Bradford councillor Ismail Uddinbeat Labour last year at the age of 19, as an independent candidate. And at a Your Party rally on 8 October, he said the new left party has to inspire hope in people that change is a very real possibility if people organise.
He insisted:
my experiences come from the ground up, from lived experiences with the people who live the struggle every single day, who continue to do so with a beautiful smile, from the single parents that are holding families together, from the young people fighting for a future they can believe in, from the protesters fighting to see a free Palestine. That’s what my grassroots look like. It’s activist, it’s raw, it’s real, and it’s absolutely powerful.
And that’s why I’m here, to give a bit of a youthful experience, a bit of a youthful perspective. And I’ve always been here to see another chance of change, which is why your party matters. Because it’s not just about my hope or your hope. It’s about tackling political apathy.
He added:
While some are easily being scapegoated, some are being pointed in the wrong directions. So it’s our job to show that change is entirely possible, convincing the people who stopped voting to start again.
As the Electoral Reform Society has noted, the 2024 general election “saw the second lowest voter turnout since the universal suffrage in 1928”. Just over half of Britain voted (28.8 million), while “over 19 million registered voters” didn’t participate and “an estimated 8.2 million eligible people” were “missing or inaccurately registered”.
Independent voices gain power in one of Britain’s youngest and most deprived cities
Uddin said he had engaged with politics from a young age, seeing teachers and youth workers struggle to cope with the gutting of key services under austerity. But his election as an independent has given him hope. As he explained:
I don’t have finances from big donors, or somebody else telling me what to do. I don’t get glossy red leaflets or any political leverage. But I can tell you what I do have. Freedom. Freedom to speak truth without a whip right behind me. Freedom to put my community before any council tax increase or before any party politics. I have the freedom to say what residents actually feel, whether it’s about SEND, or whether it’s about an animal incineration factory in my ward. I can say what needs to be said from my area.
His message is that it’s “entirely possible” to win and make a difference “when we mobilise, and we challenge, and we fight”.
Cities like Bradford deserve that hope. But as Uddin stressed, dealing with political apathy is a key area that requires the urgent attention of a new left party.
The case of death is not at all the cause of the dead, it’s the cause of the living.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the novel Men Under the Sun
My people are fearless and the gallows to each person among us is the instance that precedes the dawn of a new day for all of us … Prosecutor! Understand that when one of us enters the nation’s battle of destiny, he takes into consideration all possible results. But above all, he places his confidence in the determination of the people to win victory.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the story “A Heroine from My Country”
They tell you this is a “conflict.” A “complex issue.” A tragedy happening “over there.”
They are lying.
What is happening in Gaza, in Palestine, is the logical, bloody conclusion of a global system of exploitation—a system sustained not by monsters, but by the convenient, daily complicity of those who benefit from it most: the citizen-consumers of the West.
This complicity is masked by a grand, soothing lie: the lie of democratic citizenship.
The state and its subjects have entered a symbiotic pact of bad faith. The theory goes like this: in a democracy, the citizen is sovereign. The government’s actions are an expression of the popular will. Therefore, the citizens are responsible. This is the idealistic shell. Let us crack it open and examine the actual, pathetic reality inside.
The state, functioning as the capitalist class’s executive committee, depends on this lie as its foundational fiction. It is the democratic alibi that launders imperial violence into policy. The weapons shipped to fuel genocide are stamped with the seal of “democratic principles,” their bloody purpose blessed by the hollow ritual of the ballot. This is the dictatorship of the elite, a regime of class power wearing the convincing mask of popular consent—a specific apparatus designed to vaporize the accountability of the capitalist and imperialist classes, dispersing it as a fine mist of collective guilt over the populace.
But why do the masses accept this lie?
Because it is an anesthetic.
Having already swallowed the primordial myth of capitalist democracy—that freedom is consumption and power is a ballot—this smaller lie of passive citizenship is the necessary sedative that numbs the pain of their own powerlessness and the horror conducted in their name.
Here we must be Kanafanian in our clarity. To be a “citizen” of the metropole is, in practice, to be a consumer. And the consumer’s paradise is built on the graveyards of the Global South. Your stability, your cheap energy, your endless stream of goods, is subsidized by the control and immiseration of others. To truly confront this would shatter the consumer’s world. The cognitive dissonance would be unbearable.
And so, the lie administers the necessary anesthetic. The recited alibis of impotence (“What power do I have?”) are the superstructure of a material bargain. This is the highest stage of false consciousness: the willed surrender of agency for the comforts of the labor aristocracy. It is a transaction: the consumer trades their revolutionary potential for moral oblivion, outsourcing conscience to the state and NGOs—the very managers of the crisis—who, in return, guarantee the sanctity of the shopping aisle.
This is the “citizenshipness” we are sold: a hollowed-out identity, a safety valve for dissent. Protest, write your representative, cast your vote—then return to your consumption. The system allows you to perform concerns without ever threatening the foundations of your comfort. It is a brilliant, cynical management of dissent.
Thus, the genocide and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine are not an aberration. It is the system working as intended. The bombs falling on Rafah, Occupied Palestine, are funded by the taxes of the Western citizenry. The diplomatic cover is provided in their name. Their silence—or more accurately, their fragmented, ineffective noise—is the permission slip.
The connection is not metaphorical; it is material. The luxury lifestyle and the genocide are two outputs of the same machine. One is the direct, concentrated violence of imperialism. The other is the diffuse, structural violence of an exploitative global order. They require each other.
To the real socialists among us, the conclusion is clear: Spontaneous protest is not enough. Moral outrage is not enough. The working classes of the imperial core have been bought off with crumbs from the colonial plunder. They will not achieve revolutionary consciousness on their own. The task falls to an organized political party—those who see through the lie—to break the hypnotic spell of consumer citizenship. To organize, not to plead. To expose the comfort, to make the machinery of complicity grind to a halt.
And to the Palestinians, the path is one of steadfast, rooted resistance. The Palestinian struggle is not a plea for Western sympathy. It is an anti-colonial/imperial war. It is the absolute negation of the lie. Every act of resistance, from the stone to the slogan, is a truth-telling, exposing the brutal reality that the capitalist West so desperately masks with its talk of “complexity” and “citizenship.”
The question is not whether the Western citizen is complicit. The question is whether they will continue to choose the convenience of the lie over the difficult truth of their own justice—a justice that is inextricably linked to the justice and liberation of Palestine. To end the genocide there, they must first kill the complacent consumer within themselves.
There is no other way.
Wakefield councillor Jake Williamson spoke at a Your Party rally in Leeds last week. And he was adamant that the new left party needs working-class voices running for office, not landlords.
Your Party candidates need to be representative of ordinary people’s interests
While he’s hoping to represent the new left party when it’s up and running, he said he’s happy for members to reselect him every time. As he asserted over Your Party:
We wanna be a campaigning force of proper working-class people.
And for that to happen, he stressed, the party needs to be representative:
All of us, no matter what we’re doing, know the problems that exist in our areas. We know the issues that people face. And it’s us who have to drive this party going forward – have to decide who our representatives for public office are.
I don’t mind putting myself forward and having to be selected at every election by the membership of this new party. And that should go for the MPs as well.
I think there are some questions that need to be resolved around landlords and things like that. I know what it’s like to rent privately, and I do not see how private landlords can accurately and genuinely represent the needs of everybody else in society.
He added:
I want to see this party putting forward proper working-class candidates, whether they are nurses, or binmen, or teachers… I want to see everybody represented – ordinary working people. Because if we have a party putting forward those people, we are gonna get the policies we all need.
Fighting poverty and “standing shoulder to shoulder” with trade unions
I’m not joining something that’s a carbon copy of the Labour Party structures.
Instead, he wants a new party to focus on “engaging with the local community”. And he highlighted that “economic issues” are right at the top of the list of most people’s concerns, so addressing that needs to be a priority.
In his speech on 8 October in Leeds, he said:
I come from a normal working-class background. I’ve experienced poverty. I know what it’s like to choose between eating and heating.
That’s why, he added:
Tackling poverty is a key part of my politics. So is standing up for workers and standing with trade unions.
On that point, he asserted regarding Your Party:
there should be no difference between the struggles of workers and trade unions and the representatives elected into public office. There should be no difference at all. We should all be standing shoulder to shoulder together.
Williamson and several other councillors currently sit on Wakefield Council as part of a ‘Unity’ group. This has announced its intention to participate in Your Party’s project to build a new left-wing party.
Two leftwing opposition members of the Knesset protested in the middle of US President Donald Trump’s historic and rambling speech praising the Gaza ceasefire and his administration in West Jerusalem today.
MK Ayman Odeh, a lawyer and chair of the mainly Arab Hadash-Ta’al party, was escorted out of the Knesset plenum after holding up a protest sign calling on Trump to “recognise Palestine”.
It was a day filled with emotion as Hamas released the 20 last living Israeli captives and the Israeli military began freeing 2000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge.
Lawmaker Odeh is a strong advocate for Palestinian statehood, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyaho’s government opposes.
Ofer Cassif, the party’s only Jewish MK, also tried to hold up a protest sign and was removed from the chamber.
After the interruption, President Trump quipped: “That was very efficient” — and then carried on with his speech.
Previously, Odeh posted on his X account: “The amount of hypocrisy in the plenum is unbearable.
‘Crimes against humanity’
“To crown Netanyahu through flattery the likes of which has never been seen, through an orchestrated group, does not absolve him and his government of the crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, nor of the responsibility for the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian victims and thousands of Israeli victims.
“But only because of the ceasefire and the overall deal am I here.
“Only ending the occupation, and only recognising the State of Palestine alongside Israel, will bring justice, peace, and security to all.”
The brief interruption did not deflect from Trump’s speech that was effusive in its praise for Israel, the country’s leadership, the hostages and their families, and its military and so-called “victory” in Gaza.
הוציאו אותי מהמליאה רק כי העליתי את הדרישה הפשוטה ביותר, דרישה שכל הקהילה הבינלאומית מסכימה עליה:
“The choice for Palestinians could not be more clear,” the US president argued.
“This is their chance to turn forever from the path of terror and violence — it’s been extreme — to exile the wicked forces of hate that are in their midst, and I think that’s going to happen,” Trump said.
Palestinians welcome the release of prisoners. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Tear gas fired An Israeli armoured vehicle fired tear gas and rubber bullets at Palestinians gathered near Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, where hundreds had assembled to await the release of prisoners,
Earlier, the Israeli military, in a post on X, reported that the International Red Cross had transferred the final 13 captives held by Hamas to Shin Bet forces in the Gaza Strip, after an earlier group of seven had been released.
Al Jazeera Arabic, citing Palestinian sources, also reported that the handover of all 20 living captives had now been completed.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Adeh reported from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from reporting from Israel and the Occupied West Bank, that the Israeli Broadcasting Authority had confirmed that the Red Cross had received the remaining 13 living Israeli captives.
“They will soon be handed over to the custody of the Israeli military, which, of course, is still present in 53 percent of Gaza,” she said.
“That means that we are in the process of concluding the release of all living Israeli captives, and that is all happening as US President Trump arrived in Israel.
“These are important developments, and the choreography is not coincidental.”
Remaining in Gaza were the bodies of 28 Israeli captives, and it was not clear how many of them will be released today.
As part of the ceasefire, the Israeli military were releasing almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners — including 1700 who had been kidnapped from Gaza, and 250 Palestinians serving life or long sentences.
President Trump was due to fly to the Sharm el-Sheikh respirt in Egypt later today for a summit aimed at advancing Washington’s plans for Gaza and the region.
Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons in harsh conditions. Graphic: Al Jazeera/Creative Commons
AMY GOODMAN:Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.
According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.
Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.
Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.
The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.
Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.
FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.
I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.
What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?
AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.
On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.
KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …
This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.
If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.
Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.
And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.
Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.
So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.
And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.
This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.
DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.
But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.
These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.
And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.
What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.
AMY GOODMAN:I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.
I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?
AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.
And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.
The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.
And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.
We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.
And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.
But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.
Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.
The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?
Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?
AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.
There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.
Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.
There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.
And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?
How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.
AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.
But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.
And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.
But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.
And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.
There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.
But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.
This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.
AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.
You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.
And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.
But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.
I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.
In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.
And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.
Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.
We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.
This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.
As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.
But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.
Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.
In the first installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we take you on a journey through the inception of Morgan McSweeney’s organisation Labour Together.
Labour fought the December 2019 general election with a base split by Brexit and a party divided against itself. It went down to a heavy defeat. After Jeremy Corbyn resigned the helm, Keir Starmer wasted no time in putting his own name forward for the role of new party leader. Starmer’s leadership campaign was a slick affair, launched and defined by a well-produced video that touted his leftist credentials and values. One campaign insider described how, from the outset, it was streets ahead of any contenders in terms of messaging, organisation, infrastructure, and funding.
Starmer could launch his candidacy so quickly thanks to years of preparation largely outside the public eye. This work was done by a political project operating through an organisation called Labour Together. The project had likely started preparing for a leadership contest before Starmer was even aware of its existence. Labour Together provided access to funders. It would also supply Starmer’s key officials including his Svengali, Morgan McSweeney, and many of his future shadow cabinet and cabinet ministers.
Labour Together: laying the groundwork for Starmer’s leadership
Starmer’s left-wing Labour leadership pitch was based on polling undertaken by McSweeney and Labour Together throughout 2019. This equipped Starmer’s campaign with an in-depth understanding of party members’ views. Indeed, as Times reporters Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have written, Starmer effectively ‘subcontracted’ his leadership campaign to Labour Together.
McSweeney, a Labour Together director both before and during Starmer’s leadership bid, was the head of Starmer’s leadership campaign. He was later appointed Starmer’s chief of staff in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (commonly referred to as LOTO). After Starmer formed a government in July 2024, McSweeney became arguably the most powerful unelected official in the UK as Starmer’s chief of staff in Number 10. Before his stint at Labour Together, McSweeney had worked with David Evans, who was appointed general secretary of the Labour Party less than two months after Starmer’s election as party leader.
From its formation in 2015, Labour Together had presented itself as a unifying body that sought to heal Labour’s internal divisions. It even claimed, in February 2020, that it had no horse in the Labour leadership race. Between 2016 and 2018, its website claimed that Labour Together sought to:
provide a space for members and representatives across the party to discuss and debate the future of the Labour Party.
It also promised that:
our aim is to be broadly inclusive, and to involve people right across the movement. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly challenged the Labour Party to re-think the way it does politics.
This complimentary nod to Corbyn was striking in light of what Labour Together now acknowledges it was actually doing behind the scenes.
A ‘brave band’ of MPs… now in government
In 2023, Labour Together would tell a very different story. On the social media platform Twitter (since rebranded as X), it claimed that a “brave band” of eight MPs had “[b]uilt” Labour Together in 2017 in order to make Labour “electable again”. These MPs provided the spine of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, and then his cabinet: Rachel Reeves (now chancellor), Steve Reed (secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs), Shabana Mahmood (lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice), Wes Streeting (secretary of state for health and social care), Bridget Phillipson (secretary of state for education), Lisa Nandy (secretary of state for culture, media, and sport), and Jim McMahon (minister of state in the department for levelling up, housing, and communities). Only Jon Cruddas, the eighth MP, has not subsequently served in Starmer’s shadow cabinet or government.
Editor’s note: since the book went to print, Starmer has instigated a reshuffle. Now, Steve Reed is secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Shabana Mahmood is home secretary, and Jim McMahon was axed from his cabinet role. Additionally, Bridget Phillipson is currently running as candidate for Labour Party deputy leader.
Labour Together’s retrospective claim to have been established in 2017 was curious on at least two counts. First, as discussed above, the group in fact formed in 2015. Second, it would have been most odd to found an organisation to make Labour “electable again” in 2017 – the year that Labour achieved the party’s highest vote share in any election since the Blair heyday of 2001.
The ‘secret’ campaign to ‘seize’ the Labour Party from the left
It was in 2017, however, that Labour Together became the vehicle through which McSweeney would run a “secret” campaign to “seize” the Labour Party back from its ascendant left wing. One of Labour Together’s central figures, the MP for Streatham and Croydon North Steve Reed, later bragged that:
[i]n 2017 Labour Together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left and reconnecting Labour with the voters it had abandoned. In 2020, it played a key role in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, and Keir has since transformed our party.
The Starmer Project is thus, in every sense that matters, a product and continuation of the Labour Together Project that preceded, guided, and enabled it.
As a result, the Starmer Project is both illuminated and condemned by Labour Together’s history of financial murkiness, undisclosed influence campaigns, and attacks on citizen media, as well as its role in inflaming Labour’s manipulated ‘antisemitism crisis’. Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party – and the government he went on to form – is the fruit of Labour Together’s poisoned tree.
Labour Together: conspiring behind closed doors
Labour Together was formed in the shadow of Jeremy Corbyn. Its corporate precursor, Common Good Labour, was registered with Companies House on June 9, 2015, only six days after Corbyn announced his intention to run for the party leadership. Its sole director was John Clarke, who would later turn up as a director of Blue Labour. Blue Labour advocated a mixture of redistributive economic policy and social conservatism.
Party emails show that many of the people who would go on to form Common Good Labour (later Labour Together) had collaborated closely for years beforehand. They included Jonathan Rutherford, Jon Cruddas, Steve Reed, and Morgan McSweeney, the last drafted into discussions about localism and local government because of his role in the Local Government Association (LGA). In late 2014 and prior to Labour’s embarrassing electoral defeat in 2015, this group engaged in constant correspondence about creating a project to centre Labour strategy based on a ‘values model’.
Enter Labour right stalwart: Steve Reed
The same emails reveal that the key movers behind the creation of Common Good Labour were Sir Trevor Chinn and Jon Cruddas. Cruddas, an MP well-liked across the party’s factions, was also broadly sympathetic to the Blue Labour tendency.
One email from early July 2015 shows that Chinn had initially wanted the Blairite MP Chuka Umunna to head the organisation. Umunna was at one point the leading light of sweet-talking Labour centrists and considered potential leadership material, before he immolated his political career by abandoning Labour for the ill-fated breakaway party Change UK in 2019. Umunna rejected the overture and Steve Reed or Tristram Hunt (the idiosyncratic MP for Stoke Central between 2010 and 2017) were mooted instead; Reed would become a director a few months later.
Reed, who would serve on Corbyn’s front bench as shadow minister under various portfolios between September 2015 and April 2020, would emerge as one of the key figures alongside McSweeney in the Labour Together Project, and in its undisclosed schemes that, amongst other things, stoked Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’.
Major pro-Israel donor Trevor Chinn on the scene
Chinn, who would become a major donor to both Labour Together and Keir Starmer, is a wealthy entrepreneur with a long history of funding figures on the Labour right. Chinn made donations to Tony Blair (while MP), Ruth Smeeth, Tom Watson, Rachel Reeves, Ian Austin, and Wes Streeting – all of whom would express hostility to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He has long been associated with Labour Friends of Israel and has an extended history of involvement in pro-Israel causes. For twenty years between 1973 and 1993 he chaired the Joint Israel Appeal (now United Jewish Appeal), which raised funds for cultural and educational endeavours in Israel.
In June 2016, a year after Common Good Labour was formed, Chinn was re-elected the vice chair of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), which engages in advocacy for Israel (among other things). As of November 2023, Chinn was a member of the executive committee of the Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre (BICOM), a pro-Israel lobby group. BICOM’s sister project, We Believe in Israel, was run by Luke Akehurst prior to Akehurst’s election to parliament in 2024. Akehurst is the Labour right’s most effective campaigner and a dedicated warrior against the left. The JLC was fiercely critical of Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party.
Chinn’s award for ‘extraordinary contributions’ to Israel amid a genocide
In November 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour. The award recognises individuals:
who have made an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel or to humanity through their talents, their service, or in any other way.
The award was the gift of President Isaac Herzog, who, in January 2024, had been cited by the International Court of Justice as making statements that plausibly violated the Genocide Convention. Herzog rejected the ICJ’s judgment as a ‘blood libel’ that had ‘twisted’ his words. By the time Chinn was awarded the medal, Israel’s plausibly genocidal assault on Gaza had killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 7,200 women.
Not ‘anti-Jeremy’ assurances: a mendacious deception
Labour Together’s first foray into public life made little impact. Cruddas announced in the Observer in October 2015 that Labour Together aimed to:
bring together all sections of our party to discuss and debate the future of our party
He promised that Labour Together would “learn the lessons of defeat so that we can win again” and acknowledged that Corbyn had:
rightly challenged the party to rethink the way it does politics.
Cruddas confirmed that his colleagues in Labour Together included Steve Reed, Lisa Nandy, and Baroness Judith Blake. Emails show that Corbyn’s team in LOTO was concerned about Labour Together but was mollified when Nandy explained that the group was not ‘anti-Jeremy’. Perhaps this was true at the time; McSweeney had not yet joined Labour Together or united forces with Reed. Nevertheless, the assurance that Labour Together was not ‘anti-Jeremy’ stands out in retrospect as a moment of poignant historical irony.
In March 2016, John Clarke, the original sole director of Labour Together, resigned. He was replaced by Chinn, Reed, Nandy, and Cruddas. They remained directors of Labour Together until a clear-out and reshape of the organisation in 2023.
Labour Together’s launch…for the second time
The October 2015 launch was so forgettable that Labour Together felt comfortable unveiling itself a second time. That re-launch was announced in the Guardian in May 2016 with quotes from Lisa Nandy. The Guardian’s coverage made no mention that Labour Together had already debuted the previous year. The new launch was boosted by articles from Jon Cruddas and Sharon Taylor. Taylor was head of Stevenage Borough Council and deputy leader of the LGA Labour Group – then led by Morgan McSweeney. Nandy, Reed, and Taylor were described as Labour Together’s vice chairs. Another supporter was Nick Forbes, the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council between 2011 and 2022 – a matter of relevance later in our story.
Labour Together’s second outing made almost as little public impact as its first. The group hosted a function at
Labour’s annual conference in September 2016 and established a £40,000 fund for projects advancing localism. It also co-hosted a one-day conference in November 2016 with the Fabian Society. Speakers included Nandy, Reeves, Taylor, and Tom Kibasi, the last of whom was a director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank and charity. Kibasi would go on to play a key part in linking Starmer’s leadership campaign to the Labour left – a role for which he would later express his remorse.
And then: silence. Labour Together effectively disappeared from public view. Although it claims to have done extensive work behind the scenes in setting up meetings and campaign groups, whatever happened unfolded outside the public eye. Neither of the organisation’s Facebook or Twitter accounts posted between November 3, 2016 – the day of the conference – and February 17, 2019.
McSweeney prepares to take control
The 2017 general election was a shot across the bow for the Labour right. Shattering expectations, Corbyn’s party won thirty seats more than in 2015 and, for only the third time since 1974, achieved 40% of the national vote. Within the Labour Party, the 2017 election left the Corbynite faction at its most powerful since Corbyn had been elected leader in 2015, while the right-wing faction that McSweeney represented was at its nadir.
Within hours of being named the Nobel Peace laureate for 2025, María Corina Machado called on President Trump to step up his military and economic campaign against her own country — Venezuela.
The curriculum vitae of the opposition leader hardly lines up with what one would typically associate with a Peace Maker. Nor would those who nominated her, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and recent US national security advisor Mike Waltz, both drivers of violent policies towards Venezuela.
“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace, to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness,” said the Nobel Committee statement.
Let’s see if María Corina Machado passes that litmus test and is worthy to stand alongside last year’s winners, Nihon Hidankyo, representing the Japanese hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “honoured for their decades-long commitment to nuclear disarmament and their tireless witness against the horrors of nuclear war”.
Machado supports Israel, would move embassy Machado is a passionate Zionist and supporter of both the State of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu personally. She has not been silent on the genocide; indeed she has actively called for Israel to press ahead, saying Hamas “must be defeated at all costs, whatever form it takes”.
>If Machado achieves power in Venezuela, among her first long-promised acts will be the ending of Venezuela’s support for Palestine and the transfer of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The smiling face of Washington regime change The Council on American-Islamic Relations, US’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, called Machado a supporter of anti-Muslim fascism and decried the award as “insulting and unacceptable”.
2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado . . . “It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation,” warns a history professor. Image: Cristian Hernandez/ Anadolu Agency
Venezuelan activist Michelle Ellner wrote in the US progressive outlet Code Pink:
“She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatisation, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom.’
She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.”
Legitimising US escalation against Venezuela Ellner said she almost laughed at the absurdity of the choice, which I must admit was my own reaction. Yale professor of history Greg Grandin was similarly shocked.
“It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation.”
What Grandin is referring to is the prize being used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration to legitimise escalating violence against Venezuela — an odd outcome for a peace prize.
Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World says Machado “has consistently represented a more hardline in terms of economics, in terms of US relations. That intransigence has led her to rely on outside powers, notably the United States.
“They didn’t give it to Donald Trump, but they have given it to the next best thing as far as Marco Rubio is concerned — if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela.”
The Iron Lady wins a peace prize? Rubio has repeatedly referred to Machado as the “Venezuelan Iron Lady” — fair enough, as she bears greater resemblance to Margaret Thatcher than she does to Mother Teresa.
This illogicality brought back graffiti I read on a wall in the 1970s: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”. Yet someone at the Nobel Committee had a brain explosion (fitting as Alfred Nobel invented dynamite) when they settled on Machado as the embodiment of Alfred Nobel’s ideal recipient — “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Machado, a recipient of generous US State Department funding and grants, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (the US’s prime soft power instrument of regime change) is praised for her courage in opposing the Maduro government, and in calling out a slide towards authoritarianism.
Conservatives could run a sound argument in terms of Machado as an anti-regime figure but it is ludicrous to suggest her hard-ball politics and close alliances with Trump would in any way qualify her for the peace prize. Others see her as an agent of the CIA, an agent of the Monroe Doctrine, and as a mouthpiece for a corrupt elite that wants to drive a violent antidemocratic regime change.
She has promised the US that she would privatise the country’s oil industry and open the door to US business.
“We’re grateful for what Trump is doing for peace,” the Nobel winner told the BBC. Trump’s recent actions include bombing boatloads of Venezuelans and Colombians — a violation of international law — as part of a pressure campaign on the Maduro government.
Machado says she told Trump “how grateful the Venezuelan people are for what he’s doing, not only in the Americas, but around the world for peace, for freedom, for democracy”. The dead and starving of Gaza bear witness to a counter narrative.
Rigged elections or rigged narratives? Peacemakers aren’t normally associated with coup d’etats but Machado most certainly was in 2002 when democratically elected President Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown. Machado was banned from running for President in 2024 because of her calls for US intervention in overthrowing the government.
Central to both Machado’s prize and the US government’s regime change operation is the argument that the Maduro government won a “rigged election” in 2024 and is running a narco-trafficking government; charges accepted as virtually gospel in the mainstream media and dismissed as rubbish by some scholars and experts on the country.
Alfred de Zayas, a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order, cautions against the standard Western narrative that the Venezuelan elections “were rigged”.
The reality is that the Maduro government, like the Chavez government before it, enjoys popularity with the poor majority of the country. Delegitimising any elected government opposed to Washington is standard operating procedure by the great power.
Professor Zayas led a UN mission to Venezuela in 2017 and has visited the country a number of times since. He has spoken with NGOs, such as Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, as well as people from all walks of life, including professors, church leaders and election officials.
“I gradually understood that the media mood in the West was only aiming for regime change and was deliberately distorting the situation in the country,” he said in an article in 2024.
I provide those thoughts not as proof definitive of the legitimacy of the elections but as stimulant to look beyond our tightly curated mainstream media. María Machado is Washington’s “guy” and that alone should set off alarm bells.
Michelle Ellner: “Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.”
“Beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God”. Matthew 5:9.
Amen to that.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
The global peak journalism body has condemned the targeting, harassment, and censorship by lobby groups of Australian journalists for reporting critically on Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its Australian affiliate, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), said in a statement they were attempts to silence journalists and called on media outlets and regulatory bodies to ensure the fundamental rights to freedom of expression and access to information were upheld.
In a high-profile case, Australia’s Federal Court found on June 25 that Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was unlawfully dismissed by the national public broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), for sharing a social media post by Human Rights Watch relating to violations by Israel in Gaza, reports IFJ.
Lattouf was removed from a five-day radio presenting contract in Sydney in December 2023, with the judgment confirming her dismissal was made to appease pro-Israel lobbyists.
On Seotember 24, the ABC was ordered to pay an additional $A150,000 in compensation on top of A$70,000 already awarded.
In a separate incident, Australian cricket reporter Peter Lalor was dropped from radio coverage of Australia’s Sri Lanka tour by broadcaster SEN in February after he reposted several posts on X regarding Israeli attacks in Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
“I was told in one call there were serious organisations making complaints; in another I was told that this was not the case,” said Lalor in a statement.
Kostakidis faces harassment
Prominent journalist and former SBS World News Australia presenter Mary Kostakidis has also faced ongoing harassment by the Zionist Federation of Australia, with a legal action filed in the Federal Court under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act for sharing two allegedly “antisemitic” posts on X.
Kostakidis said the case failed to identify which race, ethnicity or nationality was offended by her posts, with a verdict currently awaited on a strikeout order filed by Kostakidis in July.
The MEAA said: “MEAA journalists are subject to the code of ethics, who in their professional capacity, often provide critical commentary on political warfare.
“These are the tenets of democracy. We stand with our colleagues in their workplaces, in the courtrooms, and in their deaths to raise our voices against the silence.”
The IFJ said: “Critical and independent journalism in the public interest is more crucial than ever in the face of incessant pressure from partisan lobby groups.
“IFJ stands in firm solidarity with journalists globally facing harassment and censorship for their reporting.”
Journalist killed in Gaza City
Killed Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi . . . gained prominence for his videos covering Israel’s two-year war on Gaza Image: Abdelhakim Abu Riash/AJ file
Meanwhile, gunmen believed to be part of Israeli-linked militia, have killed Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, south of Gaza City, after the ceasefire, reports Al Jazeera.
Social media posts showed people bidding farewell to the 28-year-old who had been bringing news about the war over the last two years through his widely watched videos, the channel said.
Several people accused of attacking returnees to Gaza City by colluding with Israeli forces were killed during clashes in the area where Aljafarawi was shot dead, sources told Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera said that more than 270 Palestinian journalists had been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023.
BREAKING: Prominent Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi has been killed by gunmen in Gaza City’s al-Sabra neighbourhood, making him one of more than 270 journalists killed since Israel’s war began in 2023.
Independents are increasingly defeating establishment parties on a local level. But that’s not always a sign of progress, and Warrington is a good example of that – where Reform is disguising its candidates as independents.
Reform’s parish-level ‘independent’ candidates
Being ‘independent’ can clearly mean different things to different people.
Reform policy has been to disguise candidates at parish level, removing any controversial issues that might arise from being linked to a billionaire-owned, profit-reaping business of a political party. Nevertheless, it is still very easy to distinguish these far-right bad actors as a result of the hard work of other independents, who have chosen to pursue substance and social value where others have simply resorted to style and sensationalism.
Neil Johnson, now independent for Culcheth, Glazebury and Croft elected originally on a Labour ticket, has consistently voiced divisive and toxic views, attacking other candidates and elected representatives at a parish and borough council level. Yet when we dig deeper into the substance behind his protestations and cynical manipulations, we find precious little action taken.
Johnson has used grandstanding tactics of attacking the local council for refusing to negotiate on CPS Centre landlord issues, all whilst failing to lodge a formal objection to the first CPS planning scheme until of course, there was a wave of outrage to ride on in the CPS’ second application. Coupled with cynical attacks at other councillors, based on Facebook posts on trans rights and compassion towards immigrants and the vulnerable, Johnson’s interests are clear: toxic debate, confrontation and press coverage – with little to no actual depth and delivery.
For instance, the only verifiable applied work that has been done, other than sensationalist, divisive statements, has been the cleaning of a local speed sign and cutback of overgrowth in Risley. Every small action becomes a story, every disagreement becomes a moral crusade, whilst remaining notably silent on hard infrastructure, measurable improvements, or even concrete health checks on his own lofty claims.
Two types of independent…
Instead of winning support and respect through merit and quality, they choose to attack the character and substance of others, in absence of any value to their own.
This issue is made worse when it is amplified by local media, namely the Warrington Worldwide and Warrington Guardian, who have taken to being client journalists for right-wing candidates. Maybe the sensationalism and baseless, grand statements churned out by independent-right representatives have led to an increase in readership due to the increase in local click-bait, but it definitely has not resulted in good value for our hometown when hate and anger are simply incited with no real show of ambition for actual solutions.
As we’ve seen across the mainstream corporate media, journalists are failing in their responsibility to hold the powerful and influential to account for their statements and actions, churning positive coverage out without any attempts to ensure the accuracy of its content.
On the other hand, fellow independent local councillor Stuart Mann, for Burtonwood and Winwick, has shown what it is to choose principle over spectacle and spin. With a history of standing alone in refusing the out-of-touch allowance increase for councillors, challenging the local councils track record on spending and investments, and most recently pursuing a motion to the Labour-run council challenging the introduction of digital ID’s, demanding this to be optional rather than compulsory, this independent shows what it is to be responsible to their hometown and community.
To make the differences even more stark, we also see that Mann chooses to work collaboratively wherever possible, regardless of party lines or any need for grandstanding for applause. Where rightwing independents have chosen bullying and cancel culture, others show it is possible to put the best interests of the local community before ego and self-interest.
Reform are parachuting in politicians who don’t care about the community
Terry White, former Reform member in Birchwood, hasn’t held back following a decision to leave the party following the suspension of its Warrington Branch:
Following the suspension of the Warrington Branch, the lack of meeting to create policy in the inevitable case that they take control of Warrington Council, and the lack of free speech in practice, today I have quit Reform UK. It is simply the case that Reform UK, who have even welcomed two members of the BNP to their meetings in Warrington, have never even pondered a single local policy.
Furthermore, the branch has simply served as a vessel for the sake of getting a member of party staff to be elected as the MP for Warrington South when they do not even live in Warrington.
Parachute candidates in store for Reform UK, it seems.
To me, this highlights that Reform UK, which claims to be in favour of democracy and free speech and strong local communities, the values of which I joined the party for, do not believe in these things.
However, White holds a different perspective as to why Reform refuses to stand candidates on a party platform at parish level:
…they opted to not stand candidates for local parish council elections because they saw parish councils as being beneath them.
This damning post hardly indicates that this billionaire-run party actually gives the faintest concern about how our forgotten and left-behind communities feel about the state of our society.
Fill the void with the grassroots
That vacuum signifies the potential for a socialist, leftwing movement to really break through the hate and division in our communities that have long been let down and ignored by Westminster, but it must ensure that it connects to the organic, grassroots movements that are popping up across the country.
Showing up at a community level, addressing the concerns and anxieties of local residents, is the necessary and vital action that will ensure we defeat the rise of the far-right, as that is how local people will distinguish between style and sensationalism over substance, and choose the best candidates to represent their interests.
A temporary ceasefire and release of some Palestinians in a prisoner exchange is not a “peace agreement” and it is far from what is needed — ending colonisation; freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags (also tortured, nearly 100 have died under torture in the last two years); return of the millions of refugees; and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
That is why this global uprising (intifada) will not stop until freedom, justice, and equality are attained.
Here are brief answers I gave to questions about the agreement for Gaza:
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh during his visit to Aotearoa New Zealand last year . . . “what is needed — ending colonisation, freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags , return of the millions of refugees, and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Image: David Robie/APR
1. How has life in the West Bank changed for you and your community during the past two years of conflict? The West Bank has been illegally occupied since 1967 (ICJ ruling) but it was not merely an occupation but intensive colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The attacks on our people accelerated in the last two years with over 60,000 made homeless in the West Bank and denial of freedom of movement (including hundreds of new gates installed in these two years separating the remaining concentration camps/ghettos of the West Bank ).
2. What is your assessment of the new peace deal that brought an end to the fighting in Gaza?
It is not a peace deal. It is an agreement to pause the genocide which will not work because the belligerent occupier — “Israel” — has not respected a single agreement it signed since its founding. Even the agreement to join the United Nations was conditional on respecting the UN Charter and UN resolutions issued before and after 1949.
This continued to even breaking the signed ceasefire agreement of last year. I have 0 percent confidence that this latest agreement would be respected even on the simple aspect of “pausing” the genocide and ethnic cleansing going on since 1948.
3. In your view, why did war drag on for two years despite multiple ceasefire attempts?
Simply put because colonisation can only be done with violence. And the war on our people has gone on not for two years but for 77 years without ending (sustained by Western government support). Israel as a colonisation entity is the active face of colonisation. The USA for example broke similar agreements for “pauses” in colonisation with natives in North America and broke every single one of them.
Israeli military occupation on the environment. Video: Greenpeace
4. What kind of humanitarian and environmental toll has the conflict taken on Palestinian society? It is now well documented from UN agencies, human rights groups (like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, even the Israeli group B’Tselem). In brief it is genocide, ecocide, scholasticide, medicide,
and veriticide. (More at: ongaza.org )
5. Why do you think it took the IDF so long to rescue all the hostages? The terrorist organisation that deceptively calls itself “IDF” (Israeli Defence Forces) was not interested in rescuing their captives (not “hostages”) and they only got people back via exchange of prisoners (not rescue).
The IGF (Israeli Genocide Forces) actually killed many of their own soldiers and civilians
on 7 October 2023 by activating the Hannibal directive to prevent their capture. The resistance was aiming to capture colonisers (living on stolen Palestinian lands) to exchange for some of the more than 11,000 political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails. (Again see ongaza.org )
6. How significant was international involvement — particularly from the US — in reaching the final agreement?
This is the first genocide in human history that is not executed by one government. It is executed by a number of governments directly supporting and aiding (participating). This includes the USA, UK, France, Egypt, Germany, Australia etc. Many of these countries have governments dominated or highly influenced by the Zionist agenda.
Under the influence of a growing popular protest against the genocide around the world, some of those countries are trying to wiggle out from pressure in an effort to save
“Israel” from growing global isolation. Trump was blackmailed via videos/files collected by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghiseline Maxwell (Mossad agents). He is simply a narcissistic collaborator with genocide!
7. What concrete steps do you think are necessary now to turn this peace deal into a sustainable, lasting solution?
Again not a “peace deal”. What needs to be done is apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) on this rogue state that violates the international conventions (Geneva Convention, Conventions against Apartheid and Genocide). BDS was used against apartheid South Africa and needs to be applied here also. (For more: bdsmovement.net )
8. How do you see the Palestine Museum of Natural History contributing to rebuilding and healing efforts in the aftermath of war? Our institute (PIBS, palestinenature.org) which includes museums, a botanic garden, and many other sections is focused on “sustainable human and natural communities” Our motto is respect: for ourselves (empowerment), for others (regardless of religious or other background), and for nature.
Conflict, colonisations, oppression are obviously areas we challenge and work on in JOINT struggle with all people of various background.
9. Looking ahead, what gives you optimism—or concern—about the future relationship between Palestinians and Israelis?
What gives me optimism first and foremost is the heroic resilience and resistance (together making sumud) of our Palestinian people everywhere and the millions of other people mobilising for human rights and for justice (including the right of refugees to return and also environmental justice).
What gives me concern is the depth of depravity that greedy individuals in power go to destroying our planet and our people and profiting from colonisation and genocide.
About 8.5 million Palestinians are refugees and displaced people thanks to Zionism and Western collusion with it. A collusion intent on transforming Palestine from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multireligious, and multilingual society to a racist Jewish state (monolithic).
Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Bedouin in cyberspace; a villager at home; professor, founder and (volunteer) director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, Occupied Palestine.
The bombs have indeed stopped, but our suffering continues. Our reality has not changed. We are still under siege.
Israel still has full control over our air, land and sea; it is still blocking sick and injured Palestinians from leaving and journalists, war crimes investigators and activists from going in.
It is still controlling what food, what medicine, and essential supplies enter.
The siege has lasted more than 18 years, shaping every moment of our lives. I have lived under this blockade since I was just three years old. What kind of peace is this, if it will continue to deny us the freedoms that everyone else has?
‘Deal’ overshadowed flotilla kidnap
The news of the ceasefire deal and “the peace plan” overshadowed another, much more important development.
Israel raided another freedom flotilla in international waters loaded with humanitarian aid for Gaza, kidnapping 145 people on board — a crime under international law. This came just days after Israel attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, detaining more than 450 people who were trying to reach Gaza.
These flotillas carried more than just humanitarian aid. They carried the hope of freedom for the Palestinian people. They carried a vision of true peace — one where Palestinians are no longer besieged, occupied and dispossessed.
Many have criticised the freedom flotillas, arguing that they cannot make a difference since they are doomed to be intercepted.
I myself did not pay much attention to the movement. I was deeply disappointed, having lost hope in seeing an end to this war.
But that changed when Brazilian journalist Giovanna Vial interviewed me. Giovanna wrote an article about my story before setting sail with the Sumud Flotilla. She then made a post on social media saying: “for Sara, we sail”. Her words and her courage stirred something in me.
Afterwards, I kept my eyes on the flotilla news, following every update with hope. I told my relatives about it, shared it with my friends, and reminded anyone who would listen how extraordinary this movement was.
‘She became the light’
I kept wondering — how is it possible that, in a world so heavy with injustice, there are still people willing to abandon everything and put their lives in danger for people they had never met, for a place, most of them had never visited.
I stayed in touch with Giovanna.
“Until my last breath, I will never leave you alone,” she wrote to me while sailing towards Gaza. In the midst of so much darkness, she became the light.
This was the first time in two years I felt like we were heard. We were seen.
The Sumud Flotilla was by far the biggest in the movement’s history, but it was not about how many boats there were or how many people were on board or how much humanitarian aid they carried. It was about putting a spotlight on Gaza — about making sure the world could no longer look away.
“All Eyes on Gaza,” read one post on the official Instagram account of the flotilla. It stayed with me, I read it on a very heavy night when the deafening sound of bombs in Gaza City was relentless. It was just before I had to flee my home due to the brutal Israeli onslaught.
Israel stopped flotillas, aid
Israel stopped the flotillas. They abused and deported the participants. They seized the aid. They may have prevented them from reaching our shores, but they failed to erase the message they carried.
A message of peace. A message of freedom. A message we had been waiting to hear for two long, brutal years. The boats were captured, but the solidarity reached us.
I carry so much gratitude in my heart for every single human being who took part in the freedom flotillas. I wish I could reach each of them personally — to tell them how much their courage, their presence, and their solidarity meant to me, and to all of us in Gaza.
We will never forget them. We will carry their names, their faces, their voices in our hearts forever.
To those who sailed toward us: thank you. You reminded us that we are not alone.
And to the world: we are clinging to hope. We are still waiting — still needing — more flotillas to come. Come to us. Help us break free from this prison.
The bombing has stopped now, and I can only hope that this time it does not resume in a few weeks. But we still do not have peace.
Governments have failed us. But the people have not.
One day, I know, the freedom flotilla boats will reach the shore of Gaza and we will be free.
Sara Awad is an English literature student, writer, and storyteller based in Gaza. Passionate about capturing human experiences and social issues, Sara uses her words to shed light on stories often unheard. Her work explores themes of resilience, identity, and hope amid war. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
The Green Party is now just two points behind both Labour and the Conservatives, according to the latest polling from Find Out Now. With Zack Polanski, the party has surged four points in a week.
The stats on Zack as Green Party polling surges
Labour and the Conservatives are neck and neck on 17%, with the Greens on 15%. Reform still leads on 32%. But the Nigel Farage-led party has lost three points in the week since Find Out Now last polled.
The thing is, major polling agencies tend to underestimate potential left wing support. That’s because they deprioritise non voters, disenfranchised by the neoliberal system, who may well vote if they are inspired by a progressive campaign that speaks to their values.
The Green surge is unprecedented. 15% is the highest ever the the party has polled, according to Election Maps UK.
The polling increase as of Polanski’s election has come despite the corporate media continuing to sideline the Greens. Polanski was the only party leader that Laura Kuenssberg refused to interview on her Sunday politics show.
Membership surging too
The Greens have not just overtaken the Lib Dems in polling (the corporate party is on 12%, according to Find Out Now). They have also outdone the Lib Dems in terms of membership.
The Lib Dems have 83,174 members, while the Greens now have 95,000 – gaining 5,000 members in a day this week. On top of that, the Greens have 30,000 more members than they did at the time of their recent leadership election, an increase of almost 50%.
This reflects the fact that the 2010 Conservative/ Lib Dem coalition showed the Lib Dems are essentially a neoliberal copy of what the two main parties have become.
Greens had historic 2024 election
The 2024 election results are a strong basis for the Green Party to build on. Not only did they receive four MPs, but the Greens came second in 40 seats in 2024. Further, they got over 10% of the vote in 108 seats, which is a huge increase from 18 seats in 2015. They also got over 20% of the vote in 15 seats, a significant increase on just two in 2015.
Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is vital to nation-building. It empowers Filipinos to make informed decisions by fostering critical thinking, strengthening media awareness and encouraging responsible digital use.
This call was echoed last week when United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and MediaQuest’s THINKaMuna campaign representatives came together for a small but meaningful gathering.
The event underscored their shared commitment, with discussions centering on projects to push MIL forward in the Philippines.
“Most young people today turn to social media as their first source of news,” said UNESCO Jakarta director Maki Katsuno-Hayashikawa.
“With AI making it harder to tell what’s fake from what’s true, it’s even more important for all generations to think critically and share information responsibly.”
They are making this happen in several ways.
Explainer videos
The UNESCO-THINKaMuna partnership has rolled out three of six digital episodes so far — Cognitive Biases in July, Critical Thinking in August and Tech Addiction in September.
Each is short, visually appealing and easy to understand, perfect for audiences with short attention spans.
“Most MIL materials are very academic because they were made for schools,” shared MediaQuest corporate communications consultant Ramon Isberto.
“We want ours to be different — playful and something people can casually talk about in their neighbourhoods.”
This approach has brought the digital episodes closer to audiences, helping them reach nearly five million views.
“In the Philippines, MediaQuest is our first media partner piloting media literacy in different ways and integrating it,” added UNESCO Jakarta program specialist Ana Lomtadze.
“Our mission is really about reaching out in new, innovative ways and showing audiences how and why they should discern information and check their sources.”
Taking MIL to classrooms While UNESCO provides guidance, Katsuno-Hayashikawa noted that implementation depends on local, on-the-ground initiatives.
THINKaMuna recognises this, which is why they are distributing 1000 MIL journals to schools across the country.
“A substantial percentage of grade school and high school students are not functional readers – they can read, but don’t fully understand what they’re reading,” explained Isberto.
To address this, the journals are filled with visuals to ensure the message comes across. Workshops for senior journalists and the MILCON 2025 are also in the works to complete the offline component of the collaboration.
“Society exists because we communicate and learn from each other,” Isberto said.
“Today, media and information literacy is our way of continuing that conversation.”
This brutal war on Palestinians has not just unleashed Israel’s demons. It has unmasked our own regimes, as they crack down on humanitarian activism. Jonathan Cook reflects on Israel’s war on Gaza as the fragile ceasefire takes hold.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Anniversaries are often a cause for celebration. But who could have imagined back in October 2023 that we would now be marking the two-year anniversary of a genocide, documented in the minutest detail on our phones every day for 24 months? A genocide that could have been stopped at any point, had the US and its allies made the call.
This is an anniversary so shameful that no one in power wants it remembered. Rather, they are actively encouraging us to forget the genocide is happening, even at its very height.
Israel’s relentless crimes against the people of Gaza barely register in our news any longer.
There is a horrifying lesson here, one that applies equally to Israel and its Western patrons. A genocide takes place — and is permitted to take place — only when a profound sickness has entered the collective soul of the perpetrators.
For the past 80 years, Western societies have grappled with — or, at least, thought they did — the roots of that sickness.
They wondered how a Holocaust could have taken place in their midst, in a Germany that was central to the modern, supposedly “civilised”, Western world.
They imagined — or pretended to — that their wickedness had been extirpated, their guilt cleansed, through the sponsorship of a “Jewish state”. That state, violently established in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, served as a European protectorate on the ruins of the Palestinian people’s homeland.
Desperate to control
The Middle East, let us note, just happened to be a region that the West was desperate to keep controlling, despite growing Arab demands to end more than a century of brutal Western colonialism.
Why? Because the region had recently emerged as the world’s oil spigot.
Israel’s very purpose — enshrined in the ideology of Zionism, or Jewish supremacism in the Middle East — was to act as a proxy for Western colonialism. It was a client state planted there to keep order on the West’s behalf, while the West pretended to withdraw from the region.
This big picture — the one Western politicians and media refuse to acknowledge — has been the context for events there ever since, including Israel’s current, genocidal endgame in Gaza.
Two years in, what should have been obvious from the start is becoming ever-harder to ignore: the genocide had nothing to do with Hamas’s one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The genocide was never about “self-defence”. It was preordained by the ideological imperatives of Zionism.
Hamas’s break-out from Gaza — a prison camp into which Palestinians had been herded decades earlier, after their expulsion from their homeland — provided the pretext. It all too readily unleashed demons long lurking in the soul of the Israeli body politic.
And more importantly, it released similar demons — though better concealed — in the Western ruling class, as well as parts of their societies heavily conditioned to believe that the interests of the ruling class coincide with their own.
“History repeats itself,” as the saying goes, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”
The same could be said of “peace processes”. Thirty years ago, the West force-fed Palestinians the Oslo Accords with the promise of eventual statehood.
Oslo was the tragedy. It led to an ideological rupture in the Palestinian national movement; to a deepening geographic split between an imprisoned population in the occupied West Bank and an even more harshly imprisoned population in Gaza; to Israel’s increasing use of new technologies to confine, surveil and oppress both sets of Palestinians; and finally, to Hamas’s brief break-out from the Gaza prison camp, and Israel’s genocidal “response”.
Now, President Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” offers the farce: unapologetic gangsterism masquerading as a “solution” to the Gaza genocide. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — a war criminal who, alongside his US counterpart George W Bush, destroyed Iraq more than two decades ago — will issue diktats to the people of Gaza on Israel’s behalf.
Gaza, not just Hamas, faced an ultimatum: “Take the deal, or we will put you in concrete boots and sink you in the Mediterranean.”
Surrender document
Barely veiled by the threat was the likelihood that, even if Hamas felt compelled to sign up to this surrender document, Gaza’s people would end up in concrete boots all the same.
Gaza’s population has been so desperate for a respite from the slaughter that it would accept almost anything. But it is pure delusion for the rest of us to believe a state that has spent two years carrying out a genocide can be trusted either to respect a ceasefire or to honour the terms of a peace plan, even one so heavily skewed in its favour.
The farce of Trump’s peace plan — his “deal of the millennium” — was evident from the first of its 20 points: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.”
The document’s authors no more wonder what might have “radicalised” Gaza than Western capitals did when Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, broke out of the prison enclave with great violence on 7 October 2023.
Were the people of Gaza simply born radical, or did events turn them radical? Were they “radicalised” when Israel ethnically cleansed them from their original lands, in what is now the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, and dumped them in the tiny holding pen of Gaza?
Were they “radicalised” by being surveilled and oppressed in a dystopian, open-air prison, decade upon decade? Was it the experience of living for 17 years under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that denied them the right to travel or trade, and forced their children on to a diet that left them malnourished?
Or maybe they were radicalised by the silence from Israel’s Western patrons, who supplied the weaponry and lapped up the rewards: the latest confinement technologies, field-tested by Israel on the people of Gaza.
Gaza most extreme
The truth ignored in the opening point of Trump’s “peace plan” is that it is entirely normal to be “radicalised” when you live in an extreme situation. And there are no places on the planet more extreme than Gaza.
It is not Gaza that needs “deradicalising”. It is the West and its Israeli client state.
The case for deradicalising Israel should hardly need stating. Poll after poll has shown Israelis are not just in favour of the annihilation their state is carrying out in Gaza; they believe their government needs to be even more aggressive, even more genocidal.
This past May, as Palestinian babies were shrivelling into dry husks from Israel’s blockade on food and aid, 64 percent of Israelis said they believed “there are no innocents” in Gaza, a place where around half of the population of two million people are children.
The figure would be even higher were it reporting only the views of Israeli Jews. The survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinians — survivors of mass expulsions in 1948 during Israel’s Western-sponsored creation. This much-oppressed minority has been utterly ignored throughout these past two years.
Another survey conducted earlier this year found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews favoured the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. More than half, 56 percent, also supported the forced expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel — even though that minority has kept its head bowed throughout the genocide, for fear of reaping a whirlwind should it speak up.
In addition, 47 percent of Israeli Jews approved of killing all the inhabitants of Gaza, even its children.
Netanyahu’s crimes
The crimes overseen by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is so often held up by outsiders as some kind of aberration, are entirely representative of wider public sentiment in Israel.
The genocidal fervour in Israeli society is an open secret. Soldiers flood social media platforms with videos celebrating their war crimes. Teenage Israelis make funny videos on TikTok endorsing the starvation of babies in Gaza. Israeli state TV broadcasts a child choir evangelising for Gaza’s annihilation.
Such views are not simply a response to the horrors that unfolded inside Israel on 7 October 2023. As polls have consistently shown, deep-seated racism towards Palestinians is decades old.
It is not former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who started the trend of calling Palestinians “human animals”. Politicians and religious leaders have been depicting them as “cockroaches”, “dogs”, “snakes” and “donkeys” since Israel’s creation. It is this long process of dehumanisation that made the genocide possible.
In response to the outpouring of support in Israel for the extermination in Gaza, Orly Noy, a veteran Israeli journalist and activist, reached a painful conclusion last month on the +972 website: “What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.”
And she noted that this problem derives from an ideology with a reach far beyond Israel itself: “The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”
As the genocide has unfolded week after week, month after month — ever-more divorced from any link to 7 October 2023 — and Western leaders have carried on justifying their inaction, a much deeper realisation is dawning.
Demon in the West
This is not just about a demon unleashed among Israelis. It is about a demon in the soul of the West. It is us — the power bloc that established Israel, arms Israel, funds Israel, indulges Israel, excuses Israel — that really needs deradicalising.
Germany underwent a process of “denazification” following the end of the Second World War — a process, it is now clear from the German state’s feverish repression of any public opposition to the genocide in Gaza, that was never completed.
A far deeper campaign of deradicalisation than the one Nazi Germany was subjected to, is now required in the West — one where normalising the murder of tens of thousands of children, live-streamed to our phones, can never be allowed to happen again.
A deradicalisation that would make it impossible to conceive of our own citizens travelling to Israel to help take part in the Gaza genocide, and then be welcomed back to their home countries with open arms.
A deradicalisation that would mean our governments could not contemplate silently abandoning their own citizens — citizens who joined an aid flotilla to try to break Israel’s illegal starvation-siege of Gaza — to the goons of Israel’s fascist police minister.
A deradicalisation that would make it inconceivable for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or other Western leaders, to host Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for the genocide, arguing that no one there — not even its one million children — were innocent.
A deradicalisation that would make it self-evident to Western governments that they must uphold the World Court’s ruling last year, not ignore it: that Israel must be forced to immediately end its decades-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that they must carry out the arrest of Netanyahu on suspicion of crimes against humanity, as specified by the International Criminal Court.
A deradicalisation that would make it preposterous for Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s Home Secretary, to call demonstrations against a two-year genocide “fundamentally un-British” — or to propose ending the long-held right to protest, but only when the injustice is so glaring, the crime so unconscionable, that it leads people to repeatedly protest.
Eroding right to protest
Mahmood justifies this near-death-knell erosion of the right to protest on the grounds that regular protests have a “cumulative impact”. She is right. They do: by exposing as a sham our government’s claim to stand for human rights, and to represent anything more than naked, might-is-right politics.
A deradicalisation is long overdue — and not just to halt the West’s crimes against the people of Gaza and the wider Middle East region.
Already, as our leaders normalise their crimes abroad, they are normalising related crimes at home. The first signs are in the designation of opposition to genocide as “hate”, and of practical efforts to stop the genocide as “terrorism”.
The intensifying campaign of demonisation will grow, as will the crackdown on fundamental and long-cherished rights.
Israel has declared war on the Palestinian people. And our leaders are slowly declaring war on us, whether it be those protesting the Gaza genocide, or those opposed to a consumption-driven West’s genocide of the planet.
We are being isolated, smeared and threatened. Now is the time to stand together before it is too late. Now is the time to find your voice.
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. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
Sarah Woolley is general secretary of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). And on 8 October, she spoke at a Your Party rally in Leeds alongside Zarah Sultana. But while she praised the excitement surrounding the party, she insisted that:
While this new formation is coming together, while the ideas and the structures are being worked out, we can’t afford to sit still and wait for politics to be sorted for us. Real change doesn’t start in Westminster and won’t come from any political party as it starts. It starts in our workplaces. It starts in our communities, in the everyday organising that builds confidence, power and solidarity.
With this in mind, she called for enthusiastic engagement in Your Party whilst at the same time “building power from below”, asserting that:
No political party, no matter how radical, can deliver the change on its own. Parties follow movements, not the other way around. And we, my friends, are a great big movement. So our job right now is to be organising…
It’s not about waiting for something to represent us. It’s about representing ourselves.
Sarah Woolley: use the hope and energy to rebuild unions and communities
Sarah Woolley railed against right-wing austerity politics, but highlighted that people haven’t given up hope:
After years of austerity, broken promises, and the hollowing out of democracy, people are ready to believe that something better is possible… despite 15 plus years of austerity and the crap that we’ve had to deal with, people haven’t given up. We haven’t given up despite everything that we’ve endured: stagnant wages, insecure work, public services on their knees, food banks.
There’s more food banks than there are McDonald’s stores. That’s shameful. They’ve become normal, not something that we should only be having in times of crisis.
The fact that political elites have told us for decades that there’s no alternative to all this, she said, has:
led to despair and disengagement and has allowed the likes of Reform to step into that gap with this poisonous message that blames migrants, workers and the vulnerable instead of the powerful and the rich.
But we need to be clear that:
their real mission, and we know this, is to keep workers divided and the rich protected.
To fight back, she asserted:
We’ve got to be rebuilding our unions, growing them, strengthening them and making them fine organisations again. Every time a worker joins a trade union, stands up to their boss, wins a pay rise or secures safer conditions, that’s politics in action. That is working class power.
She also stressed:
The system that exploits us at work is the same system that’s bleeding our communities dry. So we’ve got to organise across both. Unions linking up with tenants’ campaigns, food solidarity groups, climate activists, building that collective strength wherever we are.
Sarah Woolley is right. Because the bigachievements of the working class have always come as a result of organisation and pressure from below. And that’s what we need to build again going forwards.
After persistent speculation about the possibility of the prize going to Donald Trump [see e.g.: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2025/07/24/nobel-peace-prize-choice-between-trump-and-albanese/], it was announced today 10 October that the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, winning more recognition as a woman “who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.”
The former opposition presidential candidate was lauded for being a “key, unifying figure” in the once deeply divided opposition to President Nicolás Maduro’s government, said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee. “In the past year, Ms. Machado has been forced to live in hiding,” Watne Frydnes said. Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions. When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”
The Nobel Prize Committee clarified that “Maria Corina Machado meets all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel’s will for the selection of a Peace Prize laureate. She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarisation of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.
Maria Corina Machado has shown that the tools of democracy are also the tools of peace. She embodies the hope of a different future, one where the fundamental rights of citizens are protected, and their voices are heard. In this future, people will finally be free to live in peace.”
The creation of a new left party was never going to be easy. But after some rocky moments, it looks like the energy and hope around Your Party is back. And Zarah Sultana’s speech to around 600 people in Leeds On Wednesday 8 October was a perfect example of that:
Zarah Sultana delivers a passionate call for unity and resistance
Zarah Sultana started off with honesty and openness, acknowledging the frustration many people feel about disagreements at the top of Your Party and apologising for her part in them. She stressed that she and others will need to work hard to rebuild the trust of the 800,000 people who expressed interest in a new party, who she said “are still watching us cautiously”. But she was also clear that “the stakes are simply too high” to let the project fail. And she outlined her vision for the party, and why it’s essential to build it.
She rallied against the war criminals in government, the divisive fascist rhetoric targeting marginalised groups, the political ideology of Zionism that has brought us a live-streamed genocide in the last two years, and the role NATO plays in actually making Britain and the world less safe. At the same time, she called for a party that: is proudly socialist and trade unionist; backs the creation of one state in Palestine where all groups live with equal rights and Israel’s settler-colonial occupation ends; and isn’t afraid to talk about the class war that the super-rich have been waging against the rest of us.
For Sultana, power in numbers matters. Unions need to step up their struggle. People need to join Your Party and get more active in their communities. Because fascism is on the rise. And we don’t defeat it by debating how to be perfect down the line. We defeat it by recognising what we have in common, standing firm together, and showing fascists that we won’t allow their hateful, divisive politics to fill parliament and fill our streets.
Class war, and knowing our enemy
Working-class people, Zarah Sultana stressed, aren’t “turned off by class politics”. Far from it:
They live it every single day. They live class war when their bills go up while energy companies post record profits. They see class war when landlords hike the rent and evict families without a second thought. They see class war when bankers get bailed out while austerity [lands] on their shoulders. They see class war when 50 families hoard more wealth than half the country, when food banks outnumber the number of McDonald’s restaurants in our country.
So we need to embrace class war. And it’s time we won.
The new left party, she said, must be:
Rooted in working-class communities, proudly socialist, fiercely democratic. And I will always fight for maximum member democracy. You have my word.
The “politics of anti-imperialism” also matters, she insisted. So the party must be “proudly anti-Zionist”, in favour of “a secular state with equal rights for all” in Palestine. It must treat Israel “like a pariah state” just as the world treated apartheid South Africa as such. And it must fight to leave NATO – “an imperialist war machine that profits from death and destruction” and makes the world “less safe, not more” with its “endless wars”. As she asserted:
every penny that is spent on tanks and bombs is stolen from healthcare, housing and the future.
She argued that people:
have to believe that the working class can run society better than the billionaires, better than the profiteers, and definitely better than the war criminals who are running the country today.
And with that final point, she pointed out that prime minister Keir Starmer “belongs in The Hague” over his support for Israel’s genocide.
We need a movement of “collective struggle” to defeat fascism and its billionaire backers
Zarah Sultana also insisted that:
Every single right that we have, for women to have the right to vote, for the weekend, for the NHS, that has been won through collective struggle. It was never handed down to us by the political elite. Even though we have Europe’s most repressive anti-union laws, trade unions secure real wins for their members every single day. These victories matter because they prove to us that change is always possible
And collective struggle isn’t just about making our lives better. It’s about standing up to those who want to make them worse. As she said:
We are living through the largest fascist mobilisation in recent British history. This has not come out of nowhere. It has been emboldened by politicians and the media who scapegoat migrants, Muslims and minorities every single day. And Reform is their political vehicle.
She added:
We must challenge them in the streets as well as the ballot box. To be clear, you can’t beat far-right politicians and fascism by ignoring them or, as the Labour Party are doing, copying them. You do it by fighting them, you do it by organising, you do it by uniting the working class around a positive vision. And by building a movement that is broad and rooted in solidarity.
Emphasising that “the far right thrive on a politics that is reduced to scapegoating, division and fear”, she asserted:
our movement has to say with one loud voice, we will not play that game. We will fight for every single person and we will defend the most marginalised.
In particular, she noted:
This rise in transphobia that we are seeing is deliberate. It is being stoked as a wider culture war to divide us. And just like with migrants, just like with Muslims, just like with disabled people, the goal is always the same: ‘find a scapegoat so people don’t look upwards at who is really holding the power’.
And she stressed that:
the only way to beat that is to cut through the noise, to cut through the bullshit and to speak to people about their daily realities. We have to address the housing crisis, insecure work, wages that don’t cover the bills, the NHS on its knees.
People don’t want or need culture wars, they need hope, they need material improvements in their lives and that’s what we’ll do.
The applause of hundreds of people listening to Sultana in Leeds interrupted her regularly during her speech. And when she finished, she received a standing ovation. If audience members had doubts about Your Party before attending, many of them seemed to have faded by the end.
The energy and hope in the room was palpable. And tonight, Sultana will be with Jeremy Corbyn in front of an even bigger crowd in Liverpool.
To the dismay of the billionaire class and its lackeys, Your Party is clearly just getting started.
Three New Zealanders, who were detained in Israel, after taking part in an international flotilla heading to Gaza, claim they were treated like animals.
Rana Hamida, Youssef Sammour and Samuel Leason arrived at Auckland International Airport this afternoon, and were greeted by a crowd of supporters and loved ones.
Among the supporters were Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and MP Ricardo Menéndez March.
Israel’s foreign ministry said the claims were “complete lies”, and the detainees rights were upheld, but Hamida and Sammour claimed conditions were harsh.
“We were there for almost a week, more or less, and we were treated like crap, to be honest,” Sammour said. “We were treated like animals.”
Hamida said: “It was a violation of what humanitarian law is.”
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson and Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March at Auckland Airport today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Guards refused medicine
Sammour said one of their fellow prisoners was diabetic, but the guards refused to give him his insulin, but Hamida admitted the hardship they faced was just a fraction of that experienced by the occupants of Gaza.
People gathered at Auckland Airport to welcome home the New Zealanders who were on the flotilla to Gaza. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
The flotilla, a group of dozens of boats carrying 500 people — including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg — had been trying to break Israel’s blockade.
Leason’s father, Adi Leason, earlier told RNZ’s Midday Report he was “immensely proud” of his 18-year-old son.
Samuel Leason hugging his father Adi Leason. Image: Marika Khabazi/RNZ
“We’ve been going to mass every Sunday for 18 years with Samuel, and he must have been listening and taking something of that formation on board. It’s lovely to see a young man with a deep conscience caring so deeply about people who he will never meet and to put himself in harm’s way for them.”
Samuel Leason felt a mix of relief and anger upon returning to New Zealand. He said it was amazing to see his family again, but he felt frustrated that the New Zealand government did not do more to intervene.
The trio said they had not been discouraged and planned to mobilise more than ever.
Hooton wrongly suggested an out of date way of viewing international law justified Peters as he emphasised the horror endured by Israel and did not recount the genocide with at least 67,000 Palestinians killed, mostly women and children, unfolding as the mind conditioning of New Zealanders continued along the same path we’ve been sleeping under.
Hooton neglected to mention the failure of NZ First to include official advice in their cabinet paper, the secrecy and delay over the decision, and the words of the Israeli Finance Minister just this morning.
He also said in August 2025 that plans to build more than 3000 homes in a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
The so-called E1 project between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement has been frozen for decades amid fierce opposition internationally. Building there would effectively cut off the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem, the planned capital for the state of Palestine.
Smotrich is not welcome in New Zealand — but travel bans is all Christopher Luxon’s coalition government will do as they bow low before the US and Israel — calling that “Sucking up” . . . “Independence”.
We suck up independently and clap ourselves – or at least Act do.
Japan threatens sanctions
As reported yesterday, Japan has threatened to sanction Israel if they mess with the possibility of Palestinian Statehood, but back in New Zealand we are busy festering over whether it is okay to protest outside a house — be it — an apartment block which houses a political party office and residential apartments in the same building or not.
Sticking points include a hefty 3 month prison sentence and $2000 fine but some say that this is all a distraction from our obligations to act against an unfolding genocide and from the dire state of the economy for those who are not wealthy and sorted.
Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’s negotiating team, has said the group has received guarantees from the US and mediators that an agreement on a first phase of a ceasefire agreement means the war in Gaza “has ended completely”.
We will see how Israel plays this — but levels of scepticism are sky high and many have no faith in Netanyahu because he had been offered the return of hostages a year ago and chose to ignore it.
Perhaps Israel will “behave while International Eyes” are on it but time will tell . . . whether spots have changed on the leopard.
In the meantime vote in your local elections — you only have one day to go — and when it comes to the next General Election – you know what to do.
This article is extracted from Gerard Otto’s Friday Morning Coffee column with permission. Matthew Hooton visited Israel and Palestine in 2017 as a guest of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. The Australian news site Crikey publishes a list of politicians and journalists who have travelled to Israel on junkets.
In the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire plan, Israel is required to withdraw to the agreed “yellow line” within 24 hours, after which a 72-hour period will begin for the handover of Israeli 48 captives (20 believed to be still alive) in exchange for 2000 Palestinian prisoners. Image: CC Al Jazeera
Given the massive changes in geopolitics brought about by the isolationist and bizarre behavior of the Trump administration, activists and scholars have a major role to play in drawing attention to the dangers and possibilities for peace of this embryonic new world order. It is very unfortunate then, that one of the most crucial components in this situation (Korea) continues to be portrayed with an over-simplified banal narrative. North Korea is portrayed as a place where devils rule over freedom haters, and South Korea as little more than an exporter of K-Pop and a nice place to eat. People who care about peace in East Asia must examine Korea’s history more carefully in order to work more constructively toward global partnerships based on mutual understanding rather than hackneyed stereotypes.
Let us start at home, where it hurts, by recalling one of the greatest crimes that Koreans have ever committed against Koreans, i.e., the ancient crime of slavery, with a history of a millennium and a half behind it. “Mark Peterson, a former professor of Korean studies at Brigham Young University and one of the few U.S. scholars who has studied Korean slavery, has argued that Korea had the longest, unbroken chain of slaveholding in the world, lasting nearly 1,500 years… By the 17th century in Joseon Korea, an estimated one-third of the population was engaged in some form of coerced labor… Slavery was legally abolished in Korea in the Gap-o reform of 1894 but remained extant in reality until 1930.”
So just as in the U.S., lazy aristocratic types there were allowed to live off slave labor. Nevertheless, when it came to outsiders trying to dominate, exploit, or rule them, Koreans have united to resist and stop such injustice in its tracks. In the new film “Harbin,” the first Japanese Resident-General of Korea Itō Hirobumi (1841-1909) explains to a fellow colonizer:
You know why I’ve always been skeptical about annexing Korea? For centuries the nation of Korea has been ruled by foolish kings and corrupt scholars, but Korea’s common people are the most troublesome. Even for a nation that’s given them nothing, in times of national crisis, they wield a strange power. 300 years ago, Hideyoshi’s invasion was stopped by men who volunteered to fight for the nation. The same is happening today in Manchuria…
There is a kernel of truth here. Koreans have always come together when foreign people attempted to enslave them. The Mongols tried to invade between 1231 and 1259, and they killed hundreds of thousands of Koreans and destroyed precious cultural treasures. The Mongols “demanded exorbitant tribute, including horses and young girls,” but Koreans refused and prevented a full takeover.
Between 1592 and 1598, the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/37-98), also tried and failed. Japanese attacked Korea in the Imjin War. It was “the largest conflict on the globe in the sixteenth century,” but few people in the West know anything about it. Koreans had lots of help from a multinational force from the Ming Dynasty organized by the Wanli Emperor (1563-1620). The Ming Dynasty fulfilled their promise to protect Korea in accordance with their “tributary system.” China’s defense of Korea was also self-defense. Hideyoshi had set his sights not just on Korea but on China as well.
Unfortunately for everyone, Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) seems to have been unaware of this history. He made the same mistake as Hideyoshi. On 7 October 1950 the United Nations General Assembly authorized the United Nations forces to cross the 38th Parallel into North Korea. They recommended that “all appropriate steps be taken to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea.” Their stated aim was “the establishment of a unified, independent and democratic government” for the entire Peninsula. But this is the same U.N. that only oversaw elections in the south of the Peninsula—unfair and undemocratic elections—when they helped to establish the tyrannical government of Syngman Rhee (1875-1965).
In the words of Bruce Cumings, the American historian of Korea, “The UN imprimatur gave to the Republic of Korea a crucial legitimacy.” (The Korean War: A History, Modern Library, 2010, Ch. 5). Instead of making an effort to correct the harm they had done to Korea, the harm of putting their stamp of approval on the elections that put Rhee in power on 15 August 1948, the U.N. allowed MacArthur to invade North Korea, a territory with a separate government, established through separate elections. In the end, they wound up contributing to this tragic national division that separated many millions of Koreans from their loved ones.
On balance, it must be mentioned that the elections in the North were also unfair, as they were planned by the Soviets without much input from Koreans. “Not a single Korean was present” when the Soviet generals “decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They also decided the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature” (Andrei Lankov, Chapter 1, “The Society Kim Il Sung Built and How He Did It”, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Oxford UP, 2013, p. 7). But neither had the U.N. made any “commitment to extending the ROK mandate into the North.” (Cumings, The Korean War: A History, Ch. 7). There was no plan for Syngman Rhee to rule over the North. They hoped that MacArthur’s invasion would pave the way for new elections that would establish one government that would rule the entire Peninsula.
MacArthur was not even supposed to get close to the Yalu River (i.e., the river that marks most of the border between Korea and China), or worse, to get close to Chinese or Soviet forces, but he was so arrogant that when he met President Truman in October 1950, he told the President that “there was ‘very little’ chance of [China intervening], and even if the Chinese did decide to cross the Yalu River, the U.S. air force would ‘slaughter’ them.” Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) had warned MacArthur “more than once that if UN troops approached the Yalu River, the Chinese would enter the war.” MacArthur ignored Zhou’s warnings and sent troops close to the River anyway. It took the Chinese and regular Korean troops only three weeks (between 25 November and 14 December 1950) to push MacArthur’s troops across “the 38th parallel” and back into South Korea. In a word, neither the great warlord Hideyoshi, respected by many in Japan, nor the great general MacArthur, were able to conquer Korea.
Koreans repelled France in 1866, the U.S. in 1871, and the Empire of Japan in 1884, during a period when they were materially impoverished and seriously disadvantaged in terms of military technologies. Sadly, the Empire of Japan did eventually colonize Korea. They held it for a few decades. A group of Japanese brutally assassinated Queen Min of Korea in 1895, but the statesman Kim Ku (1876-1949) took revenge by killing a Japanese man that he believed was involved in the assassination. Later, the Empire of Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and on 5 September 1905 the defeated Russians recognized Japan as the dominant power in Korea, through the Treaty of Portsmouth.
Nobody knew until 1925 that the U.S. had made a secret deal called the Taft-Katsura Memorandum on 29 July 1905 that “expressed an approval by the United States of Japanese suzerainty over Korea and a disavowal by Japan of ‘any aggressive designs whatever on the Philippines.’” Thus, with the cooperation of the U.S., the Empire of Japan colonized Korea, but one Korean gave Japan a painful bee sting. Ahn Jung-geun (1879-1910), the patriot in the above-mentioned film “Harbin,” assassinated the new ruler Itō Hirobumi in 1909.
After several years, a huge number of Koreans came together and rose up against those trying to enslave them. Two million people, out of a total population of twelve million, participated in a movement for independence called the March 1st Movement, during the year following the 1st of March 1919. In response, Japanese killed thousands of Koreans, destroyed hundreds of houses, and arrested 46,000 people in order to suppress the movement. The Movement “greatly enhanced the rise of the Korean communist party,” and despite, or perhaps due to, the intense oppression of communists and labor unions in South Korea, March 1st was eventually established as a national holiday in both the North and the South.
When the Empire of Japan was finally defeated in the summer of 1945, allowing Koreans a brief moment of freedom, the U.S., instead of letting them decide their own destiny, manipulated the U.N. to force the government of Syngman Rhee on the people. His government hired many treacherous people who had collaborated with the Empire of Japan during the colonial period. Of course, the U.S. occupation did not bring peace and prosperity to South Korea. Right away, it brought death, destruction, poverty, and violence to the Koreans in the South.
As Cumings once explained, wars in general do not “start,” and the Korean War certainly did not start in June 1950, as we have been told in the U.S. The U.S. had already deployed troops in South Korea, and had maintained a military government there for five years at that point. It was inevitable that violence broke out right away between those in favor of the U.S.-backed dictatorship in the South and those in favor of the communist/Stalinist government of Kim Il-sung (1912-94) in the North. The “U.S.-advised Korean Army and Korean National Police” were kept “very busy in 1948 and 1949.” (Cumings, The Korean War: A History, Ch. 5).
Kim Il-sung had been a guerrilla field commander in Northeastern China in the 1930s (Chapter 1, “The Society Kim Il Sung Built and How He Did It” of Lankov’s The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia). He came from a Christian family and his father was a “prominent Christian activist.” He had caused lots of trouble for the Japanese colonizers for many years and was one of the tougher guerrilla fighters in Manchuria (Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country, The New Press, 2003, Ch. 3: “The Legend of Kim Il Sung”). One single battle on 13 March 1940 was “much bigger and more significant than Fidel Castro’s legendary attack on the Moncada Barracks, which later became a centerpiece of Cuban political folklore,” in Cumings’ view.
Thus at least since 1948 or 1949, the people of North Korea have lived under a constant state of war and the threat of invasion by the United States and other countries, including those U.N.-approved nations, almost all from outside East Asia, that interfered in the Korean civil war by fighting alongside the U.S. And for decades North Koreans lived with the threat of nuclear bombs being launched against them by the U.S. military that occupied and ruled the land of their brothers and sisters in the South. Under the armistice that was signed in 1953, everyone was prohibited from introducing qualitatively new weaponry to the Peninsula, but Washington brought in nuclear cannons and Honest John nuclear-tipped missiles in January 1958. And they continued stockpiling nuclear weapons until 1991. One reason why the Civil War has not been resolved during the past several decades is that the undemocratic, militarist government of Syngman Rhee received backing from the U.S. and other foreign governments.
In spite of their isolation and poverty, and the need to spend a huge chunk of the national budget on building a “garrison state” in order to get ready to repel more invasions by powerful and rich countries like the U.S., North Korean society actually enjoyed some significant successes (Cumings, North Korea: Another Country, Ch. 6, “American Failures”). Although South Korea was supported by the U.S., North Korea was richer, even into the 1980s. According to a “Far East Specialist” in the CIA, daily necessities were low priced in North Korea; housing and health care were basically free; everyone had electricity in their home by 1968; and it was an extremely egalitarian society. “Compassionate care for war orphans in particular and for children in general, ‘radical change’ in the position of women… infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries” (until the famine that started in the late 1980s); “no organized prostitution,” and the police were “difficult, if not impossible, to bribe.”
Conclusion
“Disruption of peace in East Asia cannot be of benefit to Japan. Japan must, with all its might and sincerity, preserve peace in the Far East.” Those are the words of Ahn Jung-geun in 1909 in The New Korea (Sinhan Minbo). These words ring even truer today, when one can see the scars of decades of Japanese colonialism and the pain caused to Koreans and Japanese by the U.S.’s “light hold on the jugular,” i.e., the bases in South Korea and Japan. War in East Asia will not benefit Japan.
America is a rich country. Wouldn’t it be nice if people in the U.S. were a little more realistic? Our “unipolar” moment in history has ended. We should now reflect on how we have wronged Koreans, those in the South as well as those in the North, and start investing significant sums on the prevention of war, especially nuclear war.
Koreans are resolutely demanding justice for what the U.S. did to their compatriots, to Japanese, and to others in Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the Atomic Bombings on the 6th and 9th of August 1945. For those who know a little about the above history of the Korean commitment to justice, it is not surprising that it is the Koreans today, 80 years after America launched the Nuclear Era, who are spearheading the campaign to establish the facts of history, hold the U.S. accountable for the bombing, and open a door to a future free of the threat of nuclear war.
In addition to hundreds of thousands of Japanese, tens of thousands of Koreans were directly harmed by the Bombings. Although it may seem that many were living in those cities of their own volition, objectively speaking, it was Japanese colonialism that brought them there, whether they were forced labor or not.
To sum up, the People’s Tribunal will be a “way to tell the truth about nukes,” as Elliott Adams of Veterans For Peace once said. Its purpose will be to hold the U.S. legally responsible for what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to restore the human rights of Korean atomic bomb victims. The Tribunal could play a role in stopping the nuclear arms race, promoting nuclear disarmament, and preventing a third use of nuclear weapons in the future. If you prefer a peaceful revolution in the style of the Candlelight Revolution of Korea to a violent revolution, please learn about the People’s Tribunal and support it as much as possible.
As president Trump tears up the U.S. Constitution he twice swore to uphold, fierce backlash from an aroused John and Jane Public is not far off. Contempt for that document and Americans’ baked-in characteristic of feistiness when pushed too far is one of the four key factors preventing him and his regime from turning democracy into a dictatorial dynasty.
Three of the four historic factors buttressing America’s form of democracy against Trump’s autocracy were recently listed by Politico contributor Jonathan Schlefer. They should lift the spirits of the fearful and depressed a notch or two:
A careful comparison with countries that fought off autocratic attempts, as well as those which succumbed, suggests that American democracy might be more resilient than you think. At a minimum, it has crucial advantages over democracies that failed. Three main things stand out: None was nearly so rich [as the U.S.]. None was nearly so long-lived. And none had a legal establishment tracing its genealogy back to Magna Carta in 1215.
But the most powerful, unmentioned factor of all, however, is raising the dander of average Americans when their personal “ox is finally gored.” As consumer-advocate Ralph Nader warned Trump recently in Common Dreams:
Americans don’t like to be told to shut up; they don’t like to have things rightfully theirs taken from their families; they don’t like to be fired en masse without cause; they don’t like government contracts for vital services being arbitrarily broken. They also don’t like their government being overthrown by fascistic gangsters….
Once Trump’s voters and his business base start turning against him, with wide media coverage and dropping polls, the stage will be set for surging demands for his resignation and impeachment that starts with “impossible,” then “possible,” then “probable,” then conviction. If the GOP sees either its political skin at risk in 2026 versus Trump’s destructive, daily delusions and dangerous daily damage, politicians will put their political fortunes first. That is what Congressional Republicans did when they told Nixon to resign in 1974 over the Watergate scandal.”
Our history is punctuated by Americans initially made hot-tempered from being treated like medieval serfs with no rights by British kings and their swaggering local officials and troops. Most complaints were over British taxes and tariffs, but also tenants’ rights, starvation, cutting ship masts from trees, newcomer rivalries, Christian morality, and Parliament’s Navigation Acts mandating trade only with Britain.
The Boston Revolt of 1689, for example, had the longest list of grievances against the British governor: enforcing those Acts, restricting town meetings, promoting the Anglican church in a Quaker city, denying land claims, negating Boston’s city charter, assigning hated British officers to lead the local militia. The last straw may have been his creating a “Dominion of New England” for easier control of defiant subjects using litigation, civil disobedience, nettlesome newsletters like the Pennsylvania Journal, fists, and guns. Nearly 20 Colonial uprisings were recorded between 1676 and 1776.
At the lower social levels in those days were tavern brawls over politics, insults to women, cockfight boasts , and losing at cards and skittles. Not to mention collecting horseracing bets, or my indentured ancestor decking an officious British constable for missing a tax appointment on the Boston docks.
At upper-class levels, testiness in the early 1800s was exemplified by the famous duel between former Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton when he called his long-time political rival Vice President Aaron Burr “a dangerous man” at a dinner party. Burr called him out and fatally wounded him in a duel.
Fifty-six years later when abolition divided the nation, Massachusetts’ Sen. Charles Sumner had just made a major anti-slavery floor speech attacking a colleague (“a noisesome, squat, and nameless animal”). South Carolina’s fiery House member Preston Brooks marched into the Senate to avenge his friend. He aimed his metal-topped cane at Sumner’s head and nearly beat him to death.
Meantime out in the lawless West, cattle rustling, horse and hog thievery, and land disputes were involved in “the great range wars” usually settled by rifles, savage beatings, and impromptu hangings. One dustup was New Mexico’s “Lincoln County War” of the 1870s where Billy the Kid got his start as a posse member turned killer until he was gunned down. Jesse James was another. Hair-triggered and an unregenerate Confederate, he and his brother Frank formed a gang robbing banks, stagecoaches, and trains all over the Midwest. Jesse even issued press releases about their prowess—until he, too, took a bullet to the head.
It’s undeniable that the number of books about their deeds, the movies and television series reveals a rancorous public drawn to their murderous adventures as “speaking truth to power.” It strongly indicates millions still yearn for a Robin Hood—even though none of their booty ever went to the poor.
Economic victims in the late 1890s suffered under robber barons and their president William McKinley, a high-tariff, global conquistador. But at the 1901 New York exposition, he grandly extended a plutocratic handshake to a bitter, 28-year-old laid-off Ohio factory worker who had stalked him for weeks. The assassin threw off a handkerchief concealing a pistol, and fatally shot him.
What American today has not done a slow burn finally igniting a raging internal inferno over both molehills and mountains?
Watch a schoolyard of five-year-olds when an unintentional bump turns into fistfight. Or listen to a chorus of objections to line-jumpers at athletic events or the movies. The act of driving can transform peaceful Jekylls into near homicidal Hydes. Add resentments over barking dogs, unruly kids, driveway blockage, tree cutting or planting, spraying bushes, and grass clippings blown across a neighbor’s property line once too often.
As for loving a neighbor as “thyself,” Google lists pages of neighbor vs. neighbor lawsuits winding up in civil or criminal courts. Too often, they also turn into bloodletting.
One celebrated case involved Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul. He had just stepped off his mower when a surly neighbor raced over, struck him from behind, breaking six ribs and injuring his lungs. The cause? A bundle of yard debris crossing the property line (“He must have lost it,” said Paul).
However, testiness has grown far more serious these days with the availability of guns. Last year, an irate neighbor in Alabama “discharged multiple rounds” into his target’s house. Another pair of neighbors in Palm Beach, Florida last May evidently argued over moving a basketball hoop shared by both households to a new spot. One pulled a handgun and fatally shot the other—and his wife.
All of the evidence above brings us to the main point being made here: If Americans are so easily irked by the “small stuff,” consider what they’ll do about large and immediate issues affecting survival. Like Trump’s killing Medicaid. Or slowly strangling Social Security and Medicare. Or laying off hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants.
In Trump’s months-long blitzkrieg of more than 200 executive orders (EOs) to overthrow democracy for a dictatorship, he seems to count on his military’s use of flash-bang bombs, tear gas, beatings, jailings, and killings to silence Americans into groveling obedience.
He and his advisors somehow have forgotten the thousands of mutinous troops in Vietnam: fragging officers, disobeying direct orders for patrols and battles and the like. If they balked at killing an Asian enemy, wouldn’t they do the same when it involved fraternizatings from their fellow Americans (Sunday dinners, bowling, beer and TV sports invitations), a tactic suggested by one activist group in Portland?
Now, the July No Kings demonstration drew five million Americans to the streets (and millions more at home) 1.5 percent of the population . The second No Kings rally October 18 may well draw double that number, given Trump’s latest spate of illegal and cruel EOs. Crowd-counting statisticians such as Erica Chenoweth at Harvard’s Kennedy School have said that even a one percent protest has tumbled almost half of the world’s dictators.
Add to all these millions of angry “little people,” the anxious or furious 2.3 million Federal civil servants who’ve kept the wheels of government service running. They see the handwriting on the wall in viewing the treatment of 100,000 colleagues being summarily forced out of careers without the legality of reduction-in-force hearings. The economic impact alone on their families, landlords, producers and sellers of retail goods and services will be devastating.
True, the federal courts have temporarily halted some of the most unconstitutional of Trump’s orders so far, and he’s chosen to ignore their rulings. But not the temperament of most ticked-off Americans. And that could erupt at any time, despite Senators like Oregon’s Jeff Merkley writing to us Portland creative activists to “cool it.” He said:
“Trump’s play is right out of the authoritarian handbook: he wants to stoke violence, then use violence to justify tightening his authorian grip on our communities. We can’t play into his hand. I urge folks to remain peaceful, and to not take his bait.” Oregon’s governor Tina Kotek also told us that Trump’s federalizing 200 of our National Guard would cost state taxpayers $10 million. So we’re willing to stay calm, cool, and collected—for rhe moment.
But whether trying to bully, muzzle, and suppress feisty Americans into accepting Trumpian chains will never, ever work for long. For 400 years we have been fighting bullies and smiting would-be dictators. Here in Portland and other targeted cities, we’re unlikely to stop anytime soon.
Few in history can have achieved so much in a negative sense in so short a time. Instead of gloatingly cresting the wave of success after securing British Labour a resounding, decisive victory in July 2024, Sir Keir Starmer is schooling us in precipitous decline. John Gray, that most erratic, protean of prophets, was already suggesting last year that the prime minister and his party were overseeing less “the rise of an all-powerful machine” than “another chapter in the story of Britain’s failing state.” Not a week goes by without some sniping at the dull technocrat’s limp performances from unnamed insiders or nipping from the party hacks. And let’s not forget the parasitic media stable, always willing to magnify matters in the factory of perceptions.
In fact, media magnification has done wonders to wither and sunder Starmer’s appeal, which, in the scheme of things, wasn’t grand to begin with. Take this reading of the situation from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg towards the end of last month. “In the last few days I’ve spoken to 30 people across government and the party – ministers, MPs, advisers – to try to work out, as the prime minister makes his way to Labour’s annual party conference in Liverpool, how much trouble is he really in?” In the tradition of true British journalism, not a single name is given of the 30. But they all have opinions they wish to air – anonymously.
One source takes issue with Starmer’s judgment on people, which “has proven to be flawed”, resulting in “endless staffing resets.” His judgment on policy is also flawed. He can’t communicate. He remains unpopular “in the public’s eyes” – whoever they are. Another “insider” offers his dollop of observation by suggesting the PM is “too like a chairman, not a chief executive”. A “senior party figure” damns Starmer for not thinking “like a leader”. One wonders how he has lasted so far.
Such talk has invariably encouraged talk about a leadership challenge to Mr Stiffness. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has been as subtle as a sledgehammer on his own parliamentary ambitions. (Angela Raynor had been the media’s appointed potential challenger till her resignation as deputy prime minister and deputy party leader over a financial scandal.) Those wishing to fill column space on the theme of Starmer the Doomed also thought of another potential challenger: the new home secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Much concern centres on Starmer’s seeming inability to douse the unruly flames of nationalism sparked by Nigel Farage and his Reform UK Party. In keeping with trends on the European continent, Reform is surging like a current of indignation, threatening the dowdy political establishment with its often adventurous assessments on crime and immigration. In May, Farage was aglow with favourable results in a byelection, a mayoralty, and an electoral bag of 677 councillors from over 1,600 seats. On September 26, YouGov, using their multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) model, released a projection showing that Reform would net 311 seats were an election to be held the next day, based on a sample of 13,000 voters. At the start of October, The Guardian’s poll tracker had Reform polling at 31%, with Labour languishing at 21%.
Certainly, such figures should be seen with alarm by the party psephologists, not only in Labour, but by the Conservatives, who seemingly risk being outranked as the major party of opposition. But British politics, so long caged by the First Past the Post system, has a tendency to extinguish challenging upstarts and contenders, leaving the less deserving establishment parties on the parliamentary benches. Little is mentioned in the commentary on this fact.
At the Liverpool party conference, commentary from The Guardianpicked up on “the stony faces of cabinet ministers in the front show” as Starmer gave his speech that supposedly postponed his fate (again, more media magnification). On this occasion, his ailing fortunes had been given a tonic. He had delivered “a full-throated defence of progressive values as the antidote to Reform, with no more equivocation.” The paper rolled out the usual unnamed senior figures. “National renewal, patriotism, clear dividing lines between us and the left and the right, aimed directly at middle Britain,” came one assessment. A minister had noticed “an emotional connection” in a speech of scrappiness and defiance, “which is always good when your back’s to the wall.”
Starmer does have his defenders, but they have come from surprising company. There is Fraser Nelson, former editor of the conservative weekly, The Spectator, who has confronted Farage on spurious claims that Britain has become a lawless jungle festering in rising criminal statistics. Fraser insists on something that Farage and Reform UK are allergic to: cast iron evidence. The Crime Survey for England and Wales is a source illuminatingly suggesting that the number of crimes has fallen by four-fifths since 1995. Never mind, says Farage, it does not cover shoplifting, and many people don’t bother to report crime anyway. Unfortunately for Starmer, he has been put off his stroke when dealing with perceptions, which are being all too readily moulded and packaged in the assembly line of fear that is Reform UK. The Tories, while looking a rather sad, decrepit lot, are taking a pose they have adopted at stages before: biding their time and awaiting their opponents to fall.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released a flurry of statements in the last couple of hours, claiming that the announced agreement over the first phase of the ceasefire in the war on Gaza is because of Israel’s military pressure.
It’s because of Israel’s continuous military activity. It’s because of the objectives that Netanyahu had outlined at the beginning of the war — that’s why they reached this point.
But the reality on the ground shows a much different story.
Most of the captives who were released from the Gaza Strip were done through diplomatic means, through these ceasefire deals or through direct negotiations with the Americans.
It wasn’t really due to these advanced military operations that the army and the government alike were touting.
Netanyahu is not just under pressure internationally but domestically from the family members of those captives who have been held for two years and a day, and who have been advocating for their release every week – protesting, taking to the streets, saying they have no faith in their own leadership.
If you look on social media and if you see the statements from their family members, if you see anything relating to the captives and their families from the last week or so, it has all been thanks to President Trump. It’s all thanks to the US envoy, Steve Witkoff.
There has been no praise or thanks to the prime minister because this is a population that believes Netanyahu got in the way of many deals — such as back in July 2024, when mediators said they were at the finish line.
But at the 11th hour, Netanyahu decided to insert new conditions and essentially reneged on the entire ceasefire agreement.
Jubilation in Gaza over the ceasefire deal is announced. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Salhut reported later:
“In a few hours time, the Israeli government is going to convene and they are going to vote on this ceasefire agreement.
“After they vote, the Israeli military will then withdraw to one of those lines that were presented in the map that President Trump posted on his social media.
“Then, 72 hours after that, the captives are going to be released by Hamas. We are hearing from the Americans that it could take place on Monday.
“President Trump has been talking about Israel’s international isolation, about how they’ve become a pariah state. But they are not just isolated on a political level; it is also economic. It is also through cultural forums. It’s also a lot of different spaces in the world.”
Al Jazeera is reporting from Amman, Jordan, because it has been banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank.
I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable,…
— Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) October 8, 2025
Celebrations in Gaza after the announcement of reaching a ceasefire agreement.
The war in Gaza has ended, and the hostages will be released 72 hours after the Israeli Cabinet approves the agreement. pic.twitter.com/9hFzbCpvGk
New Zealand advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has “cautiously welcomed” the Gaza ceasefire and proposed exchange of hostages between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas.
At least 7000 Palestinians are being held in detention without trial by Israel while about 20 Israeli soldiers are held by Hamas.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said the deal was a reprieve from Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.
“It’s been two years of mass bombing and starvation. It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century,” he said in a statement.
“The real tragedy is that the main elements of this ceasefire deal were already agreed to nine months ago in January. Israel was forced to let Palestinians return to Gaza City, and lower the intensity of its attacks.
“Within a few weeks, the Israelis scuttled the agreement, shut off all food and intensified their attacks and are now ethnically re-cleansing Gaza City.
“Expulsion is still the Israeli government’s aim. Netanyahu must be disappointed that Trump is no longer advocating for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, but Netanyahu usually gets his way with Trump in the end.”
Called on support
Nazal said PSNA especially noted that the Hamas acceptance statement called on countries supporting the deal — New Zealand included — to make sure Israel abided by the few specific conditions imposed on the Zionist state in the agreement.
“Israel has broken every peace deal it has ever signed on Palestine, right from occupying more than half of what was allocated by the United Nations as a Palestinian state in 1948,” Nazzal said.
“In the 1993 Oslo peace deal, which the US also brokered, there was meant to be a Palestinian state within five years. Israel made sure this never happened.
“This time, there is no mention of the Occupied West Bank. Nothing about return of refugees. There is no commitment in the Trump deal for a Palestinian state, for Winston Peters to eventually recognise.
“There’s just a vague pathway with no timelines and it’s all conditional on Israeli approval,” Nazzal said.
“So we have a message for Winston Peters, who is demanding PSNA and other protesters applaud the Trump deal as ‘case solved’.
“Ceasefire or not, our campaign to isolate the apartheid state of Israel will continue to grow until all Palestinians are liberated.”
Two years ago, Israel suffered what was perhaps the most jarring day in its modern history. The events of October 7, 2023, weren’t just a military failure or an intelligence lapse — they were a national humiliation. Police stations were stormed and overrun. Military posts were taken. Soldiers and officers, including from elite units, were killed or captured. The Gaza Division of the Israeli army, a symbol of Israel’s long-standing dominance over the Strip, fell into chaos.
Israel invoked the Hannibal Doctrine — a policy that allows military forces to prevent the capture of soldiers even at the cost of their lives, by opening fire on both Hamas and the kidnapped Israelis. That day, it wasn’t theory — it was execution.
In the fog of panic, Israeli fire turned on its own, and the thin line between protecting society and sacrificing civilians for strategic ends evaporated.
But October 7 was just the opening act. What followed was a war unlike anything Israel had fought in fifty years — brutal, relentless, and devastating in scale and ambition. Gaza was not merely targeted; it was systematically dismantled. What began as retaliation became something else entirely: an erasure.
The illusion of military supremacy
Two years into the war, one fact is undeniable: Israel, backed by some of the most powerful military alliances in the world, has failed to conquer a territory smaller than half of New York City. 365 square kilometers — that’s all Gaza is. Yet despite overwhelming force, technological advantage, and political cover, the Israeli army has been unable to fully occupy it.
This failure is especially glaring given the scale of destruction. Over 200,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza — the equivalent of 20 nuclear bombs without radiation. That’s not metaphor. That’s the measure of how far Israel was willing to go and is not willing to stop yet: flattening entire towns, turning hospitals, schools, mosques, residential towers, universities, even cemeteries into rubble.
Gaza has endured more concentrated bombing than any territory since the Second World War.
Indeed, what Gaza has endured over the past two years dwarfs even some of the most infamous wartime bombardments of the twentieth century. In February 1945, Allied forces dropped roughly 3,900 tons of explosives on Dresden in a three-day firestorm that killed an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 people and obliterated much of the city. Where Dresden became a symbol of wartime excess, Gaza is witnessing destruction on a scale so vast it makes Dresden look like a prelude.
And unlike Dresden, Gaza’s devastation has been broadcast live, in real time, to a world that cannot claim it did not know.
But Israel was never alone and had every advantage and complicity: real-time intelligence from the United States and Britain, precision munitions from Germany, satellite targeting, drone supremacy, complete air dominance. And still, two years on, it cannot claim control over this tiny strip of land.
The problem was never firepower. It was urban warfare — a terrain where bombs are blunt tools and conquest requires something far more difficult: boots on the ground, close-quarters control, and the ability to hold territory without hemorrhaging soldiers or sparking endless insurgency.
The Israeli army, trained for dominance but not for urban occupation, found itself caught in a repetitive, grinding cycle: enter, level, retreat, repeat.
Neighborhoods were captured and declared “secured,” only to be abandoned and recontested days later. Troops rotated in and out of ruined zones, unable to maintain sustained presence. For every area leveled, resistance either moved underground or regrouped elsewhere. The war turned into a grim spectacle of destruction without achievement.
This revealed a contradiction at the heart of Israel’s military doctrine: it can destroy almost anything, but it cannot hold what it destroys. Air supremacy means nothing when the battlefield is a bombed-out maze. Gaza’s density, devastation, and defiance turned every advantage into a liability.
So while the Strip lies in ruins, it is not conquered. And that truth — buried under declarations of “strategic success” — is the defeat Israel cannot admit.
The real objective: Not security—territory
Israel’s war was not, as officially claimed, about eliminating Hamas or rescuing hostages. That narrative collapsed quickly under the weight of Israel’s own actions. From the beginning, hostage negotiations were treated as peripheral. Every time progress was made on potential ceasefires, it was Netanyahu’s office that pulled the plug — because every hostage released made the war harder to justify. Every ceasefire threatened to slow the campaign just enough for the world to ask uncomfortable questions.
This was never about hostages. It was about Gaza. More specifically: it was about removing Gaza as an obstacle to territorial ambition.
Netanyahu, cornered by political instability, corruption trials, and a fragile coalition held together by the far-right, saw in October 7 a chance to do what had always been unspoken: clear Gaza. Not of Hamas, but of Palestinians. Permanently. Not by announcement, but by attrition — bombing, starvation, siege, trauma.
Gaza’s civilian population wasn’t collateral damage. It was the target.
Destroying Gaza wasn’t a means to defeat an enemy. It was a means to reshape a demographic reality. This wasn’t defense. It was a conquest dressed up as security.
When the mask falls
In war, the first casualty is truth. But in this war, truth didn’t die quietly — it was dragged into the open, exposed by the very actors trying to hide it. Israeli soldiers live streamed brutality. Government officials made genocidal statements on public platforms. Civilian infrastructure was not accidentally struck — it was deliberately annihilated.
At first, the world made excuses. Israel had been attacked and was “entitled to defend itself”. But over time, the scale, duration, and clarity of its actions stripped away any remaining ambiguity. When every hospital (38 in total) becomes a target, when entire neighborhoods are turned to rubble, when starvation is used as a weapon — it becomes impossible to speak of “defence” without insulting reason.
And so the global tide turned. Governments hesitated, but people didn’t. From Berlin to Boston, from Sydney to Cape Town, millions marched — not for Hamas, but for the principle that no state, however victimised, has the right to massacre an entire population in response.
Israel didn’t just lose global support. It lost the moral framing that had shielded, or it had hid behind, it for decades.
It had positioned itself as a democracy surrounded by enemies. But democracies don’t bomb refugee camps, don’t livestream the deaths of children, don’t cut off water to two million people and don’t hold hostages’ lives hostage to political calculus.
Israel’s loss over the last two years hasn’t been military — it’s been existential. The myth of invincibility is broken. The image of moral exceptionalism, cultivated so carefully for decades, has shattered. Netanyahu, once a master manipulator of global opinion, now finds himself isolated, distrusted, even among allies.
What October 7 exposed was the weakness of Israel in the one arena it believed itself untouchable: control. It wasn’t just a border breach. It was a rupture of the entire apparatus that had kept Gaza contained for years. Fences, drones, AI, intelligence, surveillance — all of it failed.
And when the mask of control slipped, the response wasn’t strategic — it was criminally vengeful. It was rage mixed with blood thirst. But rage isn’t a strategy, rage destroys. And over two years, rage has destroyed Gaza — and with it, Israel’s future.
Netanyahu’s calculus: Eternal war
The war served Netanyahu well—at least at first. It silenced his critics. It unified a fractured public. It postponed trials. It gave him relevance again. But the deeper logic was more disturbing: war is the only environment where his political survival is guaranteed.
Peace, by contrast, is a threat. Peace requires compromise. Peace requires vision. Netanyahu offers neither.
Each time a ceasefire neared, his government collapsed it. Each time hostages were close to freedom, the process was torpedoed. To free the hostages would be to end the war. To end the war would be to lose power. This is the twisted loop that has defined Israel’s leadership for two years. Hostages weren’t bargaining chips — they were leverage. They were the excuse for ongoing brutality.
And the world saw it. Every broken deal, every last-minute sabotage, made it harder to pretend this was about security. By the end of the second year, no serious government believed Netanyahu was acting in good faith. Even allies began to distance themselves, not out of principle — but out of shame. What’s remarkable isn’t that Israel committed war crimes — it’s that it did so while assuming the world would look away.
For decades, that assumption held. But this time was different.
Technology turned every phone into a witness. Every child pulled from rubble was broadcast in real time. Every lie was challenged within seconds. The world saw the crimes as they happened — and watched as Israel confirmed them with its own footage.
No state can withstand that level of exposure and retain legitimacy.
Even in the US, the last bastion of unconditional support, the consensus cracked. Young people rejected the old narratives. Jewish voices joined Palestinian ones. The streets filled with dissent, not just from the fringe but from the center. Israel’s status as a protected partner is no longer guaranteed.
In Europe, traditional guilt-driven loyalty gave way to disgust. Governments clung to old alliances, but the public broke ranks. Supporting Israel was no longer an expression of Western solidarity — it became a political liability.
Ceasefire, but not peace
Now, with pressure mounting, ceasefire talks are back — this time in Egypt, under the bizarre influence of Donald Trump, whose re-entry into international politics has added a surreal dimension to an already surreal conflict. But few believe the talks will produce anything lasting. Netanyahu has built his power on conflict. He has no incentive to end it.
Even if a deal is signed, it’s unlikely to hold. The machinery of occupation, the logic of dispossession, the appetite for dominance — it remains intact. This war may pause. But the ideology that fueled it still governs Israel.
And that’s the real crisis: not the bombs, not the destruction, not even the deaths — but the belief that this can go on forever.
Israel may declare victory over Hamas. It may claim strategic success in degrading enemy capabilities. But that’s not what the world sees.
What the world sees is a nation that responded to horror with horror. A nation that lost its soul in pursuit of a war it could never truly win. A nation that allowed vengeance to become policy, and policy to become annihilation.
Two years later, Gaza lies in ruins. But so does Israel’s credibility. So does the illusion of a “moral army.” So does the narrative of self-defence that once made its case persuasive to the world.
Hamas lit the match. But Israel poured the fuel, struck the steel, and claimed the fire was purification.
In the end, what remains isn’t security. It’s ash.
Elijah J Magnier is a veteran war zone correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He specialises in real-time reporting of politics, strategic and military planning, terrorism and counter-terrorism; his strong analytical skills complement his reporting. His in-depth experience, extensive contacts and thorough political knowledge of complex political situations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria provide his writings with insights balancing the routine misreporting and propaganda in the Western press. He also comments on Al Jazeera.
The story of humanity is a story of struggle, not just between classes, but against all forms of oppression. We face a rigged system where the powerful exploit us as workers and consumers, as well as based on our differences of identity. Further, the cultural parts of our political economic system socialize us to internalize greed, selfishness, hierarchies, authoritarianism, oppression, and violence, directing them at others and ourselves, thereby increasing alienation, antagonism, low self-esteem, and loneliness. Our society experiences many forms of poverty.
The super-rich get richer while wages for most of us stagnate and prices increase. The elite maintain and increase their wealth, status, and power by dividing us, using race, gender, sexuality, age, background, nationalism, cultural issues, and whatever else they can to justify low pay, low benefits, and bad treatment for the majority, while using the slogans of freedom and democracy. The system isn’t broken; it was built this way. It uses racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and xenophobia as weapons to keep working people from uniting and demanding what’s ours.
When a Black woman is paid less than a white man for the same job, it’s not just unfair to her; it drives down wages for everyone. When a corporation exploits immigrant workers with low pay and no benefits, it’s an attack on all of our wages and benefits. When gender identity or sexual orientation are used to discriminate in hiring or housing, it weakens our entire community.
We are told that hard work leads to prosperity, but this is a myth for most of us. Many of the hardest working people are the least paid. The system has become a trap, a vicious cycle of debt from student loans, medical bills, and mortgages, while a handful of billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of the country. At the same time, the elite are sabotaging unions (the only organizations that look out for the interests of workers), rolling back our rights and protections, defunding Social Security and Medicare, charging us more for less, politicizing education and science, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and giving free reign to mega-corporations. This exploitation is not accidental; it is by design, it is anti-democratic, and it is disastrous.
Speaking of the system, another manifesto sagely says that “This Machine shapes us so deeply it feels like brainwashing. Biases, prejudices, and snap judgments often take hold before we’re even aware of them. The outer world shapes and reflects the inner; the inner shapes and reflects the outer. External oppression produces internal oppression; internal oppression produces external oppression.” It feels like brainwashing because it is. We are socialized from birth by family, friends, teachers, coaches, media, politicians, corporations, advertisements, etc. and they brainwash and domesticate us, making us willing and unwilling cogs in the machine. This is how the system successfully reproduces itself and keeps us divided and down.
This must change. Working people of America, it’s time to unite for fairness, becoming more aware and spreading awareness. And because this country is so culturally, politically, economically, and militarily powerful, changing America will also change the world.
Our power lies in our solidarity. We are the ones who build the houses, grow the food, and provide the services. Without us, the whole system grinds to a halt. We must stand together, regardless of our race, gender, background, or any other characteristic. Our shared struggle is greater than any difference that they use to divide us.
We need a Real Deal, a new political economy where the people, not corporations, are in control and where the people, not corporations, benefit the most.
This means demanding for a system that benefits the overwhelming majority, not simply a privileged few.
Democratic ownership: The workers who produce the goods and services should collectively own, control, and operate the businesses. Democracy, meaning that the people affected by decisions should participate in making those decisions, should be extended into as many spheres as possible.
Equal pay: Everyone should receive a living wage that reflects the true value of their labor, with no pay gaps based on race, gender, or other characteristics unrelated to work.
Economic security: No one should go bankrupt from medical bills, be crushed by student debt, or be unable to access the necessities of life. Housing, healthcare, food, internet, education, and public transportation should be rights for all, not commodities sold for profit.
Basic Fairness: We must dismantle the systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry that have been used to divide us, spread hate and violence, increase discrimination and mistrust, and create unequal opportunities.
Environmental justice: We need to protect our environment, leaving it at least as good for our children and grandchildren as we had it for ourselves. Without a clean and stable environment, the rest of society, including our political economy, cannot be stable.
True democracy: The government should work for the people and their needs, not for corporate lobbyist and billionaire greed. All policies and programs should primarily serve the needs of living beings, not things, governments, organizations, corporations, or systems.
Self-improvement: Along with these other changes, we can change ourselves for the better, too. Alongside a more kind, caring, and compassionate political economy, we can become more kind, caring, and compassionate people, helping ourselves to live better lives while helping others.
We have a wonderful world and meaningful lives to win. Working people of America, unite!
The father of Samuel Leason — one of the three from New Zealand held by Israel — told RNZ his son, Rana Hamida and Youssef Sammour had been released.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed the three New Zealanders detained by Israel have been released.
An MFAT spokesperson said on Wednesday morning that the trio were on board buses containing other deportees which have now crossed into Jordan.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) said on Tuesday night it did not respond to non-urgent queries after hours, and would respond on Wednesday morning.
Initially in disbelief
Adi Leason said he was initially in disbelief when his son Samuel called him late on Tuesday night. He said it was a quick call and it was fantastic to hear the teenager’s voice.
“It was little taste, just a little moment where the connection’s made and you don’t know … someone’s okay until they tell you themselves. And Samuel’s told us in no uncertain terms — he’s back.”
Leason said his son sounded surprisingly good.
“He sounded really buoyant and hopeful and he just kept saying, ‘I’ve got so many stories dad, I’ve got so many stories.’
“He said he’d been incarcerated in a cage with Nelson Mandela’s grandson, and they’d become buddies.”
Leason said he understood the flotilla participants had spent time in a big hall, “kinda being paraded and berated by the authorities”.
“Then the other times when they were crammed in … Samuel mentioned 11 crammed into a cell at one time.”
Fellow New Zealanders
He said Samuel confirmed that he was with fellow New Zealanders, Rana Hamida and Youssef Sammour, “that they were together, that they were free”.
Leason said his son was hoping to be back in the county by the end of the week.
Earlier, Leason said he thought the New Zealanders and Australians were being kept together.
“And they are being put up in a hotel at their — just to stress this — at their own expense … so, no cost to the taxpayer.”
He understood the New Zealanders’ passports had been returned to them, but their other personal belongings had not.
“We don’t know the exact details on that. Their passports are in their possession which is going to speed up the ability to book flights and get home as soon as possible.”
A welcome home celebration was being planned for Saturday, Leason said.
Relieved ordeal is over
Meanwhile, the partner of a New Zealand doctor detained by Israel is relieved the ordeal is over after confirmation of her release.
New Zealand-born Bianca Webb-Pullman was part of the aid flotilla to Gaza and was counted officially as Australian because she was using an Australian passport.
She and other participants are now in Jordan.
Stephen Rowe said it had been a sleepless week.
“It was terrible, there was no way we could really contact her, we were left completely in the dark.
“And of course we were aware of reports coming out of conditions in the prison and how bad they were, so yeah, it was incredibly worrying.”
He said he was “extremely relieved” last night to learn of her release and said Webb-Pullman had since managed to call her mother.
‘Obviously shaken’
“She’s obviously shaken . . . But as far as I know, she’s okay.”
Rowe said he planned to fly to Melbourne to meet Webb-Pullman at the end of the week.
“It’s been just a horrible experience but that part of it is over and I know that she and the rest of the people on the flotilla don’t really want this to be about them.
“They really want this to be much more about the people of Gaza and ending their suffering.
“I know that the reason Bianca was on the flotilla was that she’d just finally had enough.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealanders deserve to know how the country’s foreign policy is made, writes John Hobbs.
ANALYSIS:By John Hobbs
The New Zealand government remains unwilling to support Palestinian statehood recognition at the United Nations General Assembly.
This is a disgraceful position which gives support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and seriously undermines our standing. Of the 193 states of the UN, 157 have now provided statehood recognition. New Zealand is not one of them.
The purpose of this opinion piece is to highlight the troubling lack of transparency in how the government deliberates on its foreign policy choices.
Government decisions and calculations on foreign policy are being made behind closed doors with limited public scrutiny, unlike other areas of policy, where at least a modicum of transparency occurs.
The government has, over the past two years, exceeded itself in obscuring the process it goes through, without explaining its approach to the question of Palestine.
New Zealand still inconceivably lauds the impossible goal of a two-state solution, the hallmark of successive governments’ foreign policy positions on the question of Palestine, but does everything to not bring about its realisation.
To try to understand the basis for New Zealand’s approach to Gaza and the risks generated by the government’s lack of direct action against Israel, I placed an Official Information Request (OIA) with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Winston Peters. I requested copies of advice that had been received on New Zealand’s obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.
Plausible case against Israel
My initial OIA request was placed in January 2024, after the International Court of Justice had determined there was a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. At that point, about 27,000 people in Gaza had been killed, mainly women and children. My request was denied.
I put the same OIA request to the minister in June 2025. By this time, nearly 63,000 people had been killed by Israel. At the time of my second request there was abundant evidence reported by UN agencies of Israel’s tactics. Again, my request for information was denied.
I appealed the refusal by the minister of foreign affairs to the Office of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman reviewed the case and accepted that the minister of foreign affairs was within his right to refuse to provide the material.
The basis for the decision was that the advice given to the minister was subject to legal professional privilege, and that the right to protect legally privileged advice was not outweighed by the public interest in gaining access to that advice.
The refusal by the minister and the Ombudsman to make the advice available is deeply worrying. Although I am not questioning the importance of protecting legal professional privilege, I cannot imagine an example that could be more pressing in terms of “public interest” than the complicity of nation states in genocide.
Indeed, the threshold of legal professional privilege was never meant to be absolute. Parliament, in designing the OIA regime, had this in mind when it deemed that legal professional privilege could, under exceptional circumstances, be outweighed by the public interest.
The Office of the Ombudsman has ruled in the past that legal professional privilege is not an absolute; it accepted that legal advice received by the Ministry of Health on embryo research had to be released, for example, as it was in the public interest to do so, even though it was legally privileged.
Puzzling statement
The Ombudsman concludes his response to my request with the puzzling statement that the “general public interest in accountability and transparency in government decision-making on this issue is best reflected in the decisions made after considering the legal advice, rather than what is contained in the legal advice.”
The point I was trying to clarify is whether the government is acting in a manner that reflects the advice it has received. If it has received advice that New Zealand must take particular steps to fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and the government has chosen to ignore that advice, then surely New Zealanders have a right to know.
The content of the advice is extremely relevant: it would identify any contradictions between the advice the government received and its actions. Through public access to such information, governments can be held to account for the decisions they make.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, concluded on September 16 that Israeli authorities and security forces committed four out of the five underlying acts of genocide. Illegal settlers have been let loose in the West Bank under the protection of the Israeli army to harass and kill local Palestinians and occupy further areas of Palestinian land.
At the UN General Assembly, the New Zealand government took a stance that is squarely in support of the Israeli genocide, also supported by the United States. International law clearly forbids the act of genocide, in Gaza as much as anywhere else, including the attacks on Palestinian civilians living under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In 2015-16, New Zealand co-sponsored a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the illegality of Israel’s actions in the Occupied West Bank, with the intention of supporting a Palestinian state. New Zealand’s recent posture at the General Assembly undermines this principled precedent.
That New Zealand could not bring itself to offer the olive branch of statehood recognition is morally repugnant and severely damages our standing in the international community. The New Zealand public has the right to demand transparency in its government’s decision-making.
The advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the minister cannot be hidden behind the veil of legal professional privilege.
John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
The event, planned for October 20, was to expose how Western media amplify Israeli propaganda while silencing voices documenting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
Instead, the Press Club is reportedly considering Israel’s ambassador, retired IDF lieutenant-colonel Amir Maimon, as a replacement speaker, a move critics say perfectly illustrates the very censorship and bias Hedges intended to discuss.
Amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza, where more than 278 Palestinian journalists have been killed, many deliberately targeted, the Press Club’s decision to silence a veteran war correspondent while platforming a representative of the Israeli occupation underscores a disturbing alignment with state propaganda.
It signals a betrayal of journalistic ethics and Australia’s public right to hear unfiltered truths about Israel’s war crimes.
Rather than promoting balance, the National Press Club has chosen complicity, showing that press freedom ends where Israeli interests begin.
: A number of Australian journalists have been targeted, harassed, and censored by lobby groups for reporting critical of Israel’s war on Gaza. 
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