I was reluctant to enter into journalism because I valued the research and skills attached to the profession, particularly given it’s responsibility to hold the powerful to account.

I was lucky enough to have the legendary Colin McRae as my producer.

He said there are basically three rules. You must be fair, balanced and accurate.

• READ MORE:  Does abolishing the BSA mean the end of NZ’s enforceable media standards in general? — Peter Thompson
• Back to the old Wild West with no media standards? — The Daily Blog
• Open letter sent to Prime Minister and leaders of political parties one week before the decision to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — Gavin Ellis
• World’s most powerful are suing media outlets before stories are even published, says editor — Michael Savage
• Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped
• Other NZ media regulation and self-regulation reports

We did have some wonderful exchanges where I queried how you can be all those things in a blatantly unfair, unbalanced and inaccurate world (you know, one where the dominant lens is rarely Indigenous?).

Sometimes we made slight adjustments to ensure that voices with lived experience or expertise come through. But always — fair, balanced and accurate was the goal. On the odd occasion when I got it wrong, I would be mortified.

I watch aghast at all the people across social media speaking into their microphones and talking absolute rubbish, no restraints or repercussions whatsoever — to get views. Often journalists have to clean up that mess by countering it with facts on their own platforms where we are held to account.

The wholesale ditching of the Broadcast Standards Authority (BSA) probably doesn’t mean anything to anybody struggling to pay their rent. But it is a sign.

Instead of adjusting it to a changing environment, the New Zealand government decided to get rid of the whole thing and let the sector and media companies “self-regulate”. Why not do the same when it comes to health and safety, or dealing with waste?

It is a big deal. So is what’s happening elsewhere to journalism. Actively targeted by hostile military groups and by those who have plenty of money, constantly derided and undermined by those in power.

This is not about me or we journos. It’s about ALL of us.

Anyway, off for a hikoi and a coffee.

Moana Maniapoto MNZM (Ngāti Tūwharetoa/Tūhourangi/Ngāti Pikiao) is an Aotearoa New Zealand singer, songwriter, storyteller, documentary maker, and presenter of Te Ao With Moana. This article was first published on her personal FB page and is republished with permission.

New Zealander Jay O’Connor had finished a long but satisfying day as a crew member aboard Eros 1, one of dozens of vessels that formed the Global Sumud Flotilla that was heading to besieged Gaza to open a humanitarian aid corridor.

What Jay wanted was a well-deserved rest, not a kick in the head from a jack-booted Israeli soldier. But that’s what he got.

Late in the night of April 29, just as he was lying down for some rest, the Israelis struck.

• READ MORE: After Israel’s brutal attack on Kiwis the NZ government does nothing
• UN demands Israel immediately releases flotilla activists
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports

One of the crew ripped open the hatch, “We’re under attack!” Everyone was taken by surprise because the flotilla was nearly 1000 km out from Israel, near Greek territorial waters.

“We saw a couple of military RHIBS (rigid-hulled inflatables) sitting behind us. They had laser sights from rifles pointed in our eyes. They identified themselves as the Israeli Navy.”

The Israelis seized control of the boat, ferried the Sumud crew onto a nearby prison ship — an amphibious assault vessel converted to hold four shipping containers for the hostages.

As they did this, the Israelis sabotaged the Eros 1 and other intercepted vessels, cutting fuel lines, interfering with the engines, slashing sails, destroying navigation and comms equipment, and so on. All this happened in international waters, blatantly illegal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

‘Sticking guns in our faces’
Inside the shipping containers, the 180 captives realised things were going to get worse.

“They were holding us in stress positions for ages, yelling at us, making us touch the Israeli flag, firing flash bangs, sticking guns in our faces, all that kind of bullshit,” Jay O’Connor said.

The raiders stripped Jay of his wet weather overalls and left him with no shoes, a t-shirt and the skirt he slept in. The nights were very cold and there was no bedding or mattresses inside the shipping containers.

“Occasionally they’d toss a bit of water or some really stale bread for us to eat. They were constantly pointing guns at us. They were constantly yelling at us and then they would fuck with us for no reason — get us to line up and be counted, make us sit in stress positions and occasionally grab someone, drag him out and beat them up.”

This went on for three days.

“About a quarter of us had to sleep outside on the deck. And just for shits and giggles, they would flood the deck with sea water just to make sleeping impossible.”

An activist talks to Dawn News about the illegal, brutal Israeli attack from on board the flotilla.

Diabetic crew member prevented taking insulin
Moussa Taher, another New Zealander, sailing on the Saf Saf, said the Israelis even refused to let a diabetic crew member take his insulin. Taher said one of his comrades turned 75 years old inside that shipping container prison.

On the morning of the third day the captives were told they were being transferred to another ship.

“At this point, we stopped complying,” Jay said, “Because they had six of us in solitary. We hadn’t any confirmation that they were even alive. So we basically sat down.

“They came in and grabbed us one by one, dragged us into the fourth container.” This is where dozens were severely beaten.

“I got a few punches to the head, a kick to the head, and a couple of really nasty kicks to my ribs and right kidney. After that, they were twisting our arms and dragging us out. Then all of a sudden, we’re on a Greek Coast Guard vessel!”

Transferred by the Greeks to Crete, the most seriously injured Sumud crew were taken to a local hospital. Later that day Jay and others were released and unceremoniously dropped off in a town square to fend for themselves. No phones, no money, no support.

NZ officials’ contact ‘limited, unhelpful’
Contact with New Zealand officials was limited and unhelpful. Citizens of other Western nations were treated in the same way by their pro-Israeli governments. These heroic activists were on their own.

“We couldn’t pay for a hotel. We couldn’t pay for a coffee, we couldn’t do anything. And then we see this line of local anarchists marching towards us, chanting! It was such a wonderful moment.”

While NZ Foreign Affairs were drafting press releases making hollow declarations such as “The safety of New Zealanders involved is paramount”, the Kiwis had to rely on the kindness of strangers who took care of them, fed them, clothed them and organised places for them to sleep.

The New Zealand government refuses to condemn the attack on Kiwi citizens.

Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto) was on one of the boats that escaped the raiders. In all, the Israelis attacked 22 of the more than 60 boats in the flotilla.

“This is a humanitarian flotilla,” he told Radio New Zealand. “The only thing we are armed with is aroha (love) in our hearts. The intention is to definitely keep going.

“As tangata whenua, Māori have lived through colonisation, land being taken, and cultural suppression, so that creates a natural solidarity with the Palestinians.”

Undaunted in spite of trauma
Mousa Taher says he is undaunted despite the traumatic experience. He is now in Turkïye, linking up with others preparing to restart the journey to Gaza.

“So please keep us in your prayers, and please keep the Palestinians in your thoughts and your prayers. Our silence is helping the occupation forces to systematically destroy them and dismantle them.”

A month earlier, back in Wellington Jay O’Connor said this:

“I will be traveling from Te Whanganui a Tara [Wellington] to join the Global Sumud Flotilla. I’m doing this because I can’t just stay at this side of the world watching this genocide unfold.

“I want to be able to look my kids in the eyes and tell them that I did something to try and alleviate the suffering of children just like them who are being victimised every day by Israel. So, Free Palestine!”

Now, after the horror of what he has been subjected to by the Israelis, how does Jay feel?

“Personally, any uncertainty about whether I wanted to continue or not has been burned out of me by my experience at the hands of the Israelis. I am so incredibly angry. I’ve never been this angry in my life. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Kiwi heroes of our time
Jay O’Connor, Hāhona Ormsby, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel, Sean Janssen and all the Kiwis onboard the Sumud Flotilla and within the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation represent the very best of the New Zealand spirit. They are the Kiwi heroes of our time.

Our government, sadly, stands with the villains and their names should live in infamy for not supporting their own people.

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

The announcement by New Zealand’s Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith that the government was abolishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) came as no real surprise.

But it leaves a big question hanging: will the news media still be held accountable to basic standards which protect the public interest and the core functions of the Fourth Estate?

Dr Goldsmith has said the Media Council, the industry body dealing with news and online content, “will become the primary regulator for journalism”.

• READ MORE:  Open letter sent to Prime Minister and leaders of political parties one week before the decision to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — Gavin Ellis
• Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped
• Other NZ media regulation and self-regulation reports

That only raises more questions. The council primarily oversees standards in print and digital journalism. But unlike the BSA, it has no legal powers of enforcement, and its rulings cannot be appealed through the courts.

Goldsmith rightly points out the digital media environment has “changed dramatically, but our regulatory settings have not kept up”. But that is not the BSA’s fault.

Governments over the past two decades have proposed regulatory updates, but delivered nothing concrete.

Indeed, the Broadcasting Act dates back to 1989. Its definition of “broadcasting” excludes on-demand services but includes “any transmission of programmes […] by radio waves or other means of telecommunication”.

This became the focus of a heated dispute when the BSA signalled it was prepared to hear a complaint about online comments made on independent digital media site The Platform.

Reactions from the political right included accusations of bureaucratic overreach by the BSA, which allegedly was acting “like some Soviet-era Stasi” and making a “secret power grab”.

This significantly misrepresented the complexity of the issues at stake. For some years the BSA has openly advanced the case for regulatory reform — including whether that meant retaining the BSA itself in its current form.

No public consultation
The more fundamental question is whether any standards regime should apply to online media. That was a key issue raised in the media reform proposals put out for public consultation by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in 2025.

These included a proposal to:

modernise the broadcasting standards regime to cover all professional media operating in New Zealand, not just broadcasters. The role of the regulator […] would be revised, with more of a focus on ensuring positive system-level outcomes and less of a role in resolving audience complaints about media content.

This would have entailed a two-tier model: an industry regulator responsible for handling day-to-day complaints about breaches of content standards; and a statutory regulator to oversee systemic issues, with powers to ensure the overall standards regime remained robust.

Even if the BSA were restructured, there was no proposal to simply dispense with it and replace it with an industry self-regulator.

There were a range of responses to the proposal, but policy development certainly appeared to be progressing on the basis that some form of statutory regulator would be retained.

The decision to scrap the BSA may be a politically populist tactic to leverage the case of The Platform in an election year. But it is also democratically indefensible because it has not been subject to any meaningful form of public consultation.

Can the industry self-regulate?
There is no disputing that the regulatory frameworks need to be updated, given the current patchwork quilt of regulations that is full of digital holes. But applying basic standards such as accuracy, balance and fairness on a platform-neutral basis should not be contentious.

These principles are not, as some have claimed, an affront to free speech. They are the basis for upholding freedom of expression in a democracy.

Goldsmith explained the decision to abolish the BSA on the grounds that:

Greater industry self-regulation is the most practical way to level the playing field across platforms, and can provide an appropriate level of oversight to maintain ethical journalistic standards and audience trust.

But eschewing enforceable standards that apply to all media places too much faith in deregulated markets and the industry’s willingness to police itself in the public interest.

It is a regulatory model based on best-case scenarios, where all media players can be trusted to behave professionally, ethically and take their public obligations seriously.

The media system in general is facing unprecedented pressures from audience fragmentation, failing business models, lost advertising revenues and declining public trust.

The opportunity costs of adhering to standards are starting to collide with commercial shareholder imperatives.

That is probably an argument in favour of government funding to support public interest media. But it also demands a regulatory model fit for the digital age, with sufficient power to encourage compliance with basic standards.

Without that, any media operator deciding its commercial interests outweigh the cost of complying could choose to ignore the standards with impunity.

In a media environment where disinformation, fake news and polarising propaganda are already permitted to proliferate, this represents a real risk to democratic processes.

Dr Peter Thompson is an associate professor in media and communication at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article was originally published on The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Nothing illustrates the inversion of the international and moral order more than the genocide in Gaza and the shipment of tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel by Western nations — especially the United States — to sustain it.

Part of this inversion is the unrelenting persecution of those who denounce the genocide — especially those who risk their lives to halt it and demand the rule of law.

But the rule of law, it appears, is buried under the rubble in Gaza.

• READ MORE: NZ govt must rebuke Israeli envoy over beating of citizens, says PSNA
• Other Gaza genocide and War on Iran reports

And because of that Israel is able, with barely a word of protest by Western nations — Spain being one of the few exceptions — to abduct 175 activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla 500 nautical miles from Gaza and 80 nautical miles west of the Greek island of Crete.

This violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was accompanied by the usual Israeli brutality. Flotilla members from the 22 vessels that were intercepted and then transferred to the Israeli vessel Nahshon were denied food, forced to sleep on the floor as it was flooded “repeatedly” with water, punched, kicked, dragged across decks with their hands tied and shot at with rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Kidnapped by Israel                                   Video: The Chris Hedges Report

Eventually, all but two flotilla members were transferred to Crete, with 36 requiring medical attention.

Two of the leading activists on the flotilla, the Brazilian organiser of the flotilla, Thiago Ávila, and the Spaniard Saif Abukeshek, who is of Palestinian descent and who has organised Palestinian solidarity movements across Europe for more than two decades, were not allowed to disembark when the vessel reached Ierapetra Port in southern Crete, although the ship was in Greek territorial waters.

They were kidnapped and taken to Israel.

“Participant eyewitnesses provided harrowing testimony of Abukeshek’s screams echoing throughout the ship as he was subjected to systematic torture, after being separated from the others,” read a communique issued by the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Abukeshek was blindfolded, forced to lie on his stomach “since the moment of his seizure until this morning” which resulted in “bruising to his face and hands”.

Ávila was “dragged face-down across the floor” and beaten so severely that he passed out twice.

When the two activists appeared in an Israeli court there were visible bruises on their faces. Ávila had trouble lifting his right hand.

Since their kidnapping, the two men have been on hunger strike. They are accused of “assisting the enemy during wartime” and “membership in and providing services to a terrorist organisation”.

This is the world we now live in. The moral and the courageous are criminalised. The ruling class weaponises the law to justify the abuse and atrocities of the lawless.

Here is a link to an interview I did in Italy with Ávila.

Here is a link to the documentary we made in Italy where Ávila, along with Francesca Albanese, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis and the striking Italian dock workers, who refuse to load weapons onto ships bound for Israels, are featured.

We must contact the Israeli Embassy in Washington. We must protest in front of the embassy, as well as the Israeli consulate in New York, to demand the release of Thiago and Saif.

They are the best among us.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges X page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

Forough Amin in her opinion piece “The consequences of selective morality” (The Press, 28 April 2026) argues that the Palestine solidarity movement’s call for sanctions against Israel is “selective morality”. She says we should be calling out all human rights abuses everywhere — which in her case means Iran.

We agree with Amin’s basic premise that calls for action against countries abusing human rights should be consistent and comprehensive.

Our focus, given our organisations’ title, is however on Palestine. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is objectively the worst atrocity this century and one which all Western governments, such as ours, support. That genocide is in our name.

• READ MORE: Amnesty International calls on governments to stop predatory, anti-rights order from taking hold in pivotal moment for humanity
• Other reports in the Gaza genocide and US-Israel attacks on Iran

It is precisely because our government refuses to sanction Israel for the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and the pogroms conducted by Israeli settlers, with the support of the Israeli military, throughout the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory) that we must all speak up and demand accountability for Israel and from our government.

The complete avoidance of accountability by Israel is the single most important reason that it continues its brutal occupation in the OPT, its daily theft of Palestinian land and its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to land from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israeli militias in 1948.

Our government operates a simple, easy to understand, double standard — it calls out and acts on human rights abuses in countries that the US sees as enemies, but refuses to call out or act on human rights abuses in countries the US sees as friends.

That is why the government has enacted comprehensive sanctions against Iran and Russia, but miserly measures against a small handful of racist Israeli settlers for the most egregious of war crimes.

Tight business restrictions
Regarding Iran, for example, our government has imposed tight business restrictions, targeted travel bans, asset freezes, import/export bans and suspension of bilateral engagements.

in October last year the government even re-imposed UN sanctions following Iran’s non-compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on nuclear technology, ignoring the fact that the US pulled out of the JCPOA eight years ago.

New Zealand expects Iran, yet not the US, to keep following the trashed agreement.

So comprehensive and pervasive are the sanctions against Iran that the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) advises that “given the wide scope of the Regulations, and the penalties for non-compliance, it is recommended that anyone contemplating doing business with Iran obtain independent legal advice before engaging in business with people in Iran, or with entities that are incorporated in Iran or subject to its jurisdiction”.

The sanctions regime against Russia is similar in scope and designed to hold Russia to account for its invasion of Ukraine.

So, what did we do when the US and Israel twice launched massive air attacks against Iran, both times while the US was in negotiations with the Iranian leadership? Nothing.

Our Minister of Foreign Affairs issued a statement, not condemning the US and Israel, but condemning Iran for retaliating against US bases in the Gulf states. It would make great satire in a TV comedy but unfortunately its real.

No coup condemnation
Amin does not condemn the US-orchestrated overthrow of the first democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953 when Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was deposed in a coup to make way for the US-installed Shah of Iran — a lineage Amin wants to reinstate, albeit temporarily.

Needless to say, calls for democracy under the Shah were met with hideous brutality and widespread oppression of Iranian human rights activists.

It’s important to consider the feelings of New Zealanders who have community connections to overseas conflicts. It’s also important not to blame any community here for war crimes committed on the other side of the world.

Palestinian New Zealanders in particular deserve our support and empathy as they watch tens of thousands of their kinfolk, mostly women and children, being killed in Gaza — actions driven by the most hideous, genocidal rhetoric from Israeli political and military leaders.

The situation with Israel is similar to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Western governments, especially New Zealand, stood with apartheid South Africa and resisted black South African calls for sanctions, until international civil society groups (including HART and CARE here) mobilised public opinion to demand action against that apartheid state.

All major human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with human rights groups in Israel, describe the regime there as an apartheid state. It has a whole host of laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

Two to one back sanctions
The government’s selective morality is in our sights. Already public surveys show that of New Zealanders who give an opinion, they are two to one supporting sanctions against Israel.

Let’s hope Auckland City Council votes to end procurement of goods and services from companies identified by the UN Human Rights Council as supporting Illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT. These settlements constitute a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And if Amin can find any comparable human-rights-abusing companies the Auckland City Council is working with, then she should take that up with the council and would be guaranteed backing from our supporters.

John Minto was national co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Press and is republished with permission.

My name is Campion Ohasio, and I am currently the only political cartoonist in Solomon Islands.

In recent weeks, I have received many questions and comments from people across the country about my cartoons.

Some ask why I draw our national leaders in certain ways. Others wonder whether my caricatures are personal attacks or whether they violate the leaders’ rights.

• READ MORE: Other Campion Ohasio political cartoons and commentary
• Campion Ohasio artwork and cartoons

A few have even suggested that I should stop drawing critical cartoons.

I would like to take this opportunity to explain my work clearly and honestly.

As the only political cartoonist in our nation today, my job is simple: I use drawings to comment on the decisions, actions, policies, and laws made by our leaders.

My cartoons are not meant to attack any leader as a person or as a human being. Instead, they highlight issues that affect ordinary Solomon Islanders — issues such as corruption, poor governance, broken promises, and policies that may not serve the public interest.

Public figures hold power
In a democracy like ours, national leaders are public figures. They hold power on behalf of the people, and the people have every right to question how that power is used.

Political cartoons are one peaceful and creative way for citizens to express their views and hold leaders accountable.

As response to the many questions I have received. I believe healthy criticism is not an insult; it is an important part of democracy. Through my cartoons, I hope to encourage Solomon Islanders to think critically, ask questions, and stay engaged in the affairs of our country.

I remain committed to drawing honest cartoons that reflect the realities facing our people, always with the hope that our leaders will listen, improve, and serve the public interest better.

Thank you for your interest in my work.

A political caricature (also called a political cartoon) is a funny or exaggerated drawing that comments on a leader’s decisions, policies, or actions. It uses humour, symbols, and exaggeration to make a point about what the leader is doing in his public role.

Many people mistakenly think that a caricature is a personal attack on the leader as a human being. This is not true.

Eight reasons why leaders’ human rights are not violated
Here are eight reasons why cartoons and caricatures are not a violation of the leader’s human rights:

1 What a political caricature actually does: It criticises the actions, decisions, or policies of the leader.

It does not attack the leader’s basic human rights (such as the right to life, dignity, safety, or personal freedom). It focuses on the leader’s public role, not his private life as a father, husband, or ordinary person.

2 Why it isn’t a personal attack on human rights: Leaders are public figures. When someone becomes a president, prime minister, or national leader, they voluntarily step into the public spotlight. Their decisions affect thousands of citizens. Because of this, they must accept public criticism, including through cartoons and satire.

3 Criticism targets power, not the person: A caricature usually mocks a bad policy, a broken promise, corruption, or a harmful decision: not the leader’s race, family, or basic humanity. For example, drawing a leader as a big balloon floating away from reality is criticising his disconnection from people’s problems, not denying his right to exist.

4 Satire and humour are protected forms of free speech: In a democracy, freedom of expression includes the right to use humour and exaggeration to comment on those in power. Political caricatures have a long history of helping people understand and question government actions.

5 It doesn’t take away basic rights: Drawing a funny or critical cartoon does not stop the leader from: Living safely, having a family, practicing his religion, speaking freely, receiving fair treatment in court. These are real human rights. A caricature does not remove any of them.

6 Public accountability requires public criticism: Leaders exercise public power using taxpayers’ money. Citizens have the legitimate right to comment on how that power is used. Caricatures are one peaceful, creative way to do this.

7 Confusion between criticism and hate: Some leaders or supporters claim any negative drawing is “hate speech” or a human rights violation. This is usually an attempt to avoid accountability. Legitimate political satire is very different from threats, violence, or calls for harm.

8 Thin-skinned leaders weaken democracy: If leaders cannot handle a simple drawing or joke about their policies, it shows they may not be ready for the public scrutiny that comes with power. Strong leaders accept criticism; weak ones try to ban it.

For example: If a cartoon shows a leader pouring money into his own pocket while the people are hungry, it is highlighting possible corruption or bad priorities. It is not saying the leader has no right to live or be treated with dignity. It is saying: “Your policy or action is wrong.”

A political caricature is a form of peaceful criticism, not a personal attack. It doesn’t remove or violate any of the leader’s fundamental human rights. Instead, it exercises the public’s right to question those who hold power.

In a true democracy, leaders must learn to live with satire and criticism. Their job is to serve the people: and the people have the right to laugh, question, and point out when the leader is failing in that duty.

Criticising a leader’s actions through a caricature is about holding power accountable, not denying the leader’s humanity or human rights.

Campion Ohasio is a Solomon Islands-based self-taught visual artist, graphic designer, and prominent political cartoonist known for capturing South Pacific social issues. He gained early recognition in the 1990s for his work on Uni Tavur at the University of Papua New Guinea and later as a editor for the Solomons Voice. This commentary is republished with the author’s permission.

Kiwi Julien Blondel’s face may be bloodied but it is unbowed. So far the New Zealand government has done nothing after Blondel and other New Zealand peace activists were savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers who attacked the Global Sumud flotilla near the Greek Island of Crete on April 30.

The flotilla was Gaza-bound and seeking to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza to bring humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and apply pressure to the Israelis to halt the genocide.

New Zealanders Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel and Sean Janssen were among 176 people who were captured in international waters, subjected to vicious mistreatment then dropped onto Crete.

• READ MORE: Gaza flotilla organisers subjected to ‘extreme brutality’ in illegal Israeli detention
• Global Sumud Flotilla calls on NZ govt to intervene after Israeli interception
• Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

O’Connor and Blondel were immediately transferred to hospital on arrival in Greece.

Several days after the Israeli attack, I spoke with Samuel Leason, another Kiwi who was on a boat that evaded the Israelis and made it to Crete. He told me that several people were still in hospital.

Our government has so far offered no consular support and the Kiwis, like their comrades, have had to rely on the kindness of strangers and local peace activists.

Samuel said it was really hard to see what Julien Blondel had been through.

‘Brutalised state’
“I spent the last week with him, preparing in Barcelona. He’s just the most lovely man. It was very difficult to see him in such a brutalised state.

“Despite what happened to him, he is steadfast in the movement, and he is steadfast for Palestine. We all are. We’re all fuming. We’re all fuming that our government can let Israel get away with something so blatantly illegal.”

At least four Israeli warships, overhead surveillance planes, drones and sophisticated jamming technology (to shut down the flotilla’s Starlink comms) were deployed against the humanitarian activists.

The Israeli raiders systematically destroyed communications, navigation and other equipment on the ships they captured. They tampered with engines, cut fuel lines and shredded sails.

Once they transferred the abductees onto warships, they abandoned the Sumud vessels in open seas.

Members of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation who I talked with today said the beatings of dozens of activists was systematic. It started when flotilla members protested when two of the Steering Committee members, Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila, were isolated and then subjected to violence (they heard their screams).

The IOF soldiers dragged dozens of Sumud members, one after another, into a separate area where they were repeatedly kicked and punched.

Among many beaten
New Zealander Blondel (pictured) was one of many to be savagely beaten. Several were hospitalised when the Israelis, coordinating with allies in the Greek military, transferred them to Crete.

It is worth noting the attack happened within Greece’s Search And Rescue zone and yet the Greek Navy ignored SOS calls from the flotilla.

Such is the loyalty to Israel of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters that there has been no immediate condemnation of either the violence meted out to New Zealand citizens or the fact that this violence was part of an act of piracy in international waters hundreds of kilometres from Israel.

The NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued the standard mumble: “The safety of New Zealanders involved [is] paramount and international law must be upheld.”

Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs haul the Israeli ambassador in for a dressing down? Will the government publicly and forcefully rebuke Israel for its criminal behaviour? Will the government seek reparations for the damage done to the Sumud vessels?

Unlikely, as it was revealed last week that the New Zealand prime minister wanted to even more strongly support the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran but was blocked by the minister of foreign affairs. (Imagine if Luxon had been our prime minister when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk).

With leaders like these across the Western world the Israelis have learnt that they can act with impunity.

‘Imagine the Palestinian hostages’
Eloiza Montana, comms lead for the Global Sumud Aotearoa delegation said: “What our people suffered is terrible but it is tiny compared to what Palestinians go through.

“Imagine: if the Israelis are allowed to do this to international activists who are sailing in the middle of the Mediterranean — imagine what is going on inside Israeli prisons to the Palestinian hostages.”

I have written a series of articles over the past few years highlighting the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners. I have had the grim experience of watching footage of the rape-murder of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli soliders at Sde Teiman prison and seen one of the perpetrators blessed a few days later on-camera by Netanyahu’s rabbi, who praised him for his work.

The only person punished for these sordid events was Israel’s top military prosecutor Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi who, disgusted by the impunity, leaked the footage.

Israel’s outstanding human rights organisation B’tselem has done the world a great service by documenting the physical, sexual and psychological abuse that is standard practice within Israel’s prison system. For those who can handle the truth, I highly recommend B’tselem’s site “Welcome to Hell – The Israeli Prison Camps as a network of Torture Camps.”

New Zealand has maintained virtually total silence over this criminality in order to provide assistance to its close friend and ally Israel.

Our leaders tell us we share values with the Israelis. The New Zealand government may; I do not.

Speaking from Türkiye, Rana Hamida from Sumud’s Aotearoa New Zealand delegation told me: “We need to hold the criminals accountable, so we can move to restorative justice. Free Saif. Free Thiago. Free yourself!”

Olivia Coote, also a member of the delegation said: “Palestine activated for me a realisation that the society I was a part of is an absolute farce and that we are not the good guys.”

Last word on the attack
I’ll give the last word to Samuel Leason who told me from his ship moored off Crete this week:

“What this attack reveals is the true nature of the Israeli Occupation Force. There are 70 different nationalities on these boats — we represent the international community. For them to be able to come out here, brutalise us, steal our things and imprison us for days and then take some of our comrades to be questioned and tortured back in Israel just shows how much regard they have for people around the world.

“It shows how little regard they have for international law, and just how morally messed up they are.”

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

In middle of this month, two regencies in Papua again became epicentres of grief and national controversy.

Puncak Regency in Central Papua and Yahukimo in Mountainous Papua were struck by shooting incidents that claimed more than a dozen lives.

The tragedy reopened old wounds about how armed violence too often misses its target, making innocent people victims.

• READ MORE: Wenda calls on Indonesia to halt crackdown on peaceful Papua protests
• Stop selling arms to Indonesia, West Papuans urge Netherlands
• Other West papua reports

More than that, the events ignited a serious dispute between the official account of Indonesian state security forces and survivor testimonies, calling into question the credibility of the state’s response amid a genuine humanitarian emergency. The wounds and sorrow run so deep that no remedy seems capable of healing them.

The deadliest incident occurred in the Kembru sub-district of Puncak Regency. Initial reports spoke of an exchange of fire between the Indonesian military (TNI) and an “armed criminal group (KKB)” — as Indonesian authorities describe resistance groups — on April 14.

But the public was truly shaken days later when the Minister of Human Rights revealed that 15 civilians had been killed and seven wounded — overwhelmingly non combatants, including women and children.

What is striking is that the minister’s statement was delivered in the context of a “firefight” between the TNI and the armed resistance.

Meanwhile, the TNI, in a clarification on April 21, offered a different narrative. According to the TNI source, there were two separate incidents: first, a shootout that killed four members of the Free Papua Organisation (TPNPB/OPM), and second, a massacre of civilians carried out by the OPM itself.

With that statement, the TNI implicitly denied that its troops had fired on civilians. Sorrow splits between the official version and the cry for truth rising from the earth.

When survivors speak: ‘They were in uniform’
The contradiction peaked when the media interviewed survivors in hospitals. One survivor stated unequivocally that people in military uniforms shot him and other villagers. This is no mere rumour.

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), which conducted an initial investigation, found that several survivors consistently identified state security forces as the perpetrators.

Even more troubling, a report by the Papua People’s Assembly (MRP) for Central Papua stated that TNI soldiers from the Habema, Maleo, and Damai Carstenz units chased and attacked civilians in Makuma, Milome, and Kembru villages. The assault involved four helicopters, drones, firearms, and grenades.

One father, whose child was among the victims, told the Governor and Vice Governor at the hospital that villagers were attacked from the air around five or six in the morning, with grenades dropped from helicopters and drones. Some grenades, he said, were thrown directly into honai — traditional Papuan houses.

“They threw grenades by hand from above,” he said, cradling his wounded child.

Civil society reports indicate the military operation actually began on April 13, when the TNI attacked a TPNPB base in Pogoma District — previously acknowledged as a battlefield.

Two days later, the assault expanded to refugee camps in Kembru District, where thousands of civilians were sheltering. The result: innocent civilians became targets.

The MRP recorded at least nine civilian deaths, including a baby in the womb whose mother was also killed, plus 14 wounded. Komnas HAM reported 12 civilian deaths, while the Ministry of Human Rights said 15.

The discrepancy reveals a lack of coordination and verification at the central level, let alone the difficulty of accessing isolated locations.

More harrowing is the testimony of a woman seven months pregnant, treated at Dian Harapan Hospital in Jayapura. She was shot in the lower jaw.

In a soft but firm voice, she said the perpetrators were state security forces. She described troops attacking the village with helicopters and ground forces, using grenades and firearms. Even after the shooting, she said, uniformed soldiers posed for photos with the victims.

If true, this incident can no longer be called a mere “firefight” — it is a potential gross human rights violation. Physical wounds can be treated, but the trauma of being betrayed by those who were supposed to protect you lasts a lifetime.

Local government’s fast action amid the controversy
Amid the deadlock, the local government moved with noteworthy speed. The Governor of Central Papua, Meki Nawipa, together with Vice Governor Deinas Geley, visited Mulia Regional Hospital on April 17.

The governor declared that the provincial government would cover all medical costs and guarantee education for children who lost parents. An integrated emergency team, including the Indonesian Red Cross, was formed for data collection, evacuation, and psychosocial support.

The Regent/Mayor of Puncak Regency, Elvis Tabuni, unable to hold back tears, distributed aid and condolence payments. Yet challenges remain because access to the Kembru sub-district is difficult, isolated and prone to armed clashes.

The villagers’ sorrow was somewhat eased by the presence of local leaders, but the root wound — the uncertainty of justice — remains embedded.

Yahukimo, different pattern, same grief
Almost simultaneously, Yahukimo Regency was rocked by the shooting of a state civil servant, Yemis Yohame, head of the Housing Subdivision. He was found dead from gunshot wounds on April 21.

Unlike in Puncak, the response was relatively clearer. The Regent/Mayor of Yahukimo quickly stated that the shooting was a criminal act by an “armed criminal group (KKB)”, with no political agenda. The TNI and police launched an operation to hunt the perpetrators.

The contrast is stark. In Puncak, a large scale armed clash caused widespread civilian harm, with strong allegations of state human rights violations. In Yahukimo, the action was a targeted assassination.

For Yemis Yohame’s family, the grief is just as deep. The problem of violence in Papua is not homogeneous. But the most alarming case is Puncak, because it involves potential gross human rights violations by state forces.

If state troops shot civilians, that is not merely “imprecise fire” — it is a serious violation of the right to life and safety.

Komnas HAM stressed that any attack on civilians — by state or non state actors — violates international humanitarian law, and urged the TNI commander to evaluate operations by the Habema Task Force and pursue transparent legal action.

Without such steps, the wounds of Puncak will remain open.

Church leaders also condemned the violence. Father Yanuarius Yance Yogi criticised both sides for sacrificing innocent civilians.

“Both parties have sophisticated equipment. Yet why must civilian lives be sacrificed?” Reverend Dominggus Pigai said the situation in Papua is a military and humanitarian emergency zone. Reverend Benny Giay said the indiscriminate attack on civilians proves the state does not want Papuans to live on their own land.

Displaced grief: A humanitarian emergency
Reports indicate the military operation has triggered a massive wave of displacement. Of the twenty-five districts in Puncak Regency, only two have not seen their people flee.

Thousands of civilians are scattered in forests, neighbouring villages, and other regencies such as Timika, Nabire, and Jayapura. They live in fear, lacking food, clean water, and health services.

The Indonesian Red Cross has carried out cremations, but medical care on the ground remains extremely limited. The displaced endure an uncertain existence: driven from their own villages, stripped of shelter, and haunted by the trauma of grenade blasts and helicopter roars.

The hope of Papuans
The tragedy in Puncak presents the administration of President Prabowo Subianto with a profound test of the state’s commitment to protecting its citizens and upholding human rights. In addressing this complex situation, the government is respectfully encouraged to consider a series of measured and transparent steps that prioritise truth, justice, and the welfare of all Papuans.

First, the administration may wish to break from the pattern of contradictory official narratives by publicly acknowledging the credibility of survivor testimonies and the preliminary findings of Komnas HAM and the Papua People’s Assembly.

Rather than denial or ambiguity — which risk deepening perceptions of a legitimacy gap — the government could demonstrate leadership by establishing an independent, joint fact finding mission.

Such a mission would ideally include Komnas HAM, respected Papuan civil society leaders, church representatives, and, where appropriate, international observers, all operating with full access to affected villages and operational documents.

The objective would be to uncover the factual truth about what transpired, why civilians became victims, and who bears responsibility, without prejudging outcomes. Should evidence confirm gross human rights violations, the administration is respectfully urged to ensure that legal proceedings move forward genuinely.

Beyond the investigative track, the administration is encouraged to recognise that Puncak has already entered a humanitarian emergency. The displacement of thousands of civilians from nearly all districts demands a coordinated, large scale response that goes beyond the commendable but limited efforts of local authorities and the Indonesian Red Cross.

The government could consider declaring a temporary humanitarian corridor to enable the unhindered delivery of food, clean water, medical supplies, and psychosocial support to displaced populations hiding in forests and neighbouring regencies.

Evacuation plans, with special attention to pregnant women, children, the elderly, and the injured, would offer immediate relief. Working in partnership with the provincial government, the central administration might also commit to documenting every displaced family and restoring their basic rights to shelter, health, and education before any discussion of return.

Without such humanitarian action, broader peace and development efforts risk being seen as hollow.

Concerning the security sector, a diplomatic but firm reassessment may be timely. The administration could consider ordering a temporary suspension of offensive military operations in civilian populated areas of Puncak pending the outcome of the independent investigation.

The current approach — relying on aerial surveillance, drones, and ground manoeuvres — has, according to multiple testimonies, failed to consistently distinguish between armed group members and non-combatants, as illustrated by grenade attacks on honai homes and the wounding of a pregnant woman.

A review of rules of engagement, with specific prohibitions on the use of air delivered explosive weapons in or near civilian settlements, would align security practices with international humanitarian law.

Furthermore, the administration might explore a gradual shift from a military dominated posture toward a strengthened civilian led security framework that places the protection of civilians at its centre. Allegations that soldiers posed for photographs with victims, if substantiated, point to serious breaches of military ethics; in such a case, transparent court martial proceedings would help restore public trust.

Equally important is a broader political and developmental strategy that addresses the root causes of recurring violence. The administration is respectfully encouraged to initiate a genuine, inclusive dialogue process that brings together not only security forces and armed groups but also traditional leaders, church authorities, women’s organisations, and civil society representatives from across Papua.

Such a forum would be empowered to discuss not merely ceasefires and humanitarian access, but also longstanding grievances related to economic exploitation, land rights, political representation, and historical injustices.

In parallel, the government could reconsider the scale and nature of development spending in Papua, shifting from large scale extractive projects that often displace communities toward locally controlled economic initiatives that create tangible benefits for Papuan families.

Education, healthcare, and infrastructure built in genuine partnership with Papuan communities would likely build more trust than any number of military operations.

Finally, the administration may find value in engaging other stakeholders constructively. Komnas HAM deserves enhanced resources and political protection to conduct long term monitoring of both the investigation and the humanitarian response. Church leaders across Indonesia can be important moral partners in demanding accountability while accompanying Papuan communities in their grief.

International partners, while respecting Indonesia’s sovereignty, could be invited to offer technical assistance for independent investigations and humanitarian operations, and to continue diplomatic dialogue on civilian protection in Papua.

The media, too, has a role in connecting past and present violence to hold power accountable, rather than treating each tragedy as an isolated event.

Ultimately, what happened in Puncak and Yahukimo in April 2026 shows that the cycle of violence in Papua has never truly stopped. The discrepancy between survivor testimony and official statements cannot be left unresolved.

A purely security based approach has never been enough. A humane approach, dialogue, and equitable economic development must become mainstream. As the Regent of Puncak, Elvis Tabuni, said through his tears, they are citizens who should be protected — not turned into targets.

The wounds and sorrow left by this tragedy may never fully heal — at least, not as long as the truth remains hidden and justice is not upheld. Time will tell whether the state can uphold its constitutional mandate, or whether it will allow the land of Papua to remain soaked in the blood of its innocent children.

And for those who survived — who every night still hear the screams of their fallen friends — that wound will continue to sing in the silence: a sorrow that remains unhealed.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and an occasional contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

1news tonight featured a report on the War in Ukraine. The reporter, a foreign war correspondent, explained to viewers how Ukrainian soldiers were increasingly using long-range high-tech drones to target Russian infrastructure.

Now while not explicitly stated, the narrative being delivered through our particularly “Western-centric” media lens is that Ukrainians are legitimately resisting and defending their homeland from an evil invader.

While for some this narrative may be contentious, what’s interesting is when you apply this same narrative to the people of Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. Because when we apply these same values of “legitimate resistance” and self-defence of homeland in the context of Palestine or Lebanon or Iran, we see the contradiction of Western exceptionalism.

• READ MORE: Trump says Iran requesting end to US blockade; Israel kills three medics
• Other war on Iran, Gaza and Lebanon reports

For Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranian people, the rules around what constitutes legitimate resistance — whether militarily or otherwise — do not apply. At least they do not apply within the framework of the Western narrative, the narrative that’s seemingly ever-present in our mainstream media institutions like 1news.

There is another narrative of course, one whose legitimacy is not tied to the notion of Western exceptionalism. This narrative points out the hypocrisy of a Western exceptionalism which assumes itself as the sole determinant in defining what is or isn’t “legitimate” resistance.

Many journalists from the Middle East such as the Palestinian author Mohammed El-Kurd in his recent book Perfect Victims: And The Politics Of Appeal describe this “contradiction” in great detail.

Yet his and the many other voices which could help our comprehension of what is happening in places like Palestine, Gaza, Tehran and Southern Lebanon are consistently — and some might argue deliberately — overlooked.

Jason Brooke is a New Zealand hospital worker and activist on environmental social justice issues.

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.

How insane is it that, a Theocracy is winning the propaganda war against a Democracy?

How badly has Trump screwed up when religious zealots are beating you in the marketing game?

It’s not just the social media meme burns where Iran is winning, they are actually winning the war strategically.

• READ MORE: ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump

Trump’s inane decision to get conned into an illegal war against Iran by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has swiftly become the biggest geopolitical blunder since Vietnam.

By shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran finally has a weapon that is forcing Trump to back down.

Here’s the future timeline:

• Late May – June 2026
  → noticeable fuel price increases globally
• July – September 2026
  → inflation spike, food costs rising
• Late 2026
  → real economic slowdown / recession risk

Causing global economic pain is the only way the Iranian regime can force Trump to stop the violence.

If this is still blocked come the midterms, Trump and the Republicans are finished and he’ll be swamped with impeachments attempts.

Iran’s information war at home and abroad  Video: Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post

There is NO WAY Iran are giving that leverage up now they have been forced to use it.

For the Theocracy, Trump’s insanity has opened an unexpected door to not only have all the damage rebuilt but the economic sanctions off as well.

Did you read that?

Trump has given the Theocracy the chance to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people they have repressed.

If the Iranians can force America and Israel to agree not to attack them again, pay for all the damage they caused and lift economic sanctions, they will gain legitimacy with the Iranian population they could never have dreamt of.

There’s no way they are handing over the Strait, so Trump either surrenders or nukes the entire Iranian coastline.

Martyn Bradbury is the editor and publisher of New Zealand’s The Daily Blog. Republished with permission.

If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations for the damage done to it in the US-Israeli war, it will be a world historic moment.

Iran may be bloodied but it remains unbowed and is seeking compensation from the Arab states over “direct involvement” in the US-Israeli war of aggression.

Iran sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this month outlining its claim against Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. They also intend to apply a transit toll on the Strait of Hormuz as an instrument of restorative justice.

• READ MORE: Iran’s FM arrives in Russia as Strait of Hormuz remains closed
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Under international law — if anyone still pays attention to such things — the Iranians have a strong case. What will determine if justice is done, however, is victory over the aggressors.

More than 100 US-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners have released a letter stating that the United States and Israel violated the UN Charter by launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The signatories include leaders of prominent international law associations and former Judge Advocates General — the top legal advisors to the US armed forces. They cite the complete lack of evidence of an imminent Iranian threat that could support a self-defence claim.

Under international law the aggressor is responsible for all the destruction that follows. The white-dominated Western countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand should stop banging on about the illegality of Iran taking control of the Strait and address the root causes of why it did so.

The case against the Arab states
In the early days of the war, radar systems operating from these countries were fully engaged in the war. Thousands of US troops were operating from 14 US bases in their territories.

Attack planes, refuelling planes and aerial surveillance planes all operated from bases like Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd Air Base, as reported by Middle East Eye. Major Western outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times documented missile launches and multiple other ways Jordan and the Gulf States were directly involved in the war despite the mainstream media portraying them as innocent bystanders and victims of Iranian aggression.

Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have both described the Gulf States as fighting “shoulder to shoulder” with the US and Israel. In filing their letter with the UN the Iranians have also provided satellite and other data to support their claim.

Iran argues that the Arab states, under international law, are co-belligerents. The UN’s International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on State Responsibility (2001) defines the concept of “Aid or Assistance” in the commission of an internationally wrongful act. It is not hard for Iran to prove that these states did not maintain neutrality.

In reality, for Iran to get justice, deterrence and reparations, there is no international body or court to turn to; it must win by making a continuation too painful for the aggressors.

There are signs it might just succeed. Iran has achieved something few on the Western side anticipated: the destruction of most of the US bases. Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University told Middle East Eye, “The bases around the region are suffering real damage, and I think it’s very unlikely that we’re ever going to go back and put our Fifth Fleet back in Bahrain. It’s too vulnerable.

“This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month.”

The War on Iran is a long way from finished. Even if the ceasefire holds, the Israelis and Americans will see this only as a stage in their multi-decade project to wreck Iran as a major regional competitor.

The victims are usually the ones who must pay
At the end of imperial wars, the victims are traditionally made to pay.

In the 19th Century, the British fought the Chinese over the latter’s resistance to the British government’s lucrative opium trade into China. The imperialists won and imposed the infamous Unequal Treaties on China, including awarding to Britain the island of Hong Kong.

Queen Victoria even shamelessly named a stolen Pekingese dog “Lootie” after the British sacking of Beijing’s Summer Palace, one of the great cultural crimes of history.

When the genocidal US war on Vietnam ended, decades of harsh US sanctions on their victims began. As the US moved towards accepting it had lost the war, Nixon promised $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid under the Paris Peace Accords (1973). The Americans never paid a cent.

The US also pressured the IMF, World Bank, and UN agencies to block Hanoi’s applications for loans, seriously retarding reconstruction.

When the slave revolt in Hispaniola (present day-Haiti) drove out the French, the Western powers returned in force a few years later and imposed harsh “reparations” for being dispossessed of their “stolen” land and humans. From 1825, Haiti was forced to pay 150 million francs to France to compensate former slaveholders for their “lost property”. This debt was only fully paid off in 1947, permanently crippling the nation.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is something different. Iran, like the Vietnamese, the Algerians and the Indians may have what it takes to prevail over imperial aggression. Iran may also have something different: the power to impose reparations on the aggressor.

Across the West we are subjected to the astonishing chutzpah of Western leaders decrying the “illegality” of Iran’s declaration of sovereignty over the Hormuz Strait in response to the war launched against them. These same leaders stood silent and complicit and lifted no more than an eyebrow as hundreds of Iranian schoolchildren were killed, hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed, and leader after leader were assassinated.

Cowards, all of them, they at best offered whispered rebukes when Trump threatened the destruction of Iranian civilisation in a single night. But tax a barrel of oil and “Oh my god, this is intolerable!”

Iran has every right to insist on reparations but they will only come about if Iran succeeds in imposing its position on the belligerents. The Israelis and Americans are unlikely to face justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or International Court of Justice (ICJ), so reparations must be extracted from the other enabling states like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and France. It is an elegant solution.

One thing the Iranians will hopefully recover soon is their stolen money. Experts estimate more than $100 billion remains blocked in foreign banks (including in the US, Qatar, South Korea, and Iraq).

We should remember that since 1979 the Western world has grievously damaged Iran’s economy via sanctions and the weaponisation of international trading systems, as well as blocking its integration within the community of nations.

A world historic moment is possible
If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations, it will be a world historic moment. It will be an achievement that will benefit countries around the globe which are similarly assailed by major powers. Nuclear powers like the US and Israel should respect the territorial integrity of non-nuclear states. They have done the opposite — and should face consequences.

For these reasons and more, I hope the Iranian government succeeds in its historic mission to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Iran and that they can receive just compensation for the terrible crimes committed against them.

I will give the last word to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month about losing her daughter to a US airstrike at Minab at the very start of the US-Israeli war on Iran:

“As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence.”

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

MEDIA FREEDOM: By David Robie

In a week’s time next Sunday, it is World Press Freedom Day on May 3. And already our whānau of journalists who are facing horrendous danger at the hands of the Israeli killing machine have had a shocking few days.

During our 133 weeks of protest we have become painfully accustomed to how one journalist after another has been brutally assassinated, some even alongside their family members.

Far more than 260 journalists — the actual number varies with different media freedom monitoring agencies and different methodologies — have been slaughtered in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023.

• READ MORE: Journalist Amal Khalil killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon: RSF retraces events and denounces war crimes
• ‘We had Amal Khalil by her hand’s grip. Then Israel murdered her’
• Other Gaza and Lebanon media freedom reports

And some of you may have seen the chilling photograph circulating on some social media channels. It shows 8 Lebanese journalists – four men and four women – smiling and giving peace signs.

Eight Lebanese journalists killed in a month by Israel https://t.co/Fqeji5D3M8

— Pen MacRae (@penmacrae) April 23, 2026

They have all been murdered in the last month, including the tragic killing of Amal Khalil, who died last Wednesday under building rubble in the town of al-Tayri, southern Lebanon, after a double tap attack and then the Israelis fired a stun grenade on the ambulance rescue workers preventing them trying to save her.

But before I talk more about her tragedy and what it means– she was just buried yesterday with thousands at her funeral — I want to show you another photo.

This is Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist working for the Arabic channel Al Jazeera who was a highly popular household name right across the Middle East if not the world.

She was known as the “daughter of Palestine” and she was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces on 11 May 2022 — just eight days after Media Freedom Day that year.

I have this photo hanging on the wall of my office, thanks to Palestine Youth of Aotearoa, to remind me daily of the brutality and global impunity of the Israelis.

With my experience as a media freedom defender for Pacific Media Watch and Reporters Without Borders since 1996, I have come to a chilling and shameful conclusion:

The fact that there was no accountability for her murder and the US authorities and Biden administration orchestrated a cover-up – even though she was American — signalled to the Netanyahu government that they could target journalists and those bearing witness with absolute impunity.

So this is where we are at now, the Israeli killing machine launched into a bloody massacre of more than 72,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past two plus years, especially targeting journalists, doctors and medical workers, teachers, and aid workers.

And the hypocritical Western countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, have barely offered a timid bleat.

The Israeli bloodlust has now spread to Lebanon and other countries. The IDF claims that its military is the “most moral in the world”. That claim is an obscenity.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect journalists (CPJ), Israel is by far the world’s biggest killer of media workers.

On its monitoring website it lists the following:

• 260 journalists and media workers killed by Israel, of which:
• 207 were Palestinians killed in Gaza
• 2 Palestinian killed in Gaza during the Iran war
• 2 Palestinians killed in Israeli detention centers
• 31 Yemenis – out of a total of 32 – killed in Yemen
• 6 Lebanese in Lebanon during the war on Gaza
• 9 Lebanese in Lebanon during the Iran war
• 3 Iranians in Iran during the 12-day war

To return to the targeted murder of Amal Khalil, who worked for Al-Akhbar, she was with another journalist, Zeinab Faraj, who was rescued and survived.

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in a statement by its Middle East desk chief Jonathan Dagher:

“The Israeli army has very likely committed two more war crimes on 22 April, by targeting journalists who were identified as such, obstructing rescue operations and continuing strikes that killed one journalist and injured another.

“Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity.”

RSF published a compelling and disturbing timeline of how the IDF blocked her would-be rescuers for seven hours.

CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah said:

“We knew [Amal] was alive beneath the rubble – a real, breathing presence. Not in the abstract, not as rumour or hope.

“The 40-year-old female journalist, Amal Khalil, whose voice had just reached her family and colleagues, her survival depended on whether the machinery of rescue would be allowed to operate as it is supposed to under international law, and the law of humanity.

“That is what made what followed so difficult to process — not only emotionally, but structurally.

“Because this was not a case of disappearance in the fog of war.

“It was a case of proximity to survival that collapsed into confirmed death while rescue was still theoretically possible.”

Qudah added that her death could not be understood only as an individual tragedy, “although it was that to everyone who knew her, every journalist in the region”.

“It must also be understood as a stress test of the systems that are supposed to prevent this outcome — early warning, protection, humanitarian access and accountability. On each of these dimensions, the case raises unresolved questions.”

Israel is not only killing journalists, it is systematically torturing them — along with hundreds of other Palestinian hostages. CPJ’s recent report, “We returned from hell”, where the watchdog published the in-depth testimonies of 59 media prisoners released from jail since October 2023 is shocking reading.

I would like to finish with a quote by Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who visited New Zealand in 2023 to launch his  book The Palestine Laboratory about how the Israeli killing machine exports in brutal technologies — a book that has been translated into many languages and had a profound influence in the world.

“With some notable exceptions, too many in the international media, journalists, editors and owners, have refused to take appropriate action against Israel. No official sanction.

“[They are] still interviewing Israeli spokespeople and politicians as normal. Not treating this as a monumental crime and outrage. Instead, often deferring to unproven Israeli claims that every journalist murdered was a ‘terrorist’.”

This complicity by many journalists — even in our own region — must be widely condemned.

Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch and a media defender with global groups including RSF. He gave this short address at the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) rally in Auckland on Anzac Day.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

During the two years I spent writing American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants.

They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers.

They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

• READ MORE: Lebanon truce extended; Trump says ‘clock is ticking’ for Iran to make deal

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair.

The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers.

The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” — overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing.

Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonises nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults US allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims.

He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programmes designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorise the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the US military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as US Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterised by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace. “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children.

“If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

“He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world.

“What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours.

“He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies.

“The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.”

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralysing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point.

The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide. “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight.

“The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters.

“Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy.

This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programmes to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invalidating or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

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.

I don’t blame Iran for going cold on another sham negotiation session with the US.

After all, why would they take the US or Israel seriously? Or even remotely trust either of them when:

• They both bombed Iran right in the middle of two sets of previous “negotiations”; and
• Trump lied about Lebanon being included in the recent ceasefire agreement.

That inclusion was acknowledged by the mediators, Pakistan.

• READ MORE: Trump extends Iran ceasefire, keeps blockade as Pakistan talks in disarray
• Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as ‘voracious predators’
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As a result, Israel continued to bomb Lebanon; in fact they stepped up their attacks and killed 300+ people in one day.

In the very latest agreement, Iran opened up the Strait of Hormuz as agreed, but the US (incredulously) continued with its blockade.

Yesterday the US escalated things by attacking and confiscating an Iranian merchant ship.

750+ Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF during Trump’s fake ceasefire in October 2025. They are slaughtering women and kids in Gaza and the West Bank every day.

Thousands of Israeli violations
Israel broke their ceasefire agreement signed in November 2014 with Lebanon thousands of times (according to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon).

Both Trump and Netanyahu have made numerous threats to obliterate Iran, to commit genocide and even holocaust.

They have bombed thousands of Iranian civilian targets in contravention of international law — residential buildings, government buildings, historic sites, bridges, police stations, schools, universities, pharmacy companies, factories, public transport, ambulances, medical centres and hospitals.

So WHY the hell would Iran have any confidence that anything that these devious and untrustworthy US and Israeli war criminals agree will ever be adhered to?

Both of these warmongering nations have displayed a total lack of integrity and credibility through their disingenuous words and actions over many decades.

I don’t see any other alternative than for Iran to play hard ball.

Time is Trump’s enemy, not Iran’s.

And now Trump has extended the ceasefire at the last moment.

Tim O’Shea is a New Zealand social, environmental political activist and commentator.

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

As we continue to look at the US and Israeli war on Iran, we’re joined now by Dr Maryam Jamshidi. She is an Iranian American associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. She has written a new piece for The Nation magazine headlined “Only One Side Has Clearly Broken the Law In the Strait of Hormuz: And it isn’t Iran.”

Professor Jamshidi, explain.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, what I was trying to get at in that piece is that, you know, there’s been a lot of international outcry about what Iran has done in the strait, specifically its efforts to regulate passage of ships through the strait and to charge certain ships a fee for going through the strait.

The international rhetoric has been that what Iran is doing is completely and clearly illegal. And from my perspective, that’s not entirely true. This is not a black-and-white issue. Iran does have a reasonable legal argument to regulating the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to charging fees.

• READ MORE: ‘Predators’: Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as human rights decline
• Tehran spurns talks under threats; Trump says blockade stays
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

By contrast, the criticism of what the United States and Israel has done to Iran, which is an aggressive and illegal war, has been more muted, in particular from Western states, as well as from some of the regional Arab states. And I think this contrast between these two reactions is very telling — on the one hand, total condemnation of Iran on legal issues that are far from clear, and very more muted criticism, more limited criticism of the United States and Israel when it comes to actions they’ve taken that are very clearly unlawful under international law.

I think this says a lot about the ways in which international law is being deployed in this moment as a way of restraining and regulating Iranian behavior, while effectively allowing the United States and Israel a free hand to do what they want against the Iranian government.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz?   Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think this unprovoked war that Israel and the US — this war of choice, as it’s called — have engaged in with Iran has done to international law and people’s perspective view of it around the world, and the consequences when people want to apply international law?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, over the last few years, we’ve seen the ways in which Israel, in particular, with support from the United States, as well as with support from much of the rest of the West, Western governments, has eroded and violated and scoffed at international law, in its actions towards the Palestinians, its actions in Lebanon, its actions in Syria, its actions in Yemen, its other actions in Iran.

And I think that, you know, these actions that Israel has taken has understandably led many to question the utility and importance of international law, whether or not it still exists or not. And, you know, now with this war against Iran, that, those concerns, those fears that international law is really meaningless, have only increased.

In this moment, though, I think what’s also important to understand is that states like Iran are also at the same time saying, “No, international law matters very much, and we expect to be treated as equals under international law.”

Iran, in this moment, is framing a lot of what it’s doing in international law terms, because it understands that if international law is truly going to be thrown into the dustbin, then it’s going to be far more vulnerable on the international stage.

So, we basically see a battle. We see a battle between, on the one side, states like Israel and the United States, states that are, by and large, Western, you know, basically saying, “International law doesn’t apply to us. We can do what we want,” and then other states, like Iran, states of the Global South, saying, “No, we want international law. We value international law. International law is necessary to ensuring that we are sovereign and equal to other states on the international scale. And so, we are not going to let international law just be taken away from us.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about the UN Security Council? You’ve noted multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the strait. Who is behind these resolutions? Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalise its regulatory system, including the fee system, as part of its domestic law.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Right. So, there were — there have been multiple resolutions brought before the Security Council since the war started. They have mostly been focused on Iran and Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz. The states that have been the real force behind these resolutions appear to be the Arab Gulf states, in particular Bahrain and the UAE, who have also been the subject of the most attacks by Iran.

What’s, again, very interesting and, I think, important to understand about these resolutions is that they very clearly and absolutely condemned Iran for its regulatory actions within the Strait of Hormuz. As I mentioned, even though those actions do have a legal basis, those resolutions presented them as being fully unlawful.

And one of those resolutions, which, thankfully, was vetoed by China and Russia, would have effectively authorised all UN member states — that’s over 190 states — to go to war with Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, that is a very radical proposition, to basically validate and allow states to engage in armed conflict against another state simply for the purpose of opening a waterway.

So, you know — and again, there were no resolutions that were brought to the Security Council to explicitly condemn the US and Israel for their actions against Iran.

In terms of the domestic legislation inside Iran, you know, that the Iranian Parliament appears to be contemplating, as you mentioned, this legislation would basically make the regulatory scheme within Hormuz, in the Strait of Hormuz, a part of Iranian law.

It’s not entirely clear what the terms of that law are, you know, what the basis for it is, what kind of regulation it will in fact implement. But it does seem to have a fee system as a part of it. So, the Iranians are trying to take this ad hoc fee system that they have developed over the course of the last few weeks and actually institutionalise it within domestic law.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about [US President Donald] Trump’s comments. On Saturday, he told a reporter at Fox News, “If Iran doesn’t sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown up.” That followed two weeks before, when he warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Professor Jamshidi?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: These comments are absolutely unacceptable. I mean, they are borderline genocidal in their intent and in their implications. To say to the world that you’re going to obliterate an entire civilisation is, in fact, to make very clear that you desire to destroy an entire people.

You know, I don’t know if he thinks that this is an effective negotiating tool, but certainly from a legal perspective, from a moral perspective, it’s beyond the pale.

This article is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

AMY GOODMAN: To look more at the latest developments in Lebanon and the Middle East region, we’re joined by Dr Rami Khouri, a Palestinian American journalist and distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

Rami, we began talking about the Iran-US second round of negotiations, went to this news of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, though Hezbollah wasn’t a party to those talks. Your overall comments on what’s happening right now in the region, where you think it’s all going?

RAMI KHOURI: Well, there are so many different dynamics going on at the same time within individual countries, among countries in the region and between the region and the global powers, especially the United States, but also China and others, and Israel, of course.

My comments are that one of the striking things about this situation is that we’ve seen now, in the last six weeks, Iran and Hezbollah almost single-handedly checking — not defeating, but checking — the two biggest military powers in the region, which is the US and Israel.

They forced them into two ceasefires: one in Iran and now one in Lebanon. Now, this is not a finished story. This is still going on. This might collapse, and the war may resume.

US and Israel ‘forced into two ceasefires’                 Video: Democracy Now!

But the fact that the US and Israel have been forced to enter these ceasefires, I think, is a sign of the evolving balance of power across the region. And you’re going to see this reflected, for instance, in many Arab countries, who are — especially in the energy-producing Gulf region, who are going to recalibrate their relations.

They’ll still be very close friends with the US, buy a lot of weapons and buy a lot of tech stuff, but they’re also going to recalibrate to have more meaningful ties with Iran, with Türkiye, with China, with Russia and other people like that.

So we’re seeing a slow-motion evolution of the entire balance of power in the region, with the background being that the overwhelming majority of people in the Arab region and Islamic Türkiye and Iran, about three-quarters of a billion people, the overwhelming majority of them see Israel and the US as their main security threat.

So, something historic is going on here in slow motion.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does, Rami Khouri, these negotiations between Israel, the United States, Iran and Lebanon impact on the current situation in Gaza? Talk also about the role of the other armed groups, like Hamas, the Houthis. If you can talk about what’s happening across the region?

RAMI KHOURI: Yes. The Palestine-Israel conflict remains the starting point for all of these other conflicts. So, Iran and Israel, Hezbollah’s birth, Israel-Hezbollah, all of these tensions and conflicts ultimately derived from the unresolved battle between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism and the state of Israel.

So, it’s crucial for any attempt to get a permanent peaceful situation across the region, in the Arab countries, Iran and Israel — it’s crucial to address the Palestine issue, which means right now looking at Gaza.

Now, Gaza is in a situation of reconfigured colonial domination by the United States and Israel, with carpetbaggers from around the world, like Tony Blair and others. I call it the joint venture of the carpetbaggers and the carpet bombers. They’ve all come together on this to dominate Palestine, destroy Gaza, and now they’re looking to do the same thing in Lebanon.

But the fact that the Iranians were able to pressure the Americans, to pressure Netanyahu to enter into this ceasefire is a significant sign that the group of movements and countries that have been involved in the so-called Axis of Resistance, which pushes back against Israeli hegemony and American militarism, that group of actors is still effective.

They may not dominate the region, but they’re strong enough to do what they’ve just done, which is force the Americans, to force the Israelis to enter into a ceasefire that the Israelis did not want. The Israelis wanted to keep bombing and attacking and occupying and creating more buffer zones. But they’ve done that.

This is the seventh time, seventh time since the late 1960s, that Israel goes into Lebanon militarily in a big way, occupies land, moves millions of people around. And every time, they’ve had to pull out because of the resistance they’ve met and because they could not achieve their goals, which is an acquiescent, passive Lebanese state that agrees to be a vassal state of Israel.

And they still refuse to do it.

So, finding the negotiated mechanism to arrive at a point where the Lebanese have their sovereign rights and security protected and the Israelis have the same rights, that’s the big challenge that lies ahead. It can only be done if it is accompanied by a serious effort to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict on a permanent and fair basis.

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

Many American apologists cannot see the forest for the trees and think that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz represents a huge win for the United States and that Iran has caved in. Wrong.

When the Iran ceasefire was first announced by US President Donald Trump on April 8, it was meant to cover Lebanon as well.

Even the Pakistanis, who were the mediators said it covered Lebanon. But that war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to wreck the peace process and so bombed Lebanon viciously and committed genocide once again, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent Lebanese.

• READ MORE: Iran warns US blockade of ports must end as Strait of Hormuz opens

Trump tried to rein him in but Netanyahu refused to stop the genocide and the two got into a shouting match in the early hours of the morning. The Americans just could not control the Israelis.

So Iran maintained their vice-like closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With each passing day, the world was moving towards an economic precipice and people all over the world were blaming Trump and the Americans for starting the stupid war.

Trump eventually read the riot act to Netanyahu and unilaterally imposed the ceasefire in Lebanon. The Israelis were stunned.

The ceasefire resulted not because of talks between the Lebanese and the Israelis, but because of the leverage Iran has over the Strait of Hormuz. That is why the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that because of the ceasefire in Lebanon, Iran is reopening the Strait — and Trump thanked the Iranians profusely for it.

As for Trump still maintaining the blockade of the Iranian ports, this is pure posturing by him to show that he is strong. It means nothing.

The Iranians have already warned him that if he continues with the blockade, they will not only close off the Strait of Hormuz again but also the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea and also the Gulf of Oman.

That would plunge the entire world economy into a depression and no oil from the Gulf would flow.

Trump as usual is blustering, but in reality he is praying every minute that the Iranians will go back to the negotiating table, and give him the peace deal he so desperately needs to extricate himself from the mess he created in starting this war.

Iran is showing its maturity and displaying the might of a new global power. It will soon control the entire Middle East together with the other great power — Türkiye.

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.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant — and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine and Iran media reports
• Owen Jones on Substack

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer — dubbed “Germany’s Rupert Murdoch” — are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech”.

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its “Essentials” — “core values to which we are firmly committed”.

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan — but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

‘We support the right of Israel to exist’
Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.
2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.
3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.
5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

‘Freedom’ — within limits
Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination — a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning.

It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What ‘Israel’s right to exist’ means in practice
In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist”.

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

‘Free Palestine’ is a ‘pro-Hamas topic’
There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when employees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV — part of the Axel Springer empire — was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters”.

In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” — “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel
When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterised not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.”

He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of October 7″.

Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined “The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specialising in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.

Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

Extracted and republished from Owen Jones’ article on his Battlelines substack. Read the full article here.

It is the people of the Global South, not governments, who must resist this subversion of the concepts of the “nation’ and of non-alignment.

The Indian government’s position on the US-Israeli war against Iran shows an unbelievable degree of pusillanimity.

India attended the recent meeting of about 50 countries called by the United Kingdom where Iran was strongly criticised for closing the Strait of Hormuz, but not a word was uttered against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

• READ MORE: Iran war’s big winners: Wall Street, weapons firms, AI and green energy
• ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump
• Iran hasn’t survived decades of hostile sanctions, assassinations and sabotage by accident – it’s by strategy
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Likewise, India was one of the sponsors of a resolution at the UN General Assembly which criticised Iran for attacking other countries in the Gulf (though Iran was attacking only the American military bases located in those countries). Yet again, not a word was uttered in that resolution condemning the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

It is also noteworthy that India took several days before expressing any grief over the assassination Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several weeks before expressing any shock over the brutal killing of 175 innocent schoolgirls in Minab.

Such pusillanimity, however, is not confined to India: as many as 135 countries were co-sponsors of the dishonest and duplicitous UNGA resolution mentioned above, afraid that they would otherwise offend the Americans.

In fact, apart from a handful of countries in the entire world, none has had the gumption to condemn unambiguously the blatantly illegal and immoral war unleashed by the US-Israeli combine against Iran.

Extreme concern
This is a matter for extreme concern, for the attack on Iran abrogates the concept of sovereignty of nations that had been the core concept in the struggle for decolonisation and had underlain the entire post-colonial order. It destroys, in other words, the very rationale for decolonisation.

This pusillanimity on the part of Third World countries is also a matter of great puzzlement. After all, these are countries that have had long and arduous anti-colonial struggles to achieve the status of independent and sovereign states; how can they remain silent when this very sovereignty is being violated in the case of a fellow Third World state by the armed might of US imperialism?

The answer to this question, no doubt complex, must nonetheless incorporate recognition of at least two fractures that neoliberalism has introduced into our world. One is the fracturing of the concept of the “nation” whose coming into being had been accomplished by the anti-colonial struggle.

This concept of the “nation” had differed fundamentally from the European concept that had developed in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in at least three ways: first, it was inclusive and did not identify any “enemy within”; second, unlike European nationalism it shunned any imperial ambitions of its own, in the sense of having designs over the resources of distant lands; and third, it did not apotheosise the nation as standing above the people whose “duty” supposedly was to serve it.

The coming into being of this inclusive concept of the “nation” was in turn a reflection of the fact that the anti-colonial struggle was a multi-class struggle; and the dirigiste economic regime that was erected after independence, though it promoted capitalist development, also sought to put curbs on rampant capitalism in the name of achieving “national” development.

This was in the interests of preserving its multi-class support base, which even the monopoly capitalists were not averse to at that time, since they had wanted a trajectory of development where the state exercised relative autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism. The existence of a large public sector was a part of this trajectory.

Further, the policy of non-alignment pursued by these dirigiste regimes had complemented this quest for development in relative autonomy from imperialism. Michal Kalecki, the Polish Marxist economist, had erred in calling such regimes “intermediate regimes” and suggesting that the middle classes held decisive power in such regimes; but he had been right in identifying state capitalism (public sector) and non-alignment as the two most distinctive features of these regimes.

Monopoly bourgeoisie
With globalisation of capital, however, things changed. The domestic monopoly bourgeoisie integrated itself with globalised capital and abandoned its agenda of pursuing a development trajectory that was relatively autonomous of the metropolis.

Sections of the upper professional and bureaucratic segments of society, keen to send their children to study and settle down in the metropolis, joined in as supporters of the neoliberal regime that emerged under the aegis of this globalised capital.

The landed rich too sought their fortunes within this new neoliberal order, which not only promoted rampant unrestrained capitalism, but came down heavily against workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, petty producers and the lower salariat. A schism was effected within the class alliance that had been forged in the course of the anti-colonial struggle.

It was no longer the “nation” against the metropolis that was in focus, but big capital including multinational capital against those social groups which stood in the way of instituting rapid “development” defined exclusively in terms of GDP growth-rates.

The interest of big capital was, by a sleight of hand, identified as “national interest”, and the duty of all classes was to promote it.

This shift in the meaning of the term “nation” meant in effect a fracturing of the “nation” whose coming into being was the desideratum of the anti-colonial struggle. Freedom of the “nation” from imperialist domination, far from being the over-riding objective, was no longer even a desired or a relevant objective for the government within a neoliberal setting.

This is the first instance of “fracturing” referred to above. Because of this fracturing, the criterion on the basis of which the government of a neoliberal regime takes decisions is not whether a particular stance defends national sovereignty, but whether it promotes the material interests of big capital which are considered identical with those of the “nation” in its new meaning.

Deafening silences
Siding with the US-Israeli alliance appears, on balance, more advantageous than standing with Iran, the victim of aggression, from the point of view of the interests of big capital in countries of the Global South. This would go some way to explain the deafening silences, mentioned earlier, in the UNGA and other resolutions.

There is also a second “fracture” brought about by the neoliberal regime. While the neoliberal regime is “sold” to the Global South as ushering in export-led growth that would bring about a higher GDP growth-rate for all countries compared with the earlier dirigiste regime, this claim is completely false.

Since the growth rate of aggregate world demand does not increase when more countries pursue an export-led growth strategy, the neoliberal regime that generalises this strategy among all countries is, in effect, forcing them to engage in Darwinian competition against one another, that is, to pursue a “beggar-thy-neighbour” strategy.

Some countries’ higher growth-rate than before under the export-led growth strategy, it follows, must be at the expense of other countries that now experience lower growth-rate than before.

Countries engaged in a race to outdo one another can scarcely be said to be “co-operating” with one another. The effect of a general pursuit of the neoliberal strategy, therefore, is a de facto abandonment of non-alignment, of a trajectory where countries of the Global South stood with one another to face up to imperialism.

Now, countries of the Global South, each obsessed with achieving higher GDP growth and hence, within the neoliberal paradigm, obsessed with drawing in larger metropolitan investment for this purpose, would rather curry favour with imperialism in order to outdo their neighbours.

This leads to a fracturing of the non-aligned movement, which is the second fracturing we mentioned earlier.

The silence of most countries of the Global South in the face of the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, which may appear puzzling at first sight, is not so puzzling after all.

Subverting both ‘nation’, ‘non-alignment’
Neoliberalism has been at work for quite some time in subverting both the concept of the nation and the concept of non-alignment, abandoning the anti-imperialist core that characterised these concepts, and substituting in their place alternative concepts that prioritise the task of currying favour with imperialism over everything else.

The outcome of this process is what we see today.

Capitalism is invariably hostile to any collective praxis against it, even if this collective praxis takes the form of just trade union action. It believes in atomising economic agents.

Neoliberal capitalism, which represents a return to unrestrained and uncontrolled capitalism once more, brings to the fore this tendency toward the atomisation of economic agents, through a break-up of the class alliance that had participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and through a subversion of the non-aligned movement that had stood for collective opposition by countries of the Global South to imperialist hegemony.

It is for the people of the Global South, not the governments currently promoting the interests of the ruling big bourgeoisie, to extend solidarity to the people of Iran. The struggle of Iran against the US-Israeli alliance is of crucial importance for recovering the sovereignty of the Global South.

Dr Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal. This article is republished from Newsclick.

US President Donald Trump probably thinks he can starve a country that feeds itself.

Washington is selling the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as a chokehold. However, it is worth asking whether the hand actually reaches the throat.

Iran shares land borders with seven countries — Türkiye, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nearly 5900 kilometres of border, criss-crossed by road and rail.

• READ MORE: US ready to restart combat if Iran does not agree to deal: Hegseth
• Caitlin Johnstone: I hope the US loses and the empire collapses
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

No naval force on earth blockades a land route.

Petrochemicals, minerals, manufactured goods are moved overland. Machinery, spare parts, consumer goods, all come back the same way. The Strait of Hormuz does not sit across any of that.

Then there is the food issue, which is where blockades historically do their cruellest work.

It will not work here. Iran is approximately 96 percent self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs.

Iran doesn’t depend on imported food
Fertile western plains, mountain valleys, Caspian lowlands, including wheat, rice, fruit, livestock. The Gulf states that cheered this blockade loudest — the UAE and Qatar — depend almost entirely on food imports. Iran doesn’t.

You cannot starve a country that feeds itself.

What about the blockade?

Yes, that will hurt. Hard currency earnings from oil tanker traffic will fall. That is real and Washington knows it.

But “hurt” and “collapse” are different destinations, and the distance between them is precisely what the architects of this policy appear not to have calculated.

Central Asia and the Caucasus remain open. Regional markets will absorb what the sea lanes cannot carry.

The economic pressure is genuine. The total isolation that the blockade promises is not.

Iran has survived four decades of sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It did not survive them by accident. It survived them because its geography is not a weakness waiting to be exploited.

It is the strategy.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

Most of Iranian oil — 96.7 percent — is destined for China. If you note this figure, you will realise that the Americans are really trying to choke off the supply of Iranian oil to China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a major part of the American containment strategy against China.

Now that America will most likely lose control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they are shifting their attention to the other most critical chokepoint in the world — the Strait of Malacca.

• READ MORE: Indonesia, US sign ‘major’ defence cooperation agreement
• Why Trump’s naval blockade to ‘strangle’ Iran is a joke
• Pakistani army chief in Tehran amid bid to restart US talks
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

About 80 percent of China’s imported oil has to pass through the Strait of Malacca. Vessels come down the Strait, sail past Singapore which is at the southernmost tip of the Strait, before they swing upwards into the South China Sea to go to the Philippines and East Asia, including China.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait.

A very interesting development took place on Monday in Washington when the Defence Minister of Indonesia Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a cooperation agreement with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Speculation on details
People are speculating about the details of the agreement:

• Will it allow the Americans to base troops in Indonesia and use Indonesian airspace for their air assets?
• Will American naval vessels be allowed to dock at the old Dutch port of Belawan, near Medan, in Northern Sumatra, which is near the opening to the Strait?
• Will the Malacca Strait now become the focal point in this great power struggle between America and China?
• What will Indonesia’s other BRICs partners, principally China and Russia think of Indonesia’s move in signing this agreement with the Americans?

To spice things up, Indonesian President Probowo Subianto was in Moscow a few days ago meeting with President Putin.

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.

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

• READ MORE: The war you’re not allowed to see: How the UAE rewrites the story of Iranian strikes
• Trump says war ‘very close to over’ — US claims all Iranian sea trade halted
• Iran slams YouTube ban on pro-Iranian group’s LEGO-style AI videos
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally.            Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

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

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

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.

• READ MORE: Diplomatic efforts to revive US-Iran talks intensify amid Hormuz blockade
• Iran a hugely ‘friendly’ country behind the sabre-rattling
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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.

This US naval blockade is meant to strangle the Iranian economy by preventing it from exporting oil — the economic lifeline of Iran. It will do nothing of the sort.

Please study the infographics below. Before the war started, Iran was furiously loading tankers with oil at 3 times the normal rate and sending them off to the Far East, with the ultimate destination being China.

China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil, with many of its private refineries — known colloquially as “tea pot” refineries — depending on Iranian crude.

• READ MORE: Trump claims Iran wants a deal ‘very badly’ as US blockade begins in Hormuz
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There are presently at least 158 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting in some 96 tankers anchored near the Malaysian state of Johor. There, ship-to-ship transfers take place, before the shipments go off to their final destinations in China.

So this naval blockade will cost the Americans billions of dollars to maintain, but the only thing it will achieve is to make countries dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf such as Australia, Britain, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cry.

American voters will get mad at Trump for the surging prices at the pump and give the Republicans a shellacking in the mid-terms.

Iran rolling in cash
Iran will be rolling in cash from the sale of these 158 million barrels of oil already at sea and far away from any naval blockade, and the Iranians will be laughing at the stupidity of the Americans.

Isn’t this the classic illustration of the saying  “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”?

Let us see how long Trump can afford to keep up with this charade.

You would think that American intelligence would have the wherewithal to better advise their President what a harebrained idea his naval blockade is.

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.

AMY GOODMAN: Ship traffic has halted again in the Strait of Hormuz after President Trump ordered the US military to begin a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas starting on Monday.

Iran denounced Trump’s move as an illegal act amounting to “piracy”. Iran has threatened to strike Gulf ports in retaliation.

Trump ordered the blockade after the US and Iran failed to reach a deal to end the war following 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The negotiations marked the highest-level talks between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. US Vice-President JD Vance headed the U.S. delegation, which included US envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Iranian negotiators had flown to Pakistan on a plane they called “Minab 168” as a tribute to the 168 people killed in a US missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab on February 28. The plane carried images of the dead schoolchildren, along with blood-stained school bags recovered beneath the rubble.

Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

We’re joined now by Ervand Abrahamian, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of several books, most recently, Oil Crisis in Iran: From Nationalism to Coup d’État. His forthcoming book is 1979: An Inevitable Revolution.

So, your response to what transpired in Pakistan, the deal that was not reached between Iran and the United States, and what this means, Professor?

Trump orders naval blockade of Iran            Video: Democracy Now!

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think both sides actually presented, basically, ultimate demands which the other side couldn’t accept, so it was a false start. But the implications of the failure is going to be actually quite drastic on the United States, because Trump’s main concern has been to actually put a limit, a lid, on the oil prices going up, and they’ve already jumped from $88 a barrel to over $100. They’re going to increase more with the present crisis, with the embargo on the Strait of Hormuz.

And as the crisis escalates, I think the US will start bombing Iranian oil installations. Iran will retaliate by bombing the Gulf’s oil installations, gas installations. The oil prices then could really zoom up.

Some people expect it to reach $200 a barrel. In that case, you know, it will have long-term implications for Wall Street and the whole American economy, not to mention the world economy. So, things that Trump has tried to avoid, he has got, actually, himself into the major crisis, economic crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Robert Malley, who had previously been involved with talks with Iran, saying, “Twenty-one hours was 20 hours too many if the goal was to reiterate a demand Iran had already rejected. It was many hours too few if the goal was to negotiate.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He’s exactly right. And I think, I mean, what Iran sees as the present crisis is an existential one, because although the talk has been regime change, the Israeli policy, clearly, in the last 10 years has been more than regime change. It’s basically been the destruction of the Iranian state, Iranian nation. So Iran sees this as an existential threat.

There was a speech that Trump made when he launched the attack on Iran a couple of weeks ago. It was actually quite an interesting speech. He talked about various ethnic minorities being oppressed in Iran, and they were dying to be liberated from Iranian control. And he listed obvious ethnic groups, but then there was one ethnic group that, really, I’d never heard of.

So I scratched my head. What is this group? And I did what most people do: You google. And lo and behold, this ethnic group actually exists in the other side of the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan.

So you wonder what reason they had for putting this ethnic group that doesn’t exist in Iran as one of the ethnic groups, unless there’s some sinister idea the Israelis have of a civil war in Iran, where they will recruit, actually, mercenaries from the other side of the Caucasus to bring into Iran.

Of course, this sounds far-fetched, but this is what actually happened in Syria. You had a lot of Chechens actually brought in to fight against Assad. So, the Israelis may be thinking in those terms of actually a long civil war in Iran, where they would be bringing in mercenaries from outside. So, for this reason, I think Iran sees this as a real, serious, existential war. It’s not just a question of a minor sort of fine tuning of relations with the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written about oil in Iran a great deal. Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, tweeted on Sunday, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 [per gallon] gas.”

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the price could go up to $200 a barrel, even more than that, if, basically, the Gulf oil — it’s not just Iranian oil, but the whole Gulf oil and gas — is actually cut off from the world market.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what Iran wants right now and what the US wants. Ten o’clock am — we’re broadcasting right before that — Eastern time is when the US Navy blockades, apparently, the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

What exactly does this mean? How will the Gulf nations be affected? How will Iran be affected? Because it both exports oil, but, of course, it needs oil and makes a great deal of its own oil.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, I mean, it won’t break Iran, because it has — Iran has other ways of actually exporting oil. It’ll obviously be a hardship, but it’ll be a much worse hardship on the Gulf states, if Iran actually dismantles their oil installations.

And that affects directly United States economy, because so much of Gulf oil money, gas money actually goes into high-tech United States. And much of the American, basically, modern technology is funded by subsidies from the various Gulf states. So it would have drastic repercussions on US economy.

AMY GOODMAN: What does Trump want? His latest, and what Vance said — right? Vance leaves the Hungarian prime minister, campaigning for him, Orbán, who was soundly defeated, and then goes to Islamabad to lead this negotiation. He says it’s all about nuclear weapons. Vance said, “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them [to quickly] achieve a nuclear weapon.” Your response?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Exactly. I mean, that’s exactly what the Obama agreement was.

AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, which Trump pulled out of. But if you look at that agreement, basically, it said Iran had the right to enrich, but it had to be supervised to make sure it couldn’t enrich to the level of nuclear weapons.

So, Netanyahu cries it was vague agreement. In fact, it was very precise. Iran could enrich to 3.67 percent of uranium. That’s as precise as you can get. It was limited to 200 grams of enriched uranium. And also, it was — everything was supervised.

There were 140 international monitors, including American monitors. So, this was an incredibly tight procedure to make sure that Iran would actually fulfill its promise not to go into nuclear weapons.

When Trump pulled out of that, he basically unwound the whole system. And the best he can get is going back to that. So, demand that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment is a nonstarter. The best he could get is to go back, permit Iran to have enrichment, but with monitoring that it would not be weapon enrichment.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. In a call with the Russian President Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said a deal is, “not out of reach.” So, if you can talk about whether — where you see this all headed?

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, there are people in Iran in the — basically, in the National Security Council, including Pezeshkian, who think that they can make a deal with the United States. And they’ve been there a long time.

But there are also people now, I think, hardliners, who are stronger now than before the war, who are arguing that you can’t make a deal with Trump. Even if Trump makes a deal, he could, the following week, decide he’s going to pull out. So it’s a nonstarter, from their point of view, unless US can actually make full commitments. And I don’t see how they can do that, because Trump is basically untrustworthy.

So, from their point of view, I think the hardliners in Iran could argue, persuasively, the more the pressure they have, the more the prices are going to go up; the more it goes up, sooner or later, the patient will have a heart attack or a stroke. So they have an upper hand at the moment.

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

On the night of February 28, the Israel-US airstrike killed his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his wife, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

According to a recent report from Reuters, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei suffered life threatening injuries and apparently lost his leg and has a disfigured face.

The report said he communicated through written statements read by TV anchors and audio conferences with senior officials.

• READ MORE: US military says it will block all Iranian port traffic in Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

I don’t want to believe Reuters or any puppet media from the West but I would like to believe that the new supreme leader is not in full capacity as expected.

Well, despite all that, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is still grounded, strong and with no signs of collapse.

They lost 40+ senior leaders but still fought two superpower countries to a ceasefire. They still control the Strait of Hormuz and have thousands of missiles and drones left.

This simply points out to the fact that IRGC is in control and guess who is the leader?

Led IRGC for decades
Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the martyred Ali Khamenei, who led IRGC for decades with a hand injury over a bomb explosion in a tape recorder in 1981.

Imagine you were Mojtaba who has just lost all your family to a brutal attack that claimed even more lives in your country.

In one way or another you survived and you have people taking instructions from you.

At this point I don’t think death scares you anymore because you saw death in its true colours and even had a conversation with it.

Back to myself, what if I was Mojtaba Khamenei? First, no surrender. I would fight to the last microsecond and die fighting but surrendering is where I draw the line.

Second, the Strait of Hormuz is non-negotiable. It is our territorial waters and remains under our control. We do with it what we want. It’s ours, period.

After all, it was open and safe for all until someone decided to attack us and now we call the shots. It’s either you agree with our terms of gerrarahia!

Two options on missiles
On our missile programme, two options. It’s either we maintain our missile programme or develop nukes.

We won’t sit here and be at the mercies of aggressive enemies like Israel and US with no options to protect ourselves.

It’s either we can nuke you or we can missile you one or both options. Imagine just being there and being limited to defensive missiles capabilities yet those asking you to do that are the same people attacking you during negotiations!

Uranium enrichment. Let everyone enrich uranium and use it however they want. It’s either everyone can or no one can’t. No selective privileges.

Lastly, if I was Mojtaba Khamenei, those who murdered my family would definitely pay, not by dollars, not by Shekel and of course not by propaganda but by blood.

What would you do, if you were Mojtaba Khamenei?

Bonface Chisutia is a writer and academic based in Nairobi, Kenya. This commentary is republished from his Facebook account.

When news reports first indicated that US Vice-President JD Vance was going to lead the Americans in the negotiations with Iran, the country the US and Israel are waging a foolish war against, there was a sense that someone even as young him may have recognised the train wreck that Donald Trump was creating.

Former top negotiators real estate developer Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had already proven to be self-enriching charlatans like Trump.

If someone understood a little — only a little — more about the state of affairs, they could be excellent replacements to Witkoff and Kushner and save America from a crisis of its own making.

• READ MORE: US military to block all Iran-bound ships from transiting the Hormuz Strait
• US delegation ‘failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation’
• Protesters rally across Aotearoa in condemnation of Israel, US ‘warmongering’ and ‘shameful’ NZ​
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As it transpired, that person was not Vance.
​
In the negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, the US vice-president proved to be no more than a minion to Trump, not someone who can rise to the occasion and stop the stupid war that is taking down the American military and the global economy.
​
If you cannot see how disastrously America and Israel are conducting the war, here is Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on European history, parsing it for you in plain language on March 18, just two weeks after the war started:
​

“[Trump] took the greatest military force in world history, lost the war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else.

I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.”
​

By now, it is an open secret that Trump is being blackmailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds evidence of degenerate behavior by the US president from his devilish days on disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But even in a moment of incompetence, incredible loss, and national humiliation for America like this, Vance had a chance to save his country.
​
Now we know for certain that everyone who has ever worked for Trump is diminished by it. Vance was an exception only for a second.
​
IRNA News Agency is state-controlled media.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Vance in Pakistan to lead US-Iran ceasefire talks; Israel bombs Lebanon
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
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Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

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

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

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

• READ MORE: This illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran is also an assault on the United Nations
• Israel says no ceasefire with Lebanon, US-Iran talks due
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished under Creative Commons.

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilisation” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran.

The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war.

• READ MORE: Israel’s Lebanon attacks threaten US-Iran ceasefire as negotiations near
• Trump claims ‘success’ in Iran in just 32 days compared to lengthy US wars
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump — thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he framed it as a victory).

The Iran fiasco is only the latest in a host of examples revealing how to defeat Trump.

In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Inside the US
Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E Jean Carroll and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.

What’s the strategy that connects them all? All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power.

Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jiujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won. Consider:

Iran knew it was no match for the superior might of the US (and Israel). So it used cheap drones and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz and incapacitate other Gulf oil installations, thereby driving up the prices of oil and gas at the pump in the US, which has put growing political pressure on Trump, months before a midterm election. Hence, Trump has been forced to pause his war.

China knew what to do when Trump imposed a giant tariff on Chinese exports to the US: it put restrictions on seven types of heavy rare earth metals and magnets, crucial to US defense and tech industries. Beijing continues to use these rare earth restrictions as tactical levers in ongoing negotiations over trade, rather than demand complete surrender by Trump on his trade policies.

Russia has leveraged its vast deposits of oil and natural gas in gaining leverage over US allies. It has also demonstrated its potential ability to intrude into US elections (the Mueller report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by Russia to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, primarily favouring Trump).

Canada and Mexico have won tariff showdowns with Trump by leveraging the US’s substantial economic dependence on them for components and raw materials, but without crowing about their victories.

Greenland has leveraged public opinion globally and in the United States — overwhelmingly against an American invasion or occupation — to curb Trump’s ambitions there.

Minneapolis resistance
Now, as to what’s happened inside the United States:

The citizens of Minneapolis and St Paul have leveraged their asymmetric power against Trump’s ICE and border patrol agents by carefully organising themselves into a force of non-violent resistance to protect immigrants there.

Harvard University’s strategy for resisting Trump’s interference in Harvard’s academic freedom has been to leverage its influence with the federal courts in Boston and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to get rulings that stopped Trump (although he’s still trying).

The comedian Jimmy Kimmel turned a political crisis into a ratings victory by using the public backlash against his suspension from ABC, which Disney owns. Since ABC reinstated him, Kimmel has continued to target Trump, and secured his contract through 2027.

The writer E Jean Carroll defeated Donald Trump in two civil cases over sexual abuse and defamation, ultimately securing over $88 million in damages from him — verdicts that have been upheld by federal appeals courts.

Carroll’s lawyers used a civil lawsuit, requiring a lower burden of proof than proving a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. They presented the jury with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and testimony from other Trump accusers. His depositions, where he called her a “whack job”, were played for the jury.

The law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale refused to follow Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms that had represented causes or clients that Trump opposed.

First Amendment rights infringed
The firms leveraged constitutional arguments with the federal courts — arguing that the orders infringed on their First Amendment rights to advocate whatever causes they wished, violated the constitution’s separation of powers because the orders would prevent the judiciary from considering challenges to executive authority, and violated their clients’ rights under the constitution to be represented.

The Justice Department ultimately dropped its fight against these firms in March 2026 after federal appellate judges also found Trump’s orders unconstitutional.

What’s happened to the countries and organisations that have caved to Trump?

All have strengthened Trump’s leverage over them. Europe seems incapacitated, fearing Trump will leave Nato (despite a US law prohibiting it), but unable to decide where to draw the line with him.

The media network ABC continues to lose viewers, while being subject to Trump’s next whims. CBS was purchased by the Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son, David, and is hemorrhaging talent.

Columbia University has been racked by dissent from both students and faculty. The Trump regime continues to make demands of it.

The law firms that caved in to Trump’s executive orders have seen lawyers exit who felt the deals betrayed the firms’ values and principles.

Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher to work with Jenner & Block — a firm that fought Trump. Students at elite law schools have also reportedly begun to shun firms that struck deals with the Trump regime.

Bottom line: there’s now a clear blueprint for how to defeat Trump. It’s available to any country, organisation or person on which he seeks to impose his will: reject his demands and then use your own asymmetric power — a form of jiujitsu — to turn Trump’s power against him.

Robert Reich, a former US Secretary of Labour, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and he blogs at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK. This article is republished from his Facebook page — other Robert Reich articles at Asia Pacific Report.

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended — just ten hours later — with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms.

Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to — and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

• READ MORE: ‘Killing machine’: Lebanon mourns as Israeli raids shake US-Iran
• Iranians breathe a ‘ceasefire’ sigh of relief as all sides claim victory
• Ignoring genocide – the bill for Australia’s silence has arrived
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Those 10 points are:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.
2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear programme.
4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.
5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.
6. End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.
7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme.
8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.
9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
10. Ceasefire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all 10 points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran.

More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue — alongside Oman — to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners — countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by US sanctions.

Also strategic
Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran — a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7.

From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

The forthcoming talks in Islamabad between Washington and Tehran may yet falter. But the terrain has shifted. Trump’s failed use of force has blunted the credibility of American military threats, introducing a new dynamic into US-Iran diplomacy.

Washington can still rattle its sabre. But after a failed war, such threats ring hollow.

The United States is no longer in a position to dictate terms; any agreement will have to rest on genuine compromise. That, in turn, demands real diplomacy — patience, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity — qualities not typically associated with Trump.

It may also require the participation of other major powers, particularly China, to help anchor the process and reduce the risk of a relapse into conflict.

Above all, the ceasefire’s durability will hinge on whether Trump can restrain Israel from undermining the diplomatic track.

No illusions
On this point, there should be no illusions. Senior Israeli officials have already denounced the agreement as the greatest “political disaster” in the country’s history — a signal, if any were needed, of how fragile this moment may prove to be.

Even if the talks collapse — and even if Israel resumes its bombardment of Iran — it does not necessarily follow that the United States will return to war. There is little reason to believe a second round would produce a different outcome, or that it would not once again leave Iran in a position to hold the global economy hostage.

In that sense, Tehran has, at least for now, restored a measure of deterrence.

One final point bears emphasis: this elective war was not only a strategic blunder. Rather than precipitating regime change, it has likely granted Iran’s theocracy a renewed lease on life — much as Saddam Hussein did in 1980, when his invasion enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to consolidate power at home.

The magnitude of this miscalculation may well puzzle historians for decades to come.

Dr Trita Parsi is the executive VP of the Quincy Institute and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: US, Iran announce two-week ceasefire; Israel claims truce excludes Lebanon
• Pope Leo XIV hails ceasefire between US and Iran as “sign of real hope”
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

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.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

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.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

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

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Here is a reliable indicator that you are being managed rather than informed.

When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably toward power, toward allies, toward the architecture of foreign policy that cannot be questioned, the Murdoch press reaches for a scapegoat.

And so, as Australians watch fuel prices surge by approximately 40 percent, a direct consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, as ABC News has itself reported, the editors and columnists of News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.

• READ MORE: Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk
• ‘Complete demolition’: Trump repeats Iran ultimatum as deal deadline looms
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. Not the war that has sent energy markets into convulsions and supply chains into chaos. Not the illegal military campaign that blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent insurance premiums for tankers into the stratosphere.

No, their preferred villain is Chris Bowen.

Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who did not bomb Iran. Chris Bowen, who does not set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable on their merits, has precisely nothing to do with a US-Israeli military campaign that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.

The Bowen beat-up is not journalism. It is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press doing what it does most reliably and most effectively — running cover for power, redirecting the public’s legitimate anger toward a safe domestic target, and keeping the real architecture of the crisis, the geopolitical decisions, the alliance commitments, the illegal war, safely out of frame.

Because here is what the Murdoch press will not tell you, and what the mainstream media in general has failed to say with anything like the clarity the situation demands.

Australians are paying more for fuel because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Doh!

That war was launched on February 28 of this year by the United States and Israel against Iran.

It was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was not authorised by any provision of international law that serious legal scholars recognise as applicable. It was not preceded by any meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies would absorb its consequences.

It was a unilateral act of military aggression by the most powerful country on earth and its primary regional client, conducted because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated, correctly, that nobody with the power to stop them would try.

Puppet on a string
And when it happened, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went on the ABC’s 7:30 programme and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was the American decision to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilising the region.

Read that answer carefully. It is not an answer about Australian interests. It contains no reference to Australian sovereignty, Australian economic security, or the fuel price increase already beginning when those words were spoken.

It is a recitation, clean, fluent, almost word for word, of the American and Israeli justification for the strikes, delivered in the Prime Minister’s voice, on Australian public television, as though it represented Australia’s own sovereign and independently arrived at conclusion, which it didn’t.

He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as “constructive”. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s objectives and acknowledged there needs to be an end point.

This is the man who endorsed the war before its objectives had been defined, now asking what they are.

Managed complicity and Murdoch
This is what managed complicity looks like up close. You sign on. You use the ally’s language. You call it constructive. And then, when the consequences arrive in the form of 40 percent fuel price increases and small businesses collapsing under freight surcharge pressure, you allow the media ecosystem you have never seriously challenged to redirect the public’s fury at your own Energy Minister.

The Murdoch press is doing its job. That job is not to inform Australians.

That job, in this specific context, on this specific story, is to protect the US-Israeli alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate rage of a population being economically punished for decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem never finds its proper target.

The proprietor of that press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to exactly the power centres that prosecuted this war.

Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for the military adventurism that set the conditions for what is now unfolding. His Australian mastheads take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats American and Israeli strategic interests as essentially synonymous with the interests of the English-speaking world.

That worldview is not Australia’s sovereign foreign policy. It is an ideology dressed as common sense, distributed at scale through the country’s most-read newspapers, and deployed most aggressively when the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic pain threatens to become too obvious to ignore.

Chris Bowen did not block the Strait of Hormuz. A war did.

An illegal war. Conducted without Australian consent. Endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.

And the newspapers owned by a man whose commercial and ideological interests align entirely with the people who started it are telling you it is the Energy Minister’s fault.

That is not a coincidence; it is the system working exactly as designed.

The question is whether Australians are going to keep letting it work.

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.

• READ MORE: ‘Complete demolition’: Trump repeats Iran ultimatum as deal deadline looms
• Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

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.

In the coming years, if Iran survives as a sovereign state and retains control over the Strait of Hormuz, countries like Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South Korea and Japan will be made to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for the US-Israeli war on Iran.

For this to come to pass, Iran must fight the aggressors to a standstill and ensure they can impose, if necessary, a chokehold on the oil, gas and fertilisers vital to the global economy.

• READ MORE: Protesters condemn Luxon govt for failing to condemn illegal war on Iran
• President Trump, don’t listen to your sycophants on Iran, this isn’t reality TV
• US bombing targets bridges and Pasteur Institute – ‘symbols of Iran’s scientific strength’, says spokeswoman
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

So, when next you see an image of spectacular US-Israeli violence, think this: “I might have to pay for that”.

There is no doubt that US-Israel has succeeded in setting fire to Iran, inflicting a heavy death toll, and hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to the civilian infrastructure of the country.

As the Leader of the so-called “Free World” said this week: the aim is to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

The US and Israel have dropped well over 15,000 huge bombs and missiles on Iran. According to the United Nations, by March 17 the US and Israel had already destroyed 54,000 civilian homes.

Destruction now far worse
The destruction is now far worse, approaching 100,000 structures. By the end of March hundreds of schools, dozens of universities, much of the civilian infrastructure including major bridges, energy systems and cultural sites had been attacked by the Americans and Israelis. Does anyone still believe they have come to Iran to free the people?

Who should pay for reconstruction? The Iranian government is clear: we should — because this immense crime was, from their perspective, aided and abetted by Australia, the UK, EU, New Zealand and others, who, as with the genocide in Gaza, did nothing meaningful to stop it.

According to Lloyds, Iran has now set up a toll booth at the Strait of Hormuz — referred to by some as “The Aya-Toll-a Booth” — to tax ships that pass through the strait. It may be questionable under the Law of the Sea but this would be to quibble after the US-Israelis blitzkrieg.

The Majlis (Iranian Parliament) is finalising a law declaring Iranian “sovereignty, control and oversight” of the Strait, something it had never asserted before. The bill introduces a system of transit fees for commercial vessels passing the Hormuz Strait, effectively imposing a tax of up to $2 million per vessel that wishes to pass.

A large oil tanker has a cargo worth about $200 million so the fee is not excessive. Multiply that by more than 100 ship movements per day under peacetime conditions and Iran could be in receipt of tens of billions of dollars per year.

Given the rogue states who launched this war will never submit to international law or reparations it seems an elegant solution.

Under the system, ships must now provide their International Maritime Organisation (IMO) number, cargo manifest, crew names, ownership details and destination before Iran will issue a safe passage clearance. The law bans vessels from the US, Israel, and their allies, while granting safe transit to China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Bangladesh and other friendly nations.

Iran needs to win
For this to fully come to fruition, Iran needs to win.

Professor Robert Pape, a top US expert on warfare, based at the University of Chicago, says Iran will likely emerge from this terrible war as a super-power.  Many analysts, such as Colonel Daniel Davis, Mark Sleboda, Annelle Sheline, and Professor John Mearsheimer, now see an Iranian victory as likely.

Professor Pape himself has run simulations of US-Iran wars for decades and is clear: “Trump made a huge mistake.”

Professor Pape, who was one of the prime architects of the US Air Force’s war curriculum, told journalist Mahmoud Ansari that Trump and others are currently confusing tactical success with strategic outcomes. For the moment, the Americans and Israelis are enjoying success after success: killing leaders and school girls, blowing stuff up and so on.

“That can be mesmerising, and cause this illusion of precision control but it is not the same thing as a strategic victory. Iran before the war controlled 4 percent of the world’s oil. Twenty-six days later they control 20 percent of the world’s oil.”

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute pointed out this week, Denmark charged transit fees for 400 years for vessels to pass through the Øresund Strait into and out of the Baltic. Panama, Egypt and Turkey all charge transit fees.

The countries who played the starring supporting roles in the genocide in Gaza — Germany, UK, Australia — and supported Israel and America in their rampages across the Middle East for decades may — if they are lucky — get access to the Gulf again but may have to pay a heavy price for their role in the destruction of the lives of tens of millions of people.

NZ awaits eventual negotiations
The energy security of a minor henchman like New Zealand will have to await eventual negotiations between its major suppliers — South Korea and Singapore — and Iran.

Bloodied but as yet unbowed, Iran knows it can — and must — rise like the Phoenix from the ashes.

In the Iranian version of the Phoenix tradition — reaching back thousands of years —  the Phoenix (Simurgh in Farsi) must face death and destruction before being reborn and revitalised.

The Simurgh is so ancient it possesses the wisdom of the ages: in other words it knows how to survive calamities that would consume others. This is called civilisational resilience and it is baked into the DNA of the Iranian people.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published on his Solidarity blog.

Mr Trump, may I have a word?

Bad enough for you to insist — in the face of all evidence to the contrary — that you “won” the 2020 election.

But it’s another thing for you to pretend — in the face of mounting deaths and injuries, ballooning expenses, and rising prices — that you won, or are winning, the war with Iran you began on February 28.

“Let me say, we’ve won,” you told a rally in Kentucky on March 11.

• READ MORE: US ‘hasn’t even started’ attacks on Iran’s infrastructure, Trump warns
• US bombing targets bridges and Pasteur Institute – ‘symbols of Iran’s scientific strength’, says spokeswoman
• ‘No kings’: What Americans can learn from other nonviolent civil activism movements
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

“I think we’ve won,” you said on the White House South Lawn on March 20.

“We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” you said in the Oval Office on March 24.

“We are winning so big,” you told a fundraising dinner on March 25.

“We’ve had regime change,” you told reporters just a few days ago. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” Iran has now moved onto its “third regime,” and American negotiators are now speaking to “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable,” you said.

You’re making this up
You’re making all this up. In fact, you’re losing your war. And so is America and much of the rest of the world.

After a month, your war has already cost 13 American lives, cost American taxpayers more than US$30 billion, cost American consumers at least a dollar more per gallon of gas than they paid a month ago, pushed up food prices and mortgage rates, and pushed down the value of 401(k) retirement plans.

It’s mangled supply chains for industries that rely on items such as fertiliser to grow food or helium to make computer chips. It’s also wreaked havoc across the Middle East with at least 1574 civilians killed in Iran, including 236 children, and at least 50 killed in Iran’s attacks on other Gulf nations.

You assumed Iran would give up its nuclear programme. Wrong. After more than a month of bombing by the United States and Israel, you’ve most likely stiffened the regime’s resolve to produce a nuclear weapon.

In this respect, too, America is worse off — more endangered than we were in 2018 before you withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by former President Barack Obama. In that deal, Iran agreed to restrict its nuclear programme — reducing uranium stockpiles by 98 percent and capping enrichment at 3.67 percent, and allowing inspections — in exchange for relief from UN, EU, and US nuclear-related sanctions.

Iran now holds a stockpile of approximately 970 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60 percent purity, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. That’s close to weapons-grade. No one knows where it’s stored.

You thought winning this war would be as easy as abducting Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and setting up a puppet regime there. Wrong again. The old ayatollah is gone, but the new one and his regime are even more radical and hard line.

Embraced asymmetric warfare
You assumed America’s military might would weaken Iran’s military capacity. Wrong. They’ve embraced asymmetric warfare — using cheap drones and missiles and blocking the Strait of Hormuz — rather than take on America’s and Israel’s superior forces directly.

You thought the regime would soon cave. Wrong. It’s been over a month and they’re the ones playing the waiting game. They think they can withstand the mounting political and economic pressures better and longer than you and America can. They may be correct.

Reportedly, you’ve told aides you’re now willing to end the war even if Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe this is your best option at this point. But it will allow Iran to decide in the future how much oil gets through and for whom, and could cause the economic damage to the US to grow exponentially worse.

Mr Trump, do you really believe you won this war? Do you really believe America is better off than it was when you began the war?

Maybe the people around you are telling you that you’ve won the war and we’re better off because you punish the bearers of bad news and reward those who tell you what you want to hear. Presumably you’re hearing the same fictionalised good news from Republicans in Congress, from sycophantic leaders abroad, from other assorted lackeys and suck-ups.

Or maybe you think that if you can convince enough people that you won and we’re better off, you will have won and America will be better off. Because for you it’s always about public perceptions of reality rather than reality itself.

No truth, only belief
Everything depends on hype, spin, exaggeration, and outright lies. For you there’s no truth, only belief.

Or maybe you think that if you keep saying you won or are winning, and America has come out on top, your magical thinking will in fact come true.

But this isn’t a game, and you’re not a magician.

This is real blood and guts. Real pain. Real deaths and injuries. Real price increases at the gas pump. Real hardships for real people — in America, in the Middle East, and elsewhere.

You can’t pretend, sir. This isn’t reality television. This is for real. And the reality is Americans are worse off now and less secure than we were when you started this.

Robert Reich is an American professor, writer, former Secretary of Labour, and author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. He is also co-founder of Inequality Media. This commentary was originally published on his Facebook page and is republished under Creative Commons.

One day in October 2023 I was walking down the supermarket aisle when I saw greenwashing in plain sight.

Fonterra’s Anchor butter was sitting in the chiller with a prominent claim on the packaging that it was Grass Fed.

I knew that Fonterra cows were fed on millions of tonnes of palm kernel. So I decided to do something about it. And today we finally won that battle.

• READ MORE: Fonterra settles activists’ misleading packaging lawsuit for ‘100 percent NZ grass-fed’ claims

Today, after Greenpeace sued Fonterra under the Fair Trading Act, Fonterra has published a statement admitting its “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” claim breached section 9 of the Act.

Section 9 makes it illegal to “engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.” Fonterra has undertaken to not use this label again.

Thus Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest company, a multinational with $26 billion a year in turnover, was today forced to admit it has been deceiving its customers about a key claim it makes about its products — “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”.

Fonterra’s deception
While Fonterra was telling its customers that its Anchor brand butter was “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”, they were telling their milk suppliers that they could feed their dairy cows up to 3kg of palm kernel every day.

That works out at around 20 percent of all the food that a dairy cow eats. In practice dairy producers are probably on average providing about 6 percent to 8 percent of a New Zealand dairy cow’s diet from palm kernel, though it could be up to 20 percent in individual cases.

Palm kernel is one of the products of the palm industry in Malaysia and Indonesia — yes, the same palm industry that is destroying the last of the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests.

A million tonne deception
So on the one hand Fonterra was telling New Zealanders that they should buy Fonterra products because they are natural, 100 percent from New Zealand grass, while at the same time it was giving the green light to its milk suppliers to feed dairy cattle palm kernel from offshore.

And not just a little bit, I mean millions of tonnes of palm kernel.

In fact, Fonterra’s milk suppliers are using so much palm kernel that New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of palm kernel, at around two million tonnes per year, most of which is fed to dairy cattle.

During the period when Fonterra used the “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” label (they state from December 2023 to April 2025), New Zealand imported around three million tonnes of palm kernel, at a cost of around $800 million. Of this, around two and a quarter million tonnes went to Fonterra suppliers.

So not only was Fonterra deceiving their customers that their butter was “100% New Zealand Grass Fed”, but they were doing it on a massive scale. 

It looked like a huge lie in plain sight by New Zealand’s largest company. Someone had to do something.

Off to the Commerce Commission
So standing in the chiller aisle of the supermarket I had an idea — I should complain to the Commerce Commission, as it was a breach of the Fair Trading Act. It was deceptive and misleading advertising.

The Commerce Commission is responsible for the Fair Trading Act so surely they would care that New Zealand’s largest company was misleading millions of New Zealanders about a key claim of their products.

So I sent off my complaint in November 2023, received an automated acknowledgement, and then I waited. And waited.

Finally in June 2024 I chased them up and in July 2024 managed to get a zoom meeting with the relevant Commission investigator. The investigator explained that they had done some kind of investigation and had connected with Fonterra but they were planning to take zero enforcement action. Nothing.

So eight months after my original complaint, with zero effort by the Commerce Commission to contact me, I discovered they planned to do nothing about it.

I was pretty annoyed so I decided to make an Official Information Act (OIA) request to the Commerce Commission to find out what they had done.

Commission wrote Fonterra a letter, Fonterra carried on
And this is where it starts to get pretty interesting. The OIA showed that Commerce Commission investigators had actually done some investigating. Moreover, they had concluded that the label was likely to mislead consumers.

The Commerce Commission wrote to Fonterra in March 2024 stating that the label “may lead consumers to form an overall impression that the cow’s diet comprises of [sic] 100% grass… A reasonable consumer… may not … be aware that up to 8% of a cow’s diet may consist of supplemental non-grass feed… the use of PKE may not be clear to a reasonable consumer.”

If the Commerce Commission found the label was misleading, hence in breach of the Fair Trading Act, what would they do?

The Commission letter to Fonterra stated that “we do not intend to further investigate the complaint made against you at this time”.

So… the Commission wrote them the letter, and nothing else.

Fonterra received the Commerce Commission letter in March 2024 giving the commission’s opinion that the label was likely to be misleading but stating that the commission would take no further action.

And what did Fonterra do? Fonterra just kept using the label.

Greenpeace takes legal action against Fonterra
In late September 2024, we had had enough of the greenwashing by Fonterra and the failure of the Commerce Commission to take action and we initiated legal action ourselves.

Aside from the deceptive advertising issue, Greenpeace has campaigned on palm kernel for years. Palm kernel is driving tropical rainforest destruction in Southeast Asia as well as providing the feed for intensive dairy agribusiness in New Zealand, which is polluting fresh water and producing climate emissions.

We want the dairy industry to cut out palm kernel, and we want New Zealand consumers to know that Fonterra’s dairy products are driving rainforest destruction.

We sued them under the Fair Trading Act, doing the work that the Commerce Commission had failed to do.

This is no small matter for a New Zealand NGO to take on a $26 billion a year multinational corporation. Fonterra employed the law firm Chapman Tripp against us, the biggest law firm in the country.

If we were to lose the case and have costs awarded against us, it could have been disastrous, as both sides knew.

Fonterra stops using the deceptive label
And guess what? In April 2025, six months after we lodged our legal action, Fonterra quietly stopped using the deceptive and misleading “100% New Zealand Grass Fed” label.

And then finally in March 2026, as the court hearing date approached, Fonterra agreed to an out of court settlement in which they admitted they had breached section 9 of the Fair Trading Act by engaging in deceptive and misleading advertising. And they agreed not to use the label again.

We finally made Fonterra admit that they were using tonnes of palm kernel and that their milk is most certainly not 100 percent New Zealand Grass Fed.

Fonterra has a choice about how its milk is produced. It chooses to accept milk produced with palm kernel, chooses to accept destroying rainforests, killing orangutans and birds of paradise.

Multinational corporations are just machines for making money – we need to regulate them
Fonterra deliberately chose to use that misleading label back in December 2023. Presumably they did this to sell more of their products, to maximise profits.

Fonterra chose to keep using the label even after the Commerce Commission told them they thought it was likely to mislead consumers. It was only when Greenpeace took legal action against them that they were forced to change.

Fonterra spouts a lot of nonsense about how it cares for the environment or New Zealanders or whatever. But they are just a machine for making money for their shareholders. The practical benefit of all the corporate talk about “caring” is to avoid proper government regulation.

If we want to align the activities of multinational corporations with society’s values then we have to regulate them, as they will not do it themselves. By design, large corporations do not have “values”. They are just machines for making money, and whether they make money by destroying nature, or not, only depends on the laws under which they operate and whether those laws are enforced.

The Commerce Commission let the biggest corporation in the country get away with deceiving consumers – a deception that was millions of tonnes in size and repeated weekly to every New Zealander who walked down a supermarket aisle. And so that corporation just carried on doing it.

Greenpeace stood up and we won. But it shouldn’t have been up to us.

The role of the government is to act in our collective interest by regulating corporations, not only to make sure they don’t deceive consumers, but to protect a stable climate, to protect the biodiversity of our planet, and indeed to protect life on Earth.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

• Petition: Stop Fonterra using Palm Kernel

US President Donald Trump has been obsessed with seizing Iran’s Kharg Island for more than 35 years — way before he became a politician. In 1990, he wrote in an American newspaper that the United States should seize Kharg.

Trump thinks that by seizing Kharg, he would get hold of Iranian oil, which he has admitted he wants badly. Either he is deliberately misleading the world or he is not well informed.

Kharg is nothing more than a loading terminal. It is a small island, only about 90 sq km in size, some 28 km from the Iranian mainland.

• READ MORE: Trump says war could end in ‘two to three weeks’ — Iran’s Araghchi confirms no negotiations
• Will China join Pakistan-led efforts to mediate US-Iran peace?
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

It’s main advantage is that it is surrounded by very deep waters which allows what are known as Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) to come alongside and load huge quantities of crude oil. A VLCC can easily load up to 2 million barrels of crude.

At today’s price of US$116 per barrel, the value of the cargo would exceed $232 million.

Kharg itself is not an oilfield. It does not produce crude. Every drop of oil which is stored in its many storage tanks are piped there from the mainland through underwater pipes.

All the Iranian oil fields are on the mainland. Now that the Iranians have known well in advance that Trump might seize the island, do you know what they will do? They will turn off the spigot.

No more oil flow
No more oil will flow from the mainland to the island. What oil there is stored in the tanks on the island would have been loaded onto vessels which would have departed Kharg.

I am willing to put a wager that if the Americans seize the island, they will not find any oil. Maybe there will be some residue left in the tanks but the amounts would be so miniscule that in law it would be known as de minimis.

Trump can seize the island and I am sure the Iranians will allow him to do so. But what will happen after that?

The marines and the paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division will be slaughtered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). I pity the American mothers and wives who will be receiving the bodies of their sons and husbands.

Iranian missiles and drones will descend on the American troops like fire and brimstone. There is absolutely no way the Americans can hold the island. The Iranians know this and have dared the Americans to come because they know that it is an invitation to hell for the enemy.

The trouble with the Americans is hubris. They think the rest of the world can easily be walked over by their unbeatable marines and other elite troops.

Napoleon too thought that his Old Guards or Imperial Guards were invincible until they came up against the British Grenadier, Coldstream and Scots Guards at Waterloo. And for the first time ever in the Napoleonic Wars, the agonising cry from the French generals of “En arriere!“ meaning “backward” or “retreat” was heard in the ranks of this legendary unit.

Best trained, fanatical
When the Americans face the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, whether at Kharg or Hormuz, they will be coming up against some of the best trained and fanatical soldiers in the world, who are equipped to the hilt with modern weaponry.

All their generals are veterans of the bloody 8 year Iran-Iraq war. If there are soldiers who know what war is, it is the IRGC.

And to me it is the height of absurdity for the Americans to think that they can accomplish their missions with only about 17,000 ground troops.

I think the scale of the slaughter is going to be gut-wrenching and awful. It will be the modern day equivalent of the battle of Cannae where Hannibal destroyed the entire Roman army, killing 80,000 enemy soldiers in a single day and taking another 10,000 as prisoners.

In 1980, America was humiliated when their military helicopters floundered in the failed Operation Eagle Claw rescue mission to extract the embassy hostages. Nearly half a century later, I fear America will again be humiliated in Iran.

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.

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.

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• 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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he started naming names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convenient timing. Every single time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Alex Taylor (@AlexTaylorNews) March 27, 2026

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 reepublished 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.

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“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

COMMENTARY: By Eman Hillis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vanuatu Daily Post is deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Dan McGarry, our former media director. McGarry was a fearless investigative journalist, photographer, and software professional who made a lasting contribution to the development of the Daily Post.

He managed media content across the company’s publications, website, and social media platforms, while also shaping the wider media landscape in Vanuatu.

Before formally joining the organisation in 2015, he wrote regular columns under the pseudonym Graham Crumb.

• READ MORE: ‘He will never be replaced’ – tributes flow for ‘fearless’ Vanuatu journalist Dan McGarry
• OCCRP mourns the loss of Dan McGarry, pioneering Pacific editor and investigative journalist
• Dan McGarry’s articles on Asia Pacific Report

Prior to joining the Daily Post, McGarry was part of the Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP), an independent, non-profit, regionally focused think tank based in Port Vila. He also worked with Computer Network Services (CNS) as technical manager during its early years.

Reports indicate that McGarry, 62, fell ill following a trip to Papua New Guinea earlier this month and was evacuated to Brisbane.

He faced complications during recovery and remained in critical care in recent weeks. At the time of his passing, McGarry was serving as Pacific editor for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

McGarry was a leading voice in Pacific journalism, driven by a strong sense of justice and commitment to the public good.

He is survived by his wife and children. His passing leaves a profound gap in the media community.

The Vanuatu Daily Post extends its heartfelt condolences to his family during this difficult time and stands with them in mourning this loss.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post.

The actions of the Trump administration and its AIPAC-Israeli donors have reached new levels of immorality, illegality and unprecedented venality.

It is almost universally accepted that the US-Israel attack on Iran had no justification under international law: it was simply a war of aggression and thus the commission of perhaps the most serious crime under international law, precisely what the UN was set up to prevent.

Then we have the conduct of the war by the US and Israel, each pursuing its own agenda but completely lacking any coherent strategy.

• READ MORE: Araghchi says no talks with US as Trump vows to ‘hit harder’
  
• Other Kellie Tranter articles

From day one of the attack they have committed war crime after war crime, most recently in bombing civilian targets and now civilian infrastructure. The current escalation flowing from the attack near an Iranian nuclear power plant and on Iran’s electrical power grid demonstrates this and demonstrates equally clearly Iran’s current strategic and tactical advantages.

While all this is happening the US Empire is declining rapidly and the rogue state of Israel is experiencing in its own territory a taste of the death, injury and destruction that inevitably follows any war, yet they still both continue to escalate and to widen the war.

Now it emerges in the US that analyses of market activity including especially oil trades demonstrate a very high probability of massive insider trading that can only come from within the Trump White House coterie.

For example, market reaction to Trump’s Monday Truth Social post about having discussions with the Iranians caused the S&P market cap to rise by about two trillion dollars; the later Iranian announcement there were no discussions caused it to drop by about one trillion dollars and those market movements were anticipated by traders who made trades, literally last minute, to the value of about $500 million.

There have been similar shenanigans with the trade in oil, that market being highly sensitive to information about the likely future course of the war. Trump insiders know when a new policy tweet will be issued and what it will say.

And incredibly, the Epstein cabal play these games with human lives without compunction while grasping for unearned riches.

Innocent civilians of all ages are being slaughtered, countries are being physically and financially decimated and the entire world is spiralling into a deepening energy vortex with inevitably disastrous consequences, all while the actually crucial diplomatic and military decisions with profound geopolitical consequences are made by ignorant, incompetent, amoral, avaricious zealots pursuing immediate self-interest at the expense of the future of their countries, of people all over the world and indeed of the entire globe.

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer, researcher, and human rights advocate. This commentary was first published on her X account where she tweets from @KellieTranter

The legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific is unfinished business. From the 1997 disappearance of journalist Jean-Pascal Couraud to the 2025 return of the Rainbow Warrior, these stories are part of a continuous struggle for justice.

In the Pacific, the “Atomic Age” and the climate crisis are not competing issues, they are the same fight for habitability and truth. To face our future, we must first address the lingering shadows of the past.

In “French” Polynesia, there are concerns about the mysterious fate of former anti-nuclear investigative journalist Jean-Pascal Couraud, known as “JPK” (his byline),  who was editor of the now closed Les Nouvelles de Tahiti newspaper.

Early in 2015, a judge upheld prosecution against three men accused of a kidnapping that led his death in Tahiti in 1997.

More than a decade earlier, JK’s family lodged an allegation of murder with the police following claims that he had been assassinated by a (now disbanded) local presidential militia. An investigating commission had alleged that three men, Rere Puputauki, Tino Mara and Tutu Manate, had abducted JK and dumped his body at sea.

• READ MORE: Other Eyes of Fire reports
• The Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years on: re-energising for global peace
• Eyes of Fire website (Little Island Press)

Twenty two years later, the family are still waiting for justice, and fed up with France’s “investigation”. When the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985 is set against its broader political context in the Pacific, it can be seen that this event was much more than the dramatic, isolated episode against the Greenpeace flagship as portrayed by most New Zealand media.

An “Eyes of Fire” video project in 2015, which included more than 40 student journalists, also demonstrated the importance of a continuing interpretation of these events for the future of Aotearoa New Zealand and its citizens. The students looked back at the past, but were asking questions relevant to the present and future when they interrogated me and my Greenpeace colleagues involved in the Rongelap voyage.

My own baptism in French nuclear arrogance and perfidy was thanks to the late Swedish activist, researcher, and writer Bengt Danielsson, who was awarded the 1991 Right Livelihood Award for “exposing the tragic results… of French colonialism”. He and his wife Marie-Thérèse Danielsson wrote the classic and chilling books Moruroa, Mon Amour and Poisoned Reign.

In 2021, a French investigation team published a book and website that introduced new revelations about the nuclear testing programme and its health and environmental harm inflicted on Tahitians. The book, Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie, by Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, and the associated website Moruroa Files, were a forensic analysis of about 2,000 French government documents declassified in 2013.

Consistently lied about the tests
According to former Auckland University of Technology scholar Ena Manuireva, who was born in Mangareva (an atoll near the French nuclear testing sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa), these publications confirmed what Tahitian people already knew: “That since 1966, the French government has consistently lied about and concealed the deadly consequences of their nuclear tests, which they now seem to acknowledge, to the health of the populations and their environment.”

Following the third test after French nuclear bombs began in the Pacific, on 7 September 1966, local Tahitian lawmaker John Teariki challenged then French president Charles de Gaulle by saying: “No government has ever had the honesty or the cynical frankness to admit that its nuclear tests might be dangerous. No government has ever hesitated to make other peoples — preferably small, defenseless ones — bear the burden.”

“May you, Mr President, take back your troops, your bombs, and your planes.”

De Gaulle ignored the advice. And it took another 30 years and 190 further tests before France stopped its ruthless nuclear pollution in the Pacific.

France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) was reported in early 2025 to have spent 90,000 euros in a big public relations campaign in a vain attempt to discredit the research in Toxique and the Moruroa Files, according to documents obtained by the investigative outlet Disclose.

The CEA published 5000 copies of its booklet, titled ‘Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences’ and distributed them across Oceania.

The Rainbow Warrior bombing, with the death of photographer Fernando Pereira, was a terrible tragedy. But a greater tragedy remains in the horrendous legacy of Pacific nuclear testing for the people of Rongelap, the Marshall Islands and “French” Polynesia; associated military oppression in Kanaky New Caledonia; and lingering secrecy.

New Zealand and the PIF states should now require full investigation of nuclear testing in French Polynesia and seek a more robust compensation programme than currently exists. New Zealand and the PIF states also need to take a less ambiguous position on decolonisation in the Pacific, give greater priority to that issue and seek a “re-energising” of the activities of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation.

This is especially important in relation to “French” Polynesia, Kanaky New Caledonia and the end of the Bougainville transitional political autonomy period with a unilateral declaration of independence slated for 1 September 2027.

Decolonisation is also a critical issue that has a bearing on New Zealand’s relations with Indonesia, particularly over the six Melanesian provinces that make up the region known in the Pacific as “West Papua” and Indonesia’s growing politically motivated role in the region over climate change aid.

A massive new transmigration programme under current President Prabowo Subianto is taking place at the same time as Jakarta’s “ecocidal” deforestation regime intensifies in the Melanesian region with the destruction of millions of hectares of tropical rainforest.

“The wealth of West Papua — gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine. Palm oil from Merauke — has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta,” says a West Papuan leader, Benny Wenda.

Taking the lead
It is critically important that New Zealand and the PIF states take a lead from the Melanesian Spearhead Group — at least those states other than Fiji and Papua New Guinea, which have both been co-opted by Indonesian bribery through economic aid.

They should take a more pro-active stance on West Papuan human rights and socio-political development, with a view to encouraging a process of political self-determination and a new, more credible United Nations supervised vote replacing the 1968 “Act of No Choice”.

With regard to climate change issues, it is essential to address the lack of an officially recognised category for “climate refugee” under international law. It is also important to seek an international framework, convention, protocol and specific guidelines that can provide protection and assistance for people crossing international borders because of climate change.

The existing rights guaranteed refugees — specifically the right to international humanitarian assistance and the right of return — must be extended to “climate refugees” or climate migrants.

This issue should be acted on systematically and with a practical vision by the PIF with the Australian and New Zealand governments. Australia and New Zealand need to respond to Pacific Island States’ (PIS) concerns over climate change and global warming with a greater sense of urgency and resolve.

Regional and country specific climate change plans and policies are needed to deal with large numbers of Pacific refugees or climate-forced migrants, in the event of worsening climate-change scenarios in the future.

This is especially important for New Zealand, as a country with a significant Pacific population (442,632 — 8.9 percent, 2023 NZ Census) with island communities well integrated into the national infrastructure and as a country that is well placed to welcome more Pacific Islanders.

In April 2025, the New Zealand government announced plans to double defence spending as a share of GDP over the next eight years under its long-awaited Defence Capability Plan.

Trump-inspired global arms race
However, the priority appeared to be New Zealand joining a new Donald Trump-inspired global arms race while the country faced no threat, at the expense of the climate crisis, nuclear free and Pacific peace-making capacity that have forged the country’s global reputation.

Speculation was also rife about the possibility of New Zealand joining a second tier of the controversial AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the US, which would raise geopolitical tensions with little benefit for the Pacific region.

As Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson has remarked, the people of Rongelap changed the course of history for Pacific nuclear justice by taking control of their destiny with the help of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior.

However, the relocation of the islanders four decades ago has revealed that the legacy of nuclear tests remains unfinished business.

“In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament,” says former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.

“New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

“On the fateful last voyage,” reflects Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, “the crew of the Rainbow Warrior, look at us in black and white through the lens of time, and lay down the wero — the challenge. They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific.

“Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?’

To Ngāti Kura kaumatua Dover Samuels, the Rainbow Warrior was “probably the biggest battleship that ever traversed the oceans of the world. But she wasn’t armed with guns, she was armed with peace”.

An edited extract from the final chapter of New Zealand journalist Dr David Robie’s recent book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing. He sailed with the Greenpeace crew to Rongelap Atoll for the evacuation of the nuclear health-damaged community and remained on board for 11 weeks. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa.

• David is speaking about the Rainbow Warrior and nuclear justice tomorrow, 24 March 2026, at Grey Lynn Library, 6-8pm, as part of EcoFest.