Defence Minister Judith Collins says the liaison officer will work from a United States-led Civil Military Coordination Centre, initially for six weeks.
She said it would act as a coordination hub for support to Gaza, monitor the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, and support the implementation of the 20-Point Peace Plan to end the war in Gaza.
“The deployment will improve New Zealand’s understanding of co-ordination efforts on the ground and enable us to better assess options for any potential future contributions to the centre or other initiatives in support of sustained peace in Gaza,” she said.
She said this would improve New Zealand’s understanding of efforts on the ground and enable a better assessment of future contributions to the centre, or other initiatives to support peace in Gaza.
Future deployments would be a decision for the government.
Add to this that the Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister, Sharren Haskel, visited NZ last weekend to thank evangelical Christian freaks who empower them and the Zionesik apologist groups who threaten everyone with anti-semitism for criticising Israel’s genocide and we are now in danger of being seen as an ally for war criminals.
We are on the side of genocide because this New Zealand government has no morality whatsoever.
Kiwis have cut their Jacinda off to spite their race to justify the way their post-covid bitterness has been manipulated into agreeing to this.
For shame New Zealand.
For shame.
Editor’s note: Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel met the PNG, Fijian and Samoan prime ministers on her week-long drumming up Pacific support last week, but while she met rightwing Destiny Church leaders, she did not meet any cabinet ministers on her unofficial visit to New Zealand. Republished with permission.
Today marks 108 years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and New Zealand pro-Palestinian protest groups have condemned this infamous date in rallies across the country.
“Britain promised a land that wasn’t theirs to give,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair Maher Nazzal.
“That single act of colonial arrogance set in motion more than a century of displacement, occupation, and suffering for the Palestinian people.
“It’s time for the world, including Aotearoa New Zealand, to stand firmly for justice, equality, and the right of Palestinians to live free on their land.”
Reporting on the Auckland rally and march yesterday, Bruce King said Janfrie Wakim, a longtime stalwart of pro-Palestine activism in Aotearoa New Zealand, had criticised the Balfour Declaration that had promised Palestine as a Jewish state.
‘Mendacious, deceitful’
She quoted the late British journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk calling it “the most mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document in British history”.
Opposition Labour MP and shadow attorney-general Vanushi Walters outlined discussions over sanctions legislation against Israel in preparation for the party winning next year’s general election.
The opposition Labour Party currently leads in most opinion polls.
The infamous Balfour Declaration by Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917. Image: MN screenshot APR
Greens MP Ricardo Menéndez protested against the NZ government having signed a free trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this year.
This week, the rebel RSF (Rapid Support Forces) fighters that the UAE is accused of backing overran the city of El Fasher, capital of Darfur in Sudan, and carried out massacres of civilians, reports the United Nations.
Al Jazeera reports the Balfour Declaration (Balfour’s “promise” in Arabic) turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine into a reality when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” there.
The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the brutality that the emerging Zionist state of Israel inflicted on the Palestinian people.
It is regarded as one of the most controversial and criticised documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades.
More than a quarter of Australia’s National Press Club sponsors are part of the global arms industry or working on its behalf. Michelle Fahy reports.
ANALYSIS:By Michelle Fahy
The National Press Club of Australia lists 81 corporate sponsors on its website. Of those, 10 are multinational weapons manufacturers or military services corporations, and another eleven provide services to the arms industry, including consultants KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY.
They include the world’s two biggest weapons makers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (RTX); British giant BAE Systems; France’s largest weapons-maker, Thales; and US weapons corporation Leidos — all of which are in the global top 20.
BAE Systems, which is the largest contractor to the Department of Defence, received $2 billion from Australian taxpayers last year.
In 2023, those five corporations alone were responsible for almost a quarter of total weapons sales ($973 billion) by the world’s top 100 weapons companies that year.
Last year, UN experts named Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, RTX (Raytheon) and eight other multinationals in a statement, warning them that they risked being found in violation of international law for their continued supply of weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces.
The experts called on the corporations to immediately end weapons transfers to Israel.
None has done so.
Another of the club’s sponsors, Thales, is being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. In a fourth, long-running corruption case in South Africa, the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is now in court, alongside Thales, being tried on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and money laundering in connection with arms deals his government did with Thales.
Global expert Andrew Feinstein has documented his extensive research into the arms industry. He told Undue Influence that wherever the arms trade operates, it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”.
Undue Influence asked the Press Club’s CEO, Maurice Reilly, what written policies or guidelines were in place that addressed the suitability and selection of corporations proposing to become Press Club sponsors.
Reilly responded: “The board are informed monthly about . . . proposals and have the right to refuse any application.”
National Press Club The National Press Club, established by journalists in 1963, is an iconic Australian institution. It is best known for its weekly luncheon addresses, televised on the ABC, covering issues of national importance, after which the speaker is questioned by journalists.
The club’s board has 10 directors led by Tom Connell, political host and reporter at Sky News, who was elected president in February following the resignation of the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The other board members are current and former mainstream media journalists, as well as at least two board members who have jobs that involve lobbying.
Long-term board member Steve Lewis works as a senior adviser for lobbying firm SEC Newgate, which itself is a Press Club sponsor and also has as clients the Press Club’s two largest sponsors: Westpac and Telstra.
SEC Newgate has previously acted for several Press Club sponsors, including Serco (one of the arms industry multinationals listed below), BHP, Macquarie Bank, Tattarang, and Spirits & Cocktails Australia Inc.
Gemma Daley joined the board a year ago, having started with Ai Group as its head of media and government affairs four months earlier. Daley had worked for Nationals’ leader David Littleproud, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Joe Hockey, and, before that, for media outlets The Financial Review and Bloomberg.
Ai Group has a significant defence focus and promotes itself as “the peak national representative body for the Australian defence industry”. The group has established a Defence Council and, in 2017, appointed a former assistant secretary of the Defence Department, Kate Louis, to lead it.
The co-chairs of its Defence Council are senior arms industry executives. One of them, Paul Chase, is CEO of Leidos Australia, a Press Club sponsor.
Conflicts of interest Undue Influence asked Daley for comment on several aspects related to her position on the board, including whether she has had to declare any conflicts of interest to date. She responded: “Thanks for the inquiry. I have forwarded this through to Maurice Reilly. Have a good day.”
Given the potential for conflicts of interest to arise, as happens on any board, Undue Influence had already asked the Press Club CEO what written policies or guidelines existed to ensure the appropriate management of conflicts of interest by board members and staff. Reilly responded:
“The club has a directors’ conflict register which is updated when required. Each meeting, board members and management are asked if they have conflicts of interest with the meeting agenda. We have a standard corporate practice that where a director has a conflict on an agenda item they excuse themselves from the meeting and take no [part] in any discussion or any decision.”
MWM is neither alleging nor implying inappropriate or illegal behaviour by anyone named in this article.
Selling access While Reilly declined to disclose the club’s sponsorship arrangements with Westpac and Telstra, citing “commercial in confidence” reasons, The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that Westpac paid $3 million in 2015 to replace NAB as the Press Club’s principal sponsor.
The SMH article, “Westpac centre stage at post-budget bash”, on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House in late March, added:
“(Westpac) . . . gets more than its money’s worth in terms of access. New-ish chief executive Anthony Miller got the most coveted seat in the house, between Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese . . . Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles were also on the front tables.
“Westpac occupied prime real estate in the Great Hall, with guests on its tables including Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Glyn Davis, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Labor national secretary and campaign mastermind Paul Erickson…
“Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was on the Telstra table.”
Reilly told Undue Influence that all the other corporate sponsors pay $25,000 a year, with a few paying extra as partners in the club’s journalism awards.
The 21 arms industry and related sponsors, therefore, contribute an annual $525,000 to the Press Club’s coffers. This is 23 percent of the $2.26 million revenue it earns from “membership, sponsorship and broadcasting”, the club’s largest revenue line for the 2024 financial year.
“The National Press Club of Australia proudly partners with organisations that share our commitment to quality, independent journalism,” says the club’s website.
Acclaimed journalist and Middle East expert Chris Hedges . . . the National Press Club cancelled a planned speech by him, reportedly under pressure. Image: The Chris Hedges Report
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on September 10, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Compare this with two addresses given by $25,000 corporate sponsors — Kurt Campbell (former US deputy secretary of state, now co-founder and chair of The Asia Group), who gave an address on September 7; and Mike Johnson, CEO of Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), who gave an address on October 15. Neither the Press Club nor the speakers disclosed the companies’ sponsorship of the Press Club.
The club also promotes additional benefits of corporate sponsorship, including “Brand association with inclusion on our prestigious ‘Corporate Partners’ board and recognition on the National Press Club of Australia website”.
The club also promises corporate sponsors that they will receive “priority seating and brand positioning” at its weekly luncheon addresses.
Profiting from genocide In July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, issued a report explaining how the corporate sector had become complicit with the State of Israel in conducting the genocide.
Albanese highlighted Lockheed Martin and the F-35 programme, which has 1650 companies worldwide in its supply chain. More than 75 of those companies are Australian.
Her report also noted that arms-making multinationals depend on legal, auditing and consulting firms to facilitate export and import transactions to supply Israel with weapons.
Four of the world’s largest accounting, audit and consulting firms — all of which have arms industry corporations as clients — are sponsors of the Press Club: KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY. Until recently, PwC counted among them.
EY (Ernst & Young) has been Lockheed Martin’s auditor since 1994. EY is also one of two auditors used by Thales, and has been for 22 years. Deloitte has been BAE Systems’ auditor since 2018. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — a Press Club sponsor until 2024 — has been Raytheon’s auditor since 1947.
Lockheed Martin’s supply to Israel of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and C-130 Hercules transport planes, and their parts and components, along with Hellfire missiles and other munitions, has directly facilitated Israel’s genocide.
Raytheon’s (RTX) supply of guided missiles, bombs, and other advanced weaponry and defence systems, like the Iron Dome interceptors, also directly supports Israel’s military capability.
In England, BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage of every F-35, with the horizontal and vertical tails and other crucial components manufactured in its UK and Australian facilities. It also supplies the Israeli military with munitions, missile launching kits and armoured vehicles, while BAE technologies are integrated into Israel’s drones and warships.
Thales supplies Israel’s military with vital components, including drone transponders. Australian Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were murdered by an Israeli Hermes drone, which contained Thales’ transponders. Yet, echoing Australia, France claims its military exports to Israel are non-lethal.
Michelle Fahy is an independent Australian writer and researcher, specialising in the examination of connections between the weapons industry and government. She writes for various independent publications and on Substack on Undueinfluence.substack.com This article was first published on Undueinfluence and Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
More than a quarter of Australia’s National Press Club sponsors are part of the global arms industry or working on its behalf. Michelle Fahy reports.
ANALYSIS:By Michelle Fahy
The National Press Club of Australia lists 81 corporate sponsors on its website. Of those, 10 are multinational weapons manufacturers or military services corporations, and another eleven provide services to the arms industry, including consultants KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY.
They include the world’s two biggest weapons makers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (RTX); British giant BAE Systems; France’s largest weapons-maker, Thales; and US weapons corporation Leidos — all of which are in the global top 20.
BAE Systems, which is the largest contractor to the Department of Defence, received $2 billion from Australian taxpayers last year.
In 2023, those five corporations alone were responsible for almost a quarter of total weapons sales ($973 billion) by the world’s top 100 weapons companies that year.
Last year, UN experts named Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, RTX (Raytheon) and eight other multinationals in a statement, warning them that they risked being found in violation of international law for their continued supply of weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces.
The experts called on the corporations to immediately end weapons transfers to Israel.
None has done so.
Another of the club’s sponsors, Thales, is being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. In a fourth, long-running corruption case in South Africa, the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is now in court, alongside Thales, being tried on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and money laundering in connection with arms deals his government did with Thales.
Global expert Andrew Feinstein has documented his extensive research into the arms industry. He told Undue Influence that wherever the arms trade operates, it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”.
Undue Influence asked the Press Club’s CEO, Maurice Reilly, what written policies or guidelines were in place that addressed the suitability and selection of corporations proposing to become Press Club sponsors.
Reilly responded: “The board are informed monthly about . . . proposals and have the right to refuse any application.”
National Press Club The National Press Club, established by journalists in 1963, is an iconic Australian institution. It is best known for its weekly luncheon addresses, televised on the ABC, covering issues of national importance, after which the speaker is questioned by journalists.
The club’s board has 10 directors led by Tom Connell, political host and reporter at Sky News, who was elected president in February following the resignation of the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The other board members are current and former mainstream media journalists, as well as at least two board members who have jobs that involve lobbying.
Long-term board member Steve Lewis works as a senior adviser for lobbying firm SEC Newgate, which itself is a Press Club sponsor and also has as clients the Press Club’s two largest sponsors: Westpac and Telstra.
SEC Newgate has previously acted for several Press Club sponsors, including Serco (one of the arms industry multinationals listed below), BHP, Macquarie Bank, Tattarang, and Spirits & Cocktails Australia Inc.
Gemma Daley joined the board a year ago, having started with Ai Group as its head of media and government affairs four months earlier. Daley had worked for Nationals’ leader David Littleproud, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Joe Hockey, and, before that, for media outlets The Financial Review and Bloomberg.
Ai Group has a significant defence focus and promotes itself as “the peak national representative body for the Australian defence industry”. The group has established a Defence Council and, in 2017, appointed a former assistant secretary of the Defence Department, Kate Louis, to lead it.
The co-chairs of its Defence Council are senior arms industry executives. One of them, Paul Chase, is CEO of Leidos Australia, a Press Club sponsor.
Conflicts of interest Undue Influence asked Daley for comment on several aspects related to her position on the board, including whether she has had to declare any conflicts of interest to date. She responded: “Thanks for the inquiry. I have forwarded this through to Maurice Reilly. Have a good day.”
Given the potential for conflicts of interest to arise, as happens on any board, Undue Influence had already asked the Press Club CEO what written policies or guidelines existed to ensure the appropriate management of conflicts of interest by board members and staff. Reilly responded:
“The club has a directors’ conflict register which is updated when required. Each meeting, board members and management are asked if they have conflicts of interest with the meeting agenda. We have a standard corporate practice that where a director has a conflict on an agenda item they excuse themselves from the meeting and take no [part] in any discussion or any decision.”
MWM is neither alleging nor implying inappropriate or illegal behaviour by anyone named in this article.
Selling access While Reilly declined to disclose the club’s sponsorship arrangements with Westpac and Telstra, citing “commercial in confidence” reasons, The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that Westpac paid $3 million in 2015 to replace NAB as the Press Club’s principal sponsor.
The SMH article, “Westpac centre stage at post-budget bash”, on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House in late March, added:
“(Westpac) . . . gets more than its money’s worth in terms of access. New-ish chief executive Anthony Miller got the most coveted seat in the house, between Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese . . . Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles were also on the front tables.
“Westpac occupied prime real estate in the Great Hall, with guests on its tables including Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Glyn Davis, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Labor national secretary and campaign mastermind Paul Erickson…
“Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was on the Telstra table.”
Reilly told Undue Influence that all the other corporate sponsors pay $25,000 a year, with a few paying extra as partners in the club’s journalism awards.
The 21 arms industry and related sponsors, therefore, contribute an annual $525,000 to the Press Club’s coffers. This is 23 percent of the $2.26 million revenue it earns from “membership, sponsorship and broadcasting”, the club’s largest revenue line for the 2024 financial year.
“The National Press Club of Australia proudly partners with organisations that share our commitment to quality, independent journalism,” says the club’s website.
Acclaimed journalist and Middle East expert Chris Hedges . . . the National Press Club cancelled a planned speech by him, reportedly under pressure. Image: The Chris Hedges Report
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on September 10, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Compare this with two addresses given by $25,000 corporate sponsors — Kurt Campbell (former US deputy secretary of state, now co-founder and chair of The Asia Group), who gave an address on September 7; and Mike Johnson, CEO of Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), who gave an address on October 15. Neither the Press Club nor the speakers disclosed the companies’ sponsorship of the Press Club.
The club also promotes additional benefits of corporate sponsorship, including “Brand association with inclusion on our prestigious ‘Corporate Partners’ board and recognition on the National Press Club of Australia website”.
The club also promises corporate sponsors that they will receive “priority seating and brand positioning” at its weekly luncheon addresses.
Profiting from genocide In July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, issued a report explaining how the corporate sector had become complicit with the State of Israel in conducting the genocide.
Albanese highlighted Lockheed Martin and the F-35 programme, which has 1650 companies worldwide in its supply chain. More than 75 of those companies are Australian.
Her report also noted that arms-making multinationals depend on legal, auditing and consulting firms to facilitate export and import transactions to supply Israel with weapons.
Four of the world’s largest accounting, audit and consulting firms — all of which have arms industry corporations as clients — are sponsors of the Press Club: KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY. Until recently, PwC counted among them.
EY (Ernst & Young) has been Lockheed Martin’s auditor since 1994. EY is also one of two auditors used by Thales, and has been for 22 years. Deloitte has been BAE Systems’ auditor since 2018. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — a Press Club sponsor until 2024 — has been Raytheon’s auditor since 1947.
Lockheed Martin’s supply to Israel of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and C-130 Hercules transport planes, and their parts and components, along with Hellfire missiles and other munitions, has directly facilitated Israel’s genocide.
Raytheon’s (RTX) supply of guided missiles, bombs, and other advanced weaponry and defence systems, like the Iron Dome interceptors, also directly supports Israel’s military capability.
In England, BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage of every F-35, with the horizontal and vertical tails and other crucial components manufactured in its UK and Australian facilities. It also supplies the Israeli military with munitions, missile launching kits and armoured vehicles, while BAE technologies are integrated into Israel’s drones and warships.
Thales supplies Israel’s military with vital components, including drone transponders. Australian Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were murdered by an Israeli Hermes drone, which contained Thales’ transponders. Yet, echoing Australia, France claims its military exports to Israel are non-lethal.
Michelle Fahy is an independent Australian writer and researcher, specialising in the examination of connections between the weapons industry and government. She writes for various independent publications and on Substack on Undueinfluence.substack.com This article was first published on Undueinfluence and Michael West Media and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s Democracy Now! show looking at US-China relations and President Trump’s threat to resume nuclear weapons testing.
President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in South Korea and agreed to a one-year trade truce, but the trade deal was overshadowed by Trump’s announcement that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992.
Just before his meeting with Xi, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Because of other countries testing programmes, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
AMY GOODMAN: It’s unclear what President Trump was referring to. Russia and China have not tested a nuclear weapon in decades; North Korea last tested one in 2017. Trump spoke briefly with reporters after his meeting with Xi, flying back to the United States.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It had to do with others. They seem to all be nuclear testing.
REPORTER 1: Russia?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don’t do testing, and we’ve halted it years — many years ago.
But with others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also.
REPORTER 1: Did Israel — did Israel —
REPORTER 2: Any details around the testing, sir? Like where, when?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will be — it’ll be announced. You know, we have test sites. It’ll be announced.
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s threat to resume nuclear tests comes just months before the last major nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expires. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, expires February of next year.
We go right now to Dr Ira Helfand. He’s an expert on the medical consequences of nuclear war, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He also serves on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign. He’s today joining us from Winnipeg, Canada, where he’s speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.
Dr Helfand, welcome back to Democracy Now! You must have been shocked last night when, just before the certainly globally touted meeting between Trump and Xi, Trump sent out on social media that he’s going to begin testing nuclear weapons, comparing it, saying that we have to test them on an equal basis, referring to countries like Russia and China.
Can you explain what he is talking about? They, like the United States, haven’t tested nuclear weapons in decades.
DR IRA HELFAND: Good morning, Amy.
Actually, I can’t explain what he’s talking about, because it doesn’t make any sense. As you pointed out, Russia and China have not tested nuclear weapons for decades. And I think the most important thing right now is that the White House has got to clarify what President Trump is talking about.
If we really are going to resume explosive nuclear testing, this is an extraordinarily destabilising decision, and one which will increase even more the already great danger that we have of stumbling into a nuclear conflict. But they need to clarify this, because, as you pointed out, the statement doesn’t make sense in terms of what’s actually happening in the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr Helfand, what would these tests entail, were this to actually occur the way that Trump has said?
DR IRA HELFAND: Well, again, it’s not clear what he’s talking about. If he’s — if he is speaking about resuming explosive nuclear testing, presumably this would not be in the atmosphere, which is prohibited by a treaty which the United States did sign and ratify in 1963, but it would be underground nuclear explosions. And the principal danger there, I think, is political.
This will undoubtedly trigger response by other countries that have nuclear weapons, and dramatically accelerate the already very dangerous arms race that the world finds itself in today.
The one, perhaps, value of this statement is that it helps to draw attention to the fact that the nuclear problem has not gone away, as so many of us would like to believe. We are facing the gravest danger of nuclear war that has existed on the planet since the end of the Cold War, and possibly worse than it was during the Cold War.
And this comes at a time when the best science we have shows that even a very limited nuclear war, one that might take place between India and Pakistan, has the potential to trigger a global famine that could kill a quarter of the human race in two years.
We have to recognise that reality, and we need to change our nuclear policy so that it is no longer based on the idea that nuclear weapons make us safe, but that it recognises the fact that nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to our safety.
And for citizens in the United States in particular, I think this means doing things like are advocated by the Back from the Brink campaign, calling on the United States to stop this tit-for-tat exchange of threats with our nuclear adversaries and to enter into negotiations with all eight of the nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, enforceable agreement that will allow them to eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to an agreed-upon timetable, and so they can all join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at some point when they have completed this task.
This idea is dismissed sometimes as being unrealistic. I think what’s unrealistic is the belief that we can continue to maintain these enormous nuclear arsenals and expect that nothing is going to go wrong.
We’ve been lucky over and over again. This year alone, five of the nine countries which have nuclear weapons have been engaged in active military conflict. India and Pakistan were fighting each other. That could easily have escalated into a nuclear war between them, which could have had devastating consequences for the entire planet.
And we keep dodging bullets, and we keep acting as though that’s going to keep happening. It isn’t. Our luck is going to run out at some point, and we have to recognise that. We have to recognise the only way to guarantee our safety is to get rid of these weapons once and for all.
President Trump’s post announcing the U.S. would resume nuclear testing featured some inaccuracies, and introduced quite a bit of uncertainty. https://t.co/wRbnOxuaBU
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr Helfand, before we conclude, just about the timing of Trump’s comment, which came just days after Russia said it had successfully tested a nuclear-armed missile, which it said could penetrate US defences.
Do you think Trump was responding to that, without perhaps understanding that there was a difference between that and carrying out explosive nuclear tests?
DR IRA HELFAND: It’s certainly possible, and the timing suggests that may be what’s happening. But again, the White House needs to clarify this statement, because, as it stands, it was an explicit instruction to begin testing at the test sites, which suggests nuclear explosive testing.
I suspect that is not what the president meant, but at this point, who knows?
AMY GOODMAN: Right. It was nuclear-capable, not nuclear-armed. And finally, I mean, he’s talking about doing this immediately, instructing what he called the War Department, the Department of War.
Isn’t the Energy Department in charge of the nuclear stockpile? And aren’t scores of nuclear scientists now furloughed during the government shutdown? Who is maintaining this very dangerous stockpile?
DR IRA HELFAND: That was another striking inconsistency in that statement. It is not the Pentagon, which he referred to as the Department of War, that would be conducting nuclear testing if it recurs. It is, Amy, as you suggested, it’s the Department of Energy that is responsible for this activity.
So, again, another area in which the statement is just confusing, puzzling and needs clarification. And I think, you know, this is a really urgent matter, because, as it stands, the statement itself is destabilising.
It raises tension. It creates further problems. And we don’t need that anymore. We need to —
AMY GOODMAN: And opens the door for other countries, is that right, to test nuclear weapons?
DR IRA HELFAND: Well, absolutely. And that would be — you know, there would be absolutely nothing the US could do that would more undermine our security at this point with regards to nuclear weapons than to resume testing. It would give a green light to many other countries to resume testing, as well, and lead to markedly increased instability in the global situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr Ira Helfand, we thank you so much for being with us, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, won the Nobel Peace Prize, PSR, in 1985, serving on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign, joining us, interestingly, from Winnipeg, Canada, where he is speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s Democracy Now! show looking at US-China relations and President Trump’s threat to resume nuclear weapons testing.
President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in South Korea and agreed to a one-year trade truce, but the trade deal was overshadowed by Trump’s announcement that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992.
Just before his meeting with Xi, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Because of other countries testing programmes, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
AMY GOODMAN: It’s unclear what President Trump was referring to. Russia and China have not tested a nuclear weapon in decades; North Korea last tested one in 2017. Trump spoke briefly with reporters after his meeting with Xi, flying back to the United States.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It had to do with others. They seem to all be nuclear testing.
REPORTER 1: Russia?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don’t do testing, and we’ve halted it years — many years ago.
But with others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also.
REPORTER 1: Did Israel — did Israel —
REPORTER 2: Any details around the testing, sir? Like where, when?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will be — it’ll be announced. You know, we have test sites. It’ll be announced.
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s threat to resume nuclear tests comes just months before the last major nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expires. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, expires February of next year.
We go right now to Dr Ira Helfand. He’s an expert on the medical consequences of nuclear war, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He also serves on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign. He’s today joining us from Winnipeg, Canada, where he’s speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.
Dr Helfand, welcome back to Democracy Now! You must have been shocked last night when, just before the certainly globally touted meeting between Trump and Xi, Trump sent out on social media that he’s going to begin testing nuclear weapons, comparing it, saying that we have to test them on an equal basis, referring to countries like Russia and China.
Can you explain what he is talking about? They, like the United States, haven’t tested nuclear weapons in decades.
DR IRA HELFAND: Good morning, Amy.
Actually, I can’t explain what he’s talking about, because it doesn’t make any sense. As you pointed out, Russia and China have not tested nuclear weapons for decades. And I think the most important thing right now is that the White House has got to clarify what President Trump is talking about.
If we really are going to resume explosive nuclear testing, this is an extraordinarily destabilising decision, and one which will increase even more the already great danger that we have of stumbling into a nuclear conflict. But they need to clarify this, because, as you pointed out, the statement doesn’t make sense in terms of what’s actually happening in the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr Helfand, what would these tests entail, were this to actually occur the way that Trump has said?
DR IRA HELFAND: Well, again, it’s not clear what he’s talking about. If he’s — if he is speaking about resuming explosive nuclear testing, presumably this would not be in the atmosphere, which is prohibited by a treaty which the United States did sign and ratify in 1963, but it would be underground nuclear explosions. And the principal danger there, I think, is political.
This will undoubtedly trigger response by other countries that have nuclear weapons, and dramatically accelerate the already very dangerous arms race that the world finds itself in today.
The one, perhaps, value of this statement is that it helps to draw attention to the fact that the nuclear problem has not gone away, as so many of us would like to believe. We are facing the gravest danger of nuclear war that has existed on the planet since the end of the Cold War, and possibly worse than it was during the Cold War.
And this comes at a time when the best science we have shows that even a very limited nuclear war, one that might take place between India and Pakistan, has the potential to trigger a global famine that could kill a quarter of the human race in two years.
We have to recognise that reality, and we need to change our nuclear policy so that it is no longer based on the idea that nuclear weapons make us safe, but that it recognises the fact that nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to our safety.
And for citizens in the United States in particular, I think this means doing things like are advocated by the Back from the Brink campaign, calling on the United States to stop this tit-for-tat exchange of threats with our nuclear adversaries and to enter into negotiations with all eight of the nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, enforceable agreement that will allow them to eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to an agreed-upon timetable, and so they can all join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at some point when they have completed this task.
This idea is dismissed sometimes as being unrealistic. I think what’s unrealistic is the belief that we can continue to maintain these enormous nuclear arsenals and expect that nothing is going to go wrong.
We’ve been lucky over and over again. This year alone, five of the nine countries which have nuclear weapons have been engaged in active military conflict. India and Pakistan were fighting each other. That could easily have escalated into a nuclear war between them, which could have had devastating consequences for the entire planet.
And we keep dodging bullets, and we keep acting as though that’s going to keep happening. It isn’t. Our luck is going to run out at some point, and we have to recognise that. We have to recognise the only way to guarantee our safety is to get rid of these weapons once and for all.
President Trump’s post announcing the U.S. would resume nuclear testing featured some inaccuracies, and introduced quite a bit of uncertainty. https://t.co/wRbnOxuaBU
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr Helfand, before we conclude, just about the timing of Trump’s comment, which came just days after Russia said it had successfully tested a nuclear-armed missile, which it said could penetrate US defences.
Do you think Trump was responding to that, without perhaps understanding that there was a difference between that and carrying out explosive nuclear tests?
DR IRA HELFAND: It’s certainly possible, and the timing suggests that may be what’s happening. But again, the White House needs to clarify this statement, because, as it stands, it was an explicit instruction to begin testing at the test sites, which suggests nuclear explosive testing.
I suspect that is not what the president meant, but at this point, who knows?
AMY GOODMAN: Right. It was nuclear-capable, not nuclear-armed. And finally, I mean, he’s talking about doing this immediately, instructing what he called the War Department, the Department of War.
Isn’t the Energy Department in charge of the nuclear stockpile? And aren’t scores of nuclear scientists now furloughed during the government shutdown? Who is maintaining this very dangerous stockpile?
DR IRA HELFAND: That was another striking inconsistency in that statement. It is not the Pentagon, which he referred to as the Department of War, that would be conducting nuclear testing if it recurs. It is, Amy, as you suggested, it’s the Department of Energy that is responsible for this activity.
So, again, another area in which the statement is just confusing, puzzling and needs clarification. And I think, you know, this is a really urgent matter, because, as it stands, the statement itself is destabilising.
It raises tension. It creates further problems. And we don’t need that anymore. We need to —
AMY GOODMAN: And opens the door for other countries, is that right, to test nuclear weapons?
DR IRA HELFAND: Well, absolutely. And that would be — you know, there would be absolutely nothing the US could do that would more undermine our security at this point with regards to nuclear weapons than to resume testing. It would give a green light to many other countries to resume testing, as well, and lead to markedly increased instability in the global situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr Ira Helfand, we thank you so much for being with us, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, won the Nobel Peace Prize, PSR, in 1985, serving on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign, joining us, interestingly, from Winnipeg, Canada, where he is speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.
Palestinian officials have accused Israel of using the issue of captive bodies in the Gaza Strip as a pretext to violate the ceasefire and prolong its military presence in the devastated territory.
The officials said Israel was exploiting the matter to justify new attacks, stop aid entering the territory, and delay the reopening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
The ceasefire, which came into effect on October 10, was meant to allow humanitarian relief and a gradual return to calm. Instead, Israel has carried out repeated airstrikes and tightened restrictions on aid deliveries.
Overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, the Israeli army launched dozens of raids on Gaza City. At least 100 Palestinians were killed and many more wounded.
The Israeli army claimed the attacks were in response to delays in handing over Israeli remains and to the killing of a soldier by a sniper in Rafah, which is under full Israeli control.
Hamas said this week that it had recovered two additional Israeli bodies — one in Khan Younis and another in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, delayed handing them over because Israel “breached the agreement” with new airstrikes on Gaza.
Despite limited Egyptian equipment entering the Gaza Strip to help with recovery efforts, Israel continues to block the entry of heavy machinery and specialist teams.
11 bodies remain lost
With the two bodies newly recovered, Hamas said 11 remain lost in Gaza. Israeli officials admit they lack information on about five of them, meaning they may not be located soon.
Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas in Gaza, said finding the remaining bodies was extremely difficult. Vast destruction and the deaths of fighters who had guarded captives had made recovery operations almost impossible.
At least 10,000 Palestinian bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble.
Since the truce began, Palestinian factions have handed over 20 living Israeli captives and about 15 bodies. Some were killed by Israeli strikes during the war; others died on 7 October 2023, at the start of the conflict.
Ahmad al-Tanani, director of the Arab Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, said Israel created the very conditions that now make recovery so difficult.
“This has become a political pretext to sustain a state of no war, no peace and to block the second phase of President Donald Trump’s plan,” he told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
He said not all the bodies were held by Hamas. “They are divided among different factions, and some of those who knew their locations were killed in the war,” he explained.
Al-Tanani added that some Israeli captives were likely killed by the Israeli army’s bombing of sites that held captives.
Israel blocks equipment
“Israel refuses to allow the equipment and technical teams that could help,” he said. “The factions in Gaza have offered every guarantee and even broadcasted recovery attempts live to prove good faith.”
He accused Israel of spreading “a false narrative that the resistance is manipulating the issue” to justify continuing its assault and maintaining constant tension in Gaza. This, he said, gave the Israeli army “freedom of movement” and weakened Egyptian mediation efforts aimed at stabilising governance in the Strip.
Tel Aviv, he added, was working to block any path toward a new political reality or a reorganisation of Palestinian leadership.
Israeli affairs analyst Firas Yaghi said Israel was using the bodies as “a political card” to stop progress toward the next stage of Trump’s plan, which calls for a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and renewed political talks.
“Netanyahu is using the issue to justify Israel’s continued military presence deep inside Gaza under the pretext of searching for the missing,” Yaghi told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Gaza’s changed landscape
He said Israeli intelligence “knows that some bodies were lost under the rubble due to intense bombardment that changed Gaza’s landscape completely”.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, he noted, had warned against letting the issue block the ceasefire. But “the current government prefers to exploit it for domestic political gain”.
Yaghi also criticised the United States for what he described as a weak position.
“Trump’s administration and its allies are giving Netanyahu wide freedom of action,” he said. “They ignore repeated ceasefire violations and the ongoing closure of Rafah.”
“If Washington decided to apply real pressure,” Yaghi added, “the plan could still move forward regardless of the handover of bodies. But for now, the US does not want to weaken Netanyahu”.
The rift between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is real. However, to understand it, one must see it for what it is — not a clash of principles, but of priorities.
Trump and the US establishment seek to expand the Abraham Accords, especially to bring Saudi Arabia on board. Tel Aviv, meanwhile, is fixated on accelerating its settlement project, beginning with annexations across large swathes of land in the West Bank.
Beneath this lies another tension. Israel wants to erase any talk of a Palestinian state, while the US, though never serious about Palestinian sovereignty, insists on keeping the illusion alive.
For Washington, that illusion is useful leverage with Arab capitals; for Israel, it is an obstacle.
Trump’s plan even hinted at this illusion in its nineteenth clause: after certain “conditions,” a state might someday emerge. Yet annexation would shatter even that mirage.
Trump, a man known for lying, is sincere in one thing: his promise to Arab states to restrain Israel from annexing land in the West Bank. But his sincerity is tactical, not moral.
The restraint he offers is temporary, a pause meant to preserve the path toward expanding the Abraham Accords. It is not a strategic position, only a calculation.
Natural next step
Netanyahu, meanwhile, wants to force the world to accept that the West Bank is part of Israel, beyond the reach of UN resolutions or international law. For him, annexation is not a bargaining chip but the natural next step in completing the Zionist project.
Both men seek Arab submission to Israeli hegemony. Yet Washington has learned that Arab leaders, while complicit, remain wary. They fear that deepening normalisation, meant to evolve from official policy to popular acceptance, could backfire after Gaza’s devastation, Israel’s ongoing assaults, the seizure of Syrian and Lebanese land, and the aggression against Qatar.
Annexing the West Bank now, they worry, could blow up the illusion of peace that underpins normalisation itself.
For the US, that illusion is vital. The Abraham Accords are not just about recognition but about institutionalising a regional order, a military and security alliance led by Israel, with Arab acquiescence to its sovereignty over all of historic Palestine.
Netanyahu, however, sees no need for Arab consent. He believes force, not diplomacy, will impose Israel’s supremacy. His political survival depends on it: projecting strength, showing no retreat, proving that Arabs, defeated and divided, will ultimately rush to make deals with him.
And so far, he has reason to believe he’s right. The war on Gaza has not halted normalisation; no Arab state has suspended trade or energy ties.
On the contrary, cooperation, especially with the UAE, has expanded. Israeli analysts track this closely, confident that annexation may delay the process, but it will not derail it.
No Arab threats
Israel has concluded that no Arab state that normalised relations has threatened to suspend them, not even after the war of annihilation in Gaza, the incursions into Syria and Lebanon, or the demolition and settlement campaigns across the West Bank.
Still, Zionist and pro-Israel circles in Washington continue to warn the Trump administration that Netanyahu’s recklessness could destroy everything. They know Arab leaders find it difficult to deepen normalisation while Israel endangers regional stability and shows open contempt for their security concerns.
These leaders do not trust that their agreements can restrain Netanyahu’s excesses and take seriously his threats of expansion into Syria, Lebanon, and even Jordan, threats that have already begun to materialise.
Arab governments have managed, for now, to contain public sympathy for Palestinians and suppress popular opposition to ties with Israel. Yet they remain aware of the anger simmering beneath the surface, which could erupt if Israel’s aggressions continue.
It was this fear that drove pro-Israel circles in Washington to pressure the Trump administration to block, or rather, postpone, Israel’s annexation of West Bank land.
Trump was ultimately persuaded. Arab leaders had delivered the message to him directly: annexation would make normalisation politically impossible. He therefore pledged to prevent it, at least temporarily.
This exchange, Arab opposition to annexation and Trump’s tactical response, reveal that the Arab position can still influence Washington.
US needs cooperation
The United States cannot simply threaten every Arab government or sever all aid. It needs their cooperation to secure its regional goals, and that cooperation depends on a degree of stability.
If chaos benefits Washington, popular anger can be tolerated, but if stability is the goal, unchecked Israeli aggression becomes a liability even for the United States.
Trump’s response to the concerns of Arab leaders, especially those of Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt, revealed that they could have done more but chose not to. That, however, is another story.
What matters here is that Trump understood two key conditions for sustaining the Abraham Accords: maintaining a ceasefire and preventing Israel from annexing West Bank land.
The normalisation project aims to integrate Israel into the region and present it as an “indigenous” state, not a colonial one that expands by uprooting the land’s original population.
This has long been Israel’s dream, but Netanyahu no longer seems concerned with appearances. He imagines himself on the verge of a sweeping historic victory.
That fantasy is not his alone; Trump shares it as well.
Trump’s ego greater
Yet Trump’s own ego is greater. He now sees Netanyahu as an obstacle to his ambitions, a man jeopardising what Trump believes he has built and protected. Many within Zionist and pro-Israel circles agree: they want Trump to save Israel from Netanyahu.
Trump’s anger is therefore genuine. He and his aides, backed by influential figures from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, one of the central bastions of Zionist influence in Washington, are determined not to let Netanyahu endanger both US and Israeli interests.
This rift should be used by Arab states wisely, without illusion: it will not alter Washington’s strategic bond with Israel. However, I am under no illusion that they will do anything.
Still, Arab states, however weak-willed, can take a minimum position, to publicly reject Israeli annexation of West Bank land and any territory from Gaza, and to reaffirm their refusal to recognise Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian land.
They can at least reclaim the language of rights as a peaceful weapon: legal, diplomatic, and moral.
That weapon gains power if Arab states act by filing a case against Israel and its settlements as violations of international law. Not to defend Palestine alone, but to defend themselves.
For if they fail to act, the threat will not spare their regimes, nor the region they claim to protect.
Lamis Andoni is a Palestinian journalist, writer and academic who launched The New Arab as its editor-in-chief.
A national pro-Palestinian advocacy group has accused the New Zealand government of providing political cover and rewarding the Israeli genocide by deploying a “liaison officer” to the US-brokered peace plan for the besieged enclave.
“It’s a knee-jerk reaction for New Zealand to send in the troops to the Middle East to back Israel and the US,” said Maher Nazzal, co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
“A liaison officer deployment is political cover to assist and reward Israel for its
genocide in Gaza. The US makes bombs and bullets for Israel to fire.
“It’s a shameful betrayal of Palestine and the Palestinian steadfastness in the face of unbelievable depravity and cruelty,” Nazzal said in a statement.
He said it was ominous that the liaison officer would be based inside a US military office in Israel.
“Instead, we should be working with the United Nations in the region. Trump plans to perpetuate the Israeli occupation under a figleaf of it being multinational. That is what we are supporting.”
“This is more of the same complicity with the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza,” he said.
‘Joined at hip’
Nazzal said that for two years Foreign Minister Winston Peters had joined New Zealand “at the hip” to a country whose Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] was wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
“There have been no sanctions on Israel, but we frequently impose new sanctions on Russia and Iran,” he said.
“The NZDF was there in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government sent the army up to the Red Sea to fight with the Americans early last year to keep Israeli sea lanes open.”
Nazzal said the government should focus on aid, ensuring Palestinians’ rights and representation, and fact-finding.
“There should be a cross-party Parliamentary fact-finding mission assembled urgently, which could get into Gaza safely before Israel ramps up its murderous assault again.”he said.
“MPs should see for themselves, instead of signing off on a soldier whose job it is to ‘implement’ the Trump plan.”
Jordan rejects US plan
The King of Jordan had recently rejected the US proposal to join in patrolling Gaza to implement Trump’s vision.
“Palestinians have no say in the Trump plan. Trump decides who is going to
implement it. He’s picked Tony Blair,” Nazzal said.
“When he was British Prime Minister, Blair, and US President Bush, invaded Iraq to destroy the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. More than a million Iraqis died.
“The New Zealand people stand with Palestine – the government stands with Israel.”
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Palestinians in Gaza say they are losing hope in the ceasefire after Israel’s deadliest violation yet killed more than 100 people, mostly women and children, on Wednesday.
Israel’s military carried out another deadly attack in northern Gaza last night, killing two people, despite claiming to resume the fragile ceasefire, which had already been teetering from a wave of deadly bombardment it waged the night before.
US President Donald Trump said the ceasefire was “still strong” while mediator Qatar expressed frustration but said the mediators were looking forward to the next phase of the truce.
President Donald Trump alarmed many critics this week when he once again mused about deploying the military on the streets of US cities. As reported by The New York Times, Trump told a group of American troops stationed in Japan on Tuesday that he could send the military into US cities under the pretense of fighting crime. “We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are…
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has challenged Defence Minister Judith Collins over her “can’t be trusted” backing for controversial BlackSky Technology satellite launches and called on the Prime Minister to withdraw approval.
National co-chair John Minto today wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon — who is currently in Korea for the APEC meeting — in response to what he described as a “shocking” TVNZ 1News interview with Collins last Friday that revealed the satellite launches could be used by Israel in its genocidal attacks on the besieged enclave of Gaza.
Minto asked Luxon to “overrule” Collins and end the BlackSky satellite launches
He said PSNA had requested the Prime Minister direct Collins to withdraw approval for forthcoming Rocket Lab satellite launches for BlackSky Technology from Mahia, which could be used by Israel in Gaza.
“She went for any excuse to justify approving the launches, and the Prime Minister must rein her in.”
‘Free hand’ claim
Collins had said in the 1News report that the UN Security Council did not encourage sanctions, so she believed New Zealand had a “free hand to be militarily complicit” in Israel’s resumed genocide in Gaza, PSNA said as the ceasefire remained shaky today with Israel’s renewed attacks on the enclave.
“But New Zealand has complained for decades about the veto powers of one country in the Security Council,” Minto said.
“Then, our government uses the very same US veto — which it opposes — to justify licensing the launch of spy satellites to target Gaza.”
Defence Minister Judith Collins warned over satellites, TVNZ’s 1News reported last Friday. Image: 1News screenshot APR
Minto said New Zealand government was ignoring the International Court of Justice(ICJ), which has directed countries to do what they could to prevent Israel’s illegal occupation from continuing.
“Signing off on delivering the technology, which the IDF [Israeli military] uses for its bombing runs on a civilian population, can hardly be interpreted as helping Israel end its occupation of Gaza.”
Minto said Collins’ alternative excuse was that New Zealand was “not at war with Israel, so can’t sanction it” was “equally nonsensical”.
“It may come as news to the Defence Minister, but New Zealand is not at war with Iran or Russia either,” Minto said.
“Yet the government routinely imposes sanctions on both of these countries, with putting new sanctions on Iran just a few days ago.”
Israel kills 91 people
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have killed at least 91 people in Gaza overnight, including at least 24 children, according to medical sources, in violation of the US-brokered ceasefire.
Al Jazeera reports that US President Donald Trump said Israel had “hit back” after a soldier was “taken out” but he claimed “nothing was going to jeopardise” the ceasefire, Al Jazeera reports.
The Trump administration is making it more difficult for veterans with a rare but deadly cancer to get their health care needs covered by the government. The new policy, involving breast cancer in men, is laid out in a Department of Veterans Affairs memo obtained by ProPublica.
“As of Sept. 30, the department no longer presumes service connection for male breast cancer,” press secretary Pete Kasperowicz wrote in a statement to ProPublica. He noted that veterans who’ve previously qualified for coverage can keep it.
But for the roughly 100 male veterans who are newly diagnosed each year, the path will now be significantly harder. They will have to show their cancer was connected to their military service, a burden that has often been hard to meet.
Without VA coverage, experts say, veterans’ care could be delayed or even missed altogether — even as research has shown the rate of breast cancer among men has been increasing and the disease is deadlier than for women. One study also found that breast cancer for men is “notably higher among veterans.”
“Cancer in male veterans should be covered,” said Dr. Anita Aggarwal, a VA oncologist who researched and treated breast cancer for years before retiring recently. “These people have put their lives at risk for us.”
As Aggarwal noted, breast tissue in men and women are similar. “Male breasts don’t produce milk,” Aggarwal said. “But the treatment is the same.” She added that research has linked breast cancer to toxic exposure.
The administration’s new policy rolls back benefits that were created under the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics, or PACT, Act, a Biden-era law that ushered in one of the largest expansions of health care and benefits in VA history.
After a long fight by advocates, congressional Democrats and Republicans passed the measure three years ago, making it easier for veterans poisoned by Agent Orange and other toxic substances to get benefits.
Before the law, the VA had frequently been denying the claims. Now, the government would presume many ailments were connected to veterans’ military service, so long as they served in particular areas and had any number of diseases on a VA list.
As a result, more than 200,000 veterans likely exposed to toxic substances during their service have qualified to have their care covered.
The Trump administration’s change means that male veterans who get breast cancer will no longer be able to benefit from that easier path for coverage.
Veterans who have breast cancer said the move left them aghast and puzzled.
Jack Gelman, a 80-year-old former Navy fighter pilot who served in Vietnam, is already facing the fact that his long-dormant breast cancer came back last year. Now he has to grapple with the fact that the government has just made it harder to get his care covered.
“I’m astonished,” Gelman said repeatedly when ProPublica told him about the change. “This is really nickel and diming a very small group of people who should be taken care of.”
Other veterans echoed that. “I don’t care if it’s toenail cancer,” said Kirby Lewis, who was diagnosed with breast cancer about a dozen years ago and is now Stage 4. “If exposure occurs, they should take care of those people.”
Lewis, who served in the Navy for five years during the 1980s, isn’t worried about losing his coverage, which the VA granted him as a result of unrelated heart issues. But he said the administration’s decision risks further stigmatizing men with the disease.
“There’s this machinismo aspect that they don’t want to accept that we have breasts, but we do,” said Lewis, who called the decision “very upsetting.”
A flag, a porthole and color bars are some of the items Lewis has on display at his home from his time in the Navy.Greg Kahn for ProPublica
The PACT Act gives administrations widespread discretion to cover diseases as science develops. Last year, the VA added three cancers, including male breast cancer.
The law states that “reproductive cancer of any type” be covered. Officials added male breast cancer under that category after a working group of experts reviewed the science. The decision noted “the marked similarity of male and female breast cancer.”
The Trump administration’s memo argues that designation is a mistake. “The Biden Administration falsely classified male breasts as reproductive organs,” Kasperowicz said in his statement to ProPublica.
A former official who was involved in the VA’s decision last year said that while there were discussions about how to interpret “reproductive cancer,” the scientific consensus among VA oncologists was clear. “The evidence showed that male and female breast tissue respond similarly to toxic exposures and share nearly identical biological and mutational profiles,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing concern for his job prospects in government. “Expanding coverage to male breast cancer was the right call.”
Rosie Torres, who advocated for the PACT Act after her husband became sick, said the current administration is putting politics above patriotism and people. “It shouldn’t matter who signed the bill,” Torres said, referring to Biden. “If you don’t like the ‘reproductive’ word, do it under another category. Don’t remove it. These are peoples’ lives.”
Kasperowicz emphasized that veterans can still get coverage, so long as they show a connection between their illness and their service.
“The department grants disability benefits compensation claims for male Veterans with breast cancer on an individual basis and will continue to do so,” he said in his statement. “VA encourages any male Veterans with breast cancer who feel their health may have been impacted by their military service to submit a disability compensation claim.”
The change follows a wider tumult at the VA, where tens of thousands of staffers have left amid plummeting morale and work edicts such as a return to office.
Secretary Doug Collins has long insisted that care will not be affected. “Veterans benefits aren’t getting cut,” Collins said in February. “In fact, we are actually giving and improving services.”
Advocates and Democrats say they’re concerned that the rollback of presumptive coverage for male breast cancer could presage wider cuts. This year, House Republicans passed a bill to cut a fund for veterans covered under the PACT Act, which they’ve criticized as lacking in oversight. The bill has not passed in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Project 2025, the conservative initiative to create a blueprint for the Trump administration, urges officials to roll back benefits, or as the initiative puts it, to “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards.”
The Trump administration has so far not done that. ProPublica asked the VA whether there are any plans to change coverage beyond male breast cancer.
Middle East political analyst Zeidon Alkinani says Israel’s military is continuing “business as usual” to the east of the yellow line in Gaza in spite of the ceasefire deal.
The military withdrew behind the yellow line as part of the ceasefire deal, while the government works to ensure “absolute gains” in the enclave and the continuation of its “political, economic and military occupation”, Alkinani told Al Jazeera.
While “the attacks are much more minimised” compared with before the ceasefire, Israel’s political establishment was still trying to exert leverage over Gaza’s future — including the makeup of an international security force.
Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank, said that the Israelis had been putting a lot of pressure on mediators, specifically the United States.
“They’re saying they’re not ready for any talks on phase two or what’s next of this deal until the remaining 13 bodies of captives are brought back from Gaza,” she said.
“Hamas has said they don’t know where those bodies are, and they need assistance on the ground in the form of specialised teams and heavy machinery.”
Israel had been reluctant at first to allow this to happen.
Turkish team barred
“In fact, there was a Turkish team of about 80 people who were on the other side of the border just last week, whom Israel denied entry to,” Salhut said.
“But now they have allowed in an Egyptian team, alongside the Red Cross. Hamas too are now searching in areas that are technically under Israeli control, outside that yellow line perimeter where Israeli forces withdrew from.”
Meanwhile, an emergency doctor at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital says her team is treating a growing number of Palestinians who have been injured by unexploded ordnance when they return to their homes following their displacement by the war.
“As people come back to the north after the heavy bombardment . . . they’re moving into their old homes, they’re setting up tents in the rubble, and there are so many unexploded missiles,” said the doctor, who gave her name as Harriet.
She said children were among those being injured by the ordnance left scattered across the territory, adding her team had recently treated siblings aged five and seven who had sustained blast and shrapnel injuries from a bomb.
About 66,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance remain lying around Gaza, and at least 53 people have been killed by the bombs so far.
UNRWA international staff and humanitarian aid continue to be denied entry into #Gaza.
Food, hygiene kits, tents, and other supplies are desperately needed.
Still, about 12,000 of its local staff are pushing ahead with the delivery of “healthcare, psychosocial support, and education to the people, often under unimaginable conditions”, the agency said in a post on X.
Israel had banned UNRWA from operating in territory it controls last year, claiming a number of its employees were members of Hamas.
The International Court of Justice ruled last week that Israel, as an occupying power, must support relief efforts provided by the UN and its entities, including UNRWA. It also found that Israel had not substantiated its claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees were Hamas members.
In its post, UNRWA said “a ceasefire alone is not enough.
“Food, hygiene kits, tents, and other supplies are desperately needed,” it added.
New Zealand’s Space Minister Judith Collins was warned just two months into Israel’s war on Gaza that new BlackSky satellites being launched from NZ could be used by that country’s military, reports Television New Zealand’s 1News.
According to a network news item on Friday, government documents showed officials had recommended the launches go ahead in spite of risks, saying there were no restrictions on trade with Israel.
Minister Collins gave the green light and RocketLab began launching the the Gen-3 BlackSky satellites from Mahia Peninsula earlier this year.
In the documents, obtained by 1News political reporter Benedict Collins under the Official Information Act, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials said while there were risks, the positives outweighed the negatives.
The officials’ advice on the satellite launches stated: “While it poses risks, there is a net good associated with commercially available remote sensing due to the wide range of applications,” 1News said.
One risk they identified related to Israel, but they said there were mitigating factors.
“There are no United Nations Security Council sanctions on Israel, and New Zealand does not implement autonomous sanctions outside the context of the conflict in Ukraine,” they advised the minister.
“There are also no policy restrictions on New Zealand’s trading relationship with Israel.”
World court warnings
However, over the two years of war on Gaza since 7 October 2023, several nonbinding legal opinions by the world’s highest court and UN agencies have warned Israel about its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and also warned countries and companies about complicity with the pariah Zionist state.
In the latest ruling this week, the International Court of Justice said Israel was obliged to ease the passage of aid into Gaza, stressing it had to provide Palestinians with “basic needs” essential to survival.
The wide-ranging ICJ ruling came as aid groups were scrambling to scale up much-needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza, seizing upon a fragile ceasefire agreed earlier this month.
Another court in The Hague, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
According to 1News, the NZ documents also show that when MBIE officials recommended the application be approved they were aware experts at the UN were warning a possible genocide could unfold in Gaza and that schools and hospitals were being bombed.
‘Appalling’ decision
The officials’ advice came in December 2023, two months after the Hamas attacks on Israel which left 1200 people dead. Israel in response launched a retaliatory offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Minister Collins said this week the decision had been the right one.
“We don’t have sanctions on Israel, we’re not at war with Israel, Israel is not our enemy,” she said.
But Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said it was an “appalling” decision that could fuel human rights abuses, reports 1News.
Officials at New Zealand’s space agency declined to be interviewed by 1News about Blacksky and RocketLab did not respond to a request for an interview with its founder Sir Peter Beck.
United States top diplomat Marco Rubio says the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) “is not going to play any role” in aid delivery in Gaza, reports Al Jazeera.
He also rejected the possibility of Hamas being involved in any future governance of the besieged enclave.
Speaking during a news conference while on a visit to Israel yesterday, the US Secretary of State claimed UNRWA had become “a subsidiary of Hamas”, echoing an Israeli government line that has been discredited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In response, UNRWA insisted that its presence “remains vital to meeting urgent humanitarian needs” across the bombarded and starved enclave, where a deadly Israeli offensive has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in two years.
In a statement posted on X, the agency also highlighted that the ICJ had recognised that “no organisation can replace the UNRWA’s role in supporting the people of Gaza”.
Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, also dismissed Rubio’s characterisation.
“You’ve already heard us talk about how UNRWA is not linked to Hamas,” he told reporters at the UN. “UNRWA is the backbone of our humanitarian operations in Gaza.”
Israel banned the agency from operating after accusing some of its staff of taking part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack without providing evidence.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the proclamation by Rubio that UNRWA was a Hamas “subsidiary” was “quite shocking” and “devastating” for UNRWA and all who were involved in Gaza.
UNRWA exonerated by ICJ
UNRWA was not only exonerated by the ICJ and two separate commissions of inquiry, but also had the largest, most extensive aid mechanism in Gaza, Odeh said.
“It has thousands of employees, it has the data to distribute aid to Palestinians with dignity and in an orderly fashion,” she said.
“Nobody has that kind of infrastructure and history in Gaza.”
PRESS RELEASE: The #ICJ delivers its Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory https://t.co/uMXJBTcJq6pic.twitter.com/YuTGwDzPwP
Despite a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect earlier this month, Israel has continued launching attacks across Gaza. At least two people were killed in shelling east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza yesterday, a source at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic.
Israel has also kept the Rafah crossing near Egypt sealed, blocking large-scale aid deliveries that were stipulated in the truce agreement.
In his remarks on Friday, Rubio voiced hope of soon putting together an international security force to police the ceasefire in Gaza and said Israel, which opposes including Turkiye, could veto participants.
In Suva, The Fiji Times reports that Israel says Fiji’s “neutral and highly skilled military” could play a valuable role in future peacekeeping efforts once negotiations on Gaza’s next phase were complete.
The indication came as Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said discussions between Israel, the United States and Arab nations would determine the structure and participants of any peacekeeping arrangement.
“I have to say that we do trust the Fijian forces,” Haskel said during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka before she left for her controversial visit to New Zealand.
Fiji opening an embassy in Jerusalem last month in defiance of United Nations resolutions on Occupied Palestine and hosting a visit by a senior Israeli minister from the paraiah state this week has revived condemnation by Pacific human rights groups and Palestinian advocates.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.
Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has condemned Fiji’s coalition government for “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza”, saying it was being “deliberately orchestrated” by Israel in a statement.
The statement was issued before the opening of the embassy and the declaration of a Gaza ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump and three mediating Middle East countries.
Embassy entourage
The NGOCHR statement by chair Shamima Ali, dated September 9, criticised widespread reports in Fiji media that Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would take “an entourage of 17 government officials and spouses” to officially establish the residential Fijian embassy.
“The coalition government appears to be callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel,” she said.
“This very same Fiji government previously defended the destruction, killing, and maiming of scores of thousands of innocent civilians — 70 percent of them women and children — by Israel at the International Court of Justice [in an earlier and ongoing case on genocide].”
Shamima Ali highlighted the visit in August by two World Elders — Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand and former Head of UNDP) — to the Rafah crossing into Gaza from Egypt.
They had witnessed how Israel was preventing the flow of food, water, and medicine to the suffering people of Gaza, and declared it as an “unfolding genocide” — “this is not the chaos of war, nor the result of an environmental disaster. It is intentional.”
Ali said Prime Minster Rabuka, and ministers Lynda Tabuya and Pio Tikoduadua had made “rather unconvincing arguments” about opening of the Fijian embassy in Jerusalem on September 18 amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
“Whether they like it or not, in the eyes of the world, Fiji will be seen as a country that supports the apartheid and pariah state of Israel, and its genocide in Gaza,” the statement said.
‘Not in our name’
Ali said the NGOCHR reiterated its “Not in our name” opposition to Fiji’s defence of Israel at the ICJ in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.
It also declared its strongest “Not in our name” opposition to the establishment of the Fiji Embassy in Jerusalem.
“Neither action reflects the wishes of all citizens of Fiji. It does not reflect well on Fiji for the present coalition government to be effectively supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine.”
Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.
Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
A leading Palestine solidarity and advocacy group in New Zealand has accused an Israeli cabinet minister of “sneaking” into the country this weekend while on a Pacific tour as
Israel resumed its genocidal attacks.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskell visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.
Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.
“It seems clear from media reports that Haskell is visiting Auckland this weekend as part of a trip to strengthen ties with New Zealand and other Pacific countries,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa co-chair Maher Nazal.
He said in a statement that he would expect New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters to “have had, or will be having, a secret meeting” with Haskell.
“Haskell wouldn’t come to New Zealand unless she was having a meeting with
Peters. Otherwise, it would be a diplomatic snub,” Nazzal said.
“Haskell wouldn’t tolerate that, and Peters is most unlikely to snub Israel.
“But if he’s turned her down, we’d love to hear about it.”
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “Why would we put out the welcome mat for a representative of such a monstrous regime?”. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Nazzal said: “The trip is a ‘thank you’ visit for New Zealand refusing to recognise Palestine [statehood]. Haskell had appointments with the governments of Fiji and Papua New Guinea earlier this week.
“They are the only two countries in the world, other than the United States, which both voted in the United Nations last year against requiring Israel to leave the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and they also have an embassy in Jerusalem.
“They are the greatest fans of Israel outside the United States.”
“I have to say that we do trust the Fijian forces,” she said during the joint press conference with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.
‘Skilled, neutral military’
“We know that you have very skilled military forces that are neutral, which is something especially important for peacekeeping.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel (left) with Ambassador to Fiji and the Pacific Roi Rosenblit at the MOU signing with Fiji this week. Image: Eliki Nukutabu/The Fiji Times
“We know this is a force you can trust, with skills, with morals and we’ve had close collaboration throughout history in many posts around the Middle East and surrounding our borders as well.”
She was referring to Fiji’s long UN history as a Middle East peacekeeping force, but admitted that the Gaza role would not be through the United Nations.
“Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians and withholding New Zealand aid from the people of Gaza,” Nazzal said.
“Why would we put out the welcome mat for a representative of such a monstrous regime?”
Haskell was recently interviewed by “genocide-denier Sean Plunket” on his radio show The Platform saying she would like to visit to “thank the New Zealand government for its support over the last two years”.
“That says it all. New Zealand has stood resolutely with a racist, apartheid regime as it continues to commit genocide against the Palestinian people – two years and counting,” Nazzal said.
Seven embassies in Jerusalem
Last month, Fiji inaugurated its embassy in Jerusalem — becoming the seventh nation to have its diplomatic mission in the city in defiance of the United Nations policy.
Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel with PNG Prime Minister James Marape at Melanesian House, Waigani during a courtesy visit this week. Image: PNG Bulletin
The other countries are: Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
Other nations that maintain ties with Israel have their embassies in Tel Aviv.
Papua New Guinea inaugurated its embassy in Jerusalem last year.
Returning to Aotearoa after half a year in the occupied West Bank, Cole Martin says a peace deal that fails to address the root causes — and ignores the brutal reality of life for Palestinians — is no peace deal at all.
COMMENTARY:By Cole Martin
A ceasefire in Gaza last week brought scenes reminiscent of January’s brief pause — tears, relief, exhaustion and devastation as families reunited after months, years and even decades in captivity.
Others were exiled or discovered their entire family had been killed; thousands returned to their homes in northern Gaza, others to rubble – but just like last time, it didn’t last.
An Israeli checkpoint near Al-Khalil, Hebron . . . Palestinians stand in a crowded, fenced corridor with metal bars, waiting to pass through a turnstile gate. Image: Cole Martin
The prevention of food, water, aid and critical infrastructure continues; the borders remain closed; and across the rest of Palestine, Israel’s brutal system of domination, apartheid and displacement continues.
It’s impossible to ignore two critical elements that this deal omitted: a failure to address the root causes and a jarring lack of international accountability.
I returned to Aotearoa this week after six months documenting and reporting from the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues its campaign of violent displacement and colonial expansion. Almost everyone I know has tasted the terror of Israeli domination.
Broke into bedroom
My Arabic tutor described how soldiers broke into her bedroom at night to interrogate her family about a man they didn’t even know. My climbing partner warned you can be shot for climbing in the wrong place, with most of their crags now inaccessible.
I visited Jerusalem with a friend who scored a one-day permit. He lives in Bethlehem, just a half-hour away, but they’re barred from visiting and must return by midnight; a process involving biometric scanners and intrusive searches.
And I was based in Aida refugee camp, one of dozens across the land where thousands of families have lived since their violent displacement in 1948 — the ethnic cleansing which saw 750,000 expelled, 15,000 killed and 530 villages destroyed.
Refused the right to return, their homes are now dormant ruins in “nature reserves” or inhabited by Israeli families. Israel was built on the land, farms, businesses and stolen wealth of these families — and countless more who remain as “present absentees” within the state of Israel.
Left: Palestinian climbers enjoy one of their last accessible crags, the others too dangerous to access because of settler violence. Right: Yacoub Odeh, 84, walks the ruins of his childhood village Lifta, denied his right to return to live, despite living just 10 minutes away. Images: Cole Martin
I visited the Ofer military courts and witnessed a corrupt system designed to funnel Palestinians to prison based on extortion, plea bargains and “secret evidence” which the detainee and lawyer aren’t allowed to see. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers receive full legal rights in Israeli civil courts; two vastly different legal systems based on race — if the settler is arrested at all.
Almost everyone I met has experienced detention firsthand or through a close family member — involving beatings, humiliation, starvation and threats. A nurse my age humorously asked why I wasn’t married yet; when I asked the same, he explained he’d only recently left years of Israeli captivity.
His killer was free within five days, back harassing the family, and has established an illegal settlement in the middle of their village — destroying homes, olive groves, water and electrical infrastructure with no repercussions.
Tariq Hathaleen stares at the bloodstained courtyard where his cousin and best friend Awdah was shot. Tariq was detained for several days following Awdah’s death. Image: Cole Martin
I visited countless communities across the West Bank who face daily harassment, violence and incursions from Israeli settlers, police and military. Settlements continue to expand, preventing Palestinians from reaching their land.
All of this continues, none of it is halted by the “ceasefire”; and most of it will escalate as soldiers leave Gaza and look to exert their dominance elsewhere.
I’m truly fearful for my friends in the West Bank, particularly as Israel openly threatens annexation. A peace deal that ignores these realities is no peace deal.
Resilience and courage
But I also witnessed resilience and courageous persistence. Palestinian civil society and individuals have spent decades committed to creative non-violence in the face of these atrocities — from court battles to academia, education, art, demonstrations, general strikes, hīkoi (marches), sit-ins, civil disobedience.
These are the overlooked stories that don’t make catchy headlines, but their success depends on the international community to provide accountability. Without global support, Palestinians have been refused their right to self-defence, resistance and self-determination.
If we really care about peace, we need to support justice. To talk about peace without liberation is to suggest submission to a system of displacement, imprisonment, violence and erasure.
This is not the time to turn away, this is the time to ensure that international law is upheld, that Palestinians are given their dignity, self-determination, right to return and reparations for the horror they’ve faced.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for six months and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by the The Spinoff and is republished with the author’s permission.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) claims more than a dozen civilians have been killed in the Papuan highlands, including three men who were allegedly tortured and a woman who was allegedly raped.
However, the Indonesian government claims the accusations “baseless”.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda said 15 civilians had been killed, and the women who was allegedly raped fled from soldiers and drowned in the Hiabu River.
A spokesperson for the Indonesian embassy in Wellington said the actual number was 14, and all those killed were members of an “armed criminal group”.
The spokesperson described the alleged torture and rape as “false and baseless”.
“What Benny Wenda does not mention is their usual ploy to try to intimidate and terrorise local communities, to pressure communities to support his lost cause,” the spokesperson said.
‘Covert military posts’
According to the Indonesian embassy spokesperson, those killed were involved in burning down schools and health facilities, while falsely claiming they were being used as “covert military posts” by Indonesia.
“Their accusations were not based on any proof or arguments, other than the intention to create chaos and intimidate local communities.”
The spokesperson added the Indonesian National Police and Armed Forces had conducted “measured action” in Kiwirok.
West Papua Action Aotearoa spokesperson Catherine Delahunty said Indonesia’s military had become more active since President Prabowo Subianto came to power in October last year.
“The last year or so, it’s depressing to say, but things have actually got a whole lot worse under this president and a whole lot more violent,” Delahunty said.
“That’s his only strategy, the reign of terror, and certainly his history and the alleged war crimes he’s associated with, makes it very, very difficult to see how else it was going to go.”
Delahunty said the kidnapping of New Zealand helicopter pilot Phillip Mehrtens in 2023 also triggered increased military activity.
Schoolchildren tear gassed
Meanwhile, a video taken from a primary school in Jayapura on October 15 shows children and staff distressed and crying after being tear gassed.
The Indonesian embassy spokesperson said authorities were trying to disperse a riot that started as a peaceful protest until some people started to burn police vehicles.
They said tear gas was used near a primary school, where some rioters took shelter.
“The authorities pledge to improve their code and procedure, taking extra precautions before turning to extreme measures while always being mindful of their surroundings.”
Jakarta-based Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono said the level of care using tear gas would have been much higher if the students were not indigenous Papuan.
“If it is a school with predominantly settler children, the police will be very, very careful. They will have utmost care,” he said.
“The mistreatment of indigenous children dominated schools in West Papua is not an isolated case, there are many, many reports.”
‘Ignored by world’
Despite the increased violence in the region, Wenda said the focus of Pacific neighbours like New Zealand and Australia remained on the Middle East and Ukraine.
“What has happened in West Papua is almost a 60-year war. If the world ignores us, our people will disappear,” he said.
Delahunty said there had been a weak response from the international community as Indonesia used drones to bomb villages.
“The reign of terror that is taking place by the Indonesian military, they’re getting away with it because nobody else seems to care.
“If you look at the recent Pacific Islands Forums, it’s very disappointing, it came up with a very standard statement, like ‘it would be good if Indonesia would invite the human rights people from the UN in’.
“We close our eyes, Palestine rightly gets our support and attention for the genocide that’s being visited upon the people of Palestine, but in our own region, we’re not interested in what is happening to our neighbours.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This lecture“Requiem for Gaza” was delivered to a sold out audience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide after journalist Chris Hedges’ appearance was cancelled by the Australian National Press Club.
EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE:By Chris Hedges
The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble.
My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.
The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church.
I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.
It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.
The Edward Said Memorial Lecture. The Chris Hedges Report
Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate.
Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.
Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.
Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned.
And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”
Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?
How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?
How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?
Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?
By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?
Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?
How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?
How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?
Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?
What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?
And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?
Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, bellowed:
“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death. I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”
Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.
The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force.
Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed.
Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favour of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.
The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.
The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo:
“A sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”
Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept.
The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.
This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.
The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.
History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabise an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions.
It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism.
This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures — the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The incursion on October 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II.
German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies.
It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of October 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.
The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.
The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1700 and injuring thousands more.
The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists”. The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.
The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.
But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the US in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The US and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation — Yemen — which has tried to halt the genocide.
The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
The militarised drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.
Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book Rise and Kill First in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation”.
Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.
Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”
The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “Western civilization”.”
The moral philosophers who make up the Western canon — Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke — excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonised people, women of all races and the criminalised from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.
So, when you hear that the Western canon is an imperative, ask yourself for whom?
“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.
American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.
The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.
The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers”.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.
Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018:
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. [W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites.
Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.
There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.
Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.
Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.
Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”
The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.
Pankaj Mishra writes:
“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.”
We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialised nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable.
It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This Edward Said Memorial Lecture was hosted by the Australian Friends of Palestine and delivered at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, on 18 October 2025.
Fifteen years ago today a contingent of six New Zealanders drove three aid-packed ambulances into Gaza as part of the epic international Viva Palestina 5 solidarity convoy of 145 vehicles — to a rock-star reception from locals.
The featured PressTV report includes a short interview with Kia Ora Gaza team volunteer Hone Fowler.
Kia Ora Gaza was established from a series of public meetings to organise Kiwi participation in international efforts to end the siege of Gaza and promote practical solidarity for Palestine.
This followed the Israeli commando raid on the Mavi Marmara-led peace flotilla in international waters in 2010 which resulted in the deaths of 10 civilian peace activists.
Since then Kia Ora Gaza has organised or supported many projects.
Many more reports, photos and videos of this historic siege-busting convoy can be seen by by scrolling back to October 2010 on the Kia Ora Gaza website.
“Sir, let me emphasise that this is not an attempt to militarise our nation, but the other a long term nation-building effort aimed at enhancing Solomon Islands, resilience, sovereignty and self-reliance,” Jimson Tanagada said in Parliament last week.
He said the government was taking a prudent approach but also told Parliament the country must not ignore escalating geopolitical tension in the region.
“There’s no fixed time frame but the urgency is there given the evolving security challenges,” Tanagada said.
The country’s police force used to have a paramilitary unit but after a civil conflict at the turn of the century, during which guns from the police armoury were used on civilians, there was a complete ban on firearms.
Helpem Fren – Rebuilding a Pacific Nation.Video produced in 2013.
Leader of Opposition Matthew Wale respects the process so far, but says the government should heed lessons from the past.
“We must learn from our own civil conflict,” Wale said.
“And you know, in Fiji, of course, there’s been a number of coups where the military was directly involved in.
“And in [Papua] New Guinea when they did not pay them [soldiers] their allowance they took their guns and went to the Parliament.
“So all these things, the police must address. How do we make sure this would never happen?”
Wale said one way to ensure control of the military was for parliamentarians from across the political divide to be involved
“This issue is so critical that us as representatives must help to together, inform it, influence it, mould it, shape it. Right from the word go,” he said.
Melanesia focused
Former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said the formation of a Solomon Islands military must be Melanesia focused.
“I heard Papua New Guinea is brokering, of course, the peace [sic] treaty with America already.
“And the treaty is so wide, Mr Speaker, that it’s allowing military assets of America to land at anytime without any permission,” Manasseh Sogavare said.
“And those are serious matters that we need to discuss about the security of the region,” he said.
Police Response Team . . . government control of any armed force is “of the utmost importance”, says former PM Manasseh Sogavare. Image: RNZ
It was Sogavare who first suggested the country form a defence force after a trip to China in 2023 while prime minister.
He agreed government control of any armed force was of the utmost importance.
“We can understand the cautious approach that we take on that matter before we go seriously into establishing a defence force that the sovereign government wont have control over it,” Sogavare said.
Control issue important
“I think the control issue will be very important here. That the government must have control over the military force.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele said a Solomon Islands military could also assist in subregional crises.
He also says it would be beneficial if a Melanesian Military Force was ever created — a concept still being discussed among members of the sub-regional bloc.
“Papua, New Guinea and Fiji, of course, they have defence forces.
“Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu does not (sic) So that is also the gap in terms of the discussions,” Manele said.
Any resources for a military must not take away from the needs of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force which is currently in charge of national defence and security, says Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele. Image: RNZ/Koroi Hawkins
But cost is a major prohibitor and Manele said any resources for a military must not take away from the needs of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force which is currently in charge of national defence and security.
“I think that cautious approach is important. It’s not only about the numbers but also the cost in terms of sustaining these arrangements,” Manele said.
Overall, MPs supporting the establishment of a Solomon Islands military said it would benefit the country and wider region.
However, it remains to be seen whether their constituents agree.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed “deep gratitude” for Papua New Guinea’s support to his country over many years and during the Middle East conflict.
Prime Minister James Marape was given the message directly yesterday by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel during a courtesy call at Melanesian House, Waigani.
The support by PNG, Fiji and a handful of other Pacific nations is controversial in the face of Israel’s growing global pariah status over its two-year genocidal war on the besieged enclave of Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians.
A fragile ceasefire is in place between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas with the last 20 living Israeli captives being released last week in exchange for almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them held without charge.
Ten countries voted against, half of them from the Pacific — Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, PNG, and Tonga — while the only other countries supporting Israel and its backer United States, were Argentina, Hungary and Paraguay. Twelve countries abstained.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel highlighted Prime Minister Marape’s earlier decision to open the PNG embassy in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv — the first Asia Pacific country to do so — and for supporting Israel at the UN, report the Post-Courierand the PNG Bulletin.
“My visit here was specifically addressed by the Prime Minister [Netanyahu] to see how we can strengthen our friendship further, and to say ‘thank you’ for standing beside us especially in the last two years,” she said.
‘Darkest hours’
“These have been some of our darkest hours since 7 October 2023 . . .
“And you have been one of the most outstanding friends we have standing together on the international front, on bilateral relationship, and in international forums.
She said the people of Israel were “extremely grateful” for the opening of the PNG embassy in Jerusalem.
“This is acknowledgement of our history, our tradition, and of us — the Jewish people — who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel; that we are able to return to revive our religion, culture and language in our ancestral homeland,” Haskel claimed.
She said Netanyahu had requested that the visit to PNG and the Pacific should proceed without delay.
Prime Minister Marape reaffirmed Papua New Guinea’s commitment to the bilateral relationship, highlighting that PNG recognised Israel’s “rights to the land of Israel through its Judeo-Christian worldview”, and continued to recognise Jerusalem as the “eternal” capital of Israel through the PNG embassy.
He added that the embassy opening had encouraged other Pacific countries — such as Fiji — to also establish their diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.
Only four other countries have done so.
Haskel reconfirmed Israel’s commitment to continue assisting PNG in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, health, small business development, and women’s empowerment.
During her two-day visit to PNG, Haskel and her delegation are meeting with ministers in respective fields.
New Zealand’s major Palestine advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned Defence Minister Judith Collins for “dog-whistling to her small choir” over Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza enclave.
Claiming that Collins’ open letter attacking teachers at the weekend was an attempt to “drown out Palestine” in discussions with the government, PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said that it demonstrated more about her own prejudices than teacher priorities.
Teachers, who had devoted their lives to educating children in Aotearoa, would be “appalled at the wholesale slaughter” of Palestinian school children in Gaza, he said in a statement today.
Israel has killed at least 97 Palestinians and wounded 230 since the start of the ceasefire, and violated the truce agreement 80 times, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.
“Teachers who are committed to the education and development of the next generation of our country would feel a special affinity with the children of another nation, who are being killed by Israeli bombing in their tens of thousands, seeing all their schools destroyed, and who will suffer the consequences of two years of malnutrition for the rest of their lives,” Nazzal said.
He added that just two months ago, Collins had featured on television standing next to a damaged residential building in Kiev while condemning Russia for attacks which had killed Ukrainian children.
“But not a critical word of Israel from her, or her cabinet colleagues, despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza,” Nazzal said.
Children ‘deserve protection’
“Ukrainian, Palestinian and New Zealand school children all deserve protection and we should expect our government to speak up loudly in their defence, without having to have a teachers’ union raise government inaction on Gaza with them.
“But even after 24 months of genocide, Collins won’t find the words to express New Zealand’s horror at the indiscriminate killing of school children in Gaza.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “not a critical word of Israel from her . . . despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
“But she’s in her element dog-whistling to her small choir in the pro-Israel lobby.
“Collins has already been referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for complicity in Israel’s genocide by facilitating the supply of military technology for Israeli use.
“It’s more than time for Luxon to pull back his Israeli fanatic colleagues and uphold an ethical rule-based policy, and not default to blind prejudices.”
A critique of the Collins open letter published in The Standard . . . “she makes a number of disturbing claims, as valued workers (doctors, mental health nurses, scientists, midwives, teachers, principals, social workers, oncologists, surgeons, dentists etc) ramp up to one of the biggest strikes in history”. Image: The Standard
Tafitoala village has been directly affected by the maritime disaster.
Resident Fagailesau Afaaso Junior Saleupu said the New Zealand High Commission and Samoa government held a short meeting regarding potential compensation options this week.
Three options were tabled around the distribution process. One involved the Samoa government being responsible for the distribution of payments among families and affected businesses. Another involved the district authority being responsible for distributing payments.
The Samoa government has previously said it intends to finalise the compensation process once it passes a budget, which it reportedly intends to do at the end of this month.
Tight timeframe
Fagailesau said this week’s meeting, which involved representatives from Samoa’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, seemed to be on a tight timeframe.
“It’s not enough time for us to raise questions and . . . give them our opinion about the problem.”
He believed the Samoa government should be responsible for distributing the money directly to those affected and said many people were concerned that the wreckage remained on the reef.
“I don’t think it’s good for us in the long run.”
Fagailesau also said many locals feared the compensation amount — which equates to WST$10 million — simply was not enough to manage the long-term impacts of the wreckage on the environment.
He also said families in Tafitoala had been severely limited by the 2km prohibition zone around the wreckage.
“My village — we are fighting for a big amount for us because we are the . . . people that are really affected.
“The 2km zone — it covers the area that we access for fishing every day. We’re eating tinned fish.”
More meetings
Fagailesau also said the Samoa government told locals it intended to hold more meetings over compensation in the future.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said he had not been aware of any locals eating tinned fish due to the wreckage.
Peters spoke to RNZ Pacific Waves about the Manawanui. He reiterated that the Sāmoa government was leading the ongoing process around compensation and the wreckage, which included any discussion around its removal.
He also denied there was any cover-up over the environmental impacts of the wreckage.
To date, no environmental report on the impacts of Manawanui sinking has been made public.
“It’s not a matter of being covert or secretive about it,” Peters said.
“It’s analysing what we’re dealing with, and I think that probably better explains what’s happening here.”
Open and transparent
Peters said the New Zealand government had been open and transparent in it’s dealing and continued to work with the Sāmoa government over the Manawanui incident.
“This terrible tragedy happened, which we massively regret — no one more than me.”
But Samoa surf guide Manu Percival said the New Zealand government’s behaviour had not been good enough.
For months, Percival had been in contact with the New Zealand High Commission about compensation for the boat fuel he used in the immediate aftermath of the disaster to assist with clean-up.
“It’s real crazy. No one’s got any compensation.”
He also said it had been difficult to get any concrete answers from the Sāmoa government over the future of the wreckage and compensation.
“It’s kind of getting tossed between two different government departments.”
Percival believed New Zealand should remove its wreckage and that the compensation amount paid to the Samoa government was “an absolute joke”.
However, Peters said the NZ$6 million was the amount requested by the Samoa government.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Hundreds of Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent days have described scenes of systematic torture, starvation, and humiliation.
Their accounts, gathered by The Guardian, TRT, Al-Mayadeen, Quds News Network, and Palestine Online, among others, offer a rare glimpse into what human rights organisations call a “policy of abuse” targeting Palestinian detainees.
According to the reports, many of the freed prisoners returned to Gaza emaciated, injured, and traumatised, some learning only after their release that their families had been killed during Israel’s war on the besieged Strip.
In testimony published by The Guardian, 33-year-old Naseem al-Radee recalled the moment Israeli prison guards “gave him a farewell gift” before his release.
“They bound his hands, placed him on the ground and beat him without mercy,” the report said, describing how Radee’s first sight of Gaza after nearly two years was “blurry,” the result of a boot to the eye.
Radee, a government employee from Beit Lahia, was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers at a displacement shelter in Gaza in December 2023. He spent 22 months in detention, including 100 days in an underground cell, before being released alongside 1700 other Palestinians this week under the ceasefire agreement.
A freed Palestinian prisoner speaks in pain about the horrors and inhumane treatment inside Israeli occupation prisons. pic.twitter.com/KqNJjX2mza
“They used teargas and rubber bullets to intimidate us, in addition to constant verbal abuse and insults,” The Guardian cited Radee as saying regarding his time in Nafha prison in the Naqab desert.
“They had a strict system of repression; the electronic gate of the section would open when the soldiers entered, and they would come in with their dogs, shouting ‘on your stomach, on your stomach,’ and start beating us mercilessly”, the testimony continued.
According to the report, cramped and unsanitary cells, fungal infections, starvation, and routine beatings defined his captivity. Upon release, Radee tried to call his wife, only to learn that she and all but one of his children had been killed during his detention.
“I was very happy to be released because the date coincided with my youngest daughter Saba’s third birthday,” he said.
“I tried to find some joy in being released on this day, but sadly, Saba went with my family, and my joy went with her.”
Sound torture Also speaking to The Guardian, 22-year-old university student Mohammed al-Asaliya described contracting scabies in prison and being denied treatment.
“There was no medical care,” he said. “We tried to treat ourselves by using floor disinfectant on our wounds, but it only made them worse. The mattresses were filthy, the environment unhealthy, our immunity weak, and the food contaminated.”
He recalled an area “they called ‘the disco,’ where they played loud music nonstop for two days straight.”
The sound torture, he said, was combined with physical abuse: “They also hung us on walls, sprayed us with cold air and water, and sometimes threw chilli powder on detainees.”
By the time of his release, Asaliya’s weight had dropped from 75 kg to 42 kg.
‘We died a thousand times a day’ In testimony recorded by Palestine Online, journalist and former detainee Shadi Abu Sido described what he called “unimaginable torture”.
“They used to say: ‘Take, eat.’ But I didn’t want anything for myself. About 1800 of us were released, and thousands are still inside,” Abu Sido recounted.
“If you die once a day, we have died a thousand times a day, each day. We didn’t know the day, the hour, or even the date.
“We forgot what sleep feels like, how food tastes. In the middle of the night, they would splash water on us, in our cells.”
In another video posted by Palestine Online, Abu Sido added:
“They torture and abuse us in every possible way, physically and psychologically. We don’t sleep; they threaten us about our children. ‘We killed your children, we killed your children. There is no Gaza’.”
“I entered Gaza and I found a scene from the Day of Judgment,” he said.
‘I made this for my daughter’ In a video published by Al-Mayadeen, another recently freed detainee collapsed in tears as he learned that his entire family had been killed. Holding a handmade toy he crafted in prison, he said:
“My children are dead. I made this for my daughter. Her birthday was on October 18; my daughter was two years old. Bara is eight years old.
“My beloved ones have been killed.”
‘They amputated my leg’ Speaking to TRT World, Palestinian prisoner Jibril al-Safadi described the brutality that cost him his leg:
“My leg was amputated in prison due to severe torture. The situation was tough: relentless suffering. There were savage beatings and horrible torture,” he said. “They transferred me to Sde Teiman.
“There was no medical care. They amputated my right leg.
We faced everything you can expect, even the dogs’ raping, torturing of detainees. Killing men is usual, like it’s an ordinary thing.”
A system of abuse The Guardian report cited Palestinian medical officials in Gaza who confirmed that many detainees arrived “in poor physical health,” bearing “bruises, fractures, wounds, and marks from restraints that had bound their hands tightly.”
Eyad Qaddih, the director of public relations at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, reportedly said many of the released prisoners had to be transferred to the emergency room.
“The signs of beating and torture were clearly visible,” he told The Guardian.
The report cited the Israeli NGO Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), as saying that about 2800 Palestinians from Gaza remain in Israeli prisons without charge.
Most were detained under emergency laws amended after October 7, 2023, allowing for indefinite administrative detention of anyone deemed an “unlawful combatant”.
PCATI’s executive director, Tal Steiner, said that “the amount and scale of torture and abuse in Israeli prisons and military camps has skyrocketed since October 7.”
She described the escalation as “part of a policy led by Israeli decision-makers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and others.”
Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, has repeatedly bragged about providing Palestinian prisoners with “the minimum of the minimum” food and supplies.
The Guardian reports: In total, 88 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons and sent to the occupied West Bank on Monday – the other nearly 2000, a number that includes about 1700 Palestinians seized from Gaza during the war and held without charge, were sent back to Gaza, where a minority would travel on to neighbouring countries.
Before Monday’s release, 11,056 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons, according to statistics from the Israeli NGO HaMoked in October 2025. At least 3500 of those were held in administrative detention without trial. An Israeli military database has indicated that only a quarter of those detained in Gaza were classified as fighters.
Republished with permission from The Palestine Chronicle
It’s bizarre how little mainstream attention is given to the fact that the President of the United States has repeatedly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, especially given how intensely fixated his political opposition was on the possibility that he was compromised by a foreign government during his first term.
During a speech before the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) on Monday, President Donald Trump once again publicly admitted that he has implemented Israel-friendly policies at the behest of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, this time adding that he believes Adelson favours Israel over the United States.
Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:
“As president, I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately, I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B2 bombers. It was swift and it was accurate, and it was a military beauty. I authorized the spending of billions of dollars, which went to Israel’s defense, as you know. And after years of broken promises from many other American presidents — you know that they kept promising — I never understood it until I got there. There was a lot of pressure put on these presidents. It was put on me, too, but I didn’t yield to the pressure. But every president for decades said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The difference is I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.
“Isn’t that right Miriam? Look at Miriam. She’s back there. Stand up. Miriam and Sheldon [Adelson] would come into the office and call me. They’d call me — I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else, I guess. Look at her sitting there so innocently — got $60 billion in the bank, $60 billion. And she loves, and she, I think she said, ‘No, more.’ And she loves Israel, but she loves it. And they would come in. And her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. It was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you? I’d say ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in. But they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about Golan Heights, which is probably one of the greatest things ever happened. Miriam, stand up, please. She really is, I mean, she loves this country. She loves this country. Her and her husband are so incredible. We miss him so dearly. But I actually asked her, I’m going to get her in trouble with this. But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means — that might mean Israel, I must say, we love you. Thank you, darling, for being here. That’s a great honor. Great honor. She’s a wonderful woman. She is a great woman.”
Speaking in Israel, Trump suggests he moved the embassy to Jerusalem as a promise to the Adelsons, who he says have paid more visits to the White House than anyone he can think of.
He then says he asked Miriam if she loves Israel or America more and she refused to answer. Insane pic.twitter.com/jg9VXciRgg
Sheldon Adelson reportedly gave Trump and the Republicans more than US$424 million in campaign funding from 2016 up until his death in 2021. His widow Miriam continued her husband’s legacy and poured a further $100 million into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
On the 2024 campaign trail Trump also admitted to being controlled by Adelson cash.
“Just as I promised, I recognize Israel’s eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
“You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you, please?’ But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it.
“You know, for 72 years they’ve been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn’t have the nerve. But I said, ‘You know what?’ I said to David Friedman, ‘Give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights.’ And he did. And I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ We got it done in about 15 minutes, right?”
Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don’t. Trump said this week that he “gave” the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House “almost more than anybody.” Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi
Legitimising Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem were two of the most controversial moves Trump made in Israel’s favour during his first term, which have now been eclipsed by his backing of the genocide in Gaza and his bombings of Iran and Yemen.
And here he is openly admitting that his billionaire Zionist megadonors have been using the access their donations bought them to push him to take drastic action in favour of Israel.
Just imagine for a second if someone had leaked documents to the press proving that Trump and received extensive financial backing from a Russian oligarch to whom he doled out favors of immense geopolitical consequence.
It would be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics, bar none. But because it’s an Israeli oligarch, he can admit to it openly and repeatedly without anyone batting an eye.
During Trump’s first term his political rivals spent years pushing a bogus conspiracy theory that he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, despite his having spent that entire term aggressively ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia. Entire political punditry careers were birthed trying to create a scandal out of a narrative that could be plainly seen as false just by looking at the movements of the US war machine and Washington’s actions against Moscow.
Trump: I am bought and owned by Miriam Adelson, the world’s richest Israeli.
Democrats: Trump is a Putin puppet.
Trump: I do whatever she says.
Democrats: A Russian secret agent.
Trump: I’m controlled by the Israelis.
Democrats: He’s suspiciously close with many dictators,…
But here’s Trump openly admitting to bending over backwards to give an Israeli oligarch whatever she wants because she gave his campaign huge sums of money, while pouring weapons into Israel to facilitate its mass atrocities and engaging in acts of war on Israel’s behalf. And it barely makes a blip in mainstream Western politics or media.
This is because mainstream Western politics and media understand that we are living in an unofficial oligarchic empire to which both the US and Israel belong. They never acknowledge it, they never talk about it, but all high-level politicians, pundits and operatives in the Western world understand that they serve a globe-spanning power structure run by a loose alliance of plutocrats and empire managers.
They understand that states like Israel are a part of said power structure, while states like Russia, China and Iran are not. So they spend their time normalising the corruption and abuses of imperial member states while facilitating the empire’s efforts to attack and undermine the states which have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial power umbrella.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing I like about Donald Trump is his infantile tendency to say the quiet part out loud. He advances the same kinds of abuses as his predecessors who were no less corrupt and controlled, but he exposes the underlying mechanics of those abuses in ways that more refined presidents never would.
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
(@OnlinePalEng)