If you imagined Western politicians and media were finally showing signs of waking up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, think again.

Even the decision this week by several Western states, led by the UK, to ban the entry of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, is not quite the pushback it is meant to seem.

Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway may be seeking strength in numbers to withstand retaliation from Israel and the United States. But in truth, they have selected the most limited and symbolic of all the possible sanctions they could have imposed on the Israeli government.

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Their meagre action is motivated solely out of desperation. They urgently need to deter Israel from carrying through plans to formally annex the Occupied West Bank and thereby tear away the last remnants of the two-state comfort blanket — the West’s solitary pretext for decades of inaction.

And as a bonus, the entry ban makes Britain and the others look like they are getting tough with Israel on Gaza, even as they do nothing to stop the mounting horrors there.

Even the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper’s senior columnist Gideon Levy mocked what he called a “tiny, ridiculous step” by the UK and others, saying it would make no difference to the slaughter in Gaza. He called for sanctions against “Israel in its entirety”.

“Do they really believe this punishment will have some sort of effect on Israel’s moves?” Levy asked incredulously.

2500 sanctions on Russia
Remember as Britain raps two cabinet ministers on the knuckles that the West has imposed more than 2500 sanctions on Russia.

While David Lammy, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, worries about the future of a non-existent diplomatic process — one trashed by Israel two decades ago — Palestinian children are still starving to death unseen.

The genocide is not going to end unless the West forces Israel to stop. This week more than 40 Israeli military intelligence officers went on an effective strike, refusing to be involved in combat operations, saying Israel was waging a “clearly illegal” and “eternal war” in Gaza.

Yet Starmer and Lammy will not even concede that Israel has violated international law.  

What is clear is that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s sighs of regret last month — expressing how “intolerable” he finds the “situation” in Gaza — were purely performative.

Starmer and the rest of the Western establishment have continued tolerating what they claim to find “intolerable”, even as the death toll from Israel’s bombs, gunfire and starvation campaign grow day by day.

Those emaciated children — profoundly malnourished, their stick-then legs covered by the thinnest membrane of skin — aren’t going to recover without meaningful intervention. Their condition won’t stabilise while Israel deprives them of food day after day. Sooner or later they will die, mostly out of our view.

Parents must risk lives
Meanwhile, desperate parents must now risk their lives, forced to run the gauntlet of Israeli gunfire, in a — usually forlorn — bid to be among the handful of families able to grab paltry supplies of largely unusable, dried food. Most families have no water or fuel to cook with.

As if mocking Palestinians, the Western media continue to refer to this real-life, scaled-up Hunger Games — imposed by Israel in place of the long-established United Nations relief system — as “aid distribution”.

We are supposed to believe it is addressing Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” even as it deepens the crisis.

On the kindest analysis, Western capitals are settling back into a mix of silence and deflections, having got in their excuses just before Israel crosses the finishing line of its genocide.

They have readied their alibis for the moment when international journalists are allowed in — the day after the population of Gaza has either been exterminated or violently herded into neighbouring Sinai.

Or more likely, a bit of both.

Truth inverted
What distinguishes Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is this. It is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre, a spectacle in which every truth is carefully inverted.

That can best be achieved, of course, if those trying to write a different, honest script are eliminated. The extent and authorship of the horrors can be edited out, or obscured through a series of red herrings, misdirecting onlookers.

Israel has murdered more than 220 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 20 months, and has been keeping Western journalists far from the killing fields.

Like the West’s politicians, the foreign correspondents finally piped up last month — in their case, to protest at being barred from Gaza. No less than the politicians, they were keen to ready their excuses.

They have careers and their future credibility to think about, after all.

The journalists have publicly worried that they are being excluded because Israel has something to hide. As though Israel had nothing to hide in the preceding 20 months, when those same journalists docilely accepted their exclusion — and invariably regurgitated Israel’s deceitful spin on its atrocities.

If you imagine that the reporting from Gaza would have been much different had the BBC, CNN, The Guardian or The New York Times had reporters on the ground, think again.

The truth is the coverage would have looked much as it has done for more than a year and a half, with Israel dictating the story lines, with Israel’s denials foregrounded, with Israel’s claims of Hamas “terrorists” in every hospital, school, bakery, university, and refugee camp used to justify the destruction and slaughter.

British doctors volunteering in Gaza who have told us there were no Hamas fighters in the hospitals they worked in, or anyone armed apart from the Israeli soldiers that shot up their medical facilities, would not be more believed because Jeremy Bowen interviewed them in Khan Younis rather than Richard Madeley in a London studio.

Breaking the blockade
If proof of that was needed, it came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy against a UK-flagged ship, the Madleen, trying to break Israel’s genocidal aid blockade.

Israel’s law-breaking did not happen this time in sealed-off Gaza, or against dehumanised Palestinians.

Israel’s slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre

Israel’s ramming and seizure of the vessel took place on the high seas, and targeted a 12-member Western crew, including the famed young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. All were abducted and taken to Israel.

Thunberg was trying to use her celebrity to draw attention to Israel’s illegal, genocidal blockade of aid. She did so precisely by trying to break that blockade peacefully.

The defiance of the Madleen’s crew in sailing to Gaza was intended to shame Western governments that are under a legal — and it goes without saying, moral — obligation to stop a genocide under the provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention they have ratified.

Western citizens wring hands
Western capitals have been ostentatiously wringing their hands at the “humanitarian crisis” of Israel starving two million people in full view of the world.

The Madleen’s mission was to emphasise that those states could do much more than tell two Israeli cabinet ministers they are not welcome to visit. Together they could break the blockade, if they so wished.

Britain, France and Canada — all of whom claimed last month that the “situation” in Gaza was “intolerable” — could organise a joint naval fleet carrying aid to Gaza through international waters. They would arrive in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza.

At no point would they be in Israel territory.

Any attempt by Israel to interfere would be an act of war against these three states — and against Nato. The reality is Israel would be forced to pull back and allow the aid in.

But, of course, this scenario is pure fantasy. Britain, France and Canada have no intention of breaking Israel’s “intolerable” siege of Gaza.

None of them has any intention of doing anything but watch Israel starve the population to death, then describe it as a “humanitarian catastrophe” they were unable to stop.

The Madleen has preemptively denied them this manoeuvre and highlighted Western leaders’ actual support for genocide — as well as let the people of Gaza know that a majority of the Western public oppose their governments’ collusion in Israel’s criminality.

‘Selfie yacht’
The voyage was intended too as a vigorous nudge to awaken those in the West still slumbering through the genocide. Which is precisely why the Madleen’s message had to be smothered with spin, carefully prepared by Israel.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued statements calling the aid ship a “celebrity selfie yacht“, while dismissing its action as a “public relations stunt” and “provocation”. Israeli officials portrayed Thunberg as a “narcissist” and “antisemite”.

When Israeli soldiers illegally boarded the ship, they filmed themselves trying to hand out sandwiches to the crew — an actual stunt that should appall anyone mindful that, while Israel was concern-trolling Western publics about the nutritional needs of the Madleen crew, it was also starving two million Palestinians to death, half of them children.

Did the British government, whose vessel was rammed and invaded in international waters, angrily protest the attack? Did the reliably patriotic British media rally against this humiliating violation of UK sovereignty?

No, Starmer and Lammy once again had nothing to say on the matter.

They have yet to concede that Israel is even breaking international law in denying the people of Gaza all food and water for more than three months, let alone acknowledge that this actually constitutes genocide.

Instead, Lammy’s officials — 300 of whom have protested against the UK’s continuing collusion in Israeli atrocities — have been told to resign rather than raise objections rooted in international law.

Bypass legal advisers
According to sources within the Foreign Office cited by former British ambassador Craig Murray, Lammy has also insisted that any statements relating to the Madleen bypass the government’s legal advisers.

Why? To allow Lammy plausible deniability as he evades Britain’s legal obligation to respond to Israel’s assault on a vessel sailing under UK protection.

The media, meanwhile, has played its own part in whitewashing this flagrant crime — one that has taken place in full view, not hidden away in Gaza’s conveniently engineered “fog of war”.

Much of the press adopted the term “selfie yacht” as if it were their own. As though Thunberg and the rest of the crew were pleasure-seekers promoting their social media platforms rather than risking their lives taking on the might of a genocidal Israeli military.

They had good reason to be fearful. After all, the Israeli military shot dead 10 of their predecessors — activists on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza — 15 years ago. Israel has killed in cold blood American citizens such as Rachel Corrie, British citizens such as Tom Hurndall, and acclaimed journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh.

And for those with longer memories, the Israeli air force killed more than 30 American servicemen in a two-hour attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, and wounded 170 more. The anniversary of that crime — covered up by every US administration — was commemorated by its survivors the day before the attack on the Madleen.

‘Detained’, not abducted
Israel’s trivialising smears of the Madleen crew were echoed uncritically from Sky News and The Telegraph to LBC and Piers Morgan. 

Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.

As Thunberg headed back to Europe on Tuesday, the media continued with its assault on the English language and common sense. They reported that she had been “deported” from Israel, as though she had smuggled herself into Israel illegally rather than being been forcibly dragged there by the Israeli military.

But even the so-called “serious” media buried the significance both of the Madleen’s voyage to Gaza and of Israel’s lawbreaking. From The Guardian and BBC to The New York Times and CBS, Israel’s criminal attack was characterised as the aid ship being “intercepted” or “diverted”, and of Israel “taking control” of the vessel.

For the Western media, Thunberg was “detained”, not abducted.

The framing was straight out of Tel Aviv. It was a preposterous narrative in which Israel was presented as taking actions necessary to restore order in a situation of dangerous rule-breaking and anarchy by activists on a futile and pointless excursion to Gaza.

The coverage was so uniform not because it related to any kind of reality, but because it was pure propaganda — narrative spin that served not only Israel’s interests but that of a Western political and media class deeply implicated in Israel’s genocide.

Arming criminals
In another glaring example of this collusion, the Western media chose to almost immediately bury what should have been explosive comments last week from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He admitted that Israel has been arming and cultivating close ties with criminal gangs in Gaza.

He was responding to remarks from Avigdor Lieberman, a former political ally turned rival, that some of those assisted by Israel are affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State. The most prominent is named Yasser Abu Shabab.

The Western media either ignored this revelation or dutifully accepted Netanyahu’s self-serving characterisation of these ties as an alliance of convenience: one designed to weaken Hamas by promoting “rival local forces” and opening up new “post-war governing opportunities”.

The real aim — or rather, two aims: one immediate, the other long term — are far more cynical and disturbing.

More than six months ago, Palestinian analysts and the Israeli media began warning that Israel — after it had destroyed Gaza’s ruling institutions, including its police force – was working hand in hand with newly reinvigorated criminal gangs.

Israel’s immediate aim of arming the criminals — turning them into powerful militias — was to intensify the breakdown of law and order. That served as the prelude to a double-barrelled Israeli disinformation campaign.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals

Prime looting position
These gangs were put in a prime position to loot food from the United Nations’ long-established aid distribution system and sell it on the black market. The looting helped Israel falsely claim both that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN and that the international body had proven itself unfit to run humanitarian operations in Gaza.

Israel and the US then set about creating a mercenary front group — misleadingly called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — to run a sham replacement operation.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals.

They are located in a narrow strip of territory next to the border with Egypt. Palestinians are forced to ethnically cleanse themselves into a tiny area of Gaza — if they are to stand any hope of eating — in preparation for their expulsion into Sinai.

They have been herded into a massively congested area without the space or facilities to cope, where the spread of disease is guaranteed, and where they can be more easily massacred by Israeli bombs.

An increasingly malnourished population must walk long distances and wait in massive crowds in the heat in the hope of small handouts of food. It is a situation engineered to heighten tensions, and lead to chaos and fighting.

All of which provide an ideal pretext for Israeli soldiers to halt “aid distribution” pre-emptively in the interests of “public safety” and shoot into the crowds to “neutralise threats”, as has happened to lethal effect day after day.

Repeated ‘aid hub’ massacres
The repeated massacres at these “aid hubs” mean that the most vulnerable — those most in need of aid — have been frightened off, leaving gang members like Abu Shabab’s to enjoy the spoils.

On Wednesday, Israel massacred at least 60 Palestinians, most of them seeking food, in what has already become normalised, a daily ritual of bloodletting that is already barely making headlines.

And to add insult to injury, Israel has misrepresented its own drone footage of the very criminal gangs it arms, looting aid from trucks and shooting Palestinian aid-seekers as supposed evidence of Hamas stealing food and of the need for Israel to control aid distribution.

All of this is so utterly transparent, and repugnant, it is simply astonishing it has not been at the forefront of Western coverage as politicians and media worry about how “intolerable the situation” in Gaza has become.

Instead, the media has largely taken it as read that Hamas “steals aid”. The media has indulged an entirely bogus Israeli-fuelled debate about the need for aid distribution “reform”.

And the media has equivocated about whether it is Israeli soldiers shooting dead those seeking aid.

Of course, the media has refused to draw the only reasonable conclusion from all of this: that Israel is simply exploiting the chaos it has created to buy time for its starvation campaign to kill more Palestinians.

Calibrated warlordism
But there is much more at stake. Israel is fattening up these criminal gangs for a grander, future role in what used to be termed the “day after” — until it became all too clear that the period in question would follow the completion of Israel’s genocide.

It comes as no surprise to any Palestinian to hear confirmation from Netanyahu that Israel has been arming criminal gangs in Gaza, even those with affiliations to Islamic State.

It should not surprise any journalist who has spent serious time, as I have, living in a Palestinian community and studying Israel’s colonial control mechanisms over Palestinian society.

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians – if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland – has been of carefully calibrated warlordism

Palestinian academics have understood for at least two decades — long before Hamas’ lethal one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023 — why Israel has invested so much of its energy in dismantling bit by bit the institutions of Palestinian national identity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The goal, they have been telling me and anyone else who would listen, was to leave Palestinian society so hollowed out, so crushed by the rule of feuding criminal gangs, that statehood would become inconceivable.

As the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada observes of what is taking place in Gaza: “Israel is NOT using [the gangs] to go after Hamas, they’re using them to destroy Gaza itself from the inside.”

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians — if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland — has been of carefully calibrated warlordism. Israel would arm a series of criminal families in their geographic heartlands.

Each would have enough light arms to terrorise their local populations into submission, and fight neighbouring families to define the extent of their fiefdom.

None would have the military power to take on Israel. Instead they would have to compete for Israel’s favour — treating it like some inflated Godfather —  in the hope of securing an advantage over rivals.

In this vision, the Palestinians — one of the most educated populations in the Middle East – are to be driven into a permanent state of civil war and “survival of the fittest” politics. Israel’s ambition is to eviscerate Palestinian social cohesion as effectively as it has bombed Gaza’s cities “into the Stone Age”.

Divinely blessed
This is a simple story, one that should be all too familiar to European publics if they were educated in their own histories.

For centuries, Europeans spread outwards — driven by a supremacist zealotry and a desire for material gain — to conquer the lands of others, to steal resources, and to subordinate, expel and exterminate the natives that stood in their way.

The native people were always dehumanised. They were always barbarians, “human animals”, even as we — the members of a supposedly superior civilisation — butchered them, starved them, levelled their homes, destroyed their crops.

Our mission of conquest and extermination was always divinely blessed. Our success in eradicating native peoples, our efficiency in killing them, was always proof of our moral superiority.

We were always the victims, even while we humiliated, tortured and raped. We were always on the side of righteousness.

Israel has simply carried this tradition into the modern era. It has held a mirror up to us and shown that, despite all our grandstanding about human rights, nothing has really changed.

There are a few, like Greta Thunberg and the crew of the Madleen, ready to show by example that we can break with the past. We can refuse to dehumanise. We can refuse to collude in industrial savagery. We can refuse to give our consent through silence and inaction.

But first we must stop listening to the siren calls of our political leaders and the billionaire-owned media. Only then might we learn what it means to be human.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

The late Member of Parliament Jeton Anjain and the people of the nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll changed the course of the history of the Marshall Islands by using Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship to evacuate their radioactive home islands 40 years ago.

They did this by taking control of their own destiny after decades of being at the mercy of the United States nuclear testing programme and its aftermath.

In 1954, the US tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, spewing high-level radioactive fallout on unsuspecting Rongelap Islanders nearby.

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For years after the Bravo test, decisions by US government doctors and scientists caused Rongelap Islanders to be continuously exposed to additional radiation.

The 40th anniversary of the dramatic evacuation of Rongelap Atoll in 1985 by the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior — a few weeks before French secret agents bombed the ship in Auckland harbour — was spotlighted this week in Majuro with the arrival of Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior III to a warm welcome combining top national government leaders, the Rongelap Atoll Local Government and the Rongelap community.

“We were displaced, our lives were disrupted, and our voices ignored,” said MP Hilton Kendall, who represents Rongelap in the Marshall Islands Parliament, at the welcome ceremony in Majuro earlier in the week.

“In our darkest time, Greenpeace stood with us.”

‘Evacuated people to safety’
He said the Rainbow Warrior “evacuated the people to safety” in 1985.

Greenpeace would “forever be remembered by the people of Rongelap,” he added.

In 1984, Jeton Anjain — like most Rongelap people who were living on the nuclear test-affected atoll — knew that Rongelap was unsafe for continued habitation.

There was not a single scientist or medical doctor among their community although Jeton was a trained dentist, and they mainly depended on US Department of Energy-provided doctors and scientists for health care and environmental advice.

They were always told not to worry and that everything was fine.

But it wasn’t, as the countless thyroid tumors, cancers, miscarriages and surgeries confirmed.

As the desire of Rongelap people to evacuate their homeland intensified in 1984, unbeknown to them Greenpeace was hatching a plan to dispatch the Rainbow Warrior on a Pacific voyage the following year to turn a spotlight on the nuclear test legacy in the Marshall Islands and the ongoing French nuclear testing at Moruroa in French Polynesia.

A Rainbow Warrior question
As I had friends in the Greenpeace organisation, I was contacted early on in its planning process with the question: How could a visit by the Rainbow Warrior be of use to the Marshall Islands?

Jeton and I were good friends by 1984, and had worked together on advocacy for Rongelap since the late 1970s. I informed him that Greenpeace was planning a visit and without hesitation he asked me if the ship could facilitate the evacuation of Rongelap.

At this time, Jeton had already initiated discussions with Kwajalein traditional leaders to locate an island that they could settle in that atoll.

I conveyed Jeton’s interest in the visit to Greenpeace, and a Greenpeace International board member, the late Steve Sawyer, who coordinated the Pacific voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, arranged a meeting for the three of us in Seattle to discuss ideas.

Jeton and I flew to Seattle and met Steve. After the usual preliminaries, Jeton asked Steve if the Rainbow Warrior could assist Rongelap to evacuate their community to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, a distance of about 250 km.

Steve responded in classic Greenpeace campaign thinking, which is what Greenpeace has proved effective in doing over many decades. He said words to the effect that the Rainbow Warrior could aid a “symbolic evacuation” by taking a small group of islanders from Rongelap to Majuro or Ebeye and holding a media conference publicising their plight with ongoing radiation exposure.

“No,” said Jeton firmly. He wasn’t talking about a “symbolic” evacuation. He told Steve: “We want to evacuate Rongelap, the entire community and the housing, too.”

Steve Sawyer taken aback
Steve was taken aback by what Jeton wanted. Steve simply hadn’t considered the idea of evacuating the entire community.

But we could see him mulling over this new idea and within minutes, as his mind clicked through the significant logistics hurdles for evacuation of the community — including that it would take three-to-four trips by the Rainbow Warrior between Rongelap and Mejatto to accomplish it — Steve said it was possible.

And from that meeting, planning for the 1985 Marshall Islands visit began in earnest.

I offer this background because when the evacuation began in early May 1985, various officials from the United States government sharply criticised Rongelap people for evacuating their atoll, saying there was no radiological hazard to justify the move and that they were being manipulated by Greenpeace for its own anti-nuclear agenda.

This condescending American government response suggested Rongelap people did not have the brain power to make important decisions for themselves.

But it also showed the US government’s lack of understanding of the gravity of the situation in which Rongelap Islanders lived day in and day out in a highly radioactive environment.

The Bravo hydrogen bomb test blasted Rongelap and nearby islands with snow-like radioactive fallout on 1 March 1954. The 82 Rongelap people were first evacuated to the US Navy base at Kwajalein for emergency medical treatment and the start of long-term studies by US government doctors.

No radiological cleanup
A few months later, they were resettled on Ejit Island in Majuro, the capital atoll, until 1957 when, with no radiological cleanup conducted, the US government said it was safe to return to Rongelap and moved the people back.

“Even though the radioactive contamination of Rongelap Island is considered perfectly safe for human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than those found in other inhabited locations in the world,” said a Brookhaven National Laboratory report commenting on the return of Rongelap Islanders to their contaminated islands in 1957.

It then stated plainly why the people were moved back: “The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.”

And for 28 years, Rongelap people lived in one of the world’s most radioactive environments, consuming radioactivity through the food chain and by living an island life.

Proving the US narrative of safety to be false, the 1985 evacuation forced the US Congress to respond by funding new radiological studies of Rongelap.

Thanks to the determination of the soft-spoken but persistent leadership of Jeton, he ensured that a scientist chosen by Rongelap would be included in the study. And the new study did indeed identify health hazards, particularly for children, of living on Rongelap.

The US Congress responded by appropriating US$45 million to a Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund.

Subsistence atoll life
All of this was important — it both showed that islanders with a PhD in subsistence atoll life understood more about their situation than the US government’s university educated PhDs and medical doctors who showed up from time-to-time to study them, provide medical treatment, and tell them everything was fine on their atoll, and it produced a $45 million fund from the US government.

However, this is only a fraction of the story about why the Rongelap evacuation in 1985 forever changed the US narrative and control of its nuclear test legacy in this country.

Rongelap is the most affected population from the US hydrogen bomb testing programme in the 1950s.

By living on Rongelap, the community confirmed the US government’s narrative that all was good and the nuclear test legacy was largely a relic of the past.

The 1985 evacuation was a demonstration of the Rongelap community exerting control over their life after 31 years of dictates by US government doctors, scientists and officials.

It was difficult building a new community on Mejatto Island, which was uninhabited and barren in 1985. Make no mistake, Rongelap people living on Mejatto suffered hardship and privation, especially in the first years after the 1985 resettlement.

Nuclear legacy history
Their perseverance, however, defined the larger ramification of the move to Mejatto: It changed the course of nuclear legacy history by people taking control of their future that forced a response from the US government to the benefit of the Rongelap community.

Forty years later, the displacement of Rongelap Islanders on Mejatto and in other locations, unable to return to nuclear test contaminated Rongelap Atoll demonstrates clearly that the US nuclear testing legacy remains unresolved — unfinished business that is in need of a long-term, fair and just response from the US government.

The Rainbow Warrior will be in Majuro until next week when it will depart for Mejatto Island to mark the 40th anniversary of the resettlement, and then voyage to other nuclear test-affected atolls around the Marshall Islands.

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

The Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is disappointed with the Fiji government and Pacific Islands Forum’s endorsement of the Japanese government’s plans to dump 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean at the end of this month.

Nuclear justice campaigner Epeli Lesuma of PANG said this was a “blatant disregard” of the expert opinion of a panel of scientists commissioned by the Forum.

“It’s disappointing because Pacific leaders appointed this panel of experts so ideally our trust should be with them and the recommendations they have provided to us,” Lesuma said.

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“These are not just random scientists. These are esteemed and respected professionals engaged to provide us with this advice.”

Last week, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said he was satisfied with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report that stated Japan’s plans to release treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean had met relevant international standards.

“I have made it my business as a Pacific Island leader to carefully study the information and data on the matter…I am satisfied that Japan has demonstrated commitment to satisfy the wishes of the Pacific Island states, as conveyed to Japan by the Pacific Island Forum chair,” Rabuka said in a video on the Fiji government’s official Facebook page.

“I am satisfied that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report is reassuring enough to dispel any fears of any untoward degradation of the ocean environment that would adversely affect lives and ecosystems in our precious blue Pacific,” he said.

‘Convinced’ of IAEA’s seriousness
“I am convinced of the seriousness of the IAEA to continuously monitor this process in Japan.”

The controversial plan by Japan continues to spark anger and concern across many communities, environmental activists, non-government and civil society organisations.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s statement. Video: Fiji govt

Sharing Rabuka’s sentiments was the PIF chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, who said the IAEA was the world’s foremost authority on nuclear safety.

“We have received the comments, and the report from our scientific panel and the IAEA and [we are] taking a measured response.

“I’d have to say that as the IAEA is responsible for assessment and for anything to do with the safety of reactors around the world, their findings and credibility need to be upheld.”

For Lesuma and other concerned members of Pacific communities, the fight was more than just the Pacific being used as a dumping ground.

He maintains that the two Pacific Island leaders’ support for the IAEA report discredited the PIF-commissioned panel’s decision and credibility.

“They are contradicting themselves because they have appointed this group of experts to advise them. Yet they do not believe their recommendations.

‘Now we are backtracking’
“It’s disappointing that this panel was appointed during Fiji’s term as Forum chair. Here we were as head of this regional body but now we are backtracking and saying we don’t believe you.”

Lesuma said civil society groups would continue to back the opinions and recommendations of PIF’s independent panel of scientific experts.

“Their opinions were formulated by science and with the Pacific people and the care of the ocean at its centre,” he said.

PIF’s independent panel of experts remains adamant that there is insufficient data to deem the discharge of nuclear waste safe for release into the Pacific Ocean.

In a June statement this year, PIF General Secretary Henry Puna said the Forum remained committed to addressing strong concerns for the significance of the potential threat of nuclear contamination to the health and security of the Blue Pacific, its people, and prospects.

“Even before Japan announced its decision in April 2021, Pacific states, meeting for the first time in December 2020 as States Parties to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty (Treaty of Rarotonga), recalled concerns about the environmental impact of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor accident in 2011 and urged Japan to take all steps necessary to address any potential harm to the Pacific,” he said.

“They ‘called on states to take all appropriate measures within their territory, jurisdiction or control to prevent significant transboundary harm to the territory of another state, as required under international law’.

International legal rules
“These important statements stem from key international legal rules and principles, including the unique obligation placed by the Rarotonga Treaty on Pacific states to ‘Prevent Dumping’ (Article 7), in view of our nuclear testing legacy and its permanent impacts on our peoples’ health, environment and human rights.”

Puna said Pacific states therefore had a legal obligation “to prevent the dumping of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter by anyone” and “not to take any action to assist or encourage the dumping by anyone of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter at sea anywhere within the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone”.

Specific concerns by the Forum on nuclear contamination issues were not new, Puna added, and that for many years, the Forum had to deal with attempts by other states to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific.

“Leaders have urged Japan and other shipping states to store or dump their nuclear waste in their home countries rather than storing or dumping them in the Pacific.

“In 1985, the Forum welcomed the Japan PM’s statement that ‘Japan had no intention of dumping radioactive waste in the Pacific Ocean in disregard of the concern expressed by the communities of the region’.”

Against this regional context, he said the Forum’s engagement on the present unprecedented issue signify that for the Blue Pacific, this was not merely a nuclear safety issue.

“It is rather a nuclear legacy issue, an ocean, fisheries, environment, biodiversity, climate change, and health issue with the future of our children and future generations at stake.

Pacific people ‘have nothing to gain’
“Our people do not have anything to gain from Japan’s plan but have much at risk for generations to come,” Puna had said.

The Pacific Ocean contains the greatest biomass of organisms of ecological, economic, and cultural value, including 70 percent of the world’s fisheries. It is the largest continuous body of water on the planet.

The health of all the world’s ocean ecosystems is in documented decline due to a variety of stressors, including climate change, over-exploitation of resources, and pollution, a Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) report highlighted.

The PINA news report cited a paper by the US National Association of Marine Laboratories (NAML), an organisation of more than 100 member laboratories, that stated the proposed release of the contaminated water was a transboundary and transgenerational issue of concern for the health of marine ecosystems and those whose lives and livelihoods depend on them.

Japan aims to gradually release 1.3 million tonnes of treated nuclear wastewater from the defunct Fukushima power plant over a period of 30-40 years.

Aralai Vosayaco is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. She is also the 2023 news editor (national) of Wansolwara, USP Journalism’s student training newspaper and online publication. Asia Pacific Report and Wansolwara collaborate.

Following the publication of the book Toxic some 9 months ago and President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to French Polynesia last July, the response from the French administration has been to send French nuclear experts to Tahiti.

Their mission was to give clear and transparent answers about the state of former nuclear test sites among other topics. It was a way to counter the book’s anti-official version of the CEA’s (Centre d’Experimentation Atomique) claim of “clean and non-contaminating radioactivity” on both atolls.

The Commission of information created for those former sites of nuclear tests of the Pacific, was made up of 3 French civil servants involved in the controversial Paris roundtable — also called Reko Tika — organised by President Macron last July.

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In a media conference, they talked about radiological and geo-mechanical surveillance of the Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. They came with more scientific expertise and data that seemed to dispel the original idea of “clear and transparent answers”.

As far as the environment was concerned around those former nuclear sites, the conclusion was that the sites were much safer now after the presence of caesium-137 (a radioactive isotope of caesium formed as one of the more common products of nuclear fission) was noticed to be less year by year in all parts of the environment.

To “prove” their case of an independent and transparent study, they took samples of beef meat, whole milk or coconut juice from both atolls and are readily available to the population and analysed those samples.

Their results showed that the levels of radioactive concentration were far less than the “maximum levels admissible” — or whatever that means for the Ma’ohi who are not versed in the scientific jargon.

Artificial radioactive fallout level ‘low’
As for the health of the population, they reassured the people from the atolls that the level of toxicity of artificial radioactive fallout measured from 2019 to 2020 was extremely low, according to the data collected by the Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRNS).

They established that the overall efficient dose (external exposition, internal exposition by ingestion and inhalation) of radioactivity was evaluated at 1,4 mSv (the measure of radiation exposure) in Mā’ohi Nui — which is two times lower than in France.

An even stronger reassurance was offered to the media when the question of a possible collapse of the northern part of the atoll of Moruroa was mentioned. The French experts replied that such a disastrous scenario was extremely unlikely, because the geo-mechanical system Telsite 2 put in place in 2000, would detect signs of unusual activities weeks beforehand.

Notwithstanding their initial answer, they added that even in the worst-case scenario, preventative measures would be taken to evacuate the population of Moruroa, and Tureia would not be hit by this improbable landslide.

A reassurance that clearly leaves doubt on whether Moruroa is at all safe.

When asked by one of the local journalists, Vaite Pambrun, why the atolls were not “retroceded” (ceded back) to their people now that it is “safe”, the delegate to Nuclear Safety M. Bugault was at pains to explain that it was not possible because plutonium was not buried deep enough under the coral layer, and for safety reasons the French state still needed to monitor the atolls.

A somehow contradictory response that does not surprise the people who are used to the rhetoric used by the French state for the last 50 years.

France seems to offer very reassuring measures and answers, but the populations have learnt in the past that the word of the French state must be taken with a lot of mistrust and scepticism especially when it comes to nuclear matters.

France trying to wipe out nuclear traces from Polynesian memory

Independence leader Oscar Temaru, and former president of Tahiti, was quick to organise a press conference where he criticised the conclusions reached by the nuclear experts who seemed to contradict their findings about the safety of the atolls that still needed more monitoring, hence the refusal to retrocede.

After the last Paris roundtable, Temaru accused the French state and the local government — which he calls the local “collabos” (alluding to the French who collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War) to try “to wipe out the last evidence and vestiges that constitute the history of nuclear colonisation by the army and the money”.

According to Temaru, there is a trust crisis against the local government of territorial President Eduard Fritch and the French state that is going to last for a long time.

Those strong words also came after the decision was taken to completely destroy the last nuclear concrete shelter on the atoll of Tureia, wiping out for ever any traces of nuclear presence.

This decision is reminiscent of the one taken by the same French state to raze to the ground the two nuclear shelters used by the army on Mangareva.

By the same occasion, the hangar with the flimsy protection of corrugated iron used for the local population during the nuclear tests was also demolished. All those structures were pulled down in the early 2000s.

Father Auguste Ube Carlson, president of the anti-nuclear lobby Association 193, has also denounced the rhetoric used by the French state which “pretends’ to bring some new answers that have a “sound of deja-vu and that do not fool any of the populations who have suffered through the nuclear era”.

According to one of the Association 193 spokespeople, France is telling local populations that all is well in the best of worlds and there is nothing to worry about.

A more mitigated reaction

Local historian Jean-Marc Regnault conceded that it has been a struggle to get the French state to give access to files that at one point were declassified and then re-classified to now be reopened to the public which he considers a victory.

He does not share the same stance taken by Oscar Temaru regarding the wiping out of the last atomic shelter in Tureia. According to the historian, the shelter is a hazard to the population of Tureia as it contains asbestos and therefore needs to be destroyed.

Regnault positions himself as a researcher who, like any other member of the public, will be able to write the history of the nuclear era thanks to all those thousands of documents now available to be consulted, unless classified as state secrets.

He sees the history of a nation not in terms of buildings but in terms of what can be written and taught to the younger generations. The destruction of the building does not equal the wiping-out of a nation’s memory.

He finds it remarkable that teachers will have the material to teach the history of the atomic tests in Mā’ohi Nui, which was one the tenants of the Tavini party when they were at the helm of the country in 2004.

It is up to the women and men of Ma’ohi Nui to realise their dreams of writing the history of their islands by consulting those archives, especially the military ones and not be forced to only hear one narrative, that of the French state.

There is a movement toward more transparency, according to Regnault.

What about the conclusions drawn by the book Toxic?
The Delegate to Nuclear Safety M. Bugault, has been particularly dismissive of the book Toxic. He says that it is clear that the calculations based on the simulations are wrong and he rejected the deductions made by the book that the French state have played down the impacts of nuclear tests fallout on the Polynesians.

However, he admitted that 6 nuclear tests did not have favourable weather forecasts and generated radioactive fallout that led to doses “below the limit accepted by those working on the nuclear sites” but “higher than the doses accepted by the public”.

This is the reason why it is absolutely legitimate for people who have been contaminated to seek compensation.

He tells the press that the calculations and the investigation by Disclose wrongly contradict those made by the CEA in 2006 where the data and the mode of calculations were extremely technical and scientific and 450 pages long.

He suggested that those who were involved in the research and the publishing of Toxic were not versed enough in the technical jargon of the final document released by the CEA.
It is not enough to tell the truth but it must be accessible to the public, according to Bugault.

The book Toxic fails to explain in a clear and simple way how its calculations were carried out and achieved. He promised that in April 2022 the anti-Toxic book will be published by the CEA on Tahiti.

Ena Manuireva, born in Mangareva (Gambier islands) in Ma’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), is a language revitalisation researcher at Auckland University of Technology and is currently completing his doctorate on the Mangarevan language. He is also a campaigner for nuclear reparations justice from France over the 193 tests staged in Polynesia over three decades and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.