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By Philip Giraldi and Prof Michel Chossudovsky

First published on October 7, 2023 at the outset of Israel’s act of genocide against Palestine. Revised in April 2024.

There is an ongoing propaganda campaign which categorically denies the existence of a false flag, the objective of which is to justify the genocide against the People of Palestine.

The evidence is overwhelming.

—May 19, 2024, July 27, 2025, October 7, 2025, November 30, 2025

Introduction
Was It a False Flag?

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance. Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”? Or was it “a False Flag”?

In the words of Philip Giraldi:

“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.

In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.”

A Tissue of Lies
“A Tissue of Lies” has served to justify the killing in the Gaza Strip of more than 35,000 civilians, of which 70% are women and children coupled with total destruction and an endless string of atrocities.

The cat is out of the bag. Netanyahu has tacitly acknowledged that it was “A False Flag” which was intent upon justifying a carefully planned genocidal attack against Palestine:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)

Does this candid statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians?

On that same day of October 7, 2023 Netanyahu launched a carefully planned military operation against the Gaza Strip entitled “State of Readiness For War”.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance.

Had “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” been a “surprise attack” as parroted by the media, Netanyahu’s “State of Readiness For War” could not have been carried out (at short notice) on that same day, namely October 7, 2023.

South Africa’s Legal Procedure against the State of Israel
On January 11, 2024, the Republic of South Africa presented to The Hague World Court, a carefully formulated legal procedure against the State of Israel predicated on The Genocide Convention.

This legal procedure, however, has not contributed to repealing the ongoing genocide and saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.

I should mention that the False Flag issue —which constitutes a crime against humanity— was casually ignored by the ICJ.

Our suggestion is that an investigation followed by a legal procedure pertaining to the “False Flag” should be undertaken.

The heads of State and heads of government who have endorsed Israel’s Genocidal Acts are from a legal standpoint complicit.

The ICJ Judgement was contradictory. The Presiding Judge (former legal advisor to Hillary Clinton) was in conflict of interest:

The ICJ Judgment of January 26, 2024 assigns the Netanyahu government representing the State of Israel –accused by the Republic of South Africa of genocide against the People of Palestine– with a mandate to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent and punish” those responsible for having committed “Genocidal Acts”. (under Article IV of the Genocide Convention)

Sounds contradictory? What the ICJ judgment intimates –from a twisted legal standpoint– is that Netanyahu’s Cabinet which was “appointed” to implement the “prevent and punish” mandate cannot be accused of having committed “Genocidal Acts”.

See

[https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-icj-requires-netanyahu-to-prevent-and-punish-those-responsible-for-the-genocide/5847666]

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 24, 2024

Our intent is to provide a broad and detailed understanding of the false flag issue pertaining to Palestine.

The titles of the videos, articles and texts presented below:

1. Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”? They Let it Happen? Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?, by Dr. Philip Giraldi. 
2. Video: ICJ Hearings in The Hague, 
3. Text of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum. Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland
4. Video: “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, Interview. Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux
5. “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, by Michel Chossudovsky
6. Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor? But Who Actually Did What to Whom? “This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”, by Philip Giraldi 

In solidarity with the People of Palestine.

—Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 11, 2024, September 14, 2024, July 27, 2025, November 15, 2025

Part I

Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”?
They Let it Happen?

Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?

by Dr. Philip Giraldi
October 8, 2023

Am I the only one who read about a speech given by Netanyahu or someone in his cabinet about a week ago in which he/they in passing referred to a “developing security situation” which rather suggests (to me) that they might have known about developments in Gaza and chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map in retaliation and, possibly relying on the US pledge to have Israel’s “back,” then implicating Iran and attacking that country.

I cannot find a link to it, but have a fairly strong recollection of what I read as I thought at the time it would serve as a pretext for another massacre of Palestinians.

As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.

In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.

And as is also ALWAYS the case Joe Biden is preparing to send some billions of dollars to poor little Israel to pay for “defending” itself.

Part II
VIDEO. ICJ Hearings in The Hague
January 2024
ICJ Hearings

1. January 11, 2024. Click Here to View the ICJ Hearings,
2. January 12, 2024. Israel’s Legal Team’s response to South Africa, ICJ The Hague at 10 am. Video in Real Time

[https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k11/k11gf661b3?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Ryan%20Grim%20Newsletter]

3. Video: South Africa’s Closing Argument against Israel for Genocide. January 11 Hearing at the World Court

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4oRlvP4gsY]

Part III
Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum
Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland
by Michel Chossudovsky
October 2023

An official “secret” memorandum authored by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as consultations with the U.S.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry … assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … It recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. … The document, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

See below, click here or below to access complete document (10 pages)

[https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/secret-israel-memorandum-768×728.png]

For further details and analysis see:

“Wiping Gaza Off the Map”: Israel’s “Secret” Intelligence Memorandum “Option C” by Michel Chossudovsky

Part IV
Video: “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”
Interview: Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux
October 17, 2023

[https://rumble.com/v3prb44-michel-chossudovsky-false-flag-eradicating-gaza-from-the-map.html]

To comment or access Rumble

Part V

“False Flag”. Wiping Gaza Off the Map
by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
October 12, 2023
.
Introduction
Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” led by Hamas’ Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War”.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu’s January 2023 statement below). Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ?

U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack.

“One would have to be almost hopelessly naïve to buy the corporate state media line that the Hamas invasion was an Israeli “intelligence failure”. Mossad is one of, if not the, most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet.”

Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.

Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”? This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite.

Evidence and testimonies suggest that the Netanyahu government had foreknowledge of the actions of Hamas which have resulted in hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian deaths. And “They Let it Happen”:

“Hamas fired between 2-5 thousand rockets at Israel and hundreds of Israeli are dead, while dozens of Israelis were captured as prisoners of war. In the ensuing air response by Israel, hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.” (Stephen Sahiounie)

Following the Al Aqsa Storm Operation on October 7, Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing of the Gaza Strip home of 2.3 million Palestinians…” (Middle East Eye). A complete blockade on the Gaza Strip was initiated on October 9, 2023 consisting in blocking and obstructing the importation of food, water, fuel, and essential commodities to 2.3 Million Palestinians. It’s an outright crime against humanity. It’s genocide.

It is worth noting, that Netanyahu’s military actions are not targeting HAMAS, quite the opposite: he is targeting 2.3 million innocent Palestinian civilians, in blatant violation of the Four Basic Principles of The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC):

“….respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects [schools, hospitals and residential areas], the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” [Additional Protocol 1, Article 48]

Ironically, according to Scott Ritter, Hamas’ has acquired U.S. weapons in Ukraine.

This was Not a “Surprise Attack”
Was the Hamas Attack a “False Flag”?

“I served in the IDF 25 years ago, in the intelligence forces. There’s no way Israel did not know of what’s coming.

A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces. So this??

What happened to the “strongest army in the world”?

How come border crossings were wide open?? Something is VERY WRONG HERE, something is very strange, this chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defense system.

To me this suprise attack seems like a planned operation. On all fronts.

If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say that this feels like the work of the Deep State.

It feels like the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been sold, once again, to the higher powers that be.

Link to video (click here)

(Statement by Efrat Fenigson, former IDF intelligence, October 7, 2023, emphasis added)

Ironically, the media (NBC) is now contending that the “Hamas attack bears hallmarks of Iranian involvement”

History: The Relationship between Mossad and Hamas
What is the relationship between Mossad and Hamas? Is Hamas an “intelligence asset”? There is a long history.

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin. It was supported at the outset by Israeli intelligence as a means to weaken the Palestinian Authority:

“Thanks to Mossad, (Israel’s “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”), Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat’s Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation.

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. (L’Humanité, translated from French)

The links of Hamas to Mossad and US intelligence have been acknowledged by Rep. Ron Paul in a statement to the U.S Congress: “Hamas Was Started by Israel”?

“You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat… (Rep. Ron Paul, 2011)

What this statement entails is that Hamas is and remains “an intelligence asset”, namely “an “asset” to intelligence agencies”

See also the WSJ (January 24, 2009) “How Israel helped to Spawn Hamas”.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (WSJ, emphasis added)

“The Cat is Out of the Bag”
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)

Does this statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians?

“Support” and “Money” for Hamas.
“Transferring Money to Hamas” on behalf of Netanyahu is confirmed by a Times of Israel October 8, 2023 Report:

“Hamas was treated as a partner to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority to prevent Abbas from moving towards creating a Palestinian State. Hamas was promoted from a terrorist group to an organization with which Israel conducted negotiations through Egypt, and which was allowed to receive suitcases containing millions of dollars from Qatar through the Gaza crossings.” (emphasis added)

The Dangers of Military Escalation?

Let us be under no illusions, this “false flag” operation is a complex military-intelligence undertaking, carefully planned over several years, in liaison and coordination with US intelligence, the Pentagon and NATO.

In turn, this action against Palestine is already conducive to a process of military escalation which potentially could engulf a large part of Middle East.

Israel is a de facto member NATO (with a special status) since 2004, involving active military and intelligence coordination as well as consultations pertaining to the occupied territories.

Military cooperation with both the Pentagon and NATO is viewed by Israel’s Defence Force (IDF) as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.”

The premise of NATO-Israel military cooperation is that “Israel is under attack”. Does Israel’s agreement with the Atlantic Alliance “obligate” NATO “to come to the rescue of Israel” under the doctrine of “collective security” (Article 5 of the Washington treaty)?

In recent developments, U.S. military deployments in the Middle East are ongoing allegedly to avoid escalation.

According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

There is always the risk that nations and/or organisations hostile to Israel will take try to take advantage. And that includes, for instance, organisations like Hezbollah or a country like Iran. So this is a message to countries and organisations hostile to Israel that they should not try to utilise the situation. And the United States have deployed, or has deployed more military forces in the region, not least to deter any escalation or prevent any escalation of the situation. (NATO Press Conference, Brussels, October 12, 2023, emphasis added)

Netanyahu’s “New Stage”
“The Long War” against Palestine

Netanyahu’s stated objective, which constitutes a new stage in the 75 year old war (since Nakba, 1948) against the people of Palestine is no longer predicated on “Apartheid” or “Separation”. This new stage –which is also directed against Israelis who want peace— consists in “total appropriation” as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me [Netanyahu]: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (Netanyahu January 2023. emphasis added)

We bring to the attention of our readers the incisive analysis of Dr. Philip Giraldi pointing to the likelihood of a “False Flag’”.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 8, 2023, Above text updated on October 12, 2023

Part VI
Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor?
But Who Actually Did What to Whom?
“This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”

by Dr Philip Giraldi
October 16, 2023

.“As a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.”

It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations.

Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes,

has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and

has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are.

Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them.

But when the Arabs strike back against the hatred that confronts them with their limited resources it is Israel that is described as the victimand the Palestinians who are dehumanized and portrayed as the “terrorists.”

Media in the US and Europe were quick to label the Hamas offensive breaching the formidable Israeli border defenses as “Israel’s 9/11” or even “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” to establish the context that the Israelis have been on the receiving end of an “unprovoked” attack by a cruel and heartless enemy.

Israel has responded to the attack with a heavy bombardment of Gaza that has destroyed infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, while also cutting off food supplies, water and electricity.

It has demanded that residents of north Gaza, all 1.1 million of them, evacuate to make way for a possible ground offensive but there is nowhere to go as all the borders are closed, and the United Nations is calling it a demand with “devastating humanitarian consequences.” Journalist Peter Beinart has commented “This is a monstrous crime. It’s happening in plain view, with US support.”

And the United States government is indeed typically on the same page as Israel. President Joe Biden, citing fabricated stories about dead Jewish babies, speaks of how Israel has a “duty” to defend itself, while the Palestinians somehow have no right to protect themselves at all, much less to rise up against their persecutors in a struggle for freedom.

And Washington has also unhesitatingly chosen to directly involve itself in the conflict, completely on the side of the Jewish state, asserting repeatedly that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and telling the Israelis that “we have your back” while also dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the scene of the fighting as well as the 101st Airborne to Jordan and increasing the readiness of Marines stationed in Kuwait.

The White House could have taken more aggressive steps to encourage a ceasefire and talks but has chosen instead to issue essentially toothless calls to let the trapped civilians escape while also backing a devastating Israeli military response.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Oct. 12, 2023. – Secretary Antony Blinken on X

Israel is also hosting the worthless and brain dead Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who will be providing advice along the lines of his insightful comment that Hamas is “evil” and “worse than ISIS.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already in Jerusalem, announcing that the US is there to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unity government “as long as America exists” after first saying “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government makes clear that a key element in why he is there is because he is “a Jew.” Perhaps he should recuse himself from policy making involving Israel as being “a Jew” would not appear to be a United States national interest and is likely to produce irrational responses to developing situations.

If all of this sounds a lot like Ukraine it should, except that in Ukraine the US and NATO are fighting against Russia, which is being demonized for occupying what is claimed Ukrainian territory, whereas in Palestine they are supporting the occupier of actual Palestinian territory, Israel.

Funny thing that, and the word “hypocrisy” comes immediately to mind. As it turns out, however, I am somewhat on the same page as much of the media, agreeing that the Hamas incursion is something like 9/11, though I am sure that my take would not be found acceptable to the CNN Jake Tappers of this world.

My thinking is that Israel knew in advance about 9/11 in the United States due to its extensive spying network and chose not to share the information because it was to their advantage not to do so.

Indeed, a pleased Netanyahu even stated several years later that “9/11 was a good thing because it made the United States join us in our fight.”

That the attacks killed 3,000 Americans did not bother the Israeli government as Israel has a long history of killing Americans when it can benefit from so doing, starting with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 which killed 34 sailors.

So too in this case in Gaza, Netanyahu may have decided to encourage an unexpected development, making it like 9/11, that would enable him to escalate and “mow the grass” as the Israelis put it, in the remainder of Arab Palestine.

And bear in mind that the actual incident that triggered the uprising was a rampage involving at least 800 Israeli settlers in and around the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, beating pilgrims and destroying Palestinian shops, all without any interference from the nearby Israeli security forces. The rioting was clearly allowed and even encouraged by the government.

Drawing on my experience as a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.

Israel had an extensive electronic and physical wall backed by soldiers and weaponry that completely surrounded Gaza on the landward side, so effective that it was claimed that not even a mouse could get in.

The Mediterranean side of Gaza was also tightly controlled by the Israeli Navy and boats to and from Gaza were completely blocked.

Egypt tightly controlled the southern part of Gaza bordering on the Sinai. So Gaza was under 24/7 complete surveillance and control at all times. Israeli military intelligence also certainly had a network of recruited informants inside Gaza who would report on any training or movements, easy enough to do when you can approach people who are starving and make them an offer they cannot refuse just for providing information on what they see and hear.

And then there was a warning from the Egyptian government to Israel ten days before the Hamas attack, with Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally calling Netanyahu and sharing intelligence suggesting that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” Other media accounts reveal how Hamas trained and practiced their maneuvers publicly. There were also assessments made by US intelligence, which were shared with Israel, suggesting that something was afoot. So, given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack but rather a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza, vowing that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” and then go on from there. And “from there” might well include Lebanon, Syria and Iran, possibly with the assistance of the United States to do the heavy lifting. Iran in particular is already being blamed by the usual suspects as a party involved in the Hamas attack, so far without any evidence whatsoever, which is typical of how these stories evolve.

And Israel has moved far to the right politically to such an extent that it might appreciate a little ethnic cleansing to demonstrate its seriousness. Netanyahu and other senior government officials in his cabinet have recently been making passing references to a “developing security situation” in the country to justify the intensifying of the raids by the army against Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He has been exploiting his position to call in particular for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza, which is precisely what is happening. Gaza might be of particular interest to Ben-Gvir and others as it uniquely shelters an armed and organized resistance in the form of Hamas, which, oddly, was founded with the support of Israel to split the Palestinian political resistance with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

There is another issue relating to the recent fighting that one would like to know the answer to, namely how did Hamas get its weapons in the first place?

Some were clearly manufactured from parts and scrap but others were sophisticated and, as Gaza is blockaded on all sides, smuggling them in becomes problematical. One argument is that they were supplied by Iran and others to be brought in by tunnels, but the tunnels on two sides would end up in Israel and on the third side in Egypt. The fourth side is the Mediterranean Sea. So how did they arrive? Is there a possible triple or even quadruple cross taking place with different parties lying to each other? And should there be concerns that after the American armada arrives off the coast of Gaza there just might be some kind of false flag incident engineered by Netanyahu that will involve Washington directly in the fighting?

And there is what amounts to a related issue that should be of concern to everyone in the US and generically speaking the “Western world” where human rights are at least nominally respected. The message from almost all Western governments is that Israel has a carte blanche to do whatever it likes even when it involves war crimes to include mass forced displacement or genocide. In this case, the coordinated government-media response which is intended to protect Israel from any criticism almost immediately began circulating fabricated tales of atrocities while also delivering a hit on freedom of speech and association. President Biden, who should be trying to defuse the crisis, is instead adding fuel to the flames, saying of Hamas that “Pure, unadulterated evil has been unleashed on the earth!”

In Florida the arch Zionist stooge Governor Ron Desantis met with Jewish leaders in a synagogue to announce draconian measures against Iran to include sanctions on companies that are in any way linked to that country. One might point out that those businesses have done nothing wrong and Desantis also called for “eradication of Hamas from the earth.” His intellectual depth was at the same time revealed when he said the US should not take in any Gazan refugees because they are “antisemites.”

And in South Carolina, America’s favorite he/she Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a US attack on Iran as well as declaring the war against Hamas to be “a religious war” and urging the Israeli army to invade Gaza and do “Whatever the hell you have to do to” to “level the place.”

And the Europeans are equally spineless in their deference to Israel. The Israeli president declared the that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and not long after that top European Union representatives met with him to offer their unqualified support. Meanwhile in France, the spineless and feckless government of Emmanuel Macron has sought to outlaw any gathering that expresses support for Palestinian rights.

And in the UK, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman has proposed criminalizing any protest against Israeli actions or anything in support of Palestine to include banning any public display of the Palestinian national flag, which she regards as a “criminal offense toward the Jewish community in Britain.”

She has also said that “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.” Berlin’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has also classified the use of the expression as a “criminal offense.” The manner in which most Western political elites are lining up unquestionably and even enthusiastically behind Israel and its craven leaders’ desire for bloody vengeance is truly shocking but comes as no surprise.

Beyond the issue of Gaza itself, some in Israel are arguing that Netanyahu has personally benefitted from the unrest through the creation of the national unity government which has ended for the time being the huge demonstrations protesting his judicial reform proposals. If all of this comes together politically as it might in the next several weeks, we could be seeing the initial steps in what will develop into the complete ethnic cleansing of what was once Palestine, in line with Netanyahu’s assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” So all of the former Palestine is now a land to be defined by its Jewishness where Jews are in full control and are free to do whatever they want without any objection, referred to by the Israeli government as “an exclusive right to self-determination.” And it has all possibly been brought to fruition by the enablement provided by the current developments in Gaza.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

30 December 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Prof. Richard Falk

After October 7

24 Dec 2025 – Throughout this period challenging the adequacy of the UN in the face of genocide, there were reasons to redeem its reputation, including an awareness that its refusal to respect judgments of the leading international tribunals (International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court). It needs to be better understood that when the UN was established 80 years ago the Charter design gave the last word on issues of global security to the five winning states in World War, and not to international law as believed by its most ardent champions.

By clear intention despite the priority accorded war prevention in the Preamble to the Charter, the capabilities of the UN to act coercively against aggression, apartheid, and genocide were withheld from the Organization. Instead, the winners (that is, the five permanent members of the Security Council of P5) of the recently concluded war against fascism were also given a right of veto that amounted to a limitless entitlement of any one of the five in the only UN political organ with the authority to make binding decisions, and this provision meant not only an opting out of decisions contrary to their will but of preventing Security Council from acting even when the other 14 members were united in voting for the decision. In practice this meant that prospects for peace and security in major conflict situations were left to the geopolitical calculations and alignments of these most powerful and dangerous members of the new organization.

During the Cold War, which prevailed globally between 1945-1991 the paralysis of the UN in relation to the management of global security was mainly due to the discretion at the disposal of the opposed alliances of the US-led NATO forces on one side of the ideological divide and strategic rivalry and Soviet-led Warsaw forces on the other side. The UN contented itself with being a spectator, or site of opposing propaganda denunciations as regarding the Vietnam War, Moscow’s interventions in Eastern Europe, and other settings of violent conflict involving the strategic interests of the P5. This was partly due to the constitutional framework of the UN, but it also reflected the unwillingness of many leading countries to dilute sovereignty when it came to national security. This refusal was most dramatically illustrated by the rejection of nuclear disarmament and a preferred reliance on deterrence, exhibiting the militarist orientations of foreign policy elites in leading governments. It blends a militarized hard power version of global security with P5 strategic ambitions to reinvent Western domination in a period of collapsing European colonialism.

Against this background, the role of the UN while disappointing was not surprising given the strong ties between the white West and Israel in this encounter with a Muslim majority Palestine in the strategically important Middle East. This lent the struggle an inter-civilizational dimension while also posing a challenge to Western hegemony in relation to energy reserves, arms sales, and more generally, trade and investment. This line of interpretation was accentuated by the anti-Western religiously oriented Hamas, a non-state entity that was characterized in Western media and state propaganda as nothing other than a terrorist organization. Such a posture ignored the 2006 political victory of Hamas in an internationally monitored election and its role as the center of legally grounded Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation that consistently violated international humanitarian legal standards as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 governing ‘belligerent occupation.’ UN members complicit with Israel supported the genocide in Gaza for two years, stepping back from support mainly because of the rise of public protest activity in their countries that Israel had exceeded all constraints of law and morality in persisting with its genocidal campaign. It should be appreciated that the ICJ by a near unanimous vote on July 19, 2024 declared continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) to be unlawful, decreeing its withdrawal, an outcome that the General Assembly formally supported and Israel and its support group ignored.

This political agenda explains the six ceasefire initiatives that were vetoed in the Security Council combined with the failure of complicit states, above all, the United States, to use its soft power leverage to induce Israel to stop its assault on Gaza and satisfy the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Such a willingness is inhibited by adhering political realism of the pre-nuclear age and the special interests of the arms industries and a long militarized governmental bureaucracy.

The Disgraceful UN Response to the Trump Plan

In my view, the 15 members of the Security Council, disgracefully voted unanimously in favor of the US draft resolution, adopted as SC Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, endorsing the Trump Plan for the stabilization of Gaza. The plan emerged with the approval of Israel, significantly unveiled during a Netanyahu visit to the White House at a joint press conference. The core feature of the plan was to reward the perpetrators of prolonged genocide preceded by apartheid and resulting in making a wasteland of Gaza. Not only were there no references in the resolution to Israel’s defiance of rulings of the International Court of Justice, resolutions of the General Assembly, or the assessments of independent scholars and genocide. Neither Israel nor the United States, nor the other complicit states were even obliged to pay reparations for the unlawful damage caused in Gaza, but this was left to be sorted out by the combined forces of vulture capitalism operating freely as if Gaza reconstruction was a real estate venture and the monetary contributions of Arab governments.

In this process, not only was the diplomatic framework imposed on the Palestinians, but the US was accepted as the legitimate ‘peacemaker’ although it was overtly collaborating with Israel in drafting the plan and pointedly excluding Palestinian participation. Indeed, the US Government went so far as deny visas to any Palestinian Authority delegate who sought to attend the General Assembly meeting of the UN or to otherwise take part in UN proceedings shaping Palestine. What makes the resolution a step backward if the objective had been what it should have been, arrangements for a peaceful and just future crafted with the participation of proper Palestinian representation and dedicated to a just and durable peace.

Instead, SC Resolution 2803 if considered as a whole, indirectly exonerates the culprits for their past behavior carrying impunity to an extreme. Beyond this 2803 visibly acknowledges US total control the present diplomatic efforts to replace unrestrained Israeli violence with a ceasefire that Israel ignores at its pleasure. The bloody result has been hundreds of lethal violations of the ceasefire killing up to now of over 400 Palestinians by estimates of the Gaza Health Ministry, without Israel even being reprimanded by Washington for so abusing a ceasefire deal. Why Hamas accepts this Israeli practice of accepting the ceasefire while continuing with genocide at a decelerated rate, and exhibiting indifference to the persistence of widespread severe suffering among the entire Gazan population of two million.

As to the future, 2803 endorses a colonialist transitional arrangement given operational reality by a Board of Peace, of course chaired by none other than Donald Trump and given stability in Gaza by the formation of an International Stabilization Force to be formed by the contributions of troops by UN members endorsing the plan. The US has brazenly acknowledged its own transactional goals by pledging $112 billion to rebuild Gaza as a global hub for trade, investment, and tourism. Governance in Gaza is left in part to Israel that seems to be claiming a permanent security presence in northern Gaza above the so-called yellow line.

Given the highly dubious manner of recovering from the Gaza catastrophe at this late stage, how can we explain its widespread international support, and the disappearance of opposition in the Security Council? The five SC members from the Global South (Algeria, Somalia, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and Panama), made some critical comments about 2803 during the formal discussion that preceded the vote, centering on its vagueness as to crucial details and even its one-sidedness, yet all ended up voting in favor. Did such a vote reflect genuine agreement, or more likely, was it a vote that recognized geopolitical primacy when it came to the management of global security? And why would Indonesia and Pakistan, Muslim majority countries, even if not members of SC, go out of their way to express approval of the 2803 path to the future? More understandable was the approval expressed by the European Union, which again served as a reminder that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is part of Judeo-Christian civilizational long game of sustaining Middle Eastern hegemony.

As troubling was the endorsement of 2803 given by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who not only welcomed the resolution but expressed the hope that its momentum would be converted into “concrete action.” Thankfully, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, expressed “serious concern with the Security Council’s adoption of resolution 2803, warning that it runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israël’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.” Revealingly, Albanese spoke these words of truth to power, after enduring punitive sanctions imposed in July for her courageous willingness to bear official witness to what was becoming all too clear to the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world. It is ironic that the UN’s response to 2803 was somewhat rescued from taints of complicity by an unpaid appointee not subject to UN discipline. Her words are congruent with those of Craig Mokhiber who resigned from a senior position at the UN because of its failure to deal responsibly with respect to Palestinian grievances, and in the last couple of years emerged as the most informed and incisive critic of the UN approach, reinforcing Albanese’s forthrightness on behalf of law and justice with respect to Palestinian grievances and rights, but the Organization’s own transactional approach in clashed between geopolitical imperatives and compliance with the UN Charter.

It also seems strange that Russia and China, although voicing some criticisms during the discussion, did not use their right of veto to block passage of 2803, especially given the frequent use of the veto on Israel’s behalf by the US and considering the principles at stake. It is likely that they were impressed by Hamas’ acceptance of the overall approach and did not want to be seen as spoilers held responsible for a breakdown of the Trump Plan that would have undoubtedly mean the end of the already tarnished ceasefire. Additionally, China and Russia both seem to regard global stability as dependent upon a degree of geopolitical reciprocity in relation to their trilateral relations. In this limited sense, Trump seems more in accord with how cooperative relations with these two countries would bring stability and transactional gains than did the Biden approach of fighting Russia by way of Ukraine to preserve US post-Cold War dominance, a path that increased the risk of a third world war fought with nuclear war leading to a lengthening of the Ukraine War with heave casualties on both sides. Trump’s approach, although fragile because of his mercurial style, stressing geopolitical stability if it meant accepting spheres of influence as compromising the sovereignty of smaller states and even, as here, overlooking genocide.

The rejection of 2803 by Hamas was not entirely a surprise. It does not explain why Hamas ever accepted the Trump diplomacy at its outset except for its ceasefire and IDF withdrawal prospects. Hamas’ acceptance extended to the whole of the Trump plan, but with this stand against 2803 and its announced refusal to disarm it may now be either the basis of a better compromise or at least a stalemate as to further progress. Hamas, and Iran, the other vocal critic of the resolution, also undoubtedly are reacting to the absence on Israel’s part of any willingness to show signs of embracing a politics of reconciliation, even to the extent of conscientiously upholding the early ceasefire, partial withdrawal, and an end to the rigid constraints on humanitarian aid. For Israel to have shown no mercy to a population living without heat, secure shelter, and adequate food and medical supplies is to send the chilling message that Israel has not even considered abandoning its expansionist ambitions that include further ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a surge of settlement growth on the West Bank.

The US representative insisting that “[a] vote against this resolution is a vote to return to war” was part of the ‘take it or leave it’ Trump approach. Nor is it surprising that Netanyahu hailed the endorsement of 2803 by declaring “that President Trump’s plan will lead to peace and prosperity because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.”[15] Or that France and the UK sugarcoated their endorsements of the Trump Plan by verbal statements of conditional support for eventual Palestinian statehood as affirmed in its sponsorship of the New York Declaration, envisioning future Palestinian representation under the authority of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority (PA), itself a creature of US/Israel dominated diplomacy that has evaded Palestinian self-determination, but now is being repurposed to implement the Trump Plan. The PA announced support for 2803 is a move calculated to convince Israel and the US that it can be counted upon to go along with their stabilization scenario despite its rejection of Palestinian grievances and denial of Palestine’s right of self-determination. Offering such ‘breadcrumb’ rewards to the PA, while disqualifying Hamas from any role in representing the Palestinian people is emblematic of the next phase of the Zionist end game involving the political surrender of Palestine and the elimination of Hamas and Palestinian resistance.

Concluding Remarks

The maneuvers of states, following their interests rather than supposedly shared values associated with the UN Charter and the international rule of law, is to be expected given the history of international relations and the political realist orientation of most foreign policy elites. Nevertheless, it is regrettable, given the gross disregard of justice and rights, which pervades the Trump Plan and the diplomatic and hard power muscle at the disposal of the US. It does not augur well for meeting other world order challenges including climate change, migratory flows, ecological stability, less inequitable distributions of wealth and income to individuals, states, and regions, as well as a more robust commitment to peaceful modes of conflict resolution.

This saga of 2803 is particularly unfortunate because it shows that the geopolitical management of global security extends beyond the veto power of the P5. For the sake of stability, the UN venue implicitly swallows the Israeli genocide to an unseemly extent of unanimously endorsing a neo-colonialist future for Gaza and impunity plus for Israel and its complicit supporters. Symbolic of this unseemly submission by the UN and its membership is the endorsement of 2803 by the UN leader, an individual declared persona non grata by Israel more than a year ago. Israel’s insulting dismissal of the UN as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism’ and the like should have at least led the Organization’s Secretary General to respond with stony silence to 2803 rather than kneel in submission sending a shameful message to the world that from the perspective of the UN even genocide does not disqualify a state from receiving diplomatic and territorial rewards as long as the geopolitical actors or P5 remain on board. In effect, the dynamics of power politics is still making history, despite the disastrous consequences.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

29 December 2025

Source: .transcend.org

By Dr. Vandana Shiva 

Consciousness Symposium (2024)

Can quantum physics help us rethink the nature of consciousness? In this inspiring keynote from A Symposium on Consciousness, Dr. Vandana Shiva—a renowned physicist, author, and environmental activist—explores the profound connections between quantum mechanics, consciousness, and ecological democracy. Introduced by Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín of the Pari Center, Shiva explains how entanglement and non-duality offer transformative insights for science, philosophy, and environmental activism, moving beyond the limits of mechanistic science.

Shiva draws from the wisdom of quantum pioneers like Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, and David Bohm, whose work shows that consciousness is not confined to the brain but instead serves as the foundation of reality itself. Reflecting on ancient teachings from the Vedas and Upanishads, Shiva challenges the illusion of separateness that dominates modern thought and highlights the importance of seeing biodiversity and ecological systems as interconnected living networks.

Her ideas bridge quantum physics with practical solutions for seed sovereignty, sustainable agriculture, and ecological participation. The talk reflects Shiva’s lifelong commitment to social justice and environmental activism. Drawing on her work with the Navdanya movement, she discusses the mind-body connection, the role of consciousness in quantum theory, and the urgent need to overcome ecological apartheid. This keynote invites viewers to explore how consciousness can inspire a future rooted in biodiversity, sustainability, and ecological harmony.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4t8Xt_QqGE]

TRANSCEND Member Prof. Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmentalist, physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, food sovereignty advocate, and an anti-globalization author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy (RFSTN) in 1982 and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers’ rights. Shiva received the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993. She is executive director of the Navdanya Trust.

29 December 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Richard E. Rubenstein

The Near Death and Possible Rebirth of Human Solidarity

Exactly 70 years ago, when I was a high school senior living in a suburb of New York City, I went with my parents to see a photo exhibit called “The Family of Man” at MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art. I remember it vividly. Some 500 photos by more than 250 photographers pictured people of virtually every culture involved in common human activities: love, childbirth, work, family, education, war, and peace. According to Edward Steichen, the great photographer who curated it, the exhibit “was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” For the next eight years the show toured the globe . . . but the ideas that inspired it have long since gone into hibernation. In place of the human family conceived of as our primary identity group we have come to sanctify the ethnic nation.

How did this happen? What (if anything) can be done about it? It may help to put the hope for human solidarity in historical context.

The vision of humanity as a coherent group sharing common characteristics – a society actually or potentially like a family – originated in the religions of the axial age. To Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all people were children of God and descendants of common human ancestors, with each person possessing an equally precious soul. Eventually, they believed, God would fulfill his promise to create a universal world order, peaceful and just, recognizing the implicit holiness of every individual and every people. Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains made different assumptions about the nature of deity and the soul, but they, too, believed that human beings shared a common nature and were part of an overarching moral-spiritual order. Early Enlightenment philosophers, secular as well as religious, based the unity of mankind on the universality of reason, the existence of natural law and rights, and the possibility of human progress. Later analysts in the age of modern science asserted that humans constitute a single biological species, with each individual possessing a common neuro- psychological makeup.

That was the theory – but what about the practice? Despite these commonalities, it was clear that some forms of diversity might trump unity. The potential unity of humankind did not prevent its actual division into tribes, castes, social classes, and nations — divisions that were deep, long-lasting, and often generative of massive bloodshed and trauma. Nevertheless, the prophets of solidarity (for they were prophets, not simply analysts of “things as they are now”) asserted that the destiny of human individuals was to create a peaceful world order based on what Immanuel Kant called “cosmopolitical unity.” Karl Marx objected that this solidarity could not emerge while humanity was divided into unequally privileged social classes, but he insisted that workers’ rule would permit the development of a “species consciousness” transcending narrower forms of identity based on ethnicity and nationalism. A century later, Mohandas Gandhi emphasized that diverse identities of various sorts could be maintained while also being transcended. For him the human journey was headed toward the goal of “unity in diversity.”

These were some of the concepts underlying the Family of Man exhibit. They reflected the optimistic hopes of many progressive thinkers and activists in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Progress, symbolized by the new United Nations building rising a few blocks east of MOMA, meant realizing the potential of all peoples and nations to treat each other with the same sort of compassion, care, and responsibility that one would expect of good friends, if not members of the same family. An implication was that this fellow-feeling would produce some sort of political unity reaching beyond the nation-state and competing blocs of states. The UN was not a world government nor was it expected to be, but commentators from Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru believed that it was an important step in that direction.

What shattered these hopes and made them seem so abstract, naïve, and utopian? For years, the standard answer was the Cold War. After one or two years of international collaboration, the postwar world had divided into hostile communist and capitalist blocs, with each side denouncing each other as evil incarnate, threatening its enemy with nuclear destruction, and fighting “limited” but highly destructive wars. But the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, and more than a generation later its promised peace dividends remain undelivered. Not only is there no rebirth of the movement to realize human solidarity, but divisions based on people’s identification with ethnic, religious, and national groups have intensified and become more lethal – even genocidal.

The latest manifestation of these divisions, sometimes called right-wing populism, has seen a resurgence of ethno-nationalist fervor, competition, and violence around the globe, with leaders like Donald Trump (U.S.), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Volodymyr Zelenski (Ukraine), Narendra Modi (India), Viktor Orban (Hungary), and Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), among many others, implementing economic, political, and cultural policies that strongly favor members of their own ethnic “nation” and disfavor members of other groups, internal and international, that they consider competitors and sources of impurity. The leading prophet of this development was the late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, who argued that Cold War competition between blocs committed to opposed socioeconomic ideologies was giving way to a competition between eight “civilizations” – blocs separated by strongly conflicting cultural values and interests. Although Huntington’s analysis implied a shift from a dual power struggle toward multipolarity, he and others associated with the neoconservative movement believed that the major “clash of civilizations” of the new era would pit “the West against the rest.”

One has to admire the descriptive power of Huntington’s theory. From the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Russo-Ukrainian war, the genocidal Israel-Palestine conflict, and brutal civil struggles in Africa and Southeast Asia, violent conflicts often take place along civilizational or tribal-nationalist lines. What the analysis most obviously lacks, however, is a convincing causal explanation. Why did conflicts between culture-groups come to replace the Cold War struggle? Why have so many struggles pitted “the West against the rest”? Why do so many people around the globe, particularly workers, farmers, and members of the small business class, feel that the only way to secure threatened cultural identities and interests is to conflate their ethnic or religious group with the nation and embrace the dogma of “America First” (or India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia, Hungary, Myanmar, or any other nation First)?

Three related ideas help to explain the rise of ethno-nationalist strife: the irresistible movement toward globalization, the persistence of imperialism, and the inability of late-capitalist economic and political institutions to solve working people’s problems. A brief comment on each factor follows:

1. People are inclined to create and join militant, armed ethnic, religious, or nationalist organizations when they feel that these cultural identities are seriously threatened.  A major source of such threats in today’s world is the movement toward globalization, which is linked to the globalization of capital and trade, but also involves the exposure of every major social group in virtually every nation to the ideas, images, songs, and stories of other groups around the world, as well as to their diseases, medicines, methods of education and communication, and methods of war. Exposure to other cultures alone does not necessarily threaten one’s ethnic, national, or religious identity, but it often does so if those identities are already compromised by poverty or precarity, the loss of political power, or social indignity.  In many nations, for example, “nativist” anti-immigrant passion is fueled by the eroding economic and social status of native groups.
2. “The West against the rest” makes no sense unless one recognizes that in the U.S. the Cold War was immediately followed by the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” declaring America’s intention to remain the world’s sole military superpower and to suppress any potential rivals. This implied the continued maintenance of the U.S. role as the imperial successor to Britain and France in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, as well as continued North American domination of Central and Latin America. Fueled by aggressive oligopoly capitalism, imperialism generates continual violence by empowering oppressive elites in subject nations and by threatening the political and cultural identities of non-elite groups.  Rebels against imperial domination, as well as competitive nations with imperial ambitions of their own, tend to organize resistance by appealing to the ethnic, religious, or national solidarity of aggrieved groups.  Especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suppression of communist and socialist rebels elsewhere, anti-imperial resistance has emphasized ethnic and religious identities rather than those based on social class.
3. A world troubled by imperialist violence as well as environmental destruction, climate-based disasters, pandemic diseases, mass migrations, and other challenges affecting all humanity desperately needs global solutions to global problems.  But oligopoly capitalism exacerbates such problems rather than solving them. “Late capitalism” generates vast social and political inequalities that undermine the prosperity, power, and social status of working people and threaten their cultural identities.  The system’s fundamental driver, the pursuit of private profit, precludes the public planning needed to deal with climate change, medical challenges, mass migration, and a host of other problems.  At the same time, the masters of the system have sought to protect their privileges by making ideological and political challenges to the capitalist order taboo – unthinkable! – and by controlling the major communications media as well as most educational institutions.  As a result, working people increasingly disadvantaged by soluble social problems are often persuaded that they have been victimized by sinister cultural enemies rather than by profit-seeking, empire-building oligarchs and their political enablers.

To conclude: seldom has the world been more in need of a workable, realizable doctrine of human solidarity.  The antidote to the alarming increase in ethno-national savagery is cultivation of the understanding that our primary identity (in the sense of wholeness, as opposed to partiality) is human, not just ethnic or national.  Regardless of even deep cultural and political differences, we have the inherent emotional and intellectual capacity to treat each other as friends and family members and to build viable institutions reflecting the consciousness of our mutual needs and responsibilities.  But Marx was right: we can’t get there under the aegis of a profit-obsessed system that sets us against each other in the struggle for economic advantage, fails to solve collective social problems, defines our enemies as cultural “others,” and tries to convince us that no better system is possible.

The road to human solidarity isn’t straight or easy.  It is littered with obstacles, including the oligarchy, its political allies, and the rules that a predatory capitalist order imposes on the rest of us.  Changing these leaders and their rules clears the way for real progress toward the only goal worthy of our species: unity in diversity.

__________________________________________

Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

29 December 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Ranjan Solomon

India today wears two faces, locked in the same body but living in radically different realities. One face smiles confidently at global summits, speaks the language of rankings and growth curves, and celebrates itself as an emerging world power. The other face does not smile. It queues for work that never comes, buries its dead quietly, negotiates fear daily, and survives on debt, charity, or silence.

This split is not accidental. It is political.

The first face is manufactured through slogans -India Shining, Ache Din, Ab ki Baar Modi Sarkar, Vishwaguru. Each arrived with spectacle, promise, and certainty. Each collapsed when confronted with lived reality. Vajpayee’s India Shining failed because the rural poor, the informal worker, and the unemployed refused to recognise themselves in that narrative. Two decades later, Ache Din has followed the same path—only with louder amplification and deeper denial.

Slogans fail when they insult experience

The much-touted dream of “char sau par” collapsed not merely because of electoral arithmetic, but because India itself is cracking under the weight of unresolved structural crises. No amount of propaganda can erase hunger, joblessness, fear, or grief. When the gap between narrative and reality becomes too wide, legitimacy erodes.

The claim that India is now the world’s fourth-largest economy is the latest iteration of this narrative excess. Economic rankings are paraded as proof of national success, yet they float above collapsing foundations. GDP size does not translate automatically into well-being. Growth without redistribution is arithmetic, not justice. Nirmala Sitharaman’s celebratory statistics may satisfy investors, but they do not reflect the India that lives below, besides, and outside those numbers.

That India tells a far more disturbing story

Despite decades of growth, over 60 percent of India’s economy remains informal, and over 90 percent of its workforce lacks job security or social protection. Wealth has concentrated dramatically: the top 1 percent controls over 40 percent of national wealth, while the bottom half struggles to survive on a sliver of the economy. India today is among the most unequal societies in the world, a fact rarely acknowledged in official discourse.

Poverty, despite repeated claims of eradication, persists in stubborn and degrading forms. Conservative estimates suggest over 200 million Indians still live on extremely low daily incomes, while deprivation in nutrition, healthcare, housing, and education remains widespread. India continues to house one-third of the world’s poor, a staggering contradiction for a country aspiring to global leadership.

Nowhere is this contradiction sharper than in rural India

Nearly two-thirds of Indians still depend on rural livelihoods, yet agriculture contributes less than 18 percent to GDP. Farm incomes remain volatile, climate shocks are increasing, and institutional support is weak. More than half of all agricultural households are indebted, borrowing not to expand production but to survive—paying for seeds, fertilisers, healthcare, marriages, and funerals.

This structural neglect has produced one of India’s gravest tragedies: farmer suicides. Since the mid-1990s, over 300,000 farmers have taken their own lives, according to official crime records. Even in recent years, when the government speaks of rural resurgence, thousands of farmers die by suicide annually, crushed by debt, crop failure, price volatility, and the absence of meaningful state support.

These deaths are not accidents. They are policy outcomes.

Migration from villages has become an act of compulsion rather than choice. Entire regions are hollowing out as young people leave not in search of opportunity, but escape. Villages are ageing, feminising, and impoverishing, even as political rhetoric romanticises the “resilient farmer.”

Urban India, meanwhile, showcases the two faces of the nation in brutal proximity. Skyscrapers rise beside slums. Luxury housing stands vacant while over 65 million people live in informal settlements, and at least 1.8 million are officially homeless, a figure widely believed to be a gross undercount. Informal workers build cities they will never own, clean spaces they will never inhabit, and commute through systems designed to exclude them.

Employment—the foundation of dignity—has been systematically undermined. Youth unemployment remains alarmingly high, hovering around 20–25 percent, with even higher rates among educated youth. Women’s participation in the workforce has fallen to around 25 percent, among the lowest globally. This is not empowerment; it is economic erasure.

The government speaks endlessly of entrepreneurship while small and medium enterprises—the largest employers—collapse under credit shortages, erratic taxation, and policy shocks. MSMEs employ over 110 million people, yet receive only a fraction of the support extended to large corporations. Jobless growth has been normalised, and insecurity reframed as flexibility.

Infrastructure is paraded as proof of progress, yet it increasingly reveals the recklessness of speed over safety. India records over 150,000 road deaths annually, the highest in the world. Rail accidents, collapsing bridges, unsafe construction, and poorly regulated highways expose a governance model obsessed with announcements rather than accountability. Development measured in kilometres instead of lives is not development—it is negligence.

The second face of India is also visible in its mounting debt. India’s public debt now exceeds 80 percent of GDP, placing enormous strain on future generations. States borrow heavily not for transformation, but to meet routine expenditure. Household debt has surged, with personal and informal borrowing rising faster than incomes. For millions, debt has become a survival mechanism, not a ladder to mobility.

Several states are now fiscally stressed, struggling to service debt while maintaining basic welfare. Goa stands as a stark example. Often projected as a prosperous state due to tourism and high per capita income, Goa is today among the most indebted states in the country on a per capita basis. Its public finances are strained, its dependence on volatile tourism revenue deepened, and its local livelihoods hollowed out. Youth unemployment is rising, environmental degradation is accelerating, and informal work dominates the economy behind the postcard image. Goa’s crisis exposes a deeper truth: headline prosperity can mask profound structural fragility.

Perhaps the most damning failure of the current model lies in the condition of women and children.

Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao has become one of the most cynical slogans of our time. Crimes against women are reported every few minutes, with over 30,000 rape cases annually and conviction rates that barely cross 30 percent. Violence has become routine, justice delayed, and accountability absent. Safety is no longer assumed; it is negotiated daily.

India’s children—its most repeated rhetorical asset—bear the silent cost of this fractured reality. Over one-third of Indian children are stunted, and nearly one-third are underweight. Learning losses post-pandemic has been severe, particularly among government school students. Child labour, migration, and early dropouts continue unabated. The so-called demographic dividend is being starved before it matures.

The two faces of India also experience democracy differently. One celebrates electoral spectacle and majoritarian confidence. The other confronts shrinking freedoms, criminalised dissent, and hollowed institutions. Protest is delegitimised, civil society constrained, media intimidated, and constitutional safeguards treated as inconveniences.

Nationalism has become a substitute for economic accountability. Communal polarisation diverts attention from material failure. Identity is mobilised to silence questions of justice, redistribution, and dignity. What makes this moment dangerous is not inequality alone, but denial. Surveys are delayed, definitions changed, uncomfortable data buried. But hunger cannot be redefined away. Debt cannot be wished into prosperity. Despair cannot be marketed as pride indefinitely.

India does not need another slogan. It needs an honest reckoning.

Until the two faces of India are forced into conversation – until growth answers to hunger, infrastructure to safety, and power to accountability – the smiling face will continue speaking.And the suffering face will continue waiting.

History will not remember rankings or catchphrases. It will remember whether a nation chose truth over theatre—and justice over denial.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age in Social Movements.

27 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Lawrence S. Wittner

Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.

Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25 percent.

America’s farmworkers, too―many of them desperately poor―are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost U.S. farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.

As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official U.S. government poverty level.

Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers. Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by bringing them up to the federal minimum wage level, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage. In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.

Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it thanks to inflation. And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving such workers of key labor rights, including minimum wages and overtime pay.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025 that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8 percent.

Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.

Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any sort of clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the huge wind farms off the East Coast is predicted to cause the firing of thousands of workers.

Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving U.S. manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.

Consequently, U.S. unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4 percent, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6 percent. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.

Worker safety and health have also been seriously undermined by the Trump administration. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30 percent, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.

Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80 percent.

Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year. Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and, also, weakened workplace safety penalties for businesses.

In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for one out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.

In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day . . . the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack: On federal workers. On our unions and collective bargaining rights. On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on. . . . On our democracy itself.”

Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the President and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.

Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb(Stanford University Press).

27 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Charles Andrews

U.S. capitalism gave us a special gift for the 2025 holiday season – a healthcare crisis for millions of workers.

The immediate issue is the bitterly named Affordable Care Act (ACA), which opened for business in 2014. Headlines warn, “Higher cost, worse coverage: Affordable Care Act enrollees say expiring subsidies will hit them hard.” The Trump administration wants to abolish the ACA. Congressional Republicans, flooded with angry calls from previously loyal voters, want to dismantle healthcare programs slice by slice. Democrats are eager to score “messaging” points while they protect capitalist profit in healthcare. Whatever the outcome of this catfight, workers, their families, and retirees will pay more for healthcare, and many will not get care when they need it.

The ACA, also called Obamacare, oversees a marketplace for health insurance corporations. It is mainly targeted at people who do not have a health plan through their job or Medicare. Several states (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island) require that you have health insurance, else you are liable for a tax penalty. But the corporations’ premiums are so high that the federal government has propped up the system with partial tax credits. The insurance corporations are moving to raise premiums by 18% in 2026. All in all, if the credits expire, someone with a $28,000 income will see her premium go from $325 to $1,562 a year. A 60-year-old couple with an income of $85,000 would pay $22,600 more than they pay now.

Why Isn’t Care Free and Equal for All?

Why isn’t health care guaranteed, free, and equal for everyone? Health care is a huge source of profit for capitalists. The various bloodsuckers are stacked like a pile of blocks ready to topple down:

The health insurance corporations: UnitedHealth, Humana, CVS/Aetna Health, and others shun people with known health problems. They require you and your physician to convince the corporation when you need a medical procedure. They charge extra if the medical professional you need to see is “not in our network.”

Pharmaceutical corporations: The drug companies make huge profits off medications crucial to your survival and health. One study, comparing three dozen pharmaceutical corporations versus the Standard and Poor’s 500 as a whole, found huge differences in gross profit margin (76% versus 37%) and in earnings before taxes, interest, and depreciation (29% versus 19%). A similar industry is the medical machine and device corporations.

Hospitals and clinics: Most hospitals are in chains like HCA Healthcare (184 hospitals), Ascension (140 hospitals), and Trinity Health (101 hospitals).

Some of them claim to be nonprofit, but that just means they are exempt from property and income taxes. “Nonprofits” are run to maximize financial surplus, accumulate capital, and give top executives princely salaries. The Kaiser Permanente system with its 40 hospitals paid CEO Gregory Adams $12,721,446 in 2023; another 36 executives got anywhere from one to five million dollars.

Medical practices: Physicians used to be independent small businessmen. Today, three out of four primary-care doctors and pediatricians are overworked employees of hospitals and clinics. Other physicians are in medical group practices in which they share ownership with insurers, hospitals, and private equity financiers. Profit rules here, too.

The Remedy Is Class Struggle

In a capitalist society, we only get healthcare through class struggle.

• When workers negotiate a union contract, the bosses say, do you want to keep the health plan or would you “prefer” a wage increase? No, we want both, and we will strike to get them.
• Starbucks boasts that its baristas have a health plan – if they work at least 20 hours a week. Baristas testify that at stores with active union organizing, the bosses reduced their schedules “from working 25 hours to 17 or 18 hours a week and some … only getting five to 10 hours.” 
• In New York, 250,000 city government retirees, especially the 70,000 retired teachers, fought the City, the school system bosses, and the bureaucrats of the United Federation of Teachers and AFSCME, all intent on pushing the retirees into Medicare Advantage. MA is a growing private kingdom inside Medicare that shovels money to health insurance corporations while they confine people to narrow networks of caregivers. The retired workers campaigned for several years and blocked transfer to Medicare Advantage – for now.
• We can’t get good care when there are not enough healthcare workers and when their work suffers because they cannot pay the rent. In November, 40,000 workers at the campuses and medical centers of the University of California, including patient care assistants and hospital technicians, went on strike over these issues. A magazine for health care bosses counted 38 major strikes at hospitals and clinics across the country in 2025.

Improved Medicare for All

Healthcare activists’ programmatic demand is Improved Medicare for All, also called single payer. Everyone would be automatically enrolled at birth, and all care free. Since nearly all doctors, hospitals and other care providers would be in the system, your choice of physician and hospital is not limited to a network. Improved Medicare for All would replace the hated health insurance corporations. The single buyer of health care (the Medicare administration) would have bargaining power versus the pharmaceutical corporations, hospital chains, and other industries of the health care sector.

There were recurring drives to enact Medicare for All in the United States after World War Two, but the American Medical Association and allied capitalists defeated them. Union officials who practice business unionism instead of class struggle also resist Medicare for All. They embrace co-management of a company health plan as a selling point for joining a union.

A single payer plan or something close to it has worked well in Canada, France, Germany and many other countries. Britain after World War Two went one better, placing most doctors and other care providers in a National Health Service. Many physicians opposed single payer, but with experience in it they became supporters.

However, social democratic healthcare programs cannot escape capital’s incessant profit drive. In Britain, for example, the National Health Service was re-legislated in 2012 from a single institution into a collection of Clinical Commissioning Groups that in turn outsource healthcare to private firms dedicated to their “bottom line.” Care standards have weakened, physicians are fighting speedup and larger patient loads, and understaffing of clinics is pervasive.

The Socialist-Communist Path to the Fore

In the 1990s, big health insurance corporations arose and formed health maintenance organizations, each in business with selected hospitals and physicians. Their massive economic clout makes the struggle to win Improved Medicare for All much fiercer today. The campaign for single payer might result in some lesser relief measures, but it will take revolutionary anti-capitalist struggle to guarantee free and equal care for all.

Workers who want to advance the cause of our class will bring agitation for the socialist-communist path to every strike and every political battle where healthcare is an issue. We must overthrow capitalism. We can run society ourselves, including the hospitals, clinics, outpatient services, and pharmaceutical development and production. The purpose of economic activity shall not be profit for a few but rather the well-being of all.

U.S. capitalism is in terminal economic decay, and the capitalist republic is disintegrating. We need a communist party that agitates, educates, and organizes for the mission of our class. No matter how small our numbers are now, we need communist organization ready before the masses decide that enough is enough. The most visionary goal is the most practical one.

Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus and other books.

A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm

27 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly eighty years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?

The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like eight-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.

During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.

The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.

If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.

The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the “encouragement of migration” and demanded that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: “erase Gaza,” “leave no one there.” When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals,” they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.

This was preceded by the hermetic siege — a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of ‘security,’ always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s ‘largest open-air prison‘. Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’ whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.

Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations declared Gaza “uninhabitable.” Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.

This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of October 7, allowing Israel to weaponize its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly stripped Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanization of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.

Tragically, the conditions that fueled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal vow to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. 

27 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- Amid the ruins of Gaza’s largest hospital, 168 Palestinian doctors received their advanced medical certifications after the facility was destroyed in repeated Israeli attacks and raids during the two-year genocide.

The graduation took place on Thursday in front of the destroyed facade of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City. 

CalIing themselves the “Humanity Cohort”, the doctors completed their Palestinian Board certifications under harsh circumstances as they had studied and sat for examinations while working nonstop inside Gaza’s hospitals during two years of Israeli starvation, forced displacement and genocide. 

Some were also injured, arrested or had family members killed.

[https://twitter.com/AbujomaaGaza/status/2004383065121169664]

Gaza Health Ministry official Youssef Abu al-Reish described the ceremony as graduation from “the womb of suffering, under bombardment, among rubble and rivers of blood”.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, Al-Shifa’s medical director, said Israel sought to destroy Palestine’s human capital throughout its attacks on healthcare facilities, “but it failed in that”.

Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, Director General of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said, “We make today a platform of life, from evidence of crime to testimony of resilience and rebirth.”

The ceremony included empty chairs displaying photographs of healthcare workers killed during the Israeli war.

Al-Bursh noted that among this cohort were 10 doctors “who once stood with us, and then rose as martyrs. They departed in body, but remained in every certificate, every restored ward, and every life saved. If they kill one of us, hundreds rise in return.”

Healthcare in the Gaza Strip has been pushed to the brink of collapse following repeated attacks by Israeli forces. 

Human rights groups and United Nations-backed experts have confirmed that Israel has been systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare system.

Several medical facilities across Gaza were bombed, burned, and besieged by the Israeli military since the start of the war. Dozens of other medical clinics, stations, and vehicles also came under Israeli attack.

The targeting of health facilities, medical personnel and patients is considered a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention.

According to the World Health Programme (WHO), 18 out of 36 hospitals and 43 percent of primary health-care centers in Gaza were partially functioning.

A World Health Organization assessment conducted in early April 2024 found Al-Shifa Hospital had been reduced to what WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described as “an empty shell with human graves”.

The hospital has since been partially renovated but still largely lies in ruins.

The WHO Health Cluster has documented 825 Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities since October 2023. These attacks have killed 985 people and injured approximately 2,000 others.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 1,722 healthcare workers have been killed in Israeli strikes over the past two years. An additional 306 individuals have been detained over the course of the war, according to the WHO Health Cluster.

At least five healthcare workers have died while in detention, with other released detainees, and the bodies of Palestinians returned showing signs of severe torture and abuse.

The graduation also comes amid a fragile ceasefire that has been violated repeatedly by Israel, killing over 400 civilians and blocking much-needed aid.

27 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

The Western system, working in lockstep with Israeli state strategy and pro-Israel policy networks embedded across Western institutions, is acknowledging — by its own behavior — that Palestinian strategy is now actively reshaping the field of power itself.

By “the system,” I mean something concrete: the coordinated machinery of the United States, Canada, and European states — governments, courts, police, prisons, immigration agencies, financial regulators, together with the platform and university governance layers that now function as political gatekeepers.

This enforcement field is fractured in belief and politics, but coherent in effect.

Israel is woven into this machinery through formal alliances, intelligence and security coordination, policy partnerships, and a vast pro-Israel advocacy infrastructure that shapes legislation, enforcement priorities, and institutional risk doctrine inside Western states. The result is an integrated governance field in which Israeli state objectives and Western enforcement powers operate as a single framework shaping policy on Palestine and the region.

This acknowledgment is registered through state action such as: sanctions, bans, prosecutions, surveillance, asset freezes, platform restrictions, and financial pressure. These measures are directed at Palestinian organizational capacity.

Over the past two years, Palestinian activism has undergone a strategic transformation. Instead of concentrating primarily on recognition within Western debate, it increasingly concentrates on leverage over Western institutions themselves — through legal exposure, accountability mechanisms, material complicity, and structural pressure. That transformation has been accelerated by a growing series of flashpoints of Western repression, each one revealing where governing systems now feel the strain.

Gaza has made this shift impossible to contain.
The scale of killing, deprivation, and destruction has forced Western institutions into a stark confrontation with consequence. Either Palestinian actors and their allies succeed in converting Gaza into enforceable outcomes — court cases, arrest warrants, sanctions, arms restrictions, corporate liability, institutional delegitimation — or Western power moves aggressively to seize control of the channels through which such outcomes are produced. Gaza has exposed what power now fears most: loss of command over result, not merely over narrative.

This essay maps that shift: what it is, how it emerged, and where it is now moving.

I.1 The Target: Palestinian Political Capacity

Across the Western–Israeli enforcement field, pressure now concentrates on a single problem: the functional infrastructure that allows Palestinian politics to operate as an organized, effective political force. That capacity no longer depends only on speeches or protests. It now exists in building real accountability through solid legal evidence, in organizing and linking movements across borders, and in using practical channels that allow political action to create real, measurable change within social, economic, and digital systems.

The first site of attack is the infrastructure of accountability itself. Palestinian legal and human rights organizations have built dense records of Gaza: testimony, forensic analysis, casualty databases, and legal arguments capable of traveling across courts and jurisdictions. When this material reached international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the response was direct and systemic. In October 2024, U.S. and Canadian authorities launched coordinated enforcement actions against the prisoner solidarity network Samidoun, labeling it a terrorist entity, freezing assets, and criminalizing support. U.S. officials described the group as a “sham charity.” Samidoun responded that the measures were designed “to repress political organizing.” In the same period, YouTube removed the channels of three major Palestinian rights organizations, erasing more than 700 evidentiary videos. A Palestinian legal director summarized the dynamic with stark clarity: “We are being punished for insisting that the law apply.” Once accountability begins to threaten outcomes, the legal and archival machinery that enables it comes under direct pressure.

The second target is the infrastructure of organization. Prisoner committees, revolutionary movements, diaspora formations, and transnational solidarity networks sustain political life beyond any single event. Samidoun illustrates this with particular force. Its work linking political prisoners across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Europe, and North America has drawn bans in Germany, parallel designations and enforcement measures in North America, police raids, and financial restrictions. In the same October 2024 actions, U.S. authorities also sanctioned Khaled Barakat, a writer and leading figure in the Masar Badil movement, explicitly citing the effectiveness of his political work. After one raid, an organizer captured the intent of the campaign against them: “They are trying to make the work itself impossible.” The pressure does not settle on any single statement. It aims to disable the movement’s ability to function as a political force. In Britain, Palestine Action has faced prolonged pre-trial detention under expanding police powers, with eight activists reportedly held for over a year. Their hunger strike carried the struggle into courtrooms and prison wards, while supporters outside repeated a simple truth: “You cannot jail a movement.”

The third main target is where political work turns into real, everyday action. This is a coordinated assault on the channels of daily operation. Digital platforms suppress Palestinian content at scale. A 2024 report by 7amleh documented Meta’s systematic throttling of Palestinian posts, with leaked policies showing a lower confidence threshold for removing Arabic than Hebrew content. Activists adapt through “algospeak,” coded language, and symbols simply to remain visible. As one student organizer put it, “You spend half your time just trying to stay visible.” The material attack is also physical. By early 2025, roughly sixty-four percent of Gaza’s telecommunications towers had been destroyed, producing a near-total information blackout. Institutions mirror this closure. Universities impose discipline. Employers terminate contracts. Banks close accounts. Palestine Legal reports an unprecedented surge in cases of activists being doxxed or fired. None of this is symbolic. Each measure obstructs the circulation of Palestinian politics through the institutions that govern social and economic life.

Across all three domains the pattern is clear. Palestinian strategy has learned how to generate consequences — in courts, in contracts, in corporate boardrooms, and in international law. As those consequences begin to take shape, the system constrains the machinery that makes them possible: the legal evidence, the organized networks, and the material channels of operation. This logic is now extending into the formal Palestinian political sphere itself, where debates over a proposed Palestinian Authority Political Party Law are widely read as an effort to narrow participation and pre-empt electoral shifts, reinforcing the same systemic impulse toward control.

I.2 The Method: How the System Attacks

As Palestinian strategy begins to generate consequences, the response across the Western–Israeli enforcement field moves into direct intervention. The shift is rapid. It spreads across institutions. It settles into routine practice, targeting political infrastructure.

One method is legal. States deploy sanctions, bans, prosecutions, and terrorism designations to convert political activity into a security category. The October 2024 actions against Samidoun by U.S. and Canadian authorities reframed support for political prisoners as “material support for terrorism,” freezing assets and criminalizing fundraising. In Britain, activists linked to Palestine Action are being held in prolonged pre-trial detention — many for over a year without trial, far beyond the usual UK limit of six months. Even the legal fight to defend them and challenge the crackdown is now being targeted. After sustained accountability work on Gaza, the Palestinian organization Al-Haq faced pressure and sanctions that disrupted its banking relationships, obstructing the conditions required for legal work to continue.

Another method is administrative. This is the bureaucratic war of paperwork and procedure. Leadership is fragmented through visa revocations, residency denials, and travel restrictions. Khaled Barakat’s sanctioning directly constrains his ability to organize transnationally. Organizations face deregistration. Bank accounts are closed through compliance decisions that require no public explanation. Masar Badil reports that its international conferences are monitored and speakers barred on security grounds, hidden inside administrative protocols.

A third method operates inside institutions that present themselves as neutral. Universities discipline students and faculty for Palestine activism. Employers terminate contracts. Cultural institutions cancel events. The expanding practice of de-banking — closing accounts for “reputational risk” — severs material lifelines. These actions are framed as governance and compliance. Their combined effect is political exclusion.

A fourth method governs visibility. Platforms enforce algorithmic suppression and content removal. 7amleh’s documentation shows that Meta’s automated moderation systems apply a much lower “confidence threshold” to Arabic-language posts — meaning the AI only needs to be about 25% sure (instead of the usual 80%) that something might break the rules before it automatically reduces visibility, limits reach, or removes the post. This makes it far easier for Palestinian and Arabic content to get suppressed, even when it’s not actually violating policies.

As a result, activists have had to start using coded language, creative spellings, emojis, symbols, and indirect phrasing (often called “algospeak”) just to be able to share their messages and stay visible on the platforms without immediate censorship.

At the same time, the repeated destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure (phone networks, internet cables, cell towers) has caused near-total communication blackouts — sometimes lasting days or longer — making it extremely difficult, and often impossible, for people inside Gaza to organize digitally, share updates, coordinate aid, or connect with the outside world.

Across these methods the objective remains consistent: to disrupt, disable, and dismantle the legal, administrative, institutional, and digital machinery through which Palestinian politics produces consequences and sustains itself as a political force.

I.3 The Pushback

Pressure does not end the work. It reshapes it.

Across Palestinian movements and allied networks, repression is read as confirmation of impact. Bans, sanctions, and prosecutions become measures of consequence. Strategy adapts and the terrain of struggle expands.

One response is legal escalation. Palestinian legal organizations deepen international coordination and widen their filings. The ICC process now sits inside a growing legal front, supported by new coalitions of jurists, scholars, and civil society actors mobilized specifically to defend accountability mechanisms. Attempts to close legal channels generate additional routes of action. The judicial field has become more complex, not more contained.

A second response appears in organizational adaptation. Networks grow more distributed. Leadership circulates. Responsibilities spread across borders to absorb the impact of sanctions, travel bans, and detention. Movements such as Samidoun and Masar Badil continue operating across continents through overlapping, fluid structures that are inherently difficult to disable.

A third response moves directly into material and institutional terrain. Campaigns target contracts, procurement systems, arms supply chains, shipping routes, pension funds, and corporate partnerships. This is the logic of BDS and of direct-action formations such as Palestine Action. Universities, ports, banks, municipalities, and private firms are compelled to confront their complicity. Exposure has become leverage. Institutional risk becomes political pressure.

A fourth response reclaims informational space. Digital rights organizations such as 7amleh document censorship and convert suppression into evidence for advocacy. Organizers build parallel channels through encrypted platforms and independent media. Campaigns generate their own archives and datasets to counter erasure. Coded language evolves from mere evasion into a reconfiguration of political expression itself.

Across these responses, a single principle now governs Palestinian strategy. Activism no longer petitions for entry into public space. It applies pressure from within the structures that govern political, economic, and digital life. The struggle has entered a phase defined by sustained, multi-front confrontation with the architecture of power itself.

II.1 Gaza as Structural Break

Gaza marks the point at which the old system of management collapses.

For decades, Western and Israeli policy alignment — expressed through U.S. diplomacy, European funding mechanisms, and Israeli security doctrine — relied on a stable pattern: military assaults, humanitarian aid, diplomatic statements, and a return to routine governance. Each round of destruction was framed as crisis and then absorbed back into normal operations. The current phase in Gaza cannot be absorbed. The scale of killing, displacement, starvation, and infrastructural collapse has overwhelmed the mechanisms designed to contain it.

The failure of containment is visible in material terms. Hospitals have been destroyed. Entire neighborhoods erased. By early 2025, roughly sixty-four percent of Gaza’s telecommunications towers had been eliminated, severing the territory’s digital lifeline. This physical erasure is compounded by a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. Integrated food-security assessments openly declared famine conditions, while the World Food Programme warned of a “real prospect of famine.” These conditions did not arise from natural disaster. They followed deliberate restrictions on aid convoys at crossings. The killing of more than one hundred journalists within the first six months of Israel’s assault on Gaza, documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists, further shattered the apparatus through which outrage had previously been managed.

What distinguishes this moment is the speed and reach of its consequences. Gaza’s devastation no longer remains a contained crisis. Images, testimony, satellite data, casualty records, and displacement maps now circulate directly into institutional decision-making across the world. This material sits at the center of ICC arrest-warrant applications, national court cases challenging arms exports in Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK, university divestment campaigns, municipal boycott resolutions, and shareholder actions targeting corporate supply chains. The war no longer remains distant. It actively reorganizes political and legal calculations far beyond the region.

This produces a confrontation the old architecture was built to avoid. Either Gaza remains without consequence, or the principles of law and human rights these systems claim to uphold begin to apply. That choice now unfolds through multiplying channels: court challenges, sanctions demands, arms-embargo campaigns, and corporate complicity investigations. Gaza has made this shift impossible to contain or rhetorically manage.

The language of crisis management can no longer hold. What once functioned as a cycle of destruction and repair now generates instability inside the political, legal, and economic structures that sustained the old order. Gaza has become the structural break — the point where the architecture of control meets both its operational and moral limits.

II.2 Exhaustion of the Old Governance Framework

The collapse revealed by Gaza is institutional as much as humanitarian or military.

For more than three decades, a U.S.-led coalition of Western states and Israel operated through a political architecture established after Oslo. This structure combined limited Palestinian self-rule, donor funding administered through bodies such as the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, security coordination overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator, humanitarian management via UNRWA, and repeating negotiation cycles. It promised stability. It produced containment. Its purpose was to manage Palestinian life under occupation rather than resolve Palestinian claims.

That framework depended on three conditions. Violence had to remain periodic. Palestinian politics had to remain fragmented, reinforced by the geographic separation of Gaza and the West Bank. Western institutions had to remain shielded from legal, financial, and reputational consequence. All three conditions have now broken down.

The humanitarian model has turned from stabilizer into site of confrontation. Aid is no longer a management tool but a battleground. Convoys are restricted or blocked. Relief agencies operate under direct threat. Funding is politicized, with major donors suspending contributions to UNRWA on contested grounds. The language of humanitarianism now exposes rather than conceals the political structure of destruction, as when the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions in early 2025.

The security model has shed its façade of coordination. What was once termed “security coordination” now appears openly as enforcement against Palestinian political life. Mass arrests, pervasive surveillance, nightly military raids, and expanding checkpoints deepen control while legitimacy erodes. The Palestinian Authority’s governing credibility drains away, leaving an administrative shell that manages occupation without political authority.

The diplomatic model has lost operational function. Negotiations persist as ritual. Statements of concern circulate without effect. Core formulas such as “two-state solution” no longer correspond to any observable political reality, especially in light of Israeli officials’ open assertions of permanent control. The framework remains in form but has lost its capacity.

This exhaustion explains the intensity of current repression. The system no longer stabilizes conflict through management. It now stabilizes itself through escalating coercion. What once functioned as governance has devolved into emergency administration. The framework cannot absorb Gaza, contain Palestinian political time, or restore the conditions that once made control appear sustainable.

II.3 Palestinian Political Time Collides with Western Governance

The present crisis is a collision of time.

Palestinian politics unfolds across historical continuity: displacement, occupation, settlement expansion, and permanent refugeehood. This history is not backdrop but force. From the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 occupation and the entrenchment of the settlement regime, political life accumulates without reset. Palestinian strategy grows from this pressure, shaped by factional conflict, moments of unity, and regional intervention, all operating inside an unbroken time frame.

Western governance moves on a different rhythm. It proceeds through crises, summits, negotiations, and resets — from Madrid to Oslo to the Roadmap. The conflict is broken into separate stages or “phases” — each one gets treated as if it’s completely disconnected from the others. As soon as public/media attention moves on to something else, people and governments stop feeling responsible for what happened before. No one is held truly accountable. Keeping things “stable” (or at least the appearance of stability) relies on everyone conveniently forgetting the past crimes, injustices, or broken promises.

Big banks and financial institutions put out cold, neutral-sounding reports that describe the situation in technical terms — without pointing fingers, admitting complicity, or linking current profits to ongoing occupation/settlements/war (they stay “detached” and avoid moral or historical judgment). Official security/military thinking simplifies everything: it reduces the entire long, complicated history of the conflict to just a “counter-terrorism” story — ignoring root causes, colonial history, occupation, inequality, and rights violations, and framing it only as fighting “terrorists” vs. “defenders.”

In short: The system works by dividing time into forgettable chapters, letting attention fade responsibility, erasing memory for “stability”, neutralizing financial involvement, and shrinking history into a never-ending war-on-terror lens. This makes it easier to continue the status quo without real change or justice.

Gaza collapses the distance between these time models.

The devastation cannot be framed as temporary emergency. Satellite records, casualty databases, displacement maps, and legal archives place continuity directly before courts and publics. The International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion confirming the illegality of the occupation and UN documentation of settlement expansion render the past present as evidence.

This collision of accumulated responsibility with the present deeply destabilizes Western governance. Systems built to merely manage isolated events now buckle under the weight of unaddressed history that can no longer be reset or ignored. Traditional tools — shuttle diplomacy, economic incentives, conflict-resolution frameworks — prove inadequate against the scale of consequences unleashed. As a result, repression has become structural: the political clock cannot be wound back, so control shifts to the very conditions of political life itself. Civil society is criminalized, dissent suppressed, platforms censored, and humanitarian aid conditioned and weaponized. Courts, prisons, borders, universities, and financial systems have all become primary arenas of struggle.

Palestinian political time has entered Western institutions. It reorganizes power. It reshapes what stability now requires.

II.4 The Threshold Moment

The present moment marks a political threshold defined by asymmetric pressure.

Palestine no longer functions as a distant subject for debate. It enters directly into governance as institutional and legal friction. Western courts confront arms-export challenges and corporate-complicity cases. Universities face divestment campaigns. Corporations and banks navigate sanctions risk and exposure tied to settlements. This shift relocates the struggle into the machinery of power itself, while remaining profoundly unequal: U.S. veto power, European economic leverage, and Israeli military supremacy still dominate the field.

This explains the embedded nature of the response. Repression has become core policy. Legal and administrative systems criminalize solidarity. Diplomatic frameworks impose conditions on Palestinian self-determination. The system recalibrates defensively as pressure accumulates inside its own institutions.

From this point forward, repression and transformation advance together. International law has become central battleground through ICC warrants and ICJ proceedings. Diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood gains momentum even as it is hedged and constrained. Civil society funnels evidence into boardrooms and government agencies, forcing choices between law and alignment. Palestinian political agency intensifies, articulated in initiatives such as calls for a “Gaza Covenant,” while regional actors recalibrate normalization around irreversible steps toward statehood.

This threshold does not close the political field. It widens it. The struggle now unfolds inside the machine itself.

What follows will not resemble earlier patterns of control. A different political era is taking shape — one defined by continuous, asymmetric confrontation between an unyielding demand for justice and a powerful system of control increasingly consumed by the effort to manage its own unraveling.

III.1 Legitimacy Crisis of Western Institutions

The question of Palestine is now generating an open, visible crisis of legitimacy at the core of Western governments and institutions.
For decades, a structural contradiction has existed: Western states publicly affirm liberal values — human rights, the rule of law, and justice — while in practice enabling or disregarding grave violations. That contradiction is no longer confined to debate or theory. It now unfolds daily in courtrooms, in the streets through protest, and through the public exposure of political double standards.

Courts stand at the center of this breakdown.
In countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK, domestic courts are now hearing serious legal challenges seeking to halt arms exports to Israel on the grounds that they breach international humanitarian law, particularly protections for civilians. In the United States, federal courts routinely dismiss similar cases as “political questions” beyond judicial reach. This contrast reveals a coordinated system of avoidance: legal principles are quietly suspended whenever they collide with geopolitical priorities — here, unwavering support for Israel.

The dynamic sharpened in December 2025, when the U.S. government imposed sanctions on sitting judges of the International Criminal Court following the issuance of arrest warrants related to the conflict. The shift from criticism to direct punishment of judicial independence marked a decisive escalation. Authority is now visibly moving away from independent courts and toward executive power and diplomatic calculation.

Universities are increasingly caught in the same crisis.
In the US and UK, student protests and encampments calling for Palestinian rights are quickly dismantled by police, and free expression is constrained through claims of “campus safety” or “risk management.” In some European countries, protests are more often allowed to continue, reflecting stronger legal protections for free speech.
Across contexts, however, university leadership uses institutional authority to contain and manage political fallout — transforming campuses, traditionally spaces of open inquiry and debate, into tightly regulated environments shaped by donor pressure and fear of public backlash.

Mainstream corporate media is rapidly losing its authority.
People across the world, now connected in real time, verify events through videos, photographs, documents, and eyewitness testimony emerging directly from Gaza. Long-developing weaknesses — corporate consolidation, algorithmic bias, and elite influence — have intensified sharply under the strain of Gaza’s coverage. Public trust has fractured.
Audiences are increasingly turning toward decentralized platforms, independent journalists on the ground, and specialists who examine evidence with rigor. This shift in the information landscape has been unfolding for years, but Gaza has rendered it irreversible.

The entire framework of “human rights” is beginning to fracture.
When protections for civilians are enforced selectively — loudly invoked in some cases and abandoned in others — they lose their moral force. The US labels famine in Gaza an emergency while continuing to support the siege that produces it. The EU delivers humanitarian aid while maintaining arms sales and deep military cooperation with Israel.

As a result, terms like “human rights” and “protection” risk becoming hollow political language, rather than ethical commitments. The damage extends beyond Palestine: it erodes the very foundation of Western credibility and moral authority worldwide.

The spillover is systemic. Law appears political. Education appears managed. Media appears instrumental. Human rights appear conditional. Public consent, once the stabilizing force of these institutions, erodes into sustained skepticism.

III.2 Expansion of Repression at Home

As Western governments and institutions confront the worldwide repercussions of Palestine, tools once deployed abroad now operate inward, shaping the political life of their own societies. The boundary between foreign policy and domestic governance has thinned to the point of disappearance.

Security systems built for external confrontation now organize the management of internal protest and dissent.
In Germany, organizations such as Samidoun, a Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, have been banned under counterterrorism statutes, with accompanying raids on community spaces. In the United Kingdom, members of Palestine Action remain in extended pre-trial detention, often for more than a year without trial, far beyond standard legal limits. In the United States, repression assumes a more administrative profile: investigations, travel restrictions, blocked funding, professional sanctions, and layered institutional pressure.

Across these settings, a single logic prevails: security infrastructure designed for foreign policy now governs domestic political opposition.

Surveillance continues its steady expansion, justified as prevention. Communications and financial activity fall under scrutiny for political association and belief. Banks and payment processors close accounts under ambiguous “reputational risk” rules, enforcing economic exclusion without judicial review. Connection to pro-Palestinian causes increasingly restricts access to ordinary financial life, narrowing the space for collective organization.

Ordinary acts of solidarity now attract criminal designation. Fundraising, legal defense, humanitarian assistance, and academic criticism circulate within the category of security concern. In the United States, organizations such as Palestine Legal document record levels of doxxing, employment retaliation, investigations, and harassment — producing a chilling effect that interrupts political engagement at its earliest stages.

Public space undergoes parallel transformation. Campuses absorb heavier security regimes. Assemblies face tighter constraints. Continuous monitoring becomes routine. Visible support for Palestine provokes extraordinary regulatory intervention.

The political order that takes shape grows increasingly rigid and managed, directed through preemptive pressure, administrative command, and accelerated executive action, with diminishing space for deliberation or procedural restraint.

III.3 Fragmentation of Western Political Coalitions

Across Western political systems, the repercussions of Palestine now press inward. Instruments once deployed abroad increasingly shape domestic political life. The boundary between foreign policy and internal governance continues to thin, until separation itself becomes difficult to sustain.

What began as security architecture for external confrontation now organizes the management of internal protest and dissent.
In Germany, Samidoun has been banned under counterterrorism law, with raids extending into community spaces. Over in the United Kingdom, members of Palestine Action remain in extended pre-trial detention, often exceeding a year without trial and surpassing standard legal limits. In the United States, pressure accumulates through administrative channels: investigations, travel restrictions, blocked funding, employment consequences, institutional scrutiny.

Despite national differences, the pattern holds. Security infrastructure built for foreign policy now governs domestic political opposition.

Everywhere, surveillance expands, justified as prevention. Communications and financial transactions attract scrutiny for political association and belief. Under vague “reputational risk” standards, banks and payment processors close accounts, enforcing economic exclusion without judicial review. For many, connection to pro-Palestinian causes now constricts access to ordinary financial life, narrowing the terrain of political organization before it fully emerges.

Solidarity itself has entered a zone of criminal suspicion. Fundraising, legal defense, humanitarian assistance, academic critique — each circulates within the category of security concern. In the United States, Palestine Legal documents record levels of doxxing, employment retaliation, investigations, and harassment. The result is a pervasive chilling effect, interrupting political engagement at its earliest stages.

Meanwhile, public space has been quietly reengineered. Campuses absorb heavier security regimes. Gatherings face tighter constraints. Continuous monitoring becomes routine. Expressions of support for Palestine trigger extraordinary regulatory intervention.

What has taken shape is a political order increasingly rigid and managed, steered by preemptive pressure, administrative command, and accelerated executive action, with deliberation and procedural restraint steadily displaced.

III.4 Long-Term Systemic Consequences

The crisis triggered by Palestine is speeding up big changes in how Western countries are governed and how they are seen around the world.

The old post-Cold War system — built on promises of liberal values, international rules, and a fair “rules-based order” — is falling apart when those rules get applied unevenly. It’s not just bad publicity anymore; it’s a real breakdown in the West’s moral and political authority, which used to be its strongest weapon globally. This weakening opens the door for other countries (especially in the Global South) to push their own stories and gives rival powers strong proof of Western double standards.

As trust and legitimacy fade, governments are getting tougher and less open. Instead of convincing people, they rely more on top-down control and force. Consent is replaced by orders. Surveillance grows everywhere. Politics feels tense, divided, and fragile. We could head toward a constitutional breakdown and major anti-system protests, or toward a cold, tech-controlled form of authoritarian stability. A real fix — through honest accountability and consistent laws — looks unlikely right now.

Foreign policy and home affairs have merged completely. Methods once used abroad — in occupations, counter-insurgency, and the “war on terror” — are now turned inward, creating a sense of permanent internal conflict within Western societies.

At the same time, there’s a separate effort to shield Israel from this pressure: the Saudi–Emirati–Bahraini normalization push, along with the ongoing Abraham Accords framework. Even after Gaza and widespread regional anger, this project isn’t dead. It keeps working as a kind of protective wall — tying Israel deeper into Gulf money, security deals, energy routes, and trade networks. This regional alignment doesn’t cancel out the problems in the West; it actually proves them. The stronger the calls for accountability grow inside Western institutions, the more urgently Israel and its Gulf partners try to build these independent buffers.

All these changes are already reshaping how Western countries are run. The fight over Palestine has turned into the main battleground where the future of the entire Western political system will be decided.

IV.1 The Strategic Gain

For years, Western powers handled the Palestine issue as a manageable moral concern. They absorbed public anger with polished diplomatic statements, humanitarian aid promises, and carefully controlled news cycles. That old model still lingers, but it no longer sets the rules of engagement.

Palestinian strategy, shaped by the harsh realities in Gaza and amplified through global networks, has opened up powerful new arenas of confrontation. The fight now unfolds in international courtrooms like the ICC, where arrest warrants for alleged war crimes directly challenge long-standing impunity. It reaches into corporate boardrooms, where lawsuits over arms exports and divestment campaigns force companies to confront their complicity. It spreads across digital public spaces, where mass platform censorship and sudden account closures expose the hidden machinery of silencing. It even penetrates the internal workings of institutions, where routine decisions about procurement, investments, and compliance can no longer escape intense political scrutiny.

This shift represents a major strategic breakthrough because it dismantles the old ability to deny or speak in vague abstractions. When clear forensic evidence of destruction lands on the ICC docket, when arms contracts face litigation in national courts, when banks shut down accounts citing “reputational risk,” and when platforms throttle content using documented biased algorithms, the system is forced to reveal its true operational logic. The struggle has becomes visible beyond grand rhetoric and by concrete steps: the sanctions imposed, the lawsuits filed, the silenced accounts, and the blocked shipments.

Solidarity itself has taken on a new and more effective form. The most impactful work no longer relies solely on persuasion or symbolic protests. Instead, it focuses on creating real friction and compelling difficult choices inside institutions that must make tangible decisions every day. Universities must weigh procurement and investment policies. Ports and unions must decide whether to handle controversial shipments. Regulators must address compliance failures. Courts must rule on shared liability for complicity. Governments must calculate the rising political costs of shielding an ally from accountability.

In this current phase, Palestinian strategy has gained deep, structural leverage. It forces institutions to choose between their declared principles and their political alliances. It imposes real costs — legal, financial, and reputational — that cannot be neutralized by words alone. It transforms quiet complicity into an active, daily management problem that cannot be ignored.

At its core, this marks the decisive gain of the present moment: Palestinian politics is no longer standing outside the gates of power petitioning for change. It has entered the machinery itself, quietly reshaping the cost-benefit calculations of those who hold the levers.

IV.2 The Strategic Danger

Every strategic gain generates a ferocious counter-move. As Palestinian politics forces itself into the operating systems of Western power, those systems respond by attempting to disable the very capacity that made the intrusion possible. The paramount danger is the systematic attempt to force Palestinian strategy back into forms that can be isolated, criminalized, and neutralized.

The first pressure is fragmentation. The banning of Samidoun in Germany, the transnational sanctions against its network, and the targeting of specific leaders like Khaled Barakat are designed to sever the connective tissue of a global movement. When organizations are dismantled and networks disrupted, coordination fractures. Institutional memory is lost. Each local struggle risks becoming detached from the wider political project, transforming a unified front into a series of isolated, manageable emergencies.

The second pressure is exhaustion. This is the slow, administrative grind designed to drain the movement’s vitality: the prolonged pre-trial detention of activists in the UK, the crippling financial blockades against aid and advocacy groups, and the constant surveillance that demands perpetual security calculus. Activism is forced into survival mode. Long-term strategy is crowded out by immediate crisis management. The work that builds power is sacrificed to the work of staying alive.

The third pressure is forced misdirection. When every act of solidarity is reframed through a security lens — as “material support for terrorism” or a threat to “public order” — the movement is pushed into a defensive posture. Attention shifts from advancing political goals to endlessly answering legal accusations and navigating compliance traps. The struggle is pulled onto the adversary’s chosen terrain: the courtroom, the compliance office, the counter-terrorism review. The system seizes control of the tempo and the framing.

The deepest danger is strategic capture. If these pressures succeed, Palestinian politics is reduced to mere reaction. It moves only where the boot falls, rather than toward where power is vulnerable. Avoiding this outcome requires a discipline that runs counter to the pressure: preserving organizational continuity, protecting collective memory, and relentlessly refusing to let the system dictate the meaning, objective, or rhythm of the struggle.

IV.3 The New Terrain of Power

The present phase has clarified with brutal clarity where power now concentrates and where leverage must be applied. The most effective interventions have moved beyond the primary domain of messaging or moral appeal. They now target the operational systems that translate policy into reality: the arms supply chains, shipping routes, insurance underwriting, procurement contracts, banking compliance, institutional governance, and digital visibility algorithms. These are the chokepoints where political decisions become actionable, and where they can be disrupted.

When arms shipments are delayed by lawsuits or blockades, when insurers withdraw coverage citing war crime risks, when university contracts are challenged over complicity, when bank payments are frozen, the struggle shifts from argument to consequence. Institutions that could once claim neutrality are forced to act, revealing their alignment through their operational choices.

This terrain is complex, technical, and slow. It demands specific knowledge: legal fluency for court filings, forensic skill for building evidence archives, financial acumen for shareholder actions, and logistical understanding of global supply chains. It is not inherently dramatic. It often looks like the meticulous work of audits, regulatory complaints, procurement challenges, and platform policy appeals. Yet, this is precisely where durable leverage accumulates — not in the fleeting spectacle, but in the sustained imposition of friction.

Success in this phase hinges on sharp strategic thinking.
It requires identifying which institutions are most exposed, learning how to work through their own rules and procedures, locating points of vulnerability and dependence, and building alliances that multiply pressure rather than disperse it. Purely symbolic victories no longer suffice. The work now unfolds cumulatively — layer by layer — and at a structural level, reshaping the architecture of power itself.

This technical, targeted approach relies on mass mobilization. Mass movements generate political energy, open space, and produce urgency from below. Into that opening, precise institutional pressure moves, converting momentum into concrete shifts and unavoidable political and economic costs.

At this stage, Palestinian strategy becomes something deeper.
It matures into an effort to govern — to shape and steer — the very terrain on which the struggle is fought.

IV.4 The Time Problem

The central strategic challenge is a collision of timelines. Palestinian politics is built upon a long continuum of displacement, occupation, and resistance — an unbroken historical horizon where 1948, 1967, and 2023 are chapters in the same narrative. The Western systems it confronts operate on a rhythm of crisis cycles: outbursts of outrage, calibrated responses, diplomatic resets, and engineered amnesia. These models of time collide violently in every escalation.

Strategy, therefore, must perform a dual function. It must categorically refuse the reset and the amnesia it demands, holding the long memory of the struggle alive. Simultaneously, it must use moments of profound rupture — like the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza — to accelerate consequences and lock in gains that prevent a return to the prior “normal.” The great danger is being pulled entirely into the adversary’s calendar of crisis management, where each horror becomes a self-contained episode and previous advances are quietly erased in the fog of the “next” crisis.

This demands the construction of institutions of memory and continuity: robust legal archives, verified casualty databases, preserved organizational records, and political education networks that outlast individual campaigns and news cycles. The struggle cannot afford to be memory-less; it must be built to survive the waning of headlines. Concurrently, strategic timing is critical. Moments of heightened global exposure and political shock create narrow openings for decisive action — for filing landmark lawsuits, initiating bold divestment campaigns, or forcing diplomatic realignments. The strategy must therefore master two rhythms at once: the slow, relentless accumulation of structural power and the rapid, precise exploitation of political breaks.

Victory in this phase belongs to those who control time — who stretch the moment of crisis into a permanent reckoning and who embed the past so deeply into the present that it cannot be dismissed.

IV.5 Unity, Discipline, and Role Differentiation

The defining task of this phase is coordination.
Not uniformity, but orchestrated alignment across differentiated roles. The fronts of engagement remain multiple and distinct: legal advocacy in international courts, direct action against infrastructure, labor organizing in strategic sectors, forensic media work, humanitarian survival operations, prisoner solidarity networks, community defense, and diaspora political mobilization. No single tactic or organization can carry the full weight.

The inherent danger is internal fragmentation that does the system’s work for it. When one wing of the movement sabotages or dismisses another, it replicates the very fractures that external repression seeks to impose. Discipline, in this context, means actively refusing to internalize the logic of the adversary. It means recognizing that the activist facing terrorism charges and the lawyer filing the ICC petition, though their daily work looks nothing alike, are engaged in the same strategic campaign.

Unity is therefore is built through shared strategic objectives, secure channels of information exchange, a mature respect for necessary roles, and careful coordination so different tactics don’t interfere with each other. Some actors will necessarily absorb the sharpest repression in order to create political space; others will work to consolidate gains within institutional frameworks. Both functions are essential. Sustaining this complex equilibrium is the mark of political maturity. The movement must learn to protect its own internal capacity and cohesion as fiercely as it confronts external power.

IV.6 What Victory Looks Like in This Phase

Victory in the present phase marks a step within a longer horizon of liberation. It lies in the deliberate accumulation of irreversible gains that alter the balance of power. It is measured by the rising costs imposed on the enablers of occupation and the strengthening capacity of the Palestinian political body.

It looks like the precedent set by an ICC arrest warrant, making future impunity more legally perilous. It looks like the corporate divestment and broken contract that shrinks the space for unconditional complicity. It looks like the solidarity network that adapts and persists despite being banned. It looks like the institution — a city council, a university, a pension fund — forced into a permanent, public alignment that can no longer be hidden behind empty rhetoric.

Each legal precedent, each disrupted shipment, each exposed partnership compounds. The struggle becomes structurally heavier for those who wage and enable it, and more stable, more resilient, and more legible for those who carry it forward. This phase constructs the essential conditions for the next. Liberation is not achieved in a single, dramatic rupture, but is built through a sequence of irreversible shifts that systematically narrow the adversary’s options while widening the field of political possibility.

In this moment, victory means making the machinery of injustice increasingly expensive, legally vulnerable, politically toxic, and operationally untenable. It means making the status quo ungovernable.

Conclusion: The Shape of the Moment

The struggle over Palestine has ceased to be a question of opinion, narrative, or policy preference. It has become a question of political structure: what forms of power can govern the future, and which have lost the capacity to contain it.

This is why the present moment generates instability across so many domains at once. Gaza has not merely shattered an old order. It has exposed that order’s underlying architecture — how its containment logic functioned, what its stability required, and what violence it consistently concealed. The mechanisms of control that once operated through quiet coordination and rhetorical deflection now operate openly through sanctions on judges, bans on movements, financial coercion, and algorithmic suppression. Law, diplomacy, humanitarianism, and security no longer stabilize the system. They circulate instead as evidence of contradiction, a visible record of the widening gap between proclaimed principle and lived practice.

For Palestinian politics, this exposure is not only a crisis of survival. It is a historical opening created by the collision of political time. The struggle now unfolds inside the architecture of global power itself — in courtrooms, corporate supply chains, financial compliance regimes, and digital public space. The field of action is no longer shaped by appeals for recognition but by the imposition of consequence and the calculation of cost. The system responds with structural repression because it has no other workable currency. It is attempting to govern a political reality — a Palestinian capacity for generating accountable pressure — that its old managerial tools can no longer absorb.

Gaza has forced the system to reveal its limits. The old framework of governance cannot continue in its previous form. Whether this rupture yields transformation, authoritarian adaptation, or a new technocratic mode of containment remains unresolved. What is certain is that return is no longer possible. Gaza has become the stress test the old order cannot evade. The struggle now is over what replaces it.

What follows will not be decided by diplomatic declarations or the afterlife of failed negotiations. It will be decided through material and organizational contests: whether Palestinian political life and its allies can outlast the transnational machinery deployed to fragment them; whether historical continuity can be preserved against the cyclical amnesia of crisis management; whether institutions of memory, coordination, and collective discipline — legal archives, solidarity networks, strategic patience — can survive relentless pressure and attack.

This is the defining work of the coming period. Not a single dramatic rupture, but a steady reordering of the conditions of struggle. Not an appeal to external conscience, but the construction of a new balance of power from within the system’s own operating logic.

This essay does not prescribe campaigns or sequences. It simply maps the field in which all such decisions must now be made.

The threshold has been crossed. Change is already underway. The remaining question is whether Palestinian political organization and its allied formations will possess the clarity, unity, and endurance to shape what that change becomes — to ensure the emerging order bends not toward a more refined repression, but toward an inescapable justice.

This is the shape of the moment: an era of consequence.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

26 December 2025

Source: countercurrents.org