Two journalists were ejected from a State Department press conference yesterday for asking inconvenient questions about Gaza. One of them, Sam Husseini, was physically carried out by security while demanding to know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not in The Hague for his war crimes.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal was also made to leave while asking Blinken why he allowed hundreds of journalists to be murdered in Gaza, telling State Department spokesman Matt Miller that he “smirked through a genocide”.
Husseini was then forcibly removed for asking questions about Gaza, and about Israel’s nuclear programme and Hannibal directive.
Blinken told Husseini to “respect the process,” to which Husseini replied, “Respect the process? Respect the process?
“While everybody from Amnesty International to the ICJ says Israel’s doing genocide and extermination, and you’re telling me to respect the process? Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague?”
None of these war criminals will face justice. Video: Caitlin Johnstone
The Western political-media class is expressing outrage over the incident, not because of journalists being manhandled for asking critical questions of their government, but because those journalists asked critical questions.
The talking heads on CNN described the journalists interrogating government officials as “cringeworthy heckling by activists”, initially expressing bafflement at how those “activists” could have got into a press room intended for accredited journalists (both Blumenthal and Husseini are in fact members of the press who often attend State Department press briefings).
Chaos erupts at Antony Blinken’s final press conference. Video: New York Post
Longtime State Department swamp monster Aaron David Miller tweeted of the exchange, “In 27 years at State, never seen a situation where a Secretary of State — a caring compassionate man — is heckled in his own building by a heckler yelling ‘Why aren’t you in The Hague.’ A new low in civility and discourse.”
Western liberalism in a nutshell
This is Western liberalism in a nutshell. The problem isn’t the genocide, the problem is people being insufficiently “polite” about the genocide. Western officials feeling inconvenienced and insulted is a greater concern than children being shredded and burned by US military explosives.
Husseini’s question is an interesting one. Why isn’t Blinken in The Hague? Why hasn’t he faced justice for his facilitation of the starvation, sickness and daily massacres he’s been helping Israel inflict on civilians in Gaza for the last 15 months?
And more importantly, why does it seem like a safe assumption that he never will?
This is after all the “rules-based international order,” is it not? Surely when you’ve got mainstream human rights organisations asserting that genocidal atrocities are being committed with the facilitation of the government which purports to uphold that order, some legal repercussions should be seen as at least within the realm of possibility, should they not?
And yet we all know this won’t be happening any time in the foreseeable future. We all know that as long as the US empire exists in the way that it exists, Tony Blinken and Matt Miller will enjoy prosperous free lives after their time with the Biden administration draws to a close.
This is because “international law” only exists to the extent that it can be enforced. If a superpower doesn’t want its lackeys being carted off to war crimes tribunals in the Netherlands then they won’t be, because as things sit right now nobody’s going to war with the US empire to put Tony Blinken behind bars. Or George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for that matter.
Extraordinary moment during a Blinken press conference when reporter Sam Husseini is dragged from the room for asking a probing question.
A reminder that the corporate media is not a watchdog on power. It’s a lapdog. Any doubts, just watch the other journalists’ reaction. https://t.co/2tA3ABO0BA
As long as the US empire exists, none of these monsters will ever face justice for their actions. They will move on from their time in government to lucrative careers in think tanks or working as lobbyists until another Democratic administration calls for their services again — or, in Biden’s case, enjoy a comfortable retirement until a peaceful death surrounded by family members in the lap of luxury.
Tormenting the innocents
Until the empire has been dismantled, the world will never know justice. These swamp creatures will be able to worm their way around back and forth through the revolving door between Washington’s official government and its unofficial government while murdering, displacing and tormenting as many innocents as they please, with total impunity.
One way or another, the slaughter in Gaza will end at some point. And as long as the US-centralised power structure still dominates our world, there will be no meaningful consequences for this.
It will be filed away in the history books, and the propagandists will pace us along into the next imperial horror show. There will be more Gazas in the future, perhaps overseen by different Tony Blinkens or perhaps by the same ones, and they will keep happening for as long as this murderous empire remains standing.
This world can have justice when it finds a way to end the US empire. Until then the world will be ruled by tyrants who do exactly as they please, and anyone who questions them will be removed from the room by any force necessary.
The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication . . . Pacific media content in this comprehensive interdisiplinary volume including communication studies. Image: Sage Books
Four researchers and authors from the Asia-Pacific region have provided diverse perspectives on the media in a new global book on intercultural communication.
The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication published this week offers a global, interdisciplinary, and contextual approach to understanding the complexities of intercultural communication in our diverse and interconnected world.
It features University of Queensland academic Dr Mairead MacKinnon; founding director of the Pacific Media Centre professor David Robie; University of Ottawa’s Dr Marie M’Balla-Ndi Oelgemoeller; and University of the South Pacific journalism coordinator associate professor Shailendra Singh.
Featuring contributions from 56 leading and emerging scholars across multiple disciplines, including communication studies, psychology, applied linguistics, sociology, education, and business, the handbook covers research spanning geographical locations across Europe, Africa, Oceania, North America, South America, and the Asia Pacific.
It focuses on specific contexts such as the workplace, education, family, media, crisis, and intergroup interactions. Each chapter takes a contextual approach to examine theories and applications, providing insights into the dynamic interplay between culture, communication, and society.
One of the co-editors, University of Queensland’s associate professor Levi Obijiofor, says the book provides an overview of scholarship, outlining significant theories and research paradigms, and highlighting major debates and areas for further research in intercultural communication.
“Each chapter stands on its own and could be used as a teaching or research resource. Overall, the book fills a gap in the field by exploring new ideas, critical perspectives, and innovative methods,” he says.
Refugees to sustaining journalism Dr MacKinnon writes about media’s impact on refugee perspectives of belonging in Australia; Dr Robie on how intercultural communication influences Pacific media models; Dr M’Balla-Ndi Oelgemoeller examines accounting for race in journalism education; and Dr Singh unpacks sustaining journalism in “uncertain times” in Pacific island states.
Dr Singh says that in research terms the book is important for contributing to global understandings about the nature of Pacific media.
The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication cover. Image: Sage Books
“The Pacific papers address a major gap in international scholarship on Pacific media. In terms of professional practice, the papers address structural problems in the regional media sector, thereby providing a clearer idea of long term solutions, as opposed to ad hoc measures and knee-jerk reactions, such as harsher legislation.”
Dr Robie, who is also editor of Asia Pacific Report and pioneered some new ways of examining Pacific media and intercultural inclusiveness in the Asia-Pacific region, says it is an important and comprehensive collection of essays and ought to be in every communication school library.
He refers to his “talanoa journalism” model, saying it “outlines a more culturally appropriate benchmark than monocultural media templates.
“Hopefully, this cross-cultural model would encourage more Pacific-based approaches in revisiting the role of the media to fit local contexts.”
Comprehensive exploration
The handbook brings together established theories, methodologies, and practices and provides a comprehensive exploration of intercultural communication in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by the global society.
The opening page of David Robie’s chapter 23 in The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication. Image: Sage
From managing cultural diversity in the workplace to creating culturally inclusive learning environments in educational settings, from navigating intercultural relationships within families to understanding the role of media in shaping cultural perceptions, this handbook delves into diverse topics with depth and breadth.
It addresses contemporary issues such as hate speech, environmental communication, and communication strategies in times of crisis.
It also offers theoretical insights and practical recommendations for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, and students.
The handbook is structured into seven parts, beginning with the theoretical and methodological development of the field before delving into specific contexts of intercultural communication.
Each part provides a rich exploration of key themes, supported by cutting-edge research and innovative approaches.
With its state-of-the-art content and forward-looking perspectives, this Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication serves as an indispensable resource for understanding and navigating the complexities of intercultural communication in our increasingly interconnected world.
Republished from Pacific Media Watch.
Robie, D., (2025). How Intercultural Communication Influences Pacific Media Models. In Shuang Liu, Adam Komisarof, Zhu Hua, and Levi Obijiofor (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication. Sage. ISBN: 9781529626391
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani . . . for him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators. Image: AJ screenshot APR
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, editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye
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.
“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.” Image: flyers_for_falastin and andreadetoba
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.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Egyptian, Palestinian and Israeli authorities to allow foreign journalists into Gaza in the wake of the three-phase ceasefire agreement set to to begin on Sunday.
The New York-based global media watchdog urged the international community “to independently investigate the deliberate targeting of journalists that has been widely documented” since the 15-month genocidal war began in October 2023.
“Journalists have been paying the highest price — with their lives — to provide the world some insight into the horrors that have been taking place in Gaza during this prolonged war, which has decimated a generation of Palestinian reporters and newsrooms,” the group’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement.
According to a CPJ tally, at least 165 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began. However, according to the Gaza Media Office, the death toll is much higher — 210.
Israel and the Palestinian resistance group Hamas agreed to the ceasefire deal after more than 460 days of a war that has devastated Gaza, mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States announced.
After the ceasefire comes into effect on Sunday, Palestinians in Gaza will be left with tens of thousands of people dead and missing and many more with no homes to return to.
The war has killed at least 46,707 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Among the “horrifying numbers” released by the Gaza Government Media Office last week:
1600 families wiped off of the civil registry
17,841 children killed
44 people killed by malnutrition
CPJ welcomes the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in #Gaza and calls on authorities to grant unconditional access to journalists and independent human rights experts to investigate crimes committed against the media during the 15-month long war.https://t.co/9zloRVYhSf
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said that the ceasefire deal would come into effect on Sunday, but added that work on implementation steps with Israel and Hamas was continuing.
How the Gaza ceasefire deal was reported by the Middle East-based Al Jazeera news channel on its website. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Israel said that some final details remained, and an Israeli government vote is expected today.
Gazans celebrate but braced for attacks
However, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza that while Gazans celebrated the ceasefire news, they were braced for more Israeli attacks until the Sunday deadline.
“This courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which has seen many funerals and bodies laid on the ground, turned into a stage of celebration and happiness and excitement,” he said.
“But it’s relatively quiet in the courtyard of the hospital now.
“At this time, people are back to their tents, where they are sheltering because the ceasefire agreement does not take effect until Sunday.”
Gaza ceasefire: The moment of relief for Palestinians Video: Al Jazeera
That left time for the Israeli military to continue with the attacks, Mahmoud said.
“As people were celebrating here from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, we could clearly hear the sound of heavy artillery and bombardment on the Bureij refugee camp and Nuseirat.
“So these coming days until Sunday are very critical times, and people here expect a surge in Israeli attacks.”
Gaza ceasefire a ‘start’
Sheikh Mohammed said the Gaza deal came after extensive diplomatic efforts, but the ceasefire was a “start”, and now mediators and the international community should work to achieve lasting peace.
“I want to tell our brothers in the Gaza Strip that the State of Qatar will always continue to support our Palestinian brothers,” the Qatari prime minister said.
Welcoming the ceasefire deal, a Hamas official said Palestinians would not forget the Israeli atrocities.
The resistance movement’s Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya said Palestinians would remember who carried out mass killings against them, who justified the atrocities in the media and who provided the bombs that were dropped on their homes.
“The barbaric war of extermination . . . that the Israeli occupation and its backers have carried out over 467 days will forever be engraved in the memory of our people and the world as the worst genocide in modern history,” al-Hayya said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was “imperative” that the ceasefire removed obstacles to aid deliveries as he welcomed the deal that includes a prisoner and captive exchange.
“It is imperative that this ceasefire removes the significant security and political obstacles to delivering aid across Gaza so that we can support a major increase in urgent life-saving humanitarian support,” Guterres said.
“Over the past 15 months, this conflict has caused incomprehensible human suffering. We acknowledge the efforts of all those involved in the negotiations to bring an end to the misery, particularly the US, Qatar and Egypt.
“The terms of the deal must now be implemented fully. Protection of civilians and the release of hostages must be at the forefront of effort,” Peters said in a statement.
“There now needs to be a massive, rapid, unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
“To achieve a durable and lasting peace, we call on the parties to take meaningful steps towards a two-state solution. Political will is the key to ensuring history does not repeat itself.”
Israel isn’t eradicating “the terrorists”. It’s turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability, writes Jonathan Cook.
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran — the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza — towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.
It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians — the deaths we know about — and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.
War on Gaza: Healthcare system crisis. Video: Al Jazeera
2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.
Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor — one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers — bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By December 27, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Dr Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.
It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” — his abduction — by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.
Dr Hussem Abu Safiyeh was arrested by Israeli military soon after this photo was taken. His whereabouts are not known. He was the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza until it was forcibly evacuated by Israel. @FrontLineHRD considers him a human rights defender.… pic.twitter.com/kP7sfUefix
After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
According to a growing number of reports, Dr Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.
The hope is that Dr Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Dr Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.
Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations — as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards — tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused Dr Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” — presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
The family of Dr. Abu Safeyeh is worried that he might be tortured to death as happened to the medical doctors Iyad Rantisi and Adnan Al bursh.
So for God sake @jonstewart raise their voice. They will kill him because he revealed to the world the bombardment and the Israeli… pic.twitter.com/6slN2tBaMI
Psychotic logic According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government — meaning anyone like Dr Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital — counts as a terrorist.
By extension, any hospital — because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority — can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment — and increasingly from the cold, too.
A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.
The photograph of Dr Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.
Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up — to excuse it.
This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Dr Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.
Most foreign editors and picture editors — dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners — appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.
‘Consciousness warfare’ Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150 million on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.
That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns — to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.
Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined.
It is not enough, it seems, to have the Western establishment peddling your disinformation.
Israel is particularly concerned about young people — such as students on campuses — who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of Western corporate propaganda.
They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news — recycled and given credence by Western media — that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Dr Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.
The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.
But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.
The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches.
And it made clear to Western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system.
Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went. And that is exactly what they did.
Red herrings Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.
Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages — except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.
Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by Western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.
These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.
Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.
The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.
Mass graves Notably, none of the stream of senior Western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.
These Western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.
Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.
Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and “disappeared”.
Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults — bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.
For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.
Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: “The health sector is being systematically dismantled.”
The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. “At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients.”
In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Dr Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza”.
They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.
Trajectory to genocide The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.
Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” — that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character — had yielded “nearly zero results”.
He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities — new and historic — will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.
But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.
The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948.
And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.
Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.
Mad Max vision Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.
Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli Parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new Defence Minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.
It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.
Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.
Where does this lead?
Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.
Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.
It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.
This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south.
These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.
Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Cover story The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of Western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.
They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited Western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.
Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.
So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at Western leaders.
This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US President.
They simply do not care — not least because you cannot reach the summit of a Western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a Western military industrial complex to placate, and Western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.
This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day.
Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8 billion in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.
No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure Western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.
The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.
Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Dr Abu Safiya — one of Gaza’s great healers — to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.
Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.
Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive.
A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.
The job of the Western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong — for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
The suffering of the Palestinian people, which began with the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, reached brand new depths in the past 15 months.
More than 46,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and more than 110,000 injured in Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza. More than 10,000 others are missing, arbitrarily detained, or known to be buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes.
Israel’s relentless attacks have not spared homes, schools, and even hospitals in the besieged Strip. Hundreds of thousands of survivors, pushed out of their homes and into makeshift tents in so-called “safe zones”, are facing indiscriminate air strikes, daily massacres, disease outbreaks, hunger and harsh winter conditions with no end in sight to their misery.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are also under attack from Israeli forces and settlers and lack most basic rights and freedoms.
Palestinians document the atrocities committed against their people by Israel one by one and share them with the world in real-time for everyone to see.
South Africa has launched a genocide case against Israel at the World Court (ICJ), backed by a large variety of countries including Mexico, Brazil and Turkiye.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has also taken action against Israel, issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Global public supports Palestine
The global public is also clear in its support for Palestinians, with tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protests, vigils and sit-ins held across the world, attracting support from millions of people from all walks of life, since the beginning of the genocide on 7 October 2023.
Despite all this, however, Israel appears able to continue its crimes openly and with impunity. This is because its Western supporters and benefactors, especially the United States, turn a blind eye to all of Israel’s excesses, and refuse to acknowledge — let alone punish — its blatant violations of international law.
Washington particularly, as the main supplier of arms, bombs and other military equipment to Israel, has not done anything to help end the genocide in the past 15 months.
On the contrary, it has done everything in its power to shield Israel from accountability. For example, it has used its veto power four times, most recently on November 20, to prevent the UN Security Council from passing a resolution demanding a ceasefire.
It also voted against the UN General Assembly resolution, supported by 154 member states, calling for an immediate end to Israel’s war on Gaza. It is also attempting to punish the ICC for issuing warrants against Israeli leaders, with the House of Representatives passing a bill to sanction the court.
As such, it seems as long as the US military, political and financial support for Israel continues, there is nothing supporters of Palestine can do to bring the suffering of the Palestinian people to an end or ensure that their basic human rights are respected.
Thankfully, however, the past 15 months were not marked only by losses and disappointment. Supporters of Palestine have also scored important political, legal and electoral victories in this time.
“The Palestinian cause has more support in the global public square today than ever before.
“Israel is becoming a pariah. And this matters.”
Most importantly, despite the world’s inability to put an end to Israel’s genocide and lawless occupation, the Palestinian cause has more support in the global public square today than ever before. Israel is becoming a pariah. And this matters.
Even in US, people take to streets
Indeed, even in America, where politicians seem committed to protecting Israel at any cost, people have regularly taken to the streets to demand an end to the brutal war on Gaza’s population.
American universities, from coast to coast, have been taken over by Gaza solidarity encampments. While most of these protests were crushed with force with many of their participants severely punished, they still managed to show the world that American people do not support genocide.
They also made American people pay attention to what their country is funding in Gaza and helped shift the public opinion against the genocide.
In Western Europe, another traditional support base of Israel, Palestine has also started receiving unprecedented support at both official and grassroots levels.
Sure, the European dependence on the US and Israel’s historic ties to and extensive lobbying investment in most European nations, means official support for Israel’s war is still strong on the continent.
The German government, for example, has been unwavering in its support for Israel since the very beginning of the genocide, and to this day supports and defends all actions of the Netanyahu government.
But pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide voices gained significant prominence across Europe’s political, legal, media, entertainment and economic sectors, as well as in unions, academia and among students, gradually moving several European governments and leading institutions to stand for international law and Palestinian human rights.
26,000 demonstrations
According to the data gathered by the European Palestinian Information Center (EPAL), there have been more than 26,000 demonstrations and other activities in support of Palestinian rights in 619 cities across 20 European countries during the first year of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza.
“A growing call for justice in Palestine coming from the European public, European governments are starting to slowly show support for the struggle.”
In response to this growing call for justice in Palestine coming from the European public, European governments are starting to slowly show support for the struggle.
Belgium, Ireland and Spain officially sided with South Africa in the genocide case against Israel. Spain and Ireland also recognised the Palestinian state, bringing the number of EU nations to do so to 10.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called for an arms export halt and the UK has suspended some licences. Ireland has been so vocal in its condemnation of the genocide that Israel has recently decided to close its embassy in the country.
In electoral politics, despite the overall rise of the right and obvious successes of right-wing parties in various elections, supporters of Palestine have also made significant gains across several European countries in the past year.
The French national elections held in mid-2024, for example, saw the left-wing France Unbowed, whose leader Jean-Luc Melenchon played a key role in organising pro-Palestine demonstrations in the country, emerge victorious. The pro-Palestinian party also secured 11 seats in the European Parliament.
Pro-Palestine voices also made important gains in the European Parliamentary elections. Sweden’s Left Party, for example, which enjoys strong support from Sweden’s Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim minorities due to its active advocacy for Palestine, gained two seats. Denmark also elected several vocally pro-Palestine representatives.
‘Independence Alliance’ pressures UK
In the United Kingdom, where weekly demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation attracted tens of thousands of people, five pro-Palestinian candidates — including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — won seats in last year’s parliamentary elections. These MPs later formed a parliamentary grouping dubbed “Independence Alliance” and started pressuring Keir Starmer’s Labour government to support a ceasefire in Gaza and condemn Israel’s war crimes.
In Austria, pro-Palestine candidates participated in the September national election under the name “Gaza list: Voices against genocide” after securing enough endorsements to get their names on the ballot in seven out of nine states.
They not only managed to bring attention to the genocide in Gaza within the Austrian political conversation, but actually secured nearly 20,000 votes in the election, showing the growing strength of pro-Palestinian voices in the traditionally pro-Israel nation.
Those fighting for justice in Palestine also secured important legal victories in the past year.
In Italy, supporters of Palestinian rights won a case in the Supreme Court of Appeal against the Italian state television network, “Rai”, which had incorrectly referred to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a news bulletin. The judge ruled that Rai must publicly correct its mistake in a subsequent bulletin, stating that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel.
Meanwhile, anti-genocide activists filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government to halt arms exports to Israel in light of its conduct in Gaza. The Dutch state television aired the court proceedings live, which raised significant awareness among the Dutch public about the country’s role in facilitating Israel’s genocidal war.
Another prominent legal action in support of Palestine was the cases filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation, established in Belgium last September, at the ICC and several local courts against Israeli soldiers who took part in the Gaza genocide.
1000 Israeli soldiers named for war crimes
The foundation, named after the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tank fire in Gaza as she was stuck in a car filled with the dead bodies of her relatives, sent to the ICC a list containing the names of 1000 Israeli soldiers suspected of taking part in war crimes in the besieged Strip. The foundation collected evidence against the accused Israeli soldiers through various means, including their personal social media pages, where they boasted about committing crimes against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The foundation has also been tracking the movements of Israeli soldiers in foreign countries and filing cases against them in local courts. It located and filed complaints against suspected war criminals vacationing in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Ireland, Cyprus and most recently Sweden.
The actions of the foundation pushed Israel to instruct its soldiers to tread carefully when planning vacations abroad, and strengthened its international pariah status.
Meanwhile, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement also had significant success in curtailing support for Israel in the past year.
“While the global community has not yet been successful in bringing an end to Israel’s crimes, relentless advocacy by activists from around the world has brought us closer than ever to achieving justice for the Palestinian people.”
According to a Reuters analysis published in November, several of Europe’s biggest financial firms have reduced their links to Israeli companies or those with ties to the country, due to pressures from activists and governments to end the war in Gaza.
UN Trade and Development data showed overall foreign direct investment into Israel fell by 29 percent in 2023 — to its lowest level since 2016.
Relentless advocacy by activists
In short, while the global community has not yet been successful in bringing an end to Israel’s crimes, relentless advocacy by activists from around the world has brought us closer than ever to achieving justice for the Palestinian people.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, committed in plain sight and documented in great detail, has greatly changed public perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict around the world. Even if the US does not seem any closer to abandoning its support for the settler colony, the international opinion is rapidly shifting in favour of Palestine.
The tide is undoubtedly changing, but the fight is far from over. It is imperative that Palestinians and their supporters continue exposing the truth about Israel’s war crimes, illegal occupation, and ethnic cleansing operations, until Palestine is free and Israel has been held accountable for the many crimes it committed and continues to commit against the long-suffering Palestinian people.
Majed al-Zeer is the chair of the European Palestinian Council for Political Relations (EUPAC). This article is republished from Al Jazeera.
A protest over a controversial and widely condemned series of heavily armed nationwide raids mostly targeting Māori, including Tūhoe people in the remote Te Urewera, under the Supression of Terrorism Act in 2007. Although 17 peole were initially arrested, the police scenario of a "coordinated major terrorism threat" fell apart. Image: John Miller/The Enemy Within
REVIEW: By David Robie
Four months ago, a group of lawyers in Aotearoa New Zealand called for a little reported inquiry into New Zealand spy agencies over whether there has been possible assistance for Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a letter to the chief of intelligence and security (IGIS) on 12 September 2024, three lawyers argued that the country was in danger of aiding international war crimes, reported RNZ News.
Inspector-General Brendan Horsley, who had previously indicated he would look into conflict-related spying this year, confirmed he would consider the request, according to the report.
At least one of the lawyers was confident of a positive response, said the news report.
“I’m actually very optimistic,” noted University of Auckland associate professor Treasa Dunworth in a media interview about their argument that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) intelligence might be making its way to Israel via the US, “because our request is very, detailed, backed up with credible evidence, [and] is very careful.”
But she got a disappointing result. A month later, on October 9 — just seven weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — Inspector-General Horsley ruled out an inquiry at this time.
He said in a statement he did not want to “stop the clock” and tie up his office’s “modest resources to a deeper review of activity I have already been monitoring” while armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine were currently “active and dynamic”.
Rapid deterioration
Yet rapidly the 15-month Israeli war has deteriorated since then with President-elect Donald Trump due to take office in Israel’s main backer the United States later this month on January 20.
As the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens with intensified attacks on hospitals and civilians, a breakdown of law and order at the border, and more than 50 complaints filed against Israel soldiers for war crimes in multiple countries, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has urged medical professionals worldwide to sever all ties with the pariah state.
I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.#FreeDrHussanAbuSafiyahttps://t.co/qzZ7CqufI6
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) December 30, 2024
Ironically, the New Zealand intelligence “debate” has coincided with the publication of a new book that has debunked the view that the SIS and GCSB have been working in the interests of New Zealand. The reality, argues social justice movement historian and activist Maire Leadbeater in The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of the State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand is that these agencies have been working in the interests of the so-called “Five Eyes” partners, including the United States.
Her essential argument in this robust and comprehensive 427-page book is that New Zealand’s state surveillance has been part of a structure of state control that “serves to undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order. It had a deeply destructive impact on democracy.”
As she states, her primary focus is on the work of New Zealand’s main intelligence agencies, the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) “and their forerunners, the political police”.
Activist author and historian Maire Leadbeater with retired trade unionist Robert Reid at the Auckland book launching last November . . . her latest work exposes state spying on issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought in Aotearoa New Zealand. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
The author explains that she is not concerned with the “socially useful work of the contemporary police in the detection of criminal activity, including politically motivated crime”. She notes also that unlike the domestic spies, police detection work is subject to detailed warrants, there is due process over arrests, and the process is open to public scrutiny.
The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater. Image: Potton & Burton
Leadbeater points out that while New Zealand experience with terrorism has been limited, neither of the country’s two main intelligence agencies were much help in investigating the three notorious examples — the unsolved 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing that killed one, the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland that also killed one (but the casualties could easily have been higher), and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that murdered 51.
The regular police were the key investigators in all three cases.
Also, there is the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.
Working for ‘Five Eyes’ interests
Instead of working for the benefit of New Zealand, the intelligence agencies were set up to work closely with the country’s traditional allies and the so-called “Five Eyes” network — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
An example of this was Algerian professor and parliamentarian Ahmed Zaoui who arrived in New Zealand in 2002 as an asylum seeker after a military coup against the elected government in his home country. Within nine days of arriving, his confidentiality was breached and he was falsely branded by The New Zealand Herald as an “international terrorism suspect”.
A 24-hour vigil in support of Algerian asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui outside Mt Eden Prison in October 2003 organised by the Free Ahmed Zaoui and Justice for Asylum Seekers groups. Image: Amnesty International/The Enemy Within
He was jailed for two years without charge (part of that time held in solitary confinement) because of an SIS-imposed National Security Risk certificate and this could have have led to “deportation of this honourable man” but for the tireless work of his lawyers and a well-informed public campaign, as told by Leadbeater in this book, and also by journalist Selwyn Manning in his 2004 book I Almost Forgot about the Moon: The Disinformation Campaign Against Ahmed Zaoui.
Set free and granted asylum, he later became a New Zealand citizen in 2014. (However, on a visit to Algeria in 2023 he was arrested at gunpoint in a house in Médéa and charged with “subversion”).
Leadbeater says a strong case could be made that New Zealand’s democracy “would be stronger and more viable without the repressive laws that currently support the secretive operations of the SIS and the GCSB”. The author laments that the resources and focus of the intelligence agencies have focused too much, and wastefully, on ordinary people who are perceived to be “dissenters”.
“Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy but SIS operations targeted many of our brightest and best, damaging their personal and professional lives in the process,” Leadbeater says.
Among those who have been targeted have been the author herself, and others in her “left-wing family milieu” — including her late brother longtime Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke, as well as her parents Elsie and Jack, originally Communist Party activists prior to 1956.
The core of the book is based on primary sources, including declassified police records held in the National Archives and the declassified records of the SIS which have been released to individual activists – including her and she discovered she had been spied on since the age of 10 due to state paranoia.
At the launch of her book in Auckland last November, guest speaker and retired First Union general secretary Robert Reid — whose file also features in the book — said what a fitting way the narrative begins by outlining the important role the Locke family have played in Aotearoa over the many years.
The final chapter is devoted to another “Person of interest: Keith Locke” – “Maire’s much-loved friend and comrade.”
“In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country,” Reid said.
“The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.”
Surveillance stories and files
Among others whose surveillance stories and files have been featured are trade unionist and former Socialist Action League activist Mike Treen; Halt All Racist Tours founder Trevor Richards; economics lecturer Dr Wolfgang Rosenberg’s sons George and Bill; Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) organiser Murray Horton; antiwar activist and Peace Movement research Owen Wilkes; investigative journalist Nicky Hager; Dr Bill Sutch, who was tried and acquitted on a charge laid under the Official Secrets Act in 1975; and internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom.
State paranoia in New Zealand was driven by issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and “socialist and communist thought”.
Leadbeater reflects that she had never accepted that “anyone in my family ever threatened state security. Moreover, the solidarity, antinuclear and anti-apartheid organisations that I took part in should not have been spied on. Such groups were and are a vital part of a healthy democracy.”
At one stage when many activists were seeking copies of their surveillance files in the mid-2000s through OIA requests or later under the Privacy Act, I also applied due to my association with several of the protagonists in this book and my involvement as a writer on decolonisation and environmental justice issues.
I merely received a “neither confirm or deny” form letter on the existence of a file, and never bothered to reapply later when information became more readily available.
‘A subversive in Kanaky’: An article about David Robie’s surveilance and first arrest by the French military in January 1987. Published in the February edition of Islands Business (Fiji-based regional news magazine). Image: David Robie/RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis
But I have had my own brushes with surveillance and threatened arrest as a journalist in global settings such as New Caledonia, including when I was detained by soldiers in January 1987 for taking photographs of French military camps for a planned report about the systematic intimidation of pro-independence Kanak villagers.
This was perfectly legal, of course, and the attempt by authorities to silence me did not work; my articles appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Sunday Times the following weekend and featured on the cover of Fiji’s Islands Business news magazine.
Watched become the watchers
The structure of The Enemy Within is in three parts. As the author explains, the first part focuses on the period from 920 to the end of the First World War, and the second on the impact of the Cold War and the Western anti-communist hysteria between 1945 and 1955.
The final part covers the period from 1955 to the present, when the intelligence and security services have been under greater public scrutiny and faced campaigns for their reform or abolition.
As Leadbeater notes, “the watched, to some extent, have become the watchers”.
Because of my Asia-Pacific and decolonisation interests, I found a chapter on “colonial repression in Samoa” and the Black Saturday massacre of the Mau resistance of particular interest and a shameful stain on NZ history.
As Leadbeater notes, it was an “unexpected find in the Archives New Zealand” to stumble across a record of the surveillance of the “citizens who mounted an opposition to the New Zealand government’s colonial rule in Samoa”.
She pays tribute to the “vibrant solidarity movement” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by the peaceful Mau movement and its motto “Samoa mo Samoa” — Samoa for the Samoans — in their resistance to New Zealand’s colonial project.
This solidarity movement was in the face of a “prevailing attitude of white settlement” and its leaders were influenced by the Parihaka resistance of the 1880s.
Leadbeater is critical of New Zealand media, such as The New Zealand Herald, for siding with the colonial establishment and becoming “positively hostile to the Mau movement”.
New Zealand administrators under the League of Mandate to govern Samoa following German rule were arrogant and regarded Samoans as “inferior” and were “aghast” at Samoan and European leaders collaborating in resistance.
The leaders of the women’s Mau in Samoa: Tuimaliifano (from left), Masiofo Tamasese, Rosabel Nelson and Faumuina. Image: Francis Joseph Gleeson/Alexander Turnbull Library/The Enemy Within
Black Saturday massacre
On 28 December 1929, what became dubbed the “Black Saturday massacre” happened in Apia. A peaceful Mau procession marches to the Apia wharf to welcome home exiled trader Alfred Smyth.
Police tried to arrest the Mau secretary, Mata’ūtia Karaunu, but the marchers protected him. More police were despatched to “assert colonial authority”, shots were fired at the crowd and in the upheaval a police constable was clubbed to death.
A police sergeant the fired a Lewis machine gun from the police station over the heads of the crowd, while other police fired directly into the crowd with their rifles.
Paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, dressed in white and calling for peace, was mortally wounded and at least eight other marchers were also killed. The massacre was chronicled in journalist Michael Field’s books Mau and later Black Saturday: New Zealand’s Tragic Blunders in Samoa.
Protests followed and the Mau Movement was declared a “seditious organisation” and the wearing of Mau outfits or badges became illegal.
A crackdown ensued on Mau activists with heavy surveillance and harassment and in New Zealand public figures and community leaders called for an “independent inquiry into Samoan affairs”.
Eventually, the Labour Party victory in the 1935 elections changed the dynamic and the following year the Mau was recognised as a legitimate political movement.
After the Second World War, New Zealand became committed to self-government in Western Samoa with indigenous custom and tradition “as an important foundation”. However, full independence did not come until 1962.
Four decades later, in 2002, Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to the people of Samoa for the “inept and incompetent early administration of Samoa by New Zealand”.
She cited officials allowing the “influenza” ship Talune to dock in Apia in 1918, and the Black Saturday massacre as key examples of this incompetence.
However, Leadbeater notes that the “saga of surveillance and sedition charges” outlined in her book could well be added to the list. She adds that Samoans remember the Mau Movement and its martyrs with “pride and gratitude”.
Chapter one of colonial shame
“For New Zealanders, this chapter in our colonial history is one of shame that should be far better known and understood. The New Zealand Samoa Defence League was ahead of its time, and thankfully so.”
Leadbeater notes in her book that the SIS budget alone in 2021 was about $100 million with about 400 staff. Yet the intelligence services have been spending this sport of money for more than a century looking for “subversives and terrorists” — but in the wrong places.
This book is an excellent tribute to the many activists and dissidents who have had their lives disrupted and hounded by state spies, and is essential reading for all those committed to transparent democracy.
Following her section on more contemporary events and massive surveillance failures and wrongs, such as the 2007 Tūhoe raids, Leadbeater calls for a massive rethink on New Zealand’s approach to security.
“It is time to leave crime, including terrorist crime, to the country’s police and court system, with their built-in accountability procedures,” she concludes.
“It is time for the state to stop spying on society’s critics.”
The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
Yesterday the Biden administration formally accused the Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide in the civil war that has been ravaging the country since April 2023, announcing sanctions on the group’s leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa along with seven RSF-affiliated companies.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken moralised in a statement regarding the decision, adding, “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants – on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.
The Biden administration on genocide. Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone
“Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
Sometimes all you can do is stare wordlessly at the absolute gall of these freaks.
After reviewing the horrifying information of suffering inside Sudan, I have concluded that members of the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan. The United States is committed to pursuing accountability for these atrocities.
This is after all the same Antony Blinken who just flatly denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza in his final interviews with the press a few days ago, even as mainstream Western human rights institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unambiguously accuse Israel of committing genocidal crimes of extermination against Palestinians in the enclave.
“The UAE has been covertly shipping weapons to the RSF, but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pushing forward major arms sales to Abu Dhabi,” notes Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp regarding the announcement.
So the US is indirectly backing the genocidal atrocities it now denounces in Sudan, while aggressively defending the genocidal atrocities it is directly backing in Gaza.
This announcement comes as Biden and his handlers push through one last $8 billion weapons shipment to Israel in the last days of his term, a final blood-soaked punctuation mark on an ugly legacy of mass murder throughout Biden’s far-too-long political career.
And we can’t realistically expect it to get any better when the next soulless empire manager takes office.
In a radio interview on Monday, president-elect Trump boasted of being “the best friend that Israel ever had,” pointing to the numerous concessions he made to the Zionist state during his first time in office.
“Well, I’m the best friend that Israel ever had,” Trump said. “You look at what happened with all of the things that I’ve gotten, including Jerusalem being the capital, the embassy getting built.”
Trump then reiterated his threat to Hamas that there will be “hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he takes office, following earlier statements which suggested the US could become directly involved in the bombing of Gaza during Trump’s term.
The US government does not care about genocide, regardless of what bloodthirsty ghoul takes office or what political party they happen to belong to.
Anytime genocide rears its ugly head in a way that is convenient for the interests of the empire, the empire at best will look the other way and at worst join right in with the slaughter.
The empire itself is the problem. When the empire remains murderous even after you get rid of the official elected leaders currently overseeing the murderousness, this tells you that it is the empire itself that’s the problem.
With the door now shut on 2024, many will heave a sigh of relief and hope for better things this year.
Decolonisation issues involving the future of Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua — and also in the Middle East with controversial United Nations votes by some Pacific nations in the middle of a livestreamed genocide — figured high on the agenda in the past year along with the global climate crisis and inadequate funding rescue packages.
Asia Pacific Report looks at some of the issues and developments during the year that were regarded by critics as “betrayals”:
Palestine – “a moral litmus test for the world” . . . a Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre placard protesting against Fiji’s votes at the United Nations. Image: APR/FWCC
1. Fiji and PNG ‘betrayal’ UN votes over Palestine
The assembly passed a resolution on December 11 demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which was adopted with 158 votes in favour from the 193-member assembly and nine votes against with 13 abstentions.
Of the nine countries voting against, the three Pacific nations that sided with Israel and its relentless backer United States were Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
The other countries that voted against were Argentina, Czech Republic, Hungary and Paraguay.
Thirteen abstentions included Fiji, which had previously controversially voted with Israel, Micronesia, and Palau. Supporters of the resolution in the Pacific region included Australia, New Zealand, and Timor-Leste.
Ironically, it was announced a day before the UNGA vote that the United States will spend more than US$864 million (3.5 billion kina) on infrastructure and military training in Papua New Guinea over 10 years under a defence deal signed between the two nations in 2023, according to PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko.
Any connection? Your guess is as good as mine. Certainly it is very revealing how realpolitik is playing out in the region with an “Indo-Pacific buffer” against China.
However, the deal actually originated almost two years earlier, in May 2023, with the size of the package reflecting a growing US security engagement with Pacific island nations as it seeks to counter China’s inroads in the vast ocean region.
Noted BenarNews, a US soft power news service in the region, the planned investment is part of a defence cooperation agreement granting the US military “unimpeded access” to develop and deploy forces from six ports and airports, including Lombrum Naval Base.
Two months before PNG’s vote, the UNGA overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months — but half of the 14 countries that voted against were from the Pacific.
Affirming an International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion requested by the UN that deemed the decades-long occupation unlawful, the opposition from seven Pacific nations further marginalised the island region from world opinion against Israel.
Several UN experts and officials warned against Israel becoming a global “pariah” state over its 15 month genocidal war on Gaza.
The final vote tally was 124 member states in favour and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining. The Pacific countries that voted with Israel and its main ally and arms-supplier United States against the Palestinian resolution were Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu.
Flags of decolonisation in Suva, Fiji . . . the Morning Star flag of West Papua (colonised by Indonesia) and the flag of Palestine (militarily occupied illegally and under attack from Israel). Image: APR
In February, Fiji faced widespread condemnation after it joined the US as one of the only two countries — branded as the “outliers” — to support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory in an UNGA vote over an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion over Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.
Fiji’s envoy at the UN, retired Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini, defended the country’s stance, saying the court “fails to take account of the complexity of this dispute, and misrepresents the legal, historical, and political context”.
However, Fiji NGOs condemned the Fiji vote as supporting “settler colonialism” and long-standing Fijian diplomats such as Kaliopate Tavola and Robin Nair said Fiji had crossed the line by breaking with its established foreign policy of “friends-to-all-and-enemies-to-none”.
2. West Papuan self-determination left in limbo For the past decade, Pacific Island Forum countries have been trying to get a fact-finding human mission deployed to West Papua. But they have encountered zero progress with continuous roadblocks being placed by Jakarta.
Pacific leaders have asked for the UN’s involvement over reported abuses as the Indonesian military continues its battles with West Papuan independence fighters.
A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people”.
But the situation is worse now since President Prabowo Subianto, the former general who has a cloud of human rights violations hanging over his head, took office in October.
Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape were appointed by the Melanesian Spearhead Group in 2023 as special envoys to push for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ visit directly with Indonesia’s president.
Prabowo taking up the top job in Jakarta has filled West Papuan advocates and activists with dread as this is seen as marking a return of “the ghost of Suharto” because of his history of alleged atrocities in West Papua, and also in Timor-Leste before independence.
Already Prabowo’s acts since becoming president with restoring the controversial transmigration policies, reinforcing and intensifying the military occupation, fuelling an aggressive “anti-environment” development strategy, have heralded a new “regime of brutality”.
And Marape and Rabuka, who pledged to exiled indigenous leader Benny Wenda in Suva in February 2023 that he would support the Papuans “because they are Melanesians”, have been accused of failing the West Papuan cause.
Protesters at Molodoï, Strasbourg, demanding the release of Kanak indigenous political prisoners being detained in France pending trial for their alleged role in the pro-independence riots in May 2024. Image: @67Kanaky/X
3. France rolls back almost four decades of decolonisation ‘progress’
When pro-independence protests erupted into violent rioting in Kanaky New Caledonia on May 13, creating havoc and destruction in the capital of Nouméa and across the French Pacific territory with 14 people dead (mostly indigenous Kanaks), intransigent French policies were blamed for having betrayed Kanak aspirations for independence.
David Robie on Kanaky Independence. Video: GreenLeft Magazine
While acknowledging the goodwill and progress that had been made since the 1988 Matignon accords and the Nouméa pact a decade later following the bloody 1980s insurrection, the French government lost the self-determination trajectory after two narrowly defeated independence referendums and a third vote boycotted by Kanaks because of the covid pandemic.
This third vote with less than half the electorate taking part had no credibility, but Paris insisted on bulldozing constitutional electoral changes that would have severely disenfranchised the indigenous vote. More than 36 years of constructive progress had been wiped out.
“It’s really three decades of hard work by a lot of people to build, sort of like a future for Kanaky New Caledonia, which is part of the Pacific rather than part of France,” I was quoted as saying.
France had had three prime ministers since 2020 and none of them seemed to have any “real affinity” for indigenous issues, particularly in the South Pacific, in contrast to some previous leaders.
In the wake of a snap general election in mainland France, when President Emmanuel Macron lost his centrist mandate and is now squeezed between the polarised far right National Rally and the left coalition New Popular Front, the controversial electoral reform was quietly scrapped.
New French Overseas Minister Manual Valls has heralded a new era of negotiation over self-determination. In November, he criticised Macron’s “stubbornness’ in an interview with the French national daily Le Parisien, blaming him for “ruining 36 years of dialogue, of progress”.
But New Caledonia is not the only headache for France while pushing for its own version of an “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson and civil society leaders have called on the UN to bring Paris to negotiations over a timetable for decolonisation.
West Papuan leader Benny Wenda (left) and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “We will support them [ULMWP] because they are Melanesians.” Rabuka also had a Pacific role with New Caledonia. Image: Fiji govt/RNZ Pacific
4. Pacific Islands Forum also fails Kanak aspirations
Kanaks and the Pacific’s pro-decolonisation activists had hoped that an intervention by the Pacific Islands Forum in support of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) would enhance their self-determination stocks.However, they were disappointed. And their own internal political divisions have not made things any easier.
On the eve of the three-day fact-finding delegation to the territory in October, Fiji’s Rabuka was already warning the local government (led by pro-independence Louis Mapou to “be reasonable” in its demands from Paris.
Rabuka and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown and then Tongan counterpart Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni visited the French territory not to “interfere” but to “lower the temperature”.
But an Australian proposal for a peacekeeping force under the Australian-backed Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) fell flat, and the mission was generally considered a failure for Kanak indigenous aspirations.
Taking the planet’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court for global climate justice. Image: X/@ciel_tweets
5. Climate crisis — the real issue and geopolitics
In spite of the geopolitical pressures from countries, such as the US, Australia and France, in the region in the face of growing Chinese influence, the real issue for the Pacific remains climate crisis and what to do about it.
Controversy marked an A$140 million aid pact signed between Australia and Nauru last month in what was being touted as a key example of the geopolitical tightrope being forced on vulnerable Pacific countries.
This agreement offers Nauru direct budgetary support, banking services and assistance with policing and security. The strings attached? Australia has been granted the right to veto any agreement with a third country such as China.
Critics have compared this power of veto to another agreement signed between Australia and Tuvalu in 2023 which provided Australian residency opportunities and support for climate mitigation. However, in return Australia was handed guarantees over security.
The previous month, November, was another disappointment for the Pacific when it was “once again ignored” at the UN COP29 climate summit in the capital Baku of oil and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan.
The Suva-based Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) condemned the outcomes as another betrayal, saying that the “richest nations turned their backs on their legal and moral obligations” at what had been billed as the “finance COP”.
The new climate finance pledge of a US$300 billion annual target by 2035 for the global fight against climate change was well short of the requested US$1 trillion in aid.
Climate campaigners and activist groups branded it as a “shameful failure of leadership” that forced Pacific nations to accept the “token pledge” to prevent the negotiations from collapsing.
Much depends on a climate justice breakthrough with Vanuatu’s landmark case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
The case seeks an advisory opinion from the court on the legal responsibilities of countries over the climate crisis, and many nations in support of Vanuatu made oral submissions last month and are now awaiting adjudication.
Given the primacy of climate crisis and vital need for funding for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage faced by vulnerable Pacific countries, former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor delivered a warning:
“Pacific leaders are being side-lined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.”
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda . . . “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign.” Image: SCL montage
SPECIAL REPORT: By Paul Gregoire
United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) provisional government interim president Benny Wenda has warned that since Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto took office in October, he has been proven right in having remarked, after the politician’s last February election, that his coming marks the return of “the ghost of Suharto” — the brutal dictator who ruled over the nation for three decades.
Wenda, an exiled West Papuan leader, outlined in a December 16 statement that at that moment the Indonesian forces were carrying out ethnic cleansing in multiple regencies, as thousands of West Papuans were being forced out of their villages and into the bush by soldiers.
Displaced Oksop villagers . . . Indonesian forces have been carrying out ethnic cleansing in multiple regencies of the colonised region of West Papua. Image: ULMWP
Prabowo coming to top office has a particular foreboding for the West Papuans, who have been occupied by Indonesia since 1963, as over his military career — which spanned from 1970 to 1998 and saw rise him to the position of general, as well as mainly serve in Kopassus (special forces) — the current president perpetrated multiple alleged atrocities across East Timor and West Papua.
According to Wenda, the incumbent Indonesian president can “never clean the blood from his hands for his crimes as a general in West Papua and East Timor”. He further makes clear that Prabowo’s acts since taking office reveal that he is set on “creating a new regime of brutality” in the country of his birth.
Enhancing the occupation “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign,” Wenda made certain in mid-December.
“He is desperately seeking international legitimacy through his international tour, empty environmental pledges and the amnesty offered to various prisoners, including 18 West Papuans and the remaining imprisoned members of the Bali Nine.”
Former Indonesian President Suharto ruled over the Southeast Asian nation with an iron fist from 1967 until 1998.
In the years prior to his officially taking office, General Suharto oversaw the mass murder of up to 1 million local Communists, he further rigged the 1969 referendum on self-determination for West Papua, so that it failed and he invaded East Timor in 1975.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda . . . “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign.” Image: SCL montage
Wenda maintains that the proof Prabowo is something of an apparition of Suharto is that he has set about forging “mass displacement, increased militarisation” and “increased deforestation” in the Melanesian region of West Papua.
And he has further restarted the transmigration programme of the Suharto days, which involves Indonesians being moved to West Papua to populate the region.
Wenda considers the “occupation was entering a new phase”, when former Indonesian president Joko Widodo split the region of West Papua into five provinces in mid-2022.
Oksop displaced villagers seeking refuge in West Papua. Image: ULMWP
And the West Papuan leader advises that Prabowo is set to establish separate military commands in each province, which will provide “a new, more thorough and far-reaching system of occupation”.
West Papua was previously split into two regions, which the West Papuan people did not recognise, as these and the current five provinces are actually Indonesian administrative zones.
“By establishing new administrative divisions, Indonesia creates the pretext for new military posts and checkpoints,” Wenda underscores.
“The result is the deployment of thousands more soldiers, curfews, arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses. West Papua is under martial law.”
Ecocide on a formidable scale Prabowo paid his first official visit to West Papua as President in November, visiting the Merauke district in South Papua province, which is the site of the world’s largest deforestation project, with clearing beginning in mid-2024, and it will eventually comprise of 2 million deforested hectares turned into giant sugarcane plantations, via the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands.
Five consortiums, including Indonesian and foreign companies, are involved in the project, with the first seedlings having been planted in July. And despite promises that the megaproject would not harm existing forests, these areas are being torn down regardless.
And part of this deforestation includes the razing of forest that had previously been declared protected by the government.
A similar programme was established in Merauke district in 2011, by Widodo’s predecessor President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who established rice and sugarcane plantations in the region, aiming to turn it into a “future breadbasket for Indonesia”.
However, the plan was a failure, and the project was rather used as a cover to establish hazardous palm oil and pulpwood plantations.
“It is not a coincidence Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as their ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies,” Wenda said in a November 2024 statement. “These twin agendas represent the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement.”
Wenda added that Jakarta is only interested in West Papuan land and resources, and in exchange, Indonesia has killed at least half a million West Papuans since 1963.
And while the occupying nation is funding other projects via the profits it has been making on West Papuan palm oil, gold and natural gas, the West Papuan provinces are the poorest in the Southeast Asian nation.
Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region. Image: ULMWP
And part of the agreement was that West Papuans undertake the Act of Free Choice, or a 1969 referendum on self-determination.
So, if the West Papuans did not vote to become an autonomous nation, then Indonesian administration would continue.
However, the UN brokered referendum is now referred to as the Act of “No Choice”, as it only involved 1026 West Papuans, handpicked by Indonesia. And under threat of violence, all of these men voted to stick with their colonial oppressors.
Wenda presented The People’s Petition to the UN Human Rights High Commissioner in January 2019, which calls for a new internationally supervised vote on self-determination for the people of West Papua, and it included the signatures of 1.8 million West Papuans, or 70 percent of the Indigenous population.
The exiled West Papuan leader further announced the formation of the West Papua provisional government on 1 December 2020, which involved the establishment of entire departments of government with heads of staff appointed on the ground in the Melanesian province, and Wenda was also named the president of the body.
But with the coming of Prabowo and the recent developments in West Papua, it appears the West Papuan struggle is about to intensify at the same time as the movement for independence becomes increasingly more prominent on the global stage.
“Every element of West Papua is being systematically destroyed: our land, our people, our Melanesian culture identity,” Wenda said in November, in response to the recommencement of Indonesia’s transmigration programme and the massive environment devastation in Merauke.
“This is why it is not enough to speak about the Act of No Choice in 1969: the violation of our self-determination is continuous, renewed with every new settlement programme, police crackdown, or ecocidal development.”
