Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL 3

Unpopular governments always retreat to grounds of lazy convenience.  Instead of engaging in exercises of courage, they take refuge in obvious distractions.  And there is no more obvious distraction than preparing for war against a phantom enemy.

That is exactly where the government of Sir Keir Starmer finds itself.  Despite a mammoth majority and a dramatically diminished Tory opposition, the Prime Minister acts like a man permanently besieged, his Labour Party seemingly less popular than Typhoid Mary.  His inability to be unequivocal to questions of whether he will contest the next election suggest as much.

The same cannot be said about his enthusiasm for the sword and sabre.  There are monsters out there to battle, and Sir Keir is rising to the plate.  Sensing this, the military mandarins, most prominently General Sir Roland Walker, head of the Army, have been more than encouraging, seeing the need to ready the country for war by 2027.  Given the military’s perennial love affair with astrology, that state of readiness could only be achieved with a doubling of the Army’s fighting power and tripling it by 2030.

Given that background, the UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was commissioned in July 2024.  Led by former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson, the freshly released report promises a fat boon for the military industrial complex.  Like all efforts to encourage war, its narrative is that of supposedly making Britain safer.

Starmer’s introduction is almost grateful for the chance to out the blood lusting enemy.  “In this new era for defence and security, when Russia is waging war on our continent and probing our defences at home, we must meet the danger head on.”  The placing of noble Ukraine into the warming fraternity of Europe enables a civilisational twist to be made.  The Russian military efforts in Ukraine are not specific to a murderous family affair and historical anxieties but directed against all Europeans.  Therefore, all Europeans should militarise and join the ranks, acknowledging that “the very nature of warfare is being transformed” by that conflict.

In pursuing the guns over butter program, Starmer recapitulates the sad theme of previous eras that led to global conflict.  As Europe began rearming in the 1930s, a prevalent argument was that people could have guns and butter. Greater inventories of weaponry would encourage greater prosperity.  So, we find Starmer urging the forging of deeper ties between government and industry and “a radical reform of procurement”, one that could only be economically beneficial.  This would be the “defence dividend”, another nonsense term the military industrial complex churns out with such disconcerting ease.

The foreword from the Defence Secretary, John Healey, outlines the objectives of the SDR.  These include playing a leading role in NATO “with strengthened nuclear, new tech, and updated conventional capabilities”; moving the country to a state of “warfighting readiness”; nourishing the insatiable military industrial Moloch; learning the lessons of Ukraine (“harnessing drones, data and digital warfare”); and adopting a “whole-of-society approach”, a sly if clumsy way of enlisting the civilian populace into the military enterprise.

The review makes 62 recommendations, all accepted by the grateful government.  Some £15 billion will go to the warhead programme, supporting 9,000 jobs, while £6 billion will be spent on munitions over the course of the current Parliament.  A “New Hybrid Navy” is envisaged, one that will feature Dreadnought and the yet to be realised SSN-AUKUS submarines, alongside “support ships” and “autonomous vessels to patrol the North Atlantic and beyond.”  Submarine production is given the most optimistic assessment: one completion every 18 months.

The Royal Air Force is not to miss out, with more F-35s, modernised Typhoons, and the next generation of jets acquired through the Global Combat Air Programme.  To his splurge will be added autonomous fighters, enabling global reach.

Mindless assessments are abundant in the Review.  The government promises a British army 10 times “more lethal to deter from the land, by combining more people and armoured capability with air defence, communications, AI, software, long-range weapons, and land drone swarms.”  Some 7,000 new long-range weapons will be built and a New CyberEM Command established “to defend Britain from daily attacks in the grey zone.”  Keeping those merchants of death happy will be a new Defence Exports Office located in the Ministry of Defence, one intended “to drive exports to our allies and growth at home.”

The fanfare of the report, festooned with fripperies for war, conceals the critical problems facing the British armed forces.  The ranks are looking increasingly thinned.  (In 2010, regular troop numbers stood at 110,000; the current target of 73,000 soldiers is being barely met.)  Morale is ebbing.  The state of equipment is embarrassingly poor.  The UK’s celebrated submarine deterrent is somewhat less formidable in the deterrence department, with its personnel exhausted and subject to unpardonably lengthy stints at sea.  The 204-day patrol by HMS Vanguard is a case in point.

Whether the SDR’s recommendations ever fructify remains the hovering question.  It’s all very good to make promises about weapons programmes and boosting a country’s readiness to kill, but militaries can be tardy in delivery and faulty in execution.  What saves the day may well be standard ineptitude rather than any firebrand conviction in war.  To the unready go the spoils.

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Photo by Aidin Geranrekab

Recipe author Nagi Maehashi, unmoved by her own numbing banality, is peeved.  Her target: Penguin books and author Brooke Bellamy.  Her accusation: the apparent copying of recipes for caramel slice and baklava from Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats website, released in Bellamy’s Bake with Brooki, published in October last year.  “Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical,” she huffed, “even if it is not copyright infringement – and undermines the integrity of the entire book.”  Rather indulgently, Maehashi goes on to decry this as a “slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content rather than cutting corners.” The question left begging is whether this is ever possible for a cookbook.

Bellamy, who has the combined weight of 3 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, has flatly denied the accusation.  “I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years,” she claims on Instagram.  “In 2016, I opened my first bakery.  I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.”  The social media figure is candid in admitting that she did not invent any of the recipes listed in her book dealing with cookies, cupcakes, brownies or cakes.

On the issue of the caramel slice, Bellamy merely observes that the RecipeTin Eats recipe, published in March 2020, “uses the same ingredients as my recipe, which I have been making and selling since four years prior.”  Evidently not a pugilist, Bellamy has even offered to remove the caramel slice and baklava recipes from any future reprints of her book, a point “communicated to Nagi swiftly through discussions”.

Another author from cookbook land, Adam Liaw, abandons his kitchen implements briefly to explain the finer points of intellectual property in light of this dispute.  As an intellectual property lawyer in his previous non-cooking life, he suggests that the copyright “doesn’t protect the recipe itself. It protects the publication of the exact same written form of that recipe.  None of the recipes written in the world would reach the standards necessary to obtain patent protection.”

A closer look at the claim is one of plagiarism.  This is an interesting point, given the multitude of borrowings, replications and, along the way, adjustments, that come along with the use of recipes.  Professor John Swinson from the University of Queensland adds insult to injury to Maehashi’s case by simply stating that the steps involved in making the recipe were “not very expressive”.  When looking at a comparison between the two recipes in question, one is left with a similar impression. “You can’t protect a cake or cookie,” Swinson clarifies.  “You can only protect how it\s expressed, not the end result, and most recipes are just factual instructions”.

A sticking point here is the issue of attribution.  Under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), there are various described moral rights, as distinct from economic rights.  These include the right of attribution (that the author be identified and named as the author of that work); the right against false attribution (the right of the author to prevent someone else from being credited as the author of their work; and the right of integrity (the right of an author to ensure that the work is not subjected to derogatory treatment harmful to the author’s honour or reputation).

Historically speaking, the publication of recipes drawn from the vast archive of cookery is more than standard.  We find Isabella Beeton in October 1861, a co-editor of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine pillaging at will any number of recipes for The Book of Household Management.  As food boffin and author Helana Brigman points out, this book of revelation for Victorian readers, one that allayed fears about “how much should a family of five spend on groceries”, had nothing that was her own.  In writing her book, Beeton made generous use of readers’ submissions.

The fact remains that, however murky one might assume the laws on copyright were on the subject, neither US nor British copyright laws (ditto Australia’s equivalent) protect a listing of ingredients, even those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions.  Broadly speaking, claiming some ownership over a dish is much like asserting control over the air and its vapours.

An iconoclastic Jonathan Meades takes the torch to such proprietary assertions in his The Plagiarist in the Kitchen:  A Lifetime of Culinary Thefts.  His work eschews “culinary originality”, being an “anti-cookbook” favouring “the daylight robbery of recipes, to hijacking techniques and methods, to the notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new.”

Meades rightly notes that the pathology of originality arises from the emergence of the cult chef, the God creator in the kitchen.  In an interview, he notes how it began “in upscale restaurants in Spain and then in Britain with Heston Blumenthal.”

The entire grievance on Maehashi’s part has given Bellamy even more oxygen for her enterprise, with the latter preferring to repair back to the bakery.  Two new stores are set to open in Queensland in July.  An international pop-up store in the United Arab Emirates is planned to open by the end of the year, adding to existing ones in the Middle East.  If Bellamy was ever a thief in the kitchen, the enterprise is doing quite nicely.

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The Phantom Horseman,1870-93 by Sir John Gilbert (d.1897). Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust

As the world was readying for the Second World War, the insightful humane Austrian author Stefan Zweig made the following glum observation: “Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will to expand and make preparations for war.  The politics of rearmament is pursued in broad daylight and at breakneck speed; every day you read in the papers arguments in favour of armaments expansion, the idea that it reduces unemployment and provides a boost to the stock exchange.”

This is not so different from the approval by European Union countries on May 27 of a €150 billion loan program known as the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) borrowing scheme.  A press release from the European Council stated that the scheme “will finance urgent and large-scale investments in the European defence technological and industrial base (EDTIB)” with the intention of boosting “production capacity, making sure defence equipment is available when needed, and to address existing capability gaps – ultimately strengthening the EU’s overall defence readiness.”

The statement also makes a central rationale clear: that SAFE will enable continued European support for Ukraine, linking its defence industry to the program.  Despite not being an EU member, Kyiv will be able to participate in the scheme.  Interestingly enough, the United Kingdom, despite leaving the EU, will also be able to participate via a separate agreement.

Disbursements to interested member states upon demand, considered along national plans “will take the form of competitively priced long-maturity loans, to be repaid by the beneficiary member states.”

The scheme further anticipates the types of weaponry, euphemistically titled “defence products”, that will feature.  As outlined by the European Council on March 6, these will comprise two categories: the first covering, amongst others, such products as ammunition and missiles, artillery systems, ground combat capabilities with support systems; the second, air and missile defence systems, maritime surface and underwater capabilities, drones and anti-drone systems and “strategic enablers” including air-to-air refuelling, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare.

The broader militarisation agenda is confirmed by linking SAFE with broader transatlantic engagement and “complementarity with NATO.”  It will “strive to enhance interoperability, continue industrial cooperation, and ensure reciprocal access to state-of-the-art technologies with trusted partners.”  Significantly, the emphasis is on collaboration: a minimum of three countries must combine when requesting funding for SAFE defence projects.

There seems to be something for everyone: the militarist, the war monger and the merchants of death.  Global Finance, a publication dedicated to informing “corporate financial professionals”, was already praising the SAFE proposal in April.  “The initiative has the potential to transform the business models of many top European defense groups – like Saab, which has traditionally relied on contracts from the Swedish state to grow its sales.”  What a delight it will be for such defence companies to move beyond the constraints on sales imposed by their limiting governments.  A veritable European market of death machinery is in the offing.

The fund is intended for one, unambiguous purpose: war. The weasel word “defence” is merely the code, the cipher.  Break it, and it spells out aggression and conflict, a hankering for the next great military confrontation.  The reason is traditional, historic and irrational: the Oriental despotic eminence arising from the Asian steppes, people supposedly untutored in the niceties of European good manners and democracy. Not that European manners and democracy is in splendid health.  A mere glance at some of the candidates suggests decline in institutional credibility and scepticism.  But we can always blame the Russians for that, deviously sowing doubt with their disinformation schemes.

The initiative, and its tightening of ties with arming Ukraine, has made such critics as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sound modestly sensible.  “We need to invest in our own armies, but they expect us to fund Ukraine’s – with billions, for years to come,” he declared in a post on X.  “We’ve made it clear: Hungary will not pay.  Our duty is to protect our own people.”

The approval of the fund by the European Commission has also angered some members of the European Parliament, an institution which has been treated with near contempt by the European Commission.  European Parliament Presidente Roberta Metsola warned Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier in May to reconsider the use of Article 122 of the EU Treaty, which should be used sparingly in emergencies in speeding up approvals with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. Bypassing Europe’s invigilating lawmakers risked “undermining democratic legitimacy by weakening Parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions”.  The Council’s resort to Article 122 potentially enlivened a process that could see a legal case taken to the European Court of Justice.

The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) has also supported a legal opinion repudiating the Commission’s cavalier approach in approving the fund.  According to that tartly reasoned view, Article 122 was an inappropriate justification, as the threshold for evoking emergency powers had simply not been met.

Ironically, the rearmament surge is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, at both the behest of the Trump administration, ever aggrieved by Europe not pulling its military weight, and Moscow, characterised and caricatured as a potential invader, the catalyst for decorating a continent with bristling weaponry. The former continues to play hide and seek with Brussels while still being very much in Europe, be it in terms of permanent garrisons and military assets; the latter remains a convenient excuse to cross the palms of the military industrial establishment with silver.  How Zweig would have hated it.

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Photograph Source: DHSgov – Public Domain

Shocking it might be, yet still part of an old pattern. The US Department of Homeland Security is floating the idea of using a reality television program to select immigrants vying for US citizenship.  Whether this involves gladiatorial combat or inane pillow battles remains to be seen, though it is bound to involve airhead celebrity hosts and a set of fabricated challenges.  What matters is the premise: the reduction of a government agency’s functions to a debauched spectacle of deceit, desperation and televisual pornography.  Much, in some ways, like the Trump administration itself.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, television producer Rob Worsoff, the man behind the Duck Dynasty reality show, comes clean in his monstrous intentions behind this proposed series he hopes to call The American: he has been pursuing this seedy project since the days of the Obama administration, hoping for some amoral stakeholder to bite.  Worsoff, in true fashion, denies that such a project is intended as malicious (“this isn’t the ‘The Hunger Games’ for immigrants”), let alone denigrating the dignity of human worth.  In the grand idea of full bloom, optimistic America, it is intended as hopeful, but most of all, competitive.  Forget equal protection and a fair evaluation of merits; here is a chance for Social Darwinism to excel.

Worsoff insists he is free of political ideology.  “As an immigrant myself, I am merely trying to make a show that celebrates the immigration process, celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of people who want it most”.  He proposes to do this by, for instance, sending immigrants to San Francisco where they find themselves in a mine to retrieve gold.  Another would see the contestants journey to Detroit, where they will be placed on an auto assembly to reassemble a Model-T Ford chassis.

The winners would end up on the Capitol steps, presumably to receive their citizenship in some staged ceremony for television.  The losing contestants would go home with such generous prizes as a Starbucks gift card or airline points.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has apparently spoken to Worsoff on this steaming drivel, with the producer describing the response as “positive”.  DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, it is said, has not officially “‘backed’ or even reviewed the pitch of any scripted or reality show.  The Department of Homeland Security receives hundreds of television show pitches a year.”  The mind can only dissipate in despair at such an observation, unsurprising in a land where the television, or televisual platforms, remain brain numbing instructors.

That the DHS is considering this is unremarkable.  The department has already participated in television projects and networks, To Catch a Smuggler being a case in point.  Noem has also made much of the camera when it comes to dealing with immigrants. An ad campaign costing US$200 million promises to feature her admonishing illegal immigrants to return to their countries.  No doubt the hairdressing and makeup department will be busy when tarting her up for the noble task.

Broadcasters in a number of countries have also found the unsuspecting migrant or foreign guest captured by television irresistible viewing.  It’s not just good, couch potato fun, but also a chance to fan prejudice and feed sketchy stereotypes.  The reality TV show Border Security, which first aired on Australia’s free-to-air Channel 7 in 2004, proved to be a pioneering model in this regard.  Not only did it provide a chance to mock the eating habits of new arrivals as food stuffs were confiscated by customs officers with names like “Barbs”, the program could also impute an intention to attack the Australian agricultural sector with introduced pests and diseases.  These depictions went hand in hand with the demonising strategy of the Australian government towards unwanted asylum seekers and refugees (“Stop the Boats!” was the cry), characterised by lengthy spells of detention in an offshore tropical gulag.

The plight of the vulnerable immigrant has also become a matter of pantomime substitution, an idea supposedly educative in function.  Why not act out the entire migrant experience with reality television individuals with particularly xenophobic views?

In February, this is exactly what took place in a reality television show vulgarly titled Go Back to Where You Come From aired on the UK’s Channel 4, running four episodes where selected, largely anti-immigration participants, according to Channel 4, “experience some of the most perilous parts of the refugee journeys”.  It comes as little surprise that the series is modelled on an Australian precursor made in the early 2010s.

Even pro-immigrant groups were reduced to a state of admiring stupor, with the Refugee Council, a British charity, praising the worth of such shows to “have huge potential to highlight the stories behind the headlines”.  Gareth Benest, advocacy director at the International Broadcasting Trust charity, also thought it instructive that the participants “face the reality of irregular migration and to challenge their preconceptions.”

French politician Xavier Bertrand failed to identify similar points, calling the program “nauseating”. In his attack on the experiment, he saw the deaths across the English Channel as “a humanitarian tragedy, not the subject of a game”.  But a game it has become, at least when placed before the camera.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Contrary to the propaganda of moral upstarts, terrorism pays.  It proves rewarding.  It establishes states and reconstitutes others.  It encourages change, for ill or otherwise.  The stance taken, righteously pitiful, on not negotiating with those who practise it, is as faulty as battling gravity.  The case of Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a brilliant example of this.  While seen as a new broom that did away with the government of President Bashar al-Assad in such stunning fashion, al-Sharaa’s bristles remain blood speckled.

The scene says it all: a meeting lasting 37 minutes in Riyadh with a US President holding hands in communal machismo with a bearded Jihadi warrior who once had a $10 million bounty on his head.  Present was the delighted Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joining by telephone.

It proved most rewarding for al-Sharaa, who has become a salesman for the new Syria, scrubbing up for appearances.  His main message: remove crushing sanctions barring access to investment and finance.  It also proved rewarding for the efforts made by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in convincing the Trump administration that a new approach towards Damascus was warranted.  “The sanctions,” reflected Trump, “were brutal and crippling and served as an important, really, an important function nevertheless at the time, but now it’s their time to shine.”  But lifting sanctions would offer Syria “a chance at greatness”.  This signalled a striking volte face from the stance taken in December 2024, when Trump expressed the view that Syria was “a mess”, not a friend of the United States and not deserving of any intervention from Washington.

In remarks made by Trump to journalists keeping him company, the US President expressed admiration for the strongman, the brute, the resilient survivor.  “Tough guy, very strong past.”  And what a past, one marked by links to al-Qaeda via the affiliate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that were only severed in 2017.  HTS’s predecessor, Jabhat al-Nusra, was commanded by al-Sharaa, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.  In January 2017, HTS was born as a collective of Salafi jihadists comprising Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Liwa al-Haq, Jaysh al-Sunna and Jabhat Ansar al-Din.

Even at present, a shadow lingers over al-Sharaa’s interim government.  In March, over 100 people were butchered in the coastal city of Banias.  These atrocities were directed against the Alawite minority and instigated by militias affiliated with the new regime, ostensibly as part of a response to attacks in Latakia and Tartous from armed groups affiliated with the deposed Assad regime.  According to Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard, “the authorities failed to intervene to stop the killings.  Once again, Syrian civilians have found themselves bearing the heaviest cost as parties to the conflict seek to settle scores.”

The announcement by Trump on lifting US sanctions sent officials scurrying.  While the plan to bring Syria out of the cold had been on the books for some months, the timing, as with all things with the US president, was fickle.  Presidential waivers on sanctions do, after all, only go so far and the more technically minded will have to pour over the details of repeal.

The Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a dose of clarification some 24 hours after the announcement.  “If we make enough progress, we’d like to see the law repealed, because you’re going to struggle to find people to [invest] in a country when [at any point] in six months, sanctions could come back.  We’re not there yet.  That’s premature.”

Progress is in the works, with Rubio meeting his Syrian counterpart, Foreign Minister Asad Hassan al-Shaibani in Antalya on May 15.  In comments from State Department spokesman, Tammy Bruce, the Secretary “welcomed the Syrian government’s calls for peace with Israel, efforts to end Iran’s influence in Syria, commitment to ascertaining the fate of US citizens missing or killed in Syria, and elimination of all chemical weapons.”

In answers to a press gathering, Rubio revealed how much of a success al-Sharaa has been in wooing Washington.  “We have governing authorities there now who have expressed, not openly and repeatedly, that they do – that this is a nationalistic movement designed to building their country in a pluralistic society in which all the different elements of Syrian society are able to live together.”  There had also been an interest in normalising ties with Israel and “driving out foreign fighters and terrorists and others that would destabilize the country and are enemies of this transitional authority.”

While no mention is made of al-Sharaa’s own colourful, bloodied past, the previous ruler, Assad, comes in for scathing mention.  His rule was “brutal”, one characterised by gassing and murdering “his own people”.  It was Assad who sowed the seeds that would allow foreign fighters to take root in Syria’s soil.  How curious that HTS would have attracted those very same fighters.

Things have come full circle.  The Assad dynasts, who kept a watchful eye on fundamentalist Islamists, are gone. The Islamists, with their various backers, Turkey and Saudi Arabia being most prominent, are now nominally in charge.  The rest is a confidence trick that might, given al-Sharaa’s recent performance, just work.

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They seemed made for each other.  A former reality television star, with dubious real estate credentials, a freakish alienation from the truth, and the various leaders of the Gulf States, who never found truthful assessments that worthwhile anyway. This was certainly no time to be frugal and modest.  Many a country might be dealing with soaring prices, inaccessible housing markets, and the cost of eggs, but nothing would be spared in spoiling US President Donald Trump with overpriced kitsch and exotica.  Here was the MAGA brand in full flower.

With crude indulgence, Saudi Arabia’s putative leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, pampered and spoiled the US president with hospitality and a spray of undertakings and agreements during the first part of his Arabian Gulf tour.  Six US-made F-15 fighters piloted by the Saudis escorted Air Force One as it approached Riyadh on May 13.  There was the coffee ceremony within the royal terminal in the airport, a limousine flanked by white Arabian horses, and a decorative honour guard equipped with golden swords.

This was a time for luxury and boundless bad taste, not bleeding hearts and bleating consciences.  Memories of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in October 2018 on orders by the crown prince, could be silenced if not expunged altogether.  As for climate change, what of it?  On golden chairs in the royal place, the Crown Prince and US President could bask in each other’s triumphal, emetic glow.  Trump exclaimed that “we like each other a lot”.  In a speech, he also uttered words of music to the royal: no foreign leader should be “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”

An extravagant luncheon that followed featured a veritable Who’s Who of American corporatocracy, among them Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, Jane Fraser of Citicorp, Ruth Porat of Google, and Alex Karp of Palantir.

The value of the agreements reached between Riyadh and Washington approximate to US$600 billion, if one is to trust the anomalous “fact sheets” released by the White House.  The nature of these commitments was not exactly clear, though they promise to cover energy security, defence, technology and access to critical minerals. Terms with little clarity (“global infrastructure”, for instance) were thrown around.  Naturally, Trump will not be outdone in any deal, insisting that this was all part of the America First Trade and Investment Policy that is placing “the American economy, the American worker, and our national security first.”

A few examples were mentioned, though these figure as ongoing commitments: the plans of Saudi Arabia’s DataVolt to invest US$20 billion in US data centres and energy infrastructure; the promise by Google, DataVolt, Oracle, Salesforce, AMD and Uber to invest US$80 billion in “cutting-edge transformative technologies in both countries.”  The inevitable defence sales agreement was also praised, one hailed as the largest in history.  Worth almost US$142 billion, it will involve over a dozen US defence firms supplying the Kingdom with equipment and technology in air force and space capabilities, air and missile defence, maritime and coastal security, border security and land forces and improved information and communication systems.

This was merely the start of the Trump Splash Show.  Onward to Qatar, where another ceremonial escort of F-15 fighter planes greeted the president.  Clearly, the ruling Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, was not going to be outdone by his Saudi counterparts.  For a change, however, the president’s motorcade travelling from Doha airport to Amiri Diwan was greeted by a cavalry of mounted camels.  “I haven’t seen camels like that in a long time,” fluted the impressed leader.  “And really, we appreciate it very much.”  But showing that imperishable tradition can exist alongside technological progress, red Tesla Cybertrucks also featured in the motorcade.  This was a sweet gesture, given that Elon Musk’s company has an inventory of unsold Cybertrucks worth US$800 billion languishing in dealerships.

With the welcome indulgence concluded, the serious discussions began.  These were primarily focused on aviation, defence and energy priorities.  Of note was a contract with Doha for 210 Boeing-made 787 Dreamliners and 777x aircraft worth US$96 billion.  The US plane maker has been struggling of late, bedevilled by mishaps and questions about the quality of its manufacture.  But glossy salvations are possible in the garden of MAGA make believe.  “Congratulations to Boeing,” cooed Trump.  “Get those planes out there.”

The contract was part of a number of economic commitments from Qatar initially claimed by the White House to be worth a staggering US$1.2 trillion.  As mathematics is not the strong suit of the Trump administration, the same announcement also qualifies the over trillion dollar boast by announcing “economic deals totalling more than $243.5 billion between the United States and Qatar, including an historic sale of Boeing aircraft and GE Aerospace engines to Qatar Airways.”  Also included is an almost US$2 billion agreement allowing Qatar to acquire the MQ-9B remotely piloted aircraft system from General Atomics, and a US$1 billion agreement for Doha’s purchase of Raytheon’s small unmanned aircraft integrated defeat system.

In a shameless effort to outdo Riyadh, the Qatari royal family threw in a luxury 747 plane worth $400 million for the US Department of Defense, intended for Trump’s use as a temporary substitute Air Force One.  Reported as being a “palace in the sky”, the president sees it as a gift of infinite, irrefutable generosity.  “It’s a great gesture from Qatar,” he reasoned.  “I appreciate it very much.  I would never be one to turn down that kind of offer.”

As with his keenness to avoid anything that might ruffle feathers, or disturb restful camels, this was not a trip for presidential agitation.  He was far away from irritating European allies.  Here was Qatar, previously accused by Trump of being a sponsor of terrorism, rehabilitated in golden glory.  Forget the security implications and brazen corruption inherent in such a move: all the parties concerned could gloat without consequential censure.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The agreement between Washington and Kyiv to create an investment fund to search for rare earth minerals has been seen as something of a turn by the Trump administration.  From hectoring and mocking the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the cameras on his visit to the US capital two months ago, President Donald Trump had apparently softened.  It was easy to forget that the minerals deal was already on the negotiating table and would have been reached but for Zelensky’s fateful and ill-tempered ambush.  Dreams of accessing Ukrainian reserves of such elements as graphite, titanium and lithium were never going to dissipate.

Details remain somewhat sketchy, but the agreement supposedly sets out a sharing of revenues in a manner satisfactory to the parties while floating, if only tentatively, the prospect of renewed military assistance.  That assistance, however, would count as US investment in the fund.  According to the White House, the US Treasury Department and US International Development Finance Corporation will work with Kyiv “to finalize governance and advance this important partnership”, one that ensures the US “an economic stake in securing a free, peaceful, and sovereign future for Ukraine.”

In its current form, the agreement supposedly leaves it to Ukraine to determine what to extract in terms of the minerals and where this extraction is to take place.  A statement from the US Treasury Department also declared that, “No state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s Minister of Economy, Yulia Svyrydenko, stated that the subsoil remained within the domain of Kyiv’s ownership, while the fund would be “structured” on an equal basis “jointly managed by Ukraine and the United States” and financed by “new licenses in the field of critical materials, oil and gas – generated after the Fund is created”.  Neither party would “hold a dominant vote – a reflection of equal partnership between our two nations.”

The minister also revealed that privatisation processes and managing state-owned companies would not be altered by the arrangements.  “Companies such as Ukrnafta and Energoatom will stay in state ownership.”  There would also be no question of debt obligations owed by Kyiv to Washington.

That this remains a “joint” venture is always bound to raise some suspicions, and nothing can conceal the predatory nature of an arrangement that permits US corporations and firms access to the critical resources of another country.  For his part, Trump fantasised in a phone call to a town hall on the NewsNation network that the latest venture would yield “much more in theory than the $350 billion” worth of aid he insists the Biden administration furnished Kyiv with.

Svyrydenko chose to see the Reconstruction Investment Fund as one that would “attract global investment into our country” while still maintaining Ukrainian autonomy.  Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, thought otherwise, calling it “Donald Trump’s extortion of Ukraine deal”. Instead of focusing on the large, rather belligerent fly in the ointment – Russian President Vladimir Putin – the US president had “demonstrated nothing but weakness” towards Moscow.

The war mongering wing of the Democrats were also in full throated voice.  To make such arrangements in the absence of assured military support to Kyiv made the measure vacuous.  “Right now,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy saidon MSNBC television, “all indications are that Donald Trump’s policy is to hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and in that case, this agreement isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.”

On a certain level, Murphy has a point.  Trump’s firmness in holding to the bargain is often capricious.  In September 2017, he reached an agreement with the then Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to permit US companies to develop Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals.  Having spent 16 years in Afghanistan up to that point, ways of recouping some of the costs of Washington’s involvement were being considered.  It was agreed, went a White House statement sounding all too familiar, “that such initiatives would help American companies develop minerals critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries, therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more reliant.”

Ghani’s precarious puppet regime was ultimately sidelined in favour of direct negotiations with the Taliban that eventually culminated in their return to power, leaving the way open for US withdrawal and a termination of any grand plans for mineral extraction.

A coterie of foreign policy analysts abounded with glowing statements at this supposedly impressive feat of Ukrainian diplomacy.  Shelby Magid, deputy director of the Atlantic Council think tank’s Eurasia Centre, thought it put Kyiv “in their strongest position yet with Washington since Trump took office”.  Ukraine had withstood “tremendous pressure” to accept poorer proposals, showing “that it is not just a junior partner that has to roll over and accept a bad deal”.

Time and logistics remain significant obstacles to the realisation of the agreement.  As Ukraine’s former minister of economic development and current head of Kyiv school of economics Tymofiy Mylovanov told the BBC, “These resources aren’t in a port or warehouse; they must be developed.”  Svyrydenko had to also ruefully concede that vast resources of mineral deposits existed in territory occupied by Russian forces.  There are also issues with unexploded mines.  Any challenge to the global rare earth elements (REEs) market, currently dominated by China (60% share of production of raw materials; 85% share of global processing output; and 90% manufacturing share of rare earth magnets), will be long in coming.

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Photograph Source: Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar – CC BY-SA 4.0

The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it.  It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festive dressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion.  Feminists were nowhere to be heard.  Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge.  Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion.  Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome awaiting the news of the election.  Then, the white smoke rises from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, with gasps of excitement and elation.

Taking a punt on who the new leader of the Catholic Church will be once the conclave of Cardinals concludes is a failing bet.  A mischievous remark was once made by an Australian commentator on Church matters that you would have better chances picking a winner at the Melbourne Cup horse race than the next pontiff.

The choice of Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, Prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, was suitably surprising.  Few had their cards on a pick from the United States, let alone a pick from Chicago, Illinois.  But ever politic, the church narrative was quick to point out his naturalised status as a Peruvian and his elevation to the position of Bishop of Chiclayo in September 2015.  He had been an Augustinian missionary.  Not only was he a Western hemispheric representative, but one who doubled up as truly American, comprising North and South. This was an identitarian jackpot, a treat for the advertising wing of the Vatican.

Clues on what Leo’s reign will look like are few in number.  “We must seek together,” he urges, “how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”  His choice of name suggests a lineage of diplomatic and doctrinal-minded figures.

Much Fourth Estate commentary has been vague, laden with cryptic references and snatches of speculation.  In the absence of detail, obsession over minutiae becomes paramount.  He turned up in the garb of Benedict XVI, suggested one observer on the BBC World Service, but spoke like his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis I.  “We saw a balance of the aesthetics of the traditional church,” opined Charlie Gillespie of Sacred Heart University, “along with language that sounded like Pope Francis.”

Any use of the term “moderate” is also bound to be meaningless, though Leo’s brother, John Prevost, has aired his own prediction: “I don’t think we’ll see any extremes either way.”  Such a figure is straitjacketed by doctrine and buttoned up by process.  One who is bound to follow ancient texts drafted by the superstitious, however modernised in interpretation, will be caged by them.  In 2012, for instance, Prevost was revealing on that very issue when commenting on church attitudes to homosexuality.  Certain Western values, he thought, proved sympathetic to views “at odds with the gospel”, one of them being the “homosexual lifestyle.”

The same cannot be said about Leo’s attitudes to migrants and the poor.  A social media account bearing Prevost’s name did not shy away from attacking the immigration policy of the Trump administration via a number of reposted articles.  In February, for instance, an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” featured.  Suffice to say that his selection did not impress certain figures in the MAGA movement, most notably Steve Bannon.  Calling Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” Bannon sniffed a conspiracy.  “This is an anti-Trump vote by the globalists that run the Curia – this is the pope Bergoglio [Francis I] and his clique wanted.”

The orbit of other problems will also be impossible for the new pontiff to escape.  The stain of clerical sex abuse remains an immovable reminder of organisational defect and depravity.  Terrier like activists continue their sorties against the Church, demanding redress and publishing their findings on such outlets as ConclaveWatch.org.  Earlier this year, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), along with Nates Mission, another survivors’ organisation, named the then Cardinal Prevost as one of six figures seminal in covering up sexual abuse in the church.  These formed a dossier of complaints submitted to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.  According to the campaigners, the dossier documenting claims of mismanagement and cover-ups marked “the first time multiple high-ranking cardinals have been targeted … by co-ordinated, survivor-led action.”

An open letter published on May 8 by SNAP also proved sharp on the election.  “The sex offender in the collar commits two crimes: one against the body, and one against the voice.  The grand pageantry around your election reminds us: survivors do not carry the same weight in this world as you do.”  The organisation further stated that Prevost, when provincial of the Augustinians, permitted Father James Ray, a priest accused of child abuse with restricted ministry since 1991, to reside at the Augustinians’ St. John Stone Friary in 2000.  From the outset, the Pope’s ledger is already a heavy one.

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Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023 matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces, to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamier, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas and the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Finister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, gives a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger to desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, seeing that it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.”

The same point has been made by the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France and Germany.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state risk and oblivion.

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Map template for the Australian House of Representatives divisions used in the 2025 federal election. Image Source: Erinthecute – CC BY-SA 4.0

The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work.  If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments.  The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction.  It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter Dutton, look electable.

Overall, the campaign on the part of both sides of politics was consistently dull and persistently mediocre.  Expansive, broad ideas were eschewed in favour of minutiae and objects of bribery: tax matters, cutting fuel excise, forgiving some student debt, improved Medicare services and child care assistance.  Issues such as the parlous reliance of Australia upon US security interests, not to mention the criminally daft obligations of the AUKUS security pact, or a detailed, coherent policy on addressing environmental and climate challenges, were kept in storage.

What did become evident in the weeks leading up to the poll was that the Coalition policy palette, which never went beyond blotches of law and order (terrorism, criminal refugees, paedophilia forefront themes), mild bribes for “cost of living relief”; and illusory nuclear energy, failed to appeal.  Its campaign lacked the barely modest bite of Labor, largely because it had been eclipsed by such oxygen drawing events as US President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and the death of Pope Francis I.

It had also misread the mood of the electorate in pushing policies with a tangy Trump flavour, notably the proposed removal of 41,000 jobs from the public sector and the establishment of something similar to the US Department of Government Efficiency .  (Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price unhelpfully promised to “make Australia great again.”)  The Coalition, Dutton admitted after being accused by Labor of being “DOGE-y Dutton”, had “made a mistake” and “got it wrong”.  The focus would be, instead, on natural attrition.  There were also scrappy sorties on the cultural war front, featuring lashings of undesirable press outlets, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian (“hate media”, according to Dutton), and the presence of “wokeism” in schools.

Flimsy soothsayers could also be found, many endorsing a Liberal-Nationals victory.  “For the first time in my journalistic career,” beamed Sharri Markson of Sky News Australia on May 1, “I’m going to offer a pre-election editorial, endorsing one side of politics […] A Dutton prime ministership would give our great nation the fresh start we deserve.”  With vigorous drumbeating, Markson could only see “our values under threat – from enemies and abroad” – and retaining Anthony Albanese as prime minister was dangerous.  With the analytical skill of an unread, hungover undergraduate, the political astrologist found the PM a victim of “far-left ideology”, something “out of step with mainstream Australia.”

With Labor’s victory assured, the fiscal conservatives at the Australian Financial Review proved sniffy, noting that Labor’s record on the economy did not warrant another term “but the Coalition has not made the case to change the government.”  More explicit, with hectoring relish, was Australia’s premier shock jock of the press stable, Andrew Bolt.  “No, the voters aren’t always right,” he wrote scoldingly in the News Corp yellow press.  “This time they were wrong, and this gutless and incoherent Coalition should be ashamed.”  Australians were set to “get more” of policies that had “left this country poorer, weaker, more divided and deeper in debt”.

One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s rebuke of Chilean democracy at the election of the socialist leader Salvador Allende.  As one of US foreign policy’s chief malefactors, he refused to accept the proposition that a country could “go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”  Democracy was only worthy if directed by the appropriate interests.

Senator Price, evidently rattled by the result, returned to the Trumpian well, hoping to draw attention to claims of irregular voting in rural polling booths.  The Australian Electoral Commission, she told the ABC, “has been alerted to this over and over and does little with it.  I urge the ABC, as a taxpayer funded organisation, to go out and see what is occurring.”

There are other evident patterns that emerged in the vote.  The old division between urban, metropolitan areas and rural and country communities has been coloured with sharpness.  The Liberal Party, which must win seats in urban Australia, finds itself marginalised before its allies, the Nationals, who have retained their complement in regional and country areas.  Party voices and strategists lament that not more was done after the 2022 defeat, with the Liberals refusing to address, among other things, the failure to appeal to female voters or the youth vote.

Disappointing in such stonking majorities is the assumption that minority parties and independents can be ignored, if not with contempt, then with condescending politeness.  Labor may well be soaring with the greatest return of seats in its history, but attitudes of the electorate can harden quickly.  The move away from the major parties, as a trend, continues, and there is no room for complacency in a new Albanese government.

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Photo by Philippe Oursel

The murder and starvation of populations in real time, subject to rolling coverage and commentary, is not usually the done thing.  These are the sorts of activities kept quiet and secluded in their vicious execution.  In the Gaza Strip, these actions are taking place with a confident, almost brazen assuredness.

Israel has the means, the weapons and the sheer gumption to do so, and Palestinians in Gaza find themselves with few options for survival.  The strategic objectives of the Jewish state, involving, for instance, the elimination of Hamas, have been shown to be nonsensically irrelevant, given that they are unattainable.  Failed policies of de facto annexation and occupation are re-entering the national security argot.

In yet another round of proceedings, this time initiated by a UN General Assembly resolution, the International Court of Justice is hearing from an array of nations and bodies (40 states and four international organisations) regarding Israel’s complete blockade of Gaza since March 2.  Also featuring prominently are Israel’s efforts to attack the United Nations itself, notably UNRWA, the relief agency charged with aiding Palestinians.

As counsel for the Palestinians, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh outlined the central grievances.  The restrictions on “the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, [Israel’s] attacks on the United Nations and on UN officials, property and premises, its deliberate obstruction of the organisation’s work and its attempt to destroy an entire UN subsidiary organ” lacked precedent “in the history of the organisation”.  Being not only “antithetical to a peace-loving state”, such actions were “a fundamental repudiation by Israel of its charter obligations owed both to the organisation and to all UN members and of the international rule of law”.

Israel had further closed all relevant crossings into the Strip and seemingly planned “to annex 75 square kilometres of Rafah, one-fifth of Gaza, to [its] so-called buffer zone, permanently.  This, together with Israel’s continuing maritime blockade, cuts Gaza and its people off from direct aid and assistance and from the rest of the world”.

The submission by Ní Ghrálaigh went on to document the plight of Palestinian children, 15,600 of whom had perished, with tens of thousands more injured, missing or traumatised.  Gaza had become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairments”.

South Africa, which already has an application before the Court accusing Israel of violating the UN Genocide Convention, pointed to the international prohibition against “starvation as a method of warfare, including under siege or blockade”. Its representative Jaymion Hendricks insisted that Israel had “deployed the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation” against “the protected Palestinian population, which it holds under unlawful occupation.”  The decision to expel UNRWA and relevant UN agencies should be reversed, and access to food, medicine and humanitarian aid resumed.

In a chilling submission to the Court, Zane Dangor, director general of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, detected a scheme in the cruelty.  “The humanitarian aid system is facing total collapse.  This collapse is by design.”

Israel’s response, one increasingly rabid to the obligations of humanitarian and international law, was best stated by its Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar.  In announcing that Israel would not participate in oral proceedings derided as a “circus”, he restated the long held position that UNRWA was “an organisation infiltrated beyond repair by terrorism.”  Courts were once again being abused “to try and force Israel to cooperate with an organisation that is infested with Hamas terrorists, and it won’t happen”.

Then came an agitated flurry of accusations shamelessly evoking the message from Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” note of 1898, penned during the convulsions of the Dreyfus Affair: “I accuse UNRWA. I accuse the UN.  I accuse the Secretary General, I accuse all those that weaponize international law and its institutions in order to deprive the most attacked country in the world, Israel, of its most basic right to defend itself.”

The continuing blackening of UNRWA was also assured by Amir Weissbrod of Israel’s foreign ministry, who reiteratedthe claims that the organisation had employed 1,400 Palestinians with militant links.  Furthermore, some had taken part in Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.  That such a small number had participated was itself striking and should have spared the organisation the savaging it received.  But Israel has longed for the expulsion of an entity that is an accusing reminder of an ongoing, profane policy of oppression and dispossession.

In her moving address to the Court, Ní Ghrálaigh urged the justices to direct Israel to allow aid to enter Gaza and re-engage the offices of UNRWA.  Doing so might permit the re-mooring of international law, a ship increasingly put off course by the savage war in Gaza.  The cold, somewhat fanatical reaction to these proceedings in The Hague by Israel’s officials suggest that anchoring international obligations, notably concerning Palestinian civilians, is off the list.

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