An Al-Jazeera Arabic special report translated by The Palestine Chronicle staff details how Israel’s military strategy in Gaza, aimed at dismantling Hamas and displacing Palestinian civilians, has failed after 470 days of conflict.
ANALYSIS: By Abdulwahab al-Mursi
On May 5, 2024, nearly seven months into Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the main goal of the war was to destroy Hamas and prevent it from controlling Gaza.
However, over 250 days since this statement, and 470 days into the Israeli aggression, it has become clear that Netanyahu’s promises have faded into illusions.
In the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire on Sunday, Israeli military radio reported that Hamas forces were reasserting their control over Gaza, stating that Hamas, which had never lost control of any part of the territory during the war, was using the ceasefire to strengthen its grip.
This development highlights the gap between Israel’s strategic objectives and the reality on the ground, as images from Gaza continue to reveal widespread devastation and loss of life, yet Hamas remains firmly in control.
Popular Support: The backbone of Hamas Military literature highlights the concept of “Center of Gravity” (COG) for military organisations, a concept that can vary depending on the organisation and context.
In the case of Hamas and Palestinian Resistance, the central element of their strength lies in the support of the local population.
This grassroots support provides Hamas with invaluable social depth, a continuous supply of human resources, and strong strategic backing.
The popular support and belief in the resistance’s strategic choices and leadership have allowed Hamas to maintain its popular mandate to achieve Palestinian national goals.
Recognising this, Israel has targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure both militarily and psychologically, aiming to raise the costs of supporting the resistance and weaken Hamas’s popular base.
Israel has treated Gaza’s entire civilian infrastructure as military targets, believing that expanding the death toll among civilians and inflicting maximum suffering would force the population to turn against Hamas.
Yet, despite these efforts, images of celebrations in Gaza, even in areas heavily targeted by Israel, underscore the exceptional nature of the Gaza situation, where resistance culture is deeply rooted and unyielding.
The strategic consciousness of Gaza’s people There appears to be a collective strategic awareness among Gaza’s people to maintain a victorious image at all costs, even in the midst of devastating humanitarian crises.
This desire to project an image of resistance and triumph, despite the overwhelming tragedy, has led to spontaneous public displays of support for Hamas and resistance forces, reinforcing their resolve against the Israeli onslaught.
Failure of forced displacement plans In the initial weeks of the war, Israel revealed its plan to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population.
Israeli media outlets reported in October 2023 that Netanyahu had proposed relocating Gaza’s residents to other countries.
However, after months of war, Gaza’s residents have shown an unshakable determination to remain, with displaced individuals in refugee camps celebrating their return to their homes, despite the widespread destruction they have suffered.
In northern Gaza, particularly in Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and Shuja’iyya, Israel’s attempts to prevent the return of displaced residents became a significant obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, delaying it for months.
Israel’s plan, known as the “Generals’ Plan” by former Israeli military advisor Giora Eiland, aimed to create a buffer zone in northern Gaza by applying immense military and living pressures on the population.
However, as evident from the ongoing images from the region, the displaced population continues to resist and return, undermining Israel’s relocation goals.
Hamas’s military structure endures One of Netanyahu’s primary goals was to dismantle Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
However, in the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire, images showed Hamas fighters organising military parades in southern Gaza, signalling the resilience of Hamas’s military structure even before the ceasefire officially began.
Despite Israeli claims of killing thousands of Hamas fighters and destroying significant portions of Gaza’s tunnel network, the rapid and organized emergence of Al-Qassam forces on the ground suggests that these Israeli claims may have been aimed more at reassuring the Israeli public about the progress of the war, rather than reflecting the true situation on the ground.
Failure of post-war plans In December 2023, Netanyahu rejected Palestinian proposals that Hamas be included in Gaza’s post-war governance, insisting, “There will be no Hamas in the post-war period; we will eliminate them.”
Throughout the war, Israel attempted various unilateral methods to manage Gaza, including direct military administration and creating a new technocratic authority with local leaders, but all efforts failed.
Israeli military attempts to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza also proved ineffective, as the army struggled to manage these operations.
As the conflict nears what is supposed to be its final phase, the governance structure in Gaza has not changed.
Hamas’s leadership, especially the Al-Qassam Brigades, continues to operate effectively, and the ceasefire agreement has allowed for the resumption of local security forces.
Even after Israel’s targeted assassinations of 723 members of Gaza’s police and security apparatus, the resilience of Gaza’s security forces has remained evident.
This failure of Israel’s post-war vision was highlighted by a comment from a political analyst on Israeli i24 News, who questioned the results of the prolonged military operation: “What have we achieved in a year and five months?
“We destroyed many homes, lost many of our best soldiers, and in the end, the result is the same: Hamas rules, aid enters, and the Qassam Brigades return.”
Republished from The Palestinian Chronicle with permission.
Hamas has claimed victory in their armed conflict with the genocidal state of Israel, following the announcement of the long-overdue ceasefire agreement. The ceasefire, as impossible as it seems, may well bring an end to the killing, but it will not bring an end to the conflict.
Hamas won because they didn’t lose
Hamas arguably did win, because Israel failed to degrade and destroy them — a stated aim that was used to justify the invasion of Gaza and the barbaric murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians that followed.
Israel didn’t destroy Hamas, it sat round a negotiating table with them. Put simply, Hamas won because they didn’t lose.
Israel, humiliated by homemade hand grenades and rocket launchers built from recycled piping, has lost. Its reputation destroyed, its leader a wanted fugitive, a national conscience irreversibly stained by its vociferous support for its TikTok rapist army and their bloody, unforgivable actions carried out under the false premise of “self-defence”.
The existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, capable of blowing us all to smithereens in a matter of minutes, was built upon a foundation of lies.
The hard-right, Tory-led EU referendum project — remember that extra £350 million a week for our NHS? — and publicly-fronted by some of the most deceitful, loathsome politicians of our generation, was built upon a foundation of lies.
The vilification of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — besmirched, smeared and castigated by the ruling classes for the ‘crime’ of honesty and integrity — was built upon a foundation of lies.
And now we can add the death machine of Israel’s claim of “self-defence” to the list of colossal lies, serving as an unbearably painful reminder of the grave impact that deception can have on the world.
It’s the Palestinian people that have lost
But the greatest losers of Israel’s genocidal reign of terror are undoubtedly the Palestinian people.
As if more than 75 years of brutal oppression and illegal occupation wasn’t enough already?
As if anyone with just a shred of common decency and a semblance of humanity would think it is acceptable to slaughter children in their thousands?
As if anyone would vote for someone that thinks it is.
Keir Starmer’s suspiciously racist response to the news of a potential ceasefire may as well have been written by Labour Friends of Israel, or even Mrs Tzipi Hotoveley, the deranged Israeli ambassador to the UK. How the fuck has that hateful hag miraculously avoided a date with The Hague?
What has the lobby got on Keir Starmer? Nobody would behave quite so callously and recklessly unless they were completely and utterly compromised, would they?
I have to be honest, the thought of a return to apartheid, occupation, and the continuing violence towards the Palestinian people gives me very little reason to celebrate a fragile ceasefire agreement.
A cynical ceasefire
Cynical? You bet I am. Israel has repeatedly violated the 4th Geneva Convention and other acts contrary to its provisions, such as illegal settlements and collective punishment.
Can you really see Israel walking away from Gaza, defeated and humiliated? Their plan was clear enough: release all of the Israeli hostages and destroy Hamas. What a catastrophic failure.
A warts-and-all, independent investigation, backed by Keir Starmer, should be launched into Britain’s pivotal role in the criminality and brutality we have witnessed in Gaza and the West Bank during the past fifteen months.
Israel has always considered itself to be above the law and claims its integrity is beyond reproach.
The International Criminal Court has appeared to be somewhat sanguine about the annihilation of the Palestinian people. They have postured as the lawful solution while failing to stop the barbaric actions of a tiny pariah state that declares itself beyond the reach of international law.
International law itself is on trial alongside Israel. It isn’t unreasonable to ask what value international law holds when it cannot stop the indiscriminate killing, starving, and maiming of an entire population.
Israeli propaganda failed
Israel’s obliteration of institutions such as the Al-Shifa Hospital, the brazen assassination of healthcare workers, and the starvation of Palestinian children are rendered as contested events that should be left open to interpretation, rather than abominable, wicked war crimes that demand accountability at the very highest level of international law.
Britain’s handling of the crisis in Gaza has been absolutely disastrous. From the supply of components that are used to construct weapons of death to the embarrassingly gutless response to the shocking murder of British humanitarian workers, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have reduced our international stock to the levels of a rogue state such as Belarus
Israeli propaganda has failed to win the hearts and minds of a global audience, thanks to the first ever live-streaming of a genocide. No amount of Eylon Levy TikTok videos was ever going to change that.
Talking of that intolerable lying shit Levy, whatever happened to him? He used to be front and centre of every Israeli lie, then suddenly, he disappeared, just to be replaced by another weird private-schooled British guy
Honestly, nothing would make me happier than not having to write another word about Israel. But their vile colonialist ideology renders this almost impossible.
Will the ceasefire ever be properly implemented?
It remains to be seen if this ceasefire will ever be fully implemented. Israel cannot be trusted. My eternal hope is overshadowed by a hefty dose of past experience.
Israel would quite happily fire rockets at itself if it thought the rest of the gullible imperialist West would swallow up the lies and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the terrorist regime, once again. Tragically, and without our consent, Britain would be at the front of the queue.
Nelson Mandela once said:
We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians…
With current events in mind, never a truer word has been spoken.
A fragile ceasefire is just one small step along a seemingly never-ending road of despair for the oppressed people of Palestine, but let us take a moment to share in their relief, however temporary it may or may not be.
I have wrestled with what to say in this urgent moment, long yearned for and that often appeared beyond reach during these last 15 hideous months.
One of the questions that I grappled with was this: What could I possibly share with readers that would even remotely capture the meaning and profundity of an apparent agreement to stop the wholesale massacre of Palestinians?
I had not suffered. My home is intact. My family and I are alive and well. We are warm, together and safe.
So, the other pressing dilemma I confronted was: Is it my place to write at all? This space should be reserved, I thought, for Palestinians to reflect on the horrors they have endured and what is to come.
Their voices will, of course, be heard here and elsewhere in the days and weeks ahead. My voice, in this context, is insignificant and, under these grievous circumstances, borders on being irrelevant.
Still, if you and, in particular, Palestinians will oblige me, this is what I have to say:
I think that there are four words that each, in their own way, bear some significance to Wednesday’s happy news that the guns are poised to go silent.
The first and perhaps most fitting word is “relief”.
There will be ample time and opportunity for the “experts” to draw up their predictable scorecards of the “winners” and “losers” and the broader short- and long-term strategic implications of Wednesday’s deal.
There will, as well, be ample time and opportunity for more “experts” to consider the political consequences of Wednesday’s deal in the Middle East, Europe and Washington, DC.
My preoccupation, and I suspect the preoccupation of most Palestinians and their loved ones in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, is that peace has arrived finally.
How long it will last is a question best posed tomorrow. Today, let us all revel in the relief that is a dividend of peace.
Palestinian boys and girls are dancing with relief. After months of grief, loss and sadness, joy has returned. Smiles have returned. Hope has returned.
Let us enjoy a satisfying measure of relief, if not pleasure, in that.
There is relief in Israel, too.
The families of the surviving captives will soon be reunited with the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, they have longed to embrace again.
They will, no doubt, require care and attention to heal the wounds to their minds, souls and bodies.
That will be another, most welcomed, dividend of peace.
The next word is “gratitude”.
Those of us who, day after dreadful day, have watched — bereft and helpless as a ruthless apartheid state has gone methodically about reducing Gaza to dust and memory — owe our deepest gratitude to the brave, determined helpers who have done their best to ease the pain and suffering of besieged Palestinians.
We owe our everlasting gratitude to the countless anonymous people, in countless places throughout Gaza and the West Bank, who, at grave risk and at the expense of so many young, promising lives, put the welfare of their Palestinian brothers and sisters ahead of their own.
We must be grateful for their selflessness and courage. They did their duty. They walked into the danger. They did not retreat. They stood firm. They held their ground. They rebuffed the purveyors of death and destruction who tried to erase their pride and dignity.
They reminded the world that humanity will prevail despite the occupier’s efforts to crush it.
The third word is “acknowledge”.
The world must acknowledge the steadfast resistance of Palestinians.
The occupier’s aim was to break the will and spirit of Palestinians. That has been the occupier’s intent for the past 75 years.
Once again, the occupier has failed.
Palestinians are indefatigable. They are, like their brethren in Ireland and South Africa, immovable.
They refuse to be routed from their land because they are wedded to it by faith and history. Their roots are too deep and indestructible.
Palestinians will decide their fate — not the marauding armies headed by racists and war criminals who cling to the antiquated notion that might is right.
It will take a little more time and patience, but the sovereignty and salvation that Palestinians have earned in blood and heartache is, I am convinced, approaching not far over the horizon.
The final word is “shame”.
There are politicians and governments who will forever wear the shame of permitting Israel to commit genocide against the people of Palestine.
These politicians and governments will deny it. The evidence of their crimes is plain. We can see it in the images of the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza. We will record every name of the more than 46,000 Palestinian victims of their complicity.
That will be their decrepit legacy.
Rather than stop the mass murder of innocents, they enabled it. Rather than prevent starvation and disease from claiming the lives of babies and children, they encouraged it. Rather than turn off the spigot of arms, they delivered them. Rather than shout “enough”, they spurred the killing to go on and on.
We will remember. We will not let them forget.
That is our responsibility: to make sure that they never escape the shame that will follow each and every one of them like a long, disfiguring shadow in the late-day sun.
Shame on them. Shame on them all.
Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning writer and journalism educator at the University of Toronto. He has been an investigative reporter for a variety of news organisations and publications, including the CBC, CTV, Saturday Night Magazine, Reader’s Digest, the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. He is also a columnist for Al Jazeera.
There should be only one reason why people enter politics. It is for the good of the nation and the people who voted them in. It is to be their voice at the national level where the country’s future is decided.
The recent developments within the Samoan government are a stark reminder that people have chosen politics for reasons other than that. We are at a point where people are guessing what is next.
Will the faction backing Laauli Leuatea Schmidt continue on their path to remove Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa or will they bite the bullet and work together for the better of the nation?
The removal of the prime minister and the nation heading to snap elections has far-ranging implications. While the politicians plot and play a game of chess with the nation and its people, at the end of the day it will be people who will feel the adverse effects.
After the 2021 Constitutional Crisis and then the economic downturn from the effects of the measles lockdown and the covid-19 pandemic, the nation had just started recovering. A snap election would impact this recovery and the opportunity cost would be far greater than people have thought.
According to political scientist Dr Christina La’ala’i Tauasa, should the ruling party proceed with a vote of no confidence against the PM. In terms of party unity, a no-confidence vote could deepen internal divisions within the FAST party, potentially leading to a leadership crisis and a weakened government.
“Overall, there is Samoa’s political stability to carefully take into consideration as a successful vote of no confidence will no doubt destabilise the country’s political landscape, prompting more questions about the state of the party’s cohesion, particularly their ability and capacity to effectively govern and lead Samoa given their first term in government. The country and the FAST party cannot afford to go into a snap election, it would be a loss for all except the Opposition party,” she said.
The nation needs leadership that will drive economic growth, the development of infrastructure and basic services.
There is a hospital that is slowly falling apart, there are not enough doctors and nurses, teachers are needed in hundreds, people are unable to send children to school because of high education costs and the disabled population does not have access to equal opportunities in education and employment, better roads are needed, towns are getting flooded whenever it rains, there is a meth scourge which indicates the need for better control at the border, agriculture and fisheries are in dire need of fuel injection, many families are living in poverty, there is a need for an overhaul of the electricity infrastructure and not every household in the country can access clean water.
The list goes on. This should be the focus of the government and if the government is split then this cannot take place. It seems like there is a race to grab power at the expense of the people.
If politicians are concerned about the good of the nation and its people, all efforts should be made to have a government in place that would focus on these issues.
The days leading up to the first parliamentary session and thereafter will bring to light the true colours of the people we have elected. There will be two kinds, one who chose the path to genuinely help improve the lives of the people and prosper the nation and the second who only wants to prosper their needs.
Time will tell.
This Samoa Observer editorial was first published on 16 January 2025. Republished with permission.
Myanmar’s military approaches the fourth anniversary of the coup d’etat that put them in power in terminal decline.
The economy continues to atrophy, with even more pronounced energy shortages, less foreign exchange, and an even larger share of the budget allocated to the military.
The battlefield losses are staggering, as the opposition has withstood Chinese pressure to stop their offensives, and continues to hand the over-stretched military defeat after defeat. Opposition forces now control two of the 14 military regional commands.
According to the National Unity Government (NUG) Ministry of Defense, the opposition is in full control of 95 of 330 townships, while the State Administrative Council (SAC), as the junta calls itself, had full control over 107 townships.
By the junta’s own admission, they are only able to conduct a census and safely organize elections in 161 of Myanmar’s 330 townships.
Losses on all battlefronts
Having taken 15 of 17 townships in Rakhine state, the Arakan Army is now in almost total control of the key western state. They’ve surrounded the Rakhine capital of Sittwe and come up to the border of Kyaukphyu where China’s special economic zone and port are located.
Although the capture of Buthidaung and Ann were neither quick nor easy, the AA was able to sustain sieges of over a month at each, and in the case of the former, tunneled beneath the last military outpost in a stunning display of grit.
Having captured the southern city of Gwa, the Arakan Army has now crossed into Ayeyarwaddy, taking the fight into the Bamar ethnic majority heartland.
Smoke rises from fires in Kyauk Ni Maw village in Rakhine state, Myanmar, after a Myanmar Air Force bombing raid on Jan 8, 2025.(Arakan Princess Media)
In the north, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has shrugged off extensive Chinese pressure, and taken the strategic junction town of Mansi, which will make the overland resupply of the besieged city of Bhamo from Mandalay very hard for the junta.
Fighting is ongoing in Bhamo, Kachin’s second largest city. The KIA is now in control of well over half of Kachin, including most of the resource rich regions.
Although they are known for fractiousness, Chin opposition forces are now in almost full control of that state that borders India and Bangladesh, holding five of nine townships, roughly 85% of the territory.
In Shan state, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) temporarily succumbed to Chinese pressure to stop their offensive in November, but they’ve neither surrendered Lashio nor ceded territory, despite airstrikes.
Citing a new military offensive in Naungcho township, the TNLA, which controls nine townships, announced an end to the ceasefire on Jan. 9.
A member of the anti-junta Karenni Nationalities Defence Force holds landmines planted by the Myanmar military and removed during demining operations near Pekon township, July 11, 2023.(AFP)
In eastern Myanmar, Karenni resistance have continued to battle, despite concerted military regime efforts and airstrikes, and their acknowledged ammunition shortages. The Karenni National Defense Force and allied People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) militias claim to control 80% of Kayah state.
Further south, the Karen National Liberation Army and allied people’s defense forces (PDFs) are slowly taking pro-junta border guard posts along the frontier with Thailand.
In Tanintharyi, local PDFs have increased their coordination and are pushing west from the Thai border towards the Andaman Sea coast, diminishing the scope of the military-controlled patchwork of terrain in Myanmar’s southernmost state.
Some of the most intense fighting of late has been in the Bamar heartland, including Sagaing, Magway, and Mandalay.
The military has stepped up their bombings, artillery strikes, and arson, intentionally targeting civilians for their support of the opposition forces. A number of PDFs have expanded their operations into the dry zone.
Mounting troubles
The Myanmar military regime faces severe headwinds as the fourth anniversary of the Feb. 1, 2021 coup approaches.
Prisoners of war from multiple fronts have recounted that the military’s ability to resupply and reinforce troops in the field has all but broken down.
They have a limited number of heavy lift helicopters, including three new Mi-17s that entered service in December. But even those are vulnerable: Some six Mi-17s and two other helicopters have been lost since the coup.
In some cases, the military has tried to parachute in supplies, but those often fall into the hands of the opposition forces.
Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing arrives to deliver a speech to mark the country’s Armed Forces Day, in Naypyidaw on March 27, 2024.(AFP)
Nothing demoralizes troops more than the feeling that the headquarters has abandoned them.
The military has always treated Myanmar as a country under occupation, with thousands of remote outposts scattered throughout the country. The NUG claims that opposition forces have captured 741 of these through 2024, and they continue to fall.
The military is increasingly short of manpower. Over a thousand POWs have been taken in recent months, more have surrendered and others have deserted.
The military has now taken in nine tranches of conscripts, amounting to roughly 45,000 troops, and is increasingly dragooning men. But they are deployed almost immediately and are untrained and poorly motivated, in sharp contrast with ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) and PDFs.
That loss of manpower includes senior officers. The NUG claims that in 2024, 53 senior officers, ranked colonel to major general, were killed, captured or injured.
The military is so broke that they recently announced that they would no longer pay death benefits to conscripts. At the same time, the military is often labeling their dead as “MIA”, rather than “KIA”, to avoid paying benefits.
Sittwe township, Rakhine State, Myanmar. is seen May 15, 2023.(Military True News Information Team via AP)
While the junta fumbles, the degree of tactical battlefield coordination between the legacy ethnic armies and the new PDFs is unprecedented.
Every major offensive outside of Rakhine, entails cooperation between them, and even there, the AA was assisted by Chin PDFs who blocked the military’s resupply from Magway.
The increased PDF operations have been made possible by increased assistance from EROs. The AA and Chin PDFs are pushing in from the west and assisting local PDFs in the Bamar heartland.
The AA’s foray into Ayeyarwaddy was done in concert with local PDFs. The United Wa State Army appears to be defying China by arming and equipping the Mandalay PDF and others that are operating in Mandalay, Magway, and Sagaing.
In its favor, the military has finally caught up to the opposition and effectively employed unmanned aerial systems down to the tactical level.
These include drones that can drop munitions, kamikaze drones, and those for intelligence gathering or for more accurate targeting of artillery.
This has proven costly for the opposition and impeded some of their offensives. Nonetheless, their deployment of drones has been too little too late, and will not fundamentally alter the battlefield dynamics.
The military continues to use air power. Indeed, they put their fifth and sixth SU-30 imported from Russia and three more FTC-2000Gs imported from China into service in December.
It’s the economy
But air power is primarily used as a punitive weapon against unarmed civilian targets, not in support of ground forces.
For example, the Jan. 9 bombing in Rakhine’s Yanbye township that killed 52, wounded over 40 and destroyed 500 homes, had no military utility.
Finally, the state of the economy is even more precarious given the loss of almost all border crossings.
Although the SAC technically still controls Muse and Myawaddy, which links them to China and Thailand, respectively, opposition forces control much of the surrounding territory.
While Karen forces have not made a bid to take Myawaddy, the main border crossing, they are pinching in along Asia Highway 1 to Yangon.
On Jan. 11, some 500 reinforcements in 30 armored personnel carriers were deployed from Hpa-An to Kawkareik in Kayan state near the Thai border to keep the last main overland trade artery open.
To sum it up, the junta is entering the fifth year of military rule with its power rapidly slipping away.
Although they still control one-third of the country – land that holds two-thirds of the population – their mismanagement of the economy has left the military regime broke.
Spread too thin across too many fronts simultaneously, it’s hard to see the SAC doing anything to arrest their terminal decline in 2025.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zachary Abuza.
Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game.
It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace.
It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.
If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.
The Israeli Cabinet delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza — but finally agreed to the deal. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the first 24 hours after the ceasefire was declared.
The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.”
He warned that his cabinet would not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”
Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.
The deal includes three phases.
The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages — 33 Israelis who were captured on October 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for up to 1000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt.
It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.
But it is Netanyahu’s office that appeared to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire.
“In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice,” while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza.
Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.
Israeli military ground operations in the Gaza Strip in November 2023. Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even with the Israelis finally accepting the agreement, threaten to implode it.
Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily.
There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable.
There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced.
There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.
Camp David
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), the late US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after the Camp David Peace Accords signing ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978. Image: US National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
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 Organization (PLO), normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
But the subsequent phases, 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 honored.
Oslo Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people; and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn.
It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed.
Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C.
The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Image: Vince Musi, White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law– was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “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 was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps”.
There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.
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.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s national security minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the day he was assassinated, giving a speech in favour of the Oslo Peace agreement in Tel Aviv. Image: Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn”.
These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).
Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel.
The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the “right to defend itself”.
Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children.
Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:
“the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men.
“Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.”
A child in Gaza City during the ceasefire after the 2008–2009 conflict. Image: andlun1, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defence and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were wounded.
In May 2021, Israel killed more than 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.
And then the breaching of the security barriers on October 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison.
The attacks by Palestinian gunmen [Al-Aqsa Deluge] left some 1200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.
This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged — the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.
But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.
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 article is republished from his X account.
Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game.
It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace.
It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.
If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.
The Israeli Cabinet delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza — but finally agreed to the deal. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the first 24 hours after the ceasefire was declared.
The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.”
He warned that his cabinet would not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”
Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.
The deal includes three phases.
The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages — 33 Israelis who were captured on October 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for up to 1000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt.
It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.
But it is Netanyahu’s office that appeared to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire.
“In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice,” while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza.
Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.
Israeli military ground operations in the Gaza Strip in November 2023. Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even with the Israelis finally accepting the agreement, threaten to implode it.
Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily.
There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable.
There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced.
There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.
Camp David
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), the late US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after the Camp David Peace Accords signing ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978. Image: US National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
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 Organization (PLO), normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
But the subsequent phases, 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 honored.
Oslo Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people; and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn.
It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed.
Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C.
The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Image: Vince Musi, White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law– was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “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 was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps”.
There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.
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.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s national security minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the day he was assassinated, giving a speech in favour of the Oslo Peace agreement in Tel Aviv. Image: Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn”.
These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).
Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel.
The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the “right to defend itself”.
Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children.
Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:
“the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men.
“Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.”
A child in Gaza City during the ceasefire after the 2008–2009 conflict. Image: andlun1, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defence and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were wounded.
In May 2021, Israel killed more than 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.
And then the breaching of the security barriers on October 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison.
The attacks by Palestinian gunmen [Al-Aqsa Deluge] left some 1200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.
This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged — the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.
But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.
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 article is republished from his X account.
My name is Sean Armstrong and I am a young disabled/Autistic man living in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. I have had experience of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit system since the age of eighteen.
I’ve lived with mild cerebral palsy from birth, and dyscalculia. The latter is similar to dyslexia – only it impacts me working with numbers instead of letters. Recently, I was diagnosed with autism. To me, it explained a lot about my behavior. If I don’t like something, I tend to show it.
Finding work as an autistic disabled man
Over the years, I have had many interviews with many companies and agencies, but the majority haven’t offered me employment. They have always given me the same excuse. They’ve repeatedly told me that I do well conducting myself in the interviews – I answer all of the questions confidently and competently – however, they cannot offer me the role because I lack experience. The question is, how the devil are you supposed to get the experience if no-one gives you a chance?
To gain experience I have had odd jobs. However, these haven’t led to much. They have mainly been in call centres. These tasked me with stupid sales targets for booking as many customers appointments over the phone as possible. The pushy, manipulative nature of sales doesn’t come naturally to me. So unfortunately, due to this, these have lasted a month at most.
I grew tired of going to jobs which are unsupportive or unrealistic, and going for interviews for roles which I had no chance of getting.
Discrimination on the government Remploy programme
In 2014, I found myself on Remploy’s books. The training provider found me a placement at the Community Recycling Consortium (CRC). This was an organisation which offered volunteering and employment experience to disabled people who lived with mental health issues.
As an admin volunteer for many organisations, I have had many years of experience typing letters, dealing with paperwork, and meeting customers in person and over the phone. Therefore, I did quite well with this placement, and the CRC offered me a job as an Admin Apprentice level two.
This however, was a lie. All it involved was manning the phones and calling businesses to ask them if they were willing to donate any sort of IT or other used electrical equipment. In reality, there was no admin in the role besides creating a table as a record for the businesses which I spoke to.
Worse still was the fact that one of the directors and a manager would often bully me and subject me to disability discrimination. He regularly made comments on my telephone manner. But during my time working in call centres, nearly every member of staff had commented on how professional I sounded to customers over the phone. On top of this, the director and my manager would mock my dyscalculia.
The manager would walk into the office every morning saying verbal obscenities, which really put me off work.
However, it wasn’t only verbal bullying and harassment. The company also discriminated against me in my pay. As a result of the bullying, I took a few days off sick. When I returned the following week, the company paid me £25 for my entire weekly wage. The pay there was just £99 a week, cash-in-hand.
The following week, I left the job.
When I made a complaint to Remploy about the company, they closed ranks. My work coach took CRC’s side and it went no further.
The DWP Work Programme and Restart Scheme
The following year, I asked the Job Centre if they could help find me an administration training course. I was keen to do one to increase my chances of finding and securing work. And in March of that year, they found me one with my local college. By April, I had passed my City and Guilds Level Two in Business Administration.
Unfortunately however, it didn’t help me secure employment. Like before, I had many interviews, but all without success.
That was when the DWP put me onto the government’s Work Programme. I participated in this for a full year from September 2017. This was just more job searching and interviews, but still no work. I found the scheme hopeless as no member of staff would help.
Then, in August 2023, the DWP put me on the government’s Restart Scheme. Again, like the scheme before, this one was hopeless. Once more, all this involved was more job searching. I found one work coach very patronising. She would always tell me that I shouldn’t give up in looking for work, but then tell me that they couldn’t convince employers to offer me a role in this short period of time. By August 2024, I was glad to leave the scheme – which had utterly failed to help me find work.
DWP benefit system: not fit for purpose for disabled and autistic people
My experiences within the DWP’s benefit system, and on its work programmes, have only made it harder for me to return to employment.
Now, I am focusing on my writing and photography. I have been working on a 13-book series of young adult Science Fiction novels since 2019. Currently on my final manuscript, I’m looking for an agent to represent them. I also have dreams of pursuing a role in public speaking for disabled/autistic people.
I’m currently claiming Universal Credit, and the Jobcentre continues to pressure me to look for work.
The system for benefits has failed disabled and autistic people like me. It’s therefore not fit for purpose. The government needs to change it, in order to help disabled and autistic people to find employment which is right for them.
A ceasefire in Gaza is not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. Legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.
ANALYSIS:By David Hearst
When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first.
For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.
That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza.
Still Netanyahu persisted. Last May, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.
In October, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a “terrorist”.
It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.
Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea.
The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.
Red lines erased No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his Secretary of State, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.
Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth.
Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.
It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.
In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will
After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in military gear – now a wanted man by the ICC . . . “After one meeting, the red lines that he had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.” Image: AJ screenshot APR
As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said: “We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us . . . We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”
This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of claims of victory.
“There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging ceasefire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet.
The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had previously rejected.
Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to clear it of its inhabitants has failed.
This is the biggest single failure of Israel’s ground invasion.
Fighting back There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza.
A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.
It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.
Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.
“But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have ‘cleansed’ the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.” Image: AJ screenshot APR
Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the weakest Hamas battalion.
But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.
Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them in Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.
If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.
“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, “is managing everything”.
If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.
Against the odds In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.
In Algeria and Vietnam, the French and US armies had overwhelming military advantage.
Both forces withdrew in ignominy and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.
In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more decisive than the firepower of the strong.
In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land — even as it was being reduced to rubble — that proved to be the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat, considering that the 360 sq km territory was entirely cut off from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain for cover.
Hezbollah fought in the north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding their tents.
Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break their will to stay on their land.
Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of resistance in the history of the conflict — and it could prove to be transformative.
Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic Western nation in the eyes of global opinion.
Generational memory Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.
The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.
In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of Israel that public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was changing.
With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict
“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even.
“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”
Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.
Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 percent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathise with the Palestinian people as a whole.
This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed that a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be antisemitic.
“The antiwar protests, condemned by Western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.” Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
Deep damage The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its pocket.
But the damage goes further and deeper than this.
The antiwar protests, condemned by Western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.
Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only are there arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but a myriad of other cases are about to flood the courts in every major western democracy.
A court action has been launched in the UK against BP for supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkiye.
In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities of all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that they could be pursued when travelling abroad.
This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war crimes with the UCJ against 1000 Israelis, including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.
A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.
Internal divisions At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the Haredim who refuse to serve.
There is a battle between secular and national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory.
All the while, there has been an unprecedented exodus of Jews from Israel.
Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon and Syria. It would be foolish to think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.
Iran’s axis of resistance might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting force.
And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by the Gaza genoicide and the ongoing crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.
Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan.
Annexation would be treated in Amman as an act of war.
Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and Trump is not a patient man.
Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.
Gaza has shown all Palestinians — and the world — that it can withstand total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything they had at it, and there was not another Nakba.
Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about equal rights.
It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz.
But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic significance.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. This article has been republished from the Middle East Eye under Creative Commons.
‘In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff. However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult,’ writes Chris Gunness.
In the last week of January, two Knesset bills ending Israel’s “cooperation” with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are scheduled to come into force.
If they do, UNRWA’s activities in the territory of the state of Israel would be illegal under Israeli law and any Israeli official or institution engaging with the agency would be breaking the law.
In a letter to the president of the General Assembly in October, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, revealed he had written to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging his government to take the necessary steps to avoid the legislation being implemented.
He also expressed concern that these laws would harm UNRWA’s ability to deliver life-saving services in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
This provoked a detailed response from Israel’s UN Ambassador in New York, Danny Dannon, who responded laying out Israel’s strategic planning pursuant to the Knesset bills.
UNRWA to be expelled from Jerusalem Much about Israel’s strategy was already known, for example its plan to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza and deliver services through a combination of other UN agencies, such as the World Food Programme (WFP) along with the Israeli military and private sector companies.
Dannon made clear that the occupying authorities plan to take over UNRWA facilities in Jerusalem.
According to UNRWA’s website, these include 10 schools, three primary health clinics and a training centre. Students would likely be sent to Israeli schools for the Palestinian population of occupied East Jerusalem, whose curricula have been subject to “Judaisistation” in contravention of Israel’s international humanitarian law obligations to the occupied population.
There is also a major question mark over UNRWA’s massive headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah.
The UNRWA compound, which contains several huge warehouses for humanitarian goods, has been subjected to arson attacks in recent months, which forced it to shut down.
Nonetheless, it seems UNRWA’s Jerusalem HQ may be shut down in the face of Israeli threats, violence and pressure. Staff are being told to relocate to offices in Amman as a result of a performance review and UNRWA says its Jerusalem HQ was only ever temporary.
But a recent communication from UNRWA to its donors makes clear that the agency is ceding to Israeli intimidation: “While the review of HQ functions has been underway for a number of years, the review and decision has been fast-tracked as a result of the administrative and operational challenges experienced by the agency throughout 2024, including visa issuance, visa duration and lack of issuing diplomatic ID cards.
“These challenges have inhibited our effectiveness to work as a Headquarters in Jerusalem.”
De facto annexation If UNRWA is expelled from East Jerusalem, this would have potentially devastating impact on over 63,000 Palestinian refugees who depend on its services.
Moreover, it would have profound political significance, particularly for the global Islamic community because it would set the seal on Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, home to Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.
It would also be a violation of the ruling last July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding that the occupation ends.
The annexation of Jerusalem as the “eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state” which began with the occupation in 1967, would become another illegal fact on the ground.
Crucially, Jerusalem will have been unilaterally removed from whatever is left of the Middle East Peace Process.
Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia and Jordan, must therefore act now, and decisively, to save their holy city. The loss of Jerusalem will undoubtedly provoke a violent reaction among Palestinians and likely lead to calls for jihad more widely. In the context of an explosive Middle East this can only engender further destabilising tensions for governments in the region.
I therefore call on Saudi Arabia to make the scrapping of the Knesset legislation a precondition in the normalisation negotiations with Israel. The Saudi administration must make this clear to Netanyahu and insist that for Muslims, Jerusalem is sacrosanct, and that the expulsion of UNRWA is a step too far.
The Trump transition team has already been warned of the looming catastrophe if Israel is allowed to destroy UNRWA’s operations, and I urge Arab leaders to insist with their Saudi interlocutors that the regional fallout from this feature prominently in the normalisation talks.
Lack of contingency planning Meanwhile, the senior UN leadership has adopted the position that the responsibility to deliver aid is Israel’s as the occupying power. To the consternation of UNRWA staffers, substantive inter-agency discussions across the humanitarian system about a UN-led day-after plan have effectively been banned.
For Palestinians against whom a genocide is being committed, this feels like abandonment and betrayal — a sense compounded by suspicions that UNRWA international staff may be forced to leave Gaza at a time of mass starvation.
Similar conclusions were reached by Dr Lex Takkenberg, senior advisor with Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), and other researchers who have just completed an as yet unpublished assessment of the implications of Israel’s ban on UNRWA, based on interviews with a large number of UNRWA staff and other experts.
Their study confirms that with the lack of contingency planning, the suffering of the Palestinian population, particularly in Gaza, will increase dramatically, as the backbone of the humanitarian operation crumbles without an alternative structure in place.
Contrary to UNRWA, Israel has been doing a great deal of contingency planning with non-UNRWA agencies such as WFP, which are under strong US pressure to take over aid imports from UNRWA. As a result, the amount of aid taken into Gaza by UNRWA has reduced significantly.
In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff.
However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult. They claim to be “deconflicting” aid deliveries, but according to UN sources there is clear evidence that Israeli soldiers are firing on vehicles and allowing criminal gangs to plunder convoys with impunity.
Thus Israeli officials are able to say to journalists whom they have barred from seeing the truth in Gaza, that they are allowing in all the aid Gaza needs, but that UNRWA is unfit for purpose. This lie has gone unchallenged in the international media.
Further implications According to Takkenberg, “Mr Guterres’s strategy of calling on Israel as the occupying power to deliver aid has backfired and is inflicting untold suffering on the Palestinians.
“The strategy also feels misplaced, given that Israel is accused of genocide in the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, and is facing expulsion from the UN General Assembly”.
He adds that Israel “has exploited the UN’s strategy as part of its campaign of starvation and genocide.”
In the face of this, I call on the Secretary-General to mobilise the UN system. He has said repeatedly that UNRWA is the backbone of the UN’s humanitarian strategy, that the agency is indispensable and key to regional stability.
It is time for the UNSG to walk the walk.
He must use his powers under Article 99 of the UN charter, granted precisely for these circumstances, to call the Security Council into emergency session and make his demand that the Knesset legislation must not be implemented the top agenda item. The General Assembly which gives UNRWA its mandate must also be called into session.
Though Guterres faces huge pressure from Israel’s powerful allies, he must stand up on behalf of a people the UN is mandated to protect and double down on those who are complicit in genocide.
The UN’s policy in Gaza along with acceptance of Jerusalem’s annexation with impunity for Israel, has major implications for its credibility and I confidently predict it will lead to further attacks by Israel on other UN agencies, such as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which has long been an irritant to the Tel Aviv administration.
The de facto annexation of Jerusalem will also see an erosion of the international rule of law.
In its advisory opinion in July last year, the ICJ concluded that Israel is not entitled to exercise sovereign powers in any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory on account of its occupation. In addition, the expulsion of UNRWA would be in violation of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which obliges Israel as a signatory, to cooperate with UN Agencies such as UNRWA.
The UN’s historic responsibility to the Palestinians Already, through its attack on UNRWA Israel is attempting unilaterally to remove the Palestinian refugees, their history, their identity and their inalienable right of return from the peace process.
As I have argued many times, this will fail. So must Israel’s unilateral attempt to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table by expelling UNRWA and completing its illegal annexation of the city.
That would see the international community and the UN abandoning its historic responsibilities to the Palestinian people and can only lead to further suffering and instability in a chronically unstable Middle East. The Muslim world must act decisively and swiftly. The clock is ticking.
Chris Gunness served as UNRWA’s Director of Communications and Advocacy from 2007 until 2020. This article was first published in The New Arab.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s coalition government has introduced a bill to criminalise “improper conduct for or on behalf of a foreign power” or foreign interference that echoes earlier Cold War times, and could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”.
It is a threat to our democracy and here is why.
Two new offences are:
Offence 78AAA — a person thus charged must include all three of the following key elements — they:
know, or ought to know, they are acting for a foreign state, and
act in a covert, deceptive, coercive, or corruptive manner, and
intend to, or are aware that they are likely to, harm New Zealand interests specified in the offence through their actions OR are reckless as to whether their conduct harms New Zealand’s interests.
Offence 78AAB – a person thus charged must commit:
any imprisonable offence intending to OR being reckless as to whether doing so is likely to provide a relevant benefit to a foreign power.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
The bill also extends laws on publication of classified information, changes “official” information to “relevant” information, increases powers of unwarranted searches by authorities, and allows charging of people outside of New Zealand who “owe allegiance to the Sovereign in right of New Zealand” and aid and abet a non-New Zealander to carry out a “relevant act” of espionage, treason and inciting to mutiny even if the act is not in fact carried out.
Why this legislation is dangerous 1. Much of the language is vague and the terms subjective. How should we establish what an individual ‘ought to have known’ or whether he or she is being “reckless”? It is entirely possible to be a loyal New Zealand and hold a different view to that of the government of the day about “New Zealand’s interests” and “security”.
This proposed legislation is potentially highly undemocratic and a threat to free speech and freedom of association. Ironically the legislation is a close copy of similar legislation passed in Australia in 2018 and it reflects the messaging about “foreign interference” promoted by our Five Eyes partners.
How should we distinguish “foreign interference” from the multitude of ways in which other states seek to influence our trade, aid, foreign affairs and defence policies? It is not plausible that the motivation behind this legislation is to limit Western pressure on New Zealand to water down its nuclear free policy.
Or to ensure that its defence forces are interoperable with those of its allies and to be part of military exercises in the South China Sea. Or to host spyware tools on behalf of the United States. Or to sign trade agreements that favour US based corporates.
The government openly supports these activities, so it seems that the legislation is aimed at foreign interference from current geostrategic “enemies”. Which ones? China, Russia, Iran?
The introduction of a bill to criminalise foreign interference has echoes of earlier Cold War times as it has the potential to criminalise members of friendship organisations that seek to improve understanding and cooperation with people in countries such as China, Russia or North Korea.
It is entirely possible that their efforts could be seen as engaging in conduct “for or on behalf of” a foreign power.
There is also real concern is that this legislation could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”. There is a global movement of resistance to economic sanctions on Cuba and other countries including Venezuela, and North Korea.
Supporters are likely to liaise with representatives of those countries, and perhaps circulate their material. Could that be considered harming New Zealand’s interests? The inclusion of such vague wording (Clause 78AAB) as “enhancing the influence” of a foreign power is chilling in its potential to silence open debate, and especially dissent or protest.
The legislation is unnecessary Existing law already criminalises espionage which intentionally prejudices the security or defence of New Zealand. There are also laws to cover pressurising others by blackmail, corruption, and threats of violence or threats of harm to people and property.
It is true that diaspora critics of authoritarian regimes come under pressure from their home governments. Such governments seek to silence their critics who are outside their jurisdiction by threatening harm to their families still living in the home country.
But it is not clear how New Zealand law could prevent this as it cannot protect people who are not within its jurisdiction. This is something which diaspora citizens and overseas students studying here must be acutely conscious of. This issue is one for diplomacy and negotiation rather than law.
A threat to democracy The terms sedition and subversion have gone into disuse and are no longer part of our law.
They were used in the past to criminalise some and ensure that others were subject to intrusive surveillance.
In essence both terms justified State actions against dissidents or those who held an alternative vision of how society should be ordered. In Cold War times the State was particularly exercised with those who championed communist ideas, took an interest in the Soviet Union or China or associated with Communists.
Those who associated with Soviet diplomats or attended functions at the Soviet Embassy would often be subject to SIS surveillance.
Indonesia officially joined the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa — consortium last week marking a significant milestone in its foreign relations.
In a statement released a day later on January 7, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that this membership reflected Indonesia’s dedication to strengthening multilateral cooperation and its growing influence in global politics.
The ministry highlighted that joining BRICS aligned with Indonesia’s independent and proactive foreign policy, which seeks to maintain balanced relations with major powers while prioritising national interests.
This pivotal move showcases Jakarta’s efforts to enhance its international presence as an emerging power within a select group of global influencers.
Traditionally, Indonesia has embraced a non-aligned stance while bolstering its military and economic strength through collaborations with both Western and Eastern nations, including the United States, China, and Russia.
By joining BRICS, Indonesia clearly signals a shift from its non-aligned status, aligning itself with a coalition of emerging powers poised to challenge and redefine the existing global geopolitical landscape dominated by a Western neoliberal order led by the United States.
Indonesia joining boosts BRICS membership to 10 countres — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — but there are also partnerships.
Supporters of a multipolar world, championed by China, Russia, and their allies, may view Indonesia’s entry into BRICS as a significant victory.
In contrast, advocates of the US-led unipolar world, often referred to as the “rules-based international order” are likely to see Indonesia’s decision as a regrettable shift that could trigger retaliatory actions from the United States.
The future will determine how Indonesia balances its relations with these two superpowers. However, there is considerable concern about the potential fallout for Indonesia from its long-standing US allies.
The future will determine how Indonesia balances its relations with these two superpowers, China and the US. However, there is considerable concern about the potential fallout for Indonesia from its long-standing US allies. Image: NHK TV News screenshot APR
The smaller Pacific Island nations, which Indonesia has been endeavouring to win over in a bid to thwart support for West Papuan independence, may also become entangled in the crosshairs of geostrategic rivalries, and their response to Indonesia’s membership in the BRICS alliance will prove critical for the fate of West Papua.
Critical questions The crucial questions facing the Pacific Islanders are perhaps related to their loyalties: are they aligning themselves with Beijing or Washington, and in what ways could their decisions influence the delicate balance of power in the ongoing competition between great powers, ultimately altering the Melanesian destiny of the Papuan people?
For the Papuans, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS or any other global or regional forums is irrelevant as long as the illegal occupation of their land continues driving them toward “extinction”.
For the Papuans, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS or any other global or regional forums is irrelevant as long as the illegal occupation of their land continues driving them toward “extinction”. Image: NHK News screenshot APR
The pressing question for Papuans is which force will ultimately dismantle Indonesia’s unlawful hold on their sovereignty.
Will Indonesia’s BRICS alliance open new paths for Papuan liberation fighters to re-engage with the West in ways not seen since the Cold War? Or does this membership indicate a deeper entrenchment of Papuans’ fate within China’s influence — making it almost impossible for any dream of Papuans’ independence?
While forecasting future with certainty is difficult on these questions, these critical critical questions need to be considered in this new complex geopolitical landscape, as the ultimate fate of West Papua is what is truly at stake here.
Strengthening Indonesia’s claims over West Papuan sovereignty Indonesia’s membership in BRICS may signify a great victory for those advocating for a multipolar world, challenging the hegemony of Western powers led by the United States.
This membership could augment Indonesia’s capacity to frame the West Papuan issue as an internal matter among BRICS members within the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs.
Such backing could provide Jakarta with a cushion of diplomatic protection against international censure, particularly from Western nations regarding its policies in West Papua.
The growing BRICS world . . . can Papuans and their global solidarity networks reinvent themselves while nurturing the fragile hope of restoring West Papua’s sovereignty? Map: Russia Pivots to Asia
However, it is also crucial to note that for more than six decades, despite the Western world priding itself on being a champion of freedom and human rights, no nation has been permitted to voice concern or hold Indonesia accountable for the atrocities committed against Indigenous Papuans.
The pressing question to consider is what or who silences the 193 member states of the UN from intervening to save the Papuans from potential eradication at the hands of Indonesia.
Is it the United States and its allies, or is it China, Russia, and their allies — or the United Nations itself?
Indonesia’s double standard and hypocrisy Indonesia’s support for Palestine bolsters its image as a defender of international law and human rights in global platforms like the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
This commitment was notably highlighted at the BRICS Summit in October 2024, where Indonesia reaffirmed its dedication to Palestinian self-determination and called for global action to address the ongoing conflict in line with international law and UN resolutions, reflecting its constitutional duty to oppose colonialism.
Nonetheless, Indonesia’s self-image as a “saviour for the Palestinians” presents a rather ignoble facade being promoted in the international diplomatic arena, as the Indonesian government engages in precisely the same behaviours it condemns Israel over in Palestine.
Military engagement and regional diplomacy Moreover, Indonesia’s interaction with Pacific nations serves to perpetuate a façade of double standards — on one hand, it endeavours to portray itself as a burgeoning power and a champion of moral causes concerning security issues, human rights, climate change, and development; while on the other, it distracts the communities and nations of Oceania — particularly Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, which have long supported the West Papua independence movement — from holding Indonesia accountable for its transgressions against their fellow Pacific Islanders in West Papua.
On October 10, 2024, Brigadier-General Mohamad Nafis of the Indonesian Defence Ministry unveiled a strategic initiative intended to assert sovereignty claims over West Papua. This plan aims to foster stability across the Pacific through enhanced defence cooperation and safeguarding of territorial integrity.
The efforts to expand influence are characterised by joint military exercises, defence partnerships, and assistance programmes, all crafted to address common challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and natural disasters.
However, most critically, Indonesia’s engagement with Pacific Island nations aims to undermine the regional solidarity surrounding West Papua’s right to self-determination.
This involvement encapsulates infrastructure initiatives, defence training, and financial diplomacy, nurturing goodwill while aligning the interests of Pacific nations with Indonesia’s geopolitical aspirations.
Indonesia has formally joined the BRICS group, a bloc of emerging economies featuring Russia, China and others that is viewed as a counterweight to the West https://t.co/WArU5O2PfTpic.twitter.com/IQKmPOJqlS
Military occupation in West Papua As Indonesia strives to galvanise international support for its territorial integrity, the military presence in West Papua has intensified significantly, instilling widespread fear among local Papuan communities due to heightened deployments, surveillance, and restrictions.
Indonesian forces have been mobilised to secure economically strategic regions, including the Grasberg mine, which holds some of the world’s largest gold and copper reserves.
These operations have resulted in the displacement of Indigenous communities and substantial environmental degradation.
As of December 2024, approximately 83,295 individuals had been internally displaced in West Papua due to armed conflicts between Indonesian security forces and the West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB).
Recent reports detail new instances of displacement in the Tambrauw and Pegunungan Bintang regencies following clashes between the TPNPB and security forces. Villagers have evacuated their homes in fear of further military incursions and confrontations, leaving many in psychological distress.
The significant increase in Indonesia’s military presence in West Papua has coincided with demographic shifts that jeopardise the survival of Indigenous Papuans.
Government transmigration policies and large-scale agricultural initiatives, such as the food estate project in Merauke, have marginalised Indigenous communities.
These programmes, aimed at ensuring national food security, result in land expropriation and cultural erosion, threatening traditional Papuan lifestyles and identities.
For more than 63 years, Indonesia has occupied West Papua, subjecting Indigenous communities to systemic marginalisation and brink of extinction. Traditional languages, oral histories, and cultural values face obliteration under Indonesia’s colonial occupation.
A glimmer of hope for West Papua Despite these formidable challenges, solidarity movements within the Pacific and global communities persist in their advocacy for West Papua’s self-determination.
These groups, united by a shared sense of humanity and justice, work tirelessly to maintain hope for West Papua’s liberation. Even so, Indonesia’s diplomatic engagement with Pacific nations, characterised by eloquent rhetoric and military alliances, represents a calculated endeavour to extinguish this fragile hope for Papuan liberation.
Indonesia’s membership in BRICS will either amplify this tiny hope of salvation within the grand vision of a new world re-engineered by Beijing’s BRICS and its allies or will it conceal West Papua’s independence dream on a path that is even harder and more impossible to achieve than the one they have been on for 60 years under the US-led unipolar world system.
Most significantly, it might present a new opportunity for Papuan liberation fighters to reengage with the new re-ordering global superpowers– a chance that has eluded them for more than 60 years.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, the tumult of the First and Second World Wars, coupled with the ensuing cries for decolonisation from nations subjugated by Western powers and Cold War tensions, forged the very existence of the nation known as “Indonesia.”
It seems that this turbulent world of uncertainty is upon us, reshaping a new global landscape replete with new alliances and adversaries, harbouring conflicting visions of a new world. Indonesia’s decision to join BRICS in 2025 is a clear testament to this.
The pressing question remains whether this membership will ultimately precipitate Indonesia’s disintegration as the US-led unipolar world intervenes in its domestic affairs or catalyse its growth and strength.
Regardless of the consequences, the fundamental existential question for the Papuans is whether they, along with their global solidarity networks, can reinvent themselves while nurturing the fragile hope of restoring West Papua’s sovereignty in a world rife with change and uncertainty?
Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.
Even by Cambodian standards, it was a brazen attack on an opposition figure.
Lim Kimya, a 73-year old member of the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, was gunned down by an assassin in Bangkok on Jan. 7.
The hit was the latest in a growing pattern in which governments in Southeast Asia are complicit in the killing or rendition of opposition figures from neighboring countries –- or at least turn a blind eye to extralegal operations of their security forces within their borders.
This has been going on for years, but with little official accountability, the security forces appear to be acting with more impunity, and often in violation of the international legal norm of non-refoulement.
Central Investigation Bureau members stand near the spot where Lim Kimya, a former Cambodian MP, was shot in Bangkok on Jan. 7, 2025.(Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP)
At the heart of this is Thailand, a magnet for migrants or refugees from its poorer neighbors whose government is increasingly willing to work with its authoritarian neighbors, or is unable to prevent other security services from conducting operations on its soil.
Chinese security forces have long targeted dissidents in Thailand, such as Gui Minhai, who was snatched from his holiday home in Pattaya in 2015, or Li Xin, who went missing in the country a year later.
In both cases, it’s unclear the degree of Thai government complicity, but Bangkok’s decisions reflect the vast asymmetry in power between China and Thailand.
There’s no such power imbalance among Southeast Asian states, though.
In a recent report, Human Rights Watch has described the traffic in targeted dissidents as a “swap mart.”
There is no evidence that there are formal agreements between and among the countries, but there’s clearly a lot of informal cooperation.
Lao authorities, for example, notoriously disappeared rural development expert Sombath Somphone in December 2012 after taking him into police custody, and attempted to kill Anousa Luangsouphom in April 2023.
Quid pro quo
But less well known is their targeting of Free Lao activists on Thai soil.
In August 2019, a 34-year old Thai-based Lao activist, Od Sayavong, and his housemate went missing from his home in Bangkok. Thai authorities pled ignorance in the case and their investigation has stalled.
Lao democracy advocate Od Sayavong reads a statement at a protest in Bangkok, Thailand, June 16, 2019.(RFA)
In May 2023, Kitiyano Bounsuan, a 56-year-old Thai-based Lao democracy activist who had received UNHCR refugee status, was gunned down in bordering Ubon Ratchathani province.
These incidents may represent a quid pro quo between Bangkok and Vientiane.
Following the Thai military’s May 2014 seizure of power, a number of democracy activists fled to Laos.
During an April 2018 visit to Bangkok, Lt. Gen. Souvone Leuangbounmy, the chief-of-staff of the Lao People’s Armed Forces, pledged assistance to Gen.Prayuth Chanocha in tracking down Thai activists.
Disappearing activists
That help was already ongoing. In June 2016, the Thai anti-monarchy activists Ittapon Sukpaen disappeared; in 2017, Wuthipong Kachathamakul was abducted and never seen again.
In January 2019, the bodies of two other anti-monarchy activists, Chatcharn Buppawan, 56, and Kraidej Luelert, 46, washed up on the Thai bank of the Mekong River.
The two bodies were handcuffed and their feet bound, and they had been disemboweled, with their stomachs filled with concrete in order to sink the corpses.
One other activist, Surachai Danwattananusorn, 78, went missing at the same time, but his body has never been found.
In 2020, a Thai activist, Wanchalearm Satsaksit, was snatched from the streets of Phnom Penh.
An activist holds up a picture of Thai activist Wanchalearm Satsaksit at a protest calling for an investigation, in Bangkok, June 12, 2020.(Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)
Just last November, Thailand deported six members of the CNRP — four women and two men, along with a child — back to Cambodia. The six had escaped Cambodia in 2022, and were immediately charged with treason upon their return.
There is less cooperation between Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
Malaysian security forces have become displeased with the human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, and overall lack of accountability of Thai security forces in Thailand’s deep south, where ethnic Malay separatists have been waging a low-level insurgency for 21 years.
Nonetheless, sometimes there is a bit of Thai-Malaysian cooperation.
In September 2021, Thai authorities arrested and returned Nur Sajat, a Malaysian transgender entrepreneur, who was wanted by authorities for failing to appear before a sharia court on charges of insulting Islam.
Nur Sajat, a transgender woman wanted in Malaysia for allegedly insulting Islam, is seen in a photograph on her social media page.(nursajat23 via X)
This is all the more surprising given Thailand’s very progressive attitudes and laws on LGBTQ issues, and Malaysia’s draconian policies, including forced conversion therapy.
Helping Hanoi
No country has benefitted more from Thai cooperation or a blind eye in recent years than Vietnam.
In January 2019, Thai authorities detained Radio Free Asia blogger Truong Duy Nhat, who was in the process of applying for refugee status, and turned him over to Vietnamese police, who spirited him across the border to Laos and then Vietnam.
In March 2020, a Vietnamese court sentenced Nhat to 10 years for fraud, dating back to a nearly two-decade old investigation into the purchase of land for the newspaper’s office when he was editor at Dai Doan Ket, a state-owned paper in Danang.
Nhat had fled to Thailand in 2016 after serving a two-year prison term for “abusing democratic freedoms,” after writing blog posts that were critical of the Communist Party.
In April 2023, Vietnamese security forces allegedly abducted an exiled journalist, Duong Van Thai, 41, from outside of his house in northern Bangkok. Security cameras captured his shrieks.
Thai had fled to Thailand in 2019 fearing persecution, and like Nhat, was in the process of applying for refugee status.
Thailand’s ostensible democracy
While Vietnamese authorities may be chastened about trying more snatch-and-grabs from the streets of Germany, they clearly feel they can act with impunity or tacit approval in Southeast Asia.
Vietnamese authorities have also pursued legal extraditions.
In mid-2024, Thailand returned an ethnic minority Montagnard activist to Vietnam. Y Quynh Bdap, 32, had been living in Thailand since 2018 and had received UN refugee status.
Last October, a Thai court authorized his extradition, despite the fact that he faced a 10-year sentence after being tried and convicted in absentia of “terrorism” charges.
Trinh Xuan Thanh, a former Vietnamese state oil executive, is led to court in Hanoi on Jan. 22, 2018. Thanh was kidnapped from Germany.(VIETNAM NEWS AGENCY, Lillian Suwanrumpha/Vietnam News Agency via AFP)
Even more alarming, last March, a group of police from the Central Highland provinces of Dan Lak and Gia Lai were in Thailand conducting interviews in Montagnard refugee communities, trying to learn of Bdap’s whereabouts and to pressure the asylum seekers to return to Vietnam.
It is unlikely that Vietnamese police could have operated so overtly without the approval and support of Thai security forces.
In January 2024, nearly 100 Montagnard suspects were put on trial and convicted for riots that killed nine people, including four policemen, and resulted in the burning of commune offices. Some 53 of them were convicted on charges of “terrorism against the people’s government.”
While we should not be surprised by the actions of Lao, Cambodian or Vietnamese security forces, Thailand is ostensibly a democracy.
Since the 2014 military coup in Bangkok, however, Thai authorities have either been complicit or turned a blind eye to the actions of the security forces of neighboring authoritarian countries.
The elected Thai government of Paetongtarn Shinawatra is already on its back feet after the courts ousted her predecessor Srettha Thavsin.
Under military pressure, no Thai government can afford to be seen as anti-monarchy in any way.
To ensure access to exiled Thai anti-monarchists, Thailand has chosen to remain at the center of this informal compact to target neighboring dissidents.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
Out of the rubble of last year’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake that hit Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila on December 17 and the snap election due next week on January 16, a new leadership is required to reset the country’s developmental trajectory.
Persistent political turmoil has hampered the Pacific nation’s ability to deal with a compounding set of social and economic shocks over recent years, caused by climate-related and other natural disasters.
The earthquake is estimated to have conservatively caused US$244 million (VUV29 billion) in damage, and the Vanuatu government’s ability to pay for disaster response, the election, and resume public service delivery will require strong, committed and stable leadership.
Prior to the devastating quake and dramatic dissolution of Parliament on November 18, economist Peter Judge from Vanuatu-based Pacific Consulting warned of an evolving economic emergency.
Vanuatu’s US$1 billion economy faced a concerning decline in government revenue from value-added tax, down 25 percent on the previous year.
This was a ripple effect from the decline in economic activity after the collapse of national airline Air Vanuatu last May, as well as the falling revenues from the troubled Citizenship by Investment Programme.
Both were plagued by lack of oversight by parliamentarians.
Struggling economy
In 2024, Vanuatu is expected to record about 1 percent economic growth, as it struggles to climb out of the red and back to pre-pandemic levels.
Conversely, Vanuatu has a much more positive, although somewhat contradictory democratic profile.
According to the Global State of Democracy Initiative, Vanuatu is one of the more democratic states in the Pacific islands region, and currently ranks as 45th in the world.
But this performance comes with a significant price. Leadership turnover is frequent, with 28 prime ministerial terms in just 44 years of statehood, 20 of those in the last 25 years — the highest frequency of change in the Melanesian region.
The impacts of disrupted leadership and political instability are highly visible. Government decision-making and service delivery is grindingly slow.
In Vanuatu’s Parliament, the legislative process is frequently deferred due to regular motions of no confidence, with several critical bills still awaiting MPs’ attention.
Last October, for example, the Vanuatu government proposed a 2025 budget 10 percent smaller than 2024’s, due to reduced economic activity and declining government revenue.
Sudden dissolution
Parliament was unable to approve this year’s budget due to its sudden dissolution on November 18, only two-and-a-half years into a four-year political term.
This is the second consecutive presidential dissolution of Parliament, the previous one in 2022 also occurring barely two-and-a-half years into its term.
The Bill for the appropriation of the 2025 budget now awaits the formation of the next legislature for approval. In the meantime, earthquake recovery and election management costs accumulate under a caretaker government.
With deepening economic hardship and industries facing slow economic growth across multiple sectors, voters are looking for leadership that can stabilise the compounding cost of living pressures.
The new government will need to urgently tackle overdue, unresolved issues pertaining to reliable inter-island transport and air connectivity, outstanding teacher salaries and greater opportunities for the nation’s restive youth.
Democracy with political stability is the holy grail for Vanuatu. But attaining this legendary and supposedly miraculous prize comes with costs attached.
Rules come into force
In response to civic and youth activism in late 2023 calling for political stability and transparency, the last Parliament approved a national referendum to make political affiliation more accountable and end party hopping.The rules come into force in the next parliamentary term for the first time.
The referendum passed successfully on May 29, 2024, but cost US$2.9 million. The 2022 snap election required US$1.4 million and the 2025 poll is expected to require another US$1.6 million.
While revenue from candidature fees of US$250,000 does cover part of these costs, each legislature transition also weighs on the public purse.
The current crop of outgoing 52 parliamentarians were paid out US$1.62 million in gratuities and benefits — around US$31,000 per MP — even though most did not see out their full terms.
Whatever the outcome of the 2025 snap election, the incoming government will need to refocus attention on stabilising the trajectory of Vanuatu’s economy and development.
The next legislature — the 14th — will need to commit to stability in the interests of Vanuatu’s people and the nation’s development.
Budget, earthquake recovery priorities
The most immediate priorities for a new government should be the passage of the 2025 national budget and the implementation of an earthquake recovery and reconstruction plan.
In the 45 years since throwing off the British and French colonial yoke, citizens have enthusiastically done their duty at elections in the expectation of a national leadership that will take Vanuatu forward.
Now their faith appears to be waning, after the 2022 poll saw voter turnout — a key indicator of the health of a democracy — dropped below 50 percent for the first time since independence.
This election therefore needs to see a return on the considerable investment made in Vanuatu’s democratic processes, both in terms of financial cost to successive governments and donors, and more to the point, a political dividend for voters.
Anna Naupa is a ni-Vanuatu scholar and currently a PhD student at the Australian National University. Republished from BenarNews with permission.
An open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in response to the social media giant’s decision to abandon its fact-checking regime protection in the US against hoaxes and conspiracy theories. No New Zealand fact-checkers are on the list of signatories.
Nine years ago, we wrote to you about the real-world harms caused by false information on Facebook. In response, Meta created a fact-checking programme that helped protect millions of users from hoaxes and conspiracy theories. This week, you announced you’re ending that programme in the United States because of concerns about “too much censorship” — a decision that threatens to undo nearly a decade of progress in promoting accurate information online.
The programme that launched in 2016 was a strong step forward in encouraging factual accuracy online. It helped people have a positive experience on Facebook, Instagram and Threads by reducing the spread of false and misleading information in their feeds.
We believe — and data shows — most people on social media are looking for reliable information to make decisions about their lives and to have good interactions with friends and family. Informing users about false information in order to slow its spread, without censoring, was the goal.
Fact-checkers strongly support freedom of expression, and we’ve said that repeatedly and formally in last year’s Sarajevo statement. The freedom to say why something is not true is also free speech.
But you say the programme has become “a tool to censor,” and that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.” This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record.
Meta required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network. This meant no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency.
Each news organisation undergoes rigorous annual verification, including independent assessment and peer review. Far from questioning these standards, Meta has consistently praised their rigour and effectiveness. Just a year ago, Meta extended the programme to Threads.
Fact-checkers blamed and harassed Your comments suggest fact-checkers were responsible for censorship, even though Meta never gave fact-checkers the ability or the authority to remove content or accounts. People online have often blamed and harassed fact-checkers for Meta’s actions. Your recent comments will no doubt fuel those perceptions.
But the reality is that Meta staff decided on how content found to be false by fact-checkers should be downranked or labeled. Several fact-checkers over the years have suggested to Meta how it could improve this labeling to be less intrusive and avoid even the appearance of censorship, but Meta never acted on those suggestions.
Additionally, Meta exempted politicians and political candidates from fact-checking as a precautionary measure, even when they spread known falsehoods. Fact-checkers, meanwhile, said that politicians should be fact-checked like anyone else.
Over the years, Meta provided only limited information on the programme’s results, even though fact-checkers and independent researchers asked again and again for more data. But from what we could tell, the programme was effective. Research indicated fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information. And in your own testimony to Congress, you boasted about Meta’s “industry-leading fact-checking programme.”
You said that you plan to start a Community Notes programme similar to that of X. We do not believe that this type of programme will result in a positive user experience, as X has demonstrated.
Researchshows that many Community Notes never get displayed, because they depend on widespread political consensus rather than on standards and evidence for accuracy. Even so, there is no reason Community Notes couldn’t co-exist with the third-party fact-checking programme; they are not mutually exclusive.
A Community Notes model that works in collaboration with professional fact-checking would have strong potential as a new model for promoting accurate information. The need for this is great: If people believe social media platforms are full of scams and hoaxes, they won’t want to spend time there or do business on them.
Political context in US
That brings us to the political context in the United States. Your announcement’s timing came after President-elect Donald Trump’s election certification and as part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr Trump himself said your announcement was “probably” in response to threats he’s made against you.
Some of the journalists that are part of our fact-checking community have experienced similar threats from governments in the countries where they work, so we understand how hard it is to resist this pressure.
The plan to end the fact-checking programme in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programmes in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the programme worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.
This moment underlines the need for more funding for public service journalism. Fact-checking is essential to maintaining shared realities and evidence-based discussion, both in the United States and globally. The philanthropic sector has an opportunity to increase its investment in journalism at a critical time.
Most importantly, we believe the decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme is a step backward for those who want to see an internet that prioritises accurate and trustworthy information. We hope that somehow we can make up this ground in the years to come.
We remain ready to work again with Meta, or any other technology platform that is interested in engaging fact-checking as a tool to give people the information they need to make informed decisions about their daily lives.
Access to truth fuels freedom of speech, empowering communities to align their choices with their values. As journalists, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the freedom of the press, ensuring that the pursuit of truth endures as a cornerstone of democracy.
Editor: Fact-checking organisations continue to sign this letter, and the list is being updated as they do. No New Zealand fact-checking service has been added to the list so far. Republished from the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute.
To be Jewish does not mean an automatic identification with the rogue state of Israel. Nor does it mean that Jews are automatically threatened by criticism of Israel, yet our media and Labor and Liberal politicians would have you believe this is the case.
We are seeing a debate in Australia about the so-called rise of antisemitism which includes rally chants for Gaza at a time when we are witnessing the most horrific Israeli genocide of Palestinians in which our government is complicit.
Jewish peak bodies here and internationally have continually linked their identity to that of Israel.
Why? Can generations of Jews in this country still believe that Israel represents anything like the myths that were perpetrated at its inception?
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Jewish Board of Deputies and others, all staunchly defend this apartheid state that is accused of plausible genocide by the UN International Court of Justice and confirmed by dozens of human rights and legal NGOs, UN Rapporteurs, medical organisations and holocaust scholars.
Israel’s Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have been charged as war criminals by the International Criminal Court and must be arrested and tried in the Hague, yet Australia maintains a cosy relationship with Israel and our media dutifully repeats its outright lies verbatim.
Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been the main focus of the Israeli state and its defenders for decades. With the emergence of the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005, Israel’s narrative was countered, leading to a persistent Israeli directed campaign to link BDS with antisemitism.
Colonial, occupying power
BDS focuses on the actions of Israel as a colonial, occupying power violating international law against the indigenous people of Palestine. It is anti-racist and human rights-centred.
On December 11, we heard Prime Minister Albanese at the Jewish Museum in Sydney combining his support for Jewish people with his ongoing condemnation and active campaigning against BDS.
He referred to the Marrickville Council BDS motion, (which I proposed back in 2010 along with my Greens councillor colleague, Marika Kontellis), and again repeated the bald-faced mistruths that were spread back then about BDS and the intent and focus of the Marrickville motion.
“I was part of a campaign against BDS in my own local government area. At the time I argued that if you start targeting businesses because they happen to be owned by Jewish people, you’ll end up with the Star of David above shops.
“And that ended in World War II, during the Holocaust, with six million lives lost, murdered. We need an end to antisemitism.”
In one sentence we see Albanese’s extremely offensive equation of the horror of the Holocaust and antisemitism, directly linked to BDS. Why would a prime minister and local federal member deliberately mischaracterise BDS, given the movement has always been clear that its targets are global companies and corporations that are complicit in the Israeli state’s apartheid and genocidal actions, as well as Israeli government bodies and arms companies?
What is in it for Albanese, Wong, Plibersek or Dutton and all of the politicians back in 2010/2011 who appeared to think there was political advantage in scapegoating BDS by jumping on the frenzied anti-BDS campaign?
Fawning support for Israel
It was obvious back then, as it is now, that their fawning support for the rogue Israeli state knows no bounds. Lock step in line with the United States outlier position, Australia has maintained its repugnant inaction in the face of 15 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza despite continued condemnation by the UN and a majority of states.
But Australia has, however, appointed a public supporter of Zionism and the Israeli state, as its special envoy on antisemitism.
The inaction by all states since 1948 to apply sanctions has gifted Israel the impunity that’s led to its industrial scale slaughter of innocents in Gaza and its continuing violence and killing of civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All governments must bear responsibility for this.
At the time of the Marrickville BDS, he used the situation to attempt to discredit the Greens who were challenging the incumbent Labor state member, Carmel Tebbutt (his former wife). He fanned the national media frenzy that was fed by pro-Israel Jewish lobbyists who were the long-time custodians of the “reputation” of Israel.
Marrickville Council and the Greens were characterised as antisemites who would be pulling Jewish books out of the local library.
This insanity was akin to what is happening today. The legitimate opposition to the worst, most egregious, brutality of the Israeli state has somehow been cleverly morphed into so-called expressions of antisemitism.
Absurd claims on protest
In the media conference of December 11, Albanese also made absurd claims that the peaceful 24-hour protest outside his electorate office in Marrickville was displaying Hamas symbols in a vile attempt to discredit the constituents he had refused to meet for more than eight months.
He and his colleagues in Canberra continue to appease the powerful Israel lobby at the expense of our rights and the rights and visibility of the whole Palestinian population here and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are now literally on death row.
Back then, we heard locally that he and the party had bullied the four Labor councillors to vote to rescind the Marrickville BDS motion that they had all previously wholeheartedly supported. Some months earlier these same councillors had also supported a motion condemning the latest Israeli strike against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The meaning of BDS was no secret to them — they appreciated that it was important for a council to check its ethical purchasing guidelines to ensure that it was not supporting companies that were in violation of international human rights law by operating in the illegal Israeli settlements or by providing technology or services that maintained Israel’s apartheid and dispossession of Palestinians.
They knew then, as we know now, that this is not antisemitic. They knew then that no Jewish businesses per se were the target of this peaceful civil rights movement. And they knew then that the Labor Party was lying for political gain.
Now, as for far too many decades, political parties in power in this country have failed Palestinians for political gain and at the behest of Israel lobby groups which dare to speak on behalf of anti-Zionist Jews like me.
Despite all the gratuitous rhetoric, these politicians have failed to uphold the basic precepts of human rights law — rights they regularly give lip service to, but rights they will never defend by taking the action required of them as signatories to numerous UN conventions.
Australia must sanction Israel
To act with humanity and to act as required by international law, Australia must sanction and end all economic and military ties with the Israeli state.
We must expel the Israeli ambassador and bring our ambassador back and we must prosecute any Australian citizen or resident who has joined the IDF to kill Palestinians. We must also support Palestinian refugees and take all action necessary to assist those in Gaza for as long as it takes.
But as we have seen so clearly this year, most governments have not acted to pressure Israel to end its barbaric colonial project. To protest as allies and to call out the hypocrisy of governments and politicians that speak of a rules-based order while enabling a state that has continually breached fundamental human rights laws, is to be called antisemitic.
The pressure applied to governments, universities and the like in recent years to adopt the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism is precisely because it equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
It’s the perfect tool for shutting down condemnation of Israel’s grave human rights violations. We’ve seen some universities and parliaments endorse it in deference to this pressure, despite the serious flaws that have been identified, including from Jewish Israeli experts.
Now more than ever BDS is imperative.
BDS campaigns will work to isolate Israel as it should be isolated until it complies with international law. Multinational companies are increasingly loath to be associated with this terror state.
Major pension funds are divesting from companies that are complicit in Israel’s human rights violations and local councils, unions and universities are taking steps to ensure they divest from any partnerships or investments that would make them part of the chain of complicity and liable for prosecution by the International Court of Justice as enabling Israel’s genocide.
The facts are indisputable. Australia’s complicity with Israel’s genocide and colonisation of Palestine can be countered by individuals, churches, unions, councils and students taking immediate and urgent BDS action.
Do not wait for Labor or Liberal politicians in this country to act, as they are doing their best to shut us down and to appease Israel. Their complicity will never be forgotten.
Cathy Peters is a former Greens councillor on the Marrickville Council from 2008-2011 and the co-founder of BDS Australia. She worked as a radio producer and executive producer for the ABC for 30 years making some documentaries on the Israeli occupation. She is Jewish and her grandparents and other relatives perished in the Holocaust. She has travelled to Gaza and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories on a number of occasions and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights and justice. First published in the Australia social policy journal Pearls and Irritations and republished with permission.
The year has barely started but already disabled people are on our guard for more attacks. And we’ve got good right to be, too. In the last few months since the Labour Party came into power we’ve seen hatred for disabled people steadily rise.
While it was definitely fueled by the last iteration of the dying Tory government as their swan song, the least Labour could do was pour water over the disability hatred bin fire. Instead, during their short reign Starmer, Reeves, and Kendall have all fanned the flames.
Where the government have stoked the fire, the corporate media and Twitter outrage merchants have poured petrol on it – so that every single thing disabled people do is pulled apart and reframed as scrouging from those hard-working taxpayers.
Disabled people didn’t even get a break from the disgusting bile spewed at us over Christmas, with professional parasitic outrage-farming couple Richard Lice and Isabel Oakshitt deciding to spend their Christmas holibobs talking shite about Motability.
Whilst the venom them and their ilk were spewing for clicks can be easily debunked (and was, by me), many who they have convinced are their demographic won’t look at the facts in front of them when they want someone to blame.
Of course, the ruling class are always the ones who shout the loudest, but end up taking the least blame.
Funny that.
Disabled people: fighting for decades – and for decades more?
This of course is nothing new. We see this ramping up of the disability benefit thieves narrative every time the government are getting ready to take away our support – and especially before welfare shakeups. Many thought Labour – hoped Labour – would be different to the cruel Tories.
But after all it was Blair’s government in 1997 who realised that in order to get the public on board with welfare reforms they had to first turn everyone against disabled people (especially activists) who they’d mostly supported in their fight for more rights.
This current push to make disabled people the enemy might seem out of the blue for many, but you have to consider the fact that Labour have promised that their plans for disabled people will start to be unveiled in march.
There’s whatever the fuck they’re planning with benefits, as they’re still not telling us whether they’ll scrap the DWP WCA reforms or whether they plan to go ahead with the batshit idea of making PIP vouchers.
There’s also the totally fresh ideas to Get Britain Working – not to be confused with the Conservatives Back to Work plan from last summer which is completely different.
The demonisation has picked up a pace
Last week I was asked by Shelagh Fogarty on LBC what I thought was the most urgent thing that needed to happen in order to make life better for disabled people. My reply was:
More than anything we need an attitudinal change, we need to change the way that we treat disabled people and the way that we think about disabled people. And that’s not gonna change until the government and the media stop making us the enemy.
Because whilst there’s always been biases in society, many wouldn’t, not only so horribly towards disabled people but also terrified of becoming us, if being disabled and needing benefits wasn’t painted as the worst possible thing a person can be.
It was suggested the other day by right-wing arsehole Giles Fraser that assisted dying happened because families stopped caring for their disabled relatives and the burden fell to taxpayers for care.
That simply isn’t true.
In my opinion we ended up with assisted dying because disabled people were convinced, through the government and media, that we were burdens to our families.
Disabled people will continue to refuse to be silenced in 2025
You may’ve noticed I’ve been quiet round here these last few weeks and that’s cos I’ve been plowing away writing my bookRamping Up Rights: And Unfinished History of British Disability Activism. However it’s been hard to write about the battles disabled people fought and won to gain our rights when the current establishment are doing everything they can to strip us of them again.
Whilst writing this book I was also able to see a clear line spanning the last 30-plus years which saw the many ways that successive governments were able to use the media manipulate the British publish into believing that disabled people who needed benefits to live were the enemy.
But what I’ve also seen is just how resilient disabled people are, just how much we refuse to just roll over and die – as much as it would make the government’s job easier if we did.
That refusal to be ignored, silenced, or disregarded.
That determination that we will not let them take away our rights, no matter how much they try.
And though we have lost many battles with cruel governments, our fight is what has stopped them from obliterating us all.
We need to harness that fight into 2025, those of us that can call out the vile behaviour of the government and media, and come together to fight not just benefit cuts but the stripping away of our humanity.
Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, journalist Paul Mason managed to make it looklike he was on the left. But with his support for Keir Starmer’s hostile takeover of the party, he soon showed his true colours. And now, he has left absolutely no doubt about where he stands. Because as Declassified co-founder Matt Kennard points out:
Paul Mason is now an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, a “think-tank” funded by UK Ministry of Defence, Royal Navy, Modi’s India + pretty much every major arms dealer in West: BAE, Raytheon, Leonardo, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin et al.
By associating now with an organisation with highly unethical sponsors, however, he has made his ideological position clearer than ever. Because anyone happy to work with an organisation that gets funding from “pretty much every major arms dealer” in the Western world is a person that no one on the left should consider an ally.
Keir Starmer and Paul Mason – two charlatans in a pod
In the Brexit debate, we could see the signs of who understood what Labour’s best strategy was and who didn’t. It was tough, because there were good arguments for both leaving and remaining in the European Union. But Canary journalist James Wright saw the dangers of people like Paul Mason calling for Labour to back a controversial second referendum on Brexit in 2019.
Like Keir Starmer, who was pushing for this policy from within the shadow cabinet, Mason’s support for such a vote risked allowing the Tories to focus the 2019 election debates on Brexit rather than anything else.
It would also, as Wright explained, “undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-establishment and democratic credentials, especially among the working class”. And it would “damage Labour electorally”, as proved to be the case.
County Durham was a good example of the damage this policy caused. Because Labour once dominated there, but the Tories took four seats from them in the area in 2019.
Corbyn’s 2017 clarity on respecting the Brexit vote had faded under pressure from right-wingers like Keir Starmer. And as one 2024 independent candidate in the country told us, there were many people who thought Labour was disrespecting democracy and walked away as a result.
Curiously, Labour’s 2019 election loss and the dodgy rhetoric around why it happened then empowered people like Keir Starmer who pushed for a big shift to the right.
Academic papers have since insisted that the Brexit campaign managed to capitalise on “deep-seated political disaffection as people railed against prolonged economic abandonment and social injustice” in areas of Britain that southern political and economic elites had apparently forgotten about.
Whether London dwellers like Mason and Starmer consciously exploited that national divide to undermine Corbyn or not is a matter we can only speculate about.
Ignore the grifters
As soon as Keir Starmer offered himself up as the successor to Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Mason argued in his favour. He insisted in 2020 that Starmer would “advance the class struggle” as a social democrat. Even in 2024, after years of autocratic drift to the right under Starmer, he was trying to encourage the purged and maligned left to unite behind the Labour leader – as the ‘only option’.
His links now to arms corporations that profit from death and destruction should tarnish him forever as a shameless grifter whose opinions we should passionately avoid and ignore.
The following article is a comment piece by 16 imprisoned activists. You can read more on their stories here.
We are some of the Lord Walney 16 – the sixteen peaceful people imprisoned for a combined 41 years for refusing to be bystanders to the most horrific crimes. We should have been 17. Xavi Gonzalez-Trimmer, our beloved friend, should have been with us. He will always be with us.
Our sentences will be reviewed by the Court of Appeal on 29 and 30 January.
Lord Walney: subverting free speech and the right to protest
We were jailed after former Labour Party MP John Woodcock (‘Lord’ Walney) – lobbyist for the arms and oil industry – called for those resisting genocide, whether from carbon emissions or Israeli bombs, to face the harshest response from the government, the police and the judicial system.
The brutal sentences that followed his report were aimed at ‘deterrence’. They were designed to make us give up.
To be locked up in Britain’s cruel prison system, witnessing the violence and harm undertaken by the state against its own citizens is harrowing. But our resistance is not like the addiction to fossil fuels – a habit to be broken. It is the consequence of a profound commitment to nonviolence and the refusal to be complicit in the destruction of our fellow human beings and the poisoning of life on earth.
We can never give up. The state sponsored assault on our living planet gives us no choice. We will never give up.
And we call on you – all of you who know that what is happening is so wrong – to join us in refusing to be bystanders.
When and where: the Royal Courts of Justice, London, 29-30 January
You can find out more information and sign up to attend here.
Signed:
Anna Holland
Cressida Gethin
Daniel Shaw
Gaie Delap
Dr Larch Maxey
Louise Lancaster
Lucia Whittaker De Abreu
Paul Bell
Paul Sousek
Phoebe Plummer
Roger Hallam
Happy new year! As the Canary is back from our Christmas break today I thought what better time to start new year resolutions than six days late?
Starmer needs to make some resolutions…
Of course, being a perfect baby angel I don’t need to change in any way (except maybe be better at time keeping and eating more vegetables). So instead, I thought I would give my resolutions to the prime minister and his government instead.
While there are A LOT of ways Keir Starmer should be trying to better himself and his government in the new year, he needs to make some serious pledges to disabled people. So here are some I wrote earlier for you Mr Starmer
One: I will not be a nosy cunt
As of yet, there’s been no news on whether Starmer still plans to spy on benefit claimant’s bank accounts. However, during his maiden speech as prime minister at the Labour Party Conference back in October 2024, he revealed his plans to bring in legislation that will give DWP benefits inspectors more powers to snoop on benefits claimants’ accounts.
This sounded eerily similar to Tory plans which passed through the commons but then were binned with the old government. Big Brother Watch are still running a petition to block the plans, but they need your help. You can sign it here.
Despite what the press have convinced the public, disabled people are allowed to manage their own money and should be given the privacy to do so, without living in fear of having their benefits stopped because of how they spend or make money.
In the meantime, keep the fuck out of our business, prime minister.
Two: I wont take the PIP
Another plan that it’s unclear whether the red Tories will be stealing from the blue Tories is around, surprise surprise, disability benefits.
Last year the Tories ludicrously decided they would try and stop giving benefits claimants money and instead give us vouchers for things we needed like ramps and handrails, which would definitely feed us and keep us warm during the winter.
Labour once again haven’t directly thrown this idea out. They allowed the consultation to run it’s course and minister for disabled people Stephen Timms told the Commons that the DWP would be reviewing all 16,000 responses, before coming up with their own plan – though if it’s anything like the Get Britain Working plan, it won’t be that different.
Frankly what disabled people do with any money they receive is up to them, if we all want to blow it all on cigs and booze or maybe even push the boat out and, I don’t know, buy ourselves warm winter clothes, that’s got fuck all to do with the government.
Three: I wont talk shite to my mates in the press
It seems like every other week the prime minister or members of his cabinet are suggesting benefits claimants are draining the national resources and that they could all work if they tried hard enough.
Of course the prime minister knows this isn’t true, but being a Blairite he also no doubt knows that the only way he’ll be able to destroy more disabled people’s lives is by making them public enemy number one.
What the prime minister actually needs to do is to pledge for media reform and put more pressure on outlets to not demonise marginalised groups of people. But then if he did that he’d risk the common man lookin up and seeing who’s really causing all the problems.
Four: I’ll stop being vague AF
At the end of the day, disabled people haven’t got a bloody clue what’s going to happen to us in 2025, and that’s because the government are deliberately withholding any plans.
They say they need time to develop their own green paper on disability and welfare reform, but this should’ve been something they had planned before they came into power.
While finding out about whatever they’ve got coming for us may not put our minds at ease, it will enable disabled people to mobilise against the government – but we need to know what we’re fighting before we can fight it.
As 2024 came to a close and we have stepped into a new year overshadowed by ongoing atrocities, have you stopped to consider how these events are reshaping your world?
Did you notice how your future — and that of generations to come — is being profoundly and irreversibly altered?
The ongoing tragedy in Palestine is not an isolated event. It is a crisis that reverberates far beyond borders, threatening your safety, the well-being of your children and family.
Palestinian advocate Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab . . . a powerful address in Auckland last weekend about how people in New Zealand can help in the face of Israel’s genocide. Image: APR
Even fragile ecosystems and creatures have been obliterated and affected by the fallout from Israel’s chemicals and pollution from its weapons.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, rampant violations of international law, and the obliteration of the rights of children are not distant horrors. They are ominous warnings of a world unravelling — consequences that are slowly seeping into the comfort of your home, threatening the very foundations of the life you thought was secure.
But here’s the hard truth: these outcomes don’t just happen in a a vacuum. They persist because of the silence, indifference, or complicity of those who choose not to act.
The question is, will you stand up for a better future, or will you look away? And how could Palestine possibly affect you and your family? Read on.
Israel acting with impunity for decades
Israel has been acting with impunity for decades, flouting the norms of our legal agreements, defying the United Nations and its rulings and requests to act within the agreed global rules set after the Holocaust and the Nazis disregard for humanity.
The Germans, under Nazi rule, pursued a racist ideology to restructure the world according to race, committing crimes against humanity and war crimes that resulted in a devastating world war and the deaths of millions of people, including millions of Jews. A set of rules were formed from the ashes of these victims to ensure this horror would never happen again. It’s called international law.
However, after the Nazis defeat, it took less than a few years before atrocities began again, perpetrated by the very people who had just been brutally massacred and targeted.
European Jews, including holocaust survivors, armed by Czechoslovakia, funded by the Nazis (Havaara agreement), aided militarily by Britain, the US, Italy and France among others, arrived on foreign shores to a land that did not belong to them.
Once there, they began to disregard the very rules established to protect not only them, but the rest of humanity — rules designed to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust, safeguard against the resurgence of ideologies like Nazism, and ensure impunity for such actions would never occur again.
These rules were a shared commitment by countries to conduct themselves with agreed norms and regulations designed to respect the right of all to live in safety and security, including children, women and civilians in general. Rules that were designed to end war and promote peace, justice, and a better life for all humankind.
Rules written to ensure the sacred understanding, implementation and respect of equal rights for all people, including you, were followed to prevent us from never returning to the lawlessness and terror of World War Two.
But the creation of Israel less than 80 years ago flouted and violated these expectations. The mass murder of children, women and men in Palestine in 1948, which included burning alive Palestinians tied to trees and running them over as they lay unable to move in the middle of town squares, was only the beginning of this disrespectful dehumanisation.
Terrorised by Jewish militia
Jewish militia terrorised Palestinians, lobbing grenades into Palestinian homes where families sheltered in fear, raping women and girls, and forcing every man and boy from whole villages to dig their own trenches before being shot in the back so they fell neatly into their graves.
Pregnant Palestinian women had their bellies sliced open, homes were stolen along with everything in it — including my families — and many family members were murdered.
This included my great grandmother who was shot, execution style, in front of my mother as she carried a small mattress from our home for her grandchildren when they were forcibly displaced. I still don’t know what happened to her body or where she is buried. I do know where our house is still situated in Jerusalem, although currently occupied.
These atrocities enabled Israel’s birth, shameful atrocities behind its creation. There is not one Israeli town or village that is not built on top of a Palestinian village, or town, on the blood and bones of murdered Palestinians, a practice Israel has continued.
As I write, plans to build more illegal settlements on the buried bodies of Palestinians in Gaza have already been drawn up and areas of land pre-sold.
These horrific crimes have continued over decades, becoming worse as Israel perfected and industrialised its ability to exterminate human souls, hearts and lives. Israel’s birth from its inception was only possible through terrorist actions of Jewish militia. These militia Britain designated as terrorist organisations, a designation that still stands today.
Jewish militia such as (Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang) formed into what is now known as the Israeli Defence Force, although they aren’t defending anything; Palestine was not theirs to take in the first place.
There was never a war of independence for Israel because the state of Israel did not exist to liberate itself from anyone. Instead, Britain illegally handed over land that already belonged to the Palestinians, a peaceful existing people of three pillars of faith — Palestinian Christians Muslims and Jews. If there were any legitimate war of independence, it would be that of the Palestinian people.
Free pass to act above the law
Israel continues to rely on the Holocaust’s memory to give it a free pass to act above the law, threatening world peace and our shared humanity, by using the memory of the horrors of 1945 and the threat of antisemitism to deter people from criticising and speaking out against the state’s unlawful and inhumane actions.
Yet Israel echoes the horrors of Nazi Germany and its destruction with its behaviour, the difference being the industrialisation of mass killing, modern warfare and weapons, the use of AI as a killing machine, the creation of chemical weapons and huge concentration and death camps which far surpass Germany’s capabilities.
Jews around the world have been deeply divided by Israel’s assertion that it represents all Jewish people. Not all Jews religiously and politically support Israel, many do not feel a connection to or support Israel, viewing its actions and policies as separate from their Jewish identity. For them, Israel’s claims do not define what it means to be Jewish, nor do they see its conduct as aligned with Jewish values.
This is not a “Jewish question” but a political one and conflating the two undermines the diverse perspectives within Jewish communities globally and is harmful to Jewish people. It is important to maintain a clear distinction between Judaism and the political actions of Israel.
How does a genocide across the world affect you? The perpetration of genocide and gross violations of human rights, facilitated or supported by Western powers, erodes the very foundations of the global legal framework that protects us all. This assault weakens democracy, undermines international law, and destabilises the structures you rely on for a secure future.
“The perpetration of genocide and gross violations of human rights, facilitated or supported by Western powers, erodes the very foundations of the global legal framework that protects us all.” Image: Al Jazeera headline APR
It leaves your defences crumbling, your safety compromised, and your vulnerabilities exposed to the chaos that follows such lawlessness as a global citizen of this world under the same protections and with the same equality as the Palestinians.
Palestinian children are no less deserving of safety and rights than any other children. When their rights are ignored and violated, it undermines protections for children worldwide, creating a precedent of vulnerability and injustice. If violations are deemed acceptable for some, they risk becoming acceptable for all.
Sitting safely in Aotearoa does not guarantee protection. The actions of Israel and the US, Western countries — massacring and flattening entire neighbourhoods — send a dangerous message that such horrors are only for “others”, for “brown people” who speak a different language.
But Western countries are the global minority. Many nations now view the West with growing disdain, especially in light of Israel and America’s actions, coupled with the glaring double standards and inaction of the West, including New Zealand, as they stand by and witness a genocide in progress.
When children become a legitimate target, the safety of all children is compromised. Your kids are at risk too. Just because you live on the other side of the world does not mean you are immune or beyond the reach of those who see such actions as justification for retaliation.
If such disregard for human life is deemed acceptable for one people, it will inevitably become acceptable for others. Justice and equality must extend to all children, regardless of nationality, to ensure a safer world for everyone.
But why should you care? Because Israel and the US are undermining the framework that protects you. Israel’s violations of International and humanitarian law including laws on occupation, war crimes and bombing protected institutions such as hospitals, schools, UN facilities, civilian homes and areas of safety, undermines these and sets a dangerous precedent for others to follow. Israel does not respect global peace, civilians, human rights nor has respect for life outside of its own. This lawlessness and lack of accountability is already giving other states the green light to erode the norms that protect human rights, including the decimation of the rights of the child.
The West’s support for Israel, namely the US, the UK, Canada, much of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, despite its clear violations of international law, exposes a fundamental hypocrisy. This weakens the credibility of democratic nations that claim to champion human rights and justice.
The failure of institutions like the UN to hold Israel accountable erodes trust in these bodies, fostering widespread disillusionment and scepticism about their ability to address other global conflicts. This has already fuelled an “us versus them” mentality, deepening the divide between the Global South and the Global North.
This division is marked by growing disrespect for Western governments and their citizens, who demand moral authority and adherence to the rule of law from nations in the East and South yet allow one of their “own” to brazenly violate these principles.
This hypocrisy undermines the hope for a new, respectful world order envisioned after the Holocaust, leaving it damaged and discredited.
Israel, despite its claims, has no authentic ties to the Middle East. What was once Palestinian land deeply rooted in Middle Eastern culture, has been overtaken and reshaped into to an artificial state imposed by mixed European heritage. It now stands as a Western outpost in stark contrast and isolated from surrounding Eastern cultures.
The failure of the West and the international community to stop the Palestinian genocide has begun a new period of genocide normalisation, where it becomes acceptable to watch children being blown up, women and men being murdered, shot and starved to death.
This acceptance then becomes a part of a country’s statecraft. Palestinian genocide, while it might be a little “uncomfortable” for many, has still been tolerable. If genocide is tolerable for one, then its tolerable for another.
Bias and prejudice
If you can comfortably go about your day, knowing the horror other innocent human beings are facing then perhaps it might be time to reflect on and confront any underlying biases or prejudices you hold.
An interesting thought experiment is to transform and transfer what is happening in Palestine to New Zealand.
Imagine Nelson being completely flattened, and all the inhabitants of Auckland, plus some, being starved to death.
Imagine all New Zealand hospitals being destroyed, Wellington hospital with its patients still inside is blown up. All the babies in the neonatal unit are left to die and rot in their incubators, patients in the ICU units and those immobile or too sick to move are also left to die, this includes all children unable to walk in the Starship hospital.
Electricity for the whole country is turned off and all patients and healthcare workers are forced to leave at gunpoint. New Zealand doctors and nurses are stripped down to their underwear and tortured, this includes rape, and some male doctors are left to die bleeding in the street after being raped to death with metal poles and electrodes.
Water is then shut down and unavailable to all of you. You cannot feed your family, your grandchildren, your parents, your siblings, your best friends.
Imagine New Zealanders burying bodies of their children and loved ones in makeshift mass graves, while living in tents and then being subjected to chemical weapon strikes, quad copters or small drones’ attacks that drop bombs and exterminate, shooting people as they try to find food, but targeting mostly women and children.
Imagine every single human being in Upper Hutt completely wiped out. Imagine 305 New Zealand school buses full of dead children line the streets, that’s more than 11,000 killed so far. Each day more than 10 New Zealand kids lose a limb, including your children.
This number starts to increase with the hope to finally ethnically cleanse Aotearoa to make way for a new state defined by one religion and one ethnicity that isn’t yours, by a new group of people from the other side of the world.
These people, called settlers, are given weapons to hurt and kill New Zealanders as they rampage through towns evicting residents and moving into your homes taking everything that belongs to you and leaving you on the street. All your belongings, all your memories, your pets, your future, your family are stolen or destroyed.
Starting from January 2025, up to 15 New Zealanders will die of starvation or related diseases EVERY DAY until the rest of the world decides if it will come to your aid with this lawlessness. Or maybe you will die in desperation while others watch you on their TV screens or scroll through their social media seeing you as the “terrorist” and the invaders as the “victims”.
If this thought horrifies you, if it makes you feel shocked or upset, then so too should others having to endure such illegal horrors. None of what is happening is acceptable, as a fellow human being you should be fighting for the right of all of us. Perhaps you might think of our own tangata whenua and Aotearoa’s own history.
What could this mean for New Zealand?
We are not creating a bright future for a country like New Zealand, whose remote location, dependence on trade, and its aging infrastructure, leaves it vulnerable to changing global dynamics. This is especially concerning with our energy dependence on imported oil, our dependence on global supply chains for essential goods including medicine (Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah has compromised supply chains in a dangerous and horrific violation that New Zealand ignored), our economic marginalisation, and our security challenges.
All of this while surrounded by rising tensions between superpowers like the US and China which will affect New Zealand’s security and economic partnerships. Balancing economic and political ties is complicated by this government’s focus on strengthening strategic alliances with Western nations, mainly the US, whose complicity in genocide, war crimes, and disrespect for the rule of law is weakening its standing and threatens its very future.
Targeting marginalised groups
The precedent set in Palestine will embolden oppressive regimes elsewhere to target minority groups, knowing that the world will turn a blind eye. Israel is a violent, oppressive apartheid state, operating outside of international law and norms and has been compared to, but is much worse than the former apartheid South Africa.
This will have a huge impact felt all over the world with the continued refugee crisis. Multicultural nations such as New Zealand will struggle to cope with the support needed for the families of our citizens in need.
An increase of the far right reminiscent of Nazi ideology and extremism
Israel is a pariah state fuelled by radicalisation and extremism with an intolerance to different races, colour and ethnicity and indigenous populations. This has created a fertile ground for extremist ideologies, destabilising regions far beyond the Middle East as we have seen in Europe with the rejuvenation of the far-right movement.
Israel’s genocidal onslaughts will continue to be the cause for ongoing instability in the region, affecting global energy supplies, trade routes, and security. The Palestinian crisis will not be answered with violence, oppression and war. We aren’t going anywhere, and neither should we.
Weaponising aid and healthcare
Israel’s deliberate restriction of food, water, and medical supplies to Gaza weaponises humanitarian aid, violating basic principles of humanity. A new weapon in the arsenal of pariah states and radical violent countries and a new Israeli tactic to be copied and used elsewhere. Targeting hospitals, healthcare workers, distribution centres, ambulances, the UN, and collectively punishing whole populations has never been and will never be acceptable.
If it is not acceptable that this happens to you in Aotearoa, then nor is it acceptable for Palestinians in Palestine. It is intolerable for other “terror regimes” to commit such acts, so why is it deemed acceptable when carried out by Israel and the US?
Undermining the rights to free speech, peaceful protest and freedoms
During the covid pandemic, many New Zealanders were concerned with government-imposed restrictions that could be used disproportionately or as pretexts for authoritarian control. This included limitations on freedom of movement, speech, assembly, and privacy.
And yet Palestinians endure military checkpoints, curfews, restricted movement within and between their own territories, and the suppression of their right to protest or voice opposition to occupation — all due to Israel’s oppressive and illegal control. This is further enabled by the political cover and tacit support provided by this government’s failure to speak out and strongly condemn Israel’s actions.
Through its failure to take meaningful action or fulfil its third-party state obligations, this government continues to maintain normal relations with Israel across diplomatic, cultural, economic, and social spheres, as well as through trade. Moreover, it wrongly asserts on its official foreign affairs websites and policies that an occupying power has the right to self-defence against a defenceless population it has systematically abused and terrorised for decades.
The silencing of pro-Palestinian activists and criminalisation of humanitarian aid also create a chilling effect, discouraging global solidarity movements and undermining the moral fabric of societies. The use of victimhood to shroud the aggressor and blame the victim is a low point in our harrowed history. As is the vilification of moral activism and those that dare to stand against the illegal and sickening mass killing of civilians.
The attempt to persecute brave students standing up to Zionist and Israeli-run organisations and those supporting Israel (including academic and cultural institutions), by both trigger-happy billionaire Jewish investors and elite families and company investors whose answer to peaceful resistance is violence, demonstrates how far we have fallen from democracy and the rights of the citizen.
I find it completely bizarre that standing up against a genocide of helpless, unarmed civilians is demonised in order to protect the thugs, criminals and psychopaths that make up the Israeli state and its criminal actors, and the elite families and corporations profiting from this war.
Even here in Aotearoa, protesters have been vilified for drawing attention to Israel’s war crimes and double standards at the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Letting into New Zealand an IDF soldier who is associated with an institution directly implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity should be questioned.
These protesters were falsely labelled as “pro-Hamas” by Israeli and Western media. They were portrayed negatively, seen as a nuisance. Their messages about supporting human rights and stopping a horrific genocide from continuing were not mentioned.
The focus was the effect their chants had on the tennis match and the Israeli tennis player, who was upset. Exercising their legal rights to demonstrate, the protesters were not a security issue. Yet Lina Glushko, the Israeli tennis player, claimed she needed extra security to combat a dozen protesters, many over the age of 60, who were never in any proximity of the controversial player nor were ever a threat.
No mention that Lina Glushko lives in an illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or that she was in service from 2018-2020 during the Great March of Return. Or that this tennis player has made public statements mocking the suffering of Palestinians, inconsistent with Aotearoa’s commitment to combating hate speech and promoting inclusivity and respect.
Her presence erodes the integrity of international sports and sends a dangerous message that war crimes and human rights violations carry no meaningful consequences despite international law and the recent UNGA (UN General Assembly) and ICJ (International Court of Justice) resolutions and advisory opinions.
Allowing IDF soldiers entry into New Zealand disregards the pain and suffering of Palestinians and the New Zealand Palestinian community, dehumanising their plight. It sends a message of complicity to the broader international community, one that was ignored by most Western media.
Similarly, Israel’s attempts to not just control the Western media but to shut down and kill journalists, is not only a war crime, but is terrifying. Journalists’ protection is enshrined in international law due to the essential nature of their work in fostering accountability, transparency, and justice. They expose corruption, war crimes, and human rights abuses. Real journalism is vital for democracy, ensuring citizens are informed about government actions and global events.
Israel’s targeting of journalists undermines the rule of law and emboldens it and other perpetrators to commit further atrocities without fear of scrutiny or consequences.
The suffering of Palestinians is a human rights issue that transcends borders. Allowing genocide and oppression to continue undermines the shared humanity that binds us all.
Israel’s actions reflect the dehumanisation of an entire population and our failure to enforce accountability for these crimes weakens international systems designed to protect your family and you.
Israel’s influence is far reaching, and New Zealand is not immune. Any undue influence by foreign states, including Israel, threatens New Zealand’s sovereignty and ability to make independent decisions in its national interest. Lobbying efforts by organisations like the Zionist Federation or the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand push policies that do not align with New Zealand’s broader public interest.
Aligning with a state that is violating rights and in a court of law on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, leaves citizens wide open to the same controls and concerns we are now seeing Americans and Europeans face at the mercy of AIPAC and Israeli influence.
Palestine is a test of the international community’s commitment to justice, human rights, and the rule of law. If Israel is allowed to continue acting with impunity, the global system that protects us all will be irreparably weakened, paving the way for more injustice, oppression, and chaos. It is a fight for the moral and legal foundations of the world we live in and ignoring it will have far-reaching consequences for everyone.
So, as you usher in 2025, don’t sit there and clink your glasses, hoping for a better year while continuing to ignore the suffering around you. Act to make 2025 better than the horrific few years the world has been subjected to, if not for humanity, then for yourself and your family’s future. Start with the biggest threat to world peace and stability — Israel and US hegemony.
What you can do
You can make a difference in the fight against Israel’s illegal occupation and violations of human rights, including the deliberate targeting of children by taking simple yet impactful steps. Here’s how you can start today:
Boycott products supporting oppression:
Remove at least five products from your weekly supermarket shopping list that are linked to companies supporting Israel’s occupation or that are made in Israel. Use tools like the “No Thanks” app to identify these items or visit the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) website for detailed advice and information.
Hold the government accountable:
Write letters to your government representatives demanding action to uphold democracy and human rights. Remind them of New Zealand’s obligations under international law to stand against human rights abuses and violations of global norms. Demand fair and equitable foreign policies designed to protect us all.
Educate yourself:
Learn about the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict, especially the events of 1948, to better understand the roots of the ongoing crisis. Knowledge is a powerful tool for advocacy and change.
Seek alternative news sources:
Expand your perspective by accessing a wide range of news sources including from platforms such as Al Jazeera, Double Down News, and Middle East Eye.
Be a citizen, not a bystander:
Passive spectatorship allows injustice to thrive. Take a stand. Whether by boycotting, writing letters, educating yourself, or raising awareness, your actions can contribute to a global movement for justice for us all.
Together, we can challenge systems of oppression and demand accountability for crimes against humanity. Let 2025 not just be another year of witnessing suffering but one where we collectively take action to restore justice, uphold humanity, and demand accountability.
The time to act is now.
The closing weeks of 2024 brought troubling news from Hong Kong, from the jailing of 45 democracy activists to a guilty verdict for seven people charged with “rioting” for trying to stop a violent thug attack.
Away from the headlines, an equally insidious form of repression is playing out: the problem of more than 120,000 recent Hong Kong exiles who have been cut off from their retirement savings since 2021.
Hong Kong Watch has found that Hong Kongers were being denied access to over £3 billion (US$3.8 billion) of money they paid into the city’s retirement scheme, known as the Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF).
On Dec. 19 in London, Hong Kong Watch joined the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong and Stand with Hong Kong in a hearing on the withholding of Hong Kongers’ MPF savings in the British Parliament.
The MPF is a compulsory retirement savings scheme for the people of Hong Kong. Under the legal guidelines which govern MPF savings, Hong Kongers are entitled to withdraw their money in full once they complete a declaration form stating that they have permanently departed from Hong Kong.
However, after Hong Kong authorities announced in in January 2021 that they no longer recognized the British National (Overseas) (BNO) passport as a valid form of identity , an estimated 126,500 Hong Kongers have been blocked from accessing their MPF savings.
People walk past a branch of HSBC bank in Hong Kong, March 16, 2022.(Kin Cheung/AP)
The British Parliament heard that this number is likely higher, as the mere awareness of an overwhelming number of cases being rejected discourages Hong Kongers from applying for withdrawal.
The three Hong Kongers who testified this month also emphasized that the Hong Kong government’s non-recognition of the BNO passport has no basis in law, as there have been no legal changes made to the MPF Trust Deed.
As of the end of June, the total value of all MPF schemes was a little over £122 billion.
Taking the average MPF account size of £26,000, and multiplying it by the number of BNO visa holders at 127,000, there is over £3.25 billion worth of MPF assets that Hong Kongers are currently being denied access to as of Sept. 30.
Bank no-shows
The London-headquartered MPF trustee banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered, which manage £37 billion and £758 million worth of MPF savings respectively, were invited to testify at the hearing.
However, despite a personal request from Blair McDougall, the chair of the APPG on Hong Kong and host of the hearing, HSBC rejected the request to appear before Parliament and Standard Chartered failed to respond.
Their refusal and silence speaks louder than words.
Specifically, in their response to the APPG on Hong Kong and to 13 Parliamentarians who inquired about how the HSBC restructure will affect MPF claimants, HSBC claims that they are legally bound by Hong Kong legislation in their non-recognition of the BNO passport as proof of identity.
Yet the non-recognition of the BNO passport is not legally binding but a tactic of transnational repression against those who have fled from the quickly deteriorating human rights environment in Hong Kong.
The BNO passport is also a UK government-issued identity document, which the UK government should immediately make clear to the UK-headquartered MPF trustees.
In addition to the non-recognition of the BNO passport, MPF trustees have denied access to MPF savings for accounts which are “under investigation” by the Hong Kong government.
This is applicable for accounts connected to the Hong Kongers who were issued arrest warrants with HK$1 million bounties for participating in pro-democracy activities in 2023.
This further demonstrates that the blocking of MPF savings is a form of financial transnational repression.
Suffering, lost opportunities
The Hong Kongers who testified at the hearing included Chloe Lo, a single mother who shared, “Last winter, I could barely pay my heating bill and my child and I experienced the coldest winter of our lives.”
This could have been avoided if she had access to the £57,000 in her MPF account.
The other Hong Kongers said that accessing their MPF savings would allow them to pursue further education in the UK and to invest in British businesses.
Their testimonies coincided with a letter sent directly to HSBC last week from nearly 400 Hong Kongers in the UK, urging the financial institution to immediately release the savings that rightfully belong to them.
HSBC is mistaken in refusing to appear before Parliament, as their refusal only demonstrates HSBC’s complicity in the financial transnational repression of the Hong Kong government.
One Hong Konger who testified and whose MPF account has depreciated by 5% in 2024 alone said, “It is obvious that HSBC is arbitrarily holding our savings to roll up the assets and squeeze the administration cost and capital gains from the investment.”
Following the hearing, the Parliament is keen to continue raising this issue, and to press the UK government to issue guidance to and have conversations with HSBC and Standard Chartered about the validity of the BNO passport.
This is not just a matter for the Hong Kong authorities but also for the UK ones who issue BNO passports and are responsible for the more than 180,000 Hong Kongers who now call Britain home.
To conclude the hearing, chair McDougall said that we often talk about the cost of human rights violations against individuals around the world but how in this case, there is an actual number on that cost.
He also said that both HSBC and Standard Chartered “still have questions to answer, even if they are not willing to open themselves to scrutiny.”
This could not be more spot on, and this is not the end of HSBC and Standard Chartered being invited to appear before Parliament.
Megan Khoo is policy director at the international NGO Hong Kong Watch. Khoo, based in London, has served in communications roles at foreign policy non-profit organizations in London and Washington, D.C.. The views expressed here do not reflect the position of Radio Free Asia.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Megan Khoo.
Communist Party of Vietnam chief To Lam’s weaponization of the Ministry of Public Security to force the resignation of rivals, in the name of anti-corruption, has been well documented.
Between December 2022 and May of this year, eight members of the Politburo resigned, paving the way for Lam, the country’s former top cop, to succeed General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong following his death in July.
In each case, evidence of wrongdoing was presented in Politburo sessions, and each official was given a face-saving way out.
All were granted soft landings, with much of their wealth, corporate interests, and status preserved. None was brought to trial.
But that might be changing.
The actions are all Politburo decisions based on the recommendations of the Central Inspection Commission (CIC), the Central Committee’s investigative body that oversees corruption amongst central-level leaders.
The CIC can recommend four levels of disciplinary action to the Politburo: reprimand, warning, the loss of party positions, and expulsion from the party. It can recommend disciplinary action to entire party committees, as well.
Vietnam’s President To Lam attends the funeral of Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in Hanoi, July 25, 2024.(Vietnam News Agency via Reuters)
In November, the CIC recommended that the Politburo give a warning to former National Assembly chairman Vuong Dinh Hue, who was forced to resign in April.
At that same session, the CIC decided not to recommend a verdict on former president Vo Van Thuong, who was forced out in March, citing health reasons.
Thuong is reportedly suffering from stage-3 lung cancer, but has been blocked from traveling for treatment overseas.
‘Severe consequences’
The CIC found that Hue and former Minister of Transportation Nguyen Van The had “violated Party and state regulations in regards to their duties, committed violations regarding anti-corruption, resulting in severe consequences and affecting the reputation of the Party and the state.”
The CIC continued their investigations in their mid-December session, which resulted in disciplinary action against three former top officials.
On December 13, the Politburo issued warnings to former Prime Minister and President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and former Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh.
Phuc was singled out for violating party and state regulations in the execution of his duties and responsibilities, “particularly in the areas of anti-corruption and combating misconduct.”
In addition, he violated party rules and engaged in “prohibited activities for members,” though it was left unsaid what those were.
Vietnamese Communist Party Central Committee’s Mass Mobilization Chief Truong Thi Mai, left, and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc walk to a session of the 14th National Assembly in Hanoi, July 20, 2016.(Hau Dinh/AP)
Also disciplined was Truong Thi Mai, the former head of the CPV Secretariat and the highest-ranking woman in Vietnamese politics before her May 2024 resignation.
She received a reprimand and found to have “breached rules on controlling power in personnel matters, violated ethical codes for Party members, and failed to uphold exemplary conduct.”
Mai’s family has extensive corporate interests in healthcare, a sector that benefitted from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
These punishments are all internal Communist Party disciplinary actions.
Why they matter is that, like in China, the party conducts its own investigation of senior officials before the judicial system gets a crack at them.
State prosecution looms?
While this does not mean that any of those individuals will face legal jeopardy, the door is now open for state prosecutors.
Charging a Politburo member is a rarity. There has only been one since the renovation period began in 1986: Dinh La Thang.
Another Politburo member from that era, Hoang Trung Hai, also received a warning, but was never charged.
Phuc’s case could be different, however
What is being investigated is a $1 billion eco-tourism development project in Lam Dong province in the Central Highlands that was being developed by Saigon Dai Ninh Joint Stock Company. Most of the funds of the barely started project appear to have been embezzled.
Both Phuc and former Deputy Prime Minister Binh had been implicated in the long-running corruption investigation into Mai Tien Dung, the former head of the Government Office.
Dung told authorities that he facilitated the project in Lam Dong at the behest of “superiors.” Phuc was the prime minister at the time and reportedly received a $3 million bribe to green-light the project.
The courts continue to investigate Saigon Dai Ninh, which has also been tied into the larger investigation into Truong My Lan.
In that scandal, 58% of that company was being sold to Lan’s company, Van Thinh Phat, though the owner tried to embezzle what Lan had paid him at the time of her arrest.
Lan was sentenced to death in 2023 for secretly controlling Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) and directing over 90% of its loans to herself, Van Thinh Phat, and other affiliated companies, resulting in bank losses of some $24 billion.
Albeit tenuous, there is now a direct link between Phuc and the largest corruption case in the country’s history.
Lan is believed to have paid Phuc and his wife, Tran Thi Nguyet Thu, significant amounts of bribes.
Phuc’s wife and daughter, Nguyen Thi Xuan Trang, are also being investigated for assisting Lan’s niece, Truong Khanh Hoang, then the acting director of SCB, of laundering money to Hong Kong.
In a separate case, Lan received a life sentence for money laundering.
In all of this, it’s important to understand that Phuc is not just a political rival of Lam, but also a commercial competitor.
Phuc’s family has a controlling stake in Trung Nam Group, with corporate interests that are in direct competition in almost every sector with Xuan Cau Holdings, the conglomerate owned by Lam’s younger brother To Dung.
The Sword of Damocles is now dangling above Phuc.
But it seems far more likely at this point that the former prime minister and president, along with several family members, is going to be criminally investigated.
A drowning man is about to be thrown an anvil.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zachary Abuza.
Israel kills the journalists deliberately. This is unprecedented. The Western media — including here in Aotearoa New Zealand — kills the truth about genocide in Gaza.
The journalists from the Al-Quds Today TV channel were outside the al-Awada Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp when their satellite broadcast van was struck by a pre-dawn Israeli strike.
Video footage that went viral showed the van with the words “PRESS” clearly marked in red block letters engulfed in flames.
The slain journalists were – let’s honour their names — Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Ali, Mohammed al-Ladah, Faisal Abu al-Qumsan and Ayman al-Jadi.
Jadi had gone to the hospital with his wife who was giving birth to their first child. He had gone out to check on the car and his mates when it was bombed.
Baby born on day father died for ‘truth’
Imagine that, the baby was born on the very day his father died while doing his job as a journalist — reporting the truth.
It is another cruel example of the tragic lives lost in this genocide by Israel which has killed more than 45,400 people, mostly women and children.
Al Jazeera’s report on the journalist killings. Video: AJ
Just last week, four other journalists were killed over two days. And now the total is 201 Palestinian journalists killed since 7 October 2023.
This is by far the highest death toll of journalists in any war or conflict.
And in 20 years of the Vietnam War, just 63 journalists were killed.
Al Jazeera reports that Israel, which has not allowed foreign journalists to enter Gaza except on military embeds with the Israeli “Defence” Forces (IDF), which is increasingly being dubbed by critics as the Israeli “Offence” Forces (“IOF”), has been condemned by many media freedom organisations.
Samoan Palestine decolonisation activist Michel Mulipola . . . speaking at today’s Auckland rally about the 95th anniversary of the Black Saturday Mau massacre by NZ forces in Samoa. Image: APR
Gaza ‘most dangerous region’
The besieged enclave is now regarded as the “most dangerous region of the world” for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders in its annual report.
New Zealand journalist and author Dr David Robie . . . critical of New Zealand media’s role over the Gaza genocide. Image: Del Abcede/APR
Al Jazeera itself was banned by Israel in May from reporting within the country, and was subsequently barred from reporting within the occupied West Bank and the closure of the Ramallah bureau in mid-September.
Israel has tried to silence Al Jazeera previously in by threatening it in 2017, bombing its broadcast office in Gaza in 2021, and assassinating celebrated journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and other reporters with impunity.
Al Jazeera, TRT News and many independent news outlets as Democracy Now!, The Intercept, Middle East Eye and The Palestine Chronicle stand in contrast to mainstream media such as BBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post that have frequently been called out in investigative reports for systemic bias against Palestine.
Among the poignant messages from Palestinian journalists documenting this war are Bisan Owda, who signs on her video reports every day with “I’m still alive”.
But I would like to share this reflection from another journalist, videographer Osama Abu Rabee who says on his X news feed that he is “capturing the untold stories of resilience and hope”. He said in one post this week:
Kia Ora Gaza facilitator Roger Fowler (in hat) . . . a tribute for his many years of support for the Palestine freedom cause. Image: APR
‘Moments away from death’
“One of my most vivid memories is when three journalists and I were in Eastern Jabalia and we needed to connect our e-sims to edit and upload content of a massacre.
“We went to a room but the connection wasn’t good so I suggested we go into another room. Less than 5 minutes later, the room we had been in got bombed.
“People came over running thinking that we were killed but luckily there were only injuries.
“This was one of the many times that I was moments away from death. I know that I’m targeted as a Palestinian but also as a journalist.
“Every single day I step out of my house and put on my ‘press’ vest and I look behind at my family, I’m not sure if I’ll see them again.
“I hope you understand the risks we are taking to show you the truth.
“Even 15 month later, we continue to go out every single day and document the horrors that people in Gaza experience.
“We do this so that when God asks what you do, we respond with ‘we did what we could’.”
NZ media’s role shameful
Can journalists and the media in Aotearoa New Zealand say with hand on heart that “we did what we could” in the face of this genocide?
Palestinian advocate Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab . . . powerful address in how people in New Zealand can help in the face of Israel’s genocide. Image: APR
Of course not, the role of New Zealand media has been shameful, apart from notable exceptions such as Gordon Campbell.
It has failed to hold the Christopher Luxon coalition government to account over its pathetic inaction over the genocide.
It has failed to press the government into taking a stronger and more principled stance at the United Nations to call for sanctions against the apartheid and genocidal regime, or to even expel Israel from the global chamber — or the ambassador from Wellington.
Take Ireland, a smallish country like New Zealand, as an inspirational example. Earlier this month, Ireland responded immediately to the closure of Israel’s embassy in Dublin by opening a Palestinian museum on the premises.
Prime Minister Simon Harris condemned Israel’s genocidal actions, particularly against children and reaffirmed his country’s commitment to human rights and international law.
“You know what I think is reprehensible? Killing children, I think that’s reprehensible.
“You know what I think is reprehensible? Seeing the scale of civilian deaths that we’ve seen in Gaza.
“You know what I think is reprehensible? People being left to starve and humanitarian aid not flowing,”
Silence of the news media
Have we ever had such a courageous statement like this from our Prime Minister. Absolutely not.
It is shameful that our government has not taken a stand.
And it is shameful that the New Zealand media has been so silent over this most horrendous episode of our times — genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in front of our very eyes for 15 months.
To my knowledge, journalists in Aotearoa have not made even made statements of solidarity with the journalists of Gaza and their horrific sacrifice to bear witness to the truth.
New Zealand journalists have already “normalised” the genocide. Shameful.
Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch and editor of Asia Pacific Report. This was first presented as an address to a Palestinian solidarity rally in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Te Komititanga Square in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau on 28 December 2024.
A banner condemning New Zealand media for being “silent and complicit” over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Image: APR
The communist apparatchiks who run Laos must appease China if they are to stop their national debt crisis from worsening and avoid an outright default.
The IMF’s latest report on Laos, released last month, was particularly damning about the country’s future. Real GDP growth likely peaked this year, at around 4.1 percent, and will slide from 3.5 percent next year down to 2.5 percent by 2029.
In other words, Laos isn’t going to be able to grow itself out of debt anytime soon.
Moreover, debt servicing costs, spending that is not actually paying off the principal on its monumental debt, will rise from around $1.1 billion this year to $1.5 billion next year and peak at $1.8 billion in 2026, the equivalent of a fifth of exports.
Laos cannot even start to comprehend paying off its debt, which because of the country’s inflation crisis fluctuates as a percentage of GDP ratio. It was 131 percent of GDP in 2022, down to 108 percent this year but potentially up to 118 percent in 2025.
The IMF politely suggested that “alternative options to bring debt toward a sustainable level could also be considered,” yet noted that “the authorities’ financing plan…critically relies on the continued extension of debt relief from China.”
Debt deferrals
All that matters for Vientiane, at least for the short term, is that Beijing continues offering debt deferrals.
In 2023, these amounted to $770 million, about 5 percent of Laos’s GDP, according to the IMF. They were worth $222 million in 2020, $454 million in 2021, and $608 million in 2022.
What other options has Laos got?
It won’t turn to the IMF for a bailout, since that will come with political conditions – and half of national debt is owed to China, which doesn’t do debt write-offs.
The money Vientiane owes Beijing is vast for Laos, but peanuts for Beijing.
The International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C, Dec. 19, 2016.(Cliff Owen/AP)
Laos’s debts could be completely forgiven tomorrow and nobody in Beijing would notice. But Chinese lenders don’t like having their pockets pinched and no superpower wants to be seen as a dog being wagged by its tail.
Some people think Vientiane could offer more debt-for-equity swaps, whereby China reduces the debt in exchange for land or mineral rights or a stake in a state company.
However, for all the cries of “debt traps,” it is noticeable that there hasn’t been any major debt-for-equity swap since a Chinese state-owned firm was given majority control of a joint venture (EDL-T) with Electricite du Laos, which effectively handed Beijing Laos’ power grid, including its electricity exports. But that was in 2021!
Few desirable assets
Beijing has presumably browsed and doesn’t fancy anything it sees. As one source told me, “there aren’t enough saleable assets” in Laos for equity swaps to touch the sides of the country’s debt.
Even for natural resources or land, usually a Chinese company will get a multi-decade concession for very low rent. So it makes little sense for Chinese state firms to buy, in the form of a debt swap, what they essentially get for free, since the revenue the Lao government collects will eventually be paid back to the Chinese state.
Nor are swaps all too appealing when it comes to state-run companies.
There’s one reason why Laos’s nationalized companies are so indebted and it isn’t because they’re so well run. Électricité du Laos, the state utility, accounts for perhaps a third of all the state’s debts, for instance.
Laos’ Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone attends the 27th ASEAN-Japan Summit in Vientiane, Laos, Oct. 10, 2024.(Nhac Nguyen/AFP)
That leaves only debt deferrals, which allow Vientiane to pay back other private creditors and facilitate future loans, all the while avoiding what it must eventually do: massively increase state revenue.
According to the IMF, Laos needs a primary surplus of around 17 percent each year to bring its debt-to-GDP ratio down to a sustainable threshold (35 percent) by 2029.
Next year, Laos will likely run a primary surplus of around 3 percent, per the IMF report. In other words, Vientiane needs to boost revenue or cut expenditure (or both) by more than five-fold.
Austerity is unpopular
But the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) clearly doesn’t think now is the time to dig deeper into the pockets of ordinary people and businesses, especially as economic growth is set to slow in the coming years and the inflation crisis won’t be curbed anytime soon.
It would be politically suicidal for Vientiane to considerably raise taxes while the ordinary Loatian has seen his wealth decimated in recent years. In fact, the party has recently committed to higher state spending.
At first blush, Vientiane’s immobility might appear problematic for the current rulers of the communist party whose jobs are in the line ahead of a reshuffle at the National Congress in early 2026.
That’s especially the case for Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone, who naturally gets the most flak. Party grandees will retreat into conclaves most of next year to make these decisions, and appeasing China will be a key consideration.
Yet, while the Lao public is incensed by just how appallingly their rulers have managed the economy, the powers that be understand no-one has any real idea of how to get out of this mess other than austerity during a devastating economic crisis.
This isn’t something to be admitted publicly in a one-party state. Neither is admitting that the task of austerity is essentially being kicked to the next generation of party apparatchiks, who will have to suffer the consequences.
George Orwell once remarked that “it is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out…It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
Likewise, the current LPRP leadership must feel a certain freedom from knowing that there’s only one way out of its predicament: Keep appeasing Beijing and keep up the debt deferrals.
David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. He writes theWatching Europe In Southeast Asianewsletter. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by David Hutt.
The following article is a column from Nick Ballard, head organiser and founder of the ACORN Union
There’s little scarier than a knock at the door from bailiffs at Christmas time — but that’s the reality facing tens of thousands of people right across the country right now.
The reality is more and more people are struggling with household finances.
People have been slammed by the cost of living crisis – rising energy bills, increasing food costs, runaway rent increases, the list goes on. For too many, it’s a choice between heating and eating, which utilities are most needed and which bills most urgently need paying.
So it’s no surprise that council tax arrears are also growing.
Councils are using bailiffs more and more for council tax arrears
As of March 2023 (the most recent data available – it’s likely to have risen since), the total amount of council tax arrears in England alone was £5.5 billion, up £513 million from the previous year.
And more councils are turning to enforcement agents, aka bailiffs, and more often. Between April 2021 and June 2023, more than 3 million people were taken to court for council tax debt – that’s an average of 4,500 per day – staggering numbers!
If a payment is missed, in many cases residents become liable for the entire year’s council tax bill in one go. And if you can’t pay this, a knock at the door from bailiffs looking to take away your belongings often follows.
A visit from bailiffs is distressing for anyone, especially for those who are already in debt, and who are vulnerable.
Mental health and debt are mutually reinforcing: mental health issues can disrupt people’s lives and lead them into debt, while being indebted and harassed by bailiffs can create or worsen mental health issues. Half of people in debt have mental health problems.
But it’s also clear that aggressive bailiff visits have a huge effect on people’s wellbeing; with fear, stress and anxiety the most immediate.
Making matters worse
A recent report found that council tax debt collectors significantly harm the health of those struggling to pay.
Bailiff visits also push people further into debt, as bailiff and court fees add an average £310 additional debt.
Not only does the use of bailiffs fail to generate more income for councils, it can actually make the problem worse, ultimately costing local and national government more in extra health, social care, employment and housing support (£9.7 billion more, to be precise).
A few years age one of our members in Manchester, Viv, had a bailiffs at her door threatening to take away her children’s toy, and to arrest. She worked as a childminder, and was looking after children at her home.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Making change happen
Some councils have made the move away from bailiff use and Hammersmith and Fulham Council have entirely ended the use of bailiffs.
Instead of beating on their residents’ doors at 6am, the council intervenes early when people start to fall behind, and helps them to access all the support and advice available to them. Their ethical debt collection policy has led to an increase in council tax collection rates.
Ahead of the general election in July ACORN members decided to make the issue of bailiff use a key priority for the union, and throughout 2024 our branches have shown that local campaigns can build the power needed to force councils to change.
In January, Manchester City Council announced that residents in council tax debt won’t have bailiffs knocking at their door if they are eligible for council tax support, with £1 million in support pledged for struggling families. This was the result of a long running campaign by ACORN Manchester and Debt Justice, ranging from outreach to occupations of council meetings:
Manchester ACORN
And in October, our Brighton branch declared victory in their year-long ‘Boot the Bailiffs’ campaign, meaning people on benefits in council tax debt will no longer be referred to bailiffs, with an additional £2.2 million pledged by the council to support the most vulnerable residents in the city!
And the fight continues in Birmingham, Haringey, and Leeds:
But we know our communities across the country are suffering due to bailiff visits, which is why we want to expand our campaigns in 2025.
Council use of bailiffs can end in 2025
We recently launched our Christmas appeal, a fundraiser to get the resources we need to launch new campaigns on this issue across the country, building a national movement to end the practice for good.
Please consider donating, sharing and supporting this fundraiser and our future campaigns on this issue – together we can make 2025 the year we turn the tide on council bailiff use and end this cruel and outdated practise for good.
Why has Southeast Asia, hardly a pacifist region in previous centuries, been so peaceful since 1991?
The end of the Cold War; regional cooperation in the form of ASEAN; economic progress; a new birth of democracy and liberty — all are valid explanations.
Yet one simpler reason is that most of the more serious sovereignty disputes, largely a hangover of colonialism, had been fought by then.
Rival claims over Borneo between Indonesia and Malaysia ended after the “confrontation” of 1963-1966.
Tensions between Malaysia and the Philippines over Sabah — now part of Malaysia but which in previous centuries was administered by the Sultanate of Sulu, which the Philippines claims gives it authority — almost sparked a war when it formally joined the Malaysian Federation in 1963.
Manila broke off diplomatic relations and Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine dictator, drew up plans to invade, although diplomatic relations later resumed without too many shots being fired.
What to do about Chinese-majority Singapore was settled when it was kicked out – or left, depending on whom one asks – of the Malaysian Federation in 1965.
On the mainland, the departure of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in the late 1980s and then Vietnamese-China peace terms in 1991 allowed all governments in the region to get on with properly drawing borders that had been scribbled and traded by French colonialists.
Even though 1991 was the year of the barbaric Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste’s Dili, it was obvious at the time that Indonesia’s annexation of the former Portuguese colony couldn’t persist.
Philippine President and Mrs. Ferdinand E. Marcos, center, meet with Malaysia Deputy Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, left, and Sabah’s Chief Minister Harris Salleh, right, on August 9, 1977, in Labuan, Eastern Malaysia.(Tee/AP)
Although many of these territorial disputes were, at best, shelved rather than resolved, there was a spirit after 1991 that the more pressing concern of regional governments was making money, mutually if possible, rather than squabbling over scraps of land.
It helped that the rest of the world – particularly the United States and China – had more at stake in Southeast Asian peace after 1991 than in stirring sovereignty disputes to serve their own ends.
Worldwide irredentism
Alas, we’re now living in a new age of irredentism.
Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on the premise that the Ukrainian nation doesn’t even exist and therefore should be re-annexed by Russia.
Beijing is risking World War Three in its pursuit of “reunifying” Taiwan.
Much of the Middle East warring today rests on 1st century claims of homelands.
South Korea and North Korea both have designs to incorporate the other half of the peninsula. Venezuela apparently wants to annex Guyana.
The latest fray in Southeast Asia is between Cambodia and Thailand over the island of Koh Kood/Koh Kut – although it’s actually about who controls a 27,000 sq.km area of the Gulf of Thailand that sits on natural gas reserves.
In early November, Thai Defence Minister Phumtham Wechayachai travelled to the island for a visit that served no purpose other than for Thailand to restate its ownership.
Conservative circles in Bangkok are stirring this trouble primarily to offend the coalition government now led by the Thaksin family, yet these things have a way of getting out of hand.
Children hold photos some of the pro-independence demonstrators killed by Indonesian troops in 1991, at the Santa Cruz cemetery, during a commemoration in Dili, East Timor, Nov. 12, 2010.(Jordao Henrique/AP)
A few weeks ago, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet appealed for calm.
“One side claims their land is lost; the other says it isn’t. Why should we bring fire unnecessarily into our home? Acting rashly could provoke unnecessary conflict,” he said.
No doubt he has his own memories of having been a general when Cambodia and Thailand’s militaries came to blows in 2008 over the Preah Vihear Temple, a dispute that dates back to the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907 that swapped territory between Cambodia and Thailand, including Koh Kood/Koh Kut.
Sabah tensions
Yet, while Hun Manet’s own dictatorial ruling party has managed to quiet just about anyone capable of an independent thought, it cannot keep the Cambodian people silent whenever they get the whiff of something that smells like territorial sellout.
Intense public pressure this year led to Phnom Penh quitting the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle Area in September.
The decision was taken solely to appease those who claimed that the rather trivial economic scheme was a violation of Cambodian sovereignty by Vietnam, the Cambodian nationalist’s bete noire.
Now, the same voices are pressuring the Cambodian government to be tough on Bangkok. Phnom Penh cannot simply wash its hands of a lame economic agreement to appease critics this time around.
Tensions between Malaysia and the Philippines over Sabah are flaring again, as well.
In July 2020, the Philippines’ then-foreign minister, Teodoro Locsin Jr., tweeted in response to a U.S. government statement about sending aid to north Borneo: “Sabah is not in Malaysia if you want to have anything to do with the Philippines.”
Malaysia’s then-foreign minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, retorted: “This is an irresponsible statement that affects bilateral ties… Sabah is, and will always be, part of Malaysia.”
Tensions died down somewhat afterwards, yet Malaysia sent a protest note to the Philippines last month over two new maritime laws that Kuala Lumpur says encroaches upon the sovereignty of Sabah.
The leaders of both countries agreed this month not to discuss Sabah, which is perhaps better than them debating it, since Manila is aware that a 2011 Supreme Court ruling means the Philippines has not abandoned its claim and Malaysian political circles are increasingly touchy about sovereignty.
In 2022, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, perhaps more in a spirit of making himself a nuisance than making a genuine suggestion, told supporters that Singapore should be returned to the state of Johor, which ran the city’s affairs before its independence.
K Shanmugam, Singapore’s home affairs minister, warned Mahathir this is “not a game.”
“It is serious business,” he said. “If you get a leader in Malaysia like Dr. Mahathir, adventurous ideas may be attempted.”
The 99-year-old Mahathir probably won’t return to political office, but in January the Malaysian government set up a royal commission to study why, in 2018, Mahathir’s administration ended its review of an International Court of Justice ruling ten years earlier that awarded sovereignty of Pedra Branca island to Singapore.
On Dec. 5, the royal commission delivered a damning 217-page report that recommended a criminal investigation into Mahathir over his failure when premier to protect and defend Malaysia’s sovereignty.
Likely to stir up tensions with Singapore once again, the commission also ruled that “Malaysia has an arguable case” for claiming sovereignty over Pedra Branca.
Presumably, if Mahathir should be held criminally liable for not having asserted Malaysia’s claim in the past, as the commission argued, then Anwar Ibrahim, the current prime minister, now has a legal duty to reassert his country’s claims.
One might also add that this year has again seen tensions over who controls certain hamlets – mainly Naktuka – in Timor-Leste’s Oecusse enclave, which sits in the middle of West Timor, an Indonesian province.
Dili can be forgiven for nervousness after seeing Prabowo Subianto elected Indonesia’s president this year. Subianto was head of the Kopassus special forces that committed war crimes after Indonesia invaded and annexed Timor-Leste in 1975.
What seems to be driving all of this are the South China Sea disputes, which have forced every claimant government to think in terms of territorial competition.
China’s irredentist “nine-dash line” has naturally compelled governments in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and increasingly Indonesia to restate their opinions almost weekly on what territory they possess.
Amid this scramble to assert and reassert one’s territorial claims, it isn’t surprising that voices have grown louder about reclaiming other lost lands.
Such things tend to snowball.
David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. He writes theWatching Europe In Southeast Asianewsletter. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by David Hutt.
The A$140 million aid agreement between Australia and Nauru signed last week is a prime example of the geopolitical tightrope vulnerable Pacific nations are walking in the 21st century.
The deal provides Nauru with direct budgetary support, stable banking services, and policing and security resources. In return, Australia will have the right to veto any pact Nauru might make with other countries — namely China.
The veto terms are similar to the “Falepili Union” between Australia and Tuvalu signed late last year, which granted Tuvaluans access to Australian residency and climate mitigation support, in exchange for security guarantees.
In exchange for investment in military infrastructure development, training and equipment, the US gains unrestricted access to six ports and airports.
Also last week, PNG signed a 10-year, A$600 million deal to fund its own team in Australia’s NRL competition. In return, “PNG will not sign a security deal that could allow Chinese police or military forces to be based in the Pacific nation”.
These arrangements are all emblematic of the geopolitical tussle playing out in the Pacific between China and the US and its allies.
This strategic competition is often framed in mainstream media and political commentary as an extension of “the great game” played by rival powers. From a traditional security perspective, Pacific nations can be depicted as seeking advantage to leverage their own development priorities.
But this assumption that Pacific governments are “diplomatic price setters”, able to play China and the US off against each other, overlooks the very real power imbalances involved.
The risk, as the authors of one recent study argued, is that the “China threat” narrative becomes the justification for “greater Western militarisation and economic dominance”. In other words, Pacific nations become diplomatic price takers.
Defence diplomacy Pacific nations are vulnerable on several fronts: most have a low economic base and many are facing a debt crisis. At the same time, they are on the front line of climate change and rising sea levels.
The costs of recovering from more frequent extreme weather events create a vicious cycle of more debt and greater vulnerability. As was reported at this year’s United Nations COP29 summit, climate financing in the Pacific is mostly in the form of concessional loans.
At the country level, government systems often lack the capacity to manage increasing aid packages, and struggle with the diplomatic engagement and other obligations demanded by the new geopolitical conditions.
In August, Kiribati even closed its borders to diplomats until 2025 to allow the new government “breathing space” to attend to domestic affairs.
In the past, Australia championed governance and institutional support as part of its financial aid. But a lot of development assistance is now skewed towards policing and defence.
Kiribati: threatened by sea level rise, the nation closed its borders to foreign diplomats until 2025. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Lack of good faith At the same time, many political parties in Pacific nations operate quite informally and lack comprehensive policy manifestos. Most governments lack a parliamentary subcommittee that scrutinises foreign policy.
The upshot is that foreign policy and security arrangements can be driven by personalities rather than policy priorities, with little scrutiny. Pacific nations are also susceptible to corruption, as highlighted in Transparency International’s 2024 Annual Corruption Report.
Since 2019, my country has become a hotbed for diplomatic tensions and foreign interference, and undue influence.
Similarly, Pacific affairs expert Distinguished Professor Steven Ratuva has argued the Australia–Tuvalu agreement was one-sided and showed a “lack of good faith”.
Behind these developments, of course, lies the evolving AUKUS security pact between Australia, the US and United Kingdom, a response to growing Chinese presence and influence in the “Indo-Pacific” region.
The response from Pacific nations has been diplomatic, perhaps from a sense they cannot “rock the submarine” too much, given their ties to the big powers involved. But former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor has warned:
Pacific leaders were being sidelined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.
Unless these partnerships are grounded in good faith and genuine sustainable development, the grassroots consequences of geopolitics-as-usual will not change.
The national organization Veterans For Peace, with chapters in over 100 US cities, is calling on US Senators to vote NO on Pete Hegseth for US Defense Secretary, should President-elect nominate him.
Veterans For Peace is astounded that someone with the track record of Pete Hegseth would seriously be considered for the critically important role of US Secretary of Defense. His dubious and questionable qualifications are far overshadowed by the many reasons that should disqualify him. These include a well-documented record of misogyny, sexual assault, white supremacy, Islamophobia, financial malfeasance, alcoholism, and opposition to VA healthcare. Are these the qualities we want in our Secretary of Defense?
Misogyny
Hegseth’s long-running abusive behavior toward women – even decried by his own mother – should be more than enough to disqualify him. His stated intention to reverse progress for women and gays in the military was only reversed by him in recent days, after pressure from key women Senators whose votes he needs if he is to be confirmed as Defense Secretary. Can he be trusted to defend the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people in the military? Would he challenge the rampant sexual abuse within the military today?
White Supremacy / Islamophobia
Pete Hegseth sports tattoos on his body that are associated with White Supremacy. In January 2021, Hegseth was one of 12 national guardsmen flagged as potential insider threats and removed from a group providing security for the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden, after a fellow Guard member reported he had a tattoo on his biceps reading “Deus Vult,” a phrase associated with the Crusades and, in the 21st century, with white supremacists. Hegseth has said that his National Guard superiors removed him because of his Jerusalem Cross tattoo, a Christian symbol which they determined was connected to extremism.
Post Traumatic Stress / Alcoholism
Pete Hegseth’s bouts with binge drinking and public drunkenness at formal organizational events have been widely reported. On one such occasion, he was heard shouting “Kill All Muslims.” Was it the alcohol talking? Islamophobia? Or both? As a national guardsman, Hegseth served at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans For Peace recognizes that many veterans who experience Post Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injury, or Moral Injury have difficulty returning to civilian life, and have problems with alcohol and antisocial behavior. They need professional help, not the additional stress associated with US war-making.
A Voice of Restraint? Or Nuclear War?
Pete Hegseth should not be making critical defense decisions for the largest military in the world, particularly at this dangerous moment of superpower confrontation and nuclear brinksmanship. The very existence of human civilization is imperiled. Would Pete Hegseth be able to provide the president with wise counsel regarding ending the war in Ukraine? Could he stop sending US weapons to fuel the horrific genocide in Gaza? Would he put a brake on the Neocon drive for wars against China and Iran? Could he be a responsible check on a president’s decision to use nuclear weapons? We fear that the answer to these questions is No.
Financial Mismanagement
Pete Hegseth has a track record of “failing upward.” He has been demoted and forced to resign from several veterans organization and PAC’s, after failing to raise funds, and spending as much as half of the organizations’ funds on Christmas parties for families and friends. Arguably, the stupendous and ever-growing Pentagon budget, which just failed its 7th audit in a row, and for which there is remarkably little accountability, might be the perfect piggy bank for Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth Threatens VA Healthcare
Of particular concern to many veterans is Hegseth’s opposition to VA healthcare. He supports “outsourcing” – or privatizing VA healthcare – a concerted goal of the Koch brothers-funded Concerned Veterans of America, which Hegseth headed up from 2013-16. For all its shortcomings, the Veterans Administration continues to provide excellent healthcare to millions of veterans, who rely on it and greatly appreciate it. Undermining, defunding and privatizing healthcare is an attack on all veterans, as well as an attack on the healthcare system, for which the VA provides one of the very best models. Senators who are interviewing Pete Hegseth should ask him why he would dismantle VA healthcare in favor of the failing private healthcare model.
Poll: Pete Hegseth should not be Secretary of Defense
Veterans For Peace’s opposition to confirming Pete Hegseth as US Defense Secretary is shared by most Americans, only 20% of whom approve, according to a recent poll. Will our Senators get the message? We should make sure that they do.
There’s occasionally something to be said for symbolic gestures, but I struggle to get too worked up over the news that an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor has finally applied for an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s junta chief.
The Nov. 27 request is specifically over his military’s ethnic cleansing of the Muslim-minority group, the Rohingya, between 2017 and 2018. Human Rights Watch called it a “major step towards justice for the country’s Rohingya population.” Amnesty International regarded it as a “decisive step and an important signal.”
My disappointment is for two reasons: the local and the global.
The ICC hasn’t yet issued an arrest warrant; a prosecutor has applied for one. But even if a warrant is forthcoming, it won’t be acted upon.
Rohingya refugees embrace each other after taking part in Eid al-Fitr prayers at a temporary shelter in Meulaboh, Indonesia, April 10, 2024.
Min Aung Hlaing won’t be hauled to The Hague while his junta holds power over much of the country and has the backing of Beijing.
If his junta defeats the revolutionary forces and ends the civil war, Min Aung Hlaing won’t voluntarily make a sojourn to the Netherlands.
If his junta falls and is replaced by a new, federal democratic Myanmar, we should vehemently oppose an international tribunal in favor of a local trial. In that eventuality, Min Aung Hlaing would have much more barbarism to answer to than only the Rohingya genocide.
China won’t act
Nor will an arrest warrant, if produced, alter the civil war itself. Min Aung Hlaing won’t give a fig; he claims lineage from the generals who for decades happily impoverished the nation and regarded citizens as property of the state.
Nor does Min Aung Hlaing have a real desire or need to leave Myanmar for anywhere other than China, which offered him his first invitation since the coup last month.
Yet China isn’t a member of the ICC, so won’t act upon an arrest warrant. From Southeast Asia, only Cambodia and Timor-Leste are signatories to the Rome Statute, so Min Aung Hlaing could visit any of the other nine states and probably wouldn’t be touched.
One might retort that the importance of the request for an arrest warrant lies in the “optics.” Certainly it’s a bad look for Southeast Asia.
Yet, what optics is this request supposed to change regarding Myanmar?
Granted, if the truth isn’t repeatedly stated, it risks being drowned by lies.
Yet the military’s crimes against the Rohingya have already been abundantly documented. The UN has called it “textbook ethnic cleansing.” The United States government called it a “genocide” in 2022.
If anyone needs convincing almost a decade on from the genocide and three years on from the military coup that Min Aung Hlaing isn’t a nice chap they’ve intentionally overlooked the evidence already to hand.
Karim Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court speaks at a press conference in The Hague, Netherlands, July 3, 2023.
It isn’t as though most foreign governments have been sitting on the fence since 2021 waiting for something like an ICC arrest warrant before making up their mind whether they’re pro- or anti-junta.
The ICC prosecutor’s decision won’t isolate Min Aung Hlaing and his junta amongst friendly countries, nor motivate any more solidarity for the anti-junta revolutionaries from unfriendly states.
Waning global interest
Did China – not a signatory of the Rome Statute – even muster a shrug when this news of the warrant request broke? Is the United States – also not a signatory – now going to start supplying the anti-junta militias with proper weaponry because an international court might charge Min Aung Hlaing?
The ICC prosecutor failed to request an arrest warrant for Aung San Suu Kyi, who, though now deposed and detained, was head of the civilian government while the military was butchering the Rohingyas — a crime that Suu Kyi herself travelled to The Hague in 2017 to defend.
A Rohingya refugee looks to members of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees while they meet at a temporary shelter at a government building in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, April 22, 2024.
The global aspect of the problem is equally discouraging.
In June, Rohingya community members expressed disappointment at an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber that “enthusiasm for the ICC’s investigation appears to be at an all-time low.”
Prosecutors should have started requesting arrest warrants in 2017, but the ICC only started investigations in 2019. It was too late by the time of the February 2021 coup.
Bad timing
But now the ICC prosecutor’s request for a warrant couldn’t have come at a worse moment.
Just weeks earlier, the international court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several members of his cabinet.
The ICC is now a spent force – a pariah not only in Moscow and other despotic nations but also in some Western capitals.
The United States has already rejected the court’s warrant for Netanyahu, and some Republicans want to sanction any country that assists the ICC in its pursuit of him.
Myanmar Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, inspects officers during a parade to commemorate Myanmar’s 79th Armed Forces Day, in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, March 27, 2024.
The French government says it won’t comply with the Netanyahu warrant either because Israel isn’t a member of the ICC.
But neither is Myanmar a party to the Rome Statute, so hasn’t Paris just given Min Aung Hlaing a kind of Western-backed immunity?
For years the ICC has tried to rid itself of the criticism that it only goes after rulers of poor, internationally-weak nations while ignoring the crimes of first world leaders.
Unfortunately, by seeking to prosecute the leaders of Israel and Myanmar in the space of a few weeks, the court may have succeeded in removing that stigma – but at the cost of its credibility and authority.
David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. He writes theWatching Europe In Southeast Asianewsletter. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by David Hutt.
