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.

Pro-Palestine and anti-war protesters gathered at the US Consulate in downtown Auckland today to mark July 4 — but they were not celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, they were condemning “liberation with bombs”.

Several speakers criticised US global and military policies in this the 144th week of continuous rallies in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau.

One of them, a twice-displaced refugee from Afghanistan who has grown up in West Auckland and works as a healthcare provider, spoke of the devastation of America’s war, invasion and two-decade occupation of her country.

• READ MORE: America250: How the US heatwave will affect Fourth of July celebrations
• Chris Hedges: Requiem for America on the Fourth of July
• The Black Agenda report – an alternative view of the origins of July 4th
• Other July 4 reports

“Today, on the 4th of July, we are told to celebrate freedom. But today, we stand here to tell the truth — American freedom has always been built on the bones of the colonised,” Bibi Amena told the crowd.

“In October 2001, the US — backed by the United Kingdom — launched a bombing campaign against my home country Afghanistan. It was the start of a 20-year occupation,” she said.

“They sold it to the world as ‘self-defence’. Counter-terrorism. Then it evolved — as it always does — into nation-building, spreading democracy, and women’s liberation.”

These were the “token words of every colonialist project”.

Amena said she was “ashamed” to say that “New Zealand — under Helen Clark, a leader I have long respected — was also pulled into the conflict”.

NZ troops deployed
Over 20 years, under both Labour and National, New Zealand had deployed more than 3500 troops to Afghanistan, which she described as shameful.

“They [the US] showed us images of girls riding bicycles in Kabul. Democracy. Female generals. They told us we were liberating them,” Amena said.

“But let me tell you what they didn’t show you.

“They didn’t show you the weddings that were bombed. The hospitals. The bridges and power plants. The densely packed homes of sleeping families.

“They didn’t tell you that from 2001 to 2002 alone, the US dropped more than 1200 cluster bombs — containing almost a quarter of a million bomblets.

“These are indiscriminate. They do not distinguish between a soldier and a child.

“And when they fail to explode — as many do — they become landmines. They lie in the soil for decades, killing civilians long after the cameras leave. In Laos, in Vietnam, in Iraq, the contamination is still there today.

‘MOAB’ dropped
On April 13, 2017, the US dropped the MOAB — the so-called “Mother of All Bombs” — on Nangarhar Province. The most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat.

“Former President Hamid Karzai called it an ‘inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons’, Amena said.

“And then the night raids.”

A BBC investigation in 2022 [BBC Panorama: “I Saw War Crimes” report] had revealed testimonies from former soldiers describing war crimes as “common practice” during their night raids.

In December 2009, in Narang village, 10 Afghan civilians were dragged from their beds and shot in the head or chest. Most of them were students aged 12 to 18.

In September 2019, in Helmand, a raid killed a couple and five of their six children. Only a two-month-old baby girl survived — injured and orphaned.

In another raid, Amena said, a family who had lost three grandchildren was given a parcel of rice, a can of oil, and some sugar as “compensation”.

“And then there was the Khataba massacre. February 2010. US Army Rangers raided a home where a family was celebrating a newborn child.

Civilians killed
“They killed five civilians — two men, a teenage girl, and two pregnant women. They were bound, gagged, and shot dead.

“The Pentagon investigated and concluded the soldiers had followed the rules of engagement. No disciplinary action.

“At first they called it ‘honour killing’. And they blamed the Taliban. But the truth eventually comes out.

“Now, the opium.

“During the US occupation, Afghanistan had produced more than 80 percent of the world’s opium. Within a year of the Taliban takeover and their ban on poppy cultivation, production dropped by 95 percent.”

Amena said it was estimated that up to 4 million Afghans had been addicted to heroin. That was “nearly the population of New Zealand”.

“The streets of Kabul looked like a zombie movie [under US occupation] — men and women, families and loved ones, withering away.

“And what did America do? They sent troops to guard the opium farms. When asked about their direct involvement in the drug trade, they said the opium would be trafficked to countries like Iran and Russia — enemies they wanted to weaken.”

Poppy for export
She spoke of a 2026 interview when CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou confirmed that a DEA official had told him Afghans were allowed to cultivate poppy specifically for export to Russia and Iran — “to weaken their societies”.

“This was not a war on terror. This was a war on the Afghan people. And it was fueled by profit, and by drugs.”

Amena asked what about women’s liberation?

“At the end of 20 years, according to the Central Statistics Organisation, 84 percent of Afghan women were illiterate. And only 2 percent had access to higher education. The rest were left behind.

“The elites — the collaborators — were paraded on television, given visas, and evacuated. The rest? The widows, the orphans, the mothers of the deep south who endured decades of night raids and bombings — they were left to starve under crippling US sanctions.

Amena said this was not “liberation”. It was “colonialism”.

She stressed that Afghanistan was just one country in a long list of those impacted.

New war of aggression
“And now — less than five years after the withdrawal from Afghanistan — the US is at it again. Starting a new war of aggression against the great people of Iran,” she said.

“So today — on the 4th of July — we say no. We say never again. Not in our name. Not with our taxes. Not with our silence.”

Amena said she had brought a young girl’s shoe with her — “for the 168 children killed in Minab, Iran. I want you to look at it, and remember the 168 little girls, murdered by the US in their classrooms.”

Other speakers critical of the July 4 US anniversary included Eugene Velasco, spokesperson of the Filipino movement BAYAN Aotearoa New Zealand; Adnan Swaid, a Palestinian freedom activist and a Nakba victim; Sapna Samant, a progressive Indian activist; Diana Phillips of Americans Abroad Against the War, and Dr Barry Lee, a longtime peace activist who researched a thesis on the Auckland Progressive Youth Movement during the US war against Vietnam.

ANALYSIS: By Hossam Shaker

Once again, the United Nations reminds us that genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip.

A report issued on 23 June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory documented what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people, especially children.

This followed an earlier report from the same commission on 16 September 2025, which found that genocide was taking place, as well as the report of the UN special rapporteur issued on 20 October 2025.

• READ MORE: Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump in US over ‘attack on judicial independence’
• Chris Sidoti on UN inquiry into Palestinian rights
• Other Gaza genocide reports

But what can meticulously documented international reports do in the face of those who have insisted on averting their eyes from declared Israeli intentions to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, comprehensive destruction and horrific starvation — not to mention the torrent of live images transmitted around the clock to mobile devices from the field of atrocities over the course of two full years?

Specialised UN reports, testimonies by international rapporteurs and experts, assessments by the most prominent global human rights organisations, and even Israeli testimonies have followed one another, all confirming the reality of the genocide committed by Israel under the eyes of the world since October 2023.

In contrast, most European and Western states have clung to a rigid position that ignores this glaring truth, despite genocidal intentions being openly expressed in advance by senior Israeli leaders, who continued to boast of what their army and authorities were doing on the ground.

Official western comments on those reports were often absent, unlike what would have happened in other cases

Avoided the term ‘genocide’
Is it not worthy of condemnation that senior European and Western officials have persistently avoided using the term “genocide” in relation to these systematic and horrific Israeli practices?

It is as though the word were a firmly established taboo in European and Western political, media and cultural discourse whenever Israel is concerned.

This taboo exerts its power over those officials and commentators who, in this way, give reason to suspect that acknowledging genocide depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the status of the victims.

Double standards
It is entirely understandable that the allies of a regime of occupation and genocide, or those who consider themselves Israel’s partners and friends, would avoid issuing a clear condemnation of conduct they themselves helped support and encourage, directly or indirectly, even if only through silence and denial of its atrocities.

Throughout this prolonged season of horrors, the Israeli side has enjoyed military and political backing, as well as propagandistic cover, through carefully crafted formulas uttered by senior European and Western officials.

These amounted to evasive justifications for whatever war crimes and grave violations an occupying authority and its military forces might commit against a population left utterly exposed to continuous bombardment.

This may be inferred from the phrase that has become a staple of Western speeches: “Israel has every right to defend itself” — words that Israeli leaders understand simply as advance legitimation for a policy of mass killing and comprehensive destruction on the ground.

Naturally, no mention is made in this context of any right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, for example, or of their right under international humanitarian law to resist the military occupation entrenched on their land.

States, governments and political leaderships — joined by elites in the fields of thought, culture and media — insist on ignoring the reality of genocide against the Palestinian people, or conceal it through a tendency toward genocide denial, as though all the serious international efforts of documentation and investigation had no value for them.

Denying a genocide that has unfolded before everyone’s ears and eyes simply means minimising its confirmed atrocities. It also entails direct or indirect encouragement of this pattern of horrific violations, so long as they are met with such shocking laxity.

Clinging to outright denial
Moreover, clinging to outright denial encourages the perpetrators to resume committing appalling war crimes, so long as these crimes are not named as such. Which Western leaders — apart from a handful, such as Spain — have described what the Israeli leadership and its army have committed as “genocide” or “war crimes”?

It must be recalled that the centres of Western decision-making, including the European Union and its leading bodies crowned with slogans of noble values and human rights, became implicated in a sweeping display of bias when they chose very mild or evasive terms to describe Israeli war crimes that the entire world followed in images, sound and live broadcasts.

Leaders and spokespersons resorted to cold expressions such as the ploy of “expressing concern” and voicing “sorrow” over the victims, often without naming the perpetrator, because the perpetrator was the Israeli leadership and its army, whose brutal policies and measures were visible to all.

Observers around the world have noted how the charge of “double standards” clings to European and Western political discourse.

This is precisely what the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned his EU colleagues against — in full view of a world that notices the grave moral gap between European positions on Ukraine and Palestine. He issued that warning days into the war, at a Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 23 October 2023.

One would not be exaggerating to conclude from these contradictory positions that they place some human beings above others in status, degree of concern and human dignity, so that the lives, safety and security of Palestinians are placed lower in rank than those of others.

Thus comes the tolerance of the crushing of children, mothers, the sick and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, without serious positions being taken to restrain the machinery of genocide.

The margins, not the centre
Those faltering positions gave the strong impression that they were conferring moral immunity on the perpetrator, namely the Israeli leadership and its regular army.

Prevailing European and Western criticism was limited to only two reckless ministers from the Israeli government, which amounts to little, since Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are already constantly criticised within Israeli circles.

The narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a ‘humanitarian crisis’, as though the programmed genocide were merely a natural disaster

Meanwhile, the government and the political leadership more broadly continue to escape direct criticism, even after the accumulation of filmed atrocities and the issuance of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

This evasion becomes even clearer when criticism, along with some sanctions of limited effect, has been confined to settler gangs and their leaders, without any verbal reproach or punitive gesture directed toward the Israeli army.

The latter not only sponsors and protects settlers on the ground but also directly commits grave violations, appalling war crimes and campaigns of ethnic cleansing within the context of a horrific genocide.

This contradiction betrays a firmly rooted European and Western position intent on exempting the state, its leadership and its regular military and security apparatuses from any clear criticism, explicit condemnation or accountability, while merely formal positions are issued concerning the margins rather than the centre: some settlers instead of the army, and only two ministers instead of the government.

Evading a simple question
Political Europe, and many elites in public life across Western states, have even evaded confronting a simple question: does what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people constitute genocide?

Denying the genocide committed in Gaza requires wilful disregard.

It begins by brushing aside these war crimes and behaving as though they merit no attention. The adopted narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a “humanitarian crisis” and “alarming” conditions, or a show of concern for “civilian suffering” — as though the programmed genocide, reinforced by declared intentions to commit it, were merely a natural disaster that befell the place.

The states and governments that boast of their commitment to moral positions, human values, international law and human rights were supposed to honour those commitments. They should have warned against the campaign of genocide in its earliest stages, stripped it of political and propagandistic cover, and supported the enforcement of international justice and the cases filed over genocide against the Palestinian people.

Foremost among these is the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on the basis of Israel’s violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Instead, campaigns of moral targeting, incitement, intimidation and even the imposition of unjust sanctions on prosecutors have escalated, affecting international justice bodies and their personnel, as well as UN rapporteurs.

Thus, it becomes clear that complicity with the genocide committed against the Palestinian people goes ever further in undermining international law and threatening the foundations of international action and the protection afforded to its institutions and authorities.

Hossam Shaker is a journalist and an author who has extensively covered the topic of migration in Europe.This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

COMMENTARY: By Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitised term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy in America.

It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans.

• READ MORE: America250 versus Freedom 250: What to know about the US semiquincentennial
• Other Chris Hedges reports

It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless.

Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist.

The victims of neoliberal deindustrialisation, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the US in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Celebrated by the disenfranchised
Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the 12 richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions.

It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalised or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularised by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier.

A scam – but it worked
It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible.

Social justice, Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism, exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual.

It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’”

Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

Lack of a story unbearable
“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind.

“Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad.

“The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardise the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30 to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalised. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials.

A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe.

Palestine Action jailings
A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as “terrorists”, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offences.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes.

“And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function.

Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left”. I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalised or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomised by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit.

A nation where the government is privatised. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

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

• The Chris Hedges Report

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.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULWP) has accused the Indonesian military of shooting and wounding two teenagers in Titigi village, Intan Jaya, and causing other casualties on Monday.

The pair have been identified as 18-year-old Duad Hagismijau and Kiko Hagismijau, 16, and they are now being treated in hospital, alleges a statement by the ULMWP.

The statement said the two teenagers were working on building St Francis Xavier Titigi Catholic Church in their village when the attack began.

• READ MORE: Two teenagers in Intan Jaya reportedly shot
• Other West Papua reports

More than 2000 villagers have been displaced by this “latest display of colonial violence”, adding to more than 122,000 internal refugees spread throughout West Papua, the statement said.

“Intan Jaya is a warzone. The Titigi assault was followed by further drone attacks on Danggoa village — already the site of a previous drone-executed civilian killing — and Dangomba village in Hitadipa district,” said interim ULMWP president Benny Wenda.

Wenda also stressed the important historical date today, which marks 1 July 1971 — the 55th anniversary of the declaration of independence by the OPM (Free West Papua Movement) at Markas Victoria.

“This historic declaration, the second in the history of West Papua, was a critical moment in our struggle — a powerful rejection of Indonesian colonisation and the Act of No Choice that enabled it,” Wenda said.

“As enshrined in our constitution, the ULMWP recognises all such declarations as legitimate.”

‘Ongoing brutality’
Wenda said the “ongoing Indonesian brutality” reminded Papuans why they must “uphold the spirit of 1971”.

Also on Monday, the TNI (Indonesian military) was alleged to have opened fire on two Papuan civilians near a military base by the Dogabu river, in Hitadipa, the ULMWP statement said.

One of them, a minor named Sandibega Agimbau, was reportedly hit by an Asoka mortar shell. The other, a shepherd called Edianus Agimbau, suffered gunshot injuries and later died of his wounds.

His last words were that “I cannot walk any further”.

Later that day, the military claimed yet another victim, this time in Tolikara Regency, the ULMWP statement said.

A man named Krona Penggu was shot and killed by Indonesian soldiers near the Tolikara border.

“The ULMWP demands that Indonesia immediately withdraws its colonial military from Intan Jaya and across the highlands, in order to allow refugees to return to their homes,” Wenda said.

“They must also immediately cease using drones to drop bombs on Papuan civilians, a direct contravention of international law.”

Indonesian authorities have so far made no comment.

“Why is it that African teams and Middle Eastern teams have to answer for what their governments are doing but European teams don’t?” South African comedian Trevor Noah asked recently during a World Cup watch party.

He was reacting to the questions Western journalists had lobbed at Iranian players following their games. But the question goes far beyond Iran.

It speaks to a familiar hierarchy in global journalism: Some players are allowed to be athletes. Others are turned into ambassadors, defendants and moral exhibits.

• READ MORE: Iran’s heartbroken Team Melli exit World Cup amid silver lining of Mexican hospitality
• Iran bow out of World Cup: Late drama ends Team Melli’s knockout dream
• Iran’s Trojan Horse in US: Team Melli’s presence in WC
• Other FIFA World Cup reports

The World Cup is often sold as the place where football rises above politics. This has always been a canard. Politics, and hypocrisy, have always been part of the sport.

Teams have boycotted or been banned from the competition because of the policies of their governments. Russia is banned for its invasion of Ukraine. South Africa was eventually banned for apartheid.

Israel, however, gets to play in qualifiers despite occupying Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, bombing Iran, and despite findings by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN experts that it is committing genocide in Gaza and maintaining a system of apartheid at home and in the occupied territories.

The United States, too, has never been banned despite its many wars of aggression.

Full of politics
Nor is the World Cup unique. International cultural and sporting competitions are full of politics and hypocrisies dressed up as principle. Just look at the controversies around Israel’s participation in Eurovision.

Noah’s question is an indictment of a journalism that likes to imagine itself as challenging power but often mirrors its assumptions. Much ink was spilled over the propriety of Russia and Qatar hosting the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, given the policies of those governments.

Yet there has been far less interrogation of the propriety of the US hosting this tournament while it attacks Iran and Venezuela, deports asylum seekers, and blocks or restricts the travel of tournament officials, players and fans.

The selective accountability that runs through the institutions — who is banned, who is allowed to host — runs through the press box too. So it should not surprise us that some political questions are reserved for some teams and not others.

Ahead of their match against Egypt in Seattle, branded locally as a “Pride Match”, Iran and Egypt were both asked about LGBTQ rights. A FIFA official even read a statement saying Iran wished to answer only questions about the game. Still, the media persisted. Egyptian officials also shielded their players from similar questions.

Again, the point is not that LGBTQ rights, war, repression, discrimination, apartheid or genocide are unimportant. They are profoundly important. Journalists should ask difficult questions. But difficult questions should not become a ritual reserved for some passports only.

American players are not routinely asked to account for US bombings, border policy, racism, police violence or support for Israel. English players are not habitually asked about British arms exports or colonial legacy. French players are not expected to answer for military interventions in Africa. German players are not pressed on Berlin’s crushing of pro-Palestinian protests.

Not a confession
And when European teams have been pulled into politics — the OneLove armbands and the German squad covering their mouths for a team photo at Qatar 2022, England taking a knee at Euro 2020 — it was a protest they chose to make, not a confession demanded of them before they were allowed to speak.

No reporter required them to denounce their governments as the price of discussing a match.

Western footballers are treated as individuals who happen to represent a country. Players from Iran, Egypt, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Senegal or Ghana are more easily turned into representatives of regimes.

For many players from the Global South, the tournament press conference becomes an ideological checkpoint. Before they are allowed to talk about tactics, injuries or the opposition’s midfield, they are asked to explain their governments, their societies, their religions, their laws and their wars.

Sound familiar?

Remember Palestinian interviewees being required to condemn Hamas at the start of any interview before they could speak of the genocide in Gaza? The purpose was not clarification. It was classification.

It established the moral hierarchy before the conversation could begin: Israel good, Hamas bad. Palestinian suffering could be heard only after passing through the checkpoint of Western approval.

World Cup pressers
The same logic is visible in these World Cup pressers. The Iranians must condemn Iran. The Egyptians must condemn Egypt. Africans must prove they understand the West’s moral vocabulary before they can be trusted to speak. But Americans will not be asked to condemn the United States, nor the English the UK.

This is the real answer to Noah’s question. The issue is not whether politics belongs in sport. It always has. The issue is who is made to carry politics, and who is allowed to simply play.

Western media is not merely asking questions. It is enforcing a story long carried by Western governments and institutions: the West is the measure of morality, and the rest of the world must constantly answer for itself.

Patrick Gathara is senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

An ACT candidate has withdrawn from a new Wellington electorate race at November’s election, after failing to declare her previous membership of a Chinese political group linked to the country’s ruling communist party.

After Local Democracy Reporting sent questions about Lyra Yan Zhang’s background on Monday, the party confirmed on Tuesday the Kenepuru candidate had resigned – a week after her unveiling.

“All of our candidates are asked to disclose previous political party memberships. Ms Zhang did not disclose her previous connections, and [on Monday] she decided not to continue with her candidacy,” an ACT spokesperson said in a statement.

• READ MORE: Other Local Democracy Reports

Online publications by the China Zhi Gong Party — a satellite party of the Chinese Communist Party — reveal Zhang was a member who sat on party committees in the province of Hunan.

Zhi Gong Party is one of eight “democratic” minor parties officially recognised in China’s one-party political system.

Researchers into China’s foreign influence operations say it is a “united front” organisation controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department to assert influence on overseas Chinese communities and mobilise them to promote Beijing’s foreign policy goals.

“Membership of the party demonstrates a close affiliation with the CCP,” said Geoff Wade, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“Members of the party, even nominally retired ones overseas, thus offer overt challenges to democratic societies through potential influence and coercion activities within the host society.”

Porirua local elections
Zhang also ran in last year’s local body elections in Porirua, coming 11th out of 15 candidates at the Onepoto General Ward.

Zhang told The Post at the time she was a Zhi Gong Party party member from 2017 until 2020, when she resigned because of the covid-19 pandemic, and was “not a current membership for declarations”. She did not run under the ACT banner.

ACT said it conducted “extensive vetting” of candidates, including independent social media and background checks, criminal record checks, and credit checks. “This is alongside disclosure questions we ask prospective candidates, including previous party affiliations.”

Zhang, in a statement issued through ACT, said she remained supportive of the party.

The revelations are in the midst of New Zealand’s intelligence agency saying China is the “most active” country in conducting foreign interference and candidates being told to be wary of foreign interference, which could risk damage the reputation of the country, themselves or their party.

At the end of 2017, businessman Zhang Yikun, whose 2022 convictions over fraudulent political donations to the National Party were later quashed by the Court of Appeal, arranged for then Southland mayor Gary Tong to visit China in the name of the Zhi Gong Party’s central committee.

Businessman Zhang Yikun, whose 2022 convictions over fraudulent political donations to the National Party were later quashed by the Court of Appeal, welcomed Zhi Gong leaders to New Zealand in 2017 and attended the party’s 90th anniversary in Beijing in 2015.”

Zhang himself welcomed Zhi Gong leaders to New Zealand in 2017 and attended the party’s 90th anniversary in Beijing in 2015.

Export company
Lyra Yan Zhang moved from China to New Zealand in 2001 to study English and graduated from Massey University in 2006, according to a 2015 post on Chinese-language social media WeChat by her now-defunct export company that sells milk, honey and other health products to China.

In April 2017, a report by the provincial Zhi Gong Party in Hunan said Zhang was a member from its second branch in Lusong District of the city of Zhuzhou. She played an “important role” in arranging a visit to Zhuzhou’s high-tech industrial parks from about 10 New Zealanders, it said.

By the end of the year, she became one of six deputy chairs of a new association made up by Zhi Gong Party members, who are young diaspora with roots in Zhuzhou, according to the website of the United Front Work Department of Hunan’s provincial CCP.

Zhang’s campaign for local office in Porirua, centring on upgrading local infrastructure and pledged to improve transparency on council spending, made no references to her previous political involvement in China.

ACT’s press release announcing its candidates did not include Zhang’s biography.

ACT leader David Seymour campaigned in 2023 on stopping foreign investment from China to build New Zealand roads: “We can’t just close our eyes and hope the CCP don’t take the opportunity to gain a foothold in New Zealand.”

Earlier this month, Beijing banned four New Zealand MPs from entering China, Hong Kong and Macau for a year over their visit to Taiwan, including National’s Maureen Pugh, Labour’s Duncan Webb, ACT’s Laura McClure and NZ First’s David Wilson.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air. This story was first published on

ANALYSIS: By Shannon Bosch

A recent United Nations report has detailed serious allegations of Israel deliberately targeting Palestinian children during the conflict since October 2023.

The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, which has been rejected by the Israeli government, documents harrowing child deaths. It describes the scale of the deaths as “unprecedented”.

Legally, the report itself does not prosecute anyone, but it can have major consequences by adding to a growing record of international law evidence.

• READ MORE: Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children
• Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza children part of genocide: UN inquiry
• The Gaza doctrine – Israeli ‘journacide’ and the muted NZ media response
• Other Gaza genocide reports

An independent investigation
The commission is a standing investigative body created by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 after the escalation in Gaza and East Jerusalem that year.

Its mandate is unusually broad and ongoing. It is tasked with investigating all alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, identifying root causes and preserving evidence for accountability.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, the commission has published several reports on the conflict, including on the deaths of Israeli children.

This latest report is significant because it focuses specifically on children, examining the impact of Israeli military operations on Palestinian children between October 2023 and March 2026.

The report notes that the commission sent requests for information to the State of Palestine, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government. The first two responded, but the latter did not.

Four major findings
The commission’s report makes four highly significant findings.

1. The scale of child deaths is unprecedented
The report finds more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

The commission says the “overwhelming scale and rate of children killed and injured in Gaza have been unparalleled across modern conflicts globally”.

UNICEF describes the Gaza Strip as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.

2. Evidence of deliberate targeting
This is the report’s most legally explosive finding. It documents repeated incidents of children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso, suggesting deliberate targeting rather than incidental harm.

Cases such as Hind Rajab and other children shot while evacuating or sheltering are central examples.

Doctors on medical missions in Gaza reported to the commission that it appeared Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers were engaged in a “game” of target practice with “different body parts being targeted on different days”.

The commission concluded that based on forensic evidence and military analysis, there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately targeted.

3. Systematic attacks on child-essential infrastructure
The report documents attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, which enjoy special protection under international law. The commission found these attacks have directly contributed to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse.

The commission’s findings raise serious questions about whether those special legal protections were respected, especially where attacks disrupted paediatric care, neonatal treatment and emergency surgery.

4. Arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence
The report documents patterns of child detention, ill-treatment and abuse in custody.

The commission noted that dehumanising rhetoric by political leaders, soldiers and public figures has normalised violence against Palestinian children and contributed to an environment where such harm becomes acceptable.

How do these findings fit with international law?
This report is important because it reframes the war not only through the lens of civilian casualties, but through special legal obligations owed to children.

International humanitarian law and international human rights law apply concurrently in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is because Israel retains effective control over its borders, airspace and territorial waters, and has re-established military control on the ground.

As an occupying power, Israel has specific obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. These include ensuring food, medical care and the protection of civilians, especially children.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel must protect children’s rights to life, survival and development. It must prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and deprivation of life. It must also ensure the best interests of the child remain a primary consideration in all actions affecting them.

The commission’s conclusions are stark: children have not simply been caught in the crossfire of war. Many appear to have been deliberately targeted, denied essential care, detained, tortured, displaced and subjected to conditions that threaten their survival.

It reframes the suffering of Palestinian children not as collateral damage alone, but as a possible site of serious international crimes.

Serious legal questions
Many of the acts documented in the report amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If children were deliberately targeted, this would constitute a grave breach of the international humanitarian law principle to distinguish combatants from civilians.

The sheer scale of child deaths raises serious concerns about whether Israeli forces have been adhering to the proportionality analysis: if civilian harm is excessive compared with the concrete military advantage anticipated, the attack is unlawful.

Parties must take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian harm. The report argues Israel’s use of heavy explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas indicates repeated failures of precaution.

Israel at the UN: “This council has heard the same accusations against us again & again.. that Israel intentionally targets doctors, aid workers & journalists”

Yes, because you’ve murdered hundreds of doctors, aid workers & journalists. pic.twitter.com/9gMhanyYBa

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 30, 2026

Adding to the evidence record
In international law, accountability is often slow, but reports like this help build the legal architecture for future prosecutions.

The findings may feed directly into ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into alleged crimes in Palestine. The commission explicitly recommends further scrutiny by the court.

States could rely on this evidence in domestic prosecutions under universal jurisdiction. This allows domestic courts to hear cases alleging international crimes, regardless of where the crimes occurred, or the nationality of the victims or perpetrators.

States may also impose targeted sanctions or arms embargoes based on credible findings in UN reports documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law, even without a court ruling.

The findings could shape arguments in existing and future proceedings before the International Court of Justice, particularly around genocide and occupation.

Under international law, children are supposed to be the most protected people in war. The children of Gaza have not just suffered in the war, they have become one of its defining legal fault lines.

Shannon Bosch is associate professor (law) at Edith Cowan University. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

Iran’s bittersweet, logistically complicated, politically charged, and heartbreaking World Cup run found a silver lining in Mexico, where the men’s football team departed their base camp in Tijuana to a warm goodbye from fans in the border city.

Iran were eliminated from the World Cup on Saturday, after Austria’s last-gasp equaliser against Algeria saw them drop out of the tournament’s eight best third-placed teams.

It capped a dramatic 24 hours for Iran, who lost control of their fate for the knockout stage following a 1-1 draw with Egypt on Friday, which ended dramatically with an apparent last-ditch Iranian winner controversially ruled offside following a VAR check.

• READ MORE: Iran bow out of World Cup: Late drama ends Team Melli’s knockout dream
• Iran’s Trojan Horse in US: Team Melli’s presence in WC
• Other FIFA World Cup reports

The United States and Israel’s war on Iran dictated the logistics for Team Melli’s presence at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Iran shifted their base camp from Arizona to Tijuana not long before the tournament began, fearing visa complications.

In rarely-seen stringent logistical conditions, the team was forced to depart for Mexico mere hours after the full-time whistle of their matches in the US, despite repeated requests from the Iranians to relocate their fixtures out of the country engaged in an active war against them.

But from the moment Iran first touched down in Tijuana, Mexico welcomed the team with open arms. Fans thronged the perimeter of the team’s hotel before and after their travels for each group stage match, holding posters and waiting for autographs from players.

‘Hope our paths cross again’
The mutual love and respect that developed over three weeks made its way to social media and a global online audience that backed Team Melli through their off-pitch hardships.

It was also on social media that the team’s media department thanked the people of Mexico for their hospitality.

“Thank you for your professionalism, your support, and for covering not only our team’s sporting journey but also the unfair and unsportsmanlike treatment our delegation faced during its stay,” a message on X, posted by the Embassy of Iran in Mexico, read.

“Your commitment to reporting the facts accurately and with integrity meant a great deal to us.”

The message extended specific thanks to the residents of Tijuana, who welcomed the team with “generosity and genuine hospitality that made us feel right at home”.

“For all of us, leaving Tijuana is truly difficult. The memories we built here, the friendships we forged, and the affection we received will forever remain in the hearts of every member of the Iranian National Team.

“Thank you, and we hope our paths cross again,” the message read.

‘You’re Mexican now’
Videos on social media showed the Iranian team out and about in Tijuana as they autographed World Cup footballs and Panini sticker books and posed for photographs with fans.

Iran’s ambassador to Mexico, Abolfazl Pasandideh, and Football Federation of Iran’s (FFIRI) secretary-general, Hedayat Mombeini, spoke to supporters and media representatives over the weekend and thanked Mexico for its hospitality.

The Iranian embassy in Sarajevo also thanked Mexico for graciously hosting Iran, while simultaneously underscoring the US ill-treatment of the team.

“FIFA should exercise greater care in selecting future host nations, ensuring they are worthy hosts and committed to humanitarian principles,” the post on X read.

Anushe Engineer is a freelance sports journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan, where she previously worked for Dawn.

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 Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) has warned that a planned AI data centre in Southland would consume up to 25 percent of New Zealand’s annual electricity output and push power prices higher for Kiwi consumers and businesses.

CAFCA organiser Murray Horton said in a statement that data centres consumed a “phenomenal amount” of electricity.

“The proposed $5 billion foreign-owned Datagrid AI centre near Invercargill would require 1 gigawatt of electricity to operate,” he said.

• READ MORE: Southland’s first ‘AI factory’ data centre gets go-ahead
• Other AI energy reports

“That is nearly twice as much as the 570 megawatts that Rio Tinto’s Tiwai Point aluminium smelter consumes.

“Currently the smelter takes 13 percent of all the electricity New Zealand produces. If the data centre is built, we would have to sacrifice more than one third of the power we produce to supply just two foreign-owned businesses.”

Horton said CAFCA had long targeted Rio Tinto’s smelter near Bluff, labelling it New Zealand’s “biggest corporate bludger”.

“It pays a secret, super cheap price for power that is not available for any other user. All other electricity users in Aotearoa therefore subsidise the power that the smelter consumes and exports in the form of aluminium,” he said.

Textbook example
“Rio Tinto’s smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand, but this new data centre would take this to another level. It would use twice as much power and would require it 24 hours a day, every single day of the year.

“In a dry winter the smelter can turn off one or two of its pot lines to conserve power, but data centres cannot do that. Industry experts say AI computers can be damaged if they are shut down so they need an unending, uninterrupted supply.

“The government’s plans to develop a liquefied natural gas import terminal in Taranaki to provide backup power in lean years have to be seen in this light.

“LNG is environmentally harmful and, as we have seen with the war in Iran, potentially vulnerable solution to a problem largely created by these large power users.

“Without these major consumers, we could use new renewable energy generation and better storage and management of our supply to meet demand in dry years,” Horton said.

Another problem with AI computing centres is that they generated high levels of heat, so they must be cooled using large amounts of water. This is why cool regions such as Southland are sought after by developers.

Heat from data centres can be siphoned off and used to heat urban areas, but this requires significant investment in infrastructure.

‘Insidious nature’
Horton said concerns about electricity and water consumption as well as the “insidious nature of AI” were driving opposition to AI data centres around the world.

“Because it has made a big bet on AI, the United States is at the forefront of this. Many states have used tax incentives to encourage data centres and some AI companies are even developing their own generators to power them.”

Microsoft planned to reopen the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to run data centres in four different states, for example.

“Now opposition to them is growing right across the US. The issue unites people across the political spectrum — from MAGA to the far left. And The New York Times reports there are movements against them in Europe, South Africa, Latin America, India and Southeast Asia,” Horton said.

“There are also concerns about the nature of AI itself. Many people are worried that AI will cause massive unemployment. The military’s use of AI and facial recognition tools create some truly frightening prospects.

“AI is an unprecedented and potentially devastating technology but there has been very little discussion of it in New Zealand.

“The Overseas Investment Office has approved the construction of the data centre in Southland, but that is not a surprise because they approve nearly all projects that foreign companies want to operate here propose.”

Ethical issues
Along with the ethical issues AI poses, the economics of data centres did not add up, Horton said.

While they created jobs during the construction phase, once they were up and running they were virtually automatic and profits flowed to the biggest tech oligarchs in the world.

CAFCA is calling for a halt to major AI data centres in Aotearoa.

“They are being sold to the NZ public as The Next Big Thing, with little or no discussion about their massive impact on our electricity and water resources, let alone any discussion on the bigger issue of highly controversial AI,” Horton said.

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.

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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
• Jale Moala: Why is the UN credible when Fiji agrees but not when it’s inconvenient?
• UN report must mark a turning point for accountability for Palestinian children

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.

It’s interesting how readily many people in Fiji embrace the work of the United Nations when it supports local programmes such as climate resilience, development, governance and social inclusion.

Yet when the UN publishes reports critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, some of the same voices suddenly dismiss it as corrupt, evil or “fake news”.

Recently the UN published a report that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting children in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Israel continues to commit genocide, atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children, UN independent commission finds
• Israeli envoy and UN official clash at hearing over report blacklisting Tel Aviv
• Other Fiji and Israel reports

Facebook comments in response to the report have described the UN as the “enemy of Israel”, “a promoter of lies” and even an organisation that “stands for terrorists”.

The Fijian response raises an interesting question: Is the UN credible only when it says things we already agree with?

Or do we judge its credibility according to who its findings happen to criticise?

No institution is beyond criticism, including the UN. But it is worth remembering that it has maintained an office in Suva since Fiji’s independence, supporting everything from disaster recovery and climate resilience to governance, health and community development.

It seems odd to celebrate its work when it helps Fiji, yet dismiss it outright when its findings are politically or religiously inconvenient.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

Targeting of Gaza chidren                              Video: ABC News

Cook Islanders are set to head to the polls in six weeks’ time, the King’s Representative of the Cook Islands, Sir Tom Marsters, has announced.

“As Speaker, I extend sincere appreciation to all Honourable Members for their service, deliberations and contributions throughout this term. The work of this House-debate, scrutiny, law making and representation-reflects our shared responsibility to the people of the Cook Islands.”

This story was first published on

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
• Other US-Iran peace deal reports

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?
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‘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.

Papua New Guinea’s ruling PANGU Party says it would support a 15-year transition process for Bougainville, regardless of whether Parliament votes for or against independence.

Prime Minister James Marape outlined the proposal in a statement defending PNG’s constitutional process for deciding Bougainville’s political future.

Bougainville, which is an autonomous region within PNG, voted overwhelmingly for independence in a non-binding referendum in 2019, but the final decision rests with PNG’s national Parliament, as provided for under the Bougainville Peace Agreement.

• READ MORE: Bougainville’s Toroama accuses PNG of breaching Melanesian Agreement
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Marape said if parliament voted in favour of independence, the constitution allowed for a negotiated transition period of up to 15 years, during which powers would be progressively transferred from Port Moresby to Bougainville.

He said the process would be conditional on Bougainville demonstrating financial self-sufficiency, maintaining peace and stability, and eliminating armed violence and factionalism.

The prime minister said Bougainville would need to generate enough internal revenue to fund at least 70 percent of its annual budget over a five-year period.

But Marape also said that if Parliament rejected independence, under PANGU’s plan, the referendum result should remain “alive” rather than being extinguished.

Under that scenario, Bougainville would still be given the same 15-year period to meet agreed benchmarks before Parliament reconsidered the issue.

“What I meant was that the issue will not be finally resolved by a single vote alone,” Marape said, in reference to his comments in Parliament recently that “a yes can become a no and a no can become a yes”.

“The parliamentary vote simply begins the next stage of our collective journey as a nation.”

Constitutional path
Marape repeatedly stressed that Bougainville’s future could only be decided through constitutional processes established under the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement and incorporated into Papua New Guinea’s constitution.

He said Parliament, not the national government, had the final authority to decide the referendum outcome.

“Breaking up a country is the most serious decision any Parliament can make,” he said.

“It is only proper that a super-majority befitting a constitutional change should determine such a matter.”

Marape also defended Parliament Speaker Job Pomat’s position that a three-quarter parliamentary majority should be required in order to ratify the result to approve independence. Bougainville’s leaders have voiced frustration over this high majority threshold.

The prime minister said he would continue discussions with Bougainville leaders and wanted Parliament to consider the referendum outcome on August 30, subject to agreement from the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG).

Bougainville’s referendum saw 97.7 percent of voters support independence from PNG after decades of conflict and the Peace Agreement brokered in 2001.

Ardie Savea has been named All Blacks captain, as head coach Dave Rennie today revealed his first squad at Feilding Yellows Rugby Club.

Savea said he would be drawing on the leadership from those around him, and those who have come before, to inspire and ground him.

“To serve this team, its people and its fans is one of the greatest honours in sport,” he said.

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“I believe this role is about empowering everyone in the group to be the best that they can be — from the leadership, to the players and wider staff.

“We pay tribute to those who have gone before us while also acknowledging that the responsibility of writing the next chapter in the All Blacks story lies with us.”

Savea thanked his wife, Saskia, and their children — Kobe, Keeon and Kove — as well as parents and extended family and friends.

“We are blessed to have a ‘village’ that walks alongside us.”

Rennie said they know Savea will do an outstanding job of leading the team on and off-field.

“Ardie is highly respected by his team-mates and cares deeply about the black jersey.”

Pasifika heritage
Other players with Pasifika heritage named in the All Blacks include Asafo Aumua, Samisoni Taukei’aho, George Bower, Pasilio Tosi, Tupou Vaa’i, Patrick Tuipulotu, Wallace Sititi, and Quinn Tupaea.

Xavier Numia, Anton Segner, Fehi Fineanganofo and Josh Moorby are the debutants.

Tamaiti Williams, Scott Barrett, Fabian Holland and Leicester Fainga’anuku were unavailable due to injury.

The All Blacks’ first game of the season is against France on July 4.

Nations Championship Fixtures:

• Saturday 4 July: France, One New Zealand Stadium, Christchurch, 7.10pm NZST
• Saturday 11 July: Italy, HNRY Stadium, Wellington, 5.10pm NZST
• Saturday 18 July: Ireland, Eden Park, Auckland, 7.10pm NZST
• Sunday 8 November: Scotland, Sottish Gas Murrayfield, Edinburgh, 3.10am NZDT
• Sunday 15 November: Wales, Principality Stadium, Cardiff, 3.10am NZDT
• Sunday 22 November: England, Allianz Stadium, London, 3.10am NZDT
• 27-29 November: Nations Championship Finals Weekend, Allianz Stadium, London

The full 34-man squad:
Hookers
Asafo Aumua (29 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 20)
Codie Taylor (35 / Crusaders / Canterbury /106)
Samisoni Taukei’aho ( 28 / Chiefs / Waikato / 43)

Props
Ethan De Groot (27 / Highlanders / Southland / 40)
George Bower (34 / Crusaders / Otago / 25)
Xavier Numia * (27 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 0)
Tyrel Lomax (30 / Hurricanes / Tasman / 48)
Fletcher Newell (26 / Crusaders / Canterbury / 35)
Pasilio Tosi (27 / Hurricanes / Bay of Plenty / 16)

Locks
Tupou Vaa’i (26 / Chiefs / Taranaki / 45)
Patrick Tuipulotu (33 / Blues / Auckland / 56)
Josh Lord (25 / Chiefs / Taranaki / 12)
Sam Darry (25 / Blues / Canterbury / 8)

Loose Forwards
Peter Lakai (23 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 8)
Simon Parker (26 / Chiefs / Northland / 8)
Ardie Savea (32 / Moana Pasifika / Wellington / 106) (Captain)
Wallace Sititi (23 / Chiefs / North Harbour / 19)
Luke Jacobson (29 / Chiefs / Waikato / 24)
Anton Segner * (24 / Blues / Auckland / 0)

Halfbacks
Cameron Roigard (25 / Hurricanes / Counties Manukau / 17)
Cortez Ratima (25 / Chiefs / Waikato / 21)
Kyle Preston (26 / Crusaders / Wellington / 1)

First Five-Eighths
Ruben Love (25 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 5)
Beauden Barrett (35 / Blues / Taranaki / 144)
Damian McKenzie (31 / Chiefs / Waikato / 74)

Midfielders
Jordie Barrett (29 / Hurricanes / Taranaki / 78)
Quinn Tupaea (27 / Chiefs / Waikato / 24)
Billy Proctor (27 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 11)
Anton Lienert-Brown (31 / Chiefs / Waikato / 88)

Outside Backs
Caleb Clarke (27 / Blues / Auckland / 33)
Fehi Fineanganofo * (23 / Hurricanes / Bay of Plenty / 0)
Leroy Carter (27 / Chiefs / Bay of Plenty / 6)
Josh Moorby * (27 / Hurricanes / Waikato / 0)
Will Jordan (28 / Crusaders / Tasman / 54)

This story was first published on

An Israeli cabinet minister has named the new Middle East on live radio —  and he named it in alarm.

What Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli called the “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis” is not a threat. It is the architecture of a new regional order.

And once you see its logic, you cannot unsee it. Here is what it means — and what it means for America.

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❝What we are witnessing is the rise of a new axis❞

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli says Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis ‘is worrying’, linking three countries to recent US-Iran deal https://t.co/53i0KcwcAR pic.twitter.com/iOVMd6kEDI

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) June 17, 2026

The confession in the alarm
When Amichai Chikli went on Israel’s 103 FM radio this week to warn of the rise of a “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis,” he wasn’t making a prediction. He was issuing a confession.

An adversary’s alarm is always the most reliable confirmation that a structural shift has occurred — and what Chikli named in anxiety, we must now examine with clarity.

The old Middle East is gone. What is rising in its place is an architecture that no Western foreign policy establishment has yet fully reckoned with — one in which American primacy has been displaced, Israeli military dominance has been exposed as insufficient, and the two great Indigenous powers of the region, Iran and Türkiye, are emerging as the twin poles of a new order.

The moment the Old Order broke
The proximate event was the US-Iran framework agreement — now signed and in force. Trump signing it at the Palace of Versailles during dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday evening, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signing from Tehran.

But the manner of its emergence is as consequential as its content.

Washington and Tehran reached their temporary truce on April 8 through Pakistani mediation. The framework itself was shaped by Pakistan, Qatar, and Türkiye — playing, as one account noted, “different but complementary roles.”

Qatar hosted senior Iranian officials and maintained communication channels. Türkiye provided consistent diplomatic backing and called repeatedly for a negotiated resolution. Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was the crucial bridge, maintaining simultaneous contacts with both Washington and Tehran.

Notice who was absent from this architecture — Israel. Notice who else was absent — the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. These are the three traditional American-anchored Gulf states that for three decades defined the regional order alongside Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself admitted the scale of his marginalisation. At his first press conference in three months, he conceded he did not know what was actually written in the agreement.

The leader of the Middle East’s most powerful military, possessor of an undeclared nuclear arsenal, was reduced to a bystander while the region’s future was negotiated without him.

Trump, at the G7 summit in France, publicly described Netanyahu as “crazy” and said “without me, there would be no Israel.” Strip away the Trumpian grandiosity and a devastating strategic truth remains: Israel’s security has never rested on its own foundations, but on American patronage. And that patronage is being fundamentally recalibrated.

For American readers, this demands a moment of honest reflection. The United States spent trillions of dollars and decades of strategic energy constructing a Middle Eastern order anchored on Israeli military dominance and Gulf monarchy stability. That order has not been dismantled by an adversary’s military victory. It has been quietly superseded — by diplomacy conducted through channels America did not control, by actors America did not invite, producing an outcome America did not architect. That is a more profound kind of displacement than defeat in battle.

The dual-hegemon architecture
What is emerging is not a successor Pax — not Chinese, not Russian, not any external power’s regional order. It is something rarer and more durable: a regional order anchored by Indigenous great powers.

Iran and Turkey are the twin poles. Between them they possess the military depth, the demographic weight, the geographic centrality, and the independent foreign policy capacity that no other regional actor can match. Iran controls the eastern arc — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen — through its network of allied movements and state relationships.

Türkiye commands the northern tier, projects power into Syria, maintains NATO membership as a strategic hedge, and has emerged as the region’s most consequential diplomatic broker.

This is not a partnership moving in perfect harmony. Türkiye and Iran are rival civilisational powers with a long history of strategic friction. The more precise framework is managed bipolarity — two hegemons who converge sufficiently on the containment of Israeli expansionism to cooperate diplomatically, while competing for influence across the Arab world’s contested spaces.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his country’s position unambiguous. Speaking to Parliament, he declared that Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where it threatened Türkiye directly, and called Israel the single biggest obstacle to regional peace.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in Moscow — a symbolically charged backdrop — welcomed the US-Iran agreement but crucially called for it to evolve into “a structural and lasting security architecture rather than a temporary period of calm”.

That phrase is the key to understanding Ankara’s ambition. Turkey is not interested in episodic crisis management. It is seeking to institutionalise a new regional order in which it is a permanent rule-setter — the Ottoman inheritance reframed for the 21st century.

Iran, militarily weakened by the six-week Israeli offensive but diplomatically rehabilitated by the agreement, emerges in a paradoxical position of strength. It has traded military confrontation for international legitimacy, secured the rehabilitation of its economy, and — crucially — retained its regional network intact. The agreement has not dismantled Iranian power projection. It has brought Iran back into the international system while leaving its strategic depth untouched.

Pakistan: The nuclear keystone
The actor most consistently underestimated in Western analysis is Pakistan — and yet Pakistan may be the keystone of the entire new architecture.

Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. Its Army Chief personally bridged Washington and Tehran to produce the April 8 truce. It sits at the heart of the Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan diplomatic axis. And it has recently formalised a defence pact with Saudi Arabia.

That last point demands careful attention — and contains a particular irony for American readers.

Saudi Arabia’s strategic anxiety is acute. If American primacy in the region is receding, Riyadh needs an alternative security guarantee. It needs, specifically, nuclear cover. China has been proposed as one possible guarantor. But Pakistan is the more structurally coherent answer — and the answer whose historical roots run deepest.

Saudi money was instrumental in funding Pakistan’s nuclear programme during the 1970s and 1980s. This was never a secret in strategic circles. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s original conception of an “Islamic bomb” was always partly conceived with the broader Muslim world — and implicitly with Saudi Arabia — in mind. The recent Saudi-Pakistan defence pact is not a bilateral footnote. It is the formal institutionalisation of a security relationship whose nuclear dimension has always been implicit.

Here is the American irony: Washington funded, armed, and sustained Pakistan through decades of the Cold War and the War on Terror. American taxpayers financed the Pakistani military establishment that built the Islamic world’s first nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal may now serve as the instrument by which Saudi Arabia quietly exits the American security umbrella — replacing it with an Islamic solidarity framework that carries far greater domestic legitimacy in Riyadh than any guarantee from Washington ever did.

History has a sharp sense of irony. America built the tools of its own displacement.

Lebanon: The proving ground
Lebanon is not a footnote to this architectural shift. It is its most immediate and visible proving ground — the theatre where the transition from old order to new is being tested in real time.

Israel’s continued strikes on south Lebanon, even after the US-Iran framework was announced, reveal the central tension of this transitional moment. Netanyahu, sidelined from the deal and facing devastating domestic criticism, is using Lebanon as the one theatre where he can still project agency. But in doing so, he is accelerating precisely the dynamic that isolates Israel further from the emerging order.

Erdoğan’s response was explicit and historically significant: Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where they threatened Türkiye directly, with Ankara’s security now tied to its two neighbouring countries. That is an extraordinary statement from a NATO member — effectively drawing a Turkish strategic red line over Lebanese and Syrian territory.

Under the old American-anchored order, no such red line existed. Lebanon was perpetually sacrificed, a weak state with no regional protector capable of imposing real costs on Israeli operations. That calculus has now changed.

Hezbollah emerges weakened militarily but strategically sheltered. Iran’s diplomatic rehabilitation does not require Hezbollah’s disarmament — it requires Lebanon’s stabilisation as a buffer state within the New Order. The agreement creates pressure for a ceasefire, not for the dismantling of the network that gives Iran its Lebanese strategic depth.

For Israel, this is the core dilemma: military operations in Lebanon that once carried manageable costs now risk triggering a broader regional response that the new architecture makes structurally coherent for the first time.

The coming reckoning: Bahrain, UAE and the Abraham Accords
The states facing the most acute strategic exposure in the new architecture are Bahrain and the UAE — the two Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords most deeply integrated into the Israeli-American axis.

They signed those accords in 2020 premised on a specific geopolitical bet: that American military primacy was durable, that Israeli military dominance was unassailable, and that normalisation with Tel Aviv was the winning ticket to regional security and economic modernisation.

Every one of those premises has now been shaken to its foundation.

American primacy has visibly receded — demonstrated not by any declaration, but by the simple fact that the most consequential regional agreement in a generation was negotiated without Washington in the lead role, and with Washington explicitly sidelining Israel from the process. Israeli military might, while still formidable, has been shown to have strategic limits.

And normalisation with Israel now carries reputational and security costs that were never priced into the original Abraham Accords calculation.

Bahrain and the UAE possess sovereign wealth, infrastructure, and relationships that retain value in any regional configuration. But they are now exposed on multiple flanks simultaneously — caught between an American patron recalibrating its commitments, an Israeli partner increasingly isolated from the new regional consensus, and an emerging order being constructed around axes from which they were conspicuously absent.

Their most likely path is quiet hedging rather than dramatic realignment. Expect both states to begin softening their public identification with Israeli positions, to deepen economic ties with Türkiye and expand back-channel contacts with Tehran, and to use their sovereign wealth funds as instruments of strategic repositioning — investments that signal accommodation with the New Order without requiring a formal rupture with Washington.

Abu Dhabi in particular, will seek to be useful to all sides simultaneously. But the window for comfortable hedging is narrowing. The longer Bahrain and the UAE remain identified with a receding order, the less leverage they will carry when they eventually seek terms with the one that is rising.

Oman and Qatar occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Oman’s historic role as a quiet back-channel to Iran — it was instrumental in facilitating the early Obama-era nuclear conversations that eventually produced the JCPOA — gives it standing and credibility in the New Order. Qatar’s role in the current mediation, hosting senior Iranian officials and explicitly supporting Pakistani-led diplomacy, has purchased it significant goodwill from Tehran. Both states will navigate the transition with relative comfort.

Saudi Arabia’s inevitable pivot
Saudi Arabia’s position is the most consequential and the most delicate of all.

MBS built his regional vision on three pillars: American security guarantees, economic modernisation through Vision 2030 anchored in Western and Israeli-adjacent investment, and a forthcoming normalisation with Israel that was to be the capstone of the Abraham Accords architecture. That capstone now looks not merely delayed but structurally implausible.

The pivot toward Iran and the new regional order is not a choice Riyadh makes from strength. It is a response to the collapse of the strategic alternative. The 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement was the first clear signal. The new architecture now accelerating around the Iran-Türkiye axis makes the logic of that pivot not merely rational but increasingly urgent.

Saudi Arabia cannot indefinitely maintain a posture of confrontation with Iran while its American patron visibly disengages, while the new regional order is being built by actors — Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar — with whom Riyadh has workable and historically deep relationships, and while its own population’s Islamic solidarity instincts run counter to alignment with an Israel conducting military campaigns across the Muslim world.

The Pakistani nuclear umbrella is what makes this pivot strategically viable without strategic nakedness. It allows Riyadh to reduce its dependence on American extended deterrence without being exposed — and to do so through an Islamic solidarity framework that carries profound domestic legitimacy in a way that a Chinese or Russian guarantee never could.

A Saudi Arabia sheltered by Pakistani nuclear deterrence, reconciled with Iran, and aligned with the Turkey-Qatar axis is a Saudi Arabia that has successfully navigated the transition without catastrophic rupture with anyone.

The pivot will not be announced with fanfare. It will happen gradually — through accumulating diplomatic signals, quiet investment reorientations, and careful distancing from Israeli positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader regional conflict. By the time it is fully visible to Western analysts, it will already be irreversible.

Conclusion: Reading the tide
What Amichai Chikli named in alarm this week, we should name with analytical precision: the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order anchored by Indigenous power, shaped by Islamic solidarity and civilisational assertion, and no longer organised around American primacy or Israeli military dominance.

Iran and Turkey will not always agree. Their rivalry is ancient and will resurface across multiple theatres. But on the foundational question of this historical moment — that the old externally-imposed order must be replaced by one reflecting the region’s own balance of forces — they are aligned.

And that alignment, backstopped by Pakistan’s nuclear capability, lubricated by Qatar’s financial diplomacy, and increasingly accommodated by a pivoting Saudi Arabia, is sufficient to constitute a genuinely new architecture.

For America, the lesson is not that it has been defeated. It is that it has been superseded — which is a more permanent condition. The tools America built, the relationships America cultivated, the arsenals America funded across decades of Cold War and counter-terrorism strategy, have been repurposed by actors pursuing their own civilisational interests.

That is not a betrayal. It is simply how history works when the tide turns.

The states that bet on the Old Order — Bahrain, UAE, and above all Israel — now face a reckoning whose full dimensions are only beginning to become visible. The states that positioned themselves wisely — Türkiye, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and soon Saudi Arabia — will shape what comes next.

History rewards those who read the tide correctly. The tide has turned. The only remaining question is who moves with it — and who insists on standing still as the water rises.

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 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.