-Israel, driven to side with America.

“They need to do better urgently, before somebody takes them to the International Criminal Court for complicity.”