COMMENTARY: By Cathy Peters

In a move that’s been largely unreported in Australia and New Zealand, Hamas announced earlier this week that it would dissolve its governing Emergency Committee with the resignation of its acting leader.

This move has been recognised as an attempt to hasten the transfer of administrative authority to the Trump-appointed Board of Peace’s National Committee for the Management of Gaza (NCAG), a body of Palestinian technocrats, assembled and waiting in Cairo to manage public administration, security, recovery and transition throughout the Gaza Strip as part of the agreed ceasefire plan.

However, despite being established in January this year, the NCAG has not yet been given access to enter Gaza by the Board of Peace or Israel.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism Envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS Israel bias, wants to vet media
• Other Gaza “ceasefire” reports

Trump’s controversial Board of Peace predictably dismissed the Hamas move, stating that the NCAG is not yet in a position to take on this role while Hamas retains control of weapons. Hamas maintains that while Israel is still killing Palestinians, it will not disarm.

Nine months since the Gaza ceasefire and Trump’s 20-point peace plan of October 2025, conditions throughout the Strip have remained unlivable and deadly for Palestinians, with more than 1000 killed by Israeli forces and more than 3500 wounded.

Parents stay awake all night in their tents to stop rats feeding on their children.

The amount of humanitarian aid is far short of what is required, and there is a trickle of medical evacuations despite some 16,500 Palestinians needing urgent medical transfer out of Gaza.

A Board of Inaction
The UN Security Council supported the establishment of the Board of Peace in November last year, noting that it would be temporary and transitional, although Trump subsequently declared it would address other world conflicts beyond Gaza.

The composition of the Board of Peace Executive and the Gaza Executive Board includes a number of Trump’s leadership team, plus other Republican operatives, wealthy US businessmen and real estate magnates, as well as Tony Blair.

• Donald Trump – Chairman for life
• Marco Rubio – US Secretary of State
• Jared Kushner – US presidential advisor and son-in-law
• Steve Witkoff – US Special Envoy to the Middle East
• Tony Blair – Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• Marc Rowan – CEO of Apollo Global Management
• Ajay Banga – President of the World Bank Group
  

The Gaza Executive Board includes all of the above plus various international diplomats and intelligence officials and representatives from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE and more Republican government appointees, Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and former Trump campaign adviser, and Robert Gabriel, US Deputy National Security Advisor.

According to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803, this body has UN support to “set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until the Palestinian Authority has “satisfactorily reformed”. It also authorised the Board to deploy a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza; however, this has not occurred.

Israel has moved some of the anti-Hamas Palestinian militias it’s been arming and funding for three years now into the area it has occupied behind the yellow line. These various militias, led by factional gangs, drug lords and criminals, pose additional threats to Hamas disarming and the transition of power to a Palestinian-led reconstruction committee and the ultimate withdrawal of the IDF.

Yellow and Orange Lines

The Israeli-defined ceasefire Yellow Line, according to Israel’s legal NGO Gisha, pushes more than two million people into less than half of the Strip’s territory, exacerbating unbearable overcrowding that is harming public health, including outbreaks of disease and infestation of rats and other pests.

Israel’s seizure of such vast areas also prevents Gaza residents from returning to their homes and lands. Most of Gaza’s agricultural lands lie east of the Yellow Line, meaning they are within areas controlled by Israel. Continued denial of access for farmers to their lands prevents the rehabilitation of vital food sources.

From March 2025, Israel instituted the Orange Line, a line that delineates almost 48 percent of Gaza’s land mass where any international organisations are prohibited from moving without prior coordination with Israeli authorities. Gisha reports that this orange line is now a new border that has expanded the area that Israel now directly controls.

While negotiations have stalled for 9 months on the initial implementation of the ceasefire agreement, the IDF, following on from Netanyahu’s call in May, has now occupied almost 70 percent of Gaza, with the yellow cement perimeter markers defining an ever-shrinking area where 2.1 million war-wounded and dispossessed Palestinians are helplessly surviving.

Remote-controlled machine guns
Everyone in Gaza is constantly monitored by drones, and now occupying the eastern perimeter of this dystopian landscape are 23 massive military cranes equipped with remote-controlled machine guns and high-tech surveillance cameras inside the Israeli IDF-defined Yellow Line.

Gaza journalist Tamar Nahed posted this description of Israel’s latest killing apparatus,

“These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound … it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times.”

In the first week of July, the Board of Peace declared that there was no role for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, which is a continuation of the Israeli ban on this aid organisation, which has supported Palestinians with essential humanitarian and educational aid in Gaza since 1948.

This announcement negates the Charter of the United Nations, international law principles and fundamental human rights standards.

Shelters or camps?
Despite the Board’s apparent refusal to allow the Palestinian committee of bureaucrats (NCAG) into Gaza, the Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom just reported on plans aimed at relocating Palestinian residents into barbed wire fenced designated areas. This will allow the IDF to “deepen its grip on areas outside of the yellow line”.

“Surviving Palestinians will be herded into fenced ‘humanitarian shelters’ policed by foreign forces,” as reported by Israel Hayom on July 2.

Images of a camp that’s been described as a concentration camp have emerged in Tel Al-Sultan, an area near Rafah where a pilot project of “humanitarian shelters” will be established. Civilians will be channelled into Tel Al-Sultan, which was a densely populated area of Rafah from which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ordered to flee in April last year.

This image of stark, freshly flattened land surrounded by barbed wire fences and covered with masses of metal box shelters and no evidence of any permanent cement structures (as directed by Israel) appears to be a horrific precursor to

a very grim future for Palestinians in Gaza.

It recalls Israel Defence Minister Katz’s plan of a year ago of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where the goal was to screen people before they were allowed to enter to ensure they were not Hamas and then refuse any exits except to third countries.

Legal immunity
The Board of Peace convened in Cyprus at the end of June for 3 days to “reset” after “the Iran war has completely shifted the attention in the last several months,” according to an official source. It sought to address the funding shortfalls, logistical delays and security challenges.

One of the more controversial draft resolutions was the Board’s plan to grant legal immunity to its members, contractors, and security forces; therefore

shielding the whole enterprise from potential legal proceedings.

As reported widely, human rights lawyers are highly critical of this proposal, including Palestinian American lawyer and academic, Noura Erakat: “They are basically saying there’s no external oversight, including applicable international law regarding occupation. It’s creating a legal system unto itself.”

At the same time, the IDF has reportedly called for fighting to resume as senior officers in the IDF claim that Hamas’ military wing is rebuilding.

Hamas has maintained that it will only disarm under the auspices of the Palestinian NCAG and when Phase 1 of the ceasefire agreement is achieved, which includes the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed positions, full implementation of humanitarian measures and a complete end to Israel’s military attacks.

The nightmare on the ground in Gaza for Palestinians continues. The machinations of Trump’s Board of Peace appear to be

stymying any chance for genuine reconstruction of Gaza

led by Palestinians for Palestinians. The available evidence at this point is that the 1000-day-plus Israeli genocide in Gaza continues apace behind the veneer of Trump’s “peace” plan and the continuing indifference of world powers

On October 9, 2023, just after the State of Israel began its ongoing genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, Sarah Cotte, a French-Ethiopian student at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London gave a speech at a rally organised by the SOAS Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society.

Her speech was “expressing support for the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against occupation and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state”, as the Defend the SOAS 2 website explains.

The speech was filmed on a phone and shared online, and, in response, the vicious and vindictive pro-Israeli lobbying group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), scouring the internet for dissent, shared the video and tagged the Metropolitan Police.

• READ MORE: How were the Filton 4 sentenced for terrorism when they weren’t convicted of terrorism?
• Other Palestine protest reports

This led, in January 2024, to Sarah being arrested in a dawn raid on her home, on the basis that she had committed a crime under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for “inviting support for a proscribed organisation”, which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

It took another 13 months for the Metropolitan Police to formally charge Sarah, and, on the same day, another SOAS student was also arrested on suspicion of an offence under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, although they have not been charged.

Together, however, they are known as “the SOAS 2″.

On June 22, two years and nine months since Sarah made her speech, her trial began at the Old Bailey, with the prosecution alleging that her speech on October 9, 2023 “intentionally or recklessly” encouraged support for Hamas.

Disgraceful broadened proscription
Crucially, although the military wing of Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government in 2001 (ignoring the fact that it is a legitimate resistance movement to illegal occupation and oppression), it was not until December 2021 that then-foreign secretary Priti Patel, an ardent Zionist, broadened the proscription to encompass the whole of Hamas, which, disgracefully, enabled an entire civilian government, and everyone who worked for it, to be regarded as terrorists.

In her closing remarks after the week-long trial, the defence barrister, Margo Munro Kerr, “reminded the jury that Ms Cotte’s speech was completely legal and that protecting solidarity with Palestine is ‘an absolute necessity in a democratic society’”, as the Morning Star described it.

A spokesperson for Defend the SOAS 2 told the newspaper, “This trial has never been about justice; it is about intimidation. The Terrorism Act 2000 is being deployed by a Zionist-supporting Labour government precisely as it was intended: to systematically criminalise anti-imperialists and silence solidarity with liberation movements.

“While Israeli war criminals enter Britain fresh from committing genocide in Gaza without a glance from the police, a young woman is dragged through the courts for speaking the truth.

“Sarah did not break under the prosecution’s pressure, and neither will we.”

On July 8, after failing to reach a verdict, the jury was dismissed, and a retrial was scheduled for September 14.

Sarah told Socialist Worker that, as the newspaper described it, her trial was “part of a broader crackdown on the Palestine movement and our civil liberties”.

‘Repressing’ Palestine movement
As she described it, “The state has no choice but to repress the Palestine movement”, because it “has politicised so many young people in the past two years.”

As the Morning Star added, she “explained the state has a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it is targeting direct actionists such as the Filton 25 activists and the Brize Norton 6, but it is also trying to criminalise activists for speaking out against genocide.”

Speaking outside the court, Sarah told supporters, “We know that we are on the side of justice. We are on the side of liberation. We are on the side of people who fight back, people who strive for a better world, people who want to build a different system.

“The British state is on the side of terrorism, it’s on the side of apartheid, it’s on the side of colonialism, it’s on the side of imperialism.”

As with the case of Moog 4 — activists facing a retrial for direct action against an arms factory supplying weapons for the genocide, after the jury failed to reach a verdict — and as happened most prominently with the Filton 6, activists who took direct action against an Elbit Systems facility in Bristol in August 2024, and were acquitted of the main charge against them in February this year, the government, with the support of complicit lawyers and judges, refuses to accept defeat.

When jurors are unable to convict, or choose not to, on the basis of their consciences, the government keeps hammering away until it gets the result that it wants; in the case of the Filton 6, notoriously, that meant securing a conviction by the jury on lesser charges at the retrial, followed by the judge grafting a “terrorism connection” onto their conviction at the sentencing phase.

This is not justice, and it is to be hoped that it will backfire, with jurors becoming ever more wary of convicting defendants at all, as they recognise that they are not being allowed to exercise their fundamental rights to take decisions based on the merits of the cases before them, but are being manipulated in a toxic politically-biased charade, which is about defending a foreign country committing a genocide, and defending the rights of its arms companies to contribute to, and profit from that genocide.

The activists have true justice on their side; their opponents have only complicity in the most monstrous crimes of our lifetimes.

George Speight — a former coup frontman in Fiji — is calling on the perpetrators of the country’s past political upheavals to confess.

The ex-convict also described the idea of a common identity for the country’s citizens as “flawed” and said iTaukei (Indigenous) views must not be ignored.

Speight made the comments in a submission to Fiji’s Constitutional Review Commission this week, after spending 24 years in a maximum-security jail for treason following the racist 2000 coup.

• READ MORE:  Fiji 2000 coup leader George Speight granted presidential pardon
• Fiji’s Jo Nata reflects on the 2000 coup: ‘We let the racism genie out of the bottle’
• Coup coup land: the press and the putsch in Fiji — David Robie
• FIJI: I was just PR consultant — Jo Nata
• USP 2000 coup student journalism archive
• Other George Speight coup reports

During his submission to the government-backed panel on Thursday, he slammed the 2013 Constitution and said the immunity provision should be removed.

“The clause is unfair… If you want redemption, you have to confess,” he said, adding that Fiji could not achieve genuine reconciliation without first acknowledging past wrongdoing.

Quoting from Proverbs, he said those who admitted their crimes would find mercy, while those who tried to hide would never prosper.

“I have served my time and I don’t feel any malice towards anyone,” he said.

Sweeping immunity
The sweeping immunity provisions have protected those involved in past military and political coups from criminal prosecution and civil liability.

Fiji has been rocked by four coups since gaining independence in 1970. The first two, in May and September 1987, were led by then-military lieutenant-colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who is the current prime minister.

In 1999, Mahendra Chaudhry was sworn in as the country’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister, but the Labour Party leader’s election stoked racial tension in Fiji.

A year later, Speight led rebel soldiers from the military’s Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) Unit in an armed takeover of the then-coalition government. Chaudhry and his government were held hostage for 56 days.

The failed businessman pleaded guilty to treason after the unsuccessful coup and received the death penalty, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

However, he was granted a presidential pardon and released from prison on 19 September 2024.

Indigenous views
Speight condemned the concept of a common name for the people, an issue that has sparked widespread debate in Fiji.

In April, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), the apex indigenous body in Fiji, told the Commission that the term “Fijian” should be exclusively reserved for the iTaukei (indigenous) population.

The GCC’s proposal prompted a backlash from political parties, civil society groups and human rights organisations across the country.

Chaudhry, still the Fiji Labour Party leader, told RNZ Pacific Waves at the time that the GCC’s call was “racially divisive”.

“We [the Labour Party] are opposed to that idea and we’ve made it very clear that there can be only one nationality in the nation,” the veteran politician said.

However, Speight told the commission the idea was fundamentally wrong.

“I understand the principle behind it, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it’s flawed. It makes people second-guess something so special and so unique and God-given, their ethnic identity, unless we fix the justice element,” he said.

“All of the different ethnic groups in our country can’t live together very long, because it’s an unfair society.”

‘Uniqueness encouraged’
“The Bill of Rights is great, it covers everybody, no problem. But each ethnic group has its desire to continue with its uniqueness, and it must be encouraged, but not at the expense of the greater good,” he said.

Speight also told the CRC that iTaukei views, including those of the iTaukei Land Trust Board, should not be ignored.

“Those voices have to be heard, the process of hearing those voices and accommodating the issues brought up must never and forever going forward be labelled as racist anymore because they’re not, with respect.”

“Because iTaukei, when they get up and speak, it has been a common practice to label it all as racist, and that’s not the case. No one should feel threatened, no one should feel edited, no one should feel uncertain, because level heads will prevail,” Speight said.

“Those that push the agenda that iTaukei issues are not good for the future of this country and should not be addressed specifically, I ask that they reconsider and work together with the iTaukei community.”

Speight also told the Commission that although the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a “necessary arm of the process of moving forward”, he had chosen not to appear before it.

‘Doesn’t have teeth’
“I just feel that it doesn’t have the teeth or the mandate to go all the way to actually fix things… until [the immunity clause is removed], truth and reconciliation in my mind is premature,” he said.

“I’m grateful to be here, grateful for the opportunity of the good lord in heaven, and I’m grateful to the government today, that saw fit to release me.”

The Rabuka-led coalition government wants to amend the 2013 Constitution before the upcoming general elections, having set up the independent commission in March to consult widely on the issue.

This story was first published on

A “lock out” incident in Honiara last year barring Pacific journalists from an Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese press conference is among several events “undercutting” media freedom that have led to a new campaign by the Australian journalists’ union MEAA.

The incident happened during the Pacific Islands Forum summit in the Solomon Islands in September 2025 and sparked widespread media condemnation.

Albanese’s political team barred local journalists reporting from Pacific outlets from the conference, only allowing Australian journalists access.

“As Prime Minister Albanese entered the room, the door was immediately locked,” reported the Solomon Star newspaper at the time. “Only journalists from Australia were granted access denying regional and local media outlets from participating or asking questions.”

Now this incident and others in Australia “undercutting press freedom and the public’s right to know by restricting access to and targeting journalists who they don’t like” has resulted in a pushback campaign from the MEAA.

The campaign brief with guidelines states:
There is a growing trend of politicians undercutting press freedom and the public’s right to know by restricting access to and targeting journalists who they don’t like.

In 2025, Anthony Albanese gave a press conference in the Solomon Islands. His team barred local journalists reporting from Pacific outlets from the conference, only allowing Australian journalists access.

In early 2026, One Nation candidate in the byelection for the Victorian state seat of Nepean, Darren Hercus, refused to speak to a reporter who works for the ABC due to disagreeing with the broadcaster’s coverage.

During the Farrer byelection in May, One Nation barred another ABC journalist from a press conference.

After threatening to defund the ABC and shut down the SBS, Pauline Hanson verbally abused Guardian Australia journalist Sarah Martin on several occasions including on a live broadcast of her National Press Club address.

Local Councils, Hawkesbury City Council in NSW and Mornington Peninsula Shire Council in Victoria have declared blacklists on journalists working for local papers The Hawkesbury Gazette and Somerville Times & Peninsula Local. This act, which has gone largely unchallenged, has left communities without the local council reporting and scrutiny they deserve and rely on.

It is up to us to hold the line
We talk a lot about the importance of freedom of the press to democracy and to the public’s right to know. We also talk about it as a workplace right for journalists to be able to safely do our jobs.

The truth is, no one will give us these rights or protect them on our behalf. Employers, politicians, and courts will always be susceptible to other interests and influences. It’s the responsibility and power of working journalists alone to protect press freedom and public interest journalism.

When one of us is attacked with impunity, it sets a new standard of behaviour that will have impacted us all. That is why we must work together to draw a line and collectively hold it.

How we can hold the line
When you go to a press conference for someone known to be hostile to press freedom:

Speak to your colleagues from other workplaces in the press pack about what threats might come your way and how you can have each other’s backs. Offer support and ask for it too.

When a colleague following a line of questioning is abused, threatened or stonewalled by someone seeking to avoid valid scrutiny:

Don’t let it slide.

Pick up their question and pursue it until it is answered.

Ask the spokesperson/talent why they are avoiding scrutiny on the topic.

Ask them why they think it is acceptable to abuse a journalist at work.

When colleagues are barred from press conferences:
Call for them to be let in.

Get agreement among the press pack to lower cameras and collectively turn your backs on the talent until they agree to basic press freedom principles.

If the group isn’t ready to do this action due to fear of employer retribution, call the barred journalist and facilitate their line of questioning. Debrief with the group about how we can build up worker strength to withstand employer and politician divide-and-conquer tactics.

After an incident occurs:
Debrief with affected colleagues around you.

Call your union delegate, organiser or MEAA Member Central.

If abuse or harassment has occurred, speak to the host or venue about it. Under Workplace Health and Safety legislation, many of these venues share an obligation to mitigate risks to the health and safety of workers and other people in the venue. In some jurisdictions, unions have a right to prosecute for breaches of these obligations.

Campaign republished from Australia’s Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance website.

Former US Vice-President Mike Pence wants Donald Trump to “finish the job” in the Strait of Hormuz.

After 130 days of war that failed to reopen it for a single day, a shipping lawyer must explain to the Pence who actually rules the Strait.

It isn’t CENTCOM. It is a committee room in London.

• READ MORE: US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Vessels transit Hormuz despite renewed fighting between US and Iran
• Other War on Iran reports

Mike Pence declared this week: “If the Iran deal is over, President Trump should unleash the Armed Forces of the United States to finish the job: destroy their nuclear and missile programmes, end support for terrorist proxies and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Finish the job. Consider the phrase. It implies the job was ever within America’s power to finish — that somewhere in the arsenals of the United States there exists a munition capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

There isn’t. There never was. The past 130 days have proven it beyond any argument, and the fact that Pence has not absorbed the lesson tells you how little the American political class understands about the war it started — and how catastrophically ill-advised Trump has been by the men around him.

What the bombs couldn’t do
Let us recall the record, because the record is merciless.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched their grand aerial campaign against Iran. Washington called it Operation Epic Fury. Iran answered by closing the Strait.

The United States then imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, struck hundreds of targets, and deployed the full theatrical repertoire of American power. Thirteen American service members came home in coffins. More than 7000 people died across the region.

And the Strait? The Strait remained closed.

Tanker traffic through the world’s most vital energy chokepoint collapsed by more than 90 percent. Some 360 vessels sat stranded on either side of the passage.

Eight of the world’s largest container lines abandoned the Gulf entirely and sent their ships around the Cape of Good Hope, as if Suez and Hormuz had never been cut, as if we had returned to the age of sail.

That is the “job” Pence wishes to finish. Four months of the most intensive American military operations since Iraq did not restore freedom of navigation for a single day. Only a negotiated settlement — the Islamabad Memorandum of June 17, brokered by Pakistan, not won by CENTCOM — briefly cracked the Strait open.

And when that truce collapsed this week, with Iran striking commercial vessels and Trump declaring the ceasefire over, the Strait slammed shut again within hours.

The bombs opened nothing. The diplomats opened it briefly. The bombs are now guaranteeing it stays closed. This is the arithmetic Pence cannot count.

The judge who actually rules the strait
Here is what Pence, and evidently Trump’s advisers, have never understood: the Strait of Hormuz is not governed from Washington, or even from Tehran. It is governed from London, from the unglamorous committee rooms of the marine insurance market.

I spent decades in international shipping law, across Iran, Indonesia, Ukraine and half the maritime world, and I can tell you that no force on earth moves a merchant vessel that its insurers have abandoned.

Every commercial ship afloat carries three layers of insurance. There is Hull and Machinery cover — H&M — insuring the vessel itself, an asset worth $100 million or more for a modern VLCC. There is Protection and Indemnity cover — P&I — insuring against third-party liabilities: pollution, crew death and injury, wreck removal, cargo claims.

And there is Cargo insurance, covering the value of the goods themselves — and a laden supertanker’s crude can today be worth nearly as much as the ship that carries it.

All three carry war risk exclusions. War, mines, drones, missiles — none of it is covered under standard terms. To sail into a zone of conflict, an owner must purchase separate War risk cover, and that cover is switched on and off by the Joint War Committee of the London market, which maintains the list of designated high-risk areas.

When the JWC lists an area, premiums explode, cover becomes voyage-by-voyage, renewable in seven-day windows, cancellable on notice.

When underwriters lose confidence entirely, cover simply evaporates — and a ship without insurance does not sail. Its lenders forbid it. Its charterers refuse it. Its flag state warns against it.

Now observe what actually happened in this war. Within 48 hours of the February strikes — before Iran had laid a single mine, before the IRGC had struck a single tanker — the war risk market had already shut the Strait. Insurers terminated existing policies. The Joint War Committee designated the entire Persian Gulf.

Premiums that stood at 0.25 percent of hull value surged past 1 percent, then to several percent — for a single transit. On a $150 million VLCC, that is millions of dollars per voyage, before the cargo is even insured.

Daily charter rates for supertankers quadrupled toward $800,000.

The insurance market closed the Strait before Iran’s navy did
The commercial shutdown preceded the physical blockade. That single fact demolishes Pence’s entire thesis. You cannot bomb your way to freedom of navigation, because freedom of navigation is not a military condition. It is a commercial one.

It exists when a Lloyd’s underwriter is willing to write a policy at a price a shipowner can bear. No B-2 strike has ever changed an actuarial table in the attacking power’s favour. Every strike makes the table worse.

The market never believed the peace
And here is the detail that should end this debate permanently. Even during the June truce — even after Trump stood at Versailles proclaiming “Ships of the World, start your engines” — the war risk designation never came off.

The Joint War Committee did not delist the Gulf. Premiums remained at multiples of their pre-war level. Underwriters kept writing cover voyage by voyage, week by week, ready to withdraw at the first drone.

The men who price risk for a living looked at Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding and rendered their verdict: they did not believe it. July 8 proved them right. The market understood what the White House did not — that a ceasefire built on deferred questions, contested toll clauses and mutual bad faith was a pause, not a peace.

Now, with the MOU dead, any prospect of the designation lifting is dead with it. The Strait’s status as a war zone is entrenched for the foreseeable future.

Mike Pence proposes to fix this with more air strikes. Understand what that means in practice: every American bomb that falls on Iran adds basis points to a war risk premium, extends the JWC’s listed area, and pushes more tonnage onto the long route around Africa.

Even if the United States Navy physically escorted every tanker — an operational fantasy in waters saturated with Iranian drones, missiles and mines — the underwriters would still price the corridor as a battlefield, because it would be one.

Washington already tacitly admitted this when it directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a $40 billion reinsurance backstop, turning the American taxpayer into the marine insurer of last resort. When your own government must insure the ships because the market will not, you have conceded that the market does not believe your military assurances.

There is no clearer confession of strategic failure.

The victory America threw way
The tragedy — and I use the word deliberately — is that America had its exit in March. In the first weeks of the war, Trump declared that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the Strait was open.

The obvious move, the move a Bismarck or a Nixon would have made, was to declare victory and walk away. Announce that the nuclear facilities lay in ruins, that the objective was achieved, and that the Strait of Hormuz — through which barely a trickle of America’s own oil passes — was henceforth the problem of those who actually depend on it: China, which draws over 40 percent of its seaborne crude through the passage, India, Japan, Korea, Europe.

Let Beijing negotiate with Tehran over tolls. Let Asia underwrite the convoys. America, the world’s largest oil producer, could have watched from across two oceans.

Instead, Washington chained its prestige to a waterway it does not need and cannot control, and handed Iran the greatest strategic gift imaginable: a permanent instrument of leverage over the global economy that costs Tehran almost nothing to wield.

Iran does not need to win a naval battle. It needs only to keep the actuaries nervous — a drone here, a mine there, a seized tanker when the mood takes it. Its Persian Gulf Strait Authority now sells passage to favoured nations at seven-figure fees, exercising precisely the sovereignty over the Strait that its negotiators promised it would never surrender.

The Strait, as Iran’s chief negotiator said plainly, will not return to pre-war conditions. He was telling the truth. Washington simply refused to hear it.

The lesson Pence will never learn
This is what the collapse of the old order looks like in practice — what I have called the Legitimacy Principle. American power can destroy, but it can no longer compel. It can level a nuclear facility, but it cannot make a Greek shipowner send a $150 million vessel and 25 souls through a minefield.

It can blockade Iranian ports, but it cannot force a Lloyd’s syndicate to write a policy it knows will lose money. The instruments that actually govern the world’s arteries — insurance markets, charter rates, the quiet risk calculus of men in London and Singapore and Piraeus — do not answer to CENTCOM.

Mike Pence looks at the Strait of Hormuz and sees a target list. A shipping lawyer looks at it and sees a war risk clause. The clause has beaten the target list for 130 days, and it will beat it for a 130 more.

“Finish the job” is not a strategy. It is the sound of a man who has learned nothing, advising a president who was told nothing, about a war that neither of them can win.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Flashback 41 years on: One year ago marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, Te Aniwaniwa Paterson wrote this article. Further reading: David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (Little Island Press). The late investigative journalist John Pilger wrote: “Eyes of Fire is a beautiful book and an anger-making book, a testament to the finest activism and the need always to ‘bear witness’ and stand up to criminal state power, as you did. I was reminded how pleased I was to use the rescue of the people of Rongelap in The Coming War on China [2016 documentary]. Reading your account moved me all over again.”

SPECIAL REPORT: By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News

Forty years ago today [10 July 1985], French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

• READ MORE: David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
• Review of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire: Nuclear – now climate change: New book on how great powers have plagued the Pacific — Lee Duffield
• Operation Exodus: The Rainbow Warrior’s last Pacific mission — E-Tangata
• Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On — Little Island Press microsite on the Rainbow Warrior
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

This article was first published on 10 July 2025 to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

Nuclear – now climate change: New book on how great powers have plagued the Pacific

“They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people.

There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” Trump said after bombing Iran yesterday and and again today — and threatening to tear up the MOU.

The pussy-grabbing “Leader of the Free World” has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilisations becoming daily occurrences.

What has largely been left unreported after Trump’s outburst at the NATO Summit in Ankara is the elegant response from the Iranians.

• READ MORE: Tehran hits Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar after deadly US strikes
• Millions attend funeral prayers for Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and family
• Other war on Iran reports

Iran’s Fars News Agency reported Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi dismissing Trump’s insulting remarks. He stressed that Tehran does not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action.

FM: Iran Not to Answer Vulgarity with Vulgarity, But with Actionhttps://t.co/iFneZILzw2 pic.twitter.com/vyy3T2wfSY

— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) July 8, 2026

“Addressing the Civilised and Courageous Nation of Iran with derogatory language does not diminish its Greatness,” Araqchi said. He added that Iranians were renowned for their “civility, culture, and strong moral values”.

I can vouch for that. I have visited Iran a couple of times, most recently in 2018, and have friendships with Iranians today. Some are anti-government, some are pro-government; all are intelligent, courteous people.

Travelling through Iran it is impossible not to notice that good manners and generosity are deeply embedded in Iranian culture.

And then there’s the Americans.

Best-in-class days gone
I remember attending the APEC summit in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 with the New Zealand delegation. At the time the American diplomats were considered best-in-class, to be emulated. Those days are long gone.

When Trump said in an earlier threat over the Strait of Hormuz: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country” his diplomats made no efforts to soften the edges.

Trump threatened to end the entire Iranian civilisation overnight and the collective West did not demur. No class.

The West is now led by a senile version of Sammy The Bull Gravano, the New York mobster — violent, uncultured and believing that whacking someone is the solution to every problem.

Trump’s outbursts may not simply be a reflection of his lack of moral education but are likely symptomatic of his serious cognitive decline. Dementia experts cite a sudden increase in swearing or crude language as a neurological symptom.

The pussy-grabbing Leader of the Free World has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilizations becoming daily occurrences.

While Trump rants, Tehran’s sophisticated diplomatic corps — packed with PhDs who understand the nuances of international law far better than the real estate agents Trump sends in to bat for the USA — have quietly outmaneuvered the Americans in purely diplomatic terms.

The reason for Trump’s potty-mouthed tantrum is clear: he’s not getting away with murder.

The Iranians are not letting the Americans and Israelis get away with breaching the Memorandum of Understanding.

Tehran safeguarding sovereignty
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baqaei stated that the United States has violated the framework of the Islamabad Accord signed by the two countries, stressing that Tehran will firmly safeguard its national interests and sovereignty.

It is impossible to read the text of the MOU and not see that Iran is on firm ground.  Article One of the signed MOU reads:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final Deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.”

Pacta sunt servanda — “agreements must be kept” — has been a bedrock of international law since before the Roman Empire.  American Exceptionalism has, until now, given itself an exception to the rule. No more, one hopes.

Israel’s war and war crimes in Southern Lebanon have continued since the US signed the MOU.  Iran is imposing a new rule on the Middle East: the rules apply to everyone, including the US and Israel.

Last night, America bombed Iran. Again.

Dozens of strikes — four to five times heavier than the last round — against radar sites, anti-ship missile batteries, and the Revolutionary Guard’s swarm boats. Explosions lit up Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

And what will it change? Nothing.

• READ MORE: Trump says MoU to end Iran war is over, ‘waste of time’ dealing with Tehran
  
• Other Lim Tean articles

Because the strikes were a response to something far more revealing: in the space of 24 hours, three tankers — a Qatari LNG carrier, a Saudi supertanker, and a third vessel hit by drone — were struck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at where they were hit. All three were transiting the southern corridor hugging the Omani coast — the route Washington has designated, patrolled, and blessed with the protection of the US Navy.

That is the whole story in one map. The Strait of Hormuz today is not one waterway. It is two rival corridors.

A northern route, designated by Tehran, where ships must register with Iran and sail under Iranian rules. And a southern route, sponsored by America, where the Gulf states send their oil under the shadow of the Fifth Fleet.

‘No American route’
Iran’s message this week could not be clearer: there is no American route through “their” strait.

Tehran did not even claim the attacks. It didn’t need to. State television simply noted that a vessel had “ignored warnings”. After the American bombs fell, Iran’s military declared it would deliver a “crushing response” and that the only safe passage through Hormuz “is one set by Iran”.

Understand what is actually being contested here. This is not about tankers. It is about governance. For 80 years, freedom of navigation in the Gulf has meant navigation on Washington’s terms.

Iran is now asserting something revolutionary: that the power which sits astride the strait — geographically, permanently, immovably — will write the rules of passage. Not the US Navy. Not the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain.

And here is what Washington refuses to grasp: Iran has already priced in the bombs. It absorbed strikes 10 days ago. It absorbed heavier strikes last night. It will absorb the next round too.

Every strike costs America political capital, splits it further from European allies who have barred their bases from offensive operations, and pushes oil and bond yields higher. Every strike costs Iran some radar stations and speedboats — assets it regards as expendable ammunition in a war of endurance.

Iran is the dog that has the Hormuz bone between its teeth. You can beat the dog. You can bomb the dog. The dog will yelp, bleed — and bite down harder.

Not bargaining chip
For Tehran, control of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip. It is the last and greatest source of leverage it possesses, the one card through which the rising regional hegemon dictates the terms of 20 percent of the world’s energy.

The rules-based order said the strait belonged to everyone. The emerging order says the strait belongs to those with the legitimacy — and the will — to hold it. Iran is betting it can outlast American patience.

History suggests the dog usually keeps the bone.

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. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

China’s test firing of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile into the South Pacific on Monday has added to unease in the Pacific over military posturing and strategic alliances.

Regional governments were notified by China shortly before it launched the test, on the same day that Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to Fiji to sign new treaties related to security and defence.

If the test launch was a clear message from China, the reaction from Australia and New Zealand has been swift.

• READ MORE: Jeremy Rose: The nuclear-free Pacific and hypersonic hypocrisy
• NZ accuses China of going against peace and stability of Pacific
• RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Missile test in South Pacific ‘routine’ and ‘consistent with international law’, China insists
• Other RIMPAC reports

Both governments accused China of undermining the peace and stability of the region, and of going against the values of Pacific Island countries as enshrined in the Pacific Forum’s Ocean of Peace initiative.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the launch was consistent with international law and customary international practice and was not directed at any specific country or target.

How many missiles has the US fired into the Pacific — did Australia protest those?

Here are the dates that the US test fired nuclear-capable ICBM missiles 7,000kms into the mid-Pacific:

•2026: March 5, June tbc.
•2025: February 19, May 21, November 4.
•2024: June 4,… pic.twitter.com/v6nxkRGA9U

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) July 7, 2026

‘Please refrain’
The response from Pacific Island governments was generally more muted, although the biggest of the Island countries, Papua New Guinea, made an emphatic call against militarisation of the region.

PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape released a statement with an “appeal to our Chinese friends that this be the last such missile test conducted in Pacific waters”.

“This message is not directed only at China. It applies equally to the United States, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and every nation with military capability.

“If you respect the Pacific and its people, then please respect our ocean. We ask all major powers to refrain from using Pacific waters for missile testing, military weapons trials or any activity that contributes to conflict or militarisation,” Marape said.

Restraint urged
The Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Matthew Wale, said China’s actions were not the sort of thing a good friend to the Pacific Islands did, and described the missile test as being not good for the region.

Wale, who today hosted Albanese in Honiara, said that as chair of the Pacific Islands Forum he had registered a strong protest with China’s ambassador, and that Solomon Islands also lodged a protest note.

He said the message against using missiles in the region applied to all other nations too.

Meanwhile, Fiji reaffirmed its commitment to the Treaty of Rarotonga which established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, the intent of which, New Zealand pointed out, has been breached by China’s test.

The Fiji Foreign Minister Sakiasi Ditoka urged restraint and underlined the need for peace, dialogue, transparency, mutual respect and adherence to international law.

“Fiji therefore encourages all states to exercise restraint, communicate openly, and conduct their activities in a manner that strengthens regional confidence and security rather than contributing to heightened tensions,” he said.

Not just China
However, the Pacific Council of Churches general-secretary, Reverend James Bhagwan, said it was a reminder of how quickly the Pacific’s Ocean of Peace can be turned into a theatre of power.

“At the same time, we are very mindful of the narrative which paints only China as an aggressor,” he told RNZ Pacific.

“It must be noted that the United States of America annually fires four nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles into our Blue Pacific, targeting Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.”

Reverend Bhagwan said the Pacific region had had the most nuclear detonations of any region, at more than 300, and that Pacific Islanders were firmly opposed to nuclear arms.

“That’s why we were in the Australian Parliament this past week to call on the Labor government to sign the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, noting that Prime Minister Albanese and many others in his party and in government and in Parliament had pledged to do so eight years ago.

“We need Australia to lead the Pacific and secure our region from the threat of nuclear disaster by helping us take nuclear weapons off the table as an option,” Bhagwan said.

But at this time of heightened competition for power in the Pacific, it appears the Australian Labor Party’s promise of support for the ban on nuclear weapons may have been put on ice.

It comes as the new US Ambassador to New Zealand, Samoa, the Cook Islands and Niue last week pressed Wellington to revisit its stance against hosting nuclear ships.

The Pacific’s anti-nuclear resolve is being tested.

This story was first published on

On March 5 of this year, the United States launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 km/h, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 6700 kilometres away, 24 minutes later.

Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On March 3, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.

• READ MORE: NZ accuses China of going against peace and stability of Pacific
• RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Other RIMPAC reports

Searches of The New Zealand Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.

And yet, on Tuesday, both The Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the at least 15 ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the US since 2021.

How many missiles has the US fired into the Pacific — did Australia protest those?

Here are the dates that the US test fired nuclear-capable ICBM missiles 7,000kms into the mid-Pacific:

•2026: March 5, June tbc.
•2025: February 19, May 21, November 4.
•2024: June 4,… pic.twitter.com/v6nxkRGA9U

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) July 7, 2026

“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.

Wong isn’t wrong.

Kiribati criticised US test
In 2024 Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.

A statement from the President’s Office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.

“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”

It is a thought — almost — echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”

You will search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That is despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.

Without confirmation from China, it is impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance — which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to — is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.

When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.

Australian nuclear submarines plan
But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).

Shortly after the announcement, then Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.

The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded more than US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.

A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 percent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 percent who saw the US as one.

The US has more than 5000 nuclear warheads with 1700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.

China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.

When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the US regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they are indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

This is a story about what has been taken and what can be saved.  I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing Dr Emalani Case, a Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) academic and activist about the cultural, political and environmental impact of RIMPAC 2026 on Hawai’i.

We also discussed the wider implication of the surge in US-led militarism in the Pacific, its dangers for all Pacific nations, and what a better vision of our future might look like.

Dr Emalani Case is a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. She has written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental impacts, and decolonial movements across Oceania.

I see that you’re named after Queen Emma.

She was the godmother of my great grandmother. She loved her people and cared for their health. She was instrumental in creating the Queen’s Hospital on Oʻahu and worked to create spaces of safety, health and genuine security.If I could make some link between RIMPAC and her —  RIMPAC is not about the health of the people; it’s not about our safety; and it’s not about our future.

RIMPAC is representative of the militarisation of our islands. There’s always this claim that it is for our benefit, for our protection and for the security of Hawai’i and the region, but beginning with the military-backed overthrow of the kingdom, the military has always been there for America’s imperial interests.

The PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an environmentally and culturally sensitive manner.  Is it? What makes you stand up to RIMPAC?  

You can’t say that you are aligned with the interests of the people or even with the environment when you’re based on destruction and violence.

I’ve experienced militarism and really felt it in visceral ways. When you grow up in Hawai’i, the military becomes normalised. It’s in your face all the time. It actually wasn’t until I moved away from Hawai’i that I realised, “Oh, it’s actually odd to see helicopters every day, and it’s an odd thing to see tanks driving through your community.”

Growing up in Waimea, which is about 40 miles from Pōhakuloa, one of the biggest military training facilities in the Hawai’ian archipelago, we could hear and feel when they were doing live target bombing there.

I grew up with parents who were activists in their own right, always fighting for our language, our way.  My mom was part of opening a Hawai’ian language preschool in my town and my dad was always fighting for our rights to continued access to our land, to be able to hunt and harvest, and fish.

So I grew up with that, and I grew up experiencing militarism and observing the violence. That led me to naturally stand against RIMPAC.

Tell us more about the rhetoric that the military are here to protect you — and us.

There’s a myth that the military is here to protect us. I always ask: who’s here to protect us from the military?

They see us as being sacrificeable and dismissible. When you start to confront this notion that we are supposed to be patriotic American citizens, that it’s our duty to give up our land and it’s our duty to sacrifice our places … that can be quite confronting for people.

Militarism shouldn’t be normalised, it is highly destructive. We need to unravel and challenge military rhetoric, because it is so strong.

I had a lot of family members around me who had already started to push back against that. We have a Hawai’ian Renaissance, this huge reawakening of political consciousness that started in the 1970s around the time of the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, one of our islands [for Vietnam war live firing training]. So I was born in the 80s, and I grew up with that reawakening, that renaissance, that revitalisation of language and culture, and dance.

It’s beautiful and it’s strong. We’ve got a really strong nation of people who are still learning, still unraveling, and still dismantling these normalised ideas, this colonial rhetoric.

What else do people need to understand about the negative impact massive events like RIMPAC have on the environment?

If you take Pōhakuloa — as just one example — you have these long stretches of black lava. It might look empty but under that lava is a massive aquifer. If you bomb on top of that and contaminate it with the chemicals that then seep into the soil, there’s major environmental damage.

If you repeatedly bomb a place, the threat to the aquifer is serious.

The logo for RIMPAC looks like a tourist advertisement for a tropical paradise.

That image of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise is strategic. The tourism industry is working as a mask for all of this other violence that’s happening here.

RIMPAC is part of this alliance of nations that ultimately might do crazy things like start a war on China? How worried should we be?

We have to confront these things like RIMPAC that are pulling us together in really dangerous, violent ways. It means confronting how militarism in one place actually shapes and even bolsters militarism in other places across the Pacific.

When these countries do decide to come together and wage war on China, that’s going to impact all of us.

There’s an image of the future that’s a very dark one but there’s also a positive one, that the Pacific can be an ocean of peace. Tell us, how you would like to see things shape up?

I think for anybody who does this work, there has to be a vision of something positive and beautiful. Otherwise, why do we do all of this? My vision for the Pacific is, of course, not just the absence of conflict.

As Pacific peoples, we have responsibilities to engage in some kind of decolonial dreaming and envisioning — as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says: to think beyond the absence of something, and to think about what our futures actually look like, and feels like, and smells like in a future that is demilitarised.

I dream I wake up to silence because I’m too used to waking up to chaos. I want that silence in that moment to breathe and just hear nothing but birds or laughter or all the things that should be there. What peace is to me is waking up in a peaceful environment and having the energy to truly care for people. That brings us back to Queen Emalani.

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 he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

On June 10, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya appeared on a screen before Israel’s Supreme Court via video link. He looked gaunt, visibly emaciated, and his hands and feet were bound.

It was one of the few times the public had seen the doctor since Israeli soldiers took him from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza nearly 18 months ago, where he had served as director.

He has been held without charge for more than 500 days, with little known about his condition.

• READ MORE: Fears mounting for arbitrarily detained Palestinian Dr Hussam Abu Safiya amid reports his life is in grave danger
• ‘They brought me here to kill me’
• ‘This is the end’: From inside an underground Israeli detention centre
• A ‘genocidal project’ – Dr Abu-Sittah on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system
• Other Dr Hussam Abu Safiya reports

After the court hearing, Abu Safiya’s lawyer delivered a message from the doctor to the public: “I am a pediatrician, providing medical care to patients, the wounded, and the vulnerable in Gaza.

“I carried out my work in accordance with international law and humanitarian principles. My detention is unjust and arbitrary.”

According to the lawyer, Nasser Odeh, the court hearing followed an appeal filed by Abu Safiya’s legal team calling for his immediate release, after an earlier District Court decision had renewed his detention on 28 April 2026.

Israeli authorities must immediately release the arbitrarily detained Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya amidst reports from a lawyer who visited him that there is an imminent threat to his life as a result of torture and other…

— Amnesty MENA (@AmnestyMENA) July 6, 2026

The Supreme Court came back with a rejection of Abu Safiya’s appeal. He remains in solitary confinement in Nafha Prison, to which he had been sent earlier in June as the date of his Supreme Court appearance drew near.

No indictment filed
No formal indictment has been filed against Dr Abu Safiya to date, as he is being held under Israel’s so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law,” according to Nasser Odeh.

The law allows Israel to indefinitely detain Palestinians without having to file charges against them, subject to judicial review by the District Court every six months.

“Abu Safiya is one of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently being held in Israeli detention,” Odeh told Mondoweiss. “If there were actual charges against them, or evidence supporting the allegations made by the Israeli prosecution, indictments would have been filed and evidence presented, as is the case with any other detainee.”

The lawyer added that Dr Abu Safiya’s continued detention without the filing of formal charges demonstrated that his imprisonment was unjustified.

To make it more difficult to challenge his detention, Odeh said that Dr Abu Safiya not only continued to be isolated from other detainees but was also cut off from his legal team, making it difficult to obtain verified information about his health condition.

Despite the efforts to suppress information pertaining to Dr Abu Safiya, Mondoweiss has obtained testimony from recently released Palestinian detainees who said they spent time with the doctor in prison before he was moved to solitary confinement.

The ex-detainees, all of whom were released in March this year, said that Dr Abu Safiya was subjected to physical torture, beatings, humiliation, and degrading treatment. They also say that they spent their final days in prison with the doctor.

“We saw him weighing no more than 40 kilograms,” Ahmad Qaddas, 34, alleged. Qaddas had been detained from the Jabaila refugee camp in Gaza in December 2025, and previously knew Dr Abu Safiya as one of north Gaza’s most prominent doctors and public figures.

We are deeply alarmed by the reports that there is an imminent threat to Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya’s life as a result of torture and other ill treatment he has been suffering while in Israeli custody. Israeli authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Dr. Abu Safiya.… pic.twitter.com/sNVTL4eQTB

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) July 6, 2026

Unable to respond
Qaddas claimed that he had spent six days with Abu Safiya shortly before being released.

“I could not believe my eyes when I saw Dr Hussam,” Qaddas told Mondoweiss. “His weight, his thinness, his health, his face, his hands, his feet, his entire body — I could not believe what I saw.”

Qaddas also claimed that Dr Abu Safiya was minimally communicative, unable to respond to interactions.

“He became so weak that he could barely speak,” Qaddas said. “He had to repeat each word he said at least four times before managing to pronounce it. Even when he ate, he vomited it back up. He always appeared exhausted and barely talked.”

Qaddas also said that the prisoners wore the standard gray prison uniform and appeared relatively clean, but that Abu Safiya “looked filthy” by contrast.

The testimonies from the detainees were the first details to emerge concerning Dr Abu Safiya’s condition since reports of his torture first emerged in January 2025, a month after his arrest, as relayed by released prisoners who had been held at the notorious Sde Teiman torture camp with the doctor.

Each of the prisoners said they spent a limited period of time with the doctor, although the details of when and where they were held remain unclear.

Days and hours shackled
“We had no way of distinguishing one day from another inside the prison,” Rami Abu Amira, 32, who said he spent six days with Abu Safiya, told Mondoweiss. “We spent days and hours shackled and blindfolded, with no sense of how much time had passed.”

Abu Amira was a resident of Jabalia refugee camp, where he was arrested during an invasion of his area in December 2024. He said detainees often relied on other prisoners to learn where they were being held.

“When the opportunity arose, we would ask other detainees where we were. Some would say Sde Teiman. Others would say we’re in Ofer, or another prison,” he recounted.

“Those brief exchanges were the only way we could confirm that we were being held in a detention facility somewhere.”

Dr Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, corroborated the substance of the prisoners’ testimonies based on his knowledge of the doctor’s condition, affirming that their descriptions of how he was treated fit with his conditions.

All interviewed former detainees described the doctor being repeatedly subjected to beatings, torture, interrogation, shackling, and food deprivation — conditions which many Palestinian detainees report being subjected to across the board, but which in the case of Dr Abu Safiya were allegedly applied even more harshly.

They said that the doctor was clearly experiencing a deterioration in his health, and that they interacted with him as much as they were allowed to, even though any detainee who attempted to help him was allegedly beaten.

‘Soldiers placed their boots on his chest and forced him to insult himself’
Rami Abu Amira said that detainees, including Dr Abu Safiya, were kept shackled by their hands and feet for an entire week, without their restraints being removed even for eating or using the bathroom.

Their restraints would only be removed for 10 minutes every 3 days to shower, before being shackled again. “Occasionally, our restraints would also be removed so we could eat,” Abu Amira added.

Ahmad Qaddas emphasised that Abu Safiya “was constantly asking for medical treatment,” noting his advanced age. “Whenever he would ask for treatment, a doctor from the prison would come by and give him a single blood pressure pill.”

Nasser Odeh confirmed Qaddas’s testimony, asserting that Dr Abu Safiya continued to suffer from chronic health conditions that have been exacerbated by his systematic abuse and mistreatment.

The doctor’s lawyer said that Dr Abu Safiya suffered from high blood pressure, for which he required regular medication, as well as from other health issues affecting his back, eyes, and neck. One of the most serious concerns is what Odeh described as a policy of “deliberate medical neglect” by prison authorities, which had deprived Dr Abu Safiya of access to essential medications and treatment.

“We previously submitted a legal petition to the prison authorities,” Odeh said. “We were requesting that the detention facility’s physician examine Dr Abu Safiya and that his blood pressure medication be restored.”

Ahmad Qaddas also said that “soldiers would wrap him in a blanket and move him from one place to another, while soldiers placed their boots on his chest, and forced him to insult himself and call himself a donkey.”

“He would insult himself and cry as he did it,” Qaddas said, adding that the point was to humiliate him “in front of all the prisoners”.

The degrading treatment often crossed into torture and physical assault, the detainees added, alleging that they could hear Dr Abu Safiya screaming while he was being interrogated nearby.

“When we heard his screams, we first feared for ourselves,” Qaddas recounted. “Then we grieved for what Dr Hussam Abu Safiya was enduring.”

First image of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from his court hearing currently taking place before the Israeli military court in occupied Jerusalem.

The image shows Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in a state of severe exhaustion and clear physical deterioration after more than a year of detention… pic.twitter.com/0nCpp6N25O

— Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya د.حسام أبو صفية (@HussamAbuSafiya) June 10, 2026

Beatings, dog attacks, and food deprivation
Rami Abu Amira alleged that he witnessed some of these moments firsthand when Israeli soldiers moved the doctor from the prison section to interrogation, or when they returned him to his cell.

“Dr Abu Safiya was tortured. They stripped his clothes, dragged him across the ground, slammed him into walls, and attacked him with dogs,” he said. At other times, he added, he would only hear the doctor’s screams, but would later see him after the interrogation session when prisoners were released from their cells for brief periods of yard time.

Abu Amira also said that he witnessed soldiers raiding Abu Safiya’s cell at night as he slept, waking him up by throwing stun grenades beneath the bunk bed before storming his cell and taking him away. He would disappear for a day before being returned at night, or the following day, Abu Amira recounted.

Ahmad Qaddas said that Israeli soldiers would regularly unleash dogs on him to attack and pin him to the ground.

“At that moment, he would cry like a child from fear and exhaustion,” Qaddas said, adding that the dogs would claw at him with their paws and nails.

He described how Dr Abu Safiya would sit for long hours in prison, unable to speak to anyone because he had neither the energy nor the ability to talk.

“When we spoke to him, he could not answer, and we ourselves would be tortured for approaching him,” Qaddas said. These ranged from beatings, having dogs set on them, being denied food, or being sent to solitary confinement, he detailed.

‘We feared being tortured’
“I wanted to help him and serve him in whatever he needed, but we could not. We feared being tortured ourselves.”

He explained that when prisoners were transferred from one place to another while shackled by their hands and feet, soldiers would beat prisoners on their legs, causing them to fall onto their knees.

But with Dr Abu Safiya, Qaddas said he saw the doctor totally collapse when hit, bumping his head on the ground from the fall. “He was that weak,” Qaddas explained. “But despite that, the soldiers kept beating him without mercy.”

He noted that although he himself was a man in his 30s, when he was beaten, he felt that he might die from the severity of the abuse, while “Dr Hussam was an older man suffering from illness.”

“Now, when I remember what happened before my eyes in prison, I feel like crying from the cruelty of the scenes I witnessed and the torture inflicted on the doctor,” Qaddas said.

Breaking a symbol
The picture the ex-detainees paint is one in which every moment of Dr Abu Safiya’s life in prison is geared toward torture and degrading treatment. “They singled him out for torture and humiliation more than the other prisoners,” Qaddas noted.

According to the ex-detainees’ testimonies, doctors were the most tortured prisoners in the facility. For Qaddas, this was because the Israeli army intended to “break their convictions,” explaining how doctors in Gaza had repeatedly been a thorn in the side of Israeli ground invasions by refusing the army’s evacuation orders throughout the war.

Healthcare workers — and the health and community infrastructure they represented — became synonymous with the refusal to comply with Israeli expulsion orders.

During the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza in late 2024, Dr Abu Safiya refused to evacuate Kamal Adwan Hospital, turning the medical compound into a last refuge of civilians and becoming a symbol of north Gaza’s defiance of the Israeli army’s invasion.

Dr Abu Safiya quickly became the face of that steadfastness, even in how he surrendered to the army, walking toward two armored tanks with nothing but his white coat amid the rubble.

During an earlier invasion of northern Gaza in late 2023, Dr Adnan al-Bursh of al-Awda Hospital played a similar role. He was arrested on 19 December 2023, alongside other doctors and displaced civilians.

Death announced
Later, his death was announced in Ofer Prison in mid-April 2024. According to testimony obtained by Sky News via the Israeli rights group HaMoked, al-Bursh died shortly after being brought into Section 23 of Ofer Prison, outside Ramallah.

The prison guards had reportedly brought al-Bursh into the section “in a deplorable state,” with “injuries around his body,” which was naked from the waist down.

“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there,” one source told Sky News, adding that one of the prisoners helped him afterward and took him to one of the rooms, where he died shortly thereafter.

To this day, Dr Al-Bursh’s body remains withheld by Israeli authorities. He stands as an example of the severe torture endured by Palestinian doctors who refused to abandon their posts and leave their patients to their fate, choosing instead to carry out their duties until they were arrested or killed.

Dr Abu Safiya’s fellow prisoners fear he is on the same trajectory.

“We heard doctors inside the prison repeatedly wishing for death because of the torture they endured,” Qaddas said. “If there isn’t an urgent intervention to save Dr Hussam, he will inevitably die inside the prison.”

Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj.

New Zealand says China’s testing of nuclear-capable weapons into the South Pacific is at odds with peace and stability in the Islands region.

China briefed regional governments on Monday of its intention to fire a long-range, nuclear-capable missile with a dummy warhead into the South Pacific Ocean.

According to New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, China carried out the test within hours of informing his government.

• READ MORE: RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Other RIMPAC reports

“The Pacific is an Ocean of Peace and we are deeply concerned by China’s testing of nuclear-capable weapons into the South Pacific,” Peters said.

New Zealand and Pacific Island countries have long opposed any form of nuclear testing, or testing of nuclear-related capabilities, in the region.

“We, like our neighbours in other Pacific countries, have no interest in China using the South Pacific as a testing site for missile capability,” the minister said

Peters said China’s move was at odds with the spirit and intent of the Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace, an initiative driven by Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, aimed at safeguarding the Pacific region from conflict and militarisation, which has been endorsed by all Pacific Islands Forum members.

“This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty,” Peters noted.

One of them was today reportedly sitting in harbour of Fiji’s capital, Suva, on the same day that Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was visiting to sign landmark security and defence treaties with Fiji.

The Vuvale Union Treaty and the Ocean of Peace Alliance are the latest in a series of security or defence-related pacts that Canberra has signed with Pacific countries, seen by commentators as a move to wedge out China.

Various Pacific Islands governments have voiced concern about the increasing militarisation of the region, which was echoed by Peters today in response to China’s missile test.

“We will be talking with our Pacific partners about this development. Pacific leaders have been clear we do not want to see the region become a theatre for outside military competition.

“This launch is not consistent with regional stability, and peace in the South Pacific,” he said.

Given China’s test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile into the South Pacific in 2024, Peters said regional countries were concerned at what now seemed to be a recurring pattern by China.

He said the region should not sit by and allow such tests to become “normalised or routine”.

This story was first published on

From June 24-July 31, dozens of countries will be taking part in the latest edition of the massive RIMPAC military exercises that take place every two years — including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam. The carbon emissions alone are staggering. Eugene Doyle outlines the high stakes involved in the first of three articles.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

As a dress rehearsal for the coming war on China, RIMPAC is a big deal. This year’s event is billed as bringing together global naval forces to address “the current threat China is posing in the Indo-Pacific region”.

Every two years the US Pacific Fleet/Indo-Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, hosts the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world’s largest international maritime war games.

RIMPAC gathers the US and its allies together for a show of force and a building of interoperability, cementing relationships and ensuring countries like Australia and New Zealand are increasingly integrated into weapons procurement and US war plans so they can act as  “force multipliers” for the United States.

• READ MORE: India sends sub-hunter to US-hosted RIMPAC, world’s biggest naval war game
• Backgrounder: The Asia-Pacific arms race has taken an ominous turn
• Other RIMPAC reports

“The suggestion of being a force multiplier is both absurd and kind of terrifying,” says Valerie Morse of Peace Action.

“We don’t want to be part of a US war in the Pacific. We need to stop engaging in things like RIMPAC.”

Veteran peace activist Mike Smith (Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu) agrees: “What on earth are we doing there? The American strategy is to bind so-called allies, partners and friends all around the Pacific into a proxy force to fight for the US.

“The only thing the Americans know how to do is to bomb other countries. It’s never worked, but it’s what they do. Being led into war as a proxy for a belligerent power is just a nightmare yet our present government, Foreign Affairs, Defence Department, and security agencies are all leading us in that direction.”

Thousands of troops, dozens of ships
From June 24-July 31 dozens of countries are represented, including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam.  Tens of thousands of personnel, dozens of surface ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, naval drones and submarines, hundreds of aircraft, and all the tools of modern warfare get together to game out Armageddon.

They rehearse amphibious operations, anti-submarine warfare, air defence exercises, cybersecurity and all the systems of combined operations warfare.  The carbon emissions alone are staggering.

Unbelievably, the PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an “environmentally and culturally sensitive manner”.  Tell that to Abby Martin, the US activist and journalist who will visit Australasia in July and has produced an outstanding documentary  “Earth’s Greatest Enemy – documenting the environmental cost of history’s biggest empire”.

“The reason we’re at this tipping point is because of the cumulative emissions of carbon in the atmosphere — for which the US is the top contributor. The US military alone is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, at 270,000 barrels of oil a day … more than 150 countries.

“How is that possible?” asks Abby Martin.

Valerie Morse says, “My starting point with RIMPAC was engagement with other Pacific activists who are concerned about US militarisation across the Pacific — that includes Hawai’i, Guam, and places like Okinawa.

“Like many bits of military training, it is imperial pageantry — showing who runs the Pacific. The United States is very keen to say the Pacific is our lake.”

‘Anglo-Saxon Lake’
Just after the Second World War, General Douglas MacArthur was even more explicit: the Pacific from now on was an “Anglo-Saxon Lake”.  Hawai’ian academic and activist Emalani Case challenges this imperialist framing in my next article.

Hawai’ian activists have long campaigned against the impact of so many vessels, so many explosions, on the local environment.

Liz Remmerswaal from World Beyond War raises another reason to distance ourselves from RIMPAC: “Israel is one of the 30 countries that’s participating. For people of good conscience who care about the genocide going on in Gaza, you have to ask: ‘Why would we want to have anything to do with a group of countries which included Israel?’”

The answer, dear reader, appears to be “values”. We share values, according to RIMPAC public relations, with the Americans and Israelis.

Above all, however, RIMPAC is part of the US containment of China strategy.

Radio NZ and reporter Guyon Espiner helped set the scene this week when they gave retired US Brigadier-General David Stilwell a half an hour soap box to tell New Zealanders to embrace US nuclear ships, think Trump is doing a good job, fear wild-eyed Iranian terrorists, spend much, much more on the military, and be afraid, very afraid, of China.

“If you read New Zealand’s defence strategy and the defence capability review, China is seen as the threat,” says Mike Smith says.

“That’s totally stupid. China’s not a threat to us; it’s offering to cooperate with us. The threat to our prosperity comes from the United States.”

Most loathed countries
Smith’s comment is supported internationally. Of the 132 countries surveyed in the Global Country Perceptions Ranking (Nira Data), the USA sits at 128 out of 132 countries surveyed, with Israel claiming the spot as the most loathed country on the planet.

China was invited to just two RIMPACs — in 2014 and 2016 — before being struck off the invitation list as the security competition in the South China Sea ramped up.  Taiwanese media has been promoting the idea of Taiwan being invited to future RIMPACs, another step up the escalation ladder in terms of crossing China’s red lines on the behaviour and status of what it considers an integral part of China.

There are many good reasons countries like the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia  should cancel their subscription to RIMPAC and, more importantly, decline to enlist if a war with China erupts. The United States will in all likelihood be defeated.

How this could unfold is the subject of the third article in this series. The effective defeat of the US at the hands of Iran should be a salutary lesson … but some people never learn.

Fighting alongside the US puts us on the side of an empire that is committed to genocide and whose military industrial complex demands forever wars. The more allies the US has, the more likely megadeath will happen, and the once-peaceful Blue Pacific could be turned red with the blood of innocents.

Should war come and China prevails and pushes the US to the periphery of the region, there will be inevitable consequences for US allies who attacked China.  That is well worth pondering.

We are at a hinge moment in world history; US supremacy is receding. Tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday, and we should adjust to new realities, not cleave to old certainties.

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.

It is hard not to feel the deepest sense of shame as a New Zealander following the United Nations Independent Commission report released last week. (UN report details the “overwhelming” scale of children killed in Gaza).

This report details Israel’s direct targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

Most know the shocking case of Hind Rajab but this report exposes not just the deliberate, casualised killing of children individually but its industrial scale.

• READ MORE: A UN report details the ‘overwhelming’ scale of children killed in Gaza. It raises grave legal questions
• Gaza genocide – how many UN findings will the West ignore?
• Other Gaza genocide reports

It’s easy to see how this has occurred. A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found 62 percent to 76 percent of Jewish Israelis partially or fully agree that there are “no innocents in Gaza”.

Israeli political and military leaders have used such genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians for decades, and particularly in the last three years.

These leaders have set the tone for the behaviour of the public and the individual soldiers who do the killing.

Dehumanising a population as Israeli leaders have done is always the first step to genocide.

The most tragic aspect, however, is this would not have happened had the New Zealand government and other Western governments sanctioned Israel decades ago for the brutality of its illegal occupation in Palestine, its ethnic cleansing and its mass killing of Palestinian children as detailed in the UN report.

They are still silent even now — choosing to stand with those killing the children.

The shame of their betrayal of New Zealand values will last for generations.

John Minto is national campaign coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This letter was first published by The Press.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has issued a stark warning in its annual report.

The central bank for central banks warned that the current AI investment boom is unsustainable.

The five largest “hyperscaler” tech firms plan to spend more than a trillion dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. This spending is outpacing their earnings and free cash flow, forcing some to issue debt.

“Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust… should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.”

• READ MORE: ‘We are in a bubble’: Experts warn of historic AI bust risk
• Other financial bubble reports

When the BIS — the only central bank to warn before the 2008 crash — sounds the alarm, we should listen. The Bank of England, European Central Bank, and Monetary Authority of Singapore have since echoed similar concerns.

Financial bubbles have become the norm since the late 1970s, when the US dollar left the gold standard and financialisation took hold. Household net worth began expanding faster than GDP, creating cycles of bubbles and busts.

Yet the current bubble dwarfs all previous ones in history, as illustrated in this graphic from the US Federal Reserve.

First came the Dot-com bubble, then the housing bubble of 2008. A credit crunch in 2019 was poised to trigger another recession, but was submerged by the covid-19 crisis and the unprecedented monetary response.

The result is what can only be described as the “bubble of everything”.

• Equities: US stock market capitalisation is now 230 percent of GDP — twice the long-term average. In early June, stocks were selling at about 40 times average corporate earnings over the previous decade, a level seen only at the peak of the Dot-com bubble.
• Private credit: The $3 trillion non-bank private credit “shadow market,” which exploded over the last decade, is under severe stress.
• AI mania: A trillion-dollar spending wave on AI, chips, and data centers is a real buildout wrapped in a speculative frenzy. This circular spending by tech giants props up the bubble, a risk mainstream media has begun to highlight.

The associated wealth accumulation is historically unprecedented. A new billionaire oligarchy has emerged, deeply reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. It is fully merged with the military-industrial complex, dependent on permanent war and genocide for survival.

The tech wing of this class seeks to surveil, control, and monetise every facet of human life.

Fraud is standard operating procedure, from the Trump family’s alleged looting of state resources to the SpaceX listing.

For the SpaceX IPO, Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their rules to fast-track the company into major indexes after just days of trading. This forced retirement funds to buy a tiny 4 percent float of available shares, artificially inflating the price and creating a trillionaire in Elon Musk overnight — exposing workers’ pensions to immense risk.

This concentrated power is staggering: the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) now account for over 30 percent of the S&P 500, double their weight a decade ago. Tech makes up over 50 percent of the entire Nasdaq.

As the market saw through the SpaceX scheme, its shares fell 24 percent, and Musk lost his trillionaire status — temporarily. When the broader crash hits, pension funds globally will suffer. The longer the mania continues, the more savings will be sucked into these overvalued indexes.

As Marxist economist Gary Wilson explained, Wall Street has priced in profits that may never materialise. The bosses’ response is familiar: cut jobs, attack unions, demand subsidies, and chase war contracts.

The real AI buildout is buried inside a speculative mania. The technology may survive the bubble; these stock prices will not.

“The losses will come as layoffs, frozen hiring and closed factories… and through the 401(k)s and pension funds workers were pushed into… a forced ticket to a casino they neither own nor control.

“The workers who never shared in the boom will be told to sacrifice when the bubble breaks.”

This financial bubble is just one facet of a broader polycrisis. Capitalism has no road forward to solve these interconnected failures.

1. Grotesque inequality: Billionaire wealth jumped 16 percent in 2025 alone, reaching a historic $18.3 trillion. In New Zealand, four people now hold more wealth than 1.8 million citizens combined, while over 900,000 face food insecurity. oxfam.org.nz
2. Permanent war: The ongoing war against Iran has devastated global energy markets, spiking fuel and fertiliser prices. Over 50 percent of the profits from recent oil shocks went to the top 1 percent of Americans; the bottom half received just 1 percent.
3. Looming famine: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens cascading food shocks. As fertiliser prices spike 20-60 percent, the greatest risk is not immediate shortage but collapsing future harvests, leading to higher prices and starvation months later.
4. Debt vortex:
   • Advanced economies: Government debt (100-130 percent of GDP in the US/Europe, 200 percent in Japan) is becoming unmanageable as interest rates rise from historic lows.
   • Developing world: External debt exceeds $11 trillion, with more than 50 nations in distress. Many now spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education, trapped in a neocolonial debt cycle.
5. Climate collapse: Global warming is killing thousands in heatwaves, closing schools, and destroying crops. Political “adaptation” plans are a surrender, substituting leadership with fantasy to avoid the emergency-scale mobilisation actually required.

A major capitalist crisis is nearly certain. As always, the heaviest price will be paid by the working class through escalating unemployment and austerity.

This will radicalise people. Our duty as socialists is to offer solutions that point toward the ruling class — our real enemy — and resist the ruling class’s strategy to divide us by scapegoating racial, religious, or sexual minorities.

As Rosa Luxemburg stated, the historical choice under capitalism is “socialism or barbarism.” That choice is re-emerging as socialism or modern-day fascism.

It is no accident that these are the poles of politics globally today. Far-right parties flirting with fascism are mass movements again across Europe.

Yet, hearteningly, popular support for socialism is the majority opinion among young people in the US and UK. The Democratic Socialists of America are becoming a mass party inside the belly of the beast.

The road forks ahead. One path leads to division, austerity, and barbarism. The other, built by a united working class, leads to socialism.

Mike Treen is a retired trade unionist and political commentator. This article was first published at his Substack @miketreen860764 and is republished with the author’s permission.

Whether Israelis will ever comprehend the irreparable damage inflicted upon their country’s reputation by their UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, is a moot point. The damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.

Danon, however, uses a peculiar approach to defending Israel within international institutions: he relies on bullying, intimidation, and an overt attempt to silence anyone who dares to challenge the official Israeli narrative — particularly women leaders.

Yet, what makes his behavior most outrageous is his deployment of these abrasive tactics to suppress an issue that demands the utmost sensitivity: the systemic use of sexual violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Palestinians mark 1000 days since Israel began full-scale assault on Gaza
• Other war on Gaza reports

The confrontation took place during a UN General Assembly session convened to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Senior UN officials were presenting harrowing findings documenting sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.

True to form, Danon refused to engage with the substance of the reports.

For Israeli diplomacy, the enemy is never merely the armed adversary; it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.

The immediate target of Danon’s wrath was Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Instead of reflecting on the grim findings, Danon demanded

Patten’s resignation.

Accused over ‘obsession’
He accused her and the broader international community of harbouring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.

When Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, attempted to intervene on a point of order per established protocol, Danon unleashed a vitriolic verbal assault. Refusing to yield, he shouted over her, ordering her to “be quiet” and drowning out the chamber with his outbursts.

“Shame on you. You are part of this obsession,” Danon bellowed.

While such unruly behavior should have resulted in Danon’s immediate removal from the chamber, the diplomatic asymmetry of the UN prevailed. It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.”

Danon shot back with typical defiance: “You will not be allowed to bully us.”

Herein lies the supreme irony of Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the UN and international law. Israel stands as one of the most egregious, serial violators of international law in modern history — a decades-long pattern of behavior left unpunished by Western vetoes, which ultimately emboldened it to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Yet, Israeli officials persistently claim the mantle of the ultimate victim, alleging they are the targets of antisemitism, unfair bias, and now, “bullying” by the very institutions they defy.

Mountain of evidence
But the mountain of evidence cannot be shouted away. According to an extensive report issued by Patten’s office, there are verified patterns of systemic abuse, sexual degradation, and psychological torture weaponised against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli detention camps like Sde Teiman.

The weight of this evidence reached such an undeniable threshold that the UN Secretary-General’s office formally added Israel to the global “List of Shame” — the blacklist of states committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.

None of this exposure is enough to convince Danon or the broader Israeli political establishment that Israel does not possess a sovereign right to violate international law. In their view, merely pointing out these crimes constitutes an act of aggression.

This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict. A comprehensive UN investigation recently concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza as a core component of its military campaign.

The numbers are staggering: Between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025, an estimated 20,179 Palestinian children were killed — about 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths.

Children ‘deliberately targeted’
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” stated commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar, noting that Israeli authorities have systematically continued to commit the crime of genocide.

While these findings provide another layer of ironclad legal proof regarding genocidal intent, the true significance of the report lies in its exposure of the rationale behind targeting youth.

Typically, the disproportionate slaughter of children and women is dismissed by Western apologists as “collateral damage”.

The UN inquiry shattered this defence, offering a far more consequential conclusion: the targeting of Gaza’s children is part of a calculated strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

As Muralidhar bluntly summarized: “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.”

It remains a profound disappointment that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — often swift to indict war crimes committed elsewhere — continue to move at a glacial pace regarding Israel. Tragically, the catastrophe continues unabated because there is still no meaningful international mechanism willing to enforce sanctions or employ genuine pressure to halt it.

This is precisely why Danny Danon wants the world to be quiet. His outbursts are not merely directed at UN diplomats; they are directed at global civil society, ordinary citizens, and anyone refusing to look away.

Demands absolute silence
Israel demands absolute silence while Palestinians are starved, raped, and murdered. According to its twisted logic, committing these atrocities is an inherent right, and objecting to them is an act of malice.

If this logic is allowed to prevail, it becomes the blueprint for every future aggressor who wishes to kill, rape, and starve a population for geopolitical gain. Palestinians and Lebanese are already forced to inhabit this dystopian reality.

Our collective responsibility is clear: we must refuse to be quiet. We must speak out, ensuring our voices drown out the shouts of Danon and his peers, so that murder and systemic violence are never normalised as tools of military necessity.

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

Giving evidence before Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer, said attacks from pro-Israel groups sought to delegitimise Jewish people who criticise Israel.

“They rest on the idea that Jewish identity is inherently tied to Israel, and therefore Jewish people who don’t support Israel or who criticise Israel are not really Jewish and are traitors,” she told the commission last Thursday.

Schwartz said she had been referred to as a “self-hating Jew”, “Hitler’s Jew”, “kapo” and “Judenrat”, and had been depicted using Holocaust imagery, including “on a train to concentration camps” and with the yellow Star of David imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.

• READ MORE: ‘Unconstitutional’ – NSW court strikes down Minns’ draconian anti-protest laws
• Other Bondi Commission reports

Holocaust weaponised
She said the atrocities of the Holocaust were a motivation for her Palestine solidarity work and the weaponisation by pro-Israel accounts of Holocaust imagery was “incredibly disturbing”.

“I was taught that never again meant never again for anyone, and that’s why I do the work that I do,” Schwartz said.

“To have the symbols of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Jewish persecution used against me has been incredibly disturbing and distressing, and I think it

sends a chilling message to other Jewish people when they want to speak out.

Schwartz said the stereotype that all Jewish people are politically aligned with Israel “causes immense harm”.

“I speak … almost every day to Jewish people who contact me and who are terrified of speaking out, because they know that if they speak their political convictions, they face the risk of a similar sort of abuse and vilification and targeting that I have experienced.”

Murdoch media coverage fuelled abuse
Schwartz told the commission that reporting by The Australian undermined her safety and ultimately led her to abandon a police application intended to protect her from ongoing harassment.

She recounted an incident in March 2025 after police applied for a personal safety intervention order (PSIO) on her behalf against lawyer Zara Cooper, who targeted Schwartz on Instagram under the pseudonym “@clammy_fraud”.

Schwartz said she first learned of the application through a journalist from The Australian, who contacted her to say the newspaper was preparing a story.

“I informed him I hadn’t been informed of the nature of the PSIO,” she said.

“When I asked him if he could provide me with a copy, he said he couldn’t provide me with a copy … because I didn’t know its contents, I also couldn’t really respond to a lot of it, because it was a police application.”

Schwartz said the following day’s front-page article ($) incorrectly suggested she, rather than police, had initiated the proceedings in an attempt to suppress free speech.

Free speech for me, not for thee
She told the commission that The Australian subsequently published further articles about the case, including reproducing images and slurs that formed part of the material relied upon by police in seeking the intervention order.

“What was most distressing to me is The Australian chose to republish some of the offensive imagery that was the basis on which police applied for the PSIO,” she said.

“[The Australian] republished content that took my image and placed it on a train to concentration camps, content calling me a kapo and other various slurs.”

Schwartz said the coverage convinced her that pursuing legal protection would expose her to further public attention and place her at greater risk.

“It became very clear to me after that coverage that this was becoming a media circus,” she said.

“Having reported these matters to police … was actually something that was

going to make me less safe because of the media coverage.

She subsequently told police she no longer wished to proceed with the intervention order, and the application was withdrawn. She has since been reluctant to report further incidents because she fears doing so would attract similar publicity.

“It’s become very clear to me that, because of the media interest in me as a person, but particularly because of News Corp’s targeting of me, it’s not going to be safe for me to engage in reporting,” she said.

She also expressed concern that republishing the abusive material normalised antisemitic attacks against Jewish critics of Israel.

“I think that media reporting really normalises the use of these terms against other Jewish people … people see that coverage and think that it is legitimate to call a Jewish person Nazi-aligned or to place our face on a train to concentration camps.”

Being pro-Palestine is not antisemitism
Schwartz dispelled suggestions that pro-Palestinian activism is a significant driver of antisemitism, stating that, despite attempts to portray Palestine solidarity spaces as hostile to Jews, that had not reflected her own experience.

“I know that there is a lot of public discourse … that suggests that human rights spaces and Palestine solidarity spaces, in particular, are spaces that might be hostile to Jewish people,” she said.

That hasn’t been my experience at all.

Instead, Schwartz said she had received “many messages of support and clear condemnations of antisemitism” from Muslim colleagues following the Bondi terror attack on 14 December 2025.

Government response
Schwartz criticised the government’s responses to antisemitism, which have disproportionately focused on the Palestine solidarity movement, including the banning of protest slogans.

“I think that government responses, which locate the source of antisemitism within the Palestine solidarity movement, suggest for Jewish people who are also part of that movement that either we’re not really Jewish or that we are somehow against Jewish people in our own communities.”

Asked what measures would most effectively combat antisemitism, Schwartz said governments should prioritise addressing far-right extremism and

avoid conflating antisemitism with the Palestine solidarity movement.

“It’s really important for us to take the threat of far-right extremism really seriously … we know that it’s rising and it’s becoming more mainstream,” she said.

“It is critically important that governments and institutions don’t adopt policies in response to antisemitism that engage in that form of conflation itself that suggests that antisemitism is coming from the Palestine solidarity movement.”

She also called for progressive Jewish organisations to be included in policymaking on antisemitism.

“It’s really important that organisations such as the Jewish Council and other progressive Jewish organisations actually have a seat at the table” she said.

“It shows the broader community that

the Jewish community, like every community, has a diversity of opinions.

For four decades, the West presented Iran’s regional strategy as the work of a rogue state exporting revolution and chaos. They never told you about the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953.

They never told you that America armed the man who gassed Iranian soldiers. They never showed you the map — the ring of American military bases on every border, the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the Israeli aircraft that bombed Iranian assets with impunity and assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil.

Iran built the Axis of Resistance and the Mosaic Defence as its answer to that encirclement.

• READ MORE: ‘Technical’ talks under way in Doha as Tehran demands action
• Other Lim Tean articles

Now, with the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess the full doctrine — what it achieved, where it was tested to its limits, and what it tells us about the future of Iranian sovereignty.

This is the story they spent decades trying to prevent you from understanding.

The fortress and the forward shield: How Iran built the architecture of survival
Look at a map.

Not the map the Western press shows you — the one that marks Iran in the colour reserved for rogue states, surrounded by the clean borders of American allies and reasonable nations.

I want you to look at the real map. The strategic map below.

This is the map that every Iranian general, every Iranian strategic planner, every Iranian Supreme Leader has looked at every morning for the past four decades.

What the map shows is not an aggressive power projecting menace outward. It shows a nation under siege — encircled, threatened, and facing an existential choice that empires have always forced upon those they cannot fully control: submit, or build the architecture of survival.

Iran chose to build.

What follows is the story of how — and why. And now, in the wake of the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess that architecture under the most severe test it has ever faced.

1. The doctrine born from betrayal
To understand Iranian grand strategy, you must first understand what Iran learned — not from ideology, not from theology, but from history. From its own history, written in blood and betrayal.

Lesson One came in 1953. Iran had a democracy. A real one — a Parliament, a free press, a Prime Minister of genuine popular legitimacy who had committed the unforgivable act of returning Iran’s oil to its own people.

The West destroyed it. Not with armies, but with money, propaganda, and hired mobs. The CIA and MI6 removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a pliant Shah who would keep Iranian oil flowing to London and Washington.

The lesson Iran drew was stark and permanent: the West does not want Iran strong, sovereign, or self-determining. It wants Iran “manageable”.

Lesson Two came in the 1980s. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 with the tacit blessing of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran in 1979 as a strategic opportunity.

For eight years, Iran bled. Perhaps one million lives. And when Iranian forces began pushing back, Washington made its choice. It provided Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. It supplied the precursor chemicals for the weapons Saddam used to gas Iranian soldiers on the battlefield — mustard gas, tabun, sarin — in one of the most extensively documented war crimes of the modern era.

American officials knew. They continued regardless.

The lesson Iran drew from those eight years was equally stark: when your existence is threatened, no one will come. Not the United Nations. Not international law. Not the conventions against chemical weapons. No one.

These two lessons — the 1953 betrayal and the 1980s abandonment — are the foundation of everything that follows. They are not ideology. They are experience. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed: the life of the law — and we might add, the life of strategy — is not logic. It is experience.

Iran’s grand strategy is the experience of a nation that has been betrayed, encircled, and attacked — and has drawn the only rational conclusions available to a sovereign state determined to survive.

2. The encirclement — what Iran actually sees
Before we examine what Iran built, we must understand what Iran faces. Because the architecture of Iranian strategy makes no sense without the map — the real map, not the sanitised version.

To Iran’s east, American forces spent two decades in Afghanistan — on Iran’s longest land border. To Iran’s west, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein but replaced him with a country that became host to the largest American embassy on earth, a vast network of military bases, and tens of thousands of American troops — sitting on Iran’s western doorstep.

In the Persian Gulf — Iran’s southern maritime frontier — the United States Fifth Fleet operates from Bahrain, a permanent naval presence of carrier groups, destroyers, and the full apparatus of American maritime power.

At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, America maintained the largest US air installation in the entire Middle East — a facility capable of projecting devastating airpower across the region within hours.

In Kuwait. In the UAE. Across the Arabian Peninsula, American bases formed a constellation of military power that, viewed from Tehran, looked less like a defensive alliance and more like a slowly tightening noose.

This is not Iranian paranoia. This is Iranian geography.

Any strategic planner in any country — American, British, Chinese, Indian — looking at that map would draw the same conclusion. Iran had been encircled with a precision that left nothing to chance.

The message was unambiguous: the United States had positioned itself to strangle Iran economically through Gulf control, to strike Iran from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do so from bases close enough to minimise warning time and maximise devastation.

Iran looked at this map. And Iran made a decision.

If the Americans intend to make the Persian Gulf an American lake, Iran will ensure that lake has a price. If American power is to sit on every border, every border will become a potential front. If encirclement is the American strategy, Iran’s answer will be to make that encirclement so costly to act upon that it becomes, in practice, a cage with open bars — present but unusable.

The Axis of Resistance was not born of religious fervour or ideological ambition. It was born of that map.

3. The Israeli dimension — the undeclared nuclear power that bombs its neighbours
And then there is Israel.

The Western framing of the Iran-Israel confrontation presents it as Iranian aggression against a peaceful democratic state. This is such a complete inversion of the actual sequence of events that it requires dismantling with some care.

Israel is, by the near-universal assessment of the international intelligence community, a nuclear power. It possesses an estimated 90 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never submitted to international inspection.

It maintains what is called a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying what the entire world knows to be true. And it directs its considerable diplomatic energy toward ensuring that no other state in its region acquires the same deterrent capability it has quietly accumulated for itself.

This is the context in which Iran’s nuclear programme must be understood. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Its programme operated under international scrutiny that Israel’s never has.

And yet it was Iran that was presented as the existential threat, Iran that was sanctioned, Iran that was threatened with military strikes — and ultimately, Iran that was bombed.

But the nuclear dimension was only the beginning. Israeli planes repeatedly struck Iranian assets in Syria — military installations, weapons convoys, advisers — hundreds of strikes over a decade, conducted with complete impunity.

Israeli intelligence assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. In April 2024, Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus — sovereign Iranian territory under the Vienna Convention — killing senior commanders.

In July 2024, Israeli intelligence assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran itself.

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and America followed with Operation Midnight Hammer — the first direct US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Then, on February 28, 2026, came the full assault: Operation Epic Fury, a joint US-Israeli campaign of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iran’s missiles, air defences, military infrastructure, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Dozens of senior officials perished. Iran’s nuclear programme was severely degraded.

The doctrine that Iran had constructed across four decades — forward defence through the Axis of Resistance, interior resilience through the Mosaic Defence — was now facing its ultimate test.

Hezbollah had served as Iran’s most elegant strategic instrument — a deterrent positioned on Israel’s northern border, ensuring that any strike on Iran carried automatic, unavoidable cost.

For 30 years, it worked. Every Israeli military planner understood that attacking Natanz meant absorbing tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel simultaneously. That deterrent logic held — until 2024, when Israel called the bluff.

Yet even after Nasrallah’s assassination and the degradation of Hezbollah’s arsenal, the organisation demonstrated remarkable residual fighting capacity. When IDF ground forces attempted to push into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah gave them a drubbing — inflicting casualties, destroying armoured vehicles, and forcing repeated tactical withdrawals that exposed the limits of Israeli conventional military power on the ground.

The shield had been damaged. It had not been broken.

4. The Axis of Resistance — architecture of Forward Defence
With the American encirclement and Israeli threat understood, the Axis of Resistance reveals itself not as an Iranian imperial project but as a coherent strategic architecture built on a single organising principle: make the cost of attacking Iran prohibitive, by ensuring that any attack triggers consequences across the entire region simultaneously.

The components of that architecture were distinct in character but unified in purpose.

Hezbollah was Iran’s most sophisticated instrument — battle-hardened, institutionally deep, politically embedded in Lebanese society, and at its peak possessing an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles.

It is not a militia in the casual sense. It is a military organisation with combat experience forged across four decades, in Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian conflict, and multiple wars against one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world.

Despite the severe degradation it suffered in 2024 and 2025, Hezbollah remains a potent force — as the IDF discovered when its ground forces pushed into southern Lebanon and were met with fierce resistance, tactical ambushes, and anti-armour fire that forced repeated withdrawals.

Iran’s first line of forward defence has been bloodied but not destroyed.

Hamas was a different and more complicated case — Palestinian in origin, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition rather than Shia political theology. But Iran adopted the Palestinian cause with strategic intelligence, recognising that support for Palestinian resistance gave Tehran something invaluable: moral legitimacy across the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia alike.

Supporting Hamas cost Iran relatively little. It purchased Iran enormous influence and the one thing that money and missiles cannot buy — the genuine sympathy of the Arab street.

The Houthis of Yemen were the most recent and surprising component. Not originally an Iranian creation, they were driven into Tehran’s strategic embrace by the Saudi-led war in Yemen — backed by American weapons, logistics, and political cover.

The Houthis’ capacity to threaten Red Sea shipping and strike deep into the Gulf transformed them from a local insurgency into a regional strategic asset of considerable importance. Their intervention following October 7, 2023 demonstrated reach that surprised even optimistic Iranian planners — and their continued operations through the 2026 war demonstrated a resilience that confounded repeated predictions of their swift neutralisation.

The Iraqi militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces and their various components — completed the architecture. Born from the chaos of the American invasion and consolidated during the fight against ISIS, these forces represented Iran’s most direct penetration of a neighbouring state’s security structure, giving Tehran influence over the country on its western border through which any American ground offensive would necessarily pass.

Together, these components formed what Iranian strategists called the “ring of fire” — a constellation of armed, motivated, battle-tested forces positioned around Iran’s primary adversaries. Not an empire. A defensive perimeter, constructed outside Iran’s borders precisely because Iran’s borders had proven, twice in living memory, to be insufficient protection against the ambitions of external powers.

5. The Mosaic Defence — making Iran unconquerable
Forward defence alone — however sophisticated — was always only half of Iran’s strategic architecture. Iranian planners understood that the outer ring could be degraded. Proxies could be weakened. Forward positions could be overrun. The question that preoccupied Iran’s military establishment for four decades was this: if the forward shield fails, what then?

The answer was the Mosaic Defence.

The concept is as elegant as it is ruthless. Iran deliberately, systematically, and over decades decentralised its entire military infrastructure across all 31 of its provinces. Missile arsenals were not concentrated in single facilities but dispersed across hundreds of sites — underground, mountainside, desert — spread across a country the size of Western Europe.

Command and control was distributed rather than centralised, designed to survive the decapitation strikes that destroyed Iraq’s military capacity in 1991 and Libya’s in 2011. Defence industries were deliberately dispersed so that no single strike, however precise, could eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce and deploy weapons.

The underground dimension was particularly significant. Iran invested enormously in what it called its “missile cities” — vast subterranean complexes buried deep enough to survive all but the most specialised munitions. The 2026 campaign tested this directly.

Despite nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours and CENTCOM ultimately claiming over 11,000 targets struck across the entire war, a preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment — leaked and characterised by the Trump administration as “political” — concluded that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes began and that the underground facilities had not been collapsed.

The CIA subsequently disputed this, claiming severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The truth, as is so often the case in the fog of war, likely lies somewhere between these assessments.

What is beyond dispute is this: the logic Iran applied — the logic of a student of history who had watched what happened to states that presented centralised targets — proved partially vindicated. The 31-province dispersal model meant that even 11,000 strikes could not deliver a clean, decisive blow. Iran was damaged. Iran was not defeated.

Centralisation is a vulnerability. Dispersal is survival.

The Mosaic Defence and the Axis of Resistance were never separate strategies. They were two halves of a single, integrated doctrine. Attack Iran’s periphery — and the Axis activates. Penetrate to the interior — and the Mosaic ensures there is no clean, decisive blow to be struck. The 2026 war demonstrated both the power and the limits of that doctrine.

6. The 2026 War — the ultimate test
Intellectual honesty requires confronting what Operation Epic Fury achieved — and what it did not.

What it achieved was substantial. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes — a decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership of historic proportions. Dozens of senior IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and regime officials perished. Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure was severely degraded. Its air defences were systematically dismantled. Its navy was effectively destroyed.

The Iranian economy, already strangled by decades of sanctions, went into free fall. Its currency collapsed. Protests that had begun in December 2025 spread across the country as the regime’s authority visibly cracked.

What it did not achieve is equally instructive.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile — the IAEA had confirmed 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity before the war, sufficient for multiple weapons if further enriched — could not be fully accounted for.

Two military campaigns left that stockpile harder, not easier, to locate. Iran had anticipated decapitation. Within 30 minutes of the opening strikes, Iranian forces launched simultaneous retaliatory attacks across multiple fronts without waiting for centralised authorisation — precisely the pre-delegated response architecture that the Mosaic Defence doctrine had prescribed.

The regime was headless. The military machine kept fighting.

Iran’s response was devastating to the American strategic position in the region. It closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes — triggering a global energy shock and fuel crises across Asia.

It struck American bases across the Gulf simultaneously: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. It bombarded Israel with over 525 ballistic missiles. It struck oil infrastructure across the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen American service members were killed. The regional war that Iran’s forward defence doctrine had always promised to trigger — the promise that had deterred attack for thirty years — was fulfilled.

The ceasefire that followed told its own story. After 40 days of sustained combat, with both sides exhausted and the global economy convulsing, Pakistan brokered a conditional truce on April 8, 2026.

The highest-level direct US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution followed — JD Vance meeting Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed the Islamabad Memorandum, with Trump signing at the Palace of Versailles, establishing a 60-day framework for further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Read that again. The United States of America — which had launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and declared regime change as its explicit objective — ended up negotiating. Not dictating. Negotiating. With the Islamic Republic it had sought to destroy.

The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — son of Ali — approved the memorandum, noting he had “a different view” but accepted it in the national interest. Iran committed to reaffirming it would not develop nuclear weapons. The US committed to lifting sanctions and removing forces from Iran’s proximity after a final deal.

Iran’s nuclear programme — battered but not eliminated — remained. Its missile programme was explicitly declared off the table for negotiations by Tehran. And critically, Iran extracted from the world’s most powerful military the one concession that no amount of technical language could conceal: America negotiated.

That fact is irreversible. And every adversary of American power on earth has filed it carefully for future reference.

7. The Strategic Verdict — doctrine under fire
Here is what four decades of Iranian grand strategy achieved, assessed without sentiment.
The Axis of Resistance was degraded — Hamas devastated in Gaza, Hezbollah bloodied in Lebanon, Iranian assets struck across Syria. The Mosaic Defence was tested as never before — 11,000 targets struck, nuclear facilities damaged, leadership decapitated.

The forward shield failed to deter the ultimate assault it was designed to prevent.
And yet. Iran survived.

The Islamic Republic — written off by analysts for decades, subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, struck by two rounds of devastating military campaigns — survived. Its military kept fighting after its Supreme Leader was killed. Its enriched uranium could not be fully accounted for. Its proxies continued operating. The Strait of Hormuz became a weapon that brought the global economy to its knees.

And ultimately, America came to the table.

This is not the outcome of a state that built the wrong strategic doctrine. This is the outcome of a state that built remarkable strategic resilience — imperfect, costly, and tested to its absolute limits — but resilience nonetheless.

The Mosaic Defence’s dispersal across 31 provinces meant no clean killing blow. The pre-delegated command authority meant no paralysis after decapitation. The Houthis’ continued Red Sea operations meant the economic pressure never relented. The Iraqi militias provided Iran with leverage in negotiations.

And the nuclear stockpile — unaccounted for, potentially dispersed before the strikes — remained the ultimate trump card that no military campaign could eliminate with certainty.
What Iran demonstrated in 2026 was not the invincibility its doctrine promised. What it demonstrated was something perhaps more important: the cost of attacking Iran is catastrophic, even in victory.

America got its strikes. It killed Khamenei. It damaged the nuclear programme. It triggered regime change of a kind — though Mojtaba Khamenei is hardly the pro-Western successor Washington imagined.

And what did it get for all of that? A fragile ceasefire, a 60-day negotiating framework, an unaccounted nuclear stockpile, a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested, a global energy shock, thirteen dead Americans, and a region convulsed by war.

Mosaddegh was destroyed because Iran was weak — because it had no forward shield, no interior fortress, no capacity to make its destruction costly. The Iran of 2026 is not that Iran.

The wound of 1953 was the education. The architecture of survival — tested, battered, partially broken — was the graduation.

The lesson of Iran’s grand strategy is ultimately this: a nation that cannot be cheaply destroyed cannot be permanently dominated. Even after the most severe bombings, Iran extracted a negotiation. Even after decapitation, its military kept fighting. Even after 11,000 strikes, its nuclear stockpile remained unaccounted for.

That is not the record of a doctrine that failed. It is the record of a doctrine that made Iran’s destruction more costly than any power was ultimately willing to pay.

In a future article, I will examine Iran’s nuclear programme — not through the lens of Western proliferation anxiety, but through the strategic logic of a state that watched what happened to countries that disarmed, and has now watched what happened to itself when it did not yet possess the ultimate deterrent.

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

A friend and colleague, Solidarity columnist Eugene Doyle, posed a brief question on the Facebook media page Kiwi Journalists Association last week.

“Kiwi journalists . . . is there a reason for so little solidarity with Palestinian colleagues,” he mused over a haunting portrait of emaciated Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufleh showing his appalling state after 14 months inside an Israel torture prison.

“No trial. No conviction.”

• READ MORE: Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Facing up to genocide – a New Zealand journalist bears witness with Gaza and West Bank
• Other Gaza media reports

This is what Palestinian hostages look like after release: emaciated, exhausted, and visibly scarred by prolonged detention.

Occupied Palestine has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world. Yet merely three media people responded to Doyle’s question.

Broadcaster and singer Moana Maniapoto (Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa)
summed up the cruel image as “journacide”, citing the use of the label by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese: “Absolutely shocking.”

Journacide is a neologism used by scholars, journalists, and human rights experts to describe deliberate mass killing and hunting down of journalists and media workers in conflict zones. It is also the title of a harrowing new documentary on the topic: Journacide: The War on Truth.

Courage and fortitude
Community broadcaster and educator Victoria Quade commented: “I think few people living and working in relatively protected environments like New Zealand can imagine the courage and fortitude it takes to be a journalist under an oppressive regime where reporting on those regimes can be physically dangerous.

“And, if they can imagine it, would be able to match that courage in their own lives.”

A third comment was posted by communications adviser and journalist Susan Belt: “I think people are battle-worn after so much general genocide, kids and press included, on the part of Israel. There’s so much press targeting etc that it almost becomes ridiculous to keep posting on it. Stuff and NZME keep running Gaza, Lebanon stuff but because our govt like some others has not made much of a fuss about Israel’s illegal civilian and press killing in Gaza and its unprovoked attack on Iran and illegal forays into Lebanon, it leaves people feeling hopeless.

“I am very pro-Palestinian rights and have been since the 1970s but even my Facebook friends despair at the sad postings I seem to always be doing. They know it’s very bad behaviour but we’re in a trance at the hopelessness of it. When our ally the US is backing Israel (though cooling of late) our govt is too scared to say what’s right because it doesn’t want to offend Trump’s team.”

These comments reminded me that I have been puzzling over the generally poor and weak response from New Zealand journalists over what is currently the toughest moral and ethical challenge of our times. Yet, instead of facing up to the Gaza genocide and the accompanying journacide, most of our media colleagues have preferred to look away and remain silent.

The prevailing attitude is that it is something remote and of little relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a response of denial, astonishing given that there have been protests across the motu against the Israeli genocide — and lately the unjustified US-Israeli war on Iran and fragile peace — for the past 142 weeks: by far the longest and sustained political protests ever in this country, yet largely ignored by the media.

This has led to many public protests over media coverage. These too have rarely been reported.

Genocide in plain view
My own articles on the topic on Aotearoa and the Pacific, while stirring responses internationally, have barely raised a ripple in this country. Shameful responses to a genocide — at least 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 20,000 of them children — revealed daily before our very eyes. Even since the sham ceasefire declared in October, more than 1000 people have been killed.

And the cost in lives of hundreds of Palestinian journalists trying to bear witness on the annihilation of their own communities is deeply shocking. Yet this barely raises a shrug from New Zealand journalists.

In a report released last week by the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a chilling new statistic was revealed — out of an estimated 1200 journalists in Gaza between 60 and 75 percent of them have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced since 7 October 2023.

The report, titled “Media Without Walls”, also said that approximately 265 journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, by far the highest death toll recorded globally against journalists in a single conflict.

More than 80 percent of media offices and institutions had been completely or partially destroyed, leading to an “almost complete collapse” of journalistic infrastructure, it said.

The report added that journalists in Gaza no longer work from newsrooms but from tents, footpaths and shelter centres, with mobile phones as their primary production tool and intermittent internet dictating when they can publish.

“I lost my home and my office in the same week,” said one displaced journalist, Dr Ahed Farwana. “I no longer have a place to write, but I write from my phone among people, sometimes while searching for water for my family.”

‘Trying to concentrate’
Another Gaza journalist, Ola Kassab, said: “I work from inside a displacement shelter, choosing the quietest corner I can find. The hardest part is not the bombing itself, but trying to concentrate amid the overcrowding and fear.”

Photojournalist Wisam Zughair said: “The camera is no longer the heaviest thing I carry; it is the feeling that I may also be documenting what could happen to me.”

Just two weeks ago, an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Ahmed Wishah, 25, was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. He was the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since 2023.

His targeted murder came just weeks after his brother Mohammed Wishah, who also worked for the Doha-based global television network, was killed in a deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.

In an interview after his brother’s death, Wishah called on the world to stop the killing of journalists.

“Let the martyrdom of Mohammed Wishah be the end to the killing of journalists. This is my message to the world . . . Stop the Israeli occupation from targeting journalists.”

Smearing journalists
The routine response of Israeli military authorities is a hamfisted attempt to smear all Gazan journalists as “Hamas terrorists”. There is never any credible evidence to back this up and it is shameful that New Zealand media simply echo these lies from a discredited regime whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a “false balance”.

The New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have frequently condemned the “smearing of killed Palestine journalists” with “baseless claims”.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it condemned the Israeli occupation army’s “baseless accusations”, which sought to “justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.

“Since October 2023, the Israeli campaign of incitement has relentlessly spread false allegations and baseless accusations against Al Jazeera staff. The Network considers this smear campaign a transparent and futile attempt to justify the deliberate targeting of journalists and cameramen whose only ‘crime’ has been their courageous determination to document and expose the genocide being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip.

“These attempts deceive no one and cannot obscure the truth witnessed by the world.”

Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip and ensure their safety.

Reporters Without Borders has filed at least five complaints with the ICC over alleged war crimes against journalists, and together with other media freedom groups such as the Foreign Press Association, has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought an Israeli Supreme Court ruling overturning the IDF’s ban on global journalists being allowed into Gaza to see the reality for themselves.

Gaza bloodlust spreading
Another disturbing factor about the slaughter of journalists is the fact that the Israeli bloodlust against journalists in Gaza is spreading also to the illegally occupied West Bank and the invaded Lebanon.

Journacide: The War on Truth                                    Video: Democracy Now!

Irish filmmaker Seán Murray has investigated Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth, which was featured by Democracy Now! earlier this month. Murray says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth.

The filmmaker describes it as “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon”.

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman highlighted the attempted killing on June 15 of Iranian journalist Hadi Hoteit, who was working for the news outlet Press TV in southern Lebanon. He was attacked by an Israeli drone while reporting live for his network at Kafr Tebnit.

Although he survived the attack, he was struck by six pieces of shrapnel.

With the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the death toll of journalists has now topped 29.

Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists for his documentary Journacide.

On March 28, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed — all together — in an Israeli drone strike on their car.

The following month, on April 22, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her, reports Democracy Now!

About the silence
In a trailer for the documentary, Murray says the film is not about war, it is about the silence. “As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.”

In the Democracy Now! interview about his film, Murray explores the lengths that Israeli military authorities go to create false narratives about journalists, even to falsifying documents and creating fake images.

“I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. Not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon.

“So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike.

“This is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed.

“But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel doesn’t have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out.”

A wake up call surely for the Middle East realities for New Zealand journalists.

David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch.

The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, one of the signatories to the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US, has called out what he says are double standards and duplicity by those trying to wreck the peace deal.

His short, memorable statement was largely ignored in the Western media but its content should be digested by all.

He addressed his comments directly to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian who arrived in Pakistan on June 23. The Iranian delegation had just arrived on a plane named Minab 168 — in memory of the 168 children and staff killed in an attack on an Iranian girls’ school by US and Israeli forces at the outset of the US-Israel attack on Iran.

• READ MORE: Air raid sirens in Bahrain, Kuwait; US bombs Iran again over Hormuz attacks
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Sharif made his comments a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gulf foreign ministers issued a joint statement that “lasting regional peace and security requires addressing the full spectrum of Iran’s threats, including its ballistic missiles, drones, and support of proxies in the region.”

Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif addressing the Iranian delegation:

“There are spoilers all over the world who want to scuttle this peace deal.”

“They don’t want the Iranian nation, a great nation, to come out of the ashes of war and touch the zenith of glory.”… https://t.co/17vpQQNamy

— The Saviour (@TheSaviour) June 23, 2026

One of the reasons Sharif’s comments are important is that the US-Israeli side operates a well-thumbed playbook of agreeing on frameworks for negotiations and then immediately breaking them (killing negotiators or attacking Lebanon, for example) or trying to rewrite the framework midstream to their advantage.

Shehbaz Sharif called them out:

ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

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

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

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

• READ MORE: US strikes Iran after attack on vessel in Strait of Hormuz
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports
• Other Lim Tean articles

Left out of the room
Let us begin with the most humiliating fact. The MOU’s second paragraph mentions Lebanon three times and declares the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts — without once mentioning Israel.

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

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

Washington negotiated Israel’s strategic future without Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That project is now in ruins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children — Al Jazeera
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The commission concluded that the deliberate targeting of children was one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award. Republished from Michael West Media with permission.

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

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

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

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

Let me show you why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rubio:

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

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

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

— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Conflation of Jewish identity with Israel driving antisemitism, Jewish Council says in submission to royal commission
• Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Other Israeli propaganda reports

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

— The Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starmer spoke earlier on Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republished from Drop Site News.

• The petition against deporting Trita Parsi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video clip and images by Kerry Sorensen-Tyrer.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not diplomacy. It is

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

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

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

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

So when Newman says the survivors are lying,

he is saying the Foreign Minister of Australia is lying.

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

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

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

That is not a government with nothing to hide.

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

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

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

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

Read that twice, because it is grotesque.

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

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

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

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

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) June 11, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 18, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 14 clauses of the Iran MOU:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other pro-Palestine protest reports

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

Minto said he would donate the money to the group.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the United States military go to war?

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

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

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

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tantura trailer.           Video: Journeyman Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several of these gains are now under threat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because marching matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also in the show:

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

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

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

Inside Israel’s war on Gaza                    Video: The Tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.